humanities.

Sir Ian Mckellen deliver a 400 years olds Shakespeare monologue. YouTube video by Tristian&Co

youtube.com/shorts/uec_u...

THIS SATURDAY: Science Spotlights at the Harvard Museum of Natural History to Feature MCB’s Rebecka Sepela - Harvard University - Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology The Harvard Museum of Natural History will host a special Science Spotlights in-person event on Saturday, April 4, from 2:00–3:30 pm, featuring emerging scientists across Harvard, including MCB’s […]

THIS SATURDAY: Science Spotlights at the Harvard Museum of Natural History to Feature MCB’s Rebecka Sepela www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n...
@harvardmuseums.bsky.social @boschildmuseum.bsky.social @museumofscience.bsky.social @nbellono.bsky.social @rachellegaudet.bsky.social

👏

Evolutionary Clues Reveal How a Key Hearing Protein Adapted for Function - Harvard University - Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology A new study in Current Biology (PDF) sheds light on how a critical protein underlying hearing evolved to perform its specialized role in vertebrate sensory systems—offering a rare […]

Evolutionary Clues Reveal How a Key Hearing Protein Adapted for Function 🧪 🧬 #AcademicSky #higherEd
www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n...
@nbellono.bsky.social @treyjscott.bsky.social @rachellegaudet.bsky.social @harvardoeb.bsky.social @currentbiology.bsky.social

Evolutionary tuning of an auditory transduction channel Integrating evolutionary analysis, structural modeling, and electrophysiology, Akyuz et al. show that TMC1 and TMC2 arose by gene duplication and evolved specialized extracellular regions. In TMC1, an...

The protein that lets you hear music evolved from a family older than animals themselves. Our new paper (Current Biology) looks into how evolution doesn’t invent from scratch,
it tinkers with what’s already there :)

www.cell.com/current-biol...

What if you kept digging downward? YouTube video by xkcd's What If?

What if you kept digging downward?

What the latest What If? video in collaboration with @minuteearth.bsky.social!

youtu.be/r7B0MzvwDcA

Modeling identities among the first-sedentary communities: Emergence of clay personal ornaments in Epipaleolithic Southwest Asia The discovery of the earliest clay ornaments in Southwest Asia (15,000 years ago) made by children and adults is reported.

Modeling identities among the first-sedentary communities: Emergence of clay personal ornaments in Epipaleolithic Southwest Asia | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

cool paper on when people were using clay as ornaments, which is long before they first turned it into vessels

Quote from Darwin's letter to Charles Lyell (from the Darwin correspondence project): "At this present moment I care more about Drosera than the origin of all the species in the world… Is it not curious that a plant should be far more sensitive to a touch than any nerve in the human body!'

"I have to conclude they have sensations"

So interesting! Extinct coelacanths may have used their lungs to transmit sound pressure to the inner ear, a mechanism later lost—> different mechanical structures across vertebrates deliver vibrations to hair cells —> the mechanotransduction machinery, including TMC1 and TMC2, remains conserved.

Congratulations Eric!! Wishing you the best for the next steps and many more great discoveries ahead 👏

when you grow
but the room does not
and you shrink yourself
just enough
to keep
going

“Whoever lives there,” thought Alice, “it’ll never do to come upon them this size: why, I should frighten them out of their wits!” So she began nibbling at the righthand bit again, and did not venture to go near the house till she had brought herself down to nine inches high.

Did you know this is the world’s longest suspension bridge. It is spanning dardanelles in Turkey. We crossed the hellespont over it back in 2023, a year after it was built- the first bridge here, i think, since Xerxes’ pontoon bridges.

Exhibition: "Martin Karplus: Moments & Monuments"

events.bc.edu/event/exhibi...

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.”

Russian women take center stage in ‘Motherland,’ a riveting new history Julia Ioffe’s new blend of history and family biography takes on the contradictions of female selfhood in Soviet Russia, from achievement to marginalization

MOTHERLAND, says the @washingtonpost.com, is "riveting."

www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/1...

David Trotter · Unconditional Looking: Mrs Dalloway’s Demons Virginia Woolf admired Jane Austen above all for her ability to grasp the exceptional moment – ‘in which all the...

‘The novel’s final sentence is its least declamatory, pure cotton wool. “For there she was.”’

David Trotter on 𝘔𝘳𝘴 𝘋𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘢𝘺: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

i did not know about this imaginary novel at all. “keraban the inflexible” by jules verne- about the turkish tobacco merchant taking a guest home to uskudar for dinner - angry at the new tax he needs to pay to cross the bosphorus!

“When Abraham arrives in the promised land from his native city of Ur, a Philistine king is already there to meet him.”

Princeton alumna Mary Brunkow *91 receives Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Brunkow received her Ph.D. from Princeton in 1991 in molecular biology. She shares the award with Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi for discoveries about how the immune system is kept in check.

www.princeton.edu/news/2025/10...

Magnetotactic bacteria optimally navigate natural pore networks Diverse magnetotactic bacteria are adapted to the local geomagnetic field and grain size to maximize their swimming speed through the pore space.

Magnetotactic bacteria swim along geomagnetic field lines to navigate sediments. Using microfluidics and simulations, this study shows their motility is optimised, revealing how evolution fine-tunes life for challenging environments.

Sound by friction (stridulation) ! Spiny lobsters have lost the large claws (chelae) of true lobsters. Instead, they rely on long antennae for defense and sensing. When the antennae move, a pad-like plectrum at the base rubs against a ridged file on the head producing a scary underwater sound!

Cyzicuz- after King Kyzikos who hosted Jason and his crew on their way to the Golden Fleece… and mistakenly killed by him.

“…and the Ptolemies send with him the scholar-adventurer Eudoxus of Cyzicus. Eudoxus makes a successful return and then leads a second trading voyage of his own to the Indian coast.” — Cyzicus today is an archaeological site near the town of Erdek in Balıkesir Province, Türkiye.

Josephine Quinn · Born on the Beach: Ancient Coastlines Seas are repetitive creatures, working in cycles of tides, migration and climate change, which is normally to say the...

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Ferdinand Mount · Biff-Bang: Tariffs before Trump It is the least convincing cliché of the age that ‘globalisation has passed its sell-by date.’ On the contrary,...

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Self-termination is most likely’: the history and future of societal collapse An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation argues that a global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

“The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.”

Inimitable hand | Royal Society During Elizabeth Gould's brief career as an ornithological illustrator, she made a significant contribution to the natural history of birds, as Katherine Marshall discovers.

In her short career as an ornithological illustrator, Elizabeth Gould (1804 - 1841) produced over 650 lithographic plates, a significant contribution to the natural history of birds. Picture Curator Katherine Marshall uncovers her story on our blog: #WomenInSTEM royalsociety.org/blog/2025/07...