On Lawfare Daily, @nkorpett.bsky.social, @massdara.bsky.social, @atabatabai.bsky.social, and @juliacurlee.bsky.social discussed how the "Short War Illusion," where countries believe that with the right strategy, they can accomplish their goals with a quick war, is playing out in conflicts today.

Humans too…

Journal of Experimental Biology@jexpbiol.bsky.social · yesterday

Mammal mothers are tightly tethered to their young by the need to feed, but Shizuki Nara &co show that the Japanese house bat's mothering instinct declines over time and she is less inclined to retrieve a misplaced pup when cradling its siblings doi.org/10.1242/jeb....

🚨NEW PAPER 🚨 "Deconstructing empirical fitness seascapes across scales of granularity" published in #G3 (@genetics-gsa.bsky.social) 1/2 The fitness landscape has been among the most influential instruments in evolutionary theory for nearly a century. But we often treat them as fixed and static.

The most depressing thing about swift parrots is that this same story has been told repeatedly for the entire 16 years I’ve been working on them - same terrible conservation outcomes again and again with no changes to Tasmanian forest management www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07...

What happened when a rare bird found a place to nest near a logging coupe

It was late 2021 when one of Australia's rarest birds started to arrive in the native forests of Lonnavale. Ecologists had expected it but for a reacting forestry sector, it was "not sustainable".

abc.net.au

1st genome sequenced (Sanger 1977), 1st genome synthesised (Venter 2003), 1st genome + proteome fully mutated (Huijin Xiangua 2026!) @crg.eu @sangerinstitute.bsky.social Complete Mutagenesis of the Genome and Proteome of ΦX174 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Complete Mutagenesis of the Genome and Proteome of ΦX174

The bacteriophage ΦX174 was the first genome to be sequenced and the first to be chemically synthesised. Here we present a complete map of the consequences of changing every nucleotide in the ΦX174 ge...

biorxiv.org

It’s called science (!)

Studying Testing

ALT: Studying Testing

static.klipy.com

Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Bisexual of the Blade (Alt-text or DIE)@shengokai.blacksky.app · 2d ago

Okay, I'm watching Pluribus. THESE FUCKING NERDS. YOU DON'T JUST WHIP UP A BATCH OF SOME UNKNOWN BIOLOGICAL FROM A SIGNAL YOU INTERCEPTED FROM SPACE. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING.

The racist backlash to Chris Nolan’s Odyssey is a kind of stolen valor, an attempt by the right to claim credit for achievements they had nothing to do with in order to justify racial hierarchy in the present. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

The Fear of Black Greeks

White people don’t own the accomplishments of ancient Greece.

theatlantic.com

New work preprinted from the Daniels Lab!

SIRT1 remodels astrocyte metabolism and promotes viral replication during neurotropic orthoflavivirus infection

Orthoflaviviruses depend on host metabolic resources to replicate, but how distinct cell types in the central nervous system (CNS) alter their metabolism in response to infection remains incompletely ...

biorxiv.org

Normally I’m not a cat but person, but look at this adorable dense hairball!

Current Biology@currentbiology.bsky.social · 3w ago

The Manul/Pallas' Cat is a wild felid of arid Asian highlands and has the densest and longest fur of all #cats A new study by Jiaqing Yuan &co finds that it belongs to a distinct lineage despite many traits shared with cats in genus Felis www.cell.com/current-biol... Image: tinyurl.com/yc6banxa

He is so effing irresponsible, casually making extreme claims that fuel conspiracies and worse. I am waiting for "What is wrong with yelling fire in a crowded theatre if the presence of a fire has not been confirmed by studies that he deems worthy. I mean, you never know..."

Bill Grueskin@bgrueskin.bsky.social · 3d ago

RFK told Dana Bash that Lyme disease “almost certainly” came from gain of function research. Which is utterly false. www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdi...

Michael Nesmith created a television program called PopClips for the Nickelodeon cable network, and in 1980 PopClips was sold to Time Warner/Amex which developed PopClips into the MTV network which launched on August 1, 1981! 📺 Image by Gregory Voutsas 🙂

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Science Magazine@science.org · 4d ago

Wolves have made a spectacular comeback in Europe. But attacks on livestock and humans have caused a heated debate about the limits of coexistence. Learn more: https://scim.ag/4a9BfLS

(Also public high school for 5 days, which hardly seems like punishment and definitely wasn’t for me — 5 extra days of fishing with my grandfather. Oh, the torture! 🎣)

Vincent J Lynch 🐘🦣🦥 🦇🐋🐢🐍@devoevomed.bsky.social · 4d ago

Fun fact. I was suspended from Sunday school 🤷

Fun fact. I was suspended from Sunday school 🤷

Mike Wiser@drmikewiser.bsky.social · 4d ago

(I was raised United Church of Christ, which ranks 3rd, just under the Unitarians. The long-running joke is that UCC stands for Unitarians Considering Christ. They're about as Liberal Generic Protestant as it's possible to be. Like, I was asked to teach Sunday school while out as an atheist)

Take a few minutes to read. This is the next in my series about what we learn from evolutionary biology. Free to read, as always. open.substack.com/pub/profmcin...

For a disease as spectacularly scary as smallpox, its history is remarkably mysterious. Here is my look at what ancient DNA from the viruses is revealing. Gift link: nyti.ms/4vTU11D

‘This Is Very Strange’: Ancient Smallpox May Have Been Less Deadly (Gift Article)

Scientists have found smallpox viruses in the remains of people in Chile from around 500 years ago, revealing how the virus may have evolved into a global killer.

nyti.ms

Philosophers, spread the word! The next Special Issue of The Philosophical Quarterly will be 'Philosophy and Climate Change' - Guest Editor Stephen Gardiner, call for papers here: academic.oup.com/pq/pages/cal...

Wise words for writing academic papers too… 🧪

Ann Leckie@annleckie.com · 5d ago

I know this isn't going to come across, like, at all, because it's writers I'm talking to, but for Mithras' sake, don't catastrophize! Don't spend all your time worrying about whether or not someone is going to like your work, whether editors are likely to buy it, whether it "sounds like AI"

Update: Google just sent me a statement saying it is “rolling back” this AI feature that let anyone make completely bullshit satellite images. Comes after our demos of the tool and those from OSINT researchers. One of the worst AI tools I’ve ever seen bsky.app/profile/jose...

Joseph Cox@josephcox.bsky.social · 5d ago

New from 404 Media: Google Earth has introduced an AI feature that lets anyone fabricate completely bullshit satellite images. In our own tests, we added a “bomb blast and crater” to an area of Los Angeles. This is a misinformation time bomb, will 100% be abused www.404media.co/google-earth...

Very cool pair of papers demonstrating little link between amount of additive genetic variation and amount of nucleotide variation within species: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Levels of additive genetic variation vary substantially between species

Adaptive potential determines how populations respond to environmental change. This study compiles evolvability estimates from over 170 multicellular species, revealing substantial variation across th...

journals.plos.org

This is the best kind of compliment! We’re just people — we can be fun and esoteric and kind and have tattoos and piercings and be modest and “down–to–earth” some are just cosplaying as the ivory tower elite of old :-)

Harmit Singh Malik@harmitmalik.bsky.social · 6d ago

At a Gordon conference I’m attending, a young student told me at their poster that they had read my papers & were excited to meet me (head getting bigger) but were surprised that I was not ‘as serious’ in real life as they expected based on my papers (not sure how I should feel about that).

Wrote about the Masculinity Scam, or how selling reactionary ideas about what makes a man helps a small number of bad people profit and makes everyone else (including men) miserable www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Yeah, two things can be true--you can genuinely enjoy and even love a movie and also have (or agree with) criticisms of it. This is normal and ok.

Chuck Wendig@chuckwendig.bsky.social · last wk.

I enjoyed Nolan's ODYSSEY quite a bit, and found it more moving than expected. I also read Wilson's critique and found that both enjoyable and insightful. It's not even really a bad review -- it's an incisive dissection from the POV of someone whose knives have long been sharpened on the material.

Hmmm. I read the Emily Wilson review of Nolan's The Odyssey and not sure what the hubbub is about. Are negative reviews not allowed anymore? Some nuance of her points seems flattened in the criticisms of the review, too.

I've written about Charles Darwin's surprisingly queer science of sex in the latest issue of History Today! 🏳️‍🌈🦚🗃️🦋 www.historytoday.com/archive/feat... #Darwin #science #nature #histsci #sts #histsex #queer #queerhistory #PrideInSTEM @yalebooks.bsky.social

Charles Darwin’s Sexual Revolution

The potential implications of Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection did not sit well with Victorian gender mores – or with Darwin himself.

historytoday.com

History Today@historytoday.com · 2w ago

The new issue of History Today is in UK stores now. Featuring: #Caesar and #Cicero, Franklin D. Roosevelt, #CharlesDarwin on gender, Brazil’s free press, and more. Find out what else is inside and order it directly from our store at buff.ly/XsQsdk3

I've been waiting to see this published after Julie Dragon wowed us all with the news at ISEEC in May. A fourth type of transmissible cancer!

Vincent J Lynch 🐘🦣🦥 🦇🐋🐢🐍@devoevomed.bsky.social · 2w ago

Can't stop thinking about this; transmissible cancers are so crazy, extremely rare (tassie devils, dogs, some clams), but I wonder why? It seems like it should be very common. It's advantageous for the cancer to escape the dead-end host. And yet... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

For more than a decade, there's been something fishy going on in a lake that straddles Vermont and the province of Quebec. It involves cancer, a kind of catfish, and — possibly — clues about how tumors metastasize. n.pr/4vLzcpb

A strange transmissible cancer is spreading through the catfish in this lake

For more than a decade, there's been something fishy going on in a lake that straddles Vermont and the province of Quebec. It involves cancer, a kind of catfish, and — possibly — clues about how tumors metastasize.

n.pr

Can't stop thinking about this; transmissible cancers are so crazy, extremely rare (tassie devils, dogs, some clams), but I wonder why? It seems like it should be very common. It's advantageous for the cancer to escape the dead-end host. And yet... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Brown bullhead catfish melanoma represents a novel transmissible cancer - Nature

Whole-genome sequencing analysis of tumour and matched non-tumour host tissues of the brown bullhead catfish reveals a type of naturally occurring transmissible cancer.

nature.com

Michael Scott's Big Mistake (The Office)

ALT: Michael Scott's Big Mistake (The Office)

static.klipy.com

Carl Zimmer@carlzimmer.com · 2w ago

Did Thoreau encounter contagious cancer? A new study finds transmissible tumors in catfish--and raises questions about whether they could arise in humans someday. Gift link: nyti.ms/4whfi6v

MOVE OVER TASMANIAN DEVILS, THERE’S A NEW TRANSMISSIBLE TUMOR IN TOWN

Carl Zimmer@carlzimmer.com · 2w ago

Did Thoreau encounter contagious cancer? A new study finds transmissible tumors in catfish--and raises questions about whether they could arise in humans someday. Gift link: nyti.ms/4whfi6v