I love this research so much!!

Jeff Groh@jeffgroh.bsky.social · last wk.

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/...

AIPAC spent the largest amount of money they've ever spent on a race and lost. Their dominance in US politics stemmed not only from the actual money they spent, but on the fear that they *could* spend money to bury someone. That's now been decisively refuted. The era of AIPAC dominance is over.

I do science to serve humanity, not my country. But even if I were selfishly motivated to serve the USA only, it wouldn't change any of my practice, because international collaboration is simply how science works. Zero universities should respond to this letter.

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2d ago

While at least this letter doesn't get into definitions of biological sex, the overreach is extraordinary. Here's the last of seven demands, echoing Trump's absurdly narrow instrumentalist view of the world and the same inexplicably zero-sum logic that got into the tariff mess we're now suffering.

A shocking number of people believe, with zero evidence, that Israel is behind Moroccan migrants into Spain, which is just the Great Replacement conspiracy. Meanwhile, US Jewish orgs have declared war on Mamdani for accurately describing Netanyahu as a war criminal. www.haaretz.com/world-news/e...

Israel's fault? The conspiracy theory surrounding Spain's Ceuta border crossings

About 60,000 migrants crossing into Spain's North African enclave of Ceuta triggered conspiracy theories from across the political spectrum: Israel and the United States unleashed them in a bid to pun...

haaretz.com

Would anyone from the Reasonable Concern crowd like to Just Ask Questions about this?

Gillian Branstetter@gbbranstetter.bsky.social · 2d ago

An initiative on the ballot in Washington state in November would require all athletes seeking to play girl's sports from kindergarten to high school to undergo "genetic screening, a testosterone-levels test, or an examination of their reproductive anatomy" before they can play

I'm burnt out of discussing "AI". I don't care for the press releases from big companies. I hate having to comment immediately. I dislike "hot takes". I'm worried we, as scientists, are losing touch with scientific values. We've become customers, salivating at ads marketed to investors. 1/15

Canadian researchers found that 97 percent of youth who seek treatment for gender dysphoria still identify as trans years later.

New study finds Canadian trans youth rarely detransition | Xtra Magazine

A group of Canadian researchers found that 97 percent of youth who seek treatment for gender dysphoria still identify as trans years later

xtramagazine.com

IMPACT: that company that was offering to buy books for AI companies’ training data — and probably destroy them in the process — says it will no longer offer this service following 404 Media’s exposure of it www.404media.co/ai-company-t...

Company Offering Printed Books to Train AI Stops After 404 Media Coverage

Citing backlash, ISBNdb removed its webpages about training AI, denied ever buying, scanning, or selling a book for AI training, and said the site was a "test of market interest."

404media.co

I am thrilled to share that the biology dept at Hamilton College is hiring a TT Evolutionary Ecologist to start in fall of 2027! This position would teach an upper level Evolution lect/lab, a section of Bio-100, rotate through our 200-level Eco/Evo course, and a seminar. apply.interfolio.com/190184

Pls share. Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences - Genetics/Genomics at Smith College. apply.interfolio.com/190342

your apartment, the sport of basketball, and the Republic of Korea are all social constructs. mere recognition of this fact does not actually make the question of whether you are standing in your own apartment, playing basketball, or a Korean national up in the air until settled by op ed editors

Good-faith concern on this issue would be going, "hmm, professional sports leagues should probably have some standards in place to ensure trans competitors aren't getting an unfair advantage," googling for 5 minutes, realizing every sports league already has those standards and dropping it.

Rodger Sherman@rodger.bsky.social · 6d ago

i don't believe anyone has "good-faith" concerns about trans women in sports in 2026. there's been too much time to hear the actual evidence, the actual people affected, and the role the debate plays in attempts to purge trans people from American life. anybody picking that side has made a choice

We're now snatching Fulbright scholars from airports and throwing them in indefinite detention

Baltimore Banner@thebaltimorebanner.com · 6d ago

ICE detains Hopkins public health researcher as agency expands airport arrests

Some avocados are female in the morning and male in the afternoon, while others are on the opposite schedule. This helps them avoid self-pollination. How do they do it? A @ucdavis.bsky.social study explains. www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/st...

Study Reveals How Avocados Reverse Sexes Throughout the Day

Some avocados are female in the morning and male in the afternoon, while others are on the opposite schedule. How avocados do this has been unclear — until now, thanks to a UC Davis study.

ucdavis.edu

“Trump has rejected disaster aid for Democratic-run states at the highest rate in the 47-year history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.” Right now people in blue states are basically paying federal taxes as if they’re colonized territories of red states. www.politico.com/news/2026/03...

"Today’s biggest AI startups make no shortage of bold promises. Yet a new preprint suggests many of these firms barely participate in one of science’s most fundamental practices: publicly documenting discoveries in scientific literature so other researchers can evaluate and build on them"

AI’s top startups are barely publishing their research

More than half of AI “unicorns” have never published a paper or preprint

science.org

This is an important point!

Florence Ashley@floralashes.bsky.social · last wk.

I feel like the essentialization of Israelis as the pinnacle of colonization and cultural theft by people who are overwhelmingly white Americans functions to displace their own responsibility for colonialism and cultural theft.

Reputation holds cooperation together - but not at the scale of global problems. See also "Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation" w/ Joe Henrich: 6/6

Michael Muthukrishna (@mmuthukrishna) on X

🚨New paper on "The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation" in Annual Review of Psychology w/ @JoHenrich. Many mechanisms have been proposed to explain human cooperation. How well do they expl

x.com

🚨 PNAS paper: "Indirect reciprocity undermines indirect reciprocity destabilizing large-scale cooperation" w/ Eric Schnell How do we achieve global cooperation on climate or conflict reduction? The problem isn't selfishness as much as it is cooperation itself - at a smaller scale. 1/

Any probability theory people out there: For a discrete-time Markov chain with states X^t, it is useful to define the operator \Delta on functions f defined by \Delta f(x) = E[f(X^{t+1}) - f(X^t) | X^t = x] In words, \Delta f(x) is expected change in f's value when current state is x. 1/2

Under what conditions can the evolutionary interests of a gene differ from those of their host organism? Very cool conceptual/mathematical synthesis here!

Gaurav Athreya@gauravathreya.bsky.social · last wk.

wanna read the latest overview of “internal evolutionary conflicts” — scenarios where genes spread despite being organism-deleterious? and wanna learn how to model them? look at our new preprint! we introduce unifying ideas, and try hard to write accessibly. small 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Finally posted an ad for the postdoc position on my new NSF-funded project—come help build a new method to study plants' responses to environmental variation in space and over time, and figure out interesting ways to use it! Apply by 23 August to ensure consideration. Details: buff.ly/qTvaqvD

Read this important perspective article in the July issue of #GENETICS, where @joannamasel.bsky.social and the team review a variety of population genetics models and corresponding fitness operationalizations, their motivation, and simplify assumptions. 🔗 buff.ly/t3dyx0V

Time travel film in which late Wittgenstein goes back in time to kill the early Wittgenstein and ends up saving philosophy.

Big scoop: The solar permitting freeze is so bad a renewables developer — Clearway — asked Trump if they can swap an unpermitted solar farm in Nevada for a data center and gas power plant instead. My latest for @heatmap.news

Scoop: Clearway Asks Trump to Swap Solar Farm for Data Center and Gas Plant

The large renewables developer changes tack “in response to federal energy objectives.”

heatmap.news

Update: the relationship between Shannon entropy and time to fixation does indeed scale to any number of alleles. Thorough investigation here: www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/14...

Ben Allen@evodynamics.bsky.social · last wk.

That is, suppose the two alleles have initial proportions p and 1-p. Then t_fix = (effective pop size) * H(p) where H(p) = - p ln p - (1-p) ln (1-p) is Shannon entropy of initial distribution. Idk if this holds for n≥3 alleles, but it would be a real shame if it didn't!

TIL that in a large well-mixed population undergoing neutral drift between two alleles at a single locus, the expected time until one allele reaches fixation is proportional to the Shannon entropy of the initial distribution!

The single most salient fact about AI is the investment bubble, not the technical characteristics of chatbots or recent advances in statistical inference. 9/

Survivors of US boat strikes allege - with evidence - they were kidnapped and tortured for days by the US military. The prosecutor investigating the claims was just assassinated.

Digital Warrior - Combat Disinfo@digitalwarrior.bsky.social · 2w ago

2/ Her full name was Gloria Alexandra Bravo Cedeno. On June 14 in Manta, a hitman on a motorcycle fired five shots, killing her and her sister in broad daylight. Full story: www.dropsitenews.com/p/prosecutor...

To analyze this question from an evolutionary perspective, let us first apply the standard assumptions of weak selection and additivity of fitness costs...

Ehud@duhe.bsky.social · 2w ago

You are wandering the desert for days without water. You are close to giving up. A genie appears: “You can get a glass of water now, or flip a coin for an even chance of getting a swimming pool or getting nothing. Think carefully!” You turn to bluesky for help deciding. You die of thirst.