✨️Call for abstracts✨️ Excited to be organizing together with @leonarddung.bsky.social, @birchlse.bsky.social and Albert Newen the RUB-LSE joint workshop "Animal Minds: New Theories and New Observations" Bochum 9-10 Feb 2026 Join us! 🦧🐦🐙🐀🐬🦀🐜 Abstracts due 1 Dec 2025 philevents.org/event/show/1...

As with climate disturbance, uncertainty provides a good argument to take more action, not less.

Jumping spiders can recognise one another. This ability to learn, remember and represent images is quite surprising for such a tiny-brained animal! buff.ly/dCkwPr0

New Phil Trans B issue on the ‘Evolutionary functions of consciousness’ royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

Now out officially here! Published as part of a special issue on evolutionary functions of consciousness edited by W. Tecumseh Fitch, Colin Allen, & Adina Roskies, which also features fascinating contributions from several leaders in the field! royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

With sequencing of Hitler's DNA making headlines, time for a reminder: analysing a polygenic score from a dead historically-significant figure won't give new insights into that person's behaviour. In a brief paper last year, we used Beethoven's genome to directly illustrate the fallacies involved.🧪👇

Many congratulations to the United Kingdom for winning the prestigious 'Fossil of the Day' award at COP30 for screwing over workers. climatenetwork.org/resource/sol... h/t @amywestervelt.bsky.social

Applications now open 🎓 Spend 9 weeks at Cambridge University with the CRASSH & @cw-indiatrust.bsky.social, supporting scholars from India in the arts, humanities, and heritage conservation Funding includes travel, accommodation & research expenses Apply by 19 Jan 2026 bit.ly/3tw6OuI

PhD project on the evolution of animal memory now available in my research group, through the TREES DLA: www.trees-dla.ac.uk/projects/evo.... Come and join us if you're interested in the evolution of animal minds and you want to do some cool experimental evolution!

Now out in an issue! ~~ www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Ok, just wow. If the content of this article is right, this is depressing. We're slowly reaching the point where ~100% of what I was taught in Social Psych was either innocently wrong or plainly frauded onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

For any unfamiliar with the quality of journalism at Teen Vogue, it's well known for hard-hitting stories on "politically sensitive" topics including climate. Then there's CBS: the only major network to increase climate coverage in the last few years. They just axed nearly their whole climate team.

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵

What does postdiction show about the speed of consciousness? In this forth. piece in BBS, I respond to @smfleming.bsky.social + @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's claim that postdiction shows consciousness is slow -- too slow for its purpose to be online action guidance. 1/3 philpapers.org/rec/PHIPAT-14

What role heuristics play in model organism research? How can the DEKI capture the development of MOs? Is basal cognition introducing novel MOs for neuroscience? This is what I try to explore in the new preprint: philsci-archive.pitt.edu/27054/

For #MosaicMonday a venator (gladiators who fought wild animals) fighting a bear. Many animals were made to fight for #Roman entertainment, but conclusive evidence for fighting bears has only just been discovered. (£) doi.org/10.15184/aqy... 📷 Carole Raddato / CC BY-SA 2.0 🏺 #Archaeology

Sheeeet🤯 "when asked “what proportion of climate scientists think that global warming is caused mostly by human activities?” - only 30% of middle-school & 45% of high-school science teachers selected the correct option of “81 to 100%."

Excited to announce that Eli Garcia-Pelegrin and I are co-editing a special collection for Animal Cognition on "Social Cognition in a Human World". Do you study how urbanization, pollution, heat stress, fragmentation, ... affects cognition? We want to hear from you! link.springer.com/collections/...

PSL political compass

Hey grad students studying animal behavior! Need a little extra research $$? (Don't we all?) Apply for an ABS Student Research Grant! We award grants up to $2,000 to grad students & give feedback on the proposals. Deadline Dec 15. More info here: www.animalbehaviorsociety.org/web/awards-s...

📣 BIG NEWS EVERYONE. I am so excited to announce… 🎉 I’m moving to University College London @ucl.ac.uk to join the Experimental Psychology department in @uclpals.bsky.social! 🎉 The big move happens in spring/summer. So I’m already exploring recruiting staff & students at UCL for fall 2026!

This just happened again and it really drives home the extent to which scholarly orgs could build great bridges with museums/historical sites by figuring out how to help them get access to scholarly materials. Those places might, in turn, help support those orgs with people and money.

Interesting scheme. It would be good to see more philosophers advising on environmental ethics and policy, and correspondingly a greater role for environmental ethics within philosophy

Can Only Meat Machines be Conscious? New paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, free download until November 26 with this URL: authors.elsevier.com/a/1luwh4sIRv...

4000 people have signed up to sue poultry producers.

Bureaucratic delays and chronic underfunding are hallmarks of doing science in Global South countries. And we hear about such challenges often. New report documenting how scientists in countries like Kenya and India navigate such challenges. Lots of tips here and a vision for a collaborative future

A team I am a part of is hiring an India-based part time research assistant to help us with textual analysis of government forestry documents related to forest restoration and pastoral livelihoods in Himachal Pradesh. Information and application instructions here: forms.gle/4D6aVqtDU7FY...

Will have my first podcast interview tomorrow 🫣 Any advice? #academic #podcast

Jane Goodall died today at 91. Her death is a blow to all life on Earth, particularly at a time of ecological collapse and authoritarism. Nonetheless, we can and must celebrate her courage, her originality, and her accomplishments on behalf of nonhuman animals.

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵

Having spent the day writing law school recommendations for former students, my official ranking of JDs now goes: J Dilla JD Sports Jack Daniel's JD Wetherspoons JD from Scrubs Juris Doctor degrees VP Vance

ICYMI 💡 Late last week, #NIH made a second meaningful move for animals in labs: grant funds can now be used for their retirement or rehoming. This change goes beyond the obvious—check out the graphic to see why it matters so much. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide... #AnimalResearch #SciPol

This is extremely poor framing. It is not a "taste for soya" destroying the Amazon, it's a taste for meat. The VAST majority of soy grown in Brazil is due to animal agriculture, but your article never mentions this fact. Your readers are walking away with a poor understanding of this issue.

📣 Join the K/Creative Ape Team 🤓 2 PhDs on Creativity in Wild Chimpanzees & Bonobos; w myself & the v awesome @kathelijnekoops.bsky.social @snf-fns.ch Uni Zurich @uniofstandrews.bsky.social @efp2026.bsky.social @ips-primatenews.bsky.social @primatesocietygb.bsky.social @primbehavecol.bsky.social 🐵🧪

This on top of the 'grue-jays' news makes me worried epistemologists have been given power to secretly carry out their schemes. Expect an uptick in stopped clocks, fake barns, brains in vats etc.

#IgNoble prize winner: Painting cows with zebra-like striping reduces biting fly attacks. 💡Painting black-and-white stripes can increase cattle welfare without the use of pesticides, proposing a solution for the problem of pesticide resistance in the environment. 🧪🌍🪰🦓🐮 doi.org/10.1371/jour...

While the new NOFO doesn't exclude animal experiments, it doesn't foreground them. Instead, it elevates human-relevant and computational approaches through its data and modeling requirements. The shift in tone and framing is subtle, but the priorities are noticeably shifting. #scipol #NAMs

Don't sleep on the good news, folks. It's rare these days. www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-ind...

I'm delighted to share that, together with @crowbrain.bsky.social our paper on time estimation in crows is now published in @natcomms.nature.com We found that crows not only keep track of time, but individual neurons prefer different time durations 🐦⏱️🧠 Check it out: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Sign of the times: A Columbia grad student handcuffed on the street by people claiming to be federal agents, later released, and it's still unclear whether they were feds or not Official university statement: president.columbia.edu/news/reminde...

My new Centre for Animal Sentience will launch on 30 Sept with a public event on "How AI is helping - and harming - animals" and you can register for a free ticket now. Please join us! www.lse.ac.uk/events/how-a...

Long overdue egg update 🐥

Great to have another paper with @chazfirestone.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social and the brilliant Hanbei Zhou out! In this paper we demonstrate that stimuli within events are perceived further apart in time — an event-based analog of “object-based warping”. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Methane panel starting in just over an hour. Still time to register: us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Really happy to have a new paper forthcoming at PPR! Ever wondered if there’s any point in feeling regret? In this paper, I argue that regret is valuable because it helps us overcome temptation. Check it out: philpapers.org/rec/GOHRLA

My paper on rethinking the role and place of trust in science is at last published. It’s the basis for part of the last chapter of my new book on trust and science.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... "... observers perceive scene images achromatized in the peripheral region (chimera images) as full-color images... inattentional noise increases the occurrence of strong color signals that exceed the internal color detection criterion..." Nishida lab 🧠📈

US colleagues in #philsci #sts #histsci #histmed, please encourage your students to consider the Gates Cambridge Scholarships. Deadline for US residents is October 15th. They need to first apply for admission to the Department of HPS for MPhil or PhD (2026 entry) www.hps.cam.ac.uk/study/postgr...

'The Idealized Mind: From Model-based Science to Cognitive Science' published by MIT Press. Claims: models of the mind are idealized models; this is consistent with scientific realism; yet, it blocks realism about neural representation and neural computation based on evidence from neuroscience.