Jacob Tennessen

Next month I'm preaching a sermon in my local UU church about science and gender. Looking forward to including a lot of fascinating biology and meaningful humanity.

(if you want to do something meaningful about animals suffering in captivity, look into the meat industry)

In unprecedented move, giant monkey research center may become a primate sanctuary University votes to consider ending all studies at Oregon National Primate Research Center. But cost and feasibility are still in doubt

I've been here, and it's a lovely facility where monkeys lead happy lives. I have colleagues doing essential malaria research there which would not be possible without live monkeys. This is part of the broader US anti-science movement and not about animal welfare.
www.science.org/content/arti...

Figure from Lebel et al referencing characters from mythology, D&D, Marvel, and an internet meme ("honey badger don't care"). The title of paper itself names two other metaphors.

I don't shy away from whimsy in science communication, and scientists have always found metaphors from the humanities and pop culture. But this paper takes it to another level.

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

Babesia divergens host cell egress is mediated by essential and druggable kinases and proteases - Nature Microbiology Analysis of Babesia divergens egress from host cells reveals druggable targets and identifies compounds for potential babesiosis treatment.

The latest and greatest research on Babesia, the parasite that causes a malaria-like disease but is found in your own backyard, assuming you live somewhere with ticks.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Malaria researchers are getting closer to outsmarting the world’s deadliest parasite After decades of stalled progress, new vaccines, treatments and genetic tools are helping scientists protect children and save lives worldwide.

Nice summary of the latest wins in the fight against malaria.
theconversation.com/malaria-rese...

This is who runs this account

Roadrunner with hanging chiles

In the current political climate, it’s just nice to be in a place that does multiculturalism well and shows how it leaves us all better off. Plus chiles and neat wildlife.

Painting showing Moctezuma and Cortés praying to their respective gods with their weapons forming a double helix foreshadowing their admixed descents

The mixed heritage identity is strong here, as conveyed in this beautiful piece in the city museum (I’ll forgive the DNA chirality here as artistic license). As the inbred Duke reminds us, humans can easily suffer from too little genetic variation but are only strengthened by enriched diversity.

Francisco Fernández de la Cueva, 10th Duke of Alburquerque

I’m currently in Albuquerque NM, named for this guy (who never visited). I don’t like to judge by appearances, but let’s just say I’m not exactly surprised to learn that his mother was also his first cousin.

'They saw them on their dishes when eating': The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans Only recently described by science, the mysterious mushrooms are found in different parts of the world, but they give people the same exact visions.

There’s so much we don’t understand about the brain, but sometimes mushrooms give us little hints www.bbc.com/future/artic...

Google translate result in which it changes the prompt "Why is the IQ..." to suggest low or high depending on location when translating

Google translate automatically rewords your questions to be racist

US set to quit World Health Organization The U.S. is due to officially exit the World Health Organization on Thursday, in the face of warnings it will hit both U.S. health and global health and also in violation of a U.S. law that requires W...

Joseph Stalin also quit WHO. Fortunately the Soviets returned after he died; if they hadn't, folks around the world would most likely still be dying from smallpox.
www.reuters.com/business/hea...

Wikipedia turns 25, still boasting zero ads and over 7 billion visitors per month despite the rise of AI and threats of government repression The Ming Dynasty Yongle Encyclopedia is quietly seething.

Wikipedia is my generation’s PBS: the crowning opus we have democratically cultivated to promote an educated and open-minded populace amid an otherwise increasingly brain-numbing medium.
www.pcgamer.com/gaming-indus...

The Empirical Divine Pha Trelgen Changchup Sempa, the monkey ancestor of humans in a Tibetan myth As an evolutionary biologist married to a minister, I think a lot about science and religion. Both are important in my l…

Of course the melding of religion and evolutionary biology is a favorite topic of mine, as I recently wrote about: adaptivediversity.wordpress.com/2026/01/09/t...

Description of Unitarian church service about evolution from vanu.ca

I find myself in Canada this morning, and this is what I’ll be attending

The Empirical Divine Pha Trelgen Changchup Sempa, the monkey ancestor of humans in a Tibetan myth As an evolutionary biologist married to a minister, I think a lot about science and religion. Both are important in my l…

The Empirical Divine: The compatibility between evolutionary science and (open-minded) religion
adaptivediversity.wordpress.com/2026/01/09/t...

Also, Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid. It's about consequences of climate change, and the main association of the word "plastic" is the substance, so it sounds like it's about pollution or prostheses for cephalopods or something. Nope, it's plastic as in adjustable.

Mildly misleading titles on otherwise good nonfiction books: are these benign, or bad scicomm? E.g. Moonwalking with Einstein. It's about extraordinary mental feats, and Einstein was known for extraordinary mental feats, so one might assume it teaches Einstein's methods. Nope, he's just a mnemonic.

Passage of text from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17710279/

In Spanish, the pig genus "Sus" is a possessive pronoun, and here the species name Sus scrofa apparently got autocorrected to "estrofa" meaning "stanza"; secret porcine poetry slipping through peer review.

A drawing of a skunk spraying out a rainbow

I won’t subject you to most of my childhood artwork, but I do like how my 6th grade self inadvertently created a nice visual message to share with homophobes.

Various small items beachcombed in coastal Alaska

A shelf of natural objects

A cabinet of Alaskan artifacts

Unrelated to current geopolitics, it’s good to be reminded that I basically grew up in a natural history museum, which likely shaped who I am today.

Various souvenirs from Venezuela

Going through old things as my folks prepare to sell my childhood house, and the stuff from my high school year in Venezuela hits extra hard today.

Press release from 2001 describing how I was rescued off a mountain for being an idiot

Shout out to the West Virginia State Police for the time they rescued my brother and me after we embarked on an extremely ill-prepared hike in an Appalachian snowstorm.

Christmas for Scientists Christmas is important to me, as it is to most people in the Western world, even if, like me, they don’t believe in Christian theology. There are many reasons for this. Christmas is a cultural phen…

Christmas for Scientists: Celebrating the nativity of the universe
adaptivediversity.wordpress.com/2025/12/24/c...

Diseases of Canaries - Wikipedia

Wait, I guess he did publish: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease...

Given that Haldane submitted a paper on genetic linkage from the trenches of World War I after his coauthor had already been killed, it's certainly possible to do research in difficult settings. But I know of few incarcerated examples. I don't think the Birdman of Alcatraz ever published.

What are the best, or any, examples of scientific papers written from prison? I've been pondering that I could continue much of my work incarcerated if allowed access to an online computer. Not that I have any reason to suspect that fate for me other than (gestures broadly at current US government).

For those who’ve missed it:
The emoji science of Biolojical is now on bluesky!