2025. Larger brains and relatively smaller cerebella in Asian elephants compared with African savanna elephants academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Larger brains and relatively smaller cerebella in Asian elephants compared with African savanna elephants

Abstract. Elephants are the largest terrestrial animals, but our knowledge of their brains is limited. We studied brain size, proportions, and development

academic.oup.com

ecoevojobs.net is a great resource for our community listing faculty, permanent, & postdoc jobs. I made a quick wrapper ( brianomeara.info/ecoevojobs.h... ) to highlight recent posts, but still go to the original site for all the insights on the job searches and institutions #AcademicSky 🧪

Do animals use names? Conceptual and empirical criteria: Trends in Cognitive Sciences www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Do animals use names? Conceptual and empirical criteria

In recent years, several claims have been put forth suggesting that animals of different species address each other using receiver-specific calls that function as individual names. If accurate, this w...

cell.com

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When eyeing a predator, horses keep a poker face as their hearts race

Horses know a predator when they see one—even if it's only on a video screen while they're standing in a stall, with no sounds, smells or previous experience providing context for what they're viewing...

phys.org

I made a professional website! 🤓 Follow my research updates on sites.google.com/view/ellioth...

A goat will remake its own voice over a month to blend in with a new herd. morningoverview.com/a-goat-will-...

Since it seems like stories of Koko the gorilla are going around, hers a reminder that 1) the Loko project wasn’t well done from a scientific perspective, and it seems that Patterson/The Gorilla Foundation greatly exaggerated her sign language abilities (1/n)

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A goat's tooth may have solved a 100‑year debate about ancient Greek farming

The agricultural economy was the backbone of wealth in ancient Greece. Food brought people together, whether in smaller groups at a wine-drinking symposium or the entire community in a sacrificial fea...

phys.org

Human language is incredibly complex. But why do some primates have richer vocal repertoires than others? Open access paper in Primates: we ask what explains that variation and how lifespan, brains, groups, & conflict have shaped primate vocal communication. Open Access: rdcu.be/foZ5M 🐒🧪Thread 👇

one anecdote: I was searching for a link to one of my old papers on Google, and the automated Gemini summary attributed all of my lab's work to my husband

Mel Andrews@bayesianboy.bsky.social · 2mo ago

When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

Our Anthropological Linguistics group at Uni Zurich has a webpage now: www.isle.uzh.ch/en/AnthroL.h...

When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

Trying to find the following book chapter by Nelson & Marler: does anyone have a copy? Nelson, D. A., & Marler, P. (1990). The perception of birdsong and an ecological concept of signal space. In W. C. Stebbins & M. A. Berkley (Eds.), Comparative perception, Vol. 2. Complex signals (pp. 443-478).

☺️Lovely write-up about our new #mongoose paper on how they pre-emptively change their behaviour in relation to the #intergroup threat level. Thank you. @josharbon.bsky.social @bristolbiosci.bsky.social @ukri.org Paper: doi.org/10.1038/s415... Article: scienceblog.com/wildscience/...

Mongooses Plan Their Battles Days Before the Enemy Shows Up

On a termite mound somewhere in the Limpopo bush, a dwarf mongoose hauls itself up onto its hind legs, scans the scrub, and starts to sing. It is a small, chirruping watchman’s song, the sound of a se...

scienceblog.com

Coverage in the Guardian of our latest publication in Royal Society Open Science, with fantastic collaborators Alan McElligott (@amcell.bsky.social), Christian Nawroth (@goatswhostare.bsky.social), Federico Rossano and Simon Townsend. Paper threaded below! www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

Goats can find food by following a human voice, study finds

Experiments show 29 animals moved towards a treat-filled bucket 60% of the time when guided by a researcher

theguardian.com

Very happy to have finally published on my secret favourite animal (sorry chimps!)

Alan McElligott@amcell.bsky.social · 2mo ago

2026. Domestic goats can follow the direction of human voices to solve a hidden-object task. new from us, led by @chimpsahoi.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...

www.nine.com.au/australia-ne...

Inside the rotten work culture at Australia’s universities

According to those who knew him best, there was no better worker than Brian Stronach.

nine.com.au

'Among the universities that have done the most to offer non-traditional students the benefits of a higher education is London Metropolitan University. And I’m one of 120 academic staff who are being made redundant at the end of July: approximately 20 per cent of the teaching complement.' 1/3

The outsourcing of my job mirrors what is happening in the UK sector

Universities are using a short-term cash crunch to make long-term structural changes, including greater reliance on private providers, says Glyn Robbins

timeshighereducation.com

In our new TREE paper, with M. Borgerhoff Mulder, S. Brosnan and E. Strauss we show that power in animal societies can be subject to control. When high-powered individuals use aggression to gain better access to resources, other group members can respond with "levelling". doi.org/10.1016/j.tr...

Do elephants adress one another with vocalizations that function like human personal names, as was widely reported two years ago? Dharmarajan (2026) argues that this finding may have been just a methodological artefact. 🐘🧪 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Effects of bias when using ‘black box’ models: re-evaluating the evidence for the use of name-like calls by elephants

Machine learning (ML) tools can detect patterns in complex high-dimensional data sets, providing new ways to obtain insights into animal behaviour. Ho…

sciencedirect.com

I actually listened to the summary of @florencesn.bsky.social and mine's #chi2026 paper today and it is essentially 100% wrong in everything it says about the paper. I have to assume no-one at ACM used or tested this at any point. Good luck to anyone actually using these.

Elisa Mekler@elisamekler.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Not into the AI-generated podcast summaries of #chi2026 paper sessions – that authors *cannot* opt out of. But was thinking that perhaps this could make papers more accessible to the general public. Turns out the AI-podcasts are only available to ACM premium members... wtf...

Interested in collaborating with our lab? Why not visit? Visitors have published chapters, got new ideas and made new collaborations. At @scienceanu.bsky.social we have much to offer, including joining for cool field work and seeing great wildlife. Details here: sites.google.com/site/drfarin...

Home - Visit the lab

We welcome visiting PhD students and postdocs in the lab Since 2016, I have hosted dozens of visiting students. Together, we have completed many chapters and published many papers. These visits have ...

sites.google.com

Next Level is out in just five days! I've been going over the chapters on noise and Minecraft today, another example of the paired chapters in the book. Minecraft is probably the most iconic modern use of procedural generation, and an immensely cool generator. (Preorders: linktr.ee/next_level)

Next Level is out in less than a week! I wanted to do a few threads in the run-up to launch about some of the things I cover in the book. The core of the book is paired chapters that introduce techniques or ideas and then study games that used it, like grammars and Spelunky's level generation.

Good news! "your manuscript entitled "Domestic goats can follow the direction of human voices to solve a hidden-object task", accepted for publication, Royal Society Open Science @royalsocietypublishing.org led by @chimpsahoi.bsky.social preprint version: doi.org/10.64898/202...

PhD Opportunity! 4-year funded PhD @uniexecec.bsky.social: “From cognition to conservation: using cognitive and behavioural research to enhance animal reintroductions”. Closes: 5 June 2026. Funding: @royalsociety.org (UK/Home students only). More info & to apply: www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin... 1/

Very proud of my prior PhD student (now Dr.) Nikola Falk getting her first thesis chapter out into the wild! Nikola used playback experiments to examine the factors underlying heterospecific eavesdropping on alarm calls by meerkats and yellow mongooses: academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...

Exploring mechanisms underlying heterospecific alarm call responses in meerkats and yellow mongooses

To explore how species “eavesdrop” on the alarm calls of others, we played alarm calls from familiar and unfamiliar species to wild meerkats, yellow mongoo

academic.oup.com

📢Fully-funded #PhD opportunity with us: 🐦 Quantifying (social) learning and social behaviour in an urbanised world 🐦 Position at @ceec-research.bsky.social 📆29th May deadline More info: tinyurl.com/yz28s96x Apply: tinyurl.com/2wpkb64y #cognition #socialbehaviour #fieldwork #birds 🙏Please Share

"The AI Grad Student": A Harvard professor describes working with Claude. Early on, he describes misconduct that would cause any student to be terminated: "It faked results, hoping I wouldn't notice." But he ends the essay with "Now I'm doing 100% of my research with LLMs". Am I losing my mind?

Anthropic {bot}@anthropicbot.bsky.social · 5mo ago

We’re launching with two new posts. Can AI do theoretical physics? Harvard physicist Matthew Schwartz led Claude Opus 4.5 through a graduate-level calculation. AI can’t yet do original work autonomously, but it can vastly accelerate it. Read more: https://www.anthropic.com/research/vibe-physics

🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏