Lukas Musher

My new paper on Amazonian biogeography and genomics is out in early view at Biological Reviews onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/br…

El Niño is coming, and it is shaping up to be a big one. Over at The Climate Brink I've put together a compilation of the latest forecasts by different modeling groups. They suggest that we might see an event comparable in strength to what we saw in 2016.

I have a new preprint demonstrating a genome-architecture-aware approach to inferring species trees and introgression landscapes from a small number of genomes. If you are interested in phylogenomics, birds, or hybridization, this is for you! biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

The genomic landscape of asymmetric introgression tracks chromosomal characteristics in tinamous (Aves: Tinamidae) biorxiv.org/content/10.110… #biorxiv_genomic

New paper alert: Riverscape dynamics and habitat utilization structure evolutionary diversification in a clade of Amazonian electric fishes. researchgate.net/publication/39…

Our paper on tinamou evolution is finally out in @systbiol. academic.oup.com/sysbio/advance…

Now the DOGE scumbags are coming for the Bird Banding Laboratory (part of USGS). They just lost two senior staff members and are going to be stretched extremely thin. Without their office, bird research does not happen.

Exclusive: National Science Foundation staff were told today that the agency’s 37 divisions—across all eight directorates—are being abolished and the number of programs within those divisions will be drastically reduced. scim.ag/3F9BeuO

Happy to share our recent publication in Nature Ecology & Evolution, with @rosvall_lab, @reject_resubmit, and many more! nature.com/articles/s4155…

tried to make sense of how both the nature of science and the history of intellectual work in America have led to the current moment

Reading Liam Revell & Luke Harmon's books on comparative phylogenetics, our team knew there would be important applications to comparative oncology --and the broader evolutionary medicine field. We explore these applications in our new preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been confirmed as the USA’s Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). In this role he will manage approximately 90 thousand workers and a budget of $1.7 trillion. 1/11

Substack version here: chasewnelson.substack.com/p/rfk-jr-confi…

This framing is their framing, and NYT took the bait. The correct and accurate framing is: “Deep cuts to medical research threatens progress on cancer and heart disease research, costs the economy $80B, and threatens 300,000 jobs across red and blue states”

One of the most importantly depressing pieces of research we have produced to date: birds in pristine central Amazonian forest are not doing well. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Egg prices are way up. Medicaid and cancer research are shut down. Just what people voted for.

2024 was a brutal year for the Amazon rainforest, with rampant wildfires and extreme drought ravaging large parts of a biome that’s a critical counterweight to climate change. to.pbs.org/3Pf1tBz

Out today in @ScienceAdvances. We trace the evolutionary history of a trait under sexual selection in a genus of dancing manakins. Co-led with @hawchuan. science.org/doi/epdf/10.11…