Paper alert! 📣
Really cool study stemming from the Master thesis of #Benjamin_Zelvelder @cbgpmontpellier.bsky.social @inrae-dpt-spe.bsky.social with @remiallio.bsky.social
#insect host-shifts between #parasitic and non-parasitic plants!
#Proc.B @royalsocietypublishing.org
doi.org/10.1098/rspb...
🦔 It’s #WorldPangolinDay! The world’s only scaly mammals have skulls as distinctive as their scales. A study in our @zoojlinnsoc.bsky.social analysed 241 specimens, revealing differences between Asian & African species - and hidden diversity within the white-bellied pangolin: buff.ly/bZPlGIl
McMaster University is seeking applications for a Postdoctoral Fellow in Sedimentary Ancient DNA. The role focuses on improving sedaDNA methods and reconstructing past ecosystems. Salary: CAD $70,000/year. Apply by Feb 24, 2026. More info: [McMaster University](https://www.mcmaster.ca #postdoc
Our paper on convergent regressive evolution of genes involved in oral anatomy of myrmecophagous mammals is now officially published @molbioevol.bsky.social
🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag009
Emerling, @freddelsuc.bsky.social et al. investigated candidate genes related to dentition, gustation, and mastication in nine convergent myrmecophagous mammalian lineages, finding that convergent evolution of myrmecophagy was a protracted process.
🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag009
#evobio #molbio
We hope this little guide and review of the recent literature on SVs will be useful for the community in #ecology #evolution #genomics #PopGen.
Great lead by Kat!!
very sad news. Peer Bork was one of the leaders of our field, a wonderful scientist, and he's much too young to be gone. www.embl.org/news/embl-an...
Just sharing new tool written by Vincent Ranwez to view and manipulate sequences and alignments directly in your terminal
github.com/ranwez-searc...
Pretty convenient!
We've got ISSUES. Literally.
We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?
arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563
A 🧵 1/n
Cordyceps?
“Handbook of Amphibians of French Guiana” by Antoine Fouquet, Elodie A. Courtois, Maël Dewynter is now available in English. This reference book presents detailed keys, distribution maps, phylogeography, ecology and calls of all species of 🐸 and caecilians.
sciencepress.mnhn.fr/en/collectio...
I’ve released a tool to sketch and edit phylogenetic trees!
yawak.jp/PhyloWeaver/
Load a Newick file and intuitively add/remove/resize branches.
Useful for quick conceptual trees, extracting subtrees, or turning ideas into Newick.
NEW pub in @science.org 🥳
Is it sponges (panels A & B) or comb jellies (C & D) that root the animal tree of life?
For over 15 years, #phylogenomic studies have been divided.
We provide new evidence suggesting that...
🔗: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Right. Hitler's DNA. Brace yourselves for a deluge of misinformation and bad science.
I'm in Australia, so do get in touch if you want some expert debunking.
De mon côté on m'a confié le micro pour la chronique sciences.
Cette fois j'ai décidé de parler du fonctionnement scandaleux de l'édition scientifique, peu connu en dehors des labos : www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg2C...
Mais 4 minutes c'est court, alors j'ajoute quelques ressources ci-dessous !
If you're a #teacher interested in a great #openaccess write up on reading #phylogenetic trees, check out www.digitalatlasofancientlife.org/learn/system... created by @jonhendricks.bsky.social and Elizabeth Hermsen.
If you're interested in understanding discordance in phylogenomic analyses, the @evojlinnsoc.bsky.social's special issue 'Phylogenomic Discordance: Patterns, Processes, and Solutions' is for you!
tinyurl.com/v2eces3s
I'll be sharing a few articles a week until we're through the issue! (1/n)🧪
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.
A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:
a 🧵 1/n
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Profits from scientific publishing are eye-watering, costing us billions. In ‘The Drain of Scientific Publishing’ (arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820), (building on ‘The Strain of Scientific Publishing’ doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00327) we show how it is harmful – and unnecessary.
Retour sur quatorze années de recherche sur la #biodiversité #tropicale d'Amazonie avec le Centre d’Etude de la Biodiversité Amazonienne (Labex #CEBA) 😍 - Un grand merci à Jerôme Chave et tous les autres acteurs du LabEx! anr.fr/fr/actus/det...
Congrats Quentin! Amazing photo as always 👏
Thrilled to have won the Amphibians and Reptiles category of the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year and to be able to share this fascinating frog behavior! #wpy61 #frogs #herpetology www.quentinmartinez.fr
Cross-species cloning in ants 🐜
These two males belong to different species—but share the same mother. How? Why?
To celebrate the print release of our last paper in this week’s @nature.com (issue 8084), here’s a thread summarizing the results. Why? Let’s dive in🧵👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Preprint Alert! 🦥
We produced complete genomes for 2 Xenarthra and placed them in a mammalian comparative framework. We found that Xenarthra harbour the largest number of retrocopies in mammals! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Another record month for bioRxiv - and further evidence the pandemic spike+dip was just that and growth continues. Thanks to all involved and that includes 🫵
What have 🦷🦷 #TEETH 🦷🦷, 🥛 #MILK 🥛, and💧💧 #SALIVA 💧💧to do with each other? Ask PetarPajic, Luane Landau, and Omer Gokcumen @gokcumenlab.bsky.social ❗️
academic.oup.com/gbe/article-...
Awesome new paper by @lucalivraghi.bsky.social et al.
doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...
in @currentbiology.bsky.social
on the evo-devo of a butterfly color variation
enjoy the show!
Targeted ortholog search in unannotated genome assemblies with fDOG-Assembly www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09....
