Ben Auxier

Macro photo of a brown stink bug in face view on a leaf, guarding a tightly-clustered bunch of eggs that are shaped and colored exactly like a full tray of dark beer with foam on top.

Finally, the bug is back with a round of the Guinness.

The strongest version of this illusion I’ve seen! Absolute head-wrecker!

Collecting, Comparing, and Comput... | Archive ouverte UNIGE Archive institutionnelle de l'Université de Genève - Institutional Repository of the University of Geneva

It is from a letter to Carl Berkeley in 1967. Ref #112 here: archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:16825

Join us tomorrow for an evolutionary medicine special of internal conflicts!

ive decided to become a new type of flat earth guy i just invented who believes the earth is actually spread out on the face of a much much larger globe that is so large that the area of the earth is locally not measurably distinguishable from flat

Aspergillus fumigatus - 29.9 crossovers per homologous chromosome pair! That makes about 1500 recombination map units per chromosome....

But it does it quickly and congratulates you for asking

Two more weeks to apply to join my lab @leibniz-hki.de as PhD student working on microbial genetic engineering 💪🏻👇🏻

The next step in evolution - Resource online Darwin Café considers the predictability of evolution

Every year Bionieuws hosts a Darwin Café. This year, they invited philosopher Gerard Jagers op Akkerhuis. What a missed opportunity! His “theory” is philosophical handwaving with no empirical support, while there is so much real evolutionary research out there.
www.resource-online.nl/index.php/20...

Davis Summer Population Genomics Program Want to learn population genetics? Please fill out this form to indicate your potential interest in a 2-week intensive online summer population genetics course taught by Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra and Graham...

Fun news! @gcbias.bsky.social and I are teaching a 2-week online population genetics workshop this summer to raise money for the Center for Population Biology at UC Davis. We're trying to gauge interest -- please fill this out if you might be interested! And please share broadly!

It does seem like the field of bioinformatics tool development will need to find a different way to "publish" the tools. Some of the papers that accompany some tools are basically just vehicles for citations (which can also be a good thing!!).

I guess the hard part is proving anything. If you would questions the author on this, and they say "no, I only used LLMs for minor feedback", then what can be done? Scientific journals are built on trust.

Novel killer yeasts and toxins from the gardens of fungus-growing ants | Applied and Environmental Microbiology Attine ants perform essential ecosystem services through the harvesting of substrates for fungiculture. The cultured fungi are a food source for attine ants. Characterizing antifungal toxin-producing yeasts (killer yeasts) is vital to understanding how they might protect gardens from invasion by unwanted fungal species. This study also describes a new toxin named Ksino from the yeast Candida sinolaborantium, a member of a new group of toxins found across many different species of fungi. This work supports the role of killer yeasts in the ecology of fungicultures and competition between fungi. The observed high prevalence of killer yeasts in fungal gardens also enables the discovery of novel antifungal molecules with the potential to be applied against disease-causing fungi.

journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.... new findings in the ant fungus gardens 🐜🍄

Take me down to the Parallax city where the far moves slow and the near moves quickly

Bilbo looking at his phone top on bottom is ChatGPT After all, why not? Why shouldn't I keep it? You're absolutely right — you found it, it's been with you a long while, and it's only natural to feel fond of something that's served you so well, especially when someone like Gandalf suddenly seems to want it for himself.

A new extreme of meiotic evolution:

✔️ 𝗻𝗼 crossovers
✔️ 𝗻𝗼 gene conversion
✔️ 𝗻𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗹 meiosis & fertility

Sex mimics clonality without becoming asexual, in the holocentric multicellular eukaryote 𝘙𝘩𝘺𝘯𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘢 𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘶𝘪𝘴.

more about it:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

In reviewing grants and papers lately, as an exp., I have been using LLMs *after* my reviews to see how they stack up.

And let me tell you - they're (all) *completely* off the mark. That makes sense if you understand the fundamentals of LLMs, but I'm worried many don't.

But, please, don't do this.

It would be great if someone would write something up about this. Showing examples of the issues, to give a feeling of what LLMs actually do. People really think an LLM actually understands a paper, and overvalue the feedback

Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below!
Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage

Parasex generates highly recombinant progeny in Candida albicans with increased virulence - Nature Microbiology An alternative mating system, termed parasex, produces progeny with high levels of genotypic diversity and is able to fulfil the roles of meiosis when it is absent in the fungal pathobiont Candida alb...

OUT NOW! Parasex generates highly recombinant progeny in Candida albicans with increased virulence

By Robert Fillinger, Scott Filler, Anna Selmecki, Richard Bennett,
Matthew Anderson & colleagues.
#microsky @annaselmecki.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🌟 New position announcement! 🍄

I’m happy to share that I’ve started a new position as a Postdoc at @naturalis.bsky.social, within the Understanding Evolution group. In this role, I will be working on the next volume of the Flora Agaricina Neerlandica, focusing on the genus Russula.

Shell Game | Evan Ratliff | Substack A podcast and newsletter about things that are not what they seem, hosted by journalist Evan Ratliff. Click to read Shell Game, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

Evan Ratliff explores this REALLY well in season 2 of Shell Game: www.shellgame.co

The repeated '; typos (LLM';s as just one example) throughout is a bit too much on the nose. Luckily not in the PDF version.

Black field with a macro image of a bright orange lichen Xanthoria in one of the corner. Little diagrams showing a structure of a lichen thallus with different layers in grey and green, a phylogenetic tree, and an alphafold generated structure of a protein. White text says "PhD position in Stockholm University / SciLifeLab. Lichen Biology, Symbiosis, Microbial Ecology & Evolution,Meta-omics Fully funded for 4 years. Start Apr-Sep 2026. Deadline for application: Feb 1st."

⚡️Fully funded #PhD position in my lab at Stockholm University / SciLifeLab! If you’re interested in #lichens, #symbiosis, fungal biology, or meta-omics, please apply. Deadline Feb 1. Read more here: su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

Our eLetter github.com/caseywdunn/s... responding to a recent Science paper was just posted. The paper found more genes with consistent support for sponge-sister than ctenophore-sister. We found several technical issues that, when corrected, reverse the conclusions and recover ctenophore-sister.

Pint jar filled with blue dry beans.

A few years ago, through luck and vibes, I managed to produce this blue colored bean variety.

This was an early step in trying to answer the question, [paraphrased] "Why isn't blue as common as red in beans, even though they're both anthocyanins and the plant has the genes for both?"

The value of publishing negative data - News Scientific journals love news-worthy results. Editors want to publish studies with novel data that scientists will eagerly read and cite in their own work. Because of this desire for novelty, studies ...

Giving the gift of negative data 🥰

Since I joined @lsajournal.org I have handled several stellar manuscripts that report null results. These papers do very well and reviewers almost always appreciate them!

Thanks @rockefeller.edu news team for the article!

www.rockefeller.edu/news/38829-t...

UBC is hiring elite senior faculty for the generously funded Canada Impact+ Research Chairs Program. Requires recruitment from outside Canada, but welcomes Canadians abroad to come home. Expressions of interest due 15 January. research.ubc.ca/federal-rese...

This actually parallels the concept of the "genome" very well, where biologists are also confused about causality!

Just a few days left to apply to the PhD position in our group. It focuses on selfish genes in #fungi and how they might affect the spread of giant #TEs called Starships.