Ben Phillips

@benflips.bsky.social

Ecology | Evolution | Populations | Space | Models | Data | Things that make me laugh or cry. Prof at Curtin University. Living on Whadjuk Noongar country. Lab: popbiolgenomics.org/

Regional NSW is being smashed by a '1-in-500-year' flood, one person has died, three are missing and 50,000 people are isolated by floodwaters. Meanwhile, Albanese is considering the country's biggest new fossil fuel project, the proposed NW Shelf extension... www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

NSW floods: one dead and ‘grave fears’ held for three missing people as crisis worsens

With 48,000 already isolated, forecasters say ‘heavy, intense rainfall’ has spread north bringing life-threatening risk

theguardian.com

Why is sex so common if it's so costly? Super excited to share our new preprint “Sex decreases the pleiotropic costs of local adaptation”, where we bring a new angle to this age-old evolutionary question. Co-led by Parris Humphrey, in Michael Desai's lab. Short thread here: (1/n)

bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology@biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · last yr.

Sex decreases the pleiotropic costs of local adaptation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.28.646016v1

Is everyone huffing paint? Crypto guy claims to have built an LLM-based tool to detect errors in research papers; funded using its own cryptocurrency; will let coin holders choose what papers to go after; it's unvetted and a total black box—and Nature reports it as if it's a new protein structure.

AI tools are spotting errors in research papers: inside a growing movement

Study that hyped the toxicity of black plastic utensils inspires projects that use large language models to check papers.

nature.com

Excited to see the cover art for my new book, which is due out in February. One for the invasion nerds! This book project is hard evidence that I am a time optimist: I thought it would take me a year; it took five. 🌏 #bioinvasions

A book cover for "The ecology and evolution of invasive populations" featuring a gecko and an agar plate with various bacteria and fungi colonies growing on it.