Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Graham Coop

Ben Sheldon @sheldonbirds.bsky.social · 16h

Large citizen science datasets are powerful tools for biodiversity science, but they may have biases. Nice new paper from @louisbackstrom.bsky.social et al. showing that for eBird and Birdtrack lists there is a tendency for rare species to be over-represented
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 19h

Here's what today's Nobel Prize in Economics was all about: the importance of science and technology in driving economic growth, and the need for churn in companies to sustain it.
(Peter Howitt's name seems to have got massacred in subediting: will get that fixed asap)
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Client Challenge

www.nature.com

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Graham Coop @gcbias.bsky.social · 18h

It took me surprisingly long to work out what was happening in this photo. Nice pic!

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Ele Willoughby @minouette.bsky.social · 18h

Sharing my portrait of Isabella Aiona Abbott for #AdaLovelaceDay to celebrate #womenInSTEM and #IndigenousPeoplesDay.

🐡🧪👩🏻‍🔬 #histsci #ald25

Ele Willoughby @minouette.bsky.social · 18d

Day 26 #SciArtSeptember prompt forage. My #linocut of #botanist Isabella Aiona Abbott (1919-2010), 🧪🐡👩🏻‍🔬 #histsci renown algae expert, celebrated seaweed cook, devoted teacher & mentor, expert on Hawaiian ethnobotany, the first Indigenous Hawaiian woman to earn a doctorate in science & the first woman

My linocut portrait of Isabella Aiona Abbott in indigo on cream coloured paper. She’s facing forward at a table in a shirt and sweater vest with a sheet with algae samples on the table. In my print, she is surrounded by algae of the Pacific, all of which appeared in Abbott's research publications, including several species she discovered, or based on images of specimen she personally collected or whose traditional use as food she documented. The algae are in pinks, khaki green and rust.

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闵娅(Min Ya; Minya) PhD @minyaaa.bsky.social · 19h

Ran into these AMAZING Stapelia grandiflora in our conservatory today. The patterns, colors, hairs, and the smell - carrion mimic to perfection. #Stapelia #plantjoy #iamabotanist

A close up of one flower showing red hairs and petal with yellow strips

Another close up from a slightly diff angle

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Anthony Ricciardi @ecoinvasions.bsky.social · 1d

Attempted eradication of smallmouth bass promotes rapid evolution. Here's the study that is the focus of the Scientific American article: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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Dr. Sarah Signor @signor-molevol.bsky.social · 6d

This manuscript was so much fun to write! Who thought we'd find an ongoing invasion in Dmel. TEs are so cool 😎

Riccardo Pianezza @rpianezza.bsky.social · 10d

We discovered an endogenous retrovirus that's still spreading in natural D. melanogaster populations! It was horizontally transferred from D. erecta in Central Africa, so we named it "Kuruka", which means "jump" in Swahili. Read its cool story here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Ceri Weber @ceriweber.bsky.social · 3d

Vertebral skeletal diversity in mammals is remarkable. How do the differences between vertebral size and shape develop and evolve? See how we tackled this question in our paper published in @natcomms.nature.com today!

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jenna newman phd @jennanewman.bsky.social · 4d

Community science! Input from over TEN THOUSAND PEOPLE! From Mexico to Canada! In a natural experiment!

“Bc a total solar eclipse occurs in the same location once every 3 or4 centuries, most free-living birds, like most ppl, have never seen day turn quickly to pm, only to return again mins later”🧪

Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 4d

I have to fan-girl for a minute here. My friend @rosvall-lab.bsky.social built an app to gather data on bird behavior during the 2024 solar eclipse. 10,000+ citizen scientists contributed (including my kids), and the resulting paper was published in Science today!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Total solar eclipse triggers dawn behavior in birds: Insights from acoustic recordings and community science

On 8 April 2024, a total solar eclipse disrupted light-dark cycles for North American birds during the lead-up to spring reproduction. Compiling more than 10,000 community observations and artificial ...

www.science.org

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Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra @jrossibarra.bsky.social · 4d

PEQG website live! genetics-gsa.org/peqg-2026/

Homepage - 2026 Population, Evolutionary, and Quantitative Genetics Conference

Visit our website to learn more.

genetics-gsa.org

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Vladimir (Vova) Seplyarskiy @vseplyarskiy.bsky.social · 5d

Our paper on clonal expansions in Sperm is out in Nature www.nature.com/articles/s41...
If you are interested in working at an intersection of Mendelian genomics/Population genetics/Clonal expansions +Cancer genetics/ and of course mutagenesis, please rich out about postdoc in my lab

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Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 5d

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

nyti.ms

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April Wei @aprilwei.bsky.social · 6d

Excited to preprint our latest work (w/ Drew DeHaas, Zhibai Jia, Leo Speidel) on using ARGs for demographic inference. w/ applications using data from 1000 Genomes Project. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Inference of complex demographic history using composite likelihood based on whole-genome genealogies

Accurate parametric inference on complex demographic models is a continuing challenge in population genetics. Ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs) provide richer information than simple population ge...

www.biorxiv.org

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Nat Clarke @natclarke.bsky.social · 5d

🚨 My lab is hiring at all levels!

Interested in animal origins & evolutionary cell biology?

I'm recruiting a postdoc, PhD students & a research assistant to study the molecular evolution of cell adhesion using marine invertebrates + comparative genomics.

🔗: clarkelab.com/join/

Please repost!

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Austin Reynolds @awrgenes.bsky.social · 5d

New preprint out with Brenna Henn, led by two fantastic grad students in our labs! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Recovering the pre-colonial population structure of Khoe-San descendant populations

San populations from Botswana and Namibia retain exceptional linguistic, cultural and genetic diversity, but few Khoisan-speaking groups remain south of the Kalahari Desert. However, historically, far...

www.biorxiv.org

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Matthew Neville @mattneville.bsky.social · 5d

Now published! Our paper on:
(1) Accurate sequencing of sperm at scale
(2) Positive selection of spermatogenesis driver mutations across the exome
(3) Offspring disease risks from male reproductive aging
[1/n]
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Sperm sequencing reveals extensive positive selection in the male germline - Nature

A combination of whole-genome NanoSeq with deep whole-exome and targeted NanoSeq is used to accurately characterize mutation rates and genes under positive selection in sperm cells.

www.nature.com

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Laura Helmuth @laurahelmuth.bsky.social · 6d

Six of the nine Nobel Prize winners this year work in the U.S.
Three of the six were born outside the U.S., which is the pattern most years. No country has benefited more from welcoming immigrants from around the world.
www.nobelprize.org

The official website of the Nobel Prize - NobelPrize.org

The Nobel Prize rewards science, humanism and peace efforts. This is one of the central concepts in the will of Alfred Nobel, and it also permeates the outreach activities that have been developed for...

www.nobelprize.org

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Nancy Kanwisher @nancykanwisher.bsky.social · 7d

I am proud of MIT, where our branch of AAUP has voted unanimously to endorse this statement urging MIT leadership and the MIT Corporation to reject the Compact wholesale
docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Letter Regarding Compact

MIT Chapter of the American Association of University Professors October 6, 2025 Statement on the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” MIT has been invited by the federal governmen...

docs.google.com

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Sergey Kryazhimskiy @skryazhi.bsky.social · 6d

Dear colleagues!

@davidmccandlish.bsky.social and I are serving as guest editors for the new special issue of GENETICS on fitness landscapes:

doi.org/10.1093/gene...

Submissions are due on March 18, 2026. Please spread the word! And reach out if you have questions.

The Fitness Landscape: A Call for Papers

Ruth Isaacson; The Fitness Landscape: A Call for Papers, Genetics, , iyaf206, https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyaf206

doi.org

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Joshua G. Schraiber @jgschraiber.bsky.social · 7d

Just an absolutely horrific self own, depleting the US of amazing students from all over the world who contributed to what used to make America great: its diversity, its openness, and its leadership in education.

The New York Times @nytimes.com · 8d

The number of international students arriving in the U.S. in August fell by 19% this year compared with last year — the largest decline on record outside of the pandemic.

Nearly 20 Percent Fewer International Students Traveled to the U.S. in August

The data shows the steepest decline in August international student arrivals since the pandemic.

nyti.ms

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Graham Coop @gcbias.bsky.social · 6d

More broadly I wonder about the support for the claim: "While many variants are similar in their ancestry-specific allele frequency estimates, many are also highly divergent". What is the evidence that rare alleles are highly divergent in frequency among groups?

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Graham Coop @gcbias.bsky.social · 6d

Eg a variant at 3/10000 in Eur vs 1/10000 Afr ancestry would be put in this box. Looking at raw counts seems suspectible to sampling noise especially for rare alleles. Obviously there is drift between groups but FST is low (~0.1) so differentiation is low.

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Graham Coop @gcbias.bsky.social · 6d

Re. the claim that ~80% of variants show "twofold difference in ancestry-specific frequencies", given that many of these variants are rare I wonder how informative this statistic is?

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Jannice Friedman @jannicefriedman.bsky.social · 12d

New paper by former MSc student @christeinecke.bsky.social! ⭐ A behemoth effort to apply artificial selection on clonal reproduction in #Mimulus guttatus. We show that clonality evolves quickly, but not symmetrically in both directions, and multivariate life history traits are altered too! 🧪🌾

bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology @biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · 12d

Life-history evolution under artificial selection in a clonal plant https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.01.679824v1

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Matthew Hahn @3rdreviewer.bsky.social · 7d

New preprint led by grad student, Yu Mo! We introduce new software to calculate evolutionary rates of quantitative characters in the presence of discordance

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www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Estimating the rate of quantitative trait evolution in the presence of gene tree discordance by calculating likelihoods across trees

Quantitative traits provide insights into how phenotypes evolve across species. However, standard comparative methods often assume a single species tree and overlook the discordant gene tree histories...

www.biorxiv.org

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