Congratulations to one of #GENEAmsterdam's founding members, Wouter Peyrot, for receiving an ERC starting grant! www.amsterdamumc.org/en/research/...

Brilliant paper by Visscher et al. Populations differ in traits/disease burden. Are these differences due to genetics? Comparing single variants or polygenic scores between populations is biased due to environmental confounders correlated with the variants. 1/3 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

It was a pleasure introducing PsyNet and its many applications at the Laboratory for Experimental Social Psychology today! Thanks @felixhermans.bsky.social for the invitation and all PsyNet developers, incl. @pmcharrison.bsky.social and @norijacoby.bsky.social for creating such an amazing platform!

Our genome-wide meta-regression of social behaviour is out as a preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Wonderful @eagle-genetics.bsky.social work with first author @luciadehoyos.bsky.social! We model and predict genetic variation according to social context: outcomes, informants and age!

Andrej is a great scientist and teacher, highly recommended!

Pick an idiom: "more than meets the eye", "beauty more than skin [feather] deep" etc. In work led by Rosalyn Price-Waldman, we describe a hidden (and ignored!) black or white layer found below the visible surface of bird feathers which helps make bird colours so striking! 🧪 🪶 #colsci

Congratulations to Oleg Sobchuk and Arthur Kocher on being awarded @erc.europa.eu Starting Grants!! 🥳 @sobchuk.bsky.social will be exploring the macroevolution of European literature, while Kocher will be studying ancient pathogen dynamics. See: tinyurl.com/mr2m2zms & tinyurl.com/9cwdnc54

Join our team! We're hiring a Team Assistant to support the ALLab. Responsibilities include administrative tasks, calendar management & more. German (and English) language skills are essential. Check it out and pass on the news: www.iwm-tuebingen.de/de/karriere/...

Interested in doing a PhD with me and lacns.github.io? Or with any of the incredible fellows in the IMPRS School of Cognition www.maxplanckschools.org/cognition-en - apply before Dec 1st at cognition.maxplanckschools.org/en/application

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗱𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱𝘀 (𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲) 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺? Implications for reinforcement learning. Very interesting paper. doi.org/10.1016/j.ti... #neuroskyence

Been thinking about creating a collection of good protein structure figures, as inspiration for my own work. #1 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'm looking for a PhD student to do some trailblazing at the frontier of personality genomics and lifespan gene-environment transactions (start Fall 2026)! If you want to work with me: psychology.msu.edu/graduatestud... (PS @drmeltemyucel.bsky.social is taking a student too, in moral psych/dev!)

Excited to say we’re hiring 😊. We’re looking for a post-doc in ancient pathogen genomics to join our friendly supportive team in London at @ugiatucl.bsky.social. Start date January 2026. www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

does someone good at coding & analysis want to work remotely w/ us in the coming few months (before end of 2025), as a paid consultant? project will be on neurofeedback (fMRI, ECoG, calcium imaging). we'll work towards developing the experiments & analysis pipelines together. if so pls DM me ur CV🧠📈

Nice review of polygenic prediction of traits based on ancient DNA, by @mathiesoniain.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This flow chart is also canonical (sincere apologies but I do not think I can alt-text this)

What can *genetic insensitivity to opioids* teach us about endogenous opioid function in humans? Fully funded position in Oslo (PhD student or postdoc) Interested in pain, mu/kappa opioids, behavioural genetics, RCTs, or related? Apply here: 2411.webcruiter.no/Main2/Recrui... Please RT for reach

People with a psychiatric disorder are more likely to marry someone who has the same condition than to partner with someone who doesn’t go.nature.com/4myGLvz

Physical copies of this 71-chapter tome now exist. Do encourage your library to buy a copy…also doubles as excellent door stop! Co-edited with Jamie Tehrani and @rachkendal.bsky.social. @oxunipress.bsky.social @durhamanthropology.bsky.social

Art seems to interact well with behavioural genetics 🤓

🧵 on cool choices of image headers (and titles) all from @sashagusevposts.bsky.social's Substack 🔗 at the end 'Beneath the surface of the sum' Genetic interactions may look like the thing they deviate from Interaction (1964) by Julian Stanczak

I wrote about gene-gene interactions (epistasis) and the implications for heritability, trait definitions, natural selection, and therapeutic interventions. Biology is clearly full of causal interactions, so why don't we see them in the data? A 🧵:

#ECVP2025 In addition to yesterday's Illusion Night we would like to mention the contribution of @elinevg.bsky.social and @lisa-kossmann.bsky.social about Open-Source Toolboxes for aesthetics and perception.

For over 5,000 y, chanting has been practiced across many Western and Eastern traditions. Chants share distinctive acoustic traits which have evolved culturally to optimize listener relaxation. 👇 new paper @pnas.org by ENES Bioacoustics Research Lab & Co #bioacoustics www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The end of a PhD journey 🎓 What a ride - full of lovely people, exciting science, coding tunnels, coffee-brainstorms & amazing conferences! Whole-hearted thank you to all who shared the journey & celebrated with me - especially @sofievalk.bsky.social, @sbe.bsky.social &@mps-cognition.bsky.social 💐🥳❤️

Call for abstracts: genetics, economic & social issues. We're hosting a 1-day workshop on using genetic data to examine economic & social issues on 12th December at UCL’s Social Research Institute. More info & submission at link below #genetics #socialscience #economics #cohort bit.ly/41EnPmu

BBS just announced a call for commentaries on @manvir.bsky.social's target article, "Subjective selection, super-attractors, and the origins of the cultural manifold" Deadline is Sep 10! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

I've added a few new features to {grateful}, the package that facilitates citation of #rstats packages, and I'd love feedback before submitting to CRAN 🧵

Next, aesthetic preferences. People think real-world large objects look better when displayed large, and vice versa for small objects. Our experiments show that this is true with anagrams too!

Hi Bluesky! 🦋 We are the Aesthetics and Learning Lab (ALL). ALLab is based in the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM) in Tübingen. Its aim is to empirically investigate how and what can be learned from aesthetic experiences ✨ Stay tuned, for now... That's ALL folks!

Isn't genetics cool??? Within only 145 nucleotides(!) of a non-coding RNA (RNU4-2) - different variants in distinct regions / structures cause three distinct disorders!!! (all discovered within the last 18 months) 🤯🤓🧬❤️

One of the largest twin studies of personality anticipated massive non-additive dominance/epistasis components. These have not materialized with modern data for *any trait*, no one knows why, and the entire set of findings has apparently been memory-holed.

Not sure who came up with "Manhattan Plot", but in 2014 I coined the alternative term "Nijmegen Plot" (inspired by the Dutch town where I live) to describe underwhelming results from our earliest genome-wide association scans of language/reading traits.

Yes, But

Someone needs to vibecode an optimizer that minimizes the distance between a GWAS and big library of city silhouettes..

An analysis in Nature Genetics shows 57 DNA markers linked to stuttering. These genes also overlap with autism, depression and musical rhythm, suggesting they may be biologically connected. go.nature.com/3JbYZ7c 🧬 🧪

Since July 21st, we have a good reason to celebrate the summa cum laude Defense of the newly minted Dr. Hettwer who received her PhD from @hhu.de under the supervision of Prof. Simon Eickhoff @sbe.bsky.social with strongest support of Dr. Sofie Valk! Congratulations Meike!!!🥂👏🏻🥁🎊

Awesome job opportunity in Sweden!

How delightful! When Descartes was mulling over emotions (which he called passions), which did he list first? Not anger, fear, rage, euphoria, or sadness. Nope. "Wonder". Today, many researchers refer to what he describes here as "prediction error" (triggering "astonishment")

Any discussion of embryo selection should probably start with the description of IVF in this piece, to at least be connected to some aspect of tangiable reality.

Wow! William James said it back in 1884. Now that 140 years have passed since his call, perhaps it's time for our physiology friends "Dr. Ferrier" and "Dr. Munk" to stop ignoring "emotion" as a "problem of the future" 😊. emotion.wisc.edu/wp-content/u...

Major news! Exhaustive metaanalysis (N=2706) finding that endogenous opioids play a MINOR role in human pain regulation: Consistent with 0.3 on 11-point VAS By @isabellmeier.bsky.social @martintrostheim.bsky.social @marieeikemo.bsky.social @loseth.bsky.social et al Thread 👇 osf.io/preprints/os...

The scientists who convinced someone to pay them to study cockatoo dance moves are the true winners "...it's possible the birds just didn’t like Avicii, the researchers suggest." 😂🧪

In the case of obesity, there's nothing magical about crossing the threshold. Such ad hoc thresholds -- sometimes called "dichotomania" -- are surprisingly common in medicine. In fact, many traits currently being screened for have clinically important sub-threshold analogs:

I wrote about how genetic risk works in the context of embryo selection and how people often think about it all wrong. A short 🧵:

Some August highlights from Trends on music, communication, and genetics. First up: the review on music reward sensitivity as a model for understanding reward processing, by Mas-Herrero, Zatorre & Marco-Pallarés. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

New commentary in Science, with Gillian Brown and Kevin Lala, on the human sociobiology debate 50 years on: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I wrote another book & I'm very excited (& nervous) for it to be released into the world: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/714593...

🌟🌟🌟 We are hiring! My group is looking to recruit a postdoc interested in genomic and epigenomic studies of child development. Start date flexible; one-year contract with option to renew. utaustin.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/UTstaff/job/...