The COVID brain fog explained. The COVID-19 virus binds to the ACE2 receptor to enter cells. Dopamine producing neurons are rich in the ACE2 receptor. The virus causes disruption in the dopamine network in the brain. 🧪 tech-paper.com/scientists-f...

Scientists finally have a biological explanation for why long COVID patients lose motivation and can't think clearly. They scanned their brains and found the dopamine system was physically damaged - T...

Millions of people with long COVID report the same cluster of symptoms: a crushing lack of motivation, an inability to think clearly, memory that slips, movements that feel slower than they should. Fo...

tech-paper.com

On August 1, 1931, Harriet Creighton and Barbara McClintock published the first experimental proof that genes are physically located on chromosomes—a discovery that transformed genetics. 1/3🧵

Very cool pair of papers demonstrating little link between amount of additive genetic variation and amount of nucleotide variation within species: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Levels of additive genetic variation vary substantially between species

Adaptive potential determines how populations respond to environmental change. This study compiles evolvability estimates from over 170 multicellular species, revealing substantial variation across th...

journals.plos.org

Biology is once again full of surprises most if us couldn’t dream up if we tried.

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/...

Always share a data dictionary along with your data so that people aren't guessing what a variable represents. There are many options for creating one (see thread for examples). Choose which one works best for you and share it alongside your data files. :)

I think a lot of us underestimated how good solar would get. Modern arrays convert 20% of sunlight to electricity. Plants struggle to achieve 2% with photosynthesis. Suck it, plants.

Nicolas Fulghum@nicolasfulghum.bsky.social · 2w ago

Solar produced a record 35.5% of Germany's electricity in June ☀️ That was more than all fossil fuels combined: Solar: 35.5% Fossil: 30.7% Other: 33.8% 10 years ago, solar reached a share of 11.6% in June, and has since tripled.

Calibration Nobel xkcd.com/3275/

Do humans and birds share an eye for design? 🐦🎨 For my Master's diss, I’m testing if we share aesthetic tastes with bowerbirds. I need 100 responses to finish! Visual, anonymous & under 5 mins. Link: exe.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_... 🧪 cc: @scienseed.com #AcademicSky #SciComm

Falls jemand die Ursachen wissen will: Artenkenntnis wird seit Jahren engagierten Menschen außerhalb der Unis und Schulen überlassen. D.h. wird dieses Wissen nicht mehr vermittelt, weil Lehrpersonen mit dem Wissen fehlen. Also wird noch weniger Wissen gelehrt... 🔃 www.geo.de/wissen/jueng...

Do humans and birds share an eye for design? 🐦🎨 For my Master's diss, I’m testing if we share aesthetic tastes with bowerbirds. I need 100 responses to finish! Visual, anonymous & under 5 mins. Link: exe.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_... 🧪 cc: @academic-chatter.bsky.social #AcademicSky #SciComm

Thrilled to share that our ENCODE enhancer–gene mapping paper is now out in Nature! An encyclopedia of human enhancer–gene regulatory interactions: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Thread 👇 1/

An encyclopedia of human enhancer–gene regulatory interactions - Nature

An encyclopedia of more than 92 million enhancer–gene regulatory interactions created as part of the ENCODE4 project provides a valuable resource for future studies of gene regulation and human geneti...

nature.com

Looking for general data cleaning guidance when preparing to share your study data in a repository, particularly when using #rstats? These slides may help. 👇 cghlewis.github.io/ncme-data-cl...

Mori Shuho (1738-1823) Black Bear Cub in Snow, Ink and colour on silk, 1799

I wanted to like QED's new 1% preprint ranking. I really did. But the more I looked at the data, the more uncomfortable it made me. Here is my full peer review. open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

My Peer Review of The 1%

I wanted to like QED's new 1% ranking. I don't.

open.substack.com

"For days, officials across France have scrambled to cope with the searing heat, shutting down three nuclear reactors after the surrounding cooling waters became too hot..." So much for nuclear as a climate solution.....

UK and Switzerland record hottest ever June day as health emergencies surge in Europe

Temperatures linked to third child’s death in France, where three-quarters of country is under extreme heat alert

theguardian.com

Twitter is going kind of crazy about crime and genetics right now (What's new?). My next post is a deep dive into a paper behind a widespread claim that brutal execution in Medieval Europe selected for reduced aggression, allowing civilization to develop. The title says it all, really.

Capital punishment is not a breeding program

No, medieval execution didn't "genetically pacify" Europe

sequencesandconsequences.substack.com

This is what makes it art: '(...) the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.' www.science.org/content/arti...

Why have papers by one of history’s most famous physicists been retracted?

Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck. A bot may be to blame

science.org

This was exactly my experience with qed recently. I was glad to be able to find money to pay for what I reported in the manuscript I had checked, and I need to publish this to have a realistic try for funding the next steps.

Kevin Wright@kevinmawright.bsky.social · last mo.

This mirrored my experience with a recent paper from my lab that I ran through QED for curiosity’s sake. It basically suggested experiments that would have turned it into a 20-author Cell paper from an HHMI lab, rather than the solid paper in Development that it actually is.

So maybe a more concise list: - cut fossil use wherever you can at home & in transit - minimize food waste - eat more plants And don’t try to be perfect. Do what you can & lead by example, but even more, push for system changes that make low-GHG actions more affordable, accessible, desirable.

Today let's not worry about the interesting map showing the distribution of hogs in the USA but let's appreciate the comments underneath the map...

"IF is a flawed metric...not an indication of the quality of published research...But, we are not naive. We know IF influences authors' decisions about where to publish". ☝️ The dilemma every journal faces. And that last sentence is a huge understatement. 1/2 journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

The elephant in the room: impact factor

Summary: This Editorial offers an honest look at impact factor trends in developmental biology, explains how Development serves its community, and makes the case that sustaining developmental biology ...

journals.biologists.com

Such good news. Human beings are capable of magical and wonderful things. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Cervical cancer deaths fall to zero in young women given HPV vaccine

A new study finds that hundreds of lives have been saved since school-age girls were offered the HPV jab in 2008.

bbc.co.uk

Barbara McClintock was born #OTD in 1902. 🧪 🌽 McClintock, who spent most of her career at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, won a Basic Medical Research Lasker in 1981 for the discovery of transposons, genetic elements that can move from one location to another: http://ow.ly/hVNI50Jvkql #WomenInSTEM

OSPREY BABIES! One year they had a nest I could watch from my car without disturbing them. So I filmed three osprey chicks going from wobbly babies to learning to fly and leaving the nest. It was a thrill!! #birds 🌿 🧪 🐡

Watch Osprey Babies Grow Up!

YouTube video by Get To Know Nature

m.youtube.com

Curious about Peer Community In, but not sure where to start? Check out this new paper describing the our model, written by the PCI core team! doi.org/10.1629/uksg...

Peer Community In and Peer Community Journal: a two-step diamond OA process giving research communities back control of publishing | Insights

The current academic publishing system faces many well-identified issues. Not only is it slow and costly, but it is also an opaque system that produces a substantial amount of non-reproducible…

doi.org

www.nature.com/immersive/d4... Happy for the Waldrapp (bald ibis) to be featured in a winner photo!

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

This Korean paper asmr artist that I’ve been following for a while made a TikTok of her healing Van Gogh 🥹 Her account name is paper pepper www.tiktok.com/@paper__pepp...

Okay, gute Frage @moremilvus.bsky.social. Also... Von der Grundidee sind wissenschaftliche Namen einfach: Jemand beschreibt die Art als erstes und darf dann auch einen Namen vergeben. Der ist lateinisch oder griechisch oder zumindest mehr oder weniger an diese Sprachen angelehnt und besteht aus >

Milvus@moremilvus.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Warum zum Geier haben die Pflanzen auf der deutschen und englischen Wikipedia unterschiedliche wissenschaftliche Namen?🤯 Cyanus montanus und Centaurea montana🤯 Wie soll man denn da beim schnell überfliegen des Papers die Art finden? de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berg-Fl... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaur...

Male flame bowerbirds (Sericulus ardens) New Guinea, build elaborate structures called bowers rather than traditional nests. These bowers act as "bachelor pads" or courtship stages to attract females. Once the female mates, she will build a separate, standard nest to raise her chicks