Adria LeBoeuf

so it begins

Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too!

preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵

Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/9

Sperm's evolutionary origins go back before multicellular animals Analysis of the DNA and proteins of a range of animals has revealed that sperm’s molecular toolkit arose in our single-celled ancestors, perhaps more than a billion years ago

Analysis of the DNA and proteins of a range of animals has revealed that sperm’s molecular toolkit arose in our single-celled ancestors, perhaps more than a billion years ago

Our preprint doi.org/10.1101/2025... getting media coverage (!)

I relied on corporations announcements of Black Friday to figure out when Thanksgiving would be, and it turns out they were a week off, and consequently, I’m celebrating Thanksgiving the weekend before rather than the weekend after… still yummy

There once was a man from Tennessee
Who went on a criminal spree
To commit his crimes
He wrote them in rhymes
And gave them to ChatGPT

We just released a new major version of TrackMate (v8), the cell and organelle tracking plugin of Fiji.

It ships many new features, detailed below, but that are articulated around the following:

Had a great visit to @sussexneuro.bsky.social and @neurofishh.bsky.social today. Such a pleasure to chat with a bunch of clever and interesting folks, see a menagerie of interesting creatures and see the sea.

This parasitic ant tricks workers into committing matricide Newly mated parasitic queen ants invade colonies and spray their victims with a chemical irritant that provokes the workers to kill their mother.

This is such a cool study. A parasitic ant queen tricks worker ants into murdering their own queen, so the parasite can take over the colony.

What is this??

‘We feel we’re fighting a losing battle’: the race to remove millions of plastic beads from Camber Sands A huge cleanup effort has seen volunteers working to remove beads by hand and machine. They can only wait and see the extent of damage to wildlife and dune habitat

I am bewildered that this labour of Sisyphus is being carried out by volunteers, while Southern Water, which has admitted responsibility for the catastrophe, is doing nothing to remediate it.

[Scene is a kitchen - a middle aged woman called JANET is boiling peas at the stove. A younger more colourfully dressed woman named LIZ approached her.] JANET: Ugh... LIZ: What's up? JANET: I am so bored of cooking peas! LIZ: Have you tried... AI peas? JANET: AI peas? LIZ: They're peas with AI! [Liz holds up to us a packet of peas labelled: Pea-i AI - Peas with AI]. LIZ: Al-powered peas harness the potential of your peas JANET: What LIZ [Now a voiceover as we cut to a whizzy technology diagram of peas all connected by meaningless dotted lines] Why not take your peas to the next level with Al Peas' new Al tools to power your peas? [Show a techno diagram of a pea with a label reading 'AI' pointing to a random zone in it] LIZ: Each pea has Al in a way we haven't quite worked out yet but it's fine [Show Janet and Liz now in a Matrix-style world of peas] LIZ: With Al peas you can supercharge productivity and make AI work for your peas! JANET: What LIZ: Shut up LIZ: Our game-changing Pea-Al gives you the freedom to unlock the potential of the power of the future of your peas workflow From opening the bag of peas to boiling the peas to eating the peas To spending millions on adding Al to the peas and then having to work out what that even means. JANET: Is it really necessary to- LIZ [Grabbing Janet by the collar]: THE PEAS HAVE GOT AI, JANET [Cut to an advert ending screen, with the bag of peas and the slogan: AI PEAS: Just 'Peas' for god's sake buy the AI peas. [Ends]

Every ad now

Just gonna put this here for now
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
bsky.app/profile/jlst...

It was a pleasure to speak today at an event on Reproduction and Sustainability organized by @cambridgezero.bsky.social and @cam-repro.bsky.social so many fascinating talks across so many disciplines! I spoke about this @socialtransfernet.bsky.social project: doi.org/10.32942/X2C...

Come and join us here in Cambridge! Applications open for a new faculty position, for a researcher in computational and/or theoretical biology, based jointly in Genetics and Mathematics. Happy to answer questions about research, teaching and working here.

www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/faculty...

It is foreshadowing

Thanks so much :)

Thanks!

Thrilled to have been awarded a BBSRC grant to research metabolic cooperation between bodies (in ants). Stay tuned for open positions!

As a Californian abroad I still have strong feels about the state of the US. So glad that there was a massive left leaning sweep across CA, NYC, NJ, VA. Maybe my CA vote will finally have a little more power.

Thanks! We are pretty stoked about it! @arthurmatte.bsky.social

I went as an AI hallucination this year. I actually felt very dated because I was trying to get the LLMs to build the messed up text characteristic of a year or so ago and they won’t do it anymore!

so…bot farms.
Just thinking back to the last 9 years and all the hearings and investigations into the ways platforms like FB could be manipulated, and into how these platforms were manipulating their own algos: in the absence of good regulation/enforcement, that turned out to be just R&D

Female mountain gorilla (G. beringei beringei). CREDIT: Martha M. Robbins

Gorillas likely experience menopause, according to an analysis of over 30 years of data from wild mountain gorillas in Uganda, which shows that females can live for a decade or more after their last baby. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/kxyz50Xf1ER

AI Is Hollowing Out Higher Education Olivia Guest & Iris van Rooij urge teachers and scholars to reject tools that commodify learning, deskill students, and promote illiteracy.

“Ultimately, the collective strategy of AI companies threatens to deskill precisely those people who are essential for society to function(…) automation of knowledge and culture by private companies is a worrying prospect – conjuring dystopian and outright fascistic scenarios.” — @olivia.science

This video shows mouse sperm entering a zebrafish egg.

Don’t worry, scientists aren’t out making mousefish. This fertility research actually demonstrates that mechanisms guiding sperm toward eggs may be shared across distant species.
buff.ly/MJ1ILD1

There are plenty of animals that do coprophagy, where yes, totally #socialfluids but for dung beetles they are scavenging from another species so more on the symbiosis continuum

New Work by Gary Larson | TheFarSide.com Get an exclusive look at brand new cartoons and artwork from cartoonist Gary Larson, creator of the iconic comic strip The Far Side®.

Gary Larson is making new cartoons ! www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/

Quantitative and systematic behavioral profiling reveals social complexity in eusocial naked mole-rats Automated tracking in naked mole-rats reveals behavioral specificity of breeders and diversity of nonbreeders in a colony.

Interesting paper quantifying behavioural interactions across 5 naked mole-rat colonies over time: learn more about the strong social bonds of breeders & more here www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...