Job ad now available here: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/life-sc...!

New in @science.org ‼️ In the most comprehensive study to date, we show that wildlife trade is driving animal-to-human zoonotic spillover at a planetary scale, with +1 spillover per host every 10 years. Live animal markets and illegal trade pose even greater risks. 🔓 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Alex Kramer, Alan Zhang and friends posted our preprint today. In it, we introduce Panmap, a tool for phylogenetic placement, assembly, lineage abundance estimation, and eDNA assignment using phylogenetic pangenomes. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We are destroying species' habitats, leading to a mass extinction event. This habitat destruction also reduces the genetic diversity _within_ species. Our latest work develops quantitative models to predict how much genetic diversity has been and _will be_ lost. 🧬🧪🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Really excited that this major work from my PhD is finally published in @plosbiology.org ! In it, we were trying to tackle a fundamental question in evolution - how do genetic mutations map onto evolutionary fitness? (1/n) journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Introduced [fish] species can wreak havoc on native ecosystems. Many states are flooding their waterways with them. www.vox.com/climate/4831...

Proud that this work is now published! We hope it helps orient future #Nanopore long-read sequencing studies hunting for structural variants Also really happy to share eight new high-coverage (>100x) long-read read pools and assemblies with the #Drosophila community! doi.org/10.1093/g3jo...

I am SO THRILLED to share our first fully-lab lab paper!!!!!! Led by @hybridzones.bsky.social & @hagarsoliman.bsky.social, w/ a major assist from @pfschwarz.bsky.social!!!!!!!!!!!!! Read more below, if you're curious (you should be- it's AWESOME!!!!!!!) link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building looms in the background of the camp at Coldwater Spring, or Mni Owe Sni, at Fort Snelling along the Mississippi River — where the U.S. government in the mid-1800s killed hundreds of Dakota people and imprisoned more than 1,600 in a concentration camp.

How do compartmentalization & loop extrusion organize eukaryotic genomes beyond classical model organisms? Hi-C analysis of silkworm chromosomes by Drinnenberg, Muller, Mirny et al reveals new combination of these mechanisms, and a new, secluded “S” compartment link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New paper out in @funecology.bsky.social y.social: Warm waters undermine cryptic female choice! We find ovarian fluid only has a positive effect on sperm function at colder temperatures and that sneaker males have faster sperm than dominant nesting males at warmer temperatures. (1/3)

Really excited to share our new paper in @nature.com! We uncovered how a physical instability of the cytoplasm coupled with the cell cycle drives cytoplasmic partitioning in early embryos #zebrafish #drosophila. Read more in this🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🤩 @poldresden.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de

I came to Minneapolis to report on what's going on, and one of the main questions I showed up with is "just what is the scale of the resistance?" After all, we're all used to the news calling Portland a "war zone" or whatever when it's just some protests in one part of town.

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...

Not a single day in 2025 was cooler than the 1991-2020 average, on a global scale. @copernicusecmwf.bsky.social

Consulted with our entomologist at SUFS on what kind of invertebrate Thom Tillis is:

My name is Mary Peltola, and I'm running for U.S. Senate to fight for fish, family, and freedom – and that begins with fixing the rigged system in DC that’s shutting down Alaska. We need systemic change if we're going to lower costs, save our fisheries, and fill our homes with abundance again.

🧪New preprint! tinyurl.com/mr7km2pv When & why do predators share social information? Blue whales produce foraging calls when prey (krill) are abundant & dense, conditions arising from physical oceanographic forcing across temporal scales. Variation in ocean physics shapes blue whale communication!

This seems like a really great initiative! If you know any Trans scientists who might be interested in joining a broader community, please pass along! transscientistcollective.carrd.co

Our eLetter github.com/caseywdunn/s... responding to a recent Science paper was just posted. The paper found more genes with consistent support for sponge-sister than ctenophore-sister. We found several technical issues that, when corrected, reverse the conclusions and recover ctenophore-sister.

Please share - @pewresearch.org wants to hire a data archivist who will be an advocate for data users, helping to ensure that our datasets are easy to discover and reuse by researchers, journalists, and the public. pewtrusts.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/CenterExtern...

If this makes you mad…turn your anger into action. There are articles of impeachment against RFK jr. in the House. Sign the petition, call your rep, send a quack-o-gram, and share with LITERALLY EVERYONE YOU KNOW. This isn’t going to stop unless we make it. Standupforscience.net/impeach-rfkjr

Let’s make 2026 the year of the bog. The world’s most unique and interesting plants, clean water, cooler climate. Bogs deserve our thanks, care, and deep respect. Please join me and love a bog today.

Friendly neighborhood biologist here. I see a lot of people are talking about biological sexes right now. Lots of folks make biological sex seem really simple. Well, since it’s so simple, let’s find the biological roots, shall we? Let’s talk about sex...[a thread] (Reposted from the other site)

Balanced polymorphism in a floral transcription factor underlies an ancient rhythm of daily sex alternation in avocado https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.22.695989v1

No contest. Just read the first two sentences of the abstract. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Population genetics analysis in a phylogenetic framework shows convergent evolution in the genomes of five brood-parasitic species, including selection on genes involved in spermatogenesis, sperm function and nervous system development 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Grateful to share our paper on gene-specific selective sweeps in human gut microbiomes, now out in Nature! It has been a joy to work with @rwolff.bsky.social, whose insights and hard work made this possible. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We are excited to share our recent work on the surprising robustness of Ancestral Recombination Graph (ARG) inference tools to computational phasing errors, now available on BioRxiv: biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... This work is co-advised by @yundeng.bsky.social and Rasmus Nielsen. 1/7

Recently had the chance to hear @carlbergstrom.com on information foraging in the current space of LLMs. He and @jevinwest.bsky.social have crafted a course that touches various facets of LLMs. Just finished reading through its 18 modules. Absolutely loved it! thebullshitmachines.com

Excited to share work from my postdoc with @docedge.bsky.social and collaborators Matt Pennell and @jgschraiber.bsky.social, newly out over the weekend: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/6)

So happy to announce our new preprint, “A geothermal amoeba sets a new upper temperature limit for eukaryotes.” We cultured a novel amoeba from Lassen Volcanic NP (CA, USA) that divides at 63°C (145°F) 🔥 - a new record for euk growth! #protistsonsky 🧵

Our preprint is out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Peter Skovorodnikov and I are excited to present FERAL: a new video-understanding toolkit that maps raw video directly to behavior, no pose estimation required. It works across species, from lab to field, and even in collective systems. (🧵1/n)

@hakha.bsky.social and I wrote a Research Briefing (with a lay summary + "behind the scenes") of our paper on how genes are prioritized by GWAS and rare variant burden tests. 🧬🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Thrilled to finally share the magnum opus of my PhD that focuses on the genetic basis of evolutionary change! Specifically, we know we can map the genetic basis of a trait, but can we tell which genes will underlie the trait shift when it evolves? doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Folks, it is finally out! Our paper on T2T assemblies of the zebrafish genome is on BioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Nature research paper: An ancient recombination desert is a speciation supergene in placental mammals go.nature.com/47UiBWa

Can confirm. I am okay and more motivated than ever to speak up. Nothing scares this administration more. Their power lies in our silence.

Beyond excited to share my PhD work thus far, now up as a preprint! We found that a transposable element insertion is responsible for the recent evolution of an novel color trait. Feeling thankful to everyone who has helped in this project and thrilled to continue learning about "sparkle"!

✨ this is the skin of a swimmer, Bella ✨ awesome work led by @nadiahaghani.bsky.social that identifies what makes a swordtail fish sparkle 🪩

Super excited that the bulk of my PhD work is now preprinted! Here we used whole-community competition, or coalescence, experiments to quantify selection acting on genetically diverged strains within larger communities. (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

In our last thread, we left the jelly-enjoyers of Bluesky with a cliff hanger ending, in what one eager onlooker described as soap opera science 😜 ... wait no more, we are back! Grab your popcorn shrimp and come with us on a journey spanning more than... bsky.app/profile/iwan...

Insertion of an invading retrovirus regulates a novel color trait in swordtail fish https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.07.687308v1

In the century leading up to 1975, nearly 6000 freighters went down in the Great Lakes. The Edmund Fitzgerald was the last. The last. In 50 years, not a single commercial freighter has been lost in the Great Lakes. Why? It's NOAA. Of course it's NOAA.

Should we kill trees because they're ugly? At one point, the National Park Service did just that. Modern conservation is loaded with value judgments.

BREAKING: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is illegally closing 13 campus buildings (including ~100 laboratories). Report coming from GESTA, the Goddard employee union

Grateful to spend two days on the Klamath watching chinook, liberated by dam removal, return to streams from which they’d been precluded since the Titanic sank. Fish are everywhere, in numbers that stagger the mind & locations that biologists figured would take years to repopulate. Too beautiful.

@joann-trejo.bsky.social, @marymunson4.bsky.social and I have a commentary in @natcellbio.nature.com on recent attacks on DEI in biomedical research: "If scientific research, especially biomedical research, is meant to serve everyone, then it requires that everyone has an opportunity to participate"

Ecology faces an accumulation of models but not an accumulation of confidence. Our new paper w/ Jonathan Levine www.nature.com/articles/s41... in @natecoevo.nature.com introduces a rigorous test rooted in queueing theory to falsify inadequate models and build confidence in useful ones.

Chinook salmon have returned to the Klamath River in Oregon after being absent for more than a century. The announcement came roughly a year after the last of four major hydroelectric dams on the river was demolished.