Last year: Austin Peay State University learns prof is Nazi who went to Charlottesville rally. Admin drags heels, pays him $56k severance to leave This week: APSU prof posts screenshot of headline - Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths ‘Unfortunately’ Worth it to Keep 2nd Amendment- & is immediately fired

Thanks @newscientist.com for shining a light on the smear campaign against @toriherridge.bsky.social, @devoevomed.bsky.social, @flintdibble.bsky.social & myself just for fulfilling our critic & conscience role to provide expert commentary about de-extinction www.newscientist.com/article/2490...

After he leaked Zohran Mamdani's Columbia application data to the New York Times, critics called Jordan Lasker a "eugenicist." A Mother Jones report shows there's much more to his backstory. Read @nlanard.bsky.social on the shocking rise of one of the tech-right’s favorite posters.

In a long, whiny post about a recent Atlantic article about him, white supremacist Jordan Lasker posts an incompetent analysis using the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study dataset that appears to have been illegitimately accessed and then stolen by one of his coauthors.

How plants sense injury in their barrier tissue, periderm? Painstakingly detailed and amazing work by post doc Hiroyuki Iida shows that wounding is sensed by the diffusion of two gases: ethylene and oxygen. @treebiocoe.bsky.social‬ @erc.europa.eu‬ 1/x 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We ( @zeniabaek.bsky.social @moicoll.bsky.social and @asgerhobolth.bsky.social ) present a new cool way to visualize the optimal trade off for hmm decoding called Artemis plots! arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15156 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Patenting de-extinction. Story by @antonioregalado.bsky.social www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/16/1...

If someone tried to convince me that 14 edits to gray wolf genome makes the animal functionally dire wolf, I'd probably ask for a positive control: turn the wolf functionally jackal with just 14 edits. An easier task, and we at least know what jackals look like and how they act.

My new preprint: When R ~ B(n, p) and n/k -> b > 0, then the k:th raw moment of R is asymptotically k^k (Psi +/- epsilon)^k. Earlier only upper and lower bounds of Psi existed, and a recent sharp result when n/k -> infinity. TODO: the case n/k -> 0. arxiv.org/abs/2504.05766

New paper out: academic.oup.com/genetics/adv...

Scientific peer review by AI — with its own cryptocurrency! As promoted in Nature pivot-to-ai.com/2025/03/09/s...

It's finally official and verified: The X user "Cremieux" is ID'd as a guy called Jordan Lasker. Lasker has been LARPing as an expert in genetics on X to promote racist pseudoscience. @sashagusevposts.bsky.social has been calling out his bullshit for ages

So weird & inscrutable that Musk & his core ideology keeps having strong connections to eugenics & race science, including the pseudonymous race science account Cremieux revealed to be ran by Jordan Lasker whose race science paper was at the center of a scandal involving NIH data misuse & deception

Three cheers for the death of one of the last bastions of race science! (archive link so you don’t give them clicks) web.archive.org/web/20241213...

The flat-earth paper argues that people who live further from Africa are more intelligent, but the method used to measure distance from Africa assumes the earth is flat. When this error was pointed out, nothing was done because it was a “nit-picking” criticism www.frontiersin.org/journals/com...

Very excited (and a bit nervous) to announce that I will be hiring two Postdocs for my new group(!) in Copenhagen to study the Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA which survives in present-day humans. Retweet will be much appreciated :) Link for application: candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

Final text and PDF of our new approach - Delta-statistics - to detecting directionality of admixture (introgression, hybridization) between species/populations - empirical example reanalyzes gene flow between polar and brown bears academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

When I was 5, I loved science, which I took to be planets and magnets and chemicals and shit. Soon I realized science was a collective human activity, and these were just the objects of its attention. Anyway, whenever I read an OpEd on how science isn't political, I think "Are you 5 years old?"

A new/old paper of mine just published in Annales Fennici Mathematici. I show that you can almost always row-scale a rectangular matrix so that if you were to orthonormalize the columns, the rows would attain equal Euclidean lengths in the process. afm.journal.fi/article/view...

Another Guardian story on the Hope not Hate investigation into scientific racism, this time reporting that scientific racists unethically accessed UK Biobank data

“Just as it was then, the current renaissance of eugenics and race science is nothing more than bigotry dressed up as biology” www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Resharing this thread as the nasuscript is now out in MBE: academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-...

I wrote about the latest attempt to sell genetic IQ prediction and why it is snake oil. A short 🧵: theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/genomic-pr...

The Flour Massacre was not unique. The United Nations has identified 14 separate incidents of Israelis shooting at people in Gaza trying to receive aid. reliefweb.int/report/occup...

A method focused thread about our new preprint with Augusto da Silva Coelho, Michaela Richter, Victor A. Albert and Charlotte Lindqvistflavioascoelho @RichterMichaela @plantgenomes and @clindqvist1 How could we improve DFOIL? 🧪🏺 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Brown bear - polar bear hybridization has been principally bidirectional over time, but with different preponderant directions; ancient being brown—>polar, more recent, polar—>brown. Read our work and new method, delta-statistics, led by Kalle Leppälä www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

More on the continuing debate over polar-brown bear speciation and gene flow… 🐻 🧬 🌊

Our new preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Overleaf has some kind of psychic connection to me specifically. It's only down when I need to submit a paper or print a poster.

Is the origin of Bessel correction in Bessel's work on the "personal equation"?

#FCKNZS in Old Babylonian in case anyone was wondering about it. 𒈾𒋛 𒇷𒅖𒋫𒀠𒉿𒌅𒌑 Oh, yeah, you're all illiterate and can't read these old civilized languages. So it's pronounced "nazi lishtalpitú". You're welcome.

What is a good way to write vectors (coordinates in parenthesis separated by spaces) in LaTeX? The default spacing feels a bit random, as in distances depending on the content, and difficult to adjust using just "/,".

There was talk on citrus hybrids on the morning TV science show. So orange is some kind of hybrid between pomelo and mandarin and now they say pomelo is the "father". Citruses are monoecious, how to learn the sexes of some old hybridisation event? Chloroplast or mitochondria would point to "mother".

"Academic freedom is the freedom to research any question of (social) scientific interest using appropriate standards of methodological rigour. Work which violates such standards should not be given a platform in academia." - @rebeccasear.bsky.social blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

PNAS published a paper claiming scientists are “censoring” research for moral reasons. Yet its authors include those who believe women’s brains evolved to be incapable of science, half of Africa is intellectually impaired & promote articles claiming eugenics should be used as “foreign aid” in Africa

Imagine reading this bs 😂 Opinion piece with 38 "authors", published in a prestigious journal. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

An early peek at work from me, @jpj.bsky.social and Andrew that is forthcoming in American Psychologist sometime next year: "Confronting Scientific Racism in Psychology: Lessons from Evolutionary Biology and Genetics"

Thread of some really great works out this week in the world of countering naive genetic thinking (e.g. hereditarianism, genetic determinism, scientific racism)

Heritability within groups is uninformative about differences among groups: cases from behavioral, evolutionary, and statistical genetics www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Is there any known requirements for the objective function so that coordinate descent using simultaneous updating would be guaranteed to converge? I have a situation where each update is followed by a QR-decomposition of a matrix, so the usual one-at-a-time updating is impractical.

PS: The authors of the veggie GWAS invent (I think) a new term: they suggest vegetarianism "lacks polygenicity." Well it doesn't have monogenicity either, so this strikes me as a euphemism for nothing happening. Just say it.

Eugenics never went away Greenland women seek compensation over involuntary birth control - “At least 4,500 women, some teenagers, were fitted with coils to limit birth rates among the indigenous population” www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-e...

Copying a thread from that other site. My new article in the American Journal of Epidemiology: academic.oup.com/aje/advance-... (Everyone's an epidemiologist these days - or am I late to the party? Maybe everyone's a game theorist now...)

In a new job in January I started walking to work, and soon decided I'll also try to befriend the crows I see almost every day. I packed walnuts and ham with me a couple of times, but suddenly the crows were nowhere to be seen, fed the treats to some blackbirds instead.

Mushroom haul:

What do you call an article that has been published online, but has not been or aim to be reviewed? It's not a "preprint" then, is just a "manuscript"?

Don't know what should be the first thing to do here, so I'll just try liking and reposting this.