A year has gone by without my best bud. I miss him so much. I love you, my dearest Hobbes. Until we meet again. ❤️

“Success in US science has come from sustained funding and welcoming the best talent from around the world, yet both of these advantages are in decline” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

How do we know our research results are REAL? We replicate them! Most folks agree but lament on how hard it is to publish these replications. My dearest gentle reader, lament no more! Delighted to unveil: Replication Studies, a new section of Behavioral Ecology 1/ academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...

Striking paper from researchers at Anthropic using a randomised control trial to look at the effects of AI use on skills acquisition. TL:DR ‘We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.’ www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

Clearly winning! apnews.com/article/mode...

Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs xkcd.com/3204/

A long time ago in a galaxy far away, there was a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Our paper, led by @martibartfast.bsky.social a) correcting errors in 4.5 million genomes & their phylogeny b) improving representation of the Global South in public data www.nature.com/articles/s41... (thread 1/n)

Fun news! @gcbias.bsky.social and I are teaching a 2-week online population genetics workshop this summer to raise money for the Center for Population Biology at UC Davis. We're trying to gauge interest -- please fill this out if you might be interested! And please share broadly!

Ever had to REPEATEDLY report a colleague's emails as spam? Dude - no one likes you, or your racist/xenophobic/transphobic trash views. You're retired - STFU please with your propaganda nonsense, and disappear into that emptiness that's your heart/brain. Kthnxbai.

My favorite Superb Owl from this year. Look at those feetses!!

Symbiotic entrenchment through ecological Catch-22: Cell www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

I read this as ‘Learning to vocalize sounds like a barn owl’ and got SO excited! 😆 Everyone ready for all the superb owls? 🦉

Developing this course from scratch, incorporating several new recent developments from my lab, including tests of ghost introgression, model development and testing, and inference from Ks histograms. Do sign up! Feel free to DM me with queries.

apple.news/AIZL-85MbRPe... There’s still so much good in this world ❤️

New paper! From Sam Snodgrass and @genomeofforrest.bsky.social, w/ @druncie.bsky.social, @gcbias.bsky.social, and a collaboration with Andres Moreno and @santiagogmm.bsky.social. Can we quantify the impact of humans on maize dispersal? Plant yourself in a comfy chair and lend me your ear: 1/10

Last day of our Python course 🐍 Students are presenting individual projects: tools for analyzing biological datasets. Creativity & smart AI use produced amazing results. Really impressive work across the board 👏 Materials: github.com/bpucker/teac... #Python #Bioinformatics #OpenScience #Teaching

Alriiighhhhhttt! The Sethuraman Lab has submitted not one, but SIX abstracts to #PEEQG26! I hope to see you all there!

See you all at Darwin Day next week on our beautiful @sandiegostate.bsky.social campus, featuring Dr. Jim McGuire's keynote lecture on "Darwin, Wallace, and my Own Studies on the Magical Island of Sulawesi, Indonesia"! Deets in the flyer - but please DM me if you have any questions.

New blog post: ONT read QC strategies for assembly rrwick.github.io/2026/02/05/r... Mini-study comparing a few QC/subsampling approaches, plus practical notes from my experience.

Embarrassingly_FASTA: Enabling Recomputable, Population-Scale Pangenomics by Reducing Commercial Genome Processing Costs from $100 to less than $1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.02.703356v1

Interested in using aDNA time-series datasets to estimate selection? Our study "Assessing Ancient DNA Sampling Strategies for Natural Selection Inference in Humans Using Allele Frequency Time Series Data" is now out in GBE! doi.org/10.1093/gbe/... @genomebiolevol.bsky.social @cegamorim.bsky.social

Why are there such big differences between the sexes when it comes to immune responses? This Essay looks at what further research is required to fully determine sex-differential mechanisms in #immunity.🧪 #immunosky plos.io/4ro28S9

I was bugging him and he fell asleep mid-bite 😹

I watched a very poignant movie over the weekend called "The Boy In The Striped Pajamas" (not sure why I hadn't seen this one before). Movies about the Holocaust are devastating, but this one specifically reminded me of how ~100 years later, we are still perpetrating hatred against immigrants.

BUSTED-PH: Isolating the genomic signatures of convergent phenotypes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.29.702612v1

Time for a thread on our Christmas preprint “Origin and evolution of acrocentric chromosomes in human and great apes”. I had so much fun with this project and paper. It will be hard to summarize in a thread, but I’ll try www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... [1/21]

❤️

MSR was an icon - taught me pretty much everything that I do on the daily - probability, statistics, optimization, differential equations. His characteristic roaring voice and theatrics in his lectures were highlights of my undergrad days. RIP, Sir.

The transposable elements syndrome of wheat domestication https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.28.702265v1

Threw my comp-genomics class into a sea of Bayesian math today to explain base-calling algorithms. I think I might have lost and drowned a few of them in the process. 😞

Calling all OrthoFinder users! We’ve just released GLADE, a tool to infer gene gains, losses, duplications, and ancestral genomes across a phylogeny. GLADE runs directly on OrthoFinder results. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... github.com/lauriebelch/... (1/10)

New tool from @alexsweeten.bsky.social to find and classify all your satellites: "AniAnn's: alignment-free annotation of tandem repeat arrays using fast average nucleotide identity estimates" 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 📦 github.com/marbl/anianns

Ooh, now with fancy flyer. Zoom link usc.zoom.us/j/96588553185

New review! Theory & a practical guide to structural variants in popgen🧬 Many thanks to my co-authors: @rebekahoomen.bsky.social @annatigano.bsky.social @marenwellenreuther.bsky.social @janawold.bsky.social @dlfield.bsky.social @clairemerot.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

NEW PAPER with @arvidagren.bsky.social and Manus Patten on evolutionary reversions in individuality now out (as an advance article) at @jevbio.bsky.social (see academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-...). Thread below! [1/8] .

Excited to announce our latest publication in reporting evidence for three (3!) new whole genome duplications (WGDs) in yeasts. Scientists have often wondered why WGD is so rare in fungi, it turns out we may just not have been looking hard enough! 🧪 🍄 🧬 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The evolution of genetic drift over 50,000 generations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.25.701616v1

A new extreme of meiotic evolution: ✔️ 𝗻𝗼 crossovers ✔️ 𝗻𝗼 gene conversion ✔️ 𝗻𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗹 meiosis & fertility Sex mimics clonality without becoming asexual, in the holocentric multicellular eukaryote 𝘙𝘩𝘺𝘯𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘢 𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘶𝘪𝘴. more about it: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A Comment discusses how commands, data, and metadata currently discarded by scientific instruments could be used to train AI systems to learn to conduct experiments. @henrypinkard.bsky.social @nilsnorlin.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

PEQG! My favorite conference ever*. Single session, fantastic talks, great discussions. Only once every 2 years. And in the best conference location too! Abstract deadline coming up Feb 5! *Disclosure: I am required to say it's the best conference because it is and I told my mom I wouldn't lie.

Some days, you just crave dal and paneer with chapathis. Today was one such day.

Distribution of Gene Tree Topologies with Duplication, Loss, and Coalescence https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.19.700405v1

Our new paper is online! We found that 1) today's shark & ray diversity was already reached ~100Ma; 2) that the K/Pg extinction was not catastrophic; 3) that the max diversity was reached ~50Ma; and 4) that today's diversity is depleted compared to the past. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Come celebrate International Darwin Day with us @sandiegostate.bsky.social! Deets in the flyer (designed by the awesome @doc-brock.bsky.social).

Comparative genomics of Tandem Repeat variation in apes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.20.700717v1

Very interesting new preprint on detecting genome wide signatures of balancing selection (it’s hard, and we probably miss lots of them) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

More than 400 million years ago, during the Silurian Period, an evolutionary event led to the later emergence of spiders’ spinnerets—the abdominal organs that make silk—according to new #ScienceAdvances research. https://scim.ag/4sFX3pJ

Here are the Top 5 Dogs of the week!