Pete Buston 🐟

The Evolution of Interspecific Variation in Marine Larval Dispersal Kernels — The Role of Larval Navigation Ability. Led by Lou Schlatter, with Allison Shaw and Colleen Webb. @BUMPatBU @BU_Biology nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10…

Universities of Hull, Bangor, Bradford, UCLan, Cardiff have already closed or restructured their chemistry depts Now Nottingham announces cuts The fire that burnt through arts & humanities is now engulfing pure sciences in our universities chemistryworld.com/news/nottingha…

Revisiting Martin Nowak’s famous 2006 Science paper on five mechanisms that promote cooperation, now viewed through a darker lens: exploitation, compliance, and Jeffrey Epstein. bolesblogs.com/2026/03/06/the…

The 14th International Larval Biology Symposium (LBS) is being held from September 27th to October 1st, 2026 in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA. See the LBS website to submit an abstract, register, and sign-up for the listserv! larvalbiosociety.org

MIT announces “the number of grad students will be 20 percent less than it was in 2024 — about 500 fewer students”

A new review paper led by Kenta Suzuki was published in Biological Reviews: "Advances in causal discovery methods for ecological time series" doi.org/10.1002/brv.70…

If you work in a university, please consider signing this petition against the destruction of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nottingham. I doubt it’ll do much good, but the staff deserve all the positive words they can get. #signatories" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">nottinghamphysics.github.io/Open_Letter/#s…

Job announcement. Please RT. Department of Biology at Boston University is seeking two lecturers in cell and molecular genetics. Great department; Great uni. Come join us: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/32034

@oceaiii @landaicio Me except that beauty hides a dreadful reality: that anemone is bleached due to heat stress; soon its anemonefish may die; then the anemone itself may die nature.com/articles/s4418…

The reef never sleeps. Who else could watch this all day?🐚

Collider bias can also influence genetic associations. In a nice illustration, if we take height-raising SNPs and test their effects on sex (which should be null), then adjust for height, we obtain spurious associations with female sex. Conditioning on a collider (height), associated with both the tested SNPs and sex, induces an association between the two.

Download our updated database of postdoc fellowships from different foundations and agencies. We identified 275 fellowships. For each entry, we provide description of the fellowship, focus, amount, deadline, eligibility, etc. Download this database here: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-op…

Out today in @ScienceMagazine: with the amazing Haochuan Cui, Yiling Lin, & @LingfeiWu, we analyzed 3.6 million scientists publishing 1960–2020. The findings reshape a century-old debate about age and scientific creativity.

New paper out! BUMP Faculty Les Kaufman and John Okechi featured in Open Journal of Ecology on the effects of cage aquaculture on biodiversity of Lake Victoria, Kenya. Read more here: scirp.org/journal/paperi…

New paper out! BUMP's Xiaozhou Ruan featured in Ocean Modelling on research studying the effects of tropical cyclones on marginal seas. Read more here: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

BUMP Faculty Cédric Fichot featured in Environmental Science & Technology Letters on plastic additives and their effects on aquatic environments. Read more here: pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.10…

New paper out! BUMP faculty Robinson (Wally) Fulweiler featured in Estuaries and Coasts on salt marsh CO2 fluxes. Read more here: link.springer.com/article/10.100…

On mutualism, niches, species distributions, and clownfishes...now #OpenAccess in the journal 👇

Bdelloid Rotifers have been having sex for 50 million years. Except they haven't. Every single one of these microscopic chainsaw mouth creatures you see under a microscope is a female. They clone themselves. Perfect genetic copies, generation after generation, for longer than mammals have existed on Earth. Evolution textbooks will tell you this is impossible. Sexual reproduction exists because it shuffles genes and creates diversity. Without it, harmful mutations accumulate. Populations crash. Extinction follows. Bdelloids missed that memo completely. They survive radiation doses that would liquify a human. They dry out into dust for decades, then resurrect when water returns. They endure temperatures that freeze solid and heat that boils. They've colonized every continent including Antarctica. All while breaking the fundamental rule that sex is required for evolutionary success. The secret lies in their feeding strategy. Those rotating mouth crowns that look like biological chainsaws do more than shred algae. When rotifers eat, they accidentally consume DNA fragments from their prey. Instead of digesting these genetic pieces, they incorporate foreign genes directly into their own genome. They turned eating into horizontal gene transfer. While every other complex animal relies on mating to remix DNA, rotifers steal genetic diversity from their lunch. They've been practicing genetic engineering for 50 million years without realizing it. The implications rewrite what we thought we knew about survival. These creatures prove that life finds ways around rules we assumed were absolute. They've solved the genetic diversity problem without sex, the aging problem without death, and the environmental stress problem without hiding. They're living proof that evolution has backup plans we never imagined.

🚨New publication out! Our results show how biotic dependencies propagate from local interactions to macroecological patterns. 🔗 doi.org/10.1002/ecm.70… #clownfish #mutualism #macroevology

Your brain doesn't form the thought until you write it down. Nature Reviews Bioengineering published the case for that claim last summer in an editorial titled "Writing is thinking." The cited evidence is a 2024 EEG study at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. 36 students alternated between handwriting and typing the same words. 256-channel sensor array. Cursive on a touchscreen versus keys on a keyboard. Same words both ways. Handwriting produced widespread connectivity across parietal and central brain regions. Typing didn't. The theta and alpha frequency bands the literature ties to memory formation and encoding lit up almost exclusively when the hand was forming the letters. The motor act was producing the cognition. What the editorial extends from that finding is the more uncomfortable claim. Writing a scientific article is the mechanism by which a researcher discovers what their main message actually is. The act of constructing sentences forces the chaotic, non-linear way the mind wanders into a structured, intentional narrative. You sort years of research into a story, and in the sorting, you find out what you believe. Then the line: If writing is thinking, are we not then reading the thoughts of the LLM rather than those of the researchers behind the paper? Nature endorses LLMs for grammar, search, brainstorming, breaking through writer's block. Where the line gets drawn is outsourcing the whole writing process. Because the writing process is the thinking process. Even editing the LLM's draft is harder than writing one from scratch. To restructure someone else's reasoning you have to reconstruct it first, which means doing the cognitive work anyway, with worse leverage and more friction. The time savings on the keyboard turn out to be cognitive savings on the part of the brain you wanted to use. Your first draft was the thinking.