In a future where AI scientists run their own labs, Jonathon Keats and I argue they should learn from more than human minds. Our new essay in @nautil.us asks: What can ants, pigeons, and chimpanzees teach AI about doing better science? nautil.us/a-natural-so...

A Natural Solution to the Replication Crisis in Science - Nautilus

Dear scientists: Follow the ants

nautil.us

Boulder friends: if you're in town, come see Yasmine Meroz's talk on how plants sense, compute, and behave with no brain or nervous system! Thu 7/23, 2-3pm, JSCBB A104 @ CU Boulder. All welcome 🌻 @merozlab.bsky.social

Fireflies are best known for their glowing displays, but those flashes are also a communication system. Research from @oritpeleg.bsky.social's lab is helping uncover how these signals are coordinated across groups and how synchronized displays emerge. 🔗 Learn more: www.peleglab.com 📸 Nolan Bonnie

Fun to play a small part in this new work led by Tsevi Beatus and team: when the lights go off, honeybees simply stop flying and fall! (unlike flies and mosquitoes, which pull off smart maneuvers) Thanks to Richard Terrile in our lab for turning the lights off on bees, in the name of science 🐝🪰🦟

15 researchers from the United States and Canada have won awards in the second year of Scialog: Neurobiology and Changing Ecosystems, cosponsored with @allenphilanthro.bsky.social, the Frederick Gardner Cottrell Foundation, and @kavlifoundation.org.

2026 Scialog NCE Awards

Six cross-disciplinary projects to advance fundamental understanding of how neural systems adapt to today’s rapid environmental changes have won awards in the second year of Scialog: Neurobiology and ...

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I’m honored to join the Scouts of the Hypothesis Fund @hypothesisfund.bsky.social and help bring beautiful, hard-to-categorize, and easy-to-underestimate biological questions to the fore. Excited for this!

Hypothesis Fund@hypothesisfund.bsky.social · 5mo ago

🤩 We’re thrilled to announce 4 new Hypothesis Fund Scouts - congratulations and welcome to Orit Peleg, Kay Bidle, Denise Okafor, and Cigall Kadoch! Follow along today to learn more about each new Scout and join us in celebrating them! 1/

👋 Meet #HFScout Orit Peleg (@oritpeleg.bsky.social), trained as a physicist + computer scientist whose research combines theory, computation, experiments, & field biology to study how groups of organisms sense, decide, & build together, e.g. the fascinating collective behavior of honeybees🐝. 1/

Honeybee swarms do not come together and fall apart in the same way 🐝 In this new preprint led by Danielle Chase, we report how to trick swarms to repeatedly assemble and disassemble in front of our cameras, while tracking individual bees in 3D! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Some of you saw a preview of this result at my Cosyne talk last week. We may have had too much fun working on this worm-fly model 🤣🤓🤣 (The digital sphinx may be imagery, but the lessons are real.)

John Tuthill@tuthill.bsky.social · 6mo ago

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

How do fireflies synchronize their magical light shows? BioFrontiers Institute researcher Orit Peleg will present her findings on the mathematical rules behind firefly synchrony at the American Physical Society’s 2026 Global Physics Summit on March 16. #APSSummit26 https://bit.ly/4ru1L8e

In a South Carolina swamp, researchers uncover secrets of firefly synchrony

A new study shows how fireflies speed up or slow down their flashing to sync up with other insects, creating a beautiful and other-wordly light show.

bit.ly

In this amazing multidisciplinary collaboration, we report our early experience with the @openclaw-x.bsky.social ->

Timeline cleans with snowflake-sized baby lagoon jellyfish. . 🎥 jelliesfarm www.instagram.com/jelliesfarm?...

✨ New preprint from the lab on firefly synchronization, led by Owen Martin (freshly Dr. Martin!), with Nataliya Nechyporenko and Kaushik Jayaram. Our measured firefly phase-response curves reveal excitatory and inhibitory timing rules that facilitate population synchrony ✨ doi.org/10.64898/202...

⏰ Deadline extension for #EESBioOsc ⏰ You now have until 14 January to submit your abstract for the EMBO | EMBL Symposium 'Biological oscillators: rhythms and synchronisation across scales'! 👉 s.embl.org/ees26-04-bl

Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too! preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵 Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/9

Boulder friends: if you’re into animal behavior or vision, come to The Language of Light: Bioluminescence in the Deep Sea with Sönke Johnsen (Duke)! Fri Nov 14, 4-5:30 pm, Benson Earth Sciences Auditorium, Room 180. Reception 5:30-6:30 at the Earth Sciences & Map Library Free and open to all!

Boulder friends: if you’re into animal behavior or vision, come to The Language of Light: Bioluminescence in the Deep Sea with Sönke Johnsen (Duke)! Fri Nov 14, 4-5:30 pm, Benson Earth Sciences Auditorium, Room 180. Reception 5:30-6:30 at the Earth Sciences & Map Library Free and open to all!

I'm really looking forward to hosting this @metagov.bsky.social seminar on the governance of bees, fireflies, and plants with my colleage @oritpeleg.bsky.social: luma.com/pzbp4zq1

Seminar: Governance Among Plants & Insects with Dr. Orit Peleg · Zoom · Luma

Dr. Orit Peleg seeks to understand the behavior of disordered living systems by merging tools from physics, biology, engineering, and computer science. At the…

luma.com

#NetSI 's first-year PhD student Chethan Kavaraganahalli Prasanna co-authored a study with Univ. of Colorado Boulder featured in the NYT and published in PLOS Biology (shorturl.at/iHeXb)! www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/s...

Even on a Rough Construction Site, Honeybees Figure It Out

nytimes.com

How do #honeybees adapt their comb-building to different spatial constraints? A new study from @oritpeleg.bsky.social &co uses 3D printed panels and X-ray microscopy to reveal the existence of three distinct construction modes, from tilting cells to building complex 3D structures.🧪 plos.io/4n1g6Hs

Honeybees adapt to a range of comb cell sizes by merging, tilting, and layering their construction

Honeybees often need to build their comb under conditions that prevent a regular hexagonal lattice. This study uses 3D printed panels and X-ray microscopy to explore their adaptive process when differ...

plos.io

New paper in PLOS Biology: as we raise the difficulty of our 3D printed puzzles, bees keep landing on combs with ever stranger hexagonal order! 🐝 Led by the brilliant Golnar Gharooni Fard, in collaboration with CK Prasanna & FL Jiménez journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

More on collective behavior: Our new Annual Review of Biophysics piece - with the stellar Danielle Chase - explores how animals sense, share information, and make group decisions. In honeybees and beyond 🐝 www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

It was an honor to write this, but also great fun. A chance to look back at the classics, and think about the path forward. #Physics is a beautiful human endeavor. journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...

Emergence of Brains

This review traces how ideas from statistical physics evolved into foundational models of neural computation, shaping modern AI and culminating in the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.

journals.aps.org

New review in PRX Life, where we propose a tangibility scale for the physics of social interactions, and highlight a few tangible examples - from dead fish “swimming” to efficient schooling, warm penguin huddles, and dry ant rafts. Written with the brilliant Chantal Nguyen 🐟🐧🐜 tinyurl.com/naet5tdh

Fireflies are still generally declining, & light pollution is one big reason why, but a few species are also carrying on in places that are bathed in artificial light. Which is pretty wild! Featuring Sriram Murali's excellent photography! 🧪 www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/arti...

Fireflies are flourishing in places you wouldn't expect

Pesticides, habitat loss, and light pollution are threatening firefly populations worldwide, but even in urban areas, some lightning bugs continue to shine.

nationalgeographic.com

Nearly a century before the invention of the microscope and even longer before entomology became a field of research, Joris Hoefnagel (1542-1600) devoted himself to studying the natural world. He's thought to have created the first compendium of its kind.

The 16th-Century Artist Who Created the First Compendium of Insect Drawings

Before the invention of the microscope and the field of entomology emerged, Joris Hoefnagel devoted himself to the natural world.

thisiscolossal.com

📣 We're on the lookout for a creative postdoc with strong computational skills! Be the go-to person in the lab for building simple but powerful simulations that test wild ideas on biological rythems: from daily cycles of mussel groups at deep sea, to firefly flash synchronization! More info below👇

Help us record firefly flashes! 👇🙏

George Musser@georgemusser.com · last yr.

Do you have fireflies in your backyard? Biologist @oritpeleg.bsky.social is collecting data! #emergence docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Hello hello #complexity and #emergence people. I'm getting a complexity+emergence (broadly defined) starter pack going. I've focused on active accounts that often make original posts (not just reposts) and have at least a few thousand followers. Inclusion is not endorsement. go.bsky.app/BLuVyWj