Simon J. Greenhill

Government’s new science institute to lose 6% of staff less than a year after forming The Bioeconomy Science Institute is shedding 6% of its staff.

And people wonder why NZ’s R&D spend is way lower than the rest of the OECD & our productivity is in the toilet. www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360...

Wow

Interesting: Multilingual Large Language Models do not comprehend all natural languages to equal degrees.
- English is not best performing language but was "systematically outperformed by several Romance languages"

arxiv.org/abs/2602.20065

Infant mortality increased following the Nazi expulsion of Jewish doctors, according to Helge Liebert and Beatrice Mäder in a new REStat paper!

Interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans was strongly sex biased Sex biases in admixture and other demographic processes are recurrent features throughout human evolution. For admixture between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans (AMHs), sex bias has been p...

Many living people carry fragments of Neanderthal DNA, remnants of ancient interbreeding events, with uneven distribution across chromosomes. New work by @sarahtishkoff.bsky.social lab suggests patterns are most consistent with Neanderthal contribution to human populations being highly male biased.🧪

Can safely way this is the craziest and coolest study I have led. We chart the evolution of sheeppox virus, finding it in the Eurasian steppe ~3700 years ago, and also in a LOT of parchment from medieval Europe (made from a range of animals skins!) #aDNA

Screenshot of LinkedIn post from ARC saying that DP27 EOI outcomes will be released on RMS on the 26th Feb 2026.

The ARC have said (on LinkedIn) they will release outcomes for Discovery Projects Expressions of Interest (2027) tomorrow👇

a girl says look at the state of you while standing in a library ALT: a girl says look at the state of you while standing in a library

State of the Union? Yep. Look at the damn state of it.

AI companies think 'global coverage' means less than 3% of the world's languages.

congratulations Pat!

Just occurred to me: if chickens can distinguish spiky and round, then dinosaurs probably could as well.

#dinosaurlinguistics

Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs | PNAS As humans, we store and share information. This allows us to distribute knowledge necessary for survival and to coordinate large groups. Our homini...

Very interesting attempt to trace back the early evolution of a “system of conventional signs” (proto-writing system) 🧪✍️
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Front cover of my book, titled "Comparative musicology: Evolution, universals, and the science of the world's music" (published today by Oxford University Press)

1st of my 4-page essay published in Nature today titled "Music is not a universal language - but it can bring us together when words fail" Picture caption: "Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny (centre) performed in Spanish at the half-time show of the 2026 American Football Super Bowl LX."

My book is now published! 🌏🎶🧪

You can download it for free at academic.oup.com/book/62353 - I’d be grateful if you do!
I also published an accessible summary with audio/video today in @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Try reading that first, then give the whole book a read if you like it!

Kava consumption and the rise of sociopolitical complexity in Oceania | PNAS Humans have been using psychoactive substances for millennia, despite their potential negative health and social consequences. According to some sc...

Kava consumption and the rise of sociopolitical complexity in Oceania www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Let’s be honest, the lack of scientific leadership over the past year especially, has been disappointing. Senior scientists and leaders in the field have a responsibility to speak up. There is strength in numbers - don’t be afraid.

Switzerland decided not to fund humanities and social sciences in their new national research funding...

Academia.edu - Find Research Papers, Topics, Researchers Academia.edu is the platform to share, find, and explore 50 Million research papers. Join us to accelerate your research needs & academic interests.

FYI, Academia.edu has changed its terms of service to give an irrevocable worldwide license for anything uploaded to its site to be used for generative AI. I do not consent to this and have pulled all my papers.

New contribution to our Blog / Journal on Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice, this time by our doctoral student David Snee and myself:

Computing Detailed Colexifications with Missing Data Information from the CLICS⁴ Collection

doi.org/10.15475/cal...

calc.hypotheses.org/9164

a man is standing next to a row of chairs in the sand . ALT: a man is standing next to a row of chairs in the sand .

tibble

Oh that is lovely!

Uni ordered to return student's $8000 fees after she failed a paper The student failed a paper she needed to get into a higher doctoral course.

Well this is just a great precedent for NZ universities: www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/disputes-...

Is Email Making Professors Stupid? It used to simplify crucial tasks. Now it’s strangling scholars’ ability to think.

To be a professor in 2026 is to be a middle-manager who has to teach from time to time and who likes to write in their spare time.

www.chronicle.com/article/is-e...

#rstats

The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics will be running a special issue commemorating the 25th anniversary of the official release of R. (The Univ. of Auckland was the birthplace of R.) They invited various people to contribute articles, including me. 🧵 1/

Seconded

Language learning as ontogenetic adaptation

Opinion by Manuel Bohn (@elmanubohn.bsky.social) & Marisa Casillas
tinyurl.com/48pdbv5b

PhD student grant (3 years) on the evolution of written communication My team recruits a PhD student to work under the supervision of Olivier Morin on the evolution of written communication, within a project jointly led by Olivier Morin, Hugo Mercier, and Marc Allassonn...

CALL: a PhD grant (3 years) to do a PhD with me at @cognitionens.bsky.social on the evolution of graphic codes. euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/410213

hey this looks great, thanks!

Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords “kiki” and “bouba” with spiky and round shapes, respectively, a phenomenon named the bouba-kiki effect. To explore the origin of t...

Hey linguists -- chickens can distinguish bouba and kiki:

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...