🆕 in "Ecological Monographs": Static models miss the mark—adding nonlinear, density-based facilitation helps predict coexistence, persistence, and realistic community dynamics 📄Neighbor density-dependent facilitation promotes coexistence and internal oscillation doi.org/10.1002/ecm....

The Long-Term Evolution Experiment has returned home. Led by Professors Richard Lenski (@relenski.bsky.social) and Jeffrey Barrick, this groundbreaking work continues to reveal how bacteria evolve in real time. 12 flasks. 1 legacy. 🔗https://tinyurl.com/f6vjyjvr

1/ A concerning flu "variant" may be driving an early rise in cases in the UK. The virus is an H3N2, but has mutations that suggest it may evade some prior immunity. We're not seeing much activity in the US, but that may be changing. A 🧵 on what signals I'm watching. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Seems bad…

This is…outstanding. If I may, I urge us to read it carefully, and appreciate the details, the shape, the picture it paints.

Bluetorial-Jim Watson I met Jim Watson a few times but did not know him well. However, I was greatly influenced by his book “The Double Helix”. He was a complicated human being with some very, very bad features, but some good contributions. What follows is my personal perspective. 1/41

Pinball model of development and reprogramming. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

I’ve been casual student of physics for four decades. Why did no one ever explain to me so clearly what a conservation law is? From Susskind and Hrabovsky (2014) The Theoretical Minimum. — This is why reading basic material from brilliant thinkers is so often worth the investment.

This was a fantastic read. Nice surprise that it had guest-star @carlbergstrom.com who I guess still has not see the lyrebird :-) lareviewofbooks.org/article/what...

Scientists feel that the pressure to publish is rising, but that the time and resources they have to do the necessary research are falling, according to a survey of 3,200 researchers go.nature.com/4hNDvuN

One of my favorites is the Michelson-Morley experiment (a null result!). Only 173 citations (?!) for effectively ending the search for luminiferous aether and paved the way for relativity. I can't think of many other field-ending papers, but they can be massively impactful by redirection.

With 2508 citations in 127 years, Student (1908) introducing the t-test wins for huge actual impact with moderate citation impact: www.jstor.org/stable/23315... Now, how about huge actual impact and minimal citation impact?

I’m stuck in bed between chemo treatments for metastatic coloncancer, wearing a take-home chemo pump attached to my chest. I wanted to share my advice that you can benefit from ‘Letting Your Colleagues In’ don’t need to struggle alone @insidehighered.com www.insidehighered.com/opinion/care...

Post-election column for @undark.org: "The questions [about political identity] are more than casual curiosities but can be formalized into a technical research agenda dedicated to investigating the sometimes-hidden forces that craft political identity." undark.org/2025/11/06/o...

Sociologist Patricia Kingori is helping to expose contract cheating by scholars in high-income countries go.nature.com/485uRU7

Ok, just wow. If the content of this article is right, this is depressing. We're slowly reaching the point where ~100% of what I was taught in Social Psych was either innocently wrong or plainly frauded onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

This book coming out in early 2026 looks interesting.

If you're looking for a faculty position at the intersection of ecology and computing (both broadly defined), please apply to this joint search between the CEE Department and the College of Computing at MIT: cee.mit.edu/people/share...

Intraspecific Reaction Norm Variation Controls the Eco-Evolutionary Consequences of Environmental Change by Wieczynski et al. Read now ahead of print! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Interesting story in this preprint. A male infant was diagnosed with Fanconi anemia due to an X-linked frameshift mutation. Three years later, his hematopoiesis became normal (without intervention). How? www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Another casualty of the LLM revolution. In "arXiv’s CS category, review articles and position papers must now be accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review."

Been reading "What is Innateness?" by Paul Griffiths (2002) philpapers.org/rec/EGRWII in which he offers this very sound advice:

Rank the championship-level sports watching experiences by some measure of stress level*, even when the viewer has no allegiance. My (biased) list: 1) Baseball 2) Tennis 3) Boxing 4) Basketball 5) Hockey/Football (All are very stressful) *thinking average level, but min2min flux is relevant

‘The science world is ending’ #AcademicSky www.pbs.org/newshour/sho...

Yes - isometric scaling as a way to understand the benefits and costs of being small versus large. Haldane's Harpers article from 1926 is an amazing example of popular science writing.

*NEW PAPER* How much of a threat are within-organism conflicts, really? In Biology & Philosophy, @martijnschenkel.bsky.social, Manus Patten, and I present a mathematical framework to measure evolutionary individuality in the face of internal conflicts. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

1/5: Interested in basketball? Disease ecology? Epidemics? 5 years ago, the NBA embarked on a great experiment in infection control: "The NBA Bubble." In a new preprint led by Dr. Yun Tao + Dr. Nita Bharti, we examine it's underlying disease ecology principles. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

I'm tracking down #SciFi stories where genetic manipulation is used to modify species, for obvious reasons, and found Proteus Island; this remarkable novella from 1936 explores how artificial manipulation of chromosome number and X-rays can create new species by a mad scientist in 1918 🧪 1/n

I don’t have a problem with GMOs, I have a problem with #ColossalBio misrepresenting GMO grey wolves as Dire wolves™️ 🐺 🧪 #ExtinctionIsForever

50 years ago, King & Wilson published a foundational paper that underlies the cis-regulatory paradigm (CRP) of #DevoEvo #EvoDevo, i.e., that *almost* all morphological evolution is driven by mutations in regulatory elements, rather than proteins, and it all arose from simple misunderstanding 🧪 🧵

Biology be trippin

How does life evolve to adapt to modern cities? Out now in Science, my PhD work with @lindymcbr.bsky.social uncovers the ancient origin of the “London Underground mosquito” – one of the most iconic examples of urban adaptation. 🧵(1/n) @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady4515

My main PhD work @monteirolab.bsky.social is now in @natecoevo.nature.com! We found a Hox gene promoter that helps butterflies🦋adjust their wing eyespots in response to seasonal temperatures🍃🍂, shedding light on the evolutionary origin of phenotypic plasticity. 1/9 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@joann-trejo.bsky.social, @marymunson4.bsky.social and I have a commentary in @natcellbio.nature.com on recent attacks on DEI in biomedical research: "If scientific research, especially biomedical research, is meant to serve everyone, then it requires that everyone has an opportunity to participate"

1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv. There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.

It's Friday... start the weekend with this fascinating exploration of aeroecology, the study of the sky as habitat. #ornithology www.smithsonianmag.com/science-natu...

Rate and noise in human amygdala drive increased exploration in aversive learning www.nature.com/articles/s41... - another example where noise is exploited as a tunable resource to enable exploration

“Cellular Olympics” our catalog of freeky ultra fast cellular superhero’s is freely available “Ann Rev of microbiology” www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... This is a compilation of world’s fastest single cell organisms - enjoy this buffet of rare delightful protists with mind bending speeds. 🧪

Well that was a splendid talk by Richard Houlston, illustrating (among other things) that screening with polygenic risk scores for cancers will pick up lots of false positives and miss most true positives. And it won't get much better. #AdelphiGenomicsForum

This classic dropped 30 years ago Young folk can’t even sit through a full listen, let alone appreciate it, poor babies

🧠🌟🐭 Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity! We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have: (1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs) (2) better hand dexterity (3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN number🧵

Next up in the talks from the #NaturalPhilosophy Symposium: Sandra Mitchell @sandradmitchell.bsky.social on Biological Complexity and Scientific Practice, with comments from Brandon Ogbunu @cbo.bsky.social. www.youtube.com/watch?v=OamF...

AI tools can, within seconds, analyse information and write essays — some of the exact skills that universities teach. My @nature.com story examines what this means for universities & students: is this the future of learning of the end of critical thinking? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Some doctoral programmes in the US are admitting no students at all amid uncertainty about federal science funding go.nature.com/4o63boK

The biologist's view of how flight works. Courtesy of Rory Maizels. #GenerativeBiology

The transition from prison to community is often a socially and medically vulnerable moment for persons deprived of liberty (PDL). Our previous work found that PDL in Brazil have 3x ⬆️ risk of mortality after prison release compared with others in their community 1/5 journals.plos.org/plosmedicine...

Really looking forward to reading this book by Brian Moon which gives a naturalistic view of decision making...

Once again, EVERY R1 research university depends on federal funding for ~15-25% of its budget. You simply can't unplug the largest or 2nd-largest source of $$ of every R1 university & expect it not to have devastating consequences for graduate education, which will spill over to undergrad education.

My response to the NYT’s “moderate to win” argument: The data shows the strategy is tapped out. Being seen as moderate by voters doesn’t boost votes, replacing every progressive with moderates would net 0 seats, and the graveyard of defeated D incumbents if full of moderates, not progressives.

"[T]he innocence of basic questions around criminal propensity is only skin deep." Sitting with @cbo.bsky.social's excellent reflections on the legacy of the "Crime Gene Conference" this morning. I encourage you to do the same. undark.org/2025/10/16/o...