I'm excited to share that we've made a collection of historic Supreme Court Records and Briefs available via
@archive.org
I've written a blog post where I go into detail about the importance of this collection.
blog.archive.org/2026/04/20/u...
I'm hiring a postdoc (start date flexible) and a PhD student (for Fall 2027) to work in any area of computational phylogenetics! More info here:
mhibbins.github.io
I will be attending both PEQG and Evolution in June, so please reach out if you want to chat at these meetings!
I am so happy to share this new paper that I wrote with @cegamorim.bsky.social! We hope that it will help encourage dialogue and collaboration between archaeologists and geneticists trying to understand kinship in the past. www.cambridge.org/core/journal... 🧬🧪
Our immigrant loved ones were front of mind as we argued for babies born in the U.S. and everyone who loves them.
I should probably be more cynical. The universal translators will be on the control of tech companies, and they will have power over which languages can be translated to and from. So that would put more pressure on people to learn on of the “accepted” languages.
Our new experimental evolution study across 30+ locations using the plant Arabidopsis thaliana —— we direct "see" adaptation and extinction to different climates at the genetic as it happens!
Read it in Science
dx.doi.org/10.1126/scie...
@ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social
@hhmi-science.bsky.social
Alright linguistics nerds, if we survive all this nonsense, and the bots keep improving, how does this change language evolution? More homogeneous or less? My intuition says it reduces pressure to conform, leading to more drifty and rapid changes at local scales. I’m probably very wrong though.
🧪This is important.
Russel Vought fact check by @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social
When a non-scientist says w/ certainty that NIH caused the Covid19 pandemic, it is a red flag & arrogance.
His intention is to destroy science & implement Project 2025.
Articles of impeachment have been drafted.
A grey rock that has a beautiful fossil trilobite. The rock is rough, but the trilobite sections are smooth. One of the main features is a compound eye, made of of many lenses.
The beautiful preservstion of trilobite compound eyes will never cease to amaze me. On this little 400ish million year old Phacops you can see all the little lenses - each one a rigid calcite mineral crystal! Together they had excellent 360° vision, perfect for finding lunch on the seafloor.
How many teachers are enough? Zero?
Hirotaka Goto and I analyze the optimal allocation of dedicated teachers in a population.
@carlbergstrom.com
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Super cool! Being able to interact with apps seamlessly in the midst of the lessons is great.
I’m happy to share github.com/jpwares/mole... it’s got a long way to go but I felt a need to change my approach a few years ago. It’s clunky AF. I enjoy shaping it and keep useful stuff like your shiny apps there to help folks learn more experientially.
Oh I’m bad at reading — in progress! Would love to check it out some point.
Been working off-and-on towards an .Rmd interactive textbook but haven't been able to work on for a while; need a Shiny tool in there that @silastittes.bsky.social wrote, and so I open it to 'cover image' - always struck by beauty of these #barnacles on rusty iron structures on the Florida coast.
😍 super cool! I either forgot or didn’t know you made such a text. Link? Would love to check it out.
Bugs in a box-an analogy We can make a physical analogy (if a somewhat fanciful one) by considering a box containing hyperactive, indiscriminate, voracious, and insatiable bugs. We put k bugs into the box. They run about without paying any attention to where they are going. Occasionally two bugs collide. When they do, one instantly eats the other. Being insatiable, it then resumes running as quickly as before. It is obvious what will happen. The number of bugs in the box gradually falls from k to k - 1, to k-2, as the bugs coalesce, until finally only one bug is left. The analogy is actually fairly precise. The number of pairs of bugs that can collide is k(k - 1) /2. If there are 2N "places" in the box that can be occupied, the probability of a collision will be proportional to k(k - 1)/4N. The size of the population corresponds to the size of the box. A box with twice as many "places" will slow the coalescence process down by a factor of two. So a simpleminded physical analysis of the bugs-in-a-box process will have the Kingman coalescent distribution as the probability distribution of its outcomes.
Thought I would share this famous analogy from Felsentein’s book I just re-stumbled on. Just in case you’re bug in a box and missed it 😜
Submitting sequences to NCBI is a scrubbing the toilet.
Making the figures is baking 🥰
The last stages of finishing and submitting papers is folding laundry.
Tag* sorry all I need coffee.
Whoops! I missed that Angel already did a nice explainer here! And forgot to take him 🙃
bsky.app/profile/arco...
Angel, Clara (@ramencult.bsky.social), and Andy put together a really nice program for computing the various flavors McDonald-Kreitman tests and related analyses. Give it a spin!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Recently we're working with SNPs from whole genome assemblies to estimate ARGs. It's a pain to go from alignment files to vcf, keeping track of masked and invariant sites. So we wrote a snakemake/SLURM pipeline. Hope it's useful to others, and don't hesitate to post issues if there are problems!
It's a pretty funny criticism because
1) the data are sourced from a public database, NIH RePORTER
2) "Deranged activist" Jeremy Berg was an NIH institute director for 7 years
and most importantly
3) Thacker admits the story is totally accurate
A post from Jason Locasale quoting Paul Thacker complaining about a Nature story from Max Kozlov using data from NIH Reporter that I posted on my Bluesky account.
Apparently Jason Locasale and Paul Thacker have a problem with using publicly available data from NIH Reporter about the number of new and competitive renewal grants from fiscal year 2026 compared to previous fiscal years because I first posted it.
1/2
1. Kevin Gross and I have a new paper out today PLOS Biology.
We used economic models based around screening games and the market for unpaid labor to highlight a meltdown cycle threatening peer review.
DHS is only now admitting that one of their agents shot and killed 23-year-old Ruben Ray Martinez, a U.S. citizen, last March.
Another day, another DHS lie exposed. Congress must rein in this abusive, lawless agency.
