A deep dive into the capacity for trees to physiologically adapt to drought reaches a sobering conclusion: Trees have little ability to change their inner hydraulic systems to accommodate increasing levels of drought as the climate changes. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/rcBR50ZFVIC

🎉 New paper (and data) on editorial & peer review at Science and Science Advances, two elite general science journals. With a wonderful team! @samzhang.bsky.social, @nicklaberge.bsky.social, Quinten and @aaronclauset.bsky.social. 1/ www.science.org/doi/full/10....

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Early-life sugar restriction causally reduces adult cancer incidence and slows biological aging | PNAS

Excess sugar consumption is implicated in multiple cancers through insulin resistance, chronic inflammation, and metabolic reprogramming, yet wheth...

pnas.org

It's been a real joy to return as a faculty member to my hometown and alma mater Cornell. This profile charts a bit of that journey - along with my thoughts on what punk rock and professing have in common, plus fun oldtime photos alumni.cornell.edu/cornellians/...

How Is Academia Like Punk Rock? Ask Cornell Prof David Rand ’04 - Cornellians | Cornell University

Back at his alma mater, he’s making headlines for groundbreaking research melding AI, psychology, economics, poli sci, and more

alumni.cornell.edu

Happy to share a new paper led by the terrific Anzhi Sheng. We find that allocation policies that promote cooperation tend to concentrate benefits among the well-connected. And so structured societies must weigh collective success against the inequality it generates. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper out in @currentbiology.bsky.social ! 🎉 Who drives disease transmission? The answer seems obvious: measure who releases or disperses the most parasites. But after dissecting transmission step by step, we found that’s often not the case. 👇 🧵 #EvoSky #IDSky www.cell.com/current-biol...

Transmission heterogeneity emerges from uncoupled parasite shedding and spreading

Silva et al. show that disease transmission emerges from multiple ecological bottlenecks rather than a single host trait. Separating parasite shedding from downstream infection success reveals why hos...

cell.com

What can we learn from disruptions of seasonal patterns of disease during the pandemic? A new paper by @michaelsieber.bsky.social in PLOS Global Public Health, journals.plos.org/globalpublic..., was featured in the German news such as @zeit.de or @spiegel.de - and may be of interest also here. 1/3

Shifts in seasonal timing of respiratory diseases and causes of death following a natural pandemic event

Seasonal respiratory infections typically surge within a limited time window, but what determines the exact timing within a given year is not well understood. Major causes of death show a similar seas...

journals.plos.org

Here's the third of the Otago lectures, this one on the peer review system and why it's becoming increasingly difficult to find reviewers.

Will anyone review this paper?: How incentives are imperiling peer review – Professor Carl Bergstrom

YouTube video by University of Otago - Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka

youtube.com

Why do societies rely on rigid moral rules? Don't lie. Keep your promises. Don't steal. We all recognize there are good reasons to make exceptions. So why are moral rules so often categorical? Our new paper proposes an answer. 🧵

My TEDxNewEngland talk is live and was selected for Editor's Pick - so honored! www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1_m...

Check out our latest article (and my first publication with my husband Jon!) here! link.growkudos.com/1p2bgkc5gqo

Conformity to popular, not average, opinions: Models, data, and evolution

A free platform for explaining your research in plain language, and managing how you communicate around it – so you can understand how best to increase its impact.

link.growkudos.com

1. A bit of evolutionary biology. I'm really intrigued by a new perspective piece from Steve Frank that explores connections between how natural selection creates systems that generalize and recent work in machine learning about the surprising capabilities of massively overparameterized systems.

Generalization as the great leap in evolvability: insights from machine learning

Abstract. Natural selection encodes learned information in the genome. Learned solutions may be tuned specifically to past challenges, failing in altered e

academic.oup.com

If you like multi-level selection, you may enjoy (models of) ageing. @kokkonut.bsky.social and I show that the mortality patterns generated by dem. senescence are formally equivalent to a multi-level selection process! arxiv.org/abs/2607.00262 Confused? So were we! A short explainer thread below

Demographic senescence as multi-level selection in miniature

Multi-level selection and senescence do not at first sight have much in common. Here, we demonstrate that the emergent mortality patterns generated by demographic senescence can be understood as the p...

arxiv.org

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

This Cell Feeds, Grows and Reproduces. And It’s Manmade.

From chemical building blocks, scientists have created synthetic cells that have most of the hallmarks of life.

nytimes.com

A new primer in @microbiologysociety.org on epidemic exponential growth with @bnashby.bsky.social @chadisaadroy.bsky.social and Dan Coombs: www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour... Fun collaboration!

Microbial Primer: Understanding the exponential growth of epidemics

Microbiology Society journals contain high-quality research papers and topical review articles. We are a not-for-profit publisher and we support and invest in the microbiology community, to the benefi...

microbiologyresearch.org

Our scoping review "Emerging frontiers in infectious disease modelling: reassessing the data-driven feedback loop between human behaviour and disease dynamics" is out now! From a group of epidemiologists, behavioural scientists, & mathematicians. royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...

Emerging frontiers in infectious disease modelling: reassessing the data-driven feedback loop between human behaviour and disease dynamics

Abstract. Mathematical models have produced important insights into the relationships between disease transmission, risk perception, and human behaviour. H

royalsocietypublishing.org

The dominant model of opinion dynamics has long assumed that people average all views, outliers included. In a new paper, SFI's Kaleda Denton and colleagues test a different model, based on the most popular opinion, against real-world data and find it consistently beats DeGroot averaging.

Model redefining conformity excels against real-world data

In a new paper in PNAS, SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Kaleda Denton, SFI External Faculty Fellow, and Science Board Fellow Marcus Feldman, and independent researcher Jonathan F. Johannemann offer...

santafe.edu

"The increasing involvement of technology companies in mathematical research raises the risk that research questions may come to be prioritized because of their amenability to automated mathematics, rather than expert judgment of their deeper significance."

Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics

This declaration calls for action to address the challenges posed by the use of artificial intelligence within mathematics research.

leidendeclaration.ai

Amazon and eBay give star ratings for seller trustworthiness — but should we trust eBay? Institutions that publicize reputations, from e-commerce to religious authorities, benefit from user participation. Hiro Okabe studied how such institutions will behave. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Globally, genomic data sharing has improved greatly over the past year for the highly pathogenic avian flu H5N1. Some great news and a major concern... virological.org/t/timely-h5n...

Timely H5N1 sequence data now provided by many – but not all – countries

Sarah Otto* * Department of Zoology & Biodiversity Research Centre, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver BC Canada V6T 1Z4. E-mail: otto@zoology.ubc.ca A year ago, we raised concerns about ...

virological.org

So great to see @usbumer1's cool story out at @commsbio.nature.com! Funding thanks DBT and India Alliance. Umer et al have found a role for the neuropeptide FLP-15 in worm foraging. Thanks to all authors and our collaborators @monikakscholz.bsky.social lab. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

We're recruiting! We're looking for two graduate students to join us at UBC in Vancouver. Fully funded and open to global applicants, with flexible start-date. Topics include theory, bioinformatics, and microbiology. More details: asherleeks.com/apply #socialviruses #evosky #virosky 🧪

Phil Trans Roy Soc B theme issue ‘The evolution of collective intelligence’ is out! royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

Volume 381 Issue 1948 | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B | The Royal Society

Influential themed journal issues across the life sciences.

royalsocietypublishing.org

Honoured to have been involved in this collaboration, led by the dream team of Kylee Hoffman and @ayesha-mahmud.bsky.social

Waggoner Lab@labwaggoner.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Childhood exposure to different influenza strains shapes the age-profile of seasonal influenza mortality www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social

How many teachers are enough? Zero? Hirotaka Goto and I analyze the optimal allocation of dedicated teachers in a population. @carlbergstrom.com www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

This video was a complete joy to make. Here's a short preview, but next time you're looking to sit down for 45 minutes of math and art, take a look at the full version on YouTube: youtu.be/ldxFjLJ3rVY

Very excited to share our latest article in Trends in Microbiology, with @ninan-abraham.bsky.social, @chilbe.bsky.social, @ayesha-mahmud.bsky.social, and Arne Traulsen! We highlight the importance of disentangling these interactions and suggest potential paths forwards

Trends in Microbiology@cp-trendsmicrobiol.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Interactions between immuno-epidemiology and individual decision-making for nonpharmaceutical interventions

Here is a blog post on our recently published paper on collective movement with stopping: arshednabeel.github.io/blog/flockin... (Short thread follows)

Our new study shows that it is not just county‑level MMR coverage but the spatial clustering of unvaccinated kids that separates a contained outbreak in TX (414 cases) from sustained transmission in SC (>900 cases, with ~5.7x higher local susceptible density) www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6... #measles

Spatial Clustering of School Susceptibles Drives Divergent US Measles Outbreaks

Spatial Clustering of School Susceptibles Drives Divergent US Measles Outbreaks ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. ### Funding Statement Atkinson See...

medrxiv.org

A nice collaboration from post-docs in my lab 😊 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... @jingdi.bsky.social @luismsilva.bsky.social @paradyseb.bsky.social @molecularecolup.bsky.social

Integrating the Microbiome Into Infection Ecology and Evolution in Wild Animals

Parasites are a ubiquitous force in nature threatening wildlife populations and ecosystems. Interactions between hosts and their parasites are impacted by host-associated microbiomes, which are essen...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com