Kākāpō rising: 90 chicks swell population of the world’s heaviest parrot

Kākāpō rising: 90 chicks swell population of the world’s heaviest parrot

Critically endangered New Zealand bird enjoys record breeding season triggered by mass fruiting of native tree, pushing its numbers to 325 The population of the world’s heaviest parrot, the kākāpō, has surpassed 300 birds for the first time in 75 years, after a record breeding season triggered by the mass fruiting of a native New Zealand tree. Ninety chicks were officially added to the population of the critically endangered birds on 1 September, pushing the total to 325 – a record high since recovery efforts began. Continue reading...

theguardian.com

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, according to a paper in Nature. go.nature.com/4x4mbI6 #medsky 🧬🧪

Avocados come in 2 varieties - A-types start each day female and switch to male midday. B-types do the reverse. In work just published from the last chapter of my PhD, we show this system evolved 40+million yrs ago and is regulated by alleles of 1 transcription factor www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Balanced polymorphism in a floral transcription factor underlies the ancient rhythm of daily sex alternation in avocado | PNAS

In avocado and certain wild relatives in Lauraceae, a highly synchronized daily rhythm of floral sex timing promotes cross-pollination between two ...

pnas.org

An important paper about protecting science from political interference. Europe needs to defend its science against the kind of attacks unfurling in the US. By Martin McKee, Christina Pagel & Tiago Correia in the European Journal of Public Health: academic.oup.com/eurpub/artic...

Europe must learn from America’s assault on science

In June 2026, several prominent diabetes researchers, including Steven Kahn, editor-in-chief of Diabetes Care, were removed by police from the annual meeti

academic.oup.com

academic.oup.com/genetics/art...

Estimating recombination using only the allele frequency spectrum

Abstract. Standard methods for estimating the population recombination parameter, ρ, are dependent on sampling individual genotypes and calculating various

academic.oup.com

Come and work with us in Oxford!

Ana Ignatieva@anaignatieva.bsky.social · 6mo ago

We (with @yanwong.bsky.social) are advertising a 3 year postdoc position for a project on ARG inference and methods! Based at Oxford stats. Closing date noon 7 April, full details at my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

We (with @yanwong.bsky.social) are advertising a 3 year postdoc position for a project on ARG inference and methods! Based at Oxford stats. Closing date noon 7 April, full details at my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

Two post-doc post in ARG space and loads of internal and external collaboration Postdoctoral Research Associate in quantitative genomics elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid... Postdoctoral Research Associate in quantitative genetics and breeding elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

🧬 Just out in Bioinformatics Advances: “tskit arg visualizer: Interactive plotting of ancestral recombination graphs.”  Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1093/bioadv/vbaf302 Authors include: @kitchensjn.bsky.social, @yanwong.bsky.social

Applications for the Genetics Society Summer Studentship Grants are open! If you’re an undergrad itching to dive into real research, this is your doorway into the lab. More information here: genetics.org.uk/grants/summe...

#OnThisDay in 1859, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was first published. Much of the original manuscript was used as scrap paper by Darwin's children. On the back of this painting of a house is an original manuscript page from Origin! #CambridgeUniversityLibrary (DAR 185)

These weasels have locally adapted their winter coats to varying snow cover thanks to a million-year-old mutation 🌿 buff.ly/TnOfYWt

Okay, here are some first reflections on Watson. Watson's life is a tragedy, really of Shakespearean proportions. He did not, as most bios will tell you, do one great thing when he was young and then collect laurels for it for the next 60 years. His career arc was unlike any in science.

Full OA paper here: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Confounding fuels misinterpretation in human genetics | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

The scientific literature has seen a resurgence of interest in genetic influences on human behaviour and socioeconomic outcomes. Such studies face the central difficulty of distinguishing possible cau...

royalsocietypublishing.org

On the event of James Watson's death, I highly recommend this 2023 commentary from @matthewcobb.bsky.social and Nathaniel Comfort with crucial new insights into the discovery of the double helix. (And also check out Cobb's brand new biography of Francis Crick) www.nature.com/articles/d41...

What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure

Franklin was no victim in how the DNA double helix was solved. An overlooked letter and an unpublished news article, both written in 1953, reveal that she was an equal player.

nature.com

arXiv will no longer accept review articles and position papers unless they have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review. This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month. Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.

Latest post on how to win at 20 questions, from penguins and probability to entropy and AI: kucharski.substack.com/p/are-you-as...

Are you asking the right questions?

What lions can tell us about entropy and AI

kucharski.substack.com

The end of an era: the Tree of Life Web Project is going dark after 3 decades. Anyone interested in communicating phylogeny online should read David's account of goals, history, and future. @bembidion.bsky.social subulatepalpomere.com/2025/11/02/t...

The Passing of the Tree of Life Web Project

The Tree of Life Web Project began its journey almost 40 years ago, and was formally announced in early 1996. It has served thousands of pages of information about the evolutionary tree of life and…

subulatepalpomere.com

Excited to share our new preprint for the tskit_arg_visualizer Python package! ARGs can sometimes feel like a black box, so @yanwong.bsky.social and I have been developing a method to programmatically drawing these graphs. 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2508.03958 1/6

tskit_arg_visualizer: interactive plotting of ancestral recombination graphs

Summary: Ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs) are a complete representation of the genetic relationships between recombining lineages and are of central importance in population genetics. Recent brea...

arxiv.org

A study in Nature Ecology & Evolution identifies a bacterial species as a cause of sea star wasting disease, which has been responsible for billions of sea star deaths since 2013 and widespread loss of kelp habitats. go.nature.com/46I4kx2 🌊 🧪

I am super happy to see our dog rose's paper featuring the cover of the July 3rd issue of @nature.com read more here: tinyurl.com/dog-rose

The tragic landslide in Blatten gives me the excuse to tell you the story of how we found out Ice Ages existed. It's a cool story and the most important bit is rather similar to what's happening now.

Melaine Le Roy@subfossilguy.bsky.social · last yr.

Aerial view westward over the Blatten deposit and the newly formed lake upstream! 🧊🌊 📷Via Christian Petit/Linkedin

Join us for our Anniversary Day and hear from: Prof Josephine Pemberton (Genetics Society Medal) Prof Kathy Niakan (Mary Lyon Medal) Prof Gregory Radick (Haldane Lecture) Prof Richard Durbin (Genomics keynote) Rosie Parkin & Eldrian Tho (Student talks) Registration: genetics.org.uk/events/genet...

A paper in Nature reports the discovery of fossilized claw prints thought to belong to an amniote on a slab of rock from Australia dated to about 356 million years ago, suggesting that the origin of amniotes is earlier than expected. go.nature.com/4jm5XTP #Paleosky 🧪

➡️ This is another situation where we truly need public support. Please reach out and speak up - before it is too late.

"C'est du sabotage" Le président américain a licencié 800 scientifiques de la NOOA. La directrice du programme sur l'acidification de l'océan mise à la porte sans ménagement. Comme les chercheurs qui surveillent les alertes tsunami... "C'est de l'obscurantisme" www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/...

Un vent de panique sur les sciences du climat

C'est une nouvelle conséquence de la politique de Donald Trump. Les sciences du climat ont froid dans le dos. On savait le président américain climato-sceptique, mais désormais il franchit une nouvell...

radiofrance.fr

We ( @zeniabaek.bsky.social @moicoll.bsky.social and @asgerhobolth.bsky.social ) present a new cool way to visualize the optimal trade off for hmm decoding called Artemis plots! arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15156 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A complete and dynamic tree of birds - out today in PNAS! Teamwork with @eliotmiller.bsky.social and others at @birdsoftheworld.bsky.social and Open Tree of Life to put together current relationships across all birds. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

This is a very cool article. They did T2T (high depth, low error) sequencing on genomes from FOUR generations of a family. 🧵 "Human de novo mutation rates from a four-generation pedigree reference" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Human de novo mutation rates from a four-generation pedigree reference - Nature

Analysis of more than 95% of each diploid human genome of a four-generation, twenty-eight-member family using five complementary short-read and long-read sequencing technologies provides a truth set t...

nature.com

New preprint from Luke Snell from GSTT, Suzanne Pickering in my lab and Rui Galao, my colleague at KCL. Here we examine in detail the evolution of the SARS CoV-2 spike in persistent infections, and essentially catch a potential variant in the act of developing. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Antibody escape drives emergence of diverse spike haplotypes resembling variants of concern in persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections

Evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in long-term persistent infections is hypothesised to be a major source of variants of concern (VOC). However, the linkage of intra-host variants into haplotypes that reflect v...

biorxiv.org