Kevin Bird

👏Hey! 👏 Ho! 👏

ICYMI: in our new paper, we contend there is "no current consensus on a definition of sex that is free of assumptions and limitations... and most importantly,...no biological definition of sex should be used to dictate human rights" #evolsky #LGBTQSTEM #ecology #evolution #biologicalsex

It’s small business owner brain rot of the MAGA base: People on SNAP are like workers eating on the job, Hegseth is like when they do wage theft or commit expense fraud. It’s fine because it’s part of the “natural order” of things

Screen shot of a tweet from Marc Andreesen saying "There is so much alpha in books from 1870 to 1930, it's unreal." and Elon Musk replying "For maximum alpha, complete with fighting for princesses, the lliad. Penguin audiobook at 1.25X speed is best. It was meant to be a spoken, not written, story."

Andreesen: There is so much alpha in books from 1870 to 1930, it's unreal.

Me: Holy shit! There's so much alpha in Upton Sinclair?

A: LOL no...no not those books

Me: So...Mark Twain?

A: Haha no not those books either

Me: Which books, exactly?

A: Oh, you know the ones

Someone who is good at labor markets please help me better distribute capital my workforce is dying

Who Gets What in Education: Can School Matching Improve Student Achievement? Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

See also postsec education

“Our findings indicate that capacity constraints, rather than poor school matching, primarily drive educational inequality.”

www.nber.org/papers/w34936

New preprint alert! In this study, we tackled a long-debated question: is the genetic basis of convergent evolution predictable? Should we expect the same gene/loci contributing to convergent adaptation to a common selective pressure? Thread ahead 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Decoding the Avian Missing Gene Mystery: Dot Chromosomes Unmask Extensive Gene Loss and Novel Genetic Instability Abstract. The apparent absence of numerous conserved vertebrate genes from avian genomes has puzzled researchers for over a decade. In recent years, a subs

Hron, @dalibormiklik.bsky.social @hpaces.bsky.social et al. demonstrate that avian dot microchromosomes harbor widespread gene attrition; retained dot chromosomes genes exhibit a new form of dynamic genetic instability - sequence stuttering.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evag038

#genome #evolution #birds

New preprint on the limits of detecting higher-order interactions in microbial communities.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
We find that the dominance of additive and pairwise interactions on community function may not reflect biological simplicity, but fundamental limits of statistical detection.

OpenAI announces ChatGPT is now at the level of real scientific reviewers, “It just tells you to do single-cell RNAseq in response to every query” says Sam Altman

There might still be an ancient duplication at the root of angiosperms after all!

Orthologous synteny provides robust structural evidence for the ancestral angiosperm ε-WGD https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.05.709955v1

Reconstructing 50 million years of Xenopus borealis evolution: three temporal strata of DNA rearrangements and persistent sex chromosome homomorphism https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.05.709847v1

That is almost definitionally the job of a political candidate

Witchcraft

The source, pictured here, identified himself as Schminay Schmasad, and added, “I’m definitely not Vinay Prasad”.

hands down the absolute *strangest* “on background” sourcing I have ever seen in the NYT. Completely bonkers stuff www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03...

a grievous self-inflicted wound that will take years to heal if at all

Do you think that is an accurate way to describe, say, Human Rights Watch?

A study used a slightly complex model? Straight to Jail?
Lisa Littman polled parents on TERF message boards about their kids? Good science!

Uh, yeah I read theory

We should all set aside our differences and recognize the true enemy: "super pangenome"

Yeah, that's the main appeal of the mechanical for me too. Though later on the transcath techniques might improve. I hear that's how a lot of bioprosthetics are replaced now. Not ideal for me at this age but maybe if the Ross holds for another +30 years.

I'm leaning toward the Ross procedure, but haven't talked to a surgical team yet to know if the unit and the physiology is right. The regurgitation has led to some ventricle dilation that's might be a concern. If not, then I'll probably do mechanical even though the blood thinners will be a drag

Are you uni- or bicuspid? I rolled the rare drop table and got unicuspid

Small world! I was born with stenosis, but they did the valvuloplasty when I was 10 so it's been regurgitation for the last +20 years

Would prefer it if Toby led a commission looking at how to "shut the hell up"

I think I'm in a very similar boat to you right now (lead up to aortic valve replacement for congenital disorder). Solidarity and best wishes to you

And what if a national newspaper’s op/ed column exhibits a consistent pattern of bias for publishing pieces supporting a particular kind of bad policy or decision? Are we supposed to not acknowledge the ideological capture of the editorial board (reactionary, saber-rattling warmongers)?

This is a graph of the death of US science.