Digitally native species are a necessary shift in taxonomic practice Nature Reviews Biodiversity - Biodiversity science laments how little is known about the planet’s biodiversity, yet routinely discards much of the taxonomic evidence generated during species...

Species descriptions should not be confined to "summary" PDFs only providing access to a fraction of the data underlying the conclusions. We here argue for "digitally native species" built around structured, specimen-linked, machine-actionable evidence from day one. rdcu.be/fcbwh

As U.S. blockade bites, Cuba’s health care and science suffer Hospitals and researchers struggle to cope with lengthy blackouts and supply shortages

A U.S. blockade of oil deliveries to Cuba has contributed to power blackouts that have plunged the island nation’s science and health care communities into darkness. https://scim.ag/4vg2EVk

Introducing RustQC: 60x faster RNA-Seq quality control!

We used AI to reimplement 15 RNA-Seq QC tools (dupRadar, Qualimap, RSeQC, Preseq, samtools, featureCounts) into a single tool, written in @rust-lang.org:

✅ 15 h analyses → 15 min
✅ Identical outputs
✅ Drastically reduced I/O

Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done? Tens of thousands of publications from 2025 might include invalid references generated by AI, a Nature analysis suggests.

Tens of thousands of papers published in 2025 contain fake/hallucinated citations, an analysis by Nature and Grounded AI suggests
By @miryamnaddaf.bsky.social and Beth Quill | @nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Major conference catches illicit AI use — and rejects hundreds of papers The papers’ watermarks allowed organizers to detect use of large language models in peer review.

Major conference catches illicit AI use — and rejects hundreds of papers. The papers’ watermarks allowed organizers to detect use of large language models in peer review. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

SNP calling, haplotype phasing and allele-specific analysis with long RNA-seq reads Nature Methods - In this study, long-read RNA sequencing achieves accurate single-nucleotide polymorphism calling, haplotype phasing and allele-specific expression analysis.

LongcallR for competitive SNP calling and haplotype phasing, and simplified allele-specific analysis with long RNA-seq reads. Found ~100 junctions affected by SNPs per sample with most junctions novel.

Developed by Neng Huang. Published in @natmethods.nature.com. Read at rdcu.be/faKhL

How much protein diversity can Life on Earth actually generate?

With DIAMOND DeepClust, we show how billions of proteins across the tree of life can be clustered at low-identity for downstream analytics tasks.

📚Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
💻Code: github.com/bbuchfink/di...

Introducing ggauto: automating better charts – Nicola Rennie The ggauto package is an opinionated ggplot2 extension package that aims to help people make better charts by default. This blog post explains why it exists and how it works.

🎉 ggauto is now on CRAN 🎉

An #RStats package that selects better chart types, and provides more accessible styling for #ggplot2 plots 📊

Blog post explaining why I made it and how it works: nrennie.rbind.io/blog/introdu...

#DataViz

If you use GitHub (especially if you pay for it!!) consider doing this *immediately*

Settings -> Privacy -> Disallow GitHub to train their models on your code.

GitHub opted *everyone* into training. No matter if you pay for the service (like I do). WTH

github.com/settings/cop...

Entomologists and particle accelerator physicists have collaborated to produce a new 3D atlas of what makes up an ant, including muscles, nerves, digestive tracts, and exoskeletons. The images are free to access. spectrum.ieee.org/3d-scanning-...

A building on fire in the city centre of Lviv. People looking on.

🔴 The historic city center of Lviv, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is under attack by russian drones. Mayor Andryi Sadovy shared this picture, other channels show several fires across the city.

In daytime, Russia unleashed dozens of drones over Ukraine.

The russians have just violently bombed Lviv city center, there's fire in at least two residential apartments, one of them is right next to the St.Andriy's church. Two people are severely injured. The city is still under attack.

Learning genes deeply - Nature Methods Annevo uses deep learning to achieve unprecedented accuracy in eukaryotic gene annotation, approaching the performance of evidence-based methods.

I wrote a short Nature Methods News & Views piece on deep learning based gene finders such as ANNEVO. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Highly accurate ab initio gene annotation with ANNEVO - Nature Methods ANNEVO advances accurate and scalable ab initio gene annotation of evolutionarily diverse genomes using deep learning approach modeling sequence evolution and long-range dependencies and mixture of ex...

ANNEVO uses a deep learning approach to advance accurate and scalable ab initio gene annotation of evolutionarily diverse genomes.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A decade of research in review
For Nature Biotechnology’s 30th anniversary, our editors look back at a few of their favorite papers published in the past decade go.nature.com/4sWhZs1

Tolerance toward foreigners in ants requires chronic exposure for establishment but only sporadic exposure for maintenance Bailly et al. show that ants learn to tolerate genetically distinct non-nestmates through prolonged exposure. Once established, this tolerance persists with occasional re-encounters with ants of the s...

Ants are experts at telling nestmates from foreigners via subtle differences in odor profiles. In this new paper, we explore the conditions under which ants develop and maintain tolerance to foreigners. Turns out the ant recognition system is surprisingly plastic.
www.cell.com/current-biol...

kuva v0.1.4 released

- 4 new plots (Polar, Ternary, Ridgeline, Density)
- A completely reworked legend system
- SVG rendering 50-70% faster, and Manhattan plots 22× faster at 1M SNPs
- Many bug fixes and extra features

github.com/Psy-Fer/kuva
crates.io/crates/kuva

#rust #bioinformatics #dataviz

First 6 Days of Iran War Cost U.S. $11.3 Billion, Pentagon Says

The 2026 National Science Foundation budget is $8.75 Billion.

Bumblebee Queens Can Breathe Underwater

NEW: for @nytimes.com, I wrote about a new study showing that queen bumblebees can breathe underwater, surviving submerged for a week

the “remarkable” study stems from a lab snafu, when a co-author thought she accidentally drowned several bees—but later found that they were alive 🧪

gift link 🎁

This is figure 2, which shows global diversification dynamics of six diverse butterfly families.

Butterflies and moths are key indicators of functioning and healthy ecosystems. A Review in Nature Reviews Biodiversity describes the evolutionary history of the order Lepidoptera and tracks shifts in researchers’ understanding of the clade in the genomic era. go.nature.com/4r0kbgS 🌍 🧪

The molecular evolution of vertebrate organs - Nature Ecology & Evolution This Review discusses recent advances in the molecular evolution of vertebrate organs, including rates of evolution of organs and cell types, molecular mechanisms of organ evolution and how complex tr...

New Review 👇

The molecular evolution of vertebrate organs: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Margarida Cardoso-Moreira discusses rates of evolution of organs and cell types, molecular mechanisms of organ evolution and how complex traits contributed to the diversification of vertebrates.

Antscan

Thanks to micro-CT and www.antscan.info, you can now explore high resolution, 3D ant images from anywhere in the world. Fantastic work from Julian Katzke, Francisco Hita Garcia, @economo.bsky.social, Thomas van de Kamp and colleagues just dropped: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

On sabotage of our young scientists, by @holdenthorp.bsky.social @science.org
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

📄 A sterility-associated long noncoding RNA involved in honey bee caste determination and adult queen and worker fertility 🐝

⬇️
www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Convergent evolution of hexenal isomerases in Lepidoptera and plants - Nature Ecology & Evolution Phylogenetic and functional analyses across 34 Lepidoptera and 183 plant species show that hexenal isomerases found in Lepidoptera exhibit functional convergence with those found in plants despite hav...

Phylogenetic and functional analyses across 34 Lepidoptera and 183 plant species show that hexenal isomerases found in Lepidoptera exhibit functional convergence with those found in plants despite having evolved independently from unrelated enzyme families 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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!

Secrets of the Bees | Official Trailer | Narrated by Bertie Gregory | National Geographic YouTube video by National Geographic

A new documentary "Secrets of The Bees" will air on National Geographic on 31 March and land on Disney+ on 1 April and our bees are in it! See here for the trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mej2...

Repeated evolution of supergenes on an ancient social chromosome Lajmi et al. describe a novel supergene associated with social structure in desert ants. Surprisingly, this supergene evolved on an ancient chromosome that also evolved an analogous supergene in fire ...

📄 Repeated evolution of supergenes on an ancient social chromosome 🐜🧬

⬇️
www.cell.com/current-biol...

If we are making lists of non-ignorable "complexity" in biology, how about the interaction of selection and development? Many biologists find it boring (unnecessary complexity) or threatening (old naive adaptationism called into question). @mauriciogforero.bsky.social does good work in this area!

A parasitic, parthenogenetic ant with only queens and without workers or males Hamaguchi, Kinomura and colleagues describe an ant species that lacks workers and males and consists exclusively of queens.

📄 A parasitic, parthenogenetic ant with only queens and without workers or males 🐜

⬇️
www.cell.com/current-biol...