What is in Fifa's 25-page sales pitch: a reference to more than doubling the number of global tournaments held each year, from 200 to 450 What is not in Fifa's 25-page sales pitch: a single reference to women's football

Fifa’s sales pitch revealed: more tournaments, more debt … but no mention of women’s game

Fifa’s sales pitch to persuade members to approve the sale of the World Cup’s commercial rights clearly states that their plans for financial growth will be achieved by staging more tournaments, havin...

theguardian.com

Half the planet is having a massive fight about how to correctly interpret an Ancient Greek poem but go ahead, close some more humanities departments.

Highly amusing that people think the hantavirus outbreak 'doesn't line up' because they don't believe someone would go birding at a landfill

I am excited beyond description to lift the veil on what we have been working on in 2026: Please meet ggsql! A new extension of the SQL language for creating visualisations using the grammar of graphics. Read all about it in the blog post or visit the website at ggsql.org

ggsql: A grammar of graphics for SQL

Introducing ggsql, a grammar of graphics for SQL that lets you describe visualizations directly inside SQL queries.

opensource.posit.co

Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis is a rare but fatal side effect of #measles infection, which manifests years after a kid recovers. This story of a family who lost a 10-year old to it is heartbreaking. Renae was too young to be vaccinated when she caught measles. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/o...

Opinion | Measles Took My Daughter. This Is What I Want Everyone to Know.

nytimes.com

This isn't shortread data, but alignments of genome assemblies with N50 > 100Mb. The plot is the # of bp per 100Kb window that are dropped because of missing data -- because those bp physically are not there in one of the other 25 genomes. This is what normal plant genomes look like, folks.

This is a big part of why basically every archaeologist who gets asked "when in the past would you want to have been alive?" will answer "the present please and thank you"

Snowden St.@snowden.st · 8mo ago

Currently dorking out over this graph about child mortality with my brother. Just mind boggling to take in.

We are thrilled to announce the first official release (v0.1.8) of #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗿, the successor to one of our flagship tool, #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹𝘀! Based on ideas we conceived of long ago (!), this was achieved thanks to the dedication of Brent Pedersen. 1/n

One of the most exciting projects I have ever been involved in: Project Psyche! Read all about our ambitions and aims. It's ground breaking stuff, just mind blowing and even surreal (27 years ago we did single genes for lep phylogenetics)! @projectpsyche.bsky.social www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

Project Psyche: reference genomes for all Lepidoptera in Europe

Project Psyche is a transnational initiative to generate and study chromosome-level reference genomes of all ~11 000 species of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) found in Europe. Here, we describe t...

cell.com

We've got a really cool preprint out in collaboration with @lpachter.bsky.social's awesome student Cat Felce. Using biophysical models and RNA-seq data, we explore the mechanisms of selective constraint on mRNA abundance, finding constraint on decay rate www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Biophysical constraints on mRNA decay rates shape macroevolutionary divergence in steady-state abundances

Evolutionary changes to gene expression are understood to be a major driver of phenotypic divergence between species. Researchers have investigated the drivers of this divergence by fitting evolutiona...

biorxiv.org

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

The Conversation U.S.@us.theconversation.com · 9mo ago

Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other. Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq

Aaah! New preprint from the Sethuraman Lab has dropped! Tamsen and I have been working on this for a while, and we can’t wait for your feedback. Short thread on our swanky new polyploid genome simulator, DemographiKs, and its functionality.

bioRxiv Genomics@biorxiv-genomic.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Hidden in Plain Sight. How Ks histogram dynamics can reveal and obscure ancient whole genome duplications. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.19.689290v1

More really cool science news: Scientists have extracted the oldest known RNA! This is a particularly amazing feat because RNA degrades very quickly. (Also, we learned that Yuka here was a male, not a female as previously thought.) 🧪 (by @humbertobasilio.bsky.social for @sciam.bsky.social)

A Frozen Woolly Mammoth Reveals the World’s Oldest RNA

RNA has been extracted from an ancient woolly mammoth, providing insight into its last moments on Earth

scientificamerican.com

Every ad now

No no no begs every archivist. You are never going to be able to find anything. Please don’t start using emojis in file names. Who asked for this? What fresh hell is next?

bro are you fucking kidding me

The Economist@economist.com · 9mo ago

A new paper suggests a photo can tell a recruiter much about an applicant’s personality

🚨 NEW: The majority holder of the world's genetic sequence data is a bad actor who can cut off access to critics and competing services. We've tolerated this for years, and now it threatens the pandemic treaty. Time for WHO to step in. With @ctrlalttim.com: www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/to-f...

To Finish the Pandemic Agreement, WHO Needs a Trustworthy Viral Database | Think Global Health

Online platforms for sharing virus sequences are in disarray. The World Health Organization has a chance to build something new

thinkglobalhealth.org

At some point it has to become clear that this tech exists is to create a more toxic society and enrich its owners. These uses are not aberrations but rather the entire purpose.

OpenAI's Sora 2 Can Generate Videos of Celebrities Appearing to Shout Racial Slurs

OpenAI's Sora 2 video generation model can be exploited to push misinformation and depict public figures behaving badly despite promised guardrails.

rollingstone.com

Sharing our new paper, "Distinct haplotypes and reversed dominance at a single-gene balanced polymorphism controlling heterodichogamy in two genera of wingnuts". Genomics & evolution of a mating type system involving two morphs with alternating sexes in walnut relatives www.cell.com/current-biol...

Distinct haplotypes and reversed dominance at a single-gene balanced polymorphism controlling heterodichogamy in two genera of wingnuts

In most species within the walnut family, two genetically determined morphs alternate between male and female flowering phases in time. Groh et al. identify a distinct locus for this dimorphism in two...

cell.com

Happy to chat with any potential applicants who want to work in plant phylogenomics!

Simons Postdoctoral Fellowships in Plant Biology

Simons Postdoctoral Fellowships in Plant Biology on Simons Foundation

simonsfoundation.org

tfw you think you're missing out on something but you're actually not

probably my most deeply-held belief: it is not possible for a slide deck to be both (1) a good presentation aide; and (2) a standalone document that can be read and understood in isolation.

Most chromosomes of any animal on Earth so far!

bart simpson from the simpsons says this is the worst day of my life

Alt: bart simpson from the simpsons says “this is the worst day of my life” and homer replies “the worst day of your life so far”

media.tenor.com

Bryan White, MS Bio, MPH 🧬@crvscience.com · 10mo ago

Homie got 229 pairs of chromosomes www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...

Look at her go! #invertebrates 🌿

Janet Hill@saskajanet.bsky.social · 10mo ago

UPDATE: I saw it happen! At the Birds Canada research station at the tip of Long Point I watched an expert ever-so-gently and carefully put one of these tiny tags on a monarch. Let me walk you through the steps (1/4)

Look the mayor of Vaughan and the Premier of Ontario have said drivers are hard done by. Give them a break.

Toronto Star@thestar.com · 10mo ago

She was thrown under a streetcar when a car driver knocked her off her bike. Her case was withdrawn. The mass withdrawal of road safety-related charges has become routine, the result of an overwhelmed court system leaving millions in fines on the table and letting dangerous drivers off the hook.

Ornithology is all about the process. #GoBills | #BillsMafia

being a cat person is so crazy bc you live with someone who is undeniably annoying and you're always thinking "maybe i should get another cat"

Jane Goodall, ethologist and conservationist, has died. She was 91

This was from banning trans girls from girls sports. Just so you understand the reality of what's going on here.

Carrie Tait@carrietait.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Fewer girls are playing sports after govt erected barriers for girls to play sports. edmontonjournal.com/news/local-n...