Tragic news about Rob Reiner and wife Michelle. I first knew him from All in the Family... He went on to make some of the most heartfelt, funny, and dramatic movies ever. I loved watching and being moved by them. What a brilliant talent, activist, and humane man. Condolences to family and friends.

🔆 Good morning! #OTD 🎂 It's my birthday! Keanu Reeves’ Arch 1s Is About To Be One Of The Coolest Motorcycles On The Road www.theautopian.com/keanu-reeves... A sport cruiser hand-built to order featuring a 2,032cc V-twin making 121.77 lb-ft torque. Would make a great birthday gift... Just saying

#OTD 🎉 Dick Van Dyke... 100 years old! An American actor and comedian. His work spans screen and stage, and his awards include six Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, and a Tony Award. 🎂 Happy Birthday! And thanks for the great memories over so many years.

“It is not too late to take another path.” — David Suzuki Government of Canada launches new initiative to recruit world-leading researchers 🇨🇦 Canada will invest $1.7 billion to attract top global talent 🧪 www.canada.ca/en/innovatio...

The Mismeasure of Neanderthals 🏺🧪 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Among other aspects, this discusses Neanderthals as figures of alterity in debates on biodiversity and coexistence.

There are hints that Neanderthals engaged in ritualistic practices. And it brings about the question: Did Neanderthals have religious beliefs? 🏺🧪 www.livescience.com/archaeology/... Whether Neanderthals had religious beliefs is a subject of ongoing debate. The fact is... we just don't know.

New Neanderthal footprints in Portugal reveal a life we never expected Neanderthal coasteering and the first Portuguese hominin tracksites Carlos Neto de Carvalho @stewartfinlayson.bsky.social @gibgerry.bsky.social @clivefin.bsky.social et al www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A simple analytical model for Neanderthal disappearance due to genetic dilution by recurrent small-scale immigrations of modern humans 🏺🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41... Although other factors may have contributed, results highlight admixture as a possible key mechanism driving their disappearance.

Owls are just cats with wings; They love to snuggle www.youtube.com/shorts/fvWJy... cc @gridflay.bsky.social

On the ecological impact of prehistoric hunter-gatherers in Europe: Early Holocene (Mesolithic) and Last Interglacial (Neanderthal) foragers compared🏺🧪 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... Provides evidence that both Neanderthals and Mesolithic foragers actively shaped European interglacial ecosystems

A reanalysis of the ‘perforated’ scapula from the Boxgrove Horse Butchery Site 🏺🧪 @annemiekemilks.bsky.social @mattpope.bsky.social et al www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Suggests scapula fracture is better aligned to percussion damage from hammerstone use to access within-bone nutrients.

Earliest evidence of making fire 🏺🧪 Rob Davis, @chrisbstringer.bsky.social et al www.nature.com/articles/s41... Evidence of fire-making on a 400,000-year-old buried landsurface at Barnham (UK), where heated sediments and fire-cracked flint handaxes were found alongside two fragments of iron pyrite.

‘Mary Anning’: Swiss Animation Unearths the Childhood Backstory of a Legendary Fossil Pioneer in Annecy Playing Feature 🧪 variety.com/2025/film/gl... “Mary Anning” made its world premiere at the Annecy Animation Festival

Proximal cause: Congress Ultimate cause: The people who elected them. As a Congressman, James Garfield had stated at the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1876:

🎵 Round, round, get around, I get around... - The Beach Boys How life first got moving: Nature's motor from billions of years ago Evolution and structural diversity of the MotAB stator: Insights into the origins of bacterial flagellar motility 🧪 journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Colorful Snapdragons in the Valleys of the Pyrenees Offer a Rare Window Into How Evolution Happens Genealogical Analysis of Replicate Flower Colour Hybrid Zones in Antirrhinum 🧪 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Paints a vibrant picture of how these plants exchange genetic information.

Phylogenetic position and mitochondrial genome evolution of “orphan” eukaryotic lineages 🧪 www.cell.com/iscience/ful... Results further simplify and illuminate the evolutionary relationships between eukaryotes.

🤖 Resistance is futile... Convergent evolution of viral-like Borg archaeal extrachromosomal elements and giant eukaryotic viruses 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41... If Borgs are giant archaeal viruses they would fill the gap in the tri(um)virate of giant viruses of all three domains of life.

Stunning real-time images of DNA damage and repair Engineered chromatin readers track damaged chromatin dynamics in live cells and animals 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41... A novel protein probe with broad application potential for DNA damage research.

A machine-learning-enhanced approach to chemical analysis is drastically expanding the chemical record of life on Earth. Organic geochemical evidence for life in Archean rocks identified by pyrolysis–GC–MS and supervised machine learning🧪 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Life is just matter with meaning Physics of Life: Exploring Information as a Distinctive Feature of Living Systems🧪 journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst... This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems.

🔆 Good morning! I like to brew my coffee like a volcano... Hot and bubbling. The physics of coffee bubbles and volcanic eruptions are surprisingly similar. Shear-induced bubble nucleation in magmas 🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

"A Pox on Fools" An important and timely book.

Drop a lawyer

Star Trek episodes you've watched more than six times with a gif. That would be all of them.

actual bluesky challenge: post your favorite work of art from fifty years before you were born.

🧪This year's Friend of Darwin and Friend of the Planet recipients! 👏

📢 A great opportunity!🏺🧪

🤔 Humans can think rationally and weigh the evidence Whether other animals can also do this has been unclear Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs🏺🧪 www.science.org/doi/full/10.... Results suggest this pattern of belief revision was guided by explicit representation and weighing of evidence.

Are Humans the Only Rational Animals? 🏺🧪 academic.oup.com/pq/article/7... While growing empirical evidence suggests a continuity between human and non-human psychology, many philosophers still think that only humans can act and form beliefs rationally.

Plants communicate, learn, even remember — and that’s fueling a big debate in biology. Are plants intelligent? It seems to depend on how you define it. 🏺🧪 www.snexplores.org/article/plan... It’s hard to agree on whether plants are intelligent without first agreeing on what intelligence is.

Central role of regular firing neurons of centrolateral amygdala in affective behaviors🏺🧪 www.cell.com/iscience/ful... Highlights the critical role of regular firing CeL neurons in affective disorders and suggests targeting their activity may offer new strategies for treating anxiety and depression

Connectivity and function are coupled across cognitive domains throughout the brain 🏺🧪 direct.mit.edu/netn/article... The strongest evidence yet that the intricate web of connections linking different regions of the human brain can reveal what each area does.

An intense ethical debate As brain organoids grow increasingly complex, leading scientists and bioethicists to call for global oversight Lab-grown 3D structures spark emerging concerns over donor consent, animal welfare, and developing sentience in a dish www.statnews.com/2025/11/06/n...

The ‘Software’ Running Your Body Predates Animals By Millions Of Years Origins of the ‘Hippo pathway’ date back to single-celled organisms A selection-based knockout approach for a choanoflagellate reveals regulation of multicellular development by Hippo signaling 🧪 www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Most people have empathy... but here's why you might not see it. Why Does It Seem Like So Many People Lack Empathy? Dr Sherry Pagoto @drsherrypagoto.bsky.social www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/shri... Our capacity for empathy is not static; it can vary depending on our circumstances.

Irreplaceable human elements Health care requires capacities that remain deeply, stubbornly human AI’s limits appear most clearly in the moments that matter most, where care can’t be reduced to data or probabilities Why health care needs empathy, not just algorithms 🏺🧪 kevinmd.com/2025/11/why-...

Embracing my silly side makes me a better scientist. I wish I’d done it sooner 🧪 www.science.org/content/arti... "In the end, I have come to realize that being authentic at work is not a weakness, but rather a strength... But perhaps most importantly, humor has helped me be re­silient."

🔆 Good morning! "If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water." -Loren Eiseley

🦃 Happy #Thanksgiving to all my American colleagues, friends and family.

If evolution is real, then why isn’t it happening now? An anthropologist explains that humans actually are still evolving 🏺🧪 theconversation.com/if-evolution... Although we humans have changed our environment in many ways during the past few thousand years, we are still changed by evolution.

🔆 #OTD Nov. 24th, in 1859 Darwin's evolutionary (and revolutionary) book is published, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" It changed our view of life... "Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution." - T. Dobzhansky Darwin Online 🧪 darwin-online.org.uk

"Some social media content suggests that our work on the Yunxian 2 cranium falsifies a Recent African Origin for Homo sapiens. As I explain in this video, it does not." @chrisbstringer.bsky.social Yunxian does not disprove a Recent African Origin for Homo sapiens 🏺🧪 www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA1I...

How ancient humans bred and traded the first domestic dogs 🏺🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41... Analyses of fossils and ancient genomics reveal how early human populations bred less wolf-like companions, and might have traded them around the world.

As the first domestic species, dogs likely dispersed with different cultural groups during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene. Genomic evidence for the Holocene codispersal of dogs and humans across Eastern Eurasia 🏺🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The emergence and diversification of dog morphology 🏺🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... This study looked at more than 640 canid crania over the past 50,000 years (see the Perspective by Fillios) and found that by the beginning of the Holocene, dogs already displayed extensive variation.

Blue pigments are conspicuously absent from the Palaeolithic record. Mineral and organic colourings were exploited by both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens but have appeared limited to certain colors. The earliest evidence of blue pigment use in Europe 🏺🧪 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The Altamura Neanderthal was adapted to the cold – but not in the way we thought The nose of Neanderthals and possible adaptation to climatic conditions has long been debated The first preserved nasal cavity in the human fossil record: The Neanderthal from Altamura 🏺🧪 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

#Goyet Highly selective cannibalism in the Late Pleistocene of Northern Europe reveals Neandertals were targeted prey 🏺🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41... Dated between 41,000 and 45,000 years ago, a period marked by Neanderthal cultural diversity, biological decline and the arrival of Homo sapiens.

Hominins appear to be behaviorally and physiologically adapted for efficient scavenging. Revisiting hominin scavenging through the lens of optimal foraging theory 🏺🧪 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Scavenging is particularly advantageous during periods of plant food scarcity.