We're seeking article proposals to our cross-journal Special Feature 🔎 If you're interested in using multispecies health, agriculture, or public health to further disease ecology through a One Health lens, then we'd love to hear from you! 🩺 👇 besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/...

Sehr krass: Bisher dachte man immer, dass v.a. tierische Produkte (Fette) die Evolution des menschlichen Gehirns vorangetrieben hätten... Ein "analytical review" in @science.org zeigt jetzt aber: ...

A central role for dietary sugars in human evolution

What did our ancestors eat? Current understanding of diet in human evolution is predicated on abundant animal foods and mastery of fire, both unlikely for early hominins. Using multiple lines of evide...

science.org

Very interesting paper on smallpox sequences from when they were ibtrocuced to South America, capturing the complex evolutionary forces at play in the pathogen city of this virus. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The genomic identity of early smallpox in South America

Smallpox was a major driver of population collapse in the Americas after European contact, yet the genetic identity of the causal strains remains unknown. Here, we report the first ancient smallpox ge...

science.org

Delighted to share the work from Stefan Brändel, who dedicated 3 years to collect thousands of bat feces in #Panama. Here we analysed a small part of this looking at the effect of Astrovirus infections on the #microbiome of one bat species link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Astrovirus infection alters gut microbial communities in a widespread neotropical bat across human-modified landscapes - BMC Microbiology

Astroviruses are becoming a growing concern in public and veterinary health. In humans, astrovirus infections can cause severe diarrhea and may lead to neuropathological encephalitis, whereas in wildl...

link.springer.com

I did an interview on the MVIF podcast with @pamferretti.bsky.social about wild animal microbiomes, for anyone interested! 🦠🧬

Microbiome Virtual International Forum@microbiomevif.bsky.social · last mo.

#MVIFconversations podcast episode 6 with @elinvidevall.bsky.social is OUT! ▶️ Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/39MK... ▶️ Amazon music: music.amazon.com/podcasts/81c... ▶️ Apple Music: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... ▶️ YouTube podcast: youtu.be/_wQ4AxWoPTc 1/2

5 Jahre #IchBinHanna. Alle sind sich inzwischen einig, dass sich grundlegend was ändern muss. Zig konstruktive Vorschläge. Und dann das: Der neue Referentenentwurf fürs #WissZeitVG ist 1 Witz. Und zwar 1 ganz schlechter. Meine Einordnung ⬇️ #IchBinHanna @drkeichhorn.bsky.social @kubon.bsky.social

Die Zeiten sind ernst und die deutsche Wissenschaft sollte sich ihnen gezielt stellen. Der Aufruf "Wissenschaft gegen Faschismus", schlägt vor, vom 1.-7. Juni explizite Beschäftigung mit Faschismus und Faschisierung in Lehre und Forschung einzubauen. Machen wir mit! wissenschaft-gegen-faschismus.de

How every layer of science's "self-correcting machinery" failed when Iva Veseli and I simply wanted to reproduce the findings of a high-profile study on gut microbiome and autism: merenlab.org/2026/04/15/u...

Unfalsifiable by Design: A Year of Trying and Failing to Reproduce a Human Microbiome and Autism Study

The myth of open data, reproducibility, responsibility, and accountability in science, and your role in it

merenlab.org

Sehr spannend zu lesen und ich kann hier nur zustimmen. Mut zu neuen Regeln für die Nachwuchsförderung und mehr Geld um Forschung und Bildungsstrukturen zu verbessern ist gefragt und das darf nicht auf Kosten der Chancengleichheit gehen.

Jan-Martin Wiarda@jmwiarda.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Die trügerische Sehnsucht nach dem "Kern" der Wissenschaft Die Kritik an zu viel Normativität und gesellschaftlichem Engagement in der Wissenschaft ist doppelt falsch. Ein Essay. Im Wiarda-Blog: www.jmwiarda.de/blog/2026/04...

Congratulations to Tobias Richter - now Dr. Richter - who successfully completed his phd at TUM @edfm-tum.bsky.social! Thanks for your hard work, Tobi, which led to these three very nice papers: doi.org/10.1038/s420... doi.org/10.1111/1365... doi.org/10.1111/ddi....

@regierungbw.bsky.social @bundestag.de @gruene-bundestag.de was hindert uns eigentlich in der momentan globalen Lage mit grüner #Energie durchzustarten? Nur der Wille! Jetzt grün und weg vom Öl!

Dominik Melville@ecoevodom.bsky.social · 5mo ago

@regierungbw.bsky.social @bundestag.de @gruene.de ist die Ölkrise nicht der perfekte Zeitpunkt, #Autofreie Sonntage und Erneuerung des 9-Euro #Deutschlandtickets wieder ins Gespräch zu bringen? #greenerisbetter

New paper in mSystems! 🧵 - how much of your metagenome is actually bacterial/archaeal DNA? For many samples, nobody knows. We built SingleM prokaryotic_fraction (SPF) to answer this, then ran it on >100,000 public metagenomes. 🧬🖥️🦠 Here's what we found 👇 doi.org/10.1128/msystems.01062-25

Job 🚨 Please share!! We have a teaching track faculty opening in our undergraduate behavioral biology program at Johns Hopkins University Teaching animal behavior plus self-developed courses facultyjobs.jhu.edu/Positions/De... @jhu.edu @jhuartssciences.bsky.social

Krass: Robert Habeck hat einfach schon 2024 bei Maybrit Illner dem späteren Kanzler Friedrich Merz eine präzise Verkehrsprognose für die Straße von Hormus geliefert und was es für Folgen haben wird. Merz wollte nicht hören. Jetzt haben wir den Salat!

The “writing is thinking” posting will continue until a single freaking person in Silicon Valley has figured this out

Sean Marotta@smmarotta.bsky.social · 5mo ago

One thing that AI evangelists seem to assume, particularly legal AI evangelists assume, is that the thinking and analysis is quick, and the writing is just tedious busywork that slows us down. But the writing IS the thinking and analysis. You work out the thinking and analysis by writing it down.

@regierungbw.bsky.social @bundestag.de @gruene.de ist die Ölkrise nicht der perfekte Zeitpunkt, #Autofreie Sonntage und Erneuerung des 9-Euro #Deutschlandtickets wieder ins Gespräch zu bringen? #greenerisbetter

Join @berasymbionts.bsky.social , @tatsuyanobori.bsky.social and us for a postdoc on the remarkable developmental biology of symbiosis! Applications are due March 25th 🪲🦠 @johninnescentre.bsky.social @thesainsburylab.bsky.social

John Innes Centre@johninnescentre.bsky.social · 5mo ago

VACANCY - We’re searching for a Postdoctoral Researcher to join the newly appointed group of Dr @hassansalem.bsky.social, to explore the developmental biology of host-microbe symbiosis www.jic.ac.uk/vacancies/po... Deadline - 25 March 2026 Salary - £37,500 - £45,350 Contract - 3 years, full-time

It’s the first time a frog—or any amphibian—has been observed pollinating a plant, researchers reported in 2023. Learn more on #WorldWildlifeDay: https://scim.ag/4riUU1G

My David Attenborough moment … #science #meerkat

Fieldwork in the Kalahari following #meerkats and yellow #mongooses (if you can spot them) - total bliss

When pets devour biodiversity. My new article on the European edition of @uk.theconversation.com about the impacts of pet-wildlife interactions and the opportunities for their legal regulation in the EU. theconversation.com/our-pets-are.... Related paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Great work which I was looking forward to reading the final print since the preprint dropped! Well done to everyone involved

Michael Hiller@hillermich.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Happy to share that our work with Ekaterina Osipova, @maggiemcko.bsky.social, Tim Sackton, Maude Baldwin & fantastic collaborators on convergent and lineage-specific genomic adaptations in sugar-feeding birds is published in Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/.... While high sugar intake ...

Heading to the Kalahari Research Centre to spend time in the field with yellow mongooses and meerkats, catch up with collaborators, and carve out space to #think about the bigger picture. #Fieldwork, #ideas, and moonshoot #science — exactly where I need to be. Photo Credit: Sofia Forss

Super happy that the AllTheBacteria hypothetical proteins are now in AFDB - hopefully we can start to understand the function of some of them at least 😁

EMBL-EBI@ebi.embl.org · 6mo ago

The AlphaFold Database, jointly developed with Google DeepMind, now contains datasets from specialist communities. This includes rich datasets for microbes, viruses & parasites associated with tropical diseases. Explore the new datasets in the AlphaFold Database. www.ebi.ac.uk/about/news/u...

#DarwinDay The "Origin of Species" is deeply enriched with a symbiotic lens. Here's a 15 minute seminar from @BIRS_Math on 25 yesrs of peeling back two layers of speciation to show reproductive and gut microbes have agency in the formation of new host species. youtu.be/DBlkt8UXc_8?...

Seth Bordenstein: Darwin's Blindspot: The Symbiotic Basis of Speciation

YouTube video by Dr. Seth Bordenstein

youtu.be

Finding the natural reservoir for a pathogen and its transmission chain to humans is a great feat- well done @helmholtz-hioh.bsky.social and colleagues www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Transmission of MPXV from fire-footed rope squirrels to sooty mangabeys - Nature

An outbreak of MPXV in sooty mangabeys in Côte d’Ivoire was linked to MPXV-infected fire-footed rope squirrels, providing direct evidence of interspecies transmission and indicating risk for zoonotic ...

nature.com

This system is incredibly cool and provided another outstanding example of rigorous epidemiological science - congrats to all authors

Journal of Animal Ecology@animalecology.bsky.social · 6mo ago

🦇 "Seasonal disease outbreaks in wildlife are often attributed to birth pulses introducing susceptible juveniles. Our four-year study of Hendra virus in Australian flying foxes challenges this assumption for an important zoonotic virus" 📖 Read here! buff.ly/3oAtfrO

My first book, Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life, will be published by Yale University Press on 11 August (UK) and 8 September (US). Please help spread the word! 🙏 UK: yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300... @yalebooks.bsky.social 🏳️‍🌈📚🐵 US: yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300... @yalepress.bsky.social 🏳️‍⚧️ 🗃️🦋