"First-generation college graduates are 10% less likely to be tenured at an R1, earn 3% less & report 5% lower job satisfaction. Neither selection out of academia, different preferences nor different research productivity explain the gap. Likely drivers are differences in cultural & social capital"

🐒 Female #mandrills are more likely to #miscarry when they’re still caring for a dependent infant. New study by @nikos.ecoevo.social.ap.brid.gy et al. shows that fetal loss may help mums balance investment in current vs. future offspring. See: tinyurl.com/5nrrt9sc & journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Dependable infants and their protest behaviours predict fetal loss in wild mandrills

New research suggests that miscarriage may help mothers to balance their investment in current and future offspring

tinyurl.com

Folks, please share the link for our Fediverse Multimedia Grants. We have funding for creators to make podcasts, artist's portfolios, webcomics, music stores, video streams, or brand new kinds of channels here. And we pay developers to help them be successful. Our deadline is Wed 4 Nov 2026 […]

Why is behaviour so important for biodiversity? New paper @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social led by the amazing @ivanjaric.bsky.social: we identify a behavioural diversity shortfall and argue why we must study behaviour across the tree of life not just in animals... authors.elsevier.com/a/1o0CEcZ3X7...

Great paper this on #BaYaka hunter-gatherer mobility patterns and cultural norms of #exogamy. Paper combines genomic data from 245 individuals with detailed interviews about marriage, kinship, reproductive histories and the places people had travelled throughout their lives. Though […]

Seabirds racing home over the ocean can get jet-lagged https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/seabirds-racing-home-over-the-ocean-can-get-jet-lagged/ A long flight home from feeding grounds messes with birds’ internal clocks. Original research here […]

Die #cclizenzen sind ein häufiges Thema in der #OA-Beratung. Daher freut es mich sehr, dass die Kolleg*innen von @openaccessnetwork nun einen neuen Selbstlernkurs dazu veröffentlicht haben: "Creative-Commons-Lizenzen verstehen" https://service.tib.eu/toern/course/view.php?id=78 Sehr […]

Thirty years of hurt (and eleven years of writing about it) … Every September, as the melt season on the Greenland ice sheet fizzles out, I and my colleague Martin Stendel do the same thing: we sit down with a year's worth of daily surface mass balance maps and weather charts from the Polar […]

"Assessing directional selection on kin effects requires explicitly modelling feedback between the kinship network & life history. We develop such a framework & apply it to examine selection pressures on cooperative behaviour of closely related kin, including mothers, grandmothers & older sisters"

Useful read on how academic publishing can better manage conflicts of interest and improve accountability, and also why this is necessary: “Academic publishing gains authority by promising disciplined scrutiny. Its own governance must be open to that scrutiny” blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

Clique or journal community – Where does accountability lie in editorial decision making? - LSE Impact

Academic journals comprise close communities of scholars working on related subjects. This presents many potential conflicts of interest - can they be resolved?

blogs.lse.ac.uk

New study "Understanding variability in men’s support for women’s empowerment" (in an urbanizing community in north-west Tanzania) https://doi.org/10.1332/27523349Y2026D000000101 "four pathways that supportive men themselves emphasized: schooling that normalized female excellence through daily […]

🚨New article with @jinwenxie.bsky.social on human partner preferences. We asked whether gender gaps in partner preferences vary cross-culturally with the restrictiveness of gender norms. 🧵 @ehbea.bsky.social @humbehevosoc.bsky.social @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social 🧪 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Cross-cultural variation in partner preferences: some gender gaps are larger under restrictive gender norms | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core

Cross-cultural variation in partner preferences: some gender gaps are larger under restrictive gender norms - Volume 8

cambridge.org

„Birdwatching rewires the brain and slows cognitive decline“ https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20261019-birdwatching-rewires-the-brain-and-slows-cognitive-decline The benefits led to „German health insurance companies setting up bird feeders and viewing areas in more than 400 nursing homes“

Birdwatching rewires the brain and slows cognitive decline

Birdwatching can help slow brain ageing and is increasingly being used as therapy for dementia patients.

bbc.com

Interestingly, none of the ecological traits we tested had a consistent effect once study design was accounted for. Phylogenetic position was the strongest predictor, a possible quick first screen for species. Paper: doi.org/10.1098/rsbl... Blog: adriftlab.org/news/old-pro... #ornithology

Four weeks today we're running an interdisciplinary workshop @UCL on the emergence of language: What made us "hunter-gatherers of words"? 🌑 Tues Nov 10 🌒 10:30-6pm A fantastic lineup of speakers -- details here,

I just listened in to a talk given by a colleague called "How your students are really using AI" and wow I have a lot to digest. Great talk, showed some of the ways that students are using genAI to learn stuff better (and a lot of ways they're using genAI to not learn stuff). Speaker made the […]

"Dog that hunts invasive 'sea vomit' honoured as animal of the year" https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvwy761zyx7eo

Dog that hunts invasive sea creature named animal of the year

Sgiath is thought to be the UK's first sea squirt-hunting dog and has been trained to sniff out the marine pest.

bbc.com

Great work by https://bsky.app/profile/pablovarase.bsky.social showing that experiencing changes in wealth can influence decisions more than the amount of wealth […]

"We show that feeling devalued is the most gendered experience reported by [academics] ... the accumulation of these experiences may drive the increased rate of gendered attrition among late-career faculty." https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/5/10/pgag306/8907487?login=false More […]

Mein größtes Learning beim #FediLabDay: dass die für Social Media zuständigen Bereiche sehr auf Kennzahlen orientiert sind. Einerseits wollen sie ihren Aufwand rechtfertigen. Andererseits ist fest verankert, dass die Angebote "funktionieren" müssen, um weiter […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Smart critters! https://science.ubc.ca/news/2026-03/raccoons-solve-puzzles-fun-it-new-study-finds

Raccoons solve puzzles for the fun of it, new study finds

A new UBC study in Animal Behaviour suggests raccoons may not just be opportunistic—they may be genuinely curious.

science.ubc.ca

New #paper out in #CommunicationsPsychology #SPREAD, a #framework and #OpenSource #R #toolbox to quantify #BehaviouralContagion "SPREAD provides a permutation-based, latency-resolved, and socially structure-sensitive framework for quantifying behavioural contagion in event-based interaction […]

The 2026 Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (@sortee) #Conference will take place virtually on 13th October across time zones. Register here: https://events.humanitix.com/sortee-conference-2026 Program: https://conf-sortee.shinyapps.io/2026-program-app/

"The Fieldwork Repo" - where team-based fieldworkers in the social sciences can find and share documentation examples (health & safety protocols, codes of conduct, feedback forms) https://osf.io/4h7bu/overview For more details see: https://bsky.app/profile/sheinalew.bsky.social/post/3mwqg3bt4yk2i

"The super-man is not to be found as an individual but as a well-developed human society," concluded Scott and Fuller - based on insights from massive 1940s dog study https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20261001-the-forgotten-1940s-experiment-that-tried-and-failed-to-create-a-super-dog

How a 1940s US experiment tried, and failed, to create a 'super dog'

In 1940s Maine, a group of scientists built the School for Dogs, a massive facility to breed a "super-dog". Things didn't go as planned.

bbc.com

Update. #arXiv just took a further step to limit the volume of #AI slop. arXiv calls them "low-value" submissions. https://blog.arxiv.org/2026/10/01/updated-rate-limit-policy/ "As of October 1st, 2026, arXiv is instituting an updated rate limiting policy across all submitters and categories as […]

Yoga bears to resting owl face: 10 of the funniest animal photos of 2026 https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20261002-10-of-the-funniest-animal-photos-of-2026 I think these make us see how much other animals are can be just like us

Yoga bears to resting owl face: 10 of the funniest animal photos of 2026

From a fitness-obsessed bear to a rather rude orangutan, here are 10 of the most amusing photos of the animal kingdom this year.

bbc.com

go birding! "people don’t make that immediate connection between their bodies and the natural world. There’s so much research that shows just how beneficial it is for our bodies to spend time in nature.” […]

This is a great piece about animal communication research, with experts in the field largely explaining why they don’t use AI. Bonus: includes audio clips of dolphin whistles and elephant rumbles www.theguardian.com/technology/n...

Using AI to ‘talk to animals’ might make us feel clever – but what, if anything, does it do for them?

As animal behaviorists increasingly use AI in their research, they grapple with how to wield the technology responsibly

theguardian.com

We had an article published today in the open science journal #PeerJ about my method for recording roadkill. I've been mapping and counting roadkill along my bike commute to work since 2003. Our paper describes how I now do it using a smart phone (I started with pen and paper). It includes some […]