🧬 Just out in Bioinformatics Advances: “tskit arg visualizer: Interactive plotting of ancestral recombination graphs.”  Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1093/bioadv/vbaf302 Authors include: @kitchensjn.bsky.social, @yanwong.bsky.social

Applications for the Genetics Society Summer Studentship Grants are open! If you’re an undergrad itching to dive into real research, this is your doorway into the lab. More information here: genetics.org.uk/grants/summe...

#OnThisDay in 1859, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was first published. Much of the original manuscript was used as scrap paper by Darwin's children. On the back of this painting of a house is an original manuscript page from Origin! #CambridgeUniversityLibrary (DAR 185)

These weasels have locally adapted their winter coats to varying snow cover thanks to a million-year-old mutation 🌿 buff.ly/TnOfYWt

Okay, here are some first reflections on Watson. Watson's life is a tragedy, really of Shakespearean proportions. He did not, as most bios will tell you, do one great thing when he was young and then collect laurels for it for the next 60 years. His career arc was unlike any in science.

Full OA paper here: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

On the event of James Watson's death, I highly recommend this 2023 commentary from @matthewcobb.bsky.social and Nathaniel Comfort with crucial new insights into the discovery of the double helix. (And also check out Cobb's brand new biography of Francis Crick) www.nature.com/articles/d41...

arXiv will no longer accept review articles and position papers unless they have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review. This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month. Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.

Latest post on how to win at 20 questions, from penguins and probability to entropy and AI: kucharski.substack.com/p/are-you-as...

The end of an era: the Tree of Life Web Project is going dark after 3 decades. Anyone interested in communicating phylogeny online should read David's account of goals, history, and future. @bembidion.bsky.social subulatepalpomere.com/2025/11/02/t...

Excited to share our new preprint for the tskit_arg_visualizer Python package! ARGs can sometimes feel like a black box, so @yanwong.bsky.social and I have been developing a method to programmatically drawing these graphs. 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2508.03958 1/6

A study in Nature Ecology & Evolution identifies a bacterial species as a cause of sea star wasting disease, which has been responsible for billions of sea star deaths since 2013 and widespread loss of kelp habitats. go.nature.com/46I4kx2 🌊 🧪

I am super happy to see our dog rose's paper featuring the cover of the July 3rd issue of @nature.com read more here: tinyurl.com/dog-rose

The tragic landslide in Blatten gives me the excuse to tell you the story of how we found out Ice Ages existed. It's a cool story and the most important bit is rather similar to what's happening now.

Join us for our Anniversary Day and hear from: Prof Josephine Pemberton (Genetics Society Medal) Prof Kathy Niakan (Mary Lyon Medal) Prof Gregory Radick (Haldane Lecture) Prof Richard Durbin (Genomics keynote) Rosie Parkin & Eldrian Tho (Student talks) Registration: genetics.org.uk/events/genet...

A paper in Nature reports the discovery of fossilized claw prints thought to belong to an amniote on a slab of rock from Australia dated to about 356 million years ago, suggesting that the origin of amniotes is earlier than expected. go.nature.com/4jm5XTP #Paleosky 🧪

➡️ This is another situation where we truly need public support. Please reach out and speak up - before it is too late.

"C'est du sabotage" Le président américain a licencié 800 scientifiques de la NOOA. La directrice du programme sur l'acidification de l'océan mise à la porte sans ménagement. Comme les chercheurs qui surveillent les alertes tsunami... "C'est de l'obscurantisme" www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/...

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...

A complete and dynamic tree of birds - out today in PNAS! Teamwork with @eliotmiller.bsky.social and others at @birdsoftheworld.bsky.social and Open Tree of Life to put together current relationships across all birds. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

This is a very cool article. They did T2T (high depth, low error) sequencing on genomes from FOUR generations of a family. 🧵 "Human de novo mutation rates from a four-generation pedigree reference" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint from Luke Snell from GSTT, Suzanne Pickering in my lab and Rui Galao, my colleague at KCL. Here we examine in detail the evolution of the SARS CoV-2 spike in persistent infections, and essentially catch a potential variant in the act of developing. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

ACTION ITEM-----ACTION ITEM Implementation of Schedule F This is what a lot of us have been worried about. This allows for many civil service positions to replaced with political appointees. This could include NIH institute directors and even POs. BUT THERE IS A COMMENT PERIOD... 1/n

The White House has turned COVID.gov from a public health resource into a politically charged platform promoting the lab-leak theory and attacking specific scientists and the pandemic response in general. Let’s fact check its 5 headline claims… 🧵

Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions - rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking steps to make sure students can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let’s hope others follow suit.

With @hybridzones.bsky.social & @jenncoughlan.bsky.social, we have been working on an update to Daven Presgraves' influential 2010 review on hybrid incompatibilities (shorturl.at/cJndf). The preprint is available here (shorturl.at/DTC48) with an updated table of almost 100 incompatibilities!

Sex decreases the pleiotropic costs of local adaptation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.28.646016v1

A project five years in the making, we've now published complete "T2T" genomes for six additional ape species! It turns out that finishing (and analyzing) six genomes is slightly more work than one... doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Iguanas rafted more than 8,000 km from North America to Fiji: doi.org/10.1073/pnas... #biogeography #phylogenetics #genomics #ecology #evolution

I wrote about how population stratification in genetic analyses led to a decade of false findings and almost certainly continues to bias emerging results. But we are starting to have statistical tools to sniff it out. A 🧵:

Colleagues are cancelling their US work trips. I worry that international colleagues in the US are at risk if they collaborate with us on certain topics. I've written a new post about the increasing danger of being a foreign scientist in the US. christinapagel.substack.com/p/trumps-att...

Really excited to see this work, led by Mike Grundler, published! It's a new method for inferring the geographic locations of shared genetic ancestors. In the paper, we and use it to infer the geographic history of human genetic ancestry www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Here is the paper - nice work by @evangora.bsky.social How some tropical trees benefit from being struck by lightning: evidence for Dipteryx oleifera and other large-statured trees 🌾🧪https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nph.70062

stdpopsim v0.3.0 is out! You can now mix and match your simulations of different demographic histories with published distributions of fitness effects along with gene annotations, and you can even throw in sweeps for good measure. Check out the new manuscript for more info: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

LIVING EMERALDS Costasiella sea slugs showcase their brilliant green, plant-like appendages. Through these miniature marvels "steal" chloroplasts to perform photosynthesis. 📹 moodhumeehaa

On this #fossilfriday, take a moment to remember the great Richard Fortey, who passed last week. Scientist, naturalist, writer, and gentleman of the highest caliber. My thoughts in @stephenmossauthor.bsky.social obituary for @theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

The Harding Prize for trustworthy communication is awarded specifically to those who gather together information that helps someone make decisions without telling them what to do. Nominate someone for the prize today (nominations close 28 February): wintoncentre.github.io/harding-prize/

What an amazing piece of life-affirming, humane, compassionate good news!

Think of a polygenic score you care about. Are direct genetic effects driving variation among people in this predictor? Or perhaps other, confounding factors? We at the @arbelharpak.bsky.social & @docedge.bsky.social Labs developed a method to tackle this question. [1/n]

A thread about coin flips and what they can tell us about changing minds... Imagine you’re holding a coin you believe is biased, so heads comes up about a quarter of the time - though you’re not sure. It could be bit higher or lower. Your belief about heads follows this probability distribution: 1/

“The distribution of highly deleterious variants across human ancestry groups”. Preprint with Anastasia Stolyarova and @gcbias.bsky.social: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My bluesky debut! One week to the submission deadline for SMBE 2025, Beijing 20-24 July smbe2025.scimeeting.cn @anaignatieva.bsky.social and I are organising a symposium on popgen through time: using ARGs, aDNA, or otherwise to understand the evolutionary processes that shape genomes through time.

*Internal Conflicts and Organismal Adaptation* Join us on Thursday, 9am Eastern, for a history special in our STN lecture series! Jack Werren and Bengt Olle Bengtsson will reflect on their many years of working on genetic conflicts.

Yesterday we published an article in @natureportfolio.bsky.social's @natprot.bsky.social about the experiences of @independentsage.bsky.social communicating science; from our organisation and establishment to the learning points we took from the process. 1/4 rdcu.be/d3n6s

In 2020, I joined what I believe to have been the most important and impactful science communication project I’ve ever had the pleasure of being involved with. We called it Independent Sage, and we’ve written about it here. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

One of the things I have been very keen to do is bring some of the amazing expert evidence given to House of Lords enquiries to a bigger audience. The first attempt to do that is due to go live next week: incredible testimonies to the Food, Diet & Obesity enquiry open.spotify.com/episode/3gWN...

Never a bad time to post about the most awesomest exception to this rule onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

ICYMI My piece on last week's election: electionsetc.com/2024/11/14/w...