Knuth: "Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I'd been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 ... What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction."

Nationally, 11-12% of Australian workers are in a very high-risk psychosocial safety climate. In universities, that jumps to 44%.

I got an email celebrating a Faculty wellbeing initiative. Some lovely colleagues have been volunteering to do things like deliver flowers and citrus fruits to the tearooms to lift our spirits.

You'd think requiring everyone to agree to the fishing level would protect fish better, but this new paper shows consensus-based voting can lead to worse conservation outcomes when the fishery was already highly exploited. Congratulations to Irina Lerner on her first paper 🎉

We need $484 billion/year for nature-based climate solutions by 2030. But how do you convince investors when a single cyclone can erase years of restoration? Jordan Holdorf's new paper shows adaptive timing of investments can make risky projects financially viable.

Claude (Opus 4.5) has started citing Grokipedia in its results.

I posted this👇 to a claim that genAI is better than Ctl+F to search historical docs. @tristanpalmgren.bsky.social replied with a genAI summary of my document and @bookllyfr.bsky.social asked if it was accurate. It turns out that it did exactly what genAI does: made stuff up & got stuff wrong.🧵

I wrote a blog post about a lecture introducing stability in ODE models and their numerical solution. The lecture transcript and code for figures are included. nadiah.org/2025/12/04/m...

🚨 Excited to share our new research! 🚨 We tackle a big question in conservation: how can we make smarter use of existing surveys to learn about places and species we haven’t yet been able to survey? 🏔️ 🔗 Read the paper here: doi.org/10.1111/2041...

Happy to share that our paper ‘a formal theory of group-level adaptation for obligate eusociality’ (with @andygardner.bsky.social) is now out in @jevbio.bsky.social advances. doi.org/10.1093/jeb/... #OpenAccess #Eusociality #GroupAdaptation #FormalDarwinism

Awesome, this is the second journal I’ve published in that has since let through egregious AI slop.

Recently read a superstar outside my field, summarising their previous work modelling institutional change. A quite simple model, but it can capture, e.g., "strategic stability", where groups vote against a change that will benefit them bc it will open the door to future change that harms them.

Why is altruism more common in nature than spite? This new paper gives a general mathematical explanation: the degree of negative assortment that can be achieved is constrained in a way that positive assortment is not, particularly in unbalanced populations. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Analytic solution for the stationary distribution of actions taken in iterated games with implementation errors, and code to automate the solution in SymPy. nadiah.org/2025/11/18/a...

I wrote a blog post about an unpublished paper with a surprising result -- unequal sharing can promote cooperation. nadiah.org/2025/06/01/c...

Quite the opening sentence from the Discussion:- "Repeated interactions alone cannot explain the evolution of one-shot cooperation because they cannot explain the evolution of repeated cooperation." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congratulations to my office-mate, Zach Carter, for making the cover of Nature Ecology & Evolution 🎉

Watching “Animal Pride” hosted by Queer FoS at QUT

Turns out Alexander Magazinov has a long blog post about these guys (pretty sure it's the same paper mill): forbetterscience.com/2025/07/02/s...

The plot thickens! I just found what seems to be the original version of the paper. It wasn’t just AI generated, it was plagiarised. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Check out the graphical abstract for a paper recently published in Ecological Modelling. I have papers published in Ecological Modelling. Never again, I guess.

I got a lot out of last semester's Christian Nationalism course, so if you're interested in learning about climate action, direct action, and/or socially aware sci fi, check them out.

My PhD student @leonielorenz.bsky.social (with Eva Geissen) has made this nice (free) online course to introduce mathematical modelling for biology: www.ebi.ac.uk/training/onl... Including both molecular and epidemiological examples

I'm interested in this online seminar next week. If you want to sign up for this seminar series, which is timed to suit researchers in Asia and Oceania, there's a Google form here -- forms.gle/WSnJS3bNK1b4... -- or you can follow @courtgt.bsky.social for updates.

From student to researcher, a #career in #science can come with a high price tag. @drcraigmc.bsky.social ‬explores how wealth shapes opportunity in #STEM and proposes structural changes to support #equity and inclusion. 🧪 plos.io/4edGlY4

I keep getting academic spam saying my recent paper has won the 'Best Research Paper Award'. Sucks to be them, though, I have low self-esteem, so I'd never fall for that. Here's the paper that didn't win an award.

Binmore's flair 🖤 "the community of spirit [of] modern communitarians and ancient moralists alike actually operates ... we are not bound together by iron shackles of duty and obligation, but by common understandings and conventions that propagate through societies like fungus through a rotten log"

@carlo-h.bsky.social has finished OCR-ing the Antarctic Treaty System documents, and he also indulges my dork-nostalgia for games like Myst, excessive adjectives and archaic prose.

biorxiv is down, in case anyone else has revisions due today. Either that or something has happened to my user account :-( On the plus side, guess I get to go home now :-)

I really enjoyed the session I attended this morning from Brisbane, and there is another on in about 8 hours that you can still enrol to attend.

Well, that's something new that's never happened to me before -- my blog just got cited in a paper! journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

I am really happy to share information about the 2nd Workshop on Modeling and Applications of Evolutionary Game Theory, which will be held virtually on Thursday, May 8, and Friday, May 9. sites.google.com/view/2nd-evo... I enjoyed organizing this workshop with Olivia Chu and Alex McAvoy.

Thanks, past self, that's exactly what I was looking for!

PopBio on the Dark Side Seminar this week - "Predicting Ecosystem Responses to Perturbations via a Geometric Approach" by @akshitg.bsky.social Thursday 1pm AEST, UTC +10 April 24. Our students chose to do a project on this topic this semester, so very interested to hear Akshit's talk!

The student paper at the college at which I teach reports a "tsunami of takedown requests" from international students terrified of being targeted for innocuous, legitimate op-eds & opinions.. Many ask in person--leave no trace in writing. Reminds me of my father's account of studying in the USSR.

Carlo Hamalainen has been doing an amazing job using LLMs for OCR on early Antarctic Treaty System documents.

Ryan wrote a blog post about our new paper here:

Here is an excellent checklist for reproducible research, this is from the Biometrical Journal, but is relevant for computational scientists in all fields: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal... Lots of best practices and specific tips for increasing the quality, usefulness & impact of papers 🧪

Today, I attended the International Women in Mathematics Day, jointly hosted between @griffith.edu.au, QUT, and UQ.

I’m happy to announce our J Theor Biol paper about kin selection in group games in now available online www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Very interested to do a deep dive on this paper by @nadiah.bsky.social et al on nonlinear games in partly-related groups! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Ecologists using Qualitative Modelling often model a species eradication as a press-perturbation. This is obviously wrong, but it's not obvious how wrong it is and when. In the blog post below, I summarise a result that could be used to get started thinking about this question.

Attending the inaugural PopBio on the Dark Side seminar with Ryan Chisholm at National University of Singapore. It's tricky for those of us on this side of the planet to attend most online ecology seminars. You can sign up for the series here: forms.gle/WSnJS3bNK1b4... Thx @courtgt.bsky.social !

Le Monde reporting that a French scientist traveling to Houston to attend a conference was denied entry to US after a search of his phone & computer revealed messages critical of Trump's science cuts, "which [says CPB] conveyed hatred of Trump & could be qualified as terrorism". Computer confiscated

🎉 After minor revisions, J Theor Biol has accepted our new paper! We explored how to model the evolution of discrete strategies in group games played between relatives, and we applied it to a situation where players could verbally agree to contribute to the public good ("Coordinated Cooperation").

Reminder that we are hiring a full-time one-year math lecturer! Apply here: emmanuel.interviewexchange.com/jobofferdeta...

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I’ve now posted the national data, 2015-2023, in Stata format here. I will add state and district data when I’m able. www.datalumos.org/datalumos/pr...

If you're a scientist that serves on an NSF panel that got cancelled today, I'd love to talk to you about it for an NPR story. DM, email or reach out on signal.