Figure in the main study showing the migration route and diurnal locomotion along their migratory journey
Small migratory birds cross deserts and seas as part of their annual migration. But how?
Our new study shows how thrush nightingales do it: by flying night after night and stopping during the day, when they remain innactive🐦➡️(1/3)
doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...
@royalsocietypublishing.org
#BirdMigration
DNAharvester's workflow.
We present DNAharvester 🎉🦴🚜🧬
A pipeline to process highly degraded ancient DNA data that integrates metagenomic filtering, competitive mapping, multiple alignment strategies, reference bias evaluation and much more.
GitHub: github.com/NBISweden/DN...
Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Screenshot of a tweet by Rep. Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) praising a breakthrough in pancreatic cancer research, calling it "the best of America" and noting that lead researcher Dr. Balachandran is the son of Indian immigrants and works at Sloan Kettering. He quote-tweets Ian Weissman, DO (@DrIanWeiss...), who reports that an mRNA pancreatic cancer vaccine showed lasting results in an early trial, with nearly all responding patients still alive six years later.
Science leads to amazing breakthroughs. Immigrants lead to amazing science.
Map of the contiguous United States showing the spring bloom index anomaly as of April 19, 2026 from the USA National Phenology Network. Many areas are earlier than normal.
Aside from Florida, nearly the entire contiguous U.S. has experienced earlier than average first plant blooms in 2026. Earlier springs can cause longer allergy seasons, accelerate wildfire risk, increase pests/mosquitoes, and lead to less reliable snow-fed water.
Map: www.usanpn.org/data/maps/sp...
How every layer of science's "self-correcting machinery" failed when Iva Veseli and I simply wanted to reproduce the findings of a high-profile study on gut microbiome and autism:
merenlab.org/2026/04/15/u...
One of the best decisions ever made by the biodiversity community in Singapore was to have their annual showcase/roadshow at shopping malls, which are still heavily frequented by the public in Singapore. People don't read, but impact is more likely when you take science to where the masses are
My father survived a year with pancreatic cancer but it was a year of terrible suffering. This is very encouraging news.
www.nbcnews.com/health/cance...
‘Invisible’ birds spotted with thermal imaging Approach could help reveal which migrating species are most vulnerable to wind turbines and light pollution
A new technique quite literally shines a light on birds that would otherwise be invisible.
Learn more: https://scim.ag/4cwdaze
We (with @dornhaus.bsky.social) finally wrote up our class on how to teach modeling to biologists, which ends up being a non-trivial exercise in understanding the roles that theory plays in the scientific method. We hope others will use our class, or simply enjoy the manuscript!
Can you believe that until now there were more genomes sequenced for the woolly mammoth than for living African elephants?
Today, we bring you the first genomic, continent-scale analyses of 232 high-quality genomes of both species, the savanna and forest elephant.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A diagram showing the evolutionary relationships among modern birds. The branches are color coded by the estimated likelihood of retaining ancestral character variability, with higher likelihoods in red.
A new paper I'm on is out today! Led by Stanley Somogyi, we suggest that ancestrally variable characters stabilized independently in different bird lineages, causing distantly related groups to retain similar traits and creating headaches for bird systematists. www.cell.com/current-biol... 🪶🧪
NSF names record number of graduate fellows, rebounding from 2025 dip
www.science.org/content/arti...
Okay this is a pretty cool "language" model application, training a model on simulated demographic and mutational histories to infer coalescence times along genomes
Coalescence and translation: A language model for population genetics
Not the main point here, but I do not ever recall a federal agency making significant programmatic and personnel changes as a result of the PRESIDENT'S BUDGET PROPOSAL, which does not change any law or funding allocations. Congress hasn't acted yet.
What are we doing here?
Two Promethea moth caterpillars
New paper! If trees are closely related, does it matter where they are from to plant-eating insects? We raised >950 Promethea moth caterpillars on 14 Prunus species to answer that question. Turns out, it matters a lot! Non-native trees = Lower performance
OA paper here: doi.org/10.1002/ecs2...
Screen shot of section 1.1 of the report "vision for a new publication culture"
The governing body for 14 Dutch universities (UNL) has published a "Vision on Publication Culture" that is so inspiring and forward thinking. Worth a read for those trying to changes publishing and research assessment practices.
Take a read:
www.universiteitenvannederland.nl/files/public...
In an age of creeping relativism, a universal moral law still exists.
Threatening to end an entire civilization of 90 million people in order to bend a nation’s conduct to your will is grossly morally wrong. It is evil. And we should say this loudly.
NSF LTER program “archived”.
LTER=“Long Term Ecological Research”.
This program has been incredibly successful, incredibly frugal for what they accomplish, and…of course…targeted by evil know-nothings.
My heart is breaking.
Genomic erosion across avian lineages in the context of their evolutionary history
academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-...
This planet — with all its troubles — is worth caring for.
That should be our single purpose, as a species: To be stewards of this magnificent world, ensuring it thrives long into the future.
When an insurance company is deciding whether to pay for your medical treatment, it generates a file, which should contain all records associated with your case, including documents explaining why the claim was denied.
You have a right to see this file.
(Published May 2023)
Fifty research lab shuttered. Countless decades-old experiments and scientific records lost. Thousands of forest scientists and experts essentially forced into retirement. The destruction of science on a massive scale.
We built the first complete genome for the common marmoset, fully resolving regions that were previously missing: centromeres, acrocentric short arms, and more. A new reference genome for anyone working with marmosets. This was an awesome collaborative effort & I’m grateful to all my co-authors! 🧬
New preprint! We sequenced 175 'Alalā (Hawaiian crow) genomes to understand why >50% of eggs fail to hatch in a species recovered from just 9 individuals. What we found was a both exciting and surprising. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
After 4yr of hard work to compare empirical species range positions' shifts from the #BioShifts DB against predictions from niche-based models trained on climate & tailored to methodological attributes of each species & study, we found species shift ahead of models' predictions! 🦋
shorturl.at/vOmCw
Science magazine cover featuring a close-up of an adult koala and joey nuzzling, with cover text about bottleneck recovery in koalas and an overlaid caption reading “Reference genomes enable discovery.”
Koala clinging to a tree trunk in a forest setting, with overlaid text explaining that a reference genome is the foundation, not the finish line, and noting that the original koala reference genome was published in 2018 and later improved to support deeper population-level analysis.
🐨🧬First came the reference genome. Then came the deeper story. Biodiversity genomics is helping reveal resilience and recovery across wild koala populations. 🐨
This study is a reminder that reference genomes are not the finish line, but the foundation for discovery.
@bioplatformsaus.bsky.social
the trump administration is selling this country wholesale to rapacious, extractive industries that will destroy our collective resources for private profit morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/breaking-t...
Hey y'all. I'm a month late to this, but I wanted to share that one of my PhD chapters was published in Systematic Biology with my advisor, Frank Burbrink. Here, we explore how ecological opportunity influences phenotypic evolution in North American natricid snakes. 🧵/8
Comparison of maxent and logistic models
Do you like Maxent? You can now use it within SpeciesDistributionToolkit.jl 🎉
We have also added a bunch of dataviz functions, including bivariate and value-suppressing maps. Oh, and conformal prediction for uncertainty quantification. And more coming soon.
poisotlab.github.io/SpeciesDistr...
🌏
A species tree and a cloudogram, both showing how much gene tree discordance there is in rockfishes
New paper led by Yu Mo, with @psudmant.bsky.social
Ever wonder how extreme genealogical discordance can help you to find the genetic basis for trait variation? Wonder no more!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
