Michael

When matter came alive: the physics of life’s emergence Exploring the origins of life through the mathematical theory of transitions

Phase transitions, bifurcations, thermal vents, exoplanets and their interactive maps, as well as pointers to a whole special issue just published in @royalsocietypublishing.org about origin of life.

With Spotify and Apple podcasts as usual.

What do you need more?

CC: @ricardsole.bsky.social

🦂 Scorpions? Not quite.

Take a closer look into #NHMLA's Entomology collection and learn more about false scorpions with resident Assistant Curator of Entomology, Rodrigo Ruedas!

Poster for the talk by César Marín, entitled "Understanding plant holobionts through complexity science". It will take place on Monday, 27 October 2025 at 4 pm (CET) via Zoom.

Next week, we welcome @cmarin.bsky.social in our ROTO Lecture Series. César will speak about understanding plant holobionts through complexity science. 🌿 Just register here to participate 👉 rotorub.wordpress.com/roto-lecture...
#HPBio #PhilSci #PlantScience

New paper in @funecology.bsky.social led by @felixpleiva.bsky.social. We present ShareTrait, a community-driven platform for standardising & sharing individual-level trait data in ectotherms to improve data reuse across studies.

🔗 doi.org/10.1111/1365...

#OpenScience #FAIRdata

Do ant colonies work like liquid brains? Check this great paper in @pnas.org led by @ceabcsic.bsky.social Pol Fernandez and F.Bartumeus that shows how to explain collective foraging by modelling ants as neural agents @jordipinero.bsky.social @frazambelli.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

title of a new paper - Historical model biases in monthly high temperature anomalies indicate under-estimation of future temperature extremes https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02579-5

graph of monthly max temperature and ln of area burned for ecozone 5 in canada https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-005-5935-y

New paper out that suggests that we under-estimate future temperature extremes and this is not good news for fire. www.nature.com/articles/s43... Temperature is strongly related to area burned - the warmer we get the more fire we see. Also, extremes are important - 3% of fires burn 97% of the area

Was just sent this, author unknown. There's plenty to debate but they're right about evolutionary ecology. 🌏

Today !

Way to go, @hippieherper.bsky.social 🐍

Been really enjoying the Complexity Science Discussion Group hosted by Paul Middlebrooks, where we're working our way through the Santa Fe Institute's "Classic Papers in Complexity Science". The group is open for anyone interested:

braininspired.co/complexity-g...

I am grieving the barbarism that is going to unfurl from all this. People are going to die. Livelihoods gone. All to feed a corrupt kleptocracy.

I see every day up close how different it is from the first time around. There are no guardrails. A disaster. I’m sorry we have to live through this.

hey remember when a rich ceo died then when they caught the suspect they made a circus of it like they found osama bin laden and charged him with terrorism but less than weeks ago two democrat lawmakers and their spouses were shot as literal assassination to shift control and everyone already forgot

Unlike many here, I’m fine if some people aren’t interested in aesthetic pleasures, and want life to be condensed to the most quickly-digestible set of facts. Takes all kinds. Just don’t assume the rest of us are like that, and definitely don’t force it on us.

The way people are losing their fucking minds over a proposal for a publicly owned grocery store should give you some insight into how a proposal for public libraries would be greeted today if they didn't already exist.

Deciphering Probabilistic Species Interaction Networks We review how probabilistic species interactions are defined at different spatial scales. These definitions are based on the distinction between the realisation of an interaction at a specific time a....

New paper from the lab: how do we make probabilistic species interaction networks more useful and robust? @francisbanville.bsky.social has some thoughts, and went through the literature to map mathematical definitions to ecological concepts.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
🧪

Do you model by hand?
Do you like saving time?
Do you want better results without the grunt work?

Then come to my #Evol2025 talk! I’ll present CoalMiner, a tool I built to automate demographic model generation for tools like fastsimcoal.

Tuesday | Computational Biology II | 4:30–4:45pm

Political cycles last 3-5 years.
Buildings now stand for 50.
Appliances now break in five and can’t be fixed.
We buy new clothes each year to align with what’s hot.
We’re stuck in short-term thinking—quick wins, fast fixes, fleeting trends.

If people really find this to be such an easy conclusion, then Congressional authority should be easy to get.

So why don’t they insist on a vote?

They know this isn’t “progressive” resistance. They want to marginalize it as such because on top of this war being ILLEGAL, it’s also deeply unpopular.

Do animals dream? Here is a bank vole, sleeping (and dreaming?) in a metabolic chamber

Thanks for the share :)

Do you know how to get the GIS layers for this? I’d love to look at the biodiversity profiles of these for these regions

Attending #ICCB2025?
Join me at the poster session this evening to learn more about the findings of this research and discuss their implications!

Trump is sending ICE to blue cities to enact the "largest mass deportation program in history" and Chicago is at the top of the list.

I'm calling for every Democratic leader and candidate to stand against ICE, to call for its abolition, and to materially support immigrants.

Inaction is complicity.

It’s not farming or rewilding

It’s not land sparing or sharing

It’s using ecological understanding to design nuanced approaches

In agricultural landscapes, rewilding specific areas will likely lead to synergies that increase resilience, biodiversity, & ecosystem services
doi.org/10.1002/fee....

A female peregrine falcon flying with her wings and tail wide, with a pigeon hanging from her bill beneath her.

A fledgling peregrine falcon grabbing a pigeon hanging from its mother’s bill mid-air

A female peregrine falcon parent feeding her young fledgling mid-flight (though it doesn’t end how you expect… 🧵 ⬇️)
#birds #raptors

https://www.erinhanson.com/portfolio/joshua-blooms

Colorful rhythms dance through this painting of Joshua Tree National Park. The thickly applied brush strokes form a mosaic of texture and light across the canvas.

Joshua Blooms
Original Oil Painting
by Erin Hanson, 2016
72 x 60 in

#joshuatree #nps #dailyart #sciart @fineartgallery.bsky.social

A rendered illustration of a splendid fairywren, puffed out and electric blue, crouching slightly on a stick-perch and pointing its body to the left. Its tail sticks up and out, similar to a wren, but it is not technically a wren. Behind the bird are two light blue, to frame the bird. The bottom left corner has text that reads “Splendid fairywren.”

Splendid fairywren ✨(𝘔𝘢𝘭𝘶𝘳𝘶𝘴 𝘴𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘴)
🪶 #birds #birdart #natureillustration

Breaking: ABC News says senior national correspondent Terry Moran "has been suspended pending further evaluation." This since-deleted tweet is the reason for the suspension:

- Genes are a way of passing down information from past states to current states, is mutable, and has selection/drift processes

- books, words, and language is a way of passing on information of pass states to current states, is mutable, and has selection/drift processes

An American ‘police’ officer in military fatigues, a helmet, and gas mask, carrying an assault rifle. He’s cosplaying being a soldier so he can fulfil his racist power-fantasy.

A heavily-armed FBI agent in military fatigues, body armour and a helmet. His back is to the camera: he’s facing an armoured car covered in police-officers kitted out like soldiers in a war zone. All of them are dickheads.

In any normal, democratic country, this is not what police officers look like.

Major update to BioTIME 2.0, world’s largest biodiversity time-series database BioTIME 2.0 is the largest biodiversity time-series database on the planet and gives unprecedented insight into global biodiversity.

BioTIME 2.0 - the largest biodiversity time-series database - now spans 12 million records from 553,000 locations, tracking ecosystem changes since 1874! 📊

www.idiv.de/major-update...

@uniofstandrews.bsky.social @idiv-research.bsky.social @erc.europa.eu @jon-chase03.bsky.social