At points of our evolutionary history multiple Homo lineages coexisted. Insights into these depend mainly on rare fossil crania, damaged & deformed by age. Removing such distortions, new reconstructions of a 1-million-yr-old cranium from China suggest a surprising mix of primitive & derived traits:🧪

New paper alert! Systematic epidemiological analyses of up to 39,000 people illuminate biological/clinical links between impaired musical rhythm abilities & disorders affecting speech-language development. International collaboration led by @drsrishtin.bsky.social, out in @natcomms.nature.com. 👇🧪

Massive sibling regression study finds that human traits are largely environmentally driven (average heritability = 0.3)

“The big perspective change from ancient DNA study is that people living today are almost never the descendants of the people in the same place thousands of years before” news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

A project many years in the process, we’re pleased to present our work on multi-ancestry meta-analysis across a boatload of traits in the UK Biobank: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Taps side of head… can’t get bored if I never truly specialize!

I've only read the abstract and I already know this paper is so very correct 👀

Another social cerebellar dream team effort: Cerebellar growth is associated with domain-specific cerebral maturation and socio-linguistic behavioural outcomes - thanks Katerina Manoli and co for wonderful work! Thanks also to @imprsconi.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New @maxplanck.de study: We looked for left-right differences of gene expression and cell-type abundances in the brains of MICE 🐭using Xenium @10xgenomics.bsky.social. Possible clues to how functional brain asymmetry is supported !! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Short thread below ⬇️

𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐝𝐨 𝐰𝐞 𝐠𝐨 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐠𝐞? I loved presenting today results from my #PhD at the #Sociogenomics Seminar at the University of Tartu. Thanks to @ukuvainik.bsky.social for the invite! Find me at poster 9 tomorrow at the #GeneForum #language #neuroscience Key insights⬇️

Some people call it a minefield. Others call it dangerous, even irresponsible. I call it the most promising field in life sciences. My love letter to social science genetics: communities.springernature.com/posts/a-love...

Remember this? In the 1990s, a popular view of nanotechnology claimed that molecular gears like this, made of diamondoid carbon, were going to be the components of molecular-scale assemblers and nanobots. But that vision hasn't come to pass. My article in Aeon explores why. aeon.co/essays/no-su...

Multivariate genome-wide association analysis of dyslexia and quantitative reading skill improves gene discovery. New paper by Hayley S. Mountford & al. With Else Eising, @profsimonfisher.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s41398-025-03514-0

Thanks to the presentation by @anthe.sevenants.net at #SLE2025 today I now know of the Zipfian dinosaur 🦕 and shall henceforth use it in all my stats classes 🤩

incredible Ada Lovelace quote highlighted in a talk by Steve Furber. She spells out the dream of computational neuroscience, 2 centuries ago. The sheer ambition 🤩

"I find the type of thinking and writing involved in public-facing science communication joyful. It replenishes my awe and wonder. My value function is deeply driven by curiosity, both in the weeds (where individual scientific projects reside) and at a high level." #scicomm #joy

For the EU, this should be a very urgent matter of national security. All EU member states should build on Denmark's wise strategy to phase out Microsoft products

If someone you know buys into claims about "genetic optimization" of embryos using polygenic scores of cognition, just send them our 2024 paper on Beethoven & musicality. We wrote it to help communicate limits of individual-level genetic predictions & complexity of links between DNA & behaviour. 🧪👇

@davidpoeppel.bsky.social points out the elephant in the conference: whichever direction of the planet we look, things are bad. Einstein, chomsky and arendt point out to us that silence is not neutral 👏 #CCN2025

As always, Ted Chiang is great in this interview. cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

How delightful! When Descartes was mulling over emotions (which he called passions), which did he list first? Not anger, fear, rage, euphoria, or sadness. Nope. "Wonder". Today, many researchers refer to what he describes here as "prediction error" (triggering "astonishment")

Wow! William James said it back in 1884. Now that 140 years have passed since his call, perhaps it's time for our physiology friends "Dr. Ferrier" and "Dr. Munk" to stop ignoring "emotion" as a "problem of the future" 😊. emotion.wisc.edu/wp-content/u...

I wrote about my recent experiences taking care of my 3-year-old, Sheila Heti's "Motherhood", and the discourse around polygenic embryo selection: kathrynpaigeharden.substack.com/p/openness-t...

„Bijzonder fascinerend. Niet door seksuele ruilhandel, zoals eerder wel gedacht werd, maar door steun van de alfamannetjes en steun hing weer af van de sociale relatie tussen hen.” Mariska Kret @hendrikspiering.bsky.social @nrcwetenschap.bsky.social #ethologie www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/...

In another milestone for human genetics, the world's largest set of whole-genome DNA sequences now encompasses data from nearly half a million people, described in this new @nature.com paper from @ukbiobank.bsky.social: 🧪👇

1 To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised! 🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

And I wrote my third science snack in a series on brain evolution for our @mpi-nl.bsky.social's TalkLing blog This time: two genes, called ARHGAP11B and NOTCH2NL, we don’t share with chimpanzees and what they do to our brains. Enjoy your meal 🙂 #brain #evolution #chimpanzees #scicomm #science

Plus, we've begun to uncover how DNA variants contribute to connectivity of language circuits in the human brain, via largescale genomic analyses of resting-state functional neuroimaging data. Check out this @commsbio.nature.com paper by @jsamelink.bsky.social @clydefrancks.bsky.social & co. 🧬🧠🧪7/n

Highly recommend this superb forum article on genomics of human communication traits, free to read in @cp-trendsgenetics.bsky.social. Beautifully succinct & accessible overview by @rosagisladottir.bsky.social on where the field is now & where it's heading. 🗣️💬🧠🧬🧪 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I'm so excited to see this online now in TRENDS IN GENETICS: Advancing GWAS of Human Communication. I review latest developments in genetics of speech and language and highlight opportunities for research on genetics and evolution of human communication. authors.elsevier.com/a/1lHgMcQbJF...

In the new issue of @cp-trendsgenetics.bsky.social, @wiringthebrain.bsky.social & Nick Cheney seek out a better metaphor. They propose a generative model concept to capture the indirect, distributed, & non-linear relationship between info in the genome & form of the organism. Worth a read: 🧬👇🧪 11/11

Presented my latest #PhD work at #BioSB2025 to the Dutch bioinformatics community. Had a great time connecting with all my colleagues! #imaging #language #genomics #brain

New preprint alert 📣 #Cerebellum, organoid, autism & brain evolution 🧪 🧫🧠🧬 Collaboration with G. Testa; fruit of years of work by smart students, led by postdoc Davide Aprile. Organoids to understand better the developmental basis of autism (focus: CHD8) & sapiens brain evolution (focus: CADPS2) 🧵

🧠 Blog alert: why wrinkles make us human 🧠 I dove into the evolution of the human brain and discovered a key property: wrinkles (gyrification in science speak). Find out more below! ⬇️ www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl?p=2589&lang=en #brain #evolution #language #scicomm @mpi-nl.bsky.social

🚨PAPER ALERT Chimpanzees expand the meanings of their single calls when combining them. They use a variety of mechanisms, analogous to those found in human language, to alter the meanings of single calls in their combinations. Photo by @lirsamuni.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

"Scientists need not become full-time ethicists. Instead, they must cultivate awareness of the issues; the questions outlined above offer a starting point and can help researchers recognize when to seek out ethical expertise. This type of reflection should occur throughout the research life cycle."

New genomic evidence lines up well with archaeological sites throughout the Americas. 🧪🏺

For #SustainabilityTipTuesday we want to echo this message about donation and repair, with a shout-out our friends at EquipSent (equipsent.org) who connect labs and enable donation of functional equipment 🤗♻️ #sustainablelabs

Happy birthday, David Attenborough! 99 ways he has inspired us, by Barack Obama, Billie Eilish, Morgan Freeman – and many more

📣Blog alert📣 What are the different aspects of internationalization in science? 🌏 I had the opportunity to cover a panel discussion on the different aspects of Internationalization in Science at the #InScience Film Festival. ➡️ www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl?p=2477 @mpi-nl.bsky.social #scicomm (1/4)

📣 Blog alert 📣 What does a chocolate factory smell like? 👃🗣️ @izabjordan.bsky.social gave a fantastic talk about #language #diversity in naming smells at #InScience to introduce #WillyWonka and the #Chocolate Factory. ➡️ www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl?p=2491&lang=en #scicomm @mpi-nl.bsky.social #science

Scientists who study climate don't automatically attribute all changes to human activity. Rather, we carefully investigate every possible natural factor that could explain the planet's warming. Could these be the real culprits? The evidence is in--and the answer is NO. This thread explains! 🧵

Greta Thunberg's distant cousin, Svante Arrhenius, was a physical chemist. In between his Nobel Prize-winning chemistry research, he also calculated the very first climate model--by hand, in the 1890s! His estimates of how each latitude band would warm as CO2 increased are still accurate today.

Wait, it gets better. It was Irish scientist John Tyndall who connected coal mining with CH4 - but it was NY's Eunice Foote whose ground-breaking experiments led her to conclude that, if atmospheric CO2 were higher, the planet would be warmer...experiments in her greenhouse in 1856. 1856! Read:

Remember when you first learned about genetics at school? All those fascinating examples of human traits that are each apparently determined by just a single gene? Time to check in on some of your favourites to see how they’re doing. 🧬🧵🧪 1/n

📣 Blog alert 📣 What does a chocolate factory smell like? 👃🗣️ @izabjordan.bsky.social gave a fantastic talk about #language #diversity in naming smells at #InScience to introduce #WillyWonka and the #Chocolate Factory. ➡️ www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl?p=2491&lang=en #scicomm @mpi-nl.bsky.social #science

Last year, Pakistan installed an incredible 22GW of solar—more than Canada has ever built! Pakistan initially committed to slash emissions 20% by 2030. But in 2021, it upped that commitment to 50%, as it's a win-win: switching to clean energy addresses poverty too. Read more:

📣Blog alert📣 What are the different aspects of internationalization in science? 🌏 I had the opportunity to cover a panel discussion on the different aspects of Internationalization in Science at the #InScience Film Festival. ➡️ www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl?p=2477 @mpi-nl.bsky.social #scicomm (1/4)

Great rant on how academia NEEDS to conform around basic insights and how the populist right (I would not put all conservatives in that box) is cancelling ITSELF in science 👇🏼

So happy to finally see this paper out in @natcomms.nature.com. rdcu.be/ehQsd “Correcting for volunteer bias in GWAS increases SNP effect sizes and heritability estimates”. A thread on our findings!