Joseph W. Brown

I wrote an in-depth character-limited reply to this, and then absently did a trackpad gesture that deleted everything :/ It was, trust me, insightful and humorous beyond means, but I just don't have it in me to recreate it :(

The past and future of known biodiversity: Rates, patterns, and projections of new species over time The number of known species on Earth is increasing rapidly, suggesting unexpectedly large numbers of many groups.

"The problem is that it is difficult to include estimated extinction rates in our calculations if the number of species going extinct is unknown."

so whats the next insane bubble, "quantum"?

Title: The street tom waits grew up on. Image: a shabby, broken down old timey American street. Caption: Buildings (left to right): vern's all-nite pizza 'n' tattoo, accordion players' graveyard, abandoned clown-shoe factory, divorced salesmen's polka club, tomb of the unknown cabbie, bootleg ice-cream warehouse, saint frank's hobo orphanage, illegal umbrella incinerator.

Happy 76th Birthday, Tom Waits!

A stack of blue hardcover books titled Climate Champions: 15 Women Fighting For Your Future by Rachel Sarah

I have three copies of Climate Champions by @rachelsarah.bsky.social to give away! I bought a bunch when they came out (I’m in it). This book, targeted at middle and high schoolers, features biographies of a diversity of women working on climate action across disciplines.

A pigeon sitting on top of the skull of a bronze cast of Diplodocus, outside the NHM UK.

A pigeon sitting on top of the skull of a bronze cast of Diplodocus, outside the NHM UK.

Two saurischians hanging out at the @nhm-london.bsky.social

I crashed my mother’s library craft class this morning. I think we were supposed to be felting snowpeople ornaments but they had a variety of cookie cutter shapes for us.

My mother made a planet earth and I made a barnyard-goose-shaped Canada Goose. Not bad for my first try felting!

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...

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Good morning, sound on.

Ancient metagenomics people might also be interested in the authentication and visualization toolkit that we wrote to do this. Just published a few days ago!

GitHub
github.com/bdesanctis/b...
Paper
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Ancient metagenomics reveals subglacial microbiomes driven by oxygen availability Beneath Earth's glaciers and ice sheets lies an aquatic realm where ice, water, rock, and microbial life interact, driving chemical reactions that can collectively influence the global carbon cycle, p...

What's living in the dark, isolated subglacial waters underneath the Antarctic ice sheet, and why should we care?

Read our new preprint to find out! It combines ancient DNA, microbiology, hydrology and geochemistry. 🦠🇦🇶🪨🧬

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

How many spiders and pseudoscorpions does it take to make one of the world’s greatest taxonomists? Former Perth curator Mark Harvey is one of the few people on Earth to have described 1,000 new species, many of them arachnids. Colleagues say his legacy is ‘unquantifiable’

www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Congratulations to UMMP Associate Research Scientist Miriam Zelditch on the release of the third edition of the indispensable "Geometric Morphometrics for Biologists" (a.k.a. the green book)! #FossilFriday

The software is here: github.com/mol-evol/pan...

Latest preprint with @hairyllama.bsky.social and @evol-molly.bsky.social This is a program that helps calculate several phylogenetic support measures.

Check out our review/perspective piece on phylogenetic diversification analysis, intended for the 75th anniversary of
@systbiol.bsky.social. I had the privilege of working with great coauthors, @fhenaodiaz.bsky.social, @tvasconcelos.bsky.social and @roszenil.bsky.social!
doi.org/10.1093/sysb...

A tender moment on the water as a coot watches over its brightly-coloured chicks, glowing in the morning light. #Birds #lukehaigh #birdwatching #photography

A tender moment on the water as a coot watches over its brightly-coloured chicks, glowing in the morning light.
#Birds #lukehaigh #birdwatching #photography

We worked with a beekeeper in Kentucky (and third author) to identify what was causing half of his drones to have white eyes. We were able to identify a recessively-acting mutation in an uncharacterized ncRNA. Great work here by much of the lab and especially the lead, PhD Candidate Riley Shultz

YouTube video by Ashish Xiangyi Kumar Beethoven: Sonata Op.111 No.32 in C Minor (Uchida)

Tom Stoppard died, and Richard remembers his play, Arcadia, in which a student discovers entropy but doesn't have the math to prove it. So what actually is scientific discovery? and why is Beethoven so very different?
lastwordonnothing.com/2025/12/05/b...

The USPS posting a NINE BILLION DOLLAR LOSS!!! sounds terrible. Certainly worse than if you said "USPS costs thirty dollars per person per year" even though that means the same thing and more accurately describes a government service

I'm forced to check Turnitin Similarity and AI report for MSc theses I supervise. A thesis was flagged with "An attempt to hinder similarity detection by replacing characters with similar looking ones from different alphabets or character sets." Flagged parts were equations with Greek letters!

branchlength >> happy :P

The Microflora Danica atlas of Danish environmental microbiomes - Nature Microflora Danica—an atlas of Danish environmental microbiomes—reveals that although human-disturbed habitats have high alpha diversity, species reoccur, revealing hidden homogeneity.

Microflora Danica: What can you learn from collecting and sequencing 10,000+ samples from a single country? Check out our new paper in @nature.com to find out. Incredible work led by Caitlin Singleton, Thomas B. N. Jensen, and Mads Albertsen from @aau.dk. 🦠🧫🧬
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My employer, Dartmouth College, today boasts it's 1st Ivy "to launch AI at an institutional scale." It is doing this by partnering--"more than a collaboration"--with Anthropic, a company that stole the books of many faculty, me included, which many of us are suing.

Horrible idea. AI will regress all grants towards the mean since AI is trained to produce the average output.

Grants require expertise that ignores bad literature and rejects author assertions if false. no AI review I've seen has ever challenged the author's assertions as fundamentally flawed.

Core rumen microbes are functional generalists that sustain host metabolism and gut ecosystem function - Nature Ecology & Evolution This study uses the rumen gut microbiome to show that core microbes exhibit attributes of ecological generalists with broad functional capacity and traits that enable them to be metabolically independ...

This is fascinating work:

www.nature.com/articles/s41... #microbiomes

Jeremy & Brian are prolly my favourite team-up. Always thoughtful, rigorous, and consequential.

@phylieu.bsky.social & I have a new preprint out: "Statistical and structural bias in birth-death models" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It's NOT a "the sky is falling in div methods again" but estimates can be biased, and that can happen in small clades even on big trees (MiSSE, Clads, BAMM)

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​The @mortonarboretum.bsky.social NSF REU program ​is open for summer 2026! $7500 stipend + housing / travel. Apply by 31 Jan 2026 and share with your networks!

Details at ​​https://mortonarb.org/science/opportunities-in-science/research-experiences-for-undergraduates-program/

Check out our cover article by @timjanicke.bsky.social and colleagues about the role of sexual selection in animal speciation. academic.oup.com/evlett/artic.... The beautiful illustration is by Katharina Bóth.