Public communication of science would be more effective without billionaire tech bros & their ilk flooding the zone. There are crucial complex discussions to be had about both the promise & dangers of new genomic tools & tissue culture models. Instead we waste time debunking sensationalist nonsense.

Birdsongs give insight into evolution of vocal behaviour; global diversity may be key to develop unifying theories. @quentinbacquele.bsky.social & co studied song architecture in >3000 species, finding spatially varying equilibrium between environmental constraint & drive for complex communication.🧪

The global biogeography of passerine songs

Although bird songs are classic models for understanding the evolution of vocal communication, their global diversity has long made the development of a unifying framework challenging. By analyzing th...

science.org

“We uncovered a linguistic ‘golden age’ 3000 to 1000 years ago. Great loss of linguistic diversity did not begin with recent colonial expansion but as multinational empires first spread along with their languages, pathogens, & cultures.“ @damianblasi.bsky.social et al's new paper in @science.org. 👇🧪

The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene

Characterizing the factors that have shaped linguistic diversity is fundamental for understanding human history, culture, and cognition. In this study, we combined statistical and social computational...

science.org

Nature interviewed five artists from a variety of backgrounds about how to create engaging images that accurately convey scientific/medical concepts, & how they see the future, in light of AI developments. Insightful nuanced piece, with beautiful visuals from talented real-life human illustrators. 🧪

‘Good design takes mastery’: scientific illustrators sketch out AI’s future

Nature talks to five artists about their approaches to communicating science visually.

nature.com

“Bonferonni correction”, an invaluable method in #statistics, refers to the act of repeatedly correcting misspellings of the word Bonferroni at multiple places in a draft manuscript. #science #academia

Article in mainstream newspaper argues we should treat LLMs as moral patients, consider “wellbeing” of Claude, ChatGPT etc, ask how they feel, respect their preferences, make sure they’re not distressed, & somehow just somehow it’s not satire.

For molecular biologists planning a cinema trip to The Odyssey, you will be relieved to hear that unbalanced centrifuges do not make an appearance at any point in this epic film.

If only he'd been called UneventfulJaunteus, so much pain & suffering could have been avoided.

Our ability to speak involves remarkable feats of motor sequencing that most of us take completely for granted. The new issue of @science.org has a fascinating essay by Sergey Stavisky, covering his team's use of brain-computer interfaces to restore speech for people with neurological injuries. 🧠🗣️🧪👇

Regaining your voice

AI speech neuroprostheses can restore day-to-day communication after neurological injury

science.org

“The robot performed agile maneuvers through complex indoor obstacles & outdoor wild environments, including dynamic drop-down maneuvers reaching instantaneous peak speeds of 6 meters per second, with robust traversal of diverse obstacles: stairs, hurdles, stepping stones, gaps & fallen branches.”😲🧪

Agile perceptive multiskill locomotion for quadrupedal robots in the wild

A quadruped robot autonomously selects diverse motor skills for perceptive high-speed locomotion on unstructured wild terrains.

science.org

“Somewhere along the way, we've forgotten the computer is just a metaphor for the brain. A powerful metaphor but still a metaphor. We always get into trouble when we confuse a metaphor with the thing itself – the map with the territory.” Lucid piece by @anilseth.bsky.social on LLMs & consciousness.🧪

Once again we are told AI may be conscious – I study consciousness, and I have my doubts | Anil Seth

Despite Anthropic’s claims, Claude is no more likely to achieve sentience than a simulation of a weather system is likely to generate a real hurricane, says Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and compu...

theguardian.com

Think I'll keep doing science together with real people for the time being, if that's okay with you @nature.com.

Which ‘AI scientist’ suits your lab? A guide for the perplexed

General purpose AI tools for science, such as Claude Science, promise to accelerate research. But which is right for you?

nature.com

Amazing illustration of evolution in action. Andean leaf-eared mice occupy highest elevations of any known mammal but also live at sea level. Mice in harsh environment of high elevations have enhanced thermogenic capacity in hypoxia, increased mitochondrial capacity & ability to eat toxic plants!🐭🧪

Adaptation across an extreme elevational gradient in Andean leaf-eared mice, the world’s highest-dwelling mammal

Andean leaf-eared mice (Phyllotis vaccarum) live at the highest elevations of any mammal, and they also have the broadest elevational range, from sea level to mountain summits of >6700 meters. Highlan...

science.org

Huge thanks to Paul McCartney for our wonderful meeting last night, for the warm discussions about life, & for accompanying me on Let It Be. The experience was slightly marred by my dawning realisation, as the piano began to melt, that this was actually a dream. Nonetheless, a memory I will cherish.

Someone came up with a “humanizer” tool which modifies AI-written text to supposedly “match the author’s own voice”. Given the relentless onslaught of LLMs, I wonder if a typical scientist in the next generation will do enough actual writing/thinking to develop their own voice in the first place.😒🧪

‘Humanizer’ tool can erase signs of AI-written text — alarming scientists

Tool directs text-generation systems to remove constructions associated with artificial intelligence in research papers and grant proposals.

nature.com

25 years ago, we implicated rare variants of the FOXP2 gene in a severe speech disorder. I’ve spent much time stressing that FOXP2, while interesting, is not the mythical “gene for language”. Weirdly, on occasion I also need to explain why it’s not “proof of aliens”. Full disclosure in this 🧵. 1/n 🧪

Maybe we scientists could jointly agree as a community not to put out any new preprints or papers for (e.g.) one entire year, giving all of us time & space to thoroughly read the stuff that's already out there. [Nice dream.]

🧬 of 27 Neanderthals living <52.5kya, from sites in Belgium/France, incl high-coverage genome of a 45ky-old individual => new insight into population history of these ancient hominins & interactions with early modern humans. 🙌 @janetk.bsky.social @benmpeter.bsky.social @matejahajdi.bsky.social & co🧪

Genetic diversity of late Neanderthals in northwestern Europe - Nature

Genetic sequencing of multiple late Neanderthals living less than 52,500 years ago provides an overview of genetic diversity and demonstrates that even low-coverage nuclear genome data can increase re...

nature.com

“We use geometric morphometry to reconstruct the most complete Homo naledi endocast & find a unique combination of ancestral & modern human-like characteristics: a derived frontal lobe but ancestral size, morphology & cerebrocerebellar proportions.” @dizachster.bsky.social @johnhawks.net in BS&F: 💀🧪

Brain structure and function in Homo naledi - Brain Structure and Function

Endocasts are casts of the internal surface of skull bones created by the brain and surrounding tissues. These fossil phantoms provide the most direct evidence of the brains of extinct organisms, and ...

link.springer.com

Researchers recorded from single neurons across frontotemporal cortex in 8 awake individuals during natural speech. They show how activities of collections of cells can capture syntactic & semantic properties of words, & also dynamically incorporate sentence context to encode combinatorial info. 🗣️🧠🧪

Mapping the neuronal building blocks of human language with language models - Nature

Wide-scale recordings reveal neurons in&nbsp;the human brain that encode&nbsp;fundamental components of language such as&nbsp;the grammatical relationships between words, their parts of speech and the...

nature.com

“Not an attempt to make evolution cuddlier, but a corrective deeply informed by what we have learned since Darwin. Written with immense charm & passion, it is a paean to the wonders of nature & the value & urgency of preserving them.” @philipcball.bsky.social on @rowhoop.bsky.social's Togetherness:

Togetherness by Rowan Hooper review – a stunning portrait of cooperation in nature

This corrective to our habitual emphasis on competition had me writing ‘wow’ in the margins again and again

theguardian.com

“Introgression from Neanderthals & Denisovans shaped modern human genomes. We integrated high-quality assemblies of 4 Papua New Guinea genomes with 94 of diverse ancestry to infer an introgressed structural variant map. Results underscore introgression as a major force in human adaptive evolution.”🧪

A global map for introgressed structural variation and selection in humans

Genetic introgression from Neanderthals and Denisovans shaped modern human genomes; however, introgressed structural variants (SVs ≥ 50 base pairs) remain challenging to discover. We integrated high-q...

science.org

“Studies across diverse conditions in Spain & Japan show counterclockwise bias in roaming pedestrians is a robust reproducible feature, originating from individual tendencies. This challenges the view that social dynamics shape pedestrian motion & highlights existence of intrinsic locomotor bias.”🚶🧪

Individual locomotor bias drives counterclockwise motion in pedestrian crowds - Nature Communications

Counterclockwise motion has been documented in human gatherings. The authors show across five experiments in Spain and Japan that this bias reflects individual locomotor tendencies.

nature.com

Stunning photographs encompass different ways in which science is used to decipher our complex & beautiful world. #ScientistAtWork images in @nature.com. 📷🧪

Five winning images of scientists at work

From sky to sea, and then back to the lab, here are the top images from Nature’s 2026 photo competition.

nature.com

Seriously thinking about turning my Bsky into a bee stan account. 🐝🤩

Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D.@sarahmackattack.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Getting licked by a bee is strange and adorable

As @carlzimmer.com notes👇, next stages of controversial research on human embryo gene editing are funded by Nucleus Genomics, a company that plastered the NYC subway with “Have your best baby” “These babies have great genes” & other taglines that fuel misconceptions about complex trait genetics. 😒🧪

Scientists Edit Human Embryo Genes With Startling Precision

nytimes.com

It's just something we do to relax once in a while.

Bumble bees can apparently play with balls, count, recognize faces, & perceive rhythm. A new study out today in @science.org argues they can also solve novel tasks spontaneously without explicit training, challenging the idea that such cognitive skills are exclusive to large-brained vertebrates.😲🐝🧪👇

Spontaneous problem-solving in bumble bees

Problem-solving using novel solutions without explicit training is often considered a hallmark of cognitive flexibility. We investigated whether bumble bees (Bombus terrestris) could solve a novel obj...

science.org

“David Wu & his colleagues worked on a method to evaluate safety of medical LLM recommendations. ‘Rather than just reporting accuracy scores, studies should report adverse events’ he says. Preliminary findings across 31 LLMs found potential for severe harm from AI recommendations in ~22% of cases.”🧪

How good are ‘AI doctors’ — and will they take over medicine?

Nature talks to specialists about whether people might soon be diagnosed by artificial-intelligence systems.

nature.com