am reminded of the old joke: what did James Watson discover? Rosalind Franklin’s notes.

Today we publish a new paper at The British Medical Journal on the links between biodiversity, climate and health in relation to the hashtag#COP30 in Brazil Here we argue that climate resilience depends on nature—and both are vital for the health of people. www.bmj.com/content/391/...

It's important for Europeans, and others from visa-waiver countries, to understand they don't have freedom of speech rights when visiting the United States. The Trump regime is still deporting visitors for critical comments made online, because they can.

Wow. I did not know that Alfred Russell Wallace (co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection) wrote a book in 1904 about the biological potential for life on other planets, and I've just found this extraordinary paragraph setting out the insanity of atmospheric pollution [1/3]. In 1904!

A paper for the #eDNA crowd, in particular those using flies for terrestrial biomonitoring. We show that massive pooling works well, reducing costs + time, bringing us a step closer to scalable terrestrial eDNA biomonitoring. doi.org/10.1002/edn3...

I'm v excited to be recruiting a PhD student to work on badger behaviour and ecology! Starting date is March 2026; see the ad here, or message me for more details: www.gregalbery.me/s/March-2026...

Sadly, the conservation outlook for #BiałowieżaForest World Heritage Site is now "critical" largely on account of state border barriers, #militarization and breakdown in #transboundary cooperation. The IUCN released the assessment some days ago: worldheritageoutlook.iucn.org/explore-site...

Recently came across Lisa Taylor's amazing work on coloration in jumping spiders, including using eyeliner to give them teenytiny makeovers to see whether these colors helped them attract mates/avoid sexual cannibalism. Sometimes in science, there aren't standard tools for the thing you want to do🧪

We are pleased to announce that throughout Open Access Week, from 20 – 26 October, all Royal Society journal content is freely available. Explore our journals here: royalsociety.org/Journals/ #OAWeek #OAWeek25

Very grateful to @nsaphra.bsky.social for making their (successful) job market materials publicly available: nsaphra.net/post/jobmark.... It's very handy to be able see what these things are supposed to look like!

I'm working on a story about this policy change regarding X gender markers on passports. If you have an X gender marker and want to discuss, please DM me! papersplease.org/wp/2025/10/1...

Due to this policy, I have just applied for a visa waiver to a country of which I am a citizen. Why? Because my American passport has an X on it, and now I can only safely enter the country using my Chilean passport with a binary sex marker. www.visaverge.com/passport/cbp...

Bird species with specialized diets and migratory habits tend to show higher fear of novelty, a stable trait that may influence their adaptability to environmental change. doi.org/g96v62

Convex hull range estimation

Missing Values were dropped; Mean Imputation was applied; Data available on request; Code available on request; #rstats

Decorating my apartment with signed posters of the larps I’ve written for @makeascenemn.bsky.social

EXTREMELY COOL BAT STUFF: A study out in Science today found that the greater noctule bat, Europe's largest, hunts and catches *migrating birds* while in flight. In at least one case, a bat climbed to more than 1200 feet, then chased a robin downward FAST until it caught it near the ground.

One of the risks of bowerbirds sharing space with a university - sometimes scientific equipment (and samples) get pinched! Soy sauce containers also seem to be popular

"Cosplaying" and "larping" are real activities done by real people, and using these terms as slang for "pretending to be someone you're not, for political purposes" does indeed alienate those of us who take part in these activities.

I’m just going to start calling out people who do this. All support to AAUP, but this petition does not mention the fact that the loyalty oath requires universities to discriminate against trans students and students of color.

The 2021–2025 North American #H5N1 outbreak evolved through successive lineage replacements and each new reassortant virus outcompeted its ancestor (😯😯😯), and the Prairie Pothole Region (Minnesota and Dakota area) is the hub for spreading. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

One of the amazing things about science is we will never run out of mysteries. Take "Naturwissenschaften (2003) 90:495–500", which performed a survey of 10,000 dinosaur fossils for evidence of tumors in the bone. I was prepared for yes, no, but what I wasn't prepared for was: "only in hadrosaurs."

Really wish that all the academics rightfully denouncing Trump’s coercive “compact” for universities would mention the fact that it would require universities to viciously discriminate against trans students and students of color. Academic freedom is important, but it’s not the only value at stake.

I don’t rubber duck my code, I goldfinch my code

That's quite the chart annotation. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

let me share a little story about a remarkable wasp that I encountered yesterday in our local deserts I stumbled across her, and scrambled to get a few crappy photos .... but then realized that she had a burrow, perhaps a better photo op was possible ?? here she is at her burrow entrance.

"How many of you have opened RStudio, one of the most advanced data science IDEs ever created, to add two numbers?" - Jonathan McPherson at #positconf2025 😆🙋‍♀️

Monsoon Morning 🌵⛅️

When I designed Desaparecides, my larp about the fascist regime in Argentina 177-83, I built safety into every part of the game, not just check in and debrief. This is the effort it takes to write games on difficult themes responsibly.

Here, have some birds perched on appropriate/delightful signage. You're welcome. 🧵 ⤵️ 1. Black Vulture (Coragyps atratus) by tysmith on iNaturalist

Is anarchist science possible? As an experiment, we got together a large group of computational neuroscientists from around the world to work on a single project without top down direction. Read on to find out what happened. 🤖🧠🧪

A nice reminder that even the most fundamental 'rules' of biology are basically just strong suggestions

Some are embracing the fantasy that the cuts to #NIH funding will only have an impact here in the USA. As Nature reports, the NIH is the largest global funder by far and dwarfs the rest of the world’s funders of biomedical research. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Modellers take note!! This is a nice demonstration of the consequences of letting statistics versus a priori ecological knowledge drive predictive variable selection.

v1.0.0 of CoinfectionSimulator.jl is out! I think I'm starting to get a feel for coding in #JuliaLang style. You can use this simulator to model multiple directly transmitted infections in a host population, including different disease types and interactions between them. github.com/japilo/Coinf...

🦌 NEW PAPER ALERT! 🦌 Our paper on wild #reindeer and #caribou is out in Science Advances! Thanks to the team: Eric Post, @nmschmidt.bsky.social, Stuart Brown, @noguesbravo.bsky.social and Damien Fordham that co-lead this research. doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Except…

Never ask postdocs what they'll be doing next year, that's considered terribly offensive in their culture.

TIL about Value-Supressing Uncertainty Palettes. This really has really started the wheels turning! medium.com/@uwdata/valu...

This surprisingly relaxing footage is from SIX MILES under the ocean – and it’s the deepest ecosystem yet discovered

3 domestic cats in US consumed raw milk contaminated with HPAI = fever and neurologic signs; 2 cats died. Raw dairy a risk. 👉 wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/...

TTRPGS like most media often use gender, race and sexuality as fads rather than committing to uplift marginalized players and designers.

v 0.3.0 of CoinfectionSimulator.jl is out, now with a more logical implementation of species pair interaction strength in `prep_interaction_matrix`. github.com/japilo/Coinf...

People who are not familiar with my research history don’t know that I adore wasps and will defend them to my last breath.

🦠 Where future pandemics might start A new study maps global hotspots for disease outbreaks, showing how climate change, deforestation, and crowded cities are creating the conditions for the next epidemic. 🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #SciComm #GlobalHealth #Pandemics 🧪

Exciting new work from my @ciddpsu.bsky.social colleagues showing that pandemic H1N1 immunity reduces susceptibility to H5N1 infection and disease in ferrets.

New paper out modelling how the nutritional content of wild bird foods could affect disease transmission - a nice follow-up application of our Molecular Ecology study showing that food quality can affect immune function and disease tolerance. doi.org/10.1093/icb/... @durantlab.bsky.social

New blogpost. The shitshow that results when a publisher fails to check up on their peer reviewers, with authors caught up in a nightmare process. deevybee.blogspot.com/2025/07/trou...

No more Beewashing please! Why beekeeping doesn't help conserve bees. Pls RT if you agree. youtu.be/fiBYBmlKSYU