Thijs Janzen

Adapted from Axelsson et al. 2013 Fig 2c: Histogram showing the distribution of diploid amylase copy number in wolf (n=35, blue) and dog (n=136, red). Dogs carry more copies of the starch-digesting gene AMY2B than wolves. Additional copies make dogs better than wolves at digesting starchy foods like grains & vegetables.

Dogs evolved to eat your leftovers! Comparing dog & wolf genomes revealed dogs have up to 30 EXTRA copies of the amylase gene (AMY2B) that helps digest starch. This is a key genomic signature of living alongside humans & table scraps for thousands of years 🐕 www.nature.com/articles/nat... #2026MMM

Love the video explainer! Such a smart and smooth way to bring abroad your topic and avoid people having to wade through the bureaucratic representation of it.
(and the pub setting is lovely as well)

A Data-Inspired Framework to Simulate Collective Behaviour of Predator-Prey Systems - Marina Papadopoulou, Hanno Hildenbrandt, Charlotte K. Hemelrijk, 2025 The collective escape of prey from predators is a classic example of adaptive behavior in animal groups. Across species, individual prey have evolved a large re...

💃DaNCES with #carnivores – interested in studying predator-prey interactions? Read more about the DaNCES framework by @marinapapa.bsky.social and others, simulating #collectivebehavior of #predators and #prey below ⬇️

doi.org/10.1177/1059...

#Biology #Science #Research #AdaptiveBehavior

Koraalriffen sterven af – en dat heeft grote gevolgen voor mens en dier Wereldwijd sterven koraalriffen dermate snel af, dat we inmiddels het eerste klimaat-kantelpunt hebben bereikt, rapporteerden wetenschappers afgelopen...

#Coralreefs are dying off rapidly: we have reached the first #climate tipping point. 🧪

“Humans are changing the world so quickly that #corals can’t keep up anymore.” Sancia van der Meij, a marine biologist from #GELIFES, expresses her concern: rug.nl/research/gelifes/_news/2025/20251017-coral-reefs

🔔 Update: A new #PhDPosition at the University of Groningen (@rug.nl)! If you:

🧪 have a Master's in #Biology
🌱 are interested in #PlantBiology, #Physiology, and/or #MolecularBiology

Then this is a perfect opportunity! We at #GELIFES are looking forward to working with you 😉

#PhD #PhDLife

WTF

ShoalBase | Join, Explore, Contribute Now ShoalBase offers a global database on fish social behaviour, supporting research, conservation, and ecology through community contributions and visual data mapping.

🧵1/9 There are 35,000+ fish species, but we have formal social-behaviour classifications for a tiny fraction. Most knowledge lives in the experience of researchers, fishers, divers, aquarists, naturalists, and Indigenous communities, but almost none of it is centralised. So we built ShoalBase.org.

Poster advertising doctoral positions in 2026 at the International Max Planck Research School for Evolutionary Biology.

Up to 10 doctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology now open for application!

Start date September 2026.

More info here: www.evolbio.mpg.de/imprs

Woah, that R logo is absolute fire! Immediately set it as my application icon!

(and also, the workshop looks really cool as well!)

This is wonderful. High-end Technology together with straightforward ecology.

Statistical and structural bias in birth-death models https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.02.691894v1

Play a little game and choose the right icon for each role in science.

Play our CRediT Roles icon game/survey, and help make scientific authorship clearer and more accessible!
creditsurvey.sciux.org

#OpenScience #ScienceUX

Part 1 version 1 of my Malawi cichlid ID guide is out now. 2 more parts for follow, with my intention being to revise, expand and improve each over time. This one is essentially a companion to our whole genome sequence paper in Science (Blumer et al. 2025). ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Congratulations to Dr @euantheyoung.bsky.social who defended his PhD yesterday on 'Family matters: The role of trade-offs in shaping human life-histories and health' research.rug.nl/en/publicati... @rug.nl supervised with @erikpostma.bsky.social @lummaalab.bsky.social 🎉

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

PhD position available in evolutionary genomics/bioinformatics (hoehnalab.github.io/job_adverts/...). Topic: analyzing gene expression evolution across several firefly species and linking expression changes to genomic architecture. The position is jointly supervised with @anaevolcatalan.bsky.social

Extremely proud of my good friend and colleague @euantheyoung.bsky.social whose work is featured in @nrc.nl. Read bellow for some excellent science and fascinating results. 👪🤰👶🧬

1/13 New paper out! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Historical records across thousands of women showed that mothers with more children had shorter lifespans during a famine, fitting an evolutionary explanation for why we age
@hannahdugdale.bsky.social
@lummaalab.bsky.social
@erikpostma.bsky.social

GitHub - hadley/genzplyr: dplyr but make it bussin fr fr no cap dplyr but make it bussin fr fr no cap. Contribute to hadley/genzplyr development by creating an account on GitHub.

Do you teach #rstats? Do your students complain about how lame and old-fashioned dplyr is? Don't worry: I have the solution for you: github.com/hadley/genzp....

genzplyr is dplyr, but bussin fr fr no cap.

Please Avoid detectCores() in your R Packages The detectCores() function of the parallel package is probably one of the most used functions when it comes to setting the number of parallel workers to use in R. In this blog post, I’ll try to explai...

The detectCores() apocalypse is creeping up on us 👻🐛

As more people are getting access to 128+ CPU cores, code spinning up parallel cluster with detectCores() workers fails - not enough #RStats connections available

Friends, do *not* default to detectCores(), bc www.jottr.org/2022/12/05/a...

Potato-tomato

Congratulations to Dr @friggspeelman.bsky.social who was awarded a PhD yesterday 🎉 @rug.nl on 'Socially monogamous partnerships in birds: Causes, consequences, and pair-bond strength' research.rug.nl/en/publicati... A fantastic achievement!

Join Our Citizen Science Project!

We are mapping the house mouse hybrid zone in Schleswig-Holstein, DE, and you can help. Visit our House Mouse Hybrid Zone Project website to learn more jwinternitz.github.io/mouse-hybrid.... Funded by @dfg.de at @uni-hamburg.de

#DFG #musmusculus #wildmice

Muyuan Chen has turned structural biology into an immersive experience with his new video game Meowtabolism, now available on Steam.
Try the demo here: store.steampowered.com/app/4045010/...
Give Muyuan feedback: steamcommunity.com/app/4045010
#ScienceGaming #StructuralBiology #CryoEM #STEMOutreach

Alphavirus replicons encoding IFN-γ enhance cancer virotherapy by overcoming macrophage-mediated suppression Interference by tumor-associated macrophages may significantly reduce the efficacy of therapeutic viruses designed to infect cancer cells and activate…

Very glad to share my first last-author paper, now published in iScience! 🎉In this study, we addressed a key challenge in virus-based cancer therapy: macrophage-mediated suppression, which limits viral infection and restricts T cell activation in tumors.
Link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

ggplot2 4.0.0 A new major version of ggplot2 has been released on CRAN. Find out what is new here.

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN.

It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package.

Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

Fishing for biodiversity Horizons - In brief

Even the cichlid fish eggs of Lake Tanganyika are highly diverse!

Picture by Grégoire Vernaz and Anja Haefeli

www.horizons-mag.ch/2025/09/04/f...

🚨 Our study investigating the relationship between evolutionary age and range size across plants and animals is out in @natcomms.nature.com! Delighted to be part of this great project led by @adrianaalzate.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐📈⏳️🐐🐋🐦🦎🐸🐠🌴🏝

🚨New paper led by @adrianaalzate.bsky.social showing that in most plant and animal groups the age of a species predicts its geographical range size, although the relationship is strongly mediated by dispersal ability and occurrence on islands 🧪🌐🪶

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Now published @natecoevo.nature.com with @annika-nichols.bsky.social, our latest on the evolution of 𝘴𝘭𝘦𝘦𝘱 across 𝟲𝟬 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘀 of cichlid fishes! doi.org/10.1038/s415...
with members of the @schierlab.bsky.social and Salzburger labs, as well as the burgeoning Shafer lab @uoftcellsysbiol.bsky.social