Marta

Today is the international rare disease day #rarediseaseday 💜

Projection of the 'Rare Disease Day' logo on the facade of Magdalen College Chapel.

Last night, the chapel facade of Magdalen College was lit up ahead of #RareDiseaseDay.

A disease is classed as rare when it affects fewer than 1 in 2000 people and there are over 3.5 million people living with a rare condition in the UK alone.

📷 | @oxfordpaediatrics.bsky.social

🌍💜 Today is Rare Disease Day! 🌍💜In honor of Rare Disease Day 2025, RDI’s team will light up four landmarks, to symbolize our support to people living with a rare disease worldwide. ✨ Stay tuned and watch as these landmarks light up from 7 PM CET tonight! #LightUpForRare #RareDiseaseDay

The Idiot's Guide to Effective Population Size This is a reference manual for the elegant, yet hideously complex concept of effective population size (Ne), inspired by a classic, self-published manual of automotive repair ‘for the compleat idiot’...

Robin Waples' reference manual for the elegant, yet hideously complex concept of effective population size (Ne) #biodiversity #genomics #conservation #evolution onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

An older Charles Darwin, sitting on a huge Galápagos tortoise.

Happy birthday Charlie!
#DarwinDay

In celebration of Darwin Day 2025, Darwin Online has issued the largest collection of Darwin caricatures ever assembled, including, they claim, 30 that were previously unknown.

Here’s a link: https://darwin-online.org.uk/Caricatures.html

🌱🐋🧪🐡 #HistSTM #EvoBio

Nominations open for the 2025 Molecular Ecology Prize From the Molecular Ecology Prize Committee: We are soliciting nominations for the annual Molecular Ecology Prize. The field of molecular ecology is young and inherently interdisciplinary. As a cons…

Nominations are open for the 2025 Molecular Ecology Prize!

Nominate scientists who have made significant contributions to the field of molecular ecology with a 250-word statement & candidate CV sent to committee chair Kay Hodgins by April 11

Details: www.molecularecologist.com/2025/02/11/n...

From crafting dragon radars to pushing the boundaries of technology. Here's to empowering future scientists everywhere! 💡🌍 #InternationalDayofWomenandGirlsinScience (via Dragon Ball Complete Box Set)

This image is a promotional and motivational message for the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, which is celebrated on February 11th. The phrase in Spanish, "Las mujeres ya no lloran, las mujeres calculan, investigan y descubren" (translated as "Women no longer cry; women calculate, investigate, and discover"), is a strong statement emphasizing the role of women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) based on a liric from a Shakira's song.

International Day of Women and Girls in Science 🧪

Hi. Yes they are

Here is the link to the first episode of the Evolutionary Tree of Life series

youtu.be/Na0Q8qfsdc0?...

#evolsky 🧪

Is Climate Change Causing Sharks To Bite Humans? Metro Thinks So Taking public transit reduces greenhouse gas emissions. But does it change shark behavior? Scientists are dubious.

When I moved to DC in 2019, there were ads touting the climate change benefits of taking public transit.

One, which I had to walk by every day, claimed climate change made sharks bite people more. That's nonsense. I investigated.

It turns out this ad was misquoting some of *MY* research!

How do you say you live in Australia, without saying you live in Australia? 🦘

🎥shekayla2

Redlisting genetics: towards inclusion of genetic data in IUCN Red List assessments - Conservation Genetics Genetic diversity is critical for adaptation in response to changing environments and provides a valuable metric for predicting species’ extinction risk. The International Union for Conservation of Na...

Redlisting genetics: towards inclusion of genetic data in IUCN Red List assessments link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Code snipped showing the tidy up of two sentences which are initially very broken up by line breaks and extra spaces, using stringr::str_squish(). # One of my favourite R tricks when copying from a PDF - because we all have to do that at some point! stringr::str_squish( "Here's some text that has come from a pdf and, slightly irritatingly, has lots of linebreaks that it would take ages to delete one by one. Oh and also the odd extra space.") #[1] "Here's some text that has come from a pdf and, slightly irritatingly, has lots of linebreaks that it would take ages to delete one by one. Oh and also the odd extra space."

For today's project, I'm having to do a bit of copy-pasting of text from a PDF to add information to a quarto website. Which brings me back to one of my favourite #rstats tricks, and possibly my favourite function name! stringr::str_squish()

Hi. Would you mind giving me a copy? Should I email you? Thank you !!

Screenshot text: Coevolution simply means evolving together, and any pair of species that affect each other’s evolution may be said to coevolve. There are many ways in which interactions between species may cause them to coevolve. The most straightforward and widely cited form of coevolution is also the most restrictive. Strict-sense coevolution is specific, resulting from direct interactions between individuals of two different species; reciprocal, such that the interaction creates natural selection acting on both species; and simultaneous, such that adaptation of one species to interaction with a second species results in adaptation of the second species to the first. Interactions with other species may also create new ecological opportunity... Interactions may create opportunities for reproductive isolation to evolve between populations... The nature and coevolutionary outcomes of many species’ interactions can depend upon the broader environmental context in which they occur.

Screenshot of Fig. 2 from Yoder (2025), captioned: Plant-pollinator interactions affect traits important in plant species delimitation. (A) Animal pollination, by a honeybee (Apis mellifera) visiting milkvetch (Astragalus trichopodus). (B) Wind-pollinated Timothy grass (Phleum pratense) with exserted stamens releasing pollen. (C) Floral traits are more likely to be important in the taxonomic descriptions of plant species when those species are pollinated by animals, rather than wind or water. Photos in (A) and (B) by the author, all rights reserved. Data for (C) from Grant (1949)

Screenshot of Fig. 3 from Yoder (2025), captioned: Diversification driven by species interactions. (A) Populations of an associate species that become locally adapted to their host may have patterns of genetic differentiation (arrows) that mirror genetic differences between host populations. Coevolution between two interacting lineages over evolutionary time may lead them to have congruent phylogenies (B), but this pattern may also occur if one lineage depends strongly on the other without exerting reciprocal selection. Coevolution over ecological timescales may also lead to phylogenies that are congruent in shape but without simultaneous speciation events (C) or largely incongruent (D) if pairwise associations between species shift frequently.

The Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Biology is releasing a second edition in 2025, and my updated chapter, introducing the Coevolution topic section, is online already! (Reach out for a PDF copy if you don't have a subscription)

https://buff.ly/4guqjcY

The image shows an incredible visual coincidence between the bare branches of a foreground tree and the brilliant glow of a far-away aurora. The predominant color of the aurora is bright green with an intriguing reddish tinge at left of the pic.

1/2 🔭 🧪

'The Aurora Tree', a stunning pic by Alyn Wallace, shows an incredible visual coincidence between the bare branches of a foreground tree and the brilliant glow of a far- away aurora.

The pic was taken in Iceland in March 2017.

Image source and info: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap21022...

The Moon at waning crescent phase near left edge. Planet Jupiter with four moon dots near right edge.

On 10 January the Moon will appear close to Jupiter. Here's one of my pics from a few years ago. Includes all the Galilean moons. 🔭 🧪 🎨 #astrophotography #SciArt #photography #StormHour #ThePhotoHour

Winter flowers on my #garden 🌱😊

generative art consisting of a 42 squiggly lines

Genuary 2025 Day 3: Exactly 42 lines of code 🎨

#Genuary #Genuary2025 #RStats #GenerativeArt #Genuary3

generative art consisting of a grid of cross-hatched squares

Genuary 2025 Day 1: Vertical or horizontal lines only 🎨

#Genuary #Genuary2025 #RStats #GenerativeArt #Genuary1

OpenStax | Free Textbooks Online with No Catch OpenStax offers free college textbooks for all types of students, making education accessible & affordable for everyone. Browse our list of available subjects!

One of the decisions I am proudest of in my role as first year lead has been switching to an open access textbook. I can't control inflation and the cost of living but I can reduce unnecessary additional costs. We use Open Stax openstax.org/details/book...

#AcademicSky

💡 Start the year by learning something new!

Explore the #ERGA Knowledge Hub for a curated selection of #genomics training materials. Kick-start your journey into biodiversity #genomics today! 🧬

👉https://knowledge.erga-biodiversity.eu

@EBPgenome @BioGenEurope

GitHub - ossu/bioinformatics: :microscope: Path to a free self-taught education in Bioinformatics! :microscope: Path to a free self-taught education in Bioinformatics! - ossu/bioinformatics

Two resources to learn bioinformatics yourself:
1. Path to a free self-taught education in Bioinformatics! github.com/ossu/bioinf...
#bioinformatics

The pine martens was courteous to see what was going on behind us.

The pine martens was courteous to see what was going on behind us. #nature #animals #wildlife

I'll never forget this interaction:

Me: how do I get my grants funded?

Them: just write better grants

Me: how do I know when they're good enough?

Them: when they get funded

5 knitted tomatoes with manga-style faces. Left to right: tiny green fruit smiling, expanding green winking, full size green smiling, yellow/orange smiling and red ripe smiling. All have knitted leaves on top that go from dark green to light green as ripening occurs.

My tomato developmental series is complete 🍅💚🧡❤️ 🧶 click on image to see the whole thing! #knitting #plantscience #tomato

The evolution of reproductive leaf dimorphism in two globally distributed fern families is neither stepwise nor irreversible, unless further specialization evolves Abstract. A contemporary interpretation of Dollo’s Law states that the evolution of a specialized structure is irreversible. Among land plants, reproductiv

"But evolution has no finish line. There is no end goal, no final state. Organisms evolve by natural selection acting at a specific geologic moment, or..."

This is a great quote - especially for those of us trained in evolutionary biology.

From Jacob Suissa, phys.org/news/2024-12...

🧪 #EvoSky