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/...

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.

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.

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.

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.🗽

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.

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.

An amusing subreddit to browse is /r/Birdsfacingforward

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

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/...

Wasting away again in Amanitaville

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!

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.

If you don't have bread to go with your curry, you can use tortillas instead. It's a naan-synonymous substitution.

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...

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.

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.

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/...

Back in middle school, some friends and I started a club called Kids Protecting Our Planet, or KPOP. We never hunted demons though.

Bivalve making a toast: Pseudofeces for my real friends, and…

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!

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.

This article from just last month is now obsolete. Mosquitoes have arrived in Iceland. www.futura-sciences.com/en/why-icela...

Frogs resist!

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.

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.

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.

Some excellent nature photos www.nhm.ac.uk/wpy/gallery

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.

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day! This photo from Alaska 1914 is sad, but also has potential as a modern meme.

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/...

Mushroom friends, Washington Cascades

Do I know anyone attending Entomology 2025 next month? I probably won't formally register, but I'll be in Portland.

It Throve on Wounds: addressing the crisis of insecticide-resistant mosquitoes adaptivediversity.wordpress.com/2025/10/06/i...

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

"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.

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...

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?

What in the Hatch Act is happening to federal websites?

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.

The importance of beer to vector biology www.science.org/content/arti...

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...

This makes me so happy. Scicomm matters.

A nice example of using pop gen to find a new concerning trend with deadly consequences www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Tag yourself, I’m anti-capitalism. If you enjoy John Lennon’s song Imagine, that’s already at least half of these.

“Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky” In other breaking news, water is wet. academic.oup.com/icb/article-...

Two new big mosquito pop gen papers in Science: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... and www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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-...)

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.

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.