James Galbraith

Constraints on chromosome evolution revealed by the 229 chromosome pairs of the Atlas blue butterfly The genome of the Atlas blue butterfly contains ten times more chromosomes than most butterflies, and more than any other known diploid animal. Wright et al. show that this extraordinary karyotype is ...

How many chromosomes can an animal have?

In our paper out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social we show that the Atlas blue butterfly has 229 chromosome pairs- the highest in diploid Metazoa! These arose by rapid autosome fragmentation while sex chromosomes stayed intact.
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Edinburgh University spends thousands on chancellors bills while staff fear redundancy The UCU have called the chancellor's perks a 'slap in the face' to striking staff

“We don’t see how the university can continue to provide quality education to students with drastic reductions in staff. Management does not appear to be listening—students may [be] able to insist they do.” Sophia Woodman UCU Edinburgh President

If you do find your name, go here to file to get your money!

www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com

This is the most entertaining and most genuine piece of cinema I've watched I quite a while.

YouTube video by owen reiser LISTERS: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching

So much fun! “Listers” is worth a watch #birds youtu.be/zl-wAqplQAo?...

How Did Evolution Halve Genome Size During an Oceanic Island Colonization? Abstract. Red devil spiders of the genus Dysdera colonized the Canary Islands and underwent an extraordinary diversification. Notably, their genomes are ne

Red devil spiders from the Canary Islands have a genome half the size of mainland counterparts - Pisarenco, @jrozasub.bsky.social et al. show how purifying selection against slightly deleterious DNA and TE insertions is the primary mechanism.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf206

#evobio #molbio #TEsky

Top left: Results of genome-wide association study (GWAS) for sex in E. caeruleum, E. radiosum, and E. spectabile showing sex chromosome turnover has occurred repeatedly. Top right: Phylogeny showing sex chromosome turnover in darters and non-darter percids. Chromosome 9 is the putative ancestral sex chromosome, shared by Perca flavescens and multiple members of the orangethroat darter complex (e.g., E. spectabile, E. pulchellum). Bottom: Schematic depicting repeated turnover of sex chromosomes as a mechanism to resolve mitonuclear conflict and promote speciation.

First pop gen paper from our lab! We find repeated evolutionary turn over of sex chromosomes in darters contributes to reproductive isolation. Turnover may be an escape hatch to resolve mitonuclear conflict & neo sex chromosomes evolved via a rare recessive mutation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

HOW NEO-NAZIS CAPTURED THE MARCH FOR AUSTRALIA

WATCH: youtu.be/GLRoFdeI_5Y

Documenting the crowd manipulation tricks deployed by the National Socialist Network to transform nationalist 'Marches for Australia' into, effectively, national socialist marches.

In all seriousness, this is a fantastic study that should be catapulted into every department chair's face immediately.

One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants - Nature In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for producing the worker caste, resulting in males from the same moth...

Reproduction in ants 🐜 just keeps blowing my mind 🤯

But this here is the crown for sure... for now.

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

(go also check out obligate chimerism, social chromosomes, clonal production of females and males, and much more...)

Would a rose by any other gene smell so sweet?

Sorry for the sass, I'm just sick of seeing articles in what I thought were reputable journals, painting a canvas of futuristic AI as the Messiah that will save us from war, climate change, famine and disease "soon" with "PhD level knowledge".

Just leaving this here for any academics who still get LLMs to summarise literature for them without any critical examination of their own. Check the authors of Nature opinions pieces pumping 'AI'. Many are employees of Microsoft etc., the only people who truly profit from this.

🚨Introducing the @sortee.bsky.social Guidelines for Data and Code Quality Control in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology🚨 doi.org/10.32942/X24...

Increasingly E&E journals are recruiting data editors. We provide standardised guidelines for journals with data editors and those wanting to recruit them 🧵

Mike Ritchie reminded to publish in your society journals to keep things rolling. Overpriced journals from big publishers did not circle back their money to society!

Surprised the EU still need to be reminded, I thought many funding bodies acknowledged review-community platforms.

#ESEB2025

Ed's got a significant scoop here, an under-the-hood look at GPT5 that suggests why it feels like such a step back to users. The incompetence from OpenAI here is truly remarkable.

Point of View: To be, or not to be, part-time in academia Part-time working can be beneficial for individual academics, and also for academia as a whole.

To be, or not to be, part-time in academia?
This is a tricky question that has faced many of us and in @elife.bsky.social we discuss the benefits and challenges of being part-time. With @emiliapsantos.bsky.social and a fantastic, interdisciplinary team!
elifesciences.org/articles/106...

Does selfing allow or even lead to massive genome reshuffling, expansion and sky high homozygousity? Come and find out at posters 29 and 42 this afternoon, only at #eseb2025 and learn about an organism whose genome looks like it went through a blender and came out high repetitive and homozygous.

AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.

Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it

An old image of a salivary gland chromosome from Drosophila melanogaster, with lines across different segments indicating contact points.

The original circos plot? From the 1947-1948 Carnegie Yearbook, the page prior to McClintock's Mutable Loci in Maize paper.

Is anyone else having problems with #NCBI Datasets today? It's completely broken for me on both macOS and Windows.

In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen

I am wildly paraphrasing, but the best commentary I have seen so far is this:

Bringing AI into a learning institute is like bringing a fork lift to the gym. Sure, both accomplish the task at hand better than you, but you still fail do accomplish the thing you went there for in the first place.

Waiting with for next week's announcement of a deal with McKinsey to find more roles for consultants within government departments

A good example on why when you find nonsense papers it's worth checking an author's previous work - you often end up finding gems like.

OpenAI signs deal with UK to find government uses for its models Wide-ranging agreement with artificial intelligence firm behind ChatGPT comes after similar UK deal with Google

'OpenAI signs deal with UK to find government uses for its models' www.theguardian.com/technology/2... Neatly captures the abject state of technopolitics. We should start with people's basic needs then ask if LLMs are the most appropriate answer (guess what, they aren't!)

Teachers Are Not OK AI, ChatGPT, and LLMs "have absolutely blown up what I try to accomplish with my teaching."

And the scary thing is, they've already won over a lot of young people. This recent article from 404 Media is a must read, especially for educators

www.404media.co/teachers-are...

Using their machines techbros want to discard the natural and social scientists who would make you question the machines slop. Don't believe me that they're trying to do away with us? Listen to the recent interview where Altman told his brother he was vibe coding his way to new frontiers in physics.

They're the tool fascists are using to generate a false reality, a Mirror World, where fears they want to provoke are no longer fictions on Twitter, Rumble and 4chan - they're generated photos and videos so realistic they pull people further into the Mirror World and cast doubt on material reality

This. My disgust for LLMs isn't just due to them being built on intellectual theft, their energy use wrecking progress made on emissions reduction, their complete financial unsustainablity, or their negative impact on our learning, critical thinking and mental health