New paper where we explore how the dynamics of food webs can be explored when populations are ‘distilled’ to high and low states, or Boolean switches… Somehow this leads to a discussion involving Otodus megalodon :D nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

💙New paper!💙 How is knowledge transmitted across generations in a foraging society? With @danielredhead.bsky.social we found: In BaYaka foragers, long-term skills pass in smaller, sparser networks, while short-term food info circulates broadly & reciprocally academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Mark Novak, @kecoblentz.bsky.social, John DeLong FTW - a very cool paper I need to dig carefully through!

Okay Open Nature… are you *trying* to make me eat cat food?

"Behavior drives morphological change during human evolution" Our new article is out in @science.org today www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New paper in Science! Luke Fannin and Nate Dominy on the bridge; I'm some kind of assistant science officer or asking the chief engineer where the bathroom is, but hey I'm part of the fleet -- Also, it's just a really awesome project, so check it out... www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Make it stop…

My book drops in 2 months! “This is an essential, long-overdue guide, and a wonderful read.” -Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter @sgj.bsky.social Bookshop: bookshop.org/a/7576/97988... Barnes: www.barnesandnoble.com/w/feral-and-...

My cousin-in-law @jasonragosta.bsky.social (is that a thing?) knocks it out of the park with this amazing The Buffalo Hunter Hunter fan poster from the legendary @sgj.bsky.social www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/1715...

Exciting opportunity for prospective grad students wanting to study the science of science w/ @culturologies.co … check it out! career2.successfactors.eu/sfcareer/job...

Looks like Elon flew too close to a bloated orange giant ☀️

How is your day going? for k in 1:length(ksdvec) ksd = ksdvec[k]; ksdname = ksdstrs[k]; ksd = 1.5; ....(long simulation).... end

Jim Estes was one of my PhD advisors at UCSC… a generator of great ideas and discussions, always angling positive when others tried to tear down, a rockstar who didn’t act like a rockstar. This was my slide for Jim in my dissertation seminar… thanks for the good conversations and caribou sausage

New paper on food-cleaning monkeys showing some true grit. Led by Jessica Rosien, Nate Dominy, Luke Fannin, Suchinda Malaivijitnond and Amanda Tan - this was a fun collaboration :D 🐒 elifesciences.org/articles/98520

If this happened as described — and there is no reason to think it didn’t — what does this mean for academic freedom? The vise is closing. www.chronicle.com/article/i-di...

🦦

I resigned because of a profound breakdown in governance, transparency, and accountability at the NSF—issues I felt obligated to bring to public attention.

The dynamics of microbial cooperation... Cheap metabolites make for shaky friendships; but pricier ones can keep the peace... 🦠 Thanks @janamassing.bsky.social for leading the charge! And great working again w/ @akfbio.bsky.social & @thilogross.bsky.social

A new preprint from the lab. Might be of interest to people who use barcode lineage tracking to catch de novo adaptive mutations. #popgen #evolbiol

Excited to be included on this - a very exciting project and I learned a lot working with @mhab.bsky.social @thilogross.bsky.social and @akfbio.bsky.social (as usual) 😀

Real life is apparently Jurassic Park, but without [non-avian] dinosaurs…

What now?

You don't want to mess with shrimp.

This is a very cool paper... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“Although his name was unknown to the general public, Jay’s work has entranced and educated millions who grew up with this six murals of mammal evolution at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and his paintings at the American Museum of Natural History in New York” #Paleoart

Favorite pop-sci book outside of my field (far far outside)… read this in grad school in 2009 and need to revisit sometime soon.

Preach, Pete

Congrats to @wsj.com for breaking this news yesterday. In a word: egregious. @brianstelter.bsky.social pushes this quid pro quo story forward.

Billionaires are a scourge on our society. Check this visualization out - it's incredible. mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-weal...

Wow - what a line-up!

I'm submitting a paper to a journal that uses double blind reviews... all well and good. But they also want the data/code, which I store in GitHub and archive to Zenodo... of course this is linked to me... not to mention the code is replete with self-identifying snippets... ideas?

New preprint! Where we construct a model to explore how body size and predator-prey interactions determine macroevolutionary constraints on mammalian size and diet throughout the Cenozoic… arxiv.org/abs/2410.18849

I am hiring a lab technician! If you know anyone who has experience with field studies, enjoys working with plants, and is a good communicator and hard worker, pls pass this along! The position is for one year with the possibility of renewal. Please re-skeet! careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

Fired by Trump? Tell your story: democrats-science.house.gov/sciencefirings

Rooting for Brazil!

New preprint! Population sizes are unknowable for many species... but is low-res information still useful for exploring dynamics? We model species as either high or low in abundance—a useful way to explore how food web structure impacts extinction risk and trophic cascades: arxiv.org/abs/2502.11220

Our ad with @splcenter.org: www.commoncause.org/wp-content/u...

The Washington Post refused to run this ad. Sure would be a shame if it went viral.

Wait - I’ve seen this movie… futurism.com/huge-radioac...

UC Merced achieved R1 status this morning. 20 years after opening its doors to its first undergraduate class in 2005. And to do so while dealing with the 2007-8 financial meltdown, the pandemic, dwindling state support, and, well, now - Trump - that's quite an achievement in my humble opinion!

@florianaltermatt.bsky.social Holy smokes - this looks amazing/transformative... www.biorxiv.org/content/bior...

Expected, but still bad news. H5N1, hemorrhagic fevers, rising antimicrobial resistance, plus everything else… now is not the time for any cracks in global cohesion against pathogens. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - diseases don’t care who you voted for or what color your passport is.🧪

Octavia's Bookshelf owner Nikki High doesn’t know the state of her own house in Altadena — most houses burned — but she's turned her Pasadena bookstore into a help center for fire victims. Follow the IG/Threads accounts for updates. They still need first aid kits. We also brought bottled water.

★★★★☆ - Beginning the year with a novella, I’m catching up on some classics of weird fiction, and maybe being a little generous with my rating (3.5 might be closer). www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Anne Telnaes, Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post, has resigned. The paper censored a cartoon that criticized billionaires. Democracy dies in broad daylight, too. anntelnaes.substack.com/p/why-im-qui...

Motivated me to set up a monthly donation as well…

Do this to spite the worlds richest man

Santa didn’t realize he would be subjected to comparative handwriting analysis this morning…

This Map Lets You Plug in Your Address to See How It’s Changed Over the Past 750 Million Years www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/m...

Instead of listing my publications, as the year draws to an end, I want to shine the spotlight on the commonplace assumption that productivity must always increase. Good research is disruptive and thinking time is central to high quality scholarship and necessary for disruptive research.