James Albert

Headline photo of Chicago skyline with note about award for being the best big city.

Seems worth noting this award in light of the present circumstances. Get the troops out of our fair city please, perhaps after they enjoy a great Malnati’s pizza!

The C-value paradox: no simple correlation between the total amount of genomic DNA (C-value) and perceived biological complexity.

Bird conservation threatened by shifting baseline syndrome New research shows that populations of dozens of waterbird and seabird species have been declining for much longer than previously thought in Europe. The article "Shifting the baseline for waterbird a...

If conservationists work from a compromised baseline, our notions of abundance, scarcity, and ecological wellbeing will keep getting defined downward:
"The researchers show that using the 1970s as a baseline tends to normalize an already severely degraded state."
phys.org/news/2025-10...

There’s a straight line from Republican talking points to this gutless destruction

“The insect populations were found to have declined by an average 6.6% annually — a 72.4% drop over the 20-year period.”

🌎 🪲 🪳 🧪

The transition of vegetation from the lowly water-stressed forest with high tree cover to a savanna-grassland regime with low tree cover and the utilization of rootzone storage capacity to cope with the spatial change to a drier climate.

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965 by American radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. Primary evidence of the Big Bang.

A 2024 study found that ants best humans at tests of collective intelligence.

Learn more on #WorldAnimalDay: https://scim.ag/42nMvQJ

YouTube video by FishEvolutionLab-Edu Why did some fishes evolve to be warm-blooded? - Dahiana Arcila and Fernando Melendez

🐟 Not all fish are cold-blooded! New research led by @arciladk.bsky.social, curator of the Marine Vertebrate Collection & recent PhD grad Fernando Melendez, explores how ecological interactions + evolutionary innovation reshaped life in the ocean. 🌊

New paper alert!!!🚨 in our new study we find that Antarctic icefishes added a new module in their skulls during their adaptive radiation special shout out to @mayaranevesbio.bsky.social who led this project!

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Brazil soy expansion drives deforestation fears ahead of Cop30 summit A landmark industry pact – the Amazon Soy Moratorium, which prohibits traders from buying soy grown on recently deforested land – is now fraying as the country’s Government investigates whether it has created a cartel in the export market. And...

Brazil soy expansion drives deforestation fears ahead of Cop30 summit
->New Zealand Herald | #Deforestation | More from BigEarthData.ai

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA

10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

Indigenous groups criticize Ecuador’s $47 billion oil expansion plan in Amazon Ecuador’s plans to offer dozens of blocks of land for oil exploration for more than $47 billion has prompted opposition from seven Indigenous peoples in the Amazon.

“Ecuador’s plans to auction new oil blocks in the Amazon are doomed to fail. Indigenous resistance, civil society mobilization, & growing international pressure will continue to expose these projects as illegitimate, unlawful, & unfinanceable.”-Kevin Koenig of @AmazonWatch apnews.com/article/oil-...

Cutting down the Amazon will bring extreme rain, wind and heat We used to think that deforestation in the Amazon would dry out the local climate, but the effects may be even more extreme and varied

"Cutting down the Amazon will bring extreme rain, wind and heat.
We used to think that deforestation in the Amazon would dry out the local climate, but the effects may be even more extreme and varied." 🌍 www.newscientist.com/article/2497...

Wow, more 'myrids described in "Review of the southern African slender stonebashers, genus Heteromormyrus Steindachner 1866 (Teleostei: Mormyridae), with description of six new species" by Mutizwa, Kadye, Bragança & Chakona, open access in J Fish Biol. doi.org/10.1111/jfb....

Bumping to the Fishes! and Science feeds🐟🧪

It really helps to think of all vertebrates as fish. The position of the anus is a very stable feature of the vertebrate body plan, indicated by the red arrows in these images of embryos in four species.

The position of the anus is a core feature of the vertebrate body plan. And there are really no other landmarks on the belly side of a developing vertebrate to help guide gene expression and cellular differentiation.

Earliest gobioid fishes were coral-reef associated dwarfs: New evidence from the Eocene of Monte Bolca, Italy The earliest skeleton-based gobioid fish, the minute goby †Carlomonnius quasigobius Bannikov and Carnevale, 2016 (13 mm standard length), originates from the Lower Eocene coral reef fish assemblage...

A new study shows that the earliest gobioid fishes were coral-reef associated dwarfs. Results suggest that dwarf gobies achieved ecological success early in gobioid evolution, arising through convergent evolution across different lineages🐟 Read more: buff.ly/GVMpJaF
#Fossilfish #PaleoSky #Evolution

Makes sense, many biological systems show an intermediate sweet spot reflecting trade-offs at more extreme parameter values

Community management of protected areas in the Amazon offers 'unprecedented' results New research reveals "unprecedented" conservation results of community-based management of protected areas in the Amazon—as many face a future in which they may become increasingly degraded due to low...

"Conservation dividends from community-based protection are unprecedented & deployed at a tiny fraction of the financial costs of traditional protection mechanisms... this makes local land managers true 'unsung heroes' in the cacophony of theoretical conservation discourse."
phys.org/news/2025-09...

Although chromosome-level macrosynteny is broadly conserved among cypriniforms, we demonstrate that microsynteny can resolve deep phylogenetic nodes. Both sequence-based and microsynteny-based analyses find that Gyrinocheilidae is the sister lineage to all other cypriniforms

Bumping to the Fishes! feed🐟

Hope you’re cruising into the weekend like these sleek and shimmering silver kings ✌️🪙👑🐟✨🐟✨🐟✨ #tarpon #silverking #silver #sleek #shimmer #cruising #weekend #tgif #coral #coralhead #coralcitycamera #miami #portmiami #biscaynebay #coralcity

Why do black-and-white stripes deter biting flies from landing on surfaces? This phenomenon has been explained as modulation brightness or polarized light. A similar explanation is confusion of insect motion detection systems that control their approach and landing.

genuinely believe that a large number of political, economic and media elites do not realize that nearly half the voting public did not vote for trump

Critics of de-extinction research hit by mystery smear campaign Several researchers who have been critical of Colossal Biosciences’ plans to revive extinct animals say they have been targeted by online articles trying to discredit them

It seems like it’s dangerous for scientists to speak out against Colossal’s “de extinction research”.

www.newscientist.com/article/2490...

We implemented a spatially-explicit model involving limited dispersal, drift, trait-based selection and competition to simulate community composition under competing assembly processes in a landscape with contrasted habitat connectivity.

this is wild - i was aware of Mary-Claire King's absurdly important discoveries on BRCA / inherited breast cancer but I had no idea that her first PhD paper (King & Wilson 1975, Science, not bad lol) is the "99% of protein coding shared btwn chimps and humans" result

www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1...