A very nice end to the year: my PhD work on the development of differentiated social relationships in wild Asian elephants is now published in Ethology! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Are you an animal behavior researcher? 🐸🦜🐒🪲🦋🦇🐍🐏Consider supporting @abcmicrogrants.bsky.social this holiday season ❄️🐝 It takes less than a minute and your money goes directly towards supporting #AnimalBehavior students!! 🎄🎄🎄 opencollective.com/animal-behav...

Thrilled about this new grant we are offering for under-represented early career scholars. The first cycle is for scholars in history and area studies. Please spread the word widely. @universitypress.cambridge.org ********************************* Read more here: 🔗 cup.org/4pF5xvr

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

The Royal Society's Newton International Fellowship scheme opens to applications Jan 15 with a March 11 deadline. It provides £280K (salary and research expenses) over 2 years to outstanding ECRs from outside the UK. Why not come and work with me (or anyone else) @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social?

The Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy is hiring two post-doctoral researchers to work on a project on the logic of reasons, under the supervision of Professor Hannes Leitgeb, Chair of Logic and Philosophy of Language. More info below: job-portal.lmu.de/jobposting/7... #postdoc #philosophy

Just decline the peer review invitation. What are you people even doing?

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

the reason its bad to run universities like businesses is that almost all businesses fail on any reasonable timeline of evaluation. hudson's bay made it the longest and even they only got to about half an oxford of longevity

A study on 1.7 million people in Hong Kong shows superior hybrid immunity to Covid in people who got vaccinated before infection vs. people who got infected first. "Our findings are a direct rebuttal to arguments for natural immunity," the authors write. doi.org/10.1016/j.va...

Spotify is garbage on every count: Its treatment of artists, its ICE advertising, the CEO's investment in military AI, its leading role in the commodification and AI slopification of music, its terrible audio quality—you name it. So I quit, and put together a complete guide to getting off Spotify:

Cool paper documenting ecological insights about Indian tropical savannas in traditional literature between the 13th and 20th century. Grassland-scrubland biomes are often misconceived as deforested and/ or degraded wastelands. So, important paper. besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

The #ASABWinter2025 Tinbergen lecture will be by @toshitakaszk.bsky.social on animal linguistics. He’s studied the communication system of Japanese tits, revealing striking parallels with human language, incl. referential calls, compositional messages & symbolic gestures. A talk not to be missed…

Commissions for 2026 are now open! Researchers, labs, institutions: I’m taking new projects. If you need scientific illustrations for figures, posters or presentations, contact me at [email protected] Let’s bring your research to life with detailed, engaging art! #SciArt

The most basic of data exploration and quality checks would have identified this as a clear spurious correlation from confounded data. Same as with the National IQ case. It's deceptive and plays to people's confirmation bias. The goal is to get people to think every correlation you like is causal.

Come join this exciting workshop on social network analysis and social transmission, all within a Bayesian framework!! 💻 And many thanks to @danielredhead.bsky.social and @mchimento.bsky.social for conducting it, I'm looking forward 🤩 More information below 👇

We are happy to announce that registration for ISBE2026 is now open! We encourage you to register as soon as possible to take advantage of reduced fees and to plan your trip and accommodation in advance. Please read the information on www.isbe2026.com before proceeding with your registration.

The problems with academic publishing in one graph. The big for-profit publishers get product for free and sell it back to us. Their profits rival those from the big tech companies. This is money that could have supported research, teaching and graduate students. From: danielroelfs.com/pos...

Happy to share my new paper on the nutritional ecology of elephants🌿🐘 Should elephants graze or browse? The nutritional and functional consequences of dietary variation in a mixed-feeding megaherbivore royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... @ncbsbangalore.bsky.social @royalsocietypublishing.org

Excited to introduce the Latent Layers Framework – now out in @behavecol.bsky.social – to help think through when and why network differences confound inference in (comparative) social network analysis! 🧵 tinyurl.com/3k3yahwy

Come and join our lab! We have TWO fully funded PhD positions AND a paid field assistant opportunity in our Behavioral Ecology group @uni-goettingen.de & @primatenzentrum.bsky.social. Projects will be part of @rtg2906-curiosity.bsky.social & @sfb1528.bsky.social!! Details in thread. Please re-post!

Join me as 3-year #postdoc to study Demography of "Reproductive Ageing" -menopause 🩸infertility 💉older fathers 👨‍👧 and more -novel data sources from around the world -population-level understanding of causes and consequences of reproductive ageing + Wonderful research community @mpidr.bsky.social

Nevada, like many other states in the West, doesn’t charge corporate income tax, and it has also enacted deep tax cuts specifically for data centers that set up shop in the state. That includes abatements of up to 75% on property tax for a decade or two.

Data centers popping up on Indigenous lands everywhere, but especially perilous to us desert tribes where water availability for crops and for communities have new competition.

Our New Paper is out in Nature Human Behaviour: 🚨 Culture is critical in driving orangutan diet development past individual potentials! 🦧 www.nature.com/articles/s41.... See 🧵

Oops. Ooooooooooooops. I do hope that nobody has been given or denied a job/promotion based on their SpringerNature citation counts in the past 15 years. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01675 h/t @nathlarigaldie.bsky.social

📢Jumping back on here amidst busy fieldwork to announce 📢 🌍🦁 Our Tsavo Simba Project website is LIVE! From the red-dust plains of Tsavo straight to your 💻🤩 Dive into our research, field stories & lion insights 🦁💛 🔗 www.tsavosimba.com #jointhepride #tsavosimbaresearchproject #nsffunded

Recruiting a PhD student to join us at Univ Canterbury (Christchurch, NZ) to study how people perceive animal minds & how those perceptions shape moral concern, behaviour, & policy. Scholarship info: www.canterbury.ac.nz/research/abo... Rolling review starts Dec 2025 • Flexible Feb–July 2026 start

Love this idea! Going to have to submit something

Episode 46: Sapiens It's an ambitious goal to write the entire history of humanity in just 400 pages. It's even more ambitious to do it without reading any research.

If you use GMail, AI (Gemini) was turned on yesterday by default and now scans all of your content for machine learning. To turn off, go to Settings>General and scroll down. Uncheck the box for "Smart features." There's other "Smart" add-ons as well, but that's the one that reads your content.

Noctule bat hunting. This is the next illustration of the series on animals moving in their environment. See more below... and more coming soon! #SciArt #art #bats

There is another Masters project in our group: Examining the influence of climate on births in the Asian elephant 🐘🐘🐘 More details on both these projects at sfecologie.org/offre/examin... sfecologie.org/offre/fitnes...

We are looking for a Masters student for an exciting project! Fitness consequences of cumulative silver-spoon 🥄🥄 effects in a long-lived mammal. Study system could be humans 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 or elephants 🐘🐘 depending on your interest. ✉️ @hansraj88.bsky.social @axdela.bsky.social @nikos.ecoevo.social.ap.brid.gy

The submission deadline for #CESRabat has been extended to 30 November @ces2026.bsky.social @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social

Rich, historical polluter countries that had the highest legal responsibility to take climate action failed. And now some of these same countries are speaking about '1.5C ambition'. What a charade

Climate not-fun fact: the line from current level emissions to a reasonable chance of 1.5C is basically perpendicular to x axis. In other words, it means impossibility

Only 2 days left to get your abstracts in!

1/13 New paper out! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Historical records across thousands of women showed that mothers with more children had shorter lifespans during a famine, fitting an evolutionary explanation for why we age @hannahdugdale.bsky.social @lummaalab.bsky.social @erikpostma.bsky.social

New episode!! 🎙️🎉 A conversation w/ @erinhecht.bsky.social about the diversity and evolution of canine brains. We've lived and worked with dogs for 15,000+ years, sculpting their brains and bodies along the way. What can we learn from their singular story? Listen: disi.org/of-breeds-an...

👉 A reminder that the deadline for submitting your abstract to the CES 2026 #CESRabat is the 16th of November. 🔗Submit here: airess.fgses-um6p.ma/ces2026 We look forward to seeing you in Rabat!

#PRIMATES Studying young chimpanzees in Uganda, Canadian anthropologist @iuliabadescu.bsky.social finds that children have a "repertoire of skills that adults can pick up on, and that's how culture evolves." @nature.com nouvelles.umontreal.ca/en/article/2...

📢 The Call for Abstracts for Culture Conference 2026 is officially OPEN! 📢 🗓️ Deadline: 8 Dec 2025 We welcome submissions from all career stages and relevant disciplines. 🔎Details & submission info: culture-conference.com/abstract-sub... Keynote speakers & workshop details coming soon!

Years ago, I attempted a self-assessment of my potential gender biases in an academic research setting: ecoevoevoeco.blogspot.com/2016/04/subt... Today, I happened on a very nice summary of how to avoid such biases in letters of recommendation, which provides an comprehensive outline. Check it out

‼️SAVE THE DATE‼️ We are excited to welcome you again in Utrecht, NL for the next Culture Conference on the 26th & 27th of February 2026! And surprise! We will also host a hands-on workshop on the 25th/02 🙌💻 So stay tuned for future announcements here & on the website 🔎 culture-conference.com

Finally listened to this talk by my PhD supervisor and colleagues in India. Such interesting work! If you want to know (more) about Asian elephant societies, do watch it.

People on twitter are losing their minds over this, including several scientists who I have to assume have either brain poisoned themselves or were always like this. People don't always cite what's best; they cite what they know & researchers from historically excluded communities get the short end.

the IUCN have passed the Longevity Conservation motion put forward to them by @kellerfish.bsky.social and @pili-scotland.bsky.social and based on the paper we wrote on the value of older individuals in animal societies. www.cdu.edu.au/news/global-...

What an honor to receive the 2025 Vaikom Award for Social Justice from the Government of Tamil Nadu—in the name and spirit of Periyar. His legacy calls us to action: end discrimination in all its forms—caste, gender, sexual orientation, religion—and make self-respect a lived reality for everyone.