Tuna used to be plentiful in the north sea. But no, you're not misremembering, there are no traditional recipes on the east coast. We didn't used to eat it. We just killed it. Sad thread on why. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

First bluefin tuna caught and landed in Yorkshire since 1960s

A crew from Whitby lands two of the migratory species weighing over 300kg each in as many days.

bbc.co.uk

Live and let DIY

A fantastic episode on a someone that I knew nothing about, and a nice change of time from @iandunt.bsky.social. Also, I too shared a moment reminiscing about Tricolore textbooks. Finalement, bring on @dorianlynskey.bsky.social 's idea about a special cut-price Lestah patreon subscription!

Origin Story@originstorypodcast.bsky.social · last wk.

🚨BONUS EPISODE🚨 @iandunt.bsky.social talks @dorianlynskey.bsky.social through the extraordinary life of the Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628). It's a bizarre, tragic tale which weaves together queer history, courtly romance and unending war ➡️ linktr.ee/originstoryp...

We should get one of those National Alerts ahead of Whamageddon to be honest.

After multiple sex harassment scandals at King's College Cambridge, Gillian Tett delivers masterclass in how to handle a crisis She acknowledges institutional weaknesses have allowed misconduct to happen And she appoints an external barrister to lead investigation www.varsity.co.uk/news/31922

King’s announces externally led review following incidents of sexual misconduct

The review of the College’s institutional practices and wider culture is expected to conclude by March next year

varsity.co.uk

HIRING MICROBIOLOGIST: effective start asap! The PDRA/PDRF (per xp) will investigate the interactions of bumblebee antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) with the gut microbiota & more. Our work has shown AMPs have striking specificity for ecological microbes. careers.exeter.ac.uk/vacancies/13... 1/2

Postdoctoral Researcher Associate or Fellow in Cornwall | University of Exeter

View details and apply for this Postdoctoral Researcher Associate or Fellow vacancy in Cornwall. Postdoctoral Research Associate / Fellow This job is part of an Advanced Research + Inventio...

careers.exeter.ac.uk

🧪 "The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set some limit on infinite error". — Bertolt Brecht Via @economist.com quote of the day

This is wonderful - if you need cheering up then this is a real tonic. ordinaryabundance.com

Ordinary Abundance

A walk through a modern apartment, through the eyes of the people for whom everything in it was new.

ordinaryabundance.com

I think it is a bit strange that fossil collections are somehow regarded as the property of a human construction - the nation state. It's good that it will be displayed in support of evolutionary understanding in the Middle East.

Gabriel S. Ferreira (he/his)@gsferreira.bsky.social · 2w ago

"interesting" that returning illegally acquired fossils to where they belong is a no no, but selling a whole collection is a yes yes 🤑 www.theguardian.com/science/ng-i...

Wild times on the UK MOTHS Facebook group.

"Restructuring research funding as a choice between discovery and application gets the economics wrong, the evidence wrong and the people wrong." Great piece. I suspect Richard Jones (on Bsky?) will have views. arxiv.org/abs/2608.00172

Discovery is not the opposite of application

Restructuring research funding as a choice between discovery and application gets the economics wrong, the evidence wrong and the people wrong.

arxiv.org

Something happened in 1837, but it didn't last. Use of Vererbungsfähigkeit ('inheritance capacity' - not yet 'heritability') and Vererbung ('inheritance/heredity') in Austro-Hungarian agricultural journals.

This is a much more impressive reimagination of phiX174, which, alas, didn't get an NYTimes article about it because of, well, the other used AI. 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

This is great of course, and amazing work, but some of us studied the beta-defensin inversion 20 years ago 😎

Adam Phillippy@aphillippy.bsky.social · 2w ago

Even between the two haplotypes of HG002 we see significant variation, including a megabase-scale inversion of the beta-defensin locus and multiple genes present in one haplotype but not the other, such as DUSP22, CFHR1, CFHR3, GSTT1, and GSTM1 [9/15]

For the past 30 years, “whole-genome sequencing” has been a misnomer. Today the T2T Consortium publishes a dozen papers heralding a future of truly complete genomes for humans and nearly any vertebrate 👨‍🔬🐒🐦🐀🦒🐎🫏🐹🐟 (sorry, no salamanders): www.cell.com/consortium/t... 🧵[1/15]

One of the most important questions in the history of biology, posed during an 1837 discussion of agricultural breeding in Brnö by Abbé Cyrill Napp, the man who recruited Mendel: "What is inherited and how?" (Transliteration, translation, reference and source in Alt)

A very interesting analysis, but it's important to consist your own circumstances. For example the average UK household electricity usage is responsible for ~300kg of CO2 a year, not the 3,600kg US average cited here.

Zeke Hausfather@zekehausfather.com · 2w ago

Annualized, my agentic AI energy use is around 1.1 MWh, and is responsible for as much emissions as a clothes dryer or half a round trip flight from SF to NYC. Not enormous compared to my overall footprint, but far from trivial!

Great opportunity here...

Rebekah Rogers@evolscientist.bsky.social · 3w ago

Officially recruiting postdocs at GW. If you are interested in genetic novelty, structural variation, or evo genetics please get in touch! We have data sets on mulitple organisms with large population sizes (Drosophila, Megalonaias nervosa) and species in decline (fireflies, mussels, elephants).

My take-away from #SMBE2026 after 3 days: biodiversity genome projects such as Darwin Tree of Life @ergabiodiv.bsky.social @vertebrategenomes.bsky.social et al are no longer promises, but are changing how we do molecular evolution. I hope biodiversity gene expression will be next 😎 .

spectrum.ieee.org/3m-floppy

The Rise and Fall of 3M’s Floppy Disk

The high-profile creator of magnetic media gave it up nearly three decades ago

spectrum.ieee.org

One crumb of positivity is how the local Scottish press - free of Reach plc's slop that now is the state of almost all local English press - has held management at Dundee to account.

21 Group@21group.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Situation continues to worsen at Dundee University No serious repercussions for Prof Iain Gillespie & gang Echoing the Global Financial Crisis, those responsible seem set to evade any serious civil or criminal proceedings www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/politics/...

A sad day. Amazing to think this tree was around long before the Norman Conquest. ‘Most famous tree in the world’: Sherwood Forest’s 1,000-year-old Major oak dies www.theguardian.com/environment/...

‘Most famous tree in the world’: Sherwood Forest’s 1,000-year-old Major oak dies

Nottinghamshire tree, one of Europe’s oldest and largest, fails to produce leaves after being stressed by series of hot, dry summers

theguardian.com

I am recruiting a PhD student (fully funded, 4yrs) to analyze modern 🧬 and ancient 🦴 genomic data from humans and domestic animals 🐑 Please share, I am happy to chat at #ICP2026 or #SMBE2026 this summer www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

People. @ksamuk.bsky.social and others have made this argument before. There’s good software to do this right. Here’s the argument again: Invariant sites matter! They’re not in your standard vcf and many programs pretend they are anyway. academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

A Recipe for a Good π. How to Properly Estimate Population Genetics Summary Statistics and Why we Should Systematically Report Them

Abstract. Many long-standing questions in population genomics can now be addressed through comparative analyses and by leveraging the vast amount of genomi

academic.oup.com

Please share: Abstract deadline approaching (June 15) for the 2026 Annual Symposium of the Society for Immune Polymorphism (Nov 2-4, Netherlands). Intimate community meeting on variation and evolution of immunity and immune genes. Exciting lineup of invited speakers. #MHC #HLA sip-sassenheim.org

In completely unrelated news, my dear institution is now a Microsoft Frontier University and we now have copilot with everything.

Mostly Harmless@whalepetunias.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"Oh God," said Zaphod. He hadn't worked with this computer for long but had already learned to loathe it.

“Introgression from Neanderthals & Denisovans shaped modern human genomes. We integrated high-quality assemblies of 4 Papua New Guinea genomes with 94 of diverse ancestry to infer an introgressed structural variant map. Results underscore introgression as a major force in human adaptive evolution.”🧪

A global map for introgressed structural variation and selection in humans

Genetic introgression from Neanderthals and Denisovans shaped modern human genomes; however, introgressed structural variants (SVs ≥ 50 base pairs) remain challenging to discover. We integrated high-q...

science.org

This seems to be excellent, but I can only read the first paragraph because my instuttuion does not have a subscription. Would anyone, or @ent3c.bsky.social , be able to send me a copy please?

Anna Dearman@annadearman.bsky.social · 2mo ago

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Such an excellent explanation

There's growing unease that the UK's political consensus on support for R&D is fraying, and the rise of populism could break it altogether In our lead Research Fortnight story today, the new president of the Royal Society of Biology, Melanie Welham, warned “political buy-in could weaken” 🧵