60 years ago today, mild-mannered jim bowl was bitten by a radioactive spider

Got our plates ready for Superb Owl Sunday meal!

Guys, guys—I found a Superb Owl that is also a Super Bowl!!!

Celebrating Superb Owls day, here are some of our burrowing owls being particualrly superb! Training isn't just tricks; medical behaviors like learning voluntary nail trims here mean not having to catch and restrain birds, much less stress for people and birds alike. #SuperbOwl

Egg-cellent news! The first California condor eggs of the season have been laid at our wildlife conservation center, and more could be on the way.

i think we all need to step back and realize that peak art was made when neolithic pot in the shape of a pig was fired

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Gave a talk on free will the other day and got what is an increasingly common question: isn't my mind really being controlled by my gut microbiome? 🤪

quick, someone help, we've got a vegetable situation

Groundhog Day Meaning xkcd.com/3202/

Our founders, though deeply flawed, understood that democracy requires an informed citizenry and a government accountable to it people. That’s why the press is the only profession protected by the Constitution. It’s also why autocrats and oligarchs seek to control and destroy it.

Never forget: Pam Bondi and Kash said there was nothing in the Epstein files back in March

I found the first investigative file from the first complainant against Epstein in 2005. There are descriptions from the officer, over several interviews of the girl, of her pulling her knees up on the chair, drawing doodles, & the officer high-fiving her to keep her calm as she speaks of horror.

Even benign changes to accreditation rules can require 1000s of person hours to change policies & document compliance. And uggh the committees. Want to know why unis' admin costs have grown so much faster than faculty costs? It's partly due to unfunded mandates like this one.

Question. If Joe Biden called Greenland, “Iceland” four times…. What would the right be saying?

Toltec Potter Wasp, Parazumia tolteca. Texas.

So much of GOP policy is based on claims that don't hold up to evidence: - exporters pay for tariffs - taxing [b/m]illionaires makes them move - immigrants reduce native-born wages, get more in welfare than pay in taxes - work requirements save taxpayer money - trickle-down econ helps working class

Mainstream US press is utterly failing in its duty to inform readers that the US *already* controls land in the Arctic, and that this land is far better positioned than Greenland to stave off any Russian or Chinese threats. It's called "Alaska." It's a state. It even looks big on the map.

Just sharing something completely normal and not at all stressful or disturbing. My cat thinking he's hidden under a piece of paper.

The whole milk thing is the least of our worries, but I do wonder if any of the geniuses in MAHA/the WH know that if you consume their recommended servings of whole milk and protein, you will have exceeded their RDA cap for saturated fats. More "heads I win, tails you lose" policy, I guess.

Yeah! Some #wasplove on the cover for our article on complementary sex determination. Photo from Nicolas Vereecken.

Acoustic guitars used to just be called ‘guitars.’ Then, we invented electric guitars. Oh no. Which meant saying ‘guitar’ wasn’t clear enough. So 'guitars' became 'acoustic guitars.' ‘Acoustic guitar’ is an example of a ‘retronym.’ 🧵⬇️

Amazing experience yesterday afternoon at Pt. Reyes where my daughter and I saw three bobcats. I made a gif of a series of pics I took of one of them. More later.

BIG FIGHT AT POLAND’S WROCLAW ZOO!!!

Some dogs are “gifted word learners”, found idiosyncratically across breeds & households. Adapting methods designed to study understanding of human toddlers, researchers discovered that these dogs can pick up words by overhearing conversations, just like (or better than) 1.5-year-old children. 🐶🗣️🧪

Call now open for Visiting Fellowships in our Natural History Humanities programme! Building long-term collaborations with early career researchers on Cambridge GLAM collections. @camunivmuseums.bsky.social @theul.bsky.social @cubotanicgarden.bsky.social www.ccc.cam.ac.uk/initiatives/...

Last weekend to apply!

Nice coverage on the recent article from my lab in @currentbiology.bsky.social in the Defector. Rewilding mice alters fear and anxiety behaviors

New work from @miyapan.bsky.social and our team, bringing ant, bee, and wasp labs together. @chuanxinyu.bsky.social shows that the ANTSR locus we discovered in ants has determined sex for 150+ My across bees and stinging wasps 🐜🐝, despite virtually no sequence conservation 😮 doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

The 'kin' of ‘napkin’ means "little." ‘Nap’ comes from ‘nape,' which means “tablecloth.” So a napkin is a little tablecloth. 10/10, no notes.

Dean Martin, born Dino Paul Crocetti, son of Italian immigrant Gaetano Crocetti Frank Sinatra, son of Italian immigrants Antonino Sinatra and Natalina Garavanta Merry Christmas to everyone except Stephen Miller and his enablers and handlers

That peanut worm is a little too exciting for me you got anything else?

0.00003 foot tall xmas tree from a Drosophila flight steering muscle 🎄 image by @anne-sustar.bsky.social

Last behind-the-scenes part of my magical sandwich making

Miniaturized versions of sleep lab equipment are revealing the extreme and somewhat quirky ways animals snooze while flying, deep diving or parenting their young. #birding #nature #science bit.ly/4qnGCMZ

Hello from 65°N on the shortest day of the year. Here in Reykjavík we have four hours of "daylight." Many years, the solstice is shrouded in clouds, but even when it's sunny out, we stay in perpetual golden hour because the sun does not rise more the 3.5° above the horizon. #iceland #wintersolstice

🌊 🐟🦭🐋🐧 I have a PhD position available (4 years, start Mid-2026) at NRM Stockholm to work on the macrogenomics of sea warming. Apply here: recruit.visma.com/spa/public/a... #PhD #MarineGenomics #ClimateChange #EvolutionaryBiology #PopGen #Bioinformatics #conservationgenomics

incredible that the oldest scam in the book — “look away from the greed and poor leadership that destroy your chance to make a career, it is the [blanks] that stole your job!” — still works

New paper with @matthewzipple.bsky.social out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social We tested how living outside influenced anxiety in lab mice. Time in outdoor enclosures blocked and reversed anxiety responses. A little time in nature does a lot of good! Free link: tinyurl.com/44u7bn32

"City dwellers looking to add a touch of nature to their homes are often the ones interested in the nests." Gift link. #wasps #hymenoptera #dolichovespula #vespidae #insects #nature www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/r...

the people of this great republic yearn for locomotive transport

eggNOG v7, the first release implementing a fully phylogenetic, domain-centric workflow - Speciation and duplication events are detected using a noise-tolerant algorithm to generate hierarchically consistent, evolutionarily dated OGs academic.oup.com/nar/advance-... #orthology #evolution

Saw a stunning Pine Marten this evening

The #BEASTLab won second place in the departmental holiday decoration contest!

For our 2019 #Genome #Biology study we had just 6 beetle 🐞 genomes 🧬 to work with link.springer.com/article/10.1... ... today there are >300 chromosomal-level reference genomes for Coleoptera! #biodiversity #genomics

A giant clam the size of a small clam

At @skypeascientist.bsky.social we were able to give out more grant funding than we took in this year, thanks to people who support us! That grant funding went to 13 science communicators across the country on their in-person projects. YOU can support us here: givebutter.com/SupportSAS25