James Galbraith

A Beginner's Guide to Structural Variants in Eco‐Evolutionary Population Genomics Whole-genome sequencing (WGS) has greatly expanded researchers' ability to study structural variants (SVs), that is, the variation in the presence, number, orientation or position of a DNA sequence. ....

New review!

Theory & a practical guide to structural variants in popgen🧬

Many thanks to my co-authors: @rebekahoomen.bsky.social
@annatigano.bsky.social @marenwellenreuther.bsky.social @janawold.bsky.social @dlfield.bsky.social @clairemerot.bsky.social

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Please unfollow the altnps account. It's a do-nothing, disinfo slop mill that's trying to figure out how to Q-Anon the left for future profit, and that is not news.

NEW: Our investigation for @thenerve_news reveals not only that Peter Thiel’s Palantir is completely enmeshed in our critical national infrastructure.

It’s also the ‘cloud support’ for our nuclear weapons system 🤯
1/

www.thenerve.news/p/palantir-t...

Read this entire thread. Good morning everyone

On the repeated evolution of parthenogenesis in stick insects Abstract. Female-producing parthenogenesis is widespread in stick insects. It ranges from rare in sexual species to facultative or obligate, the latter som

Are stick insects unique in their ability to transition to parthenogenesis?

Our new review in @journal-evo.bsky.social covers intraspecific and hybrid origins, cytological mechanisms, and co-occurence of female-only and sexual populations, with comparisons to other taxa.

doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Headline: "Scientists discover emperor penguin colony in Antarctica using satellite images"

Yesterday it was cows using tools, today its penguins using satellite imagery.

📢 Three new #bioRxiv preprints from our team on holocentric chromosomes.

Together, they connect centromere repeat evolution, karyotype dynamics, and meiotic recombination outcomes, revealing how holocentric genomes evolve and function. 🧬👇

Time to end AUKUS, remove US bases and chart an independent, principled and safe defence and foreign policy for Australia. Cringing in fear under the tattered US umbrella while it’s being used to beat up US allies is no longer a credible plan.

The academic community failed Wikipedia for 25 years — now it might fail us Artificial-intelligence systems are feeding on Wikipedia without giving back, and academic indifference is threatening the survival of what is arguably the most widely used reference work on the plane...

The academic community failed Wikipedia for 25 years — now it might fail us
Jemielniak
doi.org/10.1038/d415...

"Every scholar should begin contributing their expertise to Wikipedia...This means taking ownership of articles in our specializations, ensuring they reflect current scientific consensus"

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

Take a moment to lower your blood pressure with this one.

the AI features discord are proposing in this survey are insane. tell 'em how you feel.

discord.sjc1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Doughnuts are good for you and will make your powerful, says Dunkin’s chief economist

Blows my mind that some of the same journalists who see Trump as a want-to-be dictator at home are earnestly discussing the "challenges" for this same man to "bring democracy" to a country it just illegal invaded. Please grow up.

Mamdani Called Trump to Criticize Venezuela Strikes

NYT gonna NYT: "Both Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Maduro identify as socialists, though they have no relationship.” — would be funny if they did this every time you write about two capitalists.

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/w...

Hey, fellow evolutionary biologists:

If you support trans rights, like, comment, or repost this. I want to show that transphobes like Richard Dawkins are a loud minority that does not represent our community

🔴 NEW: The University of Edinburgh has quietly paid more than £750,000 to a controversial consulting firm amid job cuts - staff say bosses ignored "repeated" questions about its role.

Read more about 'Nousferatu' 👉 www.theferret.scot/p...

Project Psyche: reference genomes for all Lepidoptera in Europe Project Psyche is a transnational initiative to generate and study chromosome-level reference genomes of all ~11 000 species of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) found in Europe. Here, we describe t...

I'm very excited that our paper on Project Psyche is now published! 🦋🧬

Over the last two years we've built an incredible community & already made huge progress. Read about this & how @projectpsyche.bsky.social will drive exciting and collaborative science here:

www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

This isn't an attack on anyone in bioinformatics, but rather frustration at how LLM slop has made it increasingly difficult to learn how to use a new package without resorting to using said LLMs, which half the time provide completely incorrect information.

We're (largely) a bunch of biologists attempting computer science writing long rambly documentation, or computer scientists attempting biology writing concise guides with many features not documented well enough for us biologists. There were once good, easy to find guides to help. They're now buried

As still of Peter Griffin complaining about what grinds his gears

You know what really grinds my gears? LLM generated slop guides for bioinformatics tools have overwhelmed the internet, and for a community that isn't the best at code documentation/guides, this has made finding quality help on how to use these tools hard to find, meaning we turn to LLMs

It reminds me of "devout" religious figures who proclaim that poverty, illness and famine need to be remedied, but instead seriously trying to address it with their communities they leave that to their god and instead seek "donations" for their private jets and mansions.

On a related tangent, from Empire of AI, Altman and co being based in SF and being confronted with the homelessness crisis daily; yet instead of using their billions to remedy it or any other societal problems, they offload that responsibility onto their Messiah of AGI to do when it appears.

I'm halfway through @karenhao.bsky.social 's Empire of AI, and the moderation of highly disturbing content by lowly paid workers of the Global South by OpenAI, Meta and friends reveals how the tech-economy is just imperialism with a shiny new coat.

Great turnout at the Edinburgh UCU rally at parliament to demand an end to the University of Edinburgh management reckless budget cuts and redundancies!

#StopStaffCutsatUoE @ucu.org.uk

Join us tomorrow at the Parliament for a staff and student rally against the cuts!

Tag us on your picket line pics and videos and tell us why you are striking #UCU members
#StopStaffCutsatUoE

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/...

disappointed that @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social is implicitly endorsing the use of LLMs to replace scientific thought

@richardsever.bsky.social this is a short-sighted move and a net negative for science