Might be the greatest opening paragraph of anything ever.

Well-fed penguins live longer but age faster—much like modern humans In public discourse, the increasing lifespan in Western countries is often linked to longer life in good health. However, studying human aging in modern societies is complex because outcomes are shaped by numerous social, behavioral, and environmental factors, including medical advances, food security, poverty, alcohol use, and civil violence.

Penguins in zoo environments live longer but show signs of accelerated aging, offering insights into how abundant resources and reduced physical activity impact longevity and health. doi.org/hbtmqk

cOMPaRatiVe cOGNitiONHumans share acousticpreferences with other animalsLogan S. James1,2,3,4* Sarah C. Woolley 1,2, Jon T. Sakata1,2,Courtney B. Hilton5,6, Michael J. Ryan3,4, Samuel A. Mehr5,7,8Many animals produce courtship sounds, and receivers prefersome sounds over others. Shared ancestry and convergentevolution may generate similarities in preference across speciesand underlie Darwin’s conjecture that some animals “havenearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have.” In this study,we show that humans share acoustic preferences with a rangeof animals, that the strength of human preferences correlateswith that in other animals, and that humans respond fasterwhen in agreement with animals. Furthermore, we foundgreatest agreement in preference for adorned, ancestral, andlower-frequency sounds. humans’ music listening experiencewas associated with preferences. These results are consistentwith theories arguing that biases in processing sculpt acousticpreferences, and they confirm Darwin’s century-old hunchabout the conservation of aesthetics in nature

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species)

he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals

doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

Webinar: Dax Kellie on reproducible R code YouTube video by SORTEE

If you missed my talk today about how to make your R code more reproducible and why it's good for science, the recording is already online!

Apologies for the internet issues, I hope you can forgive me, they do go away after a few minutes 😅
#rstats 🧪🌏 @sortee.bsky.social

youtu.be/2_Aum45rYlU

2 - Gold Open Access - same publishing process as above. The difference is that when an article is accepted for publication, the author/s or funder/s pay an Article Processing Charge (APC). The final version of the published article is then free to read for everyone. The APC to publish Gold Open Access in Nature is £9390.00/$12850.00/€10850.00.

Why are we still spending tens of thousands of $$$ on APC for non-society journals like Nature?

Wouldn’t that money be better spent at society journals at least? We are doing ourselves a disservice by continuing to participate in this madness.

You don’t need a paper in these journals to succeed.

✨ SAVE THE DATE ✨

This year's AES Conference will be held jointly with our friends at the Society of Australian Systematic Biologists 🧬

📍 University of Wollongong
📆 2-4 December

Mark it in your calendars ✏️ more information to come soon!

If you currently do not have a reproducible workflow where you can share data and code where possible, I expect you will soon not be able to publish in good journals.

Beyond being best practice, journals will use this to identify papers written by AI.

Plan a new project accordingly.

The Aola Richards Sydney Insect Hub The Aola Richards Sydney Insect Hub supports early- and mid-career researchers to advance insect ecology, evolution, genomics, and applied entomology, delivering impact in biodiversity, biosecurity, a...

🐝 POSTDOC OPPORTUNITY 🐜

@sydney.edu.au has an available position for an Aola Richards Postdoctoral Fellow in Entomology 🕷️

⌚ Full-time, fixed 2 year term
🪰 Independent research programme
💵 AUD$113k + 17% superannuation

Info and how to apply in the link below 👇
www.sydney.edu.au/science/scho...

A new Love Island? Berry bloom leads to baby boom for New Zealand’s goofiest parrot A massive bloom of rimu berries fueled a mating surge among the world’s heaviest (and strangest) parrots

A massive bloom of rimu berries fueled a mating surge among the world’s heaviest (and strangest) parrots

🌠 Meet Our Exec Committee for 2026 🌠

@erinmacartney.bsky.social is an post-doctoral research associate at the University of Sydney, where she is particularly interested in how the environment impacts post-copulatory traits including male-male and male-female reproductive interactions ✍️

Rapamycin, Not Metformin, Mirrors Dietary Restriction‐Driven Lifespan Extension in Vertebrates: A Meta‐Analysis The authors provide evidence that, together with Dietary Restriction, Rapamcyin and not Metformin, provides a significant lifespan extension in vertebrates.

The original paper by @eivimeycook.bsky.social @sultanova.bsky.social @alexeimaklakov.bsky.social from which our data was obtained. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

No evidence for squaring the survival curve: lifespan-extending treatments increase variation in age- at-death Abstract. Geroscience has the goal of extending lifespan through geroprotective interventions. These interventions are typically imparted on groups of indi

New paper out with @tahliafulton.bsky.social and Alistair Senior! A complementary meta-analysis of Ivimey-Cook, Sultanova & Maklakov (2025) where we find that lifespan extending treatments dont square the survival curve.
Longer life ≠ compressed mortality.
royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article...

Correction: *Sultanova

This was a complimentary analysis of meta-analysis data from Z Saltanova, @eivimeycook.bsky.social @alexeimaklakov.bsky.social

Sneak peak at our new paper where we ask if lifespan extending mimetics of dietary restriction benefit all equally (ie square the survival curve) 📈 @tahliafulton.bsky.social

🚨JOB alert🚨

We have three (yes, THREE) 🌟lectureships🌟 advertised in the School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol.

Broad remit, including #AnimalBehaviour & #GlobalChangeBiology

⏱️Deadline: 8th March 2026
🙏Please circulate widely

😊Come join us!

Full #job details: tinyurl.com/y3us95rc

Absolute insanity

yeah! Now I need to figure out how to get it into the seminal fluid haha 🤔

My Ecoli colonies busy making seminal fluid proteins for me 😍

🚨 Attention! DO NOT confuse the archaic hominin species Denisovans with the darts player Denis Ovens!

Hello! Does anyone know of any 'seed' type grants/awards within Australia (or potentially abroad if they fund research internationally) that contribute toward research only costs (not salary)??

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...

What a terrible year for me to give my first and last shot at a DECRA 😭. I knew it was going to be low, but still

Screenshot of tweet from the ARC saying they’ll announce DECRA and LIEF outcomes on Tuesday 25th Nov.

ARC says they’ll announce DECRA and LIEF outcomes tomorrow (Tuesday 25th Nov).

In recent times these announcements have been around 11am Canberra time. With 2 schemes on the same day, I assume they’ll announce one of them later in the day (probably DECRA first).

Anyone looking for a Australia-based postdoc? Like animal behaviour / coding / birds? My fantastic collaborator, Iliana Medina, is advertising a position researching bird nests:

unimelb.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/UoM_Ex...

Sex-specific responses of small RNAs and transposable elements to thermal stress in zebrafish germ cells Environmental fluctuations influence heritable phenotypes through complex molecular mechanisms. In zebrafish (Danio rerio), the interplay between temperature variation, transposable element (TE) activ...

🚨 New preprint alert!
Our latest work from @immler.bsky.social lab 🐟🧬

Sex-specific responses of small RNAs and transposable elements to thermal stress in zebrafish germ cells

#TESky #TE #piRNA #miRNA #zebrafish #DanioDigest
🔗 Read here www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A thread 🧵...

First successful detection of oestrogen, progesterone and testosterone in multiple human hard tissues, and their use as potential biomarkers of pregnancy The sex steroid hormones oestrogen, progesterone, and testosterone have never been detected in modern or archaeological human skeletal tissues using e…

First successful detection of oestrogen, progesterone and testosterone in multiple human hard tissues, and their use as potential biomarkers of pregnancy

What is sexual selection all about... definitionally and mathematically? A super talented PI, Jussi Lehtonen, is looking for a postdoc to work it all out! Deadline end of this month.
ats.talentadore.com/apply/postdo...

This is figure 1, which shows mutational burden and signature analysis in sperm and matched blood.

The findings of a study in Nature shed light on germline selection dynamics and highlight a broader increased disease risk for children born to fathers of advanced age than previously appreciated. go.nature.com/4h5BglX 🧬 🧪