Ian Heller

Love to see the visuals and research people can make from this!

Male Copulatory Structures in Reproductively Functional Female Live‐Bearing Fish Pseudopoecilia fria We recently discovered a population of the live-bearing fish Pseudopoecilia fria (Cyprinodontiformes: Poeciliidae), in which females were found to possess gonopodia, reproductive organs normally excl...

One of the coolest ichthyology discoveries I’ve heard about in a while. Large pregnant female livebearers with male reproductive organs found in the wild. Goes to show how fluid sex and sexual traits can be.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Google Scholar Is Doomed Academia built entire careers on a free Google service with zero guarantees. What could go wrong?

Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared

High-Level, Actionable Insights From Watching Doubles Luge For The First Time | Defector To the uninitiated, luge itself might seem a silly sport, given that the average person might guess it mostly consists of holding onto a sled real tight as it goes fast down the ice. Of course, this o...

"If someone can invent a new Olympic sport by stacking one guy on top of another guy, surely someone could invent another Olympic sport by stacking yet one more guy on top of the aforementioned guys."

Important work from @sabs.bsky.social:

[🎁]

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2026.01.033

[New Paper] @currentbiology.bsky.social presents our population genomics study of the iconic Scaly-foot Snail: 125 genomes from 8 Indian Ocean hot vents! Deep currents drive South→North gene flow, while transform faults act as dispersal barriers.
READ FOR FREE: authors.elsevier.com/c/1mbW73QW8S...

Be careful, it’s a slippery slope to lotion addiction

Is enhancer-driven gene regulation all wrapped up? - Nature Reviews Genetics In this Comment, Wendy Bickmore discusses mechanistic models of how 3D genome organization facilitates communication between distant enhancers and their target promoters to regulate gene expression.

Now reading.

The most important sentence (IMHO) in this wonderful paper:

"detecting enhancer–promoter ‘interactions’ does not mean that these interactions are mechanistically important" 🧪

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

Time for a thread on our Christmas preprint “Origin and evolution of acrocentric chromosomes in human and great apes”. I had so much fun with this project and paper. It will be hard to summarize in a thread, but I’ll try www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... [1/21]

An ancient genome duplication event drives the development and evolution of spinnerets in spiders A genome duplication event during the Silurian played a crucial role in the evolutionary emergence of spinnerets in spiders.

Chromosome-scale #genomes from newly sequenced spiders & the whip scorpion, the genetic basis of spinneret emergence in spiders & the complex history & functional importance of arachnid genome #evolution www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #biodiversity #genomics

Whoa!! I just learned that small equipment stops working when the motor brushes wear down, and that brushes are cheap and trivial to replace.

I just fixed two broken rockers and a rotator.

Damn!! This should be part of the PhD curriculum.

This is DISASTROUS for our country.

You don't understand that's my emotional support bag of loose PCR tubes

Mammals have evolved into ant eaters 12 times since the dinosaur age, study finds Mammals have developed some unusual eating habits over the past 100 million years, but a new study has uncovered the surprising lengths to which some have gone to satisfy one of the more peculiar—a ta...

Tired: Everything evolves to be a crab.

Wired: Everything evolves to eat ants.

Sugar cookie in the shape of a three spine stickleback, although with the most caudal dorsal spine quite a bit out of proportion due to the bakers lack of finesse.

A classic baking form!

We are thrilled to announce the first official release (v0.1.8) of #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗿, the successor to one of our flagship tool, #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹𝘀! Based on ideas we conceived of long ago (!), this was achieved thanks to the dedication of Brent Pedersen.

1/n

Presumably hazing is a concern for the meteorology subsection of Earth Science club though?

Life inside rotting walnut husks » Colin Purrington's blog There’s an eastern black walnut (Juglans nigra) on my neighbor’s property that rains down fruit every fall, and I finally got curious about what species might be inside. So far I’ve found four flies, ...

After years of being curious but lazy, I finally got around to documenting what's inside the black walnuts in my yard. In the process I became obsessed with the strange wasp that hunts down the pupae of the resident flies. 🌿 #wasps #diapriidae #nature #diptera colinpurrington.com/2025/11/life...

📣 Paper alert!

I am delighted that our paper exploring the impact of Neanderthal-derived variants on the activity of a disease-associated craniofacial enhancer has been published in Development today!
journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA who died Thursday at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers.

A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death.

Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written."

Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating.
🧪🧬🧫

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

This might be the most photogenic bat ever. What a cutie!

Conservation of regulatory elements with highly diverged sequences across large evolutionary distances - Nature Genetics Combining functional genomic data from mouse and chicken with a synteny-based strategy identifies positionally conserved cis-regulatory elements in the absence of direct sequence conservation.

Regulatory elements can diverge, a lot, and maintain their function:

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

You’re gibbon them out?

Daniel Naroditsky, Chess Grandmaster, Dies at 29 He earned the highest title in the chess world as he built a career as an accomplished chess teacher, commentator and author.

Daniel Naroditsky, a chess grandmaster, the highest title given to competitors by the International Chess Federation, and a former Junior World Champion, has died at 29.

multi-color labeled zebrafish heart with mosaic expression of diverse myl7:color plasmids. Abnormal atrium due to wnt8a overexpression.

Colorful collage of abnormal larval zebrafish hearts. Credit to @dorotheeb.bsky.social. #ZebrafishZunday 🧪

UMAP of single nucleus RNAseq dataset of Polypterus fin regeneration

Hey Regen folks 👋 Excited to share that our single-nucleus RNA-seq dataset for Polypterus fin regeneration is now live at the Broad Institute portal! Dive in here: tinyurl.com/5bck22jx
Big thanks to the team for making this happen—looking forward to seeing what you all discover!

I hope they also have a video where two slugs Lady and the Tramp kiss.

A pin on a desk, it has a codfish silhouette holding a library card, with the words "having fun isn't hard when you've got a library cod"

The Newfoundland and Labrador public libraries continue to make the absolute best free pins that you can just have if you go to borrow a book

Gallery of various network visualisations.

🤩 Fantastic new network plotting package available in Python by Fabio Zanini. The package supports both networkx and igraph networks, and has a wide variety of styling options. iplotx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Fights over Tylenol, SSRIs highlight the enduring lack of pregnant women in drug trials Shutting pregnant women out of clinical trials to protect them and their babies has had the opposite effect, experts say.

Shutting pregnant women out of clinical trials to protect them and their babies has had the opposite effect, experts say.
www.statnews.com/2025/10/02/c...