⚡️🔩Felsenstein's Monster🔩⚡️

I’m really happy to see Kat’s first dissertation chapter published! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Genome maintenance by telomerase is a fundamental process in nearly all eukaryotes. But where does it come from?

Today, we report the discovery of telomerase homologs in a family of antiviral reverse transcriptases, revealing an unexpected evolutionary origin in bacteria.

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Agreed.

I also find the axes orientations awkward. Normally you'd have a ++ north-east quadrant, but here it is north-west?

Revised evolutionary relationships within Brachycera and the early origin of bicoid in flies Mulhair et al. uncover a functional bicoid in non-cyclorrhaphan flies, pushing the gene's origin back by ∼20 million years. Reassessing the Diptera phylogeny using the largest dataset to date permits ...

Latest work out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social

We find the fly development gene bicoid is much older than previously thought (~20 million yrs older!) 🪰🧬

To pinpoint its origins we tackled the Diptera phylogeny, providing some resolution (many open questions remain).

🔗 tinyurl.com/2vyuevpy

A mosaic of modular variation at a single gene underpins convergent plumage coloration The reshuffling of genomic variation from multiple origins is an important contributor to phenotypic diversification, yet insights into the evolutionary trajectories of this combinatorial process and ...

A TE insertion controls throat colour in wheatears. The gene involved (ASIP) is the same one that is epigenetically affected by an IAP insertion the famous Avy mice.

As if we needed more reasons to love TEs.

Loss of macroevolutionary species fitness explains the rise and fall of clades - Nature Ecology & Evolution The interplay between speciation and extinction rates shapes clade diversity dynamics. Using a novel phylogenetic model that includes living and fossil lineages, the authors estimate speciation and ex...

Check out this amazing paper by @ignacioq.bsky.social et al. on the rise and fall of clades using a new fossilized birth-death model and inegrating phylogenetic and fossil occurence data.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A deep-time landscape of plant cis-regulatory sequence evolution Developmental gene function is conserved over deep time, but cis -regulatory sequence conservation is rarely found. Rapid sequence turnover, paleopolyploidy, structural variation, and limited phylogen...

From @kirkamundson.bsky.social this looks pretty amazing. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

On the one hand, you should _totally_ know. On the other, it is _so_ gd stupid and unsatisfying you should count yourself lucky :P

GitHub - Raphire/Win11Debloat: A simple, lightweight PowerShell script to remove pre-installed apps, disable telemetry, as well as perform various other changes to customize, declutter and improve you... A simple, lightweight PowerShell script to remove pre-installed apps, disable telemetry, as well as perform various other changes to customize, declutter and improve your Windows experience. Win11D...

If you intend to keep using Windows, you can remove the "AI" garbage and telemetry with Windows 11 Debloat.

It also works on Windows 10, because Windows 10 ALSO has Copilot.

Distinct haplotypes and reversed dominance at a single-gene balanced polymorphism controlling heterodichogamy in two genera of wingnuts In the angiosperm mating system of heterodichogamy, two hermaphroditic morphs temporally alternate between male and female flowering phases, promoting…

Congratulations to @jeffgroh.bsky.social on the publication of his paper on an ancient balanced polymorphisms controlling heterodichogamy in two genera of wingnuts. The paper shows the putative turnover & reversal of dominance of a mating type polymorphism
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We're excited to be recruiting an NIH funded postdoc to work in the Coop lab at UC Davis. We're specifically interested in candidates who are want to work at the intersection of human genetics, GWAS, and population genetics modeling. Please RT

A simple model reveals why complex evolutionary innovations follow predictable paths Determining the principles underlying the origin of novel characters has been a fundamental goal of evolutionary biology. Yet, key mechanisms remain poorly understood, hindered by the lack of a genera...

Have been a bit silent recently as I've been working on this new version of our preprint! In this study, we present a generalizable evo-devo model to explore principles of evolutionary innovations. A thread 🧵 ahead about this, and what's new... 1/11
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

YouTube video by Joe Lynch Boards of Canada "Olson" on a 1959 PDP-1 Computer

This is rad

"Loading Music from Punched Paper Tape"
youtu.be/wubkrBd3-gg?...

Want to make publication-ready figures come straight from Python without having to do any manual editing? Are you fed up with axes labels being unreadable during your presentations? Follow this short tutorial including code examples! 👇🧵

Phylogenomic Discordance: Patterns, Processes, and Solutions Phylogenomics, the study of evolutionary relationships using genomic data, has revolutionized our understanding of the Tree of Life. As a field, phylogenomics h

If you're interested in understanding discordance in phylogenomic analyses, the @evojlinnsoc.bsky.social's special issue 'Phylogenomic Discordance: Patterns, Processes, and Solutions' is for you!

tinyurl.com/v2eces3s

I'll be sharing a few articles a week until we're through the issue! (1/n)🧪

Too niche, and not of your generation/cohort :)

Probably nit all that funny, either :(

Someone asked me an easily lookupable fact about an anti-authoritarian hip hop metal band.

I told them to RTFRATMM.

For #WoodDuckWednesday, a lovely couple preening. This also fits the alternative theme of #reflection for #BirdOfTheDay! #birds #photography #EastCoastKin

🚨🪲 COOL JOB ALERT 🪲🚨
3-year position at the Western Australian Museum working on an awesome beetle phylogenetics project, starting at $105k dollarydoos per annum: search.jobs.wa.gov.au/page.php?pag...

I'm recruiting a postdoc for my group (based in beautiful Eugene, OR). Please get in touch if you're interested, esp if you'd like to chat at #ASHG25!

Out now in Biology Letters, my latest paper tackles an apparently simple question: how many characters are needed to reconstruct a phylogeny? TL;DR: in most cases between 100 and 500, more than a substantial portion of morphological datasets, but the story is more complex... doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

Here's a T. Rex bored to death trying to bite their own tail. My partner asked me to animate it in stop motion, after she watched a video about the very important topic of "could T. Rex chew its own tail like a dog". The puppet is still a work in progress 🦖

Hey #Botany2026 we're actively looking for potential speakers at ALL experience levels for our proposed colloquium: Side-quest! – Level up your science!. If you have an interesting story, project, or idea to share that qualifies as a “Side-quest” we want to know about it!

More info below⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️

The cover of the Cleaning Biodiversity Data in R book. It has an illustration of an Pacific Cleaner Shrimp in the middle of a navy background. The shrimp has a bright red-orange shell, pale-yellow body and white whiskers.

Still want to make cleaning biodiversity data shrimp-ler? 🦐

Good news: We just updated our Cleaning Biodiversity Data in R book, so you still can! We've updated data for 2025, added new content & fixed lots of silly typos 😀

Live the shrimp-le life:
cleaning-data-r.ala.org.au

#rstats #ecology 🧪🌏

Curator of Birds - Royal Ontario Museum - Career Page Apply to Curator of Birds at Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, ON, Canada.

museum job alert 🇨🇦
royalontariomuseum.applytojob.com/apply/XBR2Yc...

Female fruit flies use social cues to make egg-clustering decisions - BMC Biology Background The ability to respond plastically to environmental variation is a key determinant of fitness. Females may use cues to strategically place their eggs, for example adjusting the number or lo...

Out now - female fruit flies cluster their eggs together depending on their social environment 🪰🧪 Just wish they'd let us know why... led by @emilyrosech.bsky.social Emily Fowler, Lucy Friend and Tracey Chapman. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

A mottled brown, grey, and white chicken-like bird is perched on a bare branch with its neck extended and crest up. This Ruffed Grouse is likely a female based on the lack of dark ruff feathers and the relatively short crest.

Although most birders see grouse as rather spherical (or "borb-like"_, they do have quite long necks. This typically occurs when perched in a tree and anxious about a predator and helps them look more "branch-like".
#birds #birding #Alberta #wildlife 🪶🇨🇦