🎉 New paper out in Biological Reviews! 🎉
With 19 brilliant co‑authors from the IUCN SGA's Working Group on Chimpanzee Cultures, led by Crickette Sanz and me, we provide a much needed toolkit on how animal cultures can be built into conservation.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
For #NSF and #NIH watchers, Grant Witness now has interactive data on numbers of grants and total funding obligations, broken down by institute and directorate, new awards and non-competitive renewals.
The stranglehold on new awards is still a disaster.
grant-witness.us/funding_curv...
Culture was assumed to be unique to humans, but recent scientific discoveries have revealed that it's in fact widespread in the animal kingdom. This #PhilTransB issue is the first to present a comprehensive picture of the science & implications of this: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...
"the fact that it takes three clicks to reach says something about how much Google wants you to find it."
A six panel comic. In panel 1, a banner says "Pigeons make milk" and a smaller banner says "A fact you didn't need to know". A pigeon stands looking at the reader next to a carton of milk. In panel 2, the text says "Like mammals, pigeons feed milk to their babies. Both male and female pigeons produce it." Two pigeons sit next to their pink and gray babies, all looking happy, and one of the parents says, "Teamwork." In panel 3, the text says "Pigeons don't have nipples. They make milk in a part of their esophagus and regurgitate it." Two pigeons stand next to each other, one with a cow udder and one with a line of nipples down its chest, with red X's next to them. In panel 3, the text says "Amazingly, it evolved independently from mammal milk but it's triggered by the same hormone, prolactin." A black and white dairy cow looks down at a pigeon, who says "We're not so different, you and I." In panel 5, the text says "Like our milk, it has fats, proteins, immune-supporting substances, and more." A cow foot and a pigeon wing are shown high-fiving, and text says "milk high five". In panel 6, the text says "However, it's very chunky, so don't trust any pigeon to make you a good latte." A white coffee cup steaming with a latte inside is shown with the contents censored, and a pigeon leans into the frame looking proud of itself.
Pigeon milk.
fresh off the press from yours truly: oecs.mit.edu/pub/b61joemo...
I offer an overview of algorithmic bias. I trace its historical roots, examine canonical scholarship and notable real-world incidents, and explore how algorithmic bias emerged as a field of study
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New paper from team @aial.ie! aial.ie/research/gpa...
EU's AI Act Article 53(1)(d) is an obligation for GPAI model providers to publicly provide a 'summary' on their model’s training data. The team assessed published summaries along 6 dimensions & found that all big providers failed on all 6.
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Important thread about dehumanization by and for the benefit of tech companies w/lots of good resources
Hey genomics colleagues: are they any software programs you wish still worked on your modern OS? I’m trying to get a list of dead software that lost support and fell out of fashion, not due to method but due to software support. #genomics #evosky #evolbio #popgen #Evolution
A line curve showing number of awards for fiscal year 2026 compared to fiscal years 2021-2025 across NSF. The fiscal year 2026 curve lies well below curves for other fiscal years.
NSF Update
Funding curve overall. A little bit of progress in the past week, but only a little bit.
Now by Directorate...
1/11
We now have a CDC grant tracker and are collecting information on CDC terminations. If your CDC grant was terminated, we need your help to gather data and documents! Please report!
grant-witness.us/submit-cdc.h...
What do we want?
Fossil databases! 🐚🦕
When do we want them?
Forever! 🗓️
Nice new paper highlighting how academic funding systems and digital architecture need to change, to ensure we can protect and sustain our precious fossil data 📚
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Our newest timeline tracks actions that hamper our ability to control the spread of infectious diseases, making the US and the rest of the world more susceptible to disease outbreaks, including global pandemics:
unbreaking.org/issues/infec...
Jim Olds on what worked and didn't in NSF's EEID sciencepolicyinsider.substack.com/p/when-agenc... (Lifted from Dynamic Ecology's Friday links)
Today is the paperback release day for my book The Contagion of Liberty! It’s about how Americans demanded that their governments provide inoculations for smallpox to the public as their right and also to affirm that public health is a foremost duty of government. www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...
Join us this week on 2/6 @ 11AM ET for our next Game Changers Seminar. How can AI & open science reshape verification of the Biological Weapons Convention?
Our panel will explore opportunities, risks, and what this means for global biosecurity.
Registration open ⤵️
brown.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
On the positive side, don't forget philosophers played a major role in the UN declaration on human rights!
www.unesco.org/en/udhr
I just logged into myNCBI to update my bibliography for NIH and apparently was given access to someone else's account (totally different biosketches, papers, search history, etc). Anyone else experiencing this?
Attention folks in the weather, climate, disaster, wildfire, and Earth science communities: NSF has just published a new "Dear Colleague" letter inviting feedback (by Mar 13) on the proposal to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). www.nsf.gov/funding/...
📣 CFP for a topical collection in EJPS:
*Understanding Climate Change: A Multifaceted Inquiry*
link.springer.com/collections/...
Submission deadline: 01 March 2026
#philsci #climatechange
Please apply (or encourage your grad students to apply) to our awesome funded summer program by January 15th!
Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy these six absolutely amazing images of deep-sea life. www.scientificamerican.com/article/6-ot...
Great new paper!
Many stinging wasps, bees, and ants have controlled the sex of their developing eggs for millions of year using an ancient segment of their genome- always the same segment- but what's weird is, *the exact DNA sequence of that segment doesn't seem to matter*.
Suppose you ask #AI for improvements to your writing.
The #LLM was trained on, but doesn’t mention, Smith’s work.
You adopt the suggestions containing Smith’s ideas.
You don’t even realize YOU’VE PLAGIARIZED because you’ve never read or heard of Smith.
My new Gould paper is out today in Paleobiology (OA)! It is, in effect, a synthesis of some of my historical work on Stephen Jay Gould’s early career, which explores the curious position of punctuated equilibria in his early vision for evolutionary paleontology
www.extinctblog.org/palaeonews/2...
A THREAD, which I am calling 'Some Of The Many Reasons Lichen And Moss Are Fucking Brilliant'.
1. They make public seating super comfy.
bsky.app/profile/dj-a...
This is, not a joke, one of my favourite papers in a long time. Absolutely stellar co-authors, but also a straight line from "nitpicky little nerds obsessing over sampling" to "translational research with clear implications for management". Go read all about it here: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...
I started getting reports of an unseasonal Joshua tree bloom in the last few weeks, and looking over records on @inaturalist.bsky.social it's pretty widespread! So we're putting out the call for folks to record this "bonus bloom" and help us study it 🌿
lab.jbyoder.org/2025/12/10/w...
