Jacob Tennessen
@jacobphd.bsky.social
📤 359
📥 312
📝 527
Scientist errant. Genetics, evolution, whimsy, awe.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/jtennessen
🧬🦟🐌🩸👤🦠🍓🐸🧬
pinned post!
Stuff I've written about biology that I think is cool (and you might too): General musings:
adaptivediversity.wordpress.com
The Emoji Guide to Human Genetic Diversity:
scholar.harvard.edu/jtennessen/e...
More emoji-based science communication:
scholar.harvard.edu/jtennessen/b...
about 2 months ago
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This says Anopheles mosquitoes crossed the Atlantic when it was ~2/3 of its modern width, instead of the conventionally stated Mesozoic timing when the distance was short. Is it plausible? Mosquitoes are delicate and absent from many remote islands, but life finds a way…
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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2 days ago
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Children's book idea: A grocer decides real fruits must have seeds & reorganizes the produce stands. The fruits and veggies are appalled. Zucchinis must leave their carrot friends. Bananas protest. Grape families are split up. Customers are confused. Finally the grocer learns biology isn't identity.
2 days ago
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Only one predator species chooses its prey based on what it senses the prey has eaten. Specifically, it wants prey full of human (or other vertebrate) blood! Meet Evarcha culicivora, the spider that prefers blood-fed mosquitoes. Called the vampire spider, but this is misleading: it EATS vampires.
3 days ago
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Has anyone plotted the runaway inflation of PhD count per fictional character? Who has the most? Ford Pines (Gravity Falls) has 12, Mr Terrific (DC Comics) has 14, Mr Fantastic (Marvel) has 18. At this rate future media will have to give their heroes dozens of PhDs just to make the appear competent.
3 days ago
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Right after 9/11 I lived in the Bronx and taught in Harlem. Some of my sophomores may be grandparents by now. Feeling so hopeful for them and their families as NYC rises and shines.🗽
4 days ago
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Toxoplasma isn't "intelligent" but it manipulates the behavior of rodents & maybe other mammals. A brainless algorithm formed by natural selection to hijack brains. AI need not know what it's doing either, but versions that engage with human psyche so as to favor their own propagation will prosper.
5 days ago
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The government refuses to end the time change, but they have been willing to adjust what day it occurs. So let's keep pushing the fall back / spring forward days together until Standard Time is just the week between Christmas and New Year's when nobody knows what time it is anyway.
6 days ago
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An amusing subreddit to browse is /r/Birdsfacingforward
9 days ago
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Parasites as Halloween characters: Zombie = Naegleria •Eats your brain •Once it gets you, no cure Vampire = Plasmodium •Feeds on blood •Reaches victims using flight Werewolf = Paragonimus •Associated with canids •He'll rip your lungs out, Jim
9 days ago
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This paper makes for great discussion. Do I agree with their new definition of domestication? No. Can I come up with a better one myself? Also no.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2413207122
9 days ago
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Wasting away again in Amanitaville
10 days ago
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A "monster" was originally a biological abnormality like a birth defect, believed to be an omen. But it's ableist and scientifically inaccurate to classify births as normal vs abnormal: every baby has unique mutations as well as non-genetic quirks. You are a monster, so do the mash!
10 days ago
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The move to ban Red 40 dye is comical since it's almost literally a red herring. The problems it's supposed to solve are real, and we don't need it, but ditching it won't make America any healthier. An influencer will call it a poison but a scientist will tell you that the dose makes the poison.
11 days ago
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If you don't have bread to go with your curry, you can use tortillas instead. It's a naan-synonymous substitution.
11 days ago
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The presumptive next Surgeon General laid out her vision last year. Public health is in for a wild ride. She comes close to getting it and identifies a lot of real problems, but she sees science as a fundamentally corrupt system and endorses wacky nonsense instead.
www.caseymeans.com/learn/newsle...
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Newsletter #35: 🇺🇸 My health wishlist for the next Administration — Casey Means MD
More than anything, I would like to see our future White House rally Americans to be healthy and fit. We need inspirational national leaders helping to inspire people to care about their health, the f...
https://www.caseymeans.com/learn/newsletter-35
11 days ago
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By convention we name science projects after scientists. If someone says they've read Tennessen (2008) you wouldn't say "well actually Tennessen was the doctor, not that monster of a paper." The doctor and the monster have the same name.
12 days ago
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Fuegian “dogs" were not dogs but a partially domesticated form of the fox-like Patagonian culpeo, bred by the Selk’nam people for aid in hunting. A genocide c. 1900 targeted these pets and drove them extinct, though the Selk’nam survived. Human ingenuity, and human cruelty, shape genetic diversity.
13 days ago
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It didn’t evolve in subway tunnels, but this is still a story of a new species of urban-adapted mosquito created accidentally by humans, the kind of thing we probably want to avoid doing.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
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Ancient origin of an urban underground mosquito
Understanding how life is adapting to urban environments represents an important challenge in evolutionary biology. In this work, we investigate a widely cited example of urban adaptation, Culex pipie...
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady4515
14 days ago
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Back in middle school, some friends and I started a club called Kids Protecting Our Planet, or KPOP. We never hunted demons though.
15 days ago
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Bivalve making a toast: Pseudofeces for my real friends, and…
16 days ago
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With two big recent tomes on TB (Everything is TB; The Phantom Plague) I await a pop sci book on schisto. Affecting >200 million people; lots of not-for-the-squeamish symptoms like diarrhea, blood in stool/urine, anemia, swollen potbelly, etc.; and spread by sewage-dwelling snails! Super compelling!
16 days ago
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For a great satire of American gun culture, see the first chapter of From the Earth to the Moon written in 1865. I guess we've always been like this.
18 days ago
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This article from just last month is now obsolete. Mosquitoes have arrived in Iceland.
www.futura-sciences.com/en/why-icela...
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Why Iceland is the only country without mosquitoes (and why that could change) - Futura-Sciences
It sounds too good to be true—but there is a country on Earth where you won’t get bitten by a single mosquito. Thanks to its unique climate, Iceland remains completely mosquito-free. But with climate ...
https://www.futura-sciences.com/en/why-iceland-is-the-only-country-without-mosquitoes-and-why-that-could-change_20116/
19 days ago
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Frogs resist!
21 days ago
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Average human sperm count evolved to be higher than necessary for effective fertilization due to intrasex competition. Gorillas have lower counts because a female rarely has >1 partner at a time. Condolences to guys dealing with low fertility, but our species overall has more sperm than we need.
22 days ago
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Watching the word "crispant" emerge for a CRISPR/Cas9 mutant, so far mostly confined to aquatic zoology research (fish, amphibians, marine inverts) where external fertilization allows these mutants themselves (as opposed to their descendants in a stable lineage) to be studied.
23 days ago
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If a journal editor fails to find reviewers promptly, a bot will choose potential experts and start sending out requests in the editor's name. This is a good use of AI, similar to WMDs: as a threat, hopefully never to be used.
23 days ago
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Some excellent nature photos
www.nhm.ac.uk/wpy/gallery
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Gallery | Wildlife Photographer of the Year | Natural History Museum
Browse the WPY winning images in our immersive gallery. Use the filter tab to customise your search
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/wpy/gallery
24 days ago
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Eugenics has led to forced sterilization of about 70000 people in the United States alone. Not only did these victims not consent, but they were often not even informed of the procedure, which might be performed during an operation ostensibly for another purpose like Cesarean birth or appendectomy.
25 days ago
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Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day! This photo from Alaska 1914 is sad, but also has potential as a modern meme.
26 days ago
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A common misconception is that CRISPR/Cas9 has allowed anyone to genetically edit anything for over a decade now. But in reality some organisms have been really hard to modify, including a few with major health impacts. We’ve been awaiting this breakthrough for years
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
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CRISPR/Cas9-germline editing of Biomphalaria glabrata: A breakthrough in genetic modification of snails that transmit schistosomiasis
Creation of germline-edited vector snails is a key advance in efforts to combat schistosomiasis.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx5889
28 days ago
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Mushroom friends, Washington Cascades
29 days ago
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Do I know anyone attending Entomology 2025 next month? I probably won't formally register, but I'll be in Portland.
about 1 month ago
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It Throve on Wounds: addressing the crisis of insecticide-resistant mosquitoes
adaptivediversity.wordpress.com/2025/10/06/i...
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It Throve on Wounds
In ancient Greek myth, the hero Heracles (romanized as Hercules) had to complete twelve seemingly impossible tasks. One was to slay the Hydra. This snake-like beast dwelt in a swamp and terrorized …
https://adaptivediversity.wordpress.com/2025/10/06/it-throve-on-wounds/
about 1 month ago
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Match these two classic adventure tales with the exciting climax scene for which they are famous. Novels: 1. Tarzan of the Apes 2. Robinson Crusoe Climax: A. Escaping a forest fire in Wisconsin B. Fighting bears and wolves in the snowy Pyrenees
about 1 month ago
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"Otter" and "Hydra" are really the same word, modern versions of the Proto-Indo-European *udros for "water creature." You can still hear it in the names.
about 1 month ago
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This slick documentary starring Idris Elba is secretly an ad by the World Gold Council. It implies that gold mining companies are leading the fight against malaria. In truth, gold mining is one of the *worst* practices promoting new malaria cases and drug resistance.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS4x...
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Gold and the fight against malaria
YouTube video by World Gold Council
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS4x8bVeXZw
about 1 month ago
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Right now if you want to separate out the two chromosomes in diploid genomic sequence data, your choices are 1. whatshap (
whatshap.readthedocs.io
) 2. phasebook (
github.com/phasebook/ph...
) How far can the social media theme go? Who can release a Bluesky- or Mastodon-named bioinformatic tool?
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WhatsHap — whatshap 2.8 documentation
https://whatshap.readthedocs.io
about 1 month ago
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What in the Hatch Act is happening to federal websites?
about 1 month ago
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Today I’m in war-torn Portland (well, Beaverton) visiting the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute at Oregon Health & Science University. Hope to see some primates of the human and non-human varieties.
about 1 month ago
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The importance of beer to vector biology
www.science.org/content/arti...
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Does drinking beer make you more attractive to mosquitoes?
Experiments performed at a large music festival suggest the bloodsuckers are more attracted to hedonistic attendees
https://www.science.org/content/article/does-drinking-beer-make-you-more-attractive-mosquitoes
about 1 month ago
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Biology is Bigger: There’s more to life than binary sex Inspiration to write this came from a shirt by
@sarahmackattack.bsky.social
and a comment by
@mousqueton1291.bsky.social
adaptivediversity.wordpress.com/2025/09/30/b...
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Biology is Bigger
The penis of a Japanese volcano barnacle is several times longer than his entire body. While remaining firmly attached to a cliff, he can slither his member into another barnacle up to four body-le…
https://adaptivediversity.wordpress.com/2025/09/30/biology-is-bigger/
about 1 month ago
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This makes me so happy. Scicomm matters.
about 1 month ago
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A nice example of using pop gen to find a new concerning trend with deadly consequences
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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A novel locus associated with decreased susceptibility of Plasmodium falciparum to lumefantrine and dihydroartemisinin has emerged and spread in Uganda
Malaria control in Uganda is threatened by the emergence of artemisinin partial resistance (ART-R) and decreasing lumefantrine susceptibility. To identify loci contributing to decreased drug susceptib...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.30.667738v1
about 1 month ago
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Tag yourself, I’m anti-capitalism. If you enjoy John Lennon’s song Imagine, that’s already at least half of these.
add a skeleton here at some point
about 1 month ago
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“Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky” In other breaking news, water is wet.
academic.oup.com/icb/article-...
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Validate User
https://academic.oup.com/icb/article-abstract/65/3/538/8196180?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false
about 1 month ago
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Two new big mosquito pop gen papers in Science:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
and
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
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1206 genomes reveal origin and movement of Aedes aegypti driving increased dengue risk
The emergence and global expansion of Aedes aegypti puts more than half of all humans at risk of arbovirus infection, but the origin of this mosquito and the impact of contemporary gene flow on arbovi...
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads3732
about 1 month ago
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Has anyone compiled a list of all the terms for this human-dominated period of Earth's history? There's: Anthropocene (
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthrop...
) Pyrocene (
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrocene
) Plasticene (
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
) Homoge[n]ocene (
orionmagazine.org/article/the-...
)
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Anthropocene - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene
about 1 month ago
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Acetaminophen was first used on humans in 1887 yet Jules Verne described Phileas Fogg in 1872 presumably by observing the personalities of real humans who existed at that time.
about 2 months ago
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After I did my PhD work on frog antimicrobial peptides and moved on, another J Tennessen published on the same topic with some of the same coauthors. I’m related to her but we’ve never published together. I suspect at least one reader of our papers has concluded that we are the same trans woman.
about 2 months ago
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