iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

At least mathematical biology is too basic for them to bother with

The OpenAI Research Catalog contains 722 manuscripts arranged under 17 mathematical subjects, excluding mathematical biology.

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Having fun with www.phylopic.org as I prep for teaching a new course this term

The cover page for my lecture notes on Mathematical Biology, featuring three starlings and the bifurcation diagram for the logistic map.

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

I saw this just two weeks ago. The room contains a lot of gold jewellery but this piece absolutely steals the show. Fantastic museum. Here's a blurry photo of a less glamorous insect, among the tiniest things on show.

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Understandable given how thorough the post is! It's near the end.

"Another potential explanation for these impossible results is that the experiments actually were performed with a p16-INK4a specific antibody, but at the moment of writing the paper, a p16-ARC antibody code was retrieved from Abcam or Santa Cruz’s website and inserted into the methods section erroneously. This second explanation might seem more charitable in some sense, but I’m not sure it is… are we to believe that antibody codes in papers are selected at random by a lab tech based on the first search result? For papers to be meaningful the methods have to describe what was actually done and the results have to show what was observed."

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Four current special issues and calls for papers related to cancer evolution/ecology and mathematical oncology (details also in the alt text for you to copy and search)

Cancer in an evolutionary framework: across species and within individualsJournal of Evolutionary Biology
Editors: B Ujvari, A Marusyk, A Nedelcu & N Raven
Deadline: 31st August 2026

Mechanistic and data-driven modeling in mathematical oncologynpj Systems Biology and Applications
Editors: J West, S Hamis, G Lorenzo & R Noble
Deadline: 2nd December 2026

Evolutionary MedicineEvolutionary Applications
Editors: F Thomas, A Dujon, J-P Capp & K Asselin
Deadline: 30th June 2026

Exploring Eco-Evo Applications in Cancer
Evolution, Medicine and Public Health
Editors: B Vibishan, N Johnson & J Somarelli
Deadline: 30th June 2026

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Having just finished @adamjkucharski.bsky.social's "Proof", I found myself at last week's conference referencing the book wrt the ladder of causation; why RCTs aren't always best; communicating uncertainty; and what constitutes proof. Ended up telling everyone just to buy and read it themselves.

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

What a wonderful Cretan ISEEC Conference that was! Four days bouncing around ideas about evolution, ecology, cancer, translational tech, the future of AI, and much more. See you again in two years!

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Lacking time for yesterday's post-conference excursion (which also sounded fantastic) I spent the afternoon at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, which is packed with phenomenal, ridiculously ancient artworks, many inspired by the natural world. A great end to a great few days of science and fun.

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

First up this morning: ISEEC President @athenaaktipis.bsky.social on cancer-like phenomena in AI. Her substack is athenaaktipis.substack.com

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

ISEEC keynote speaker Viktor Müller discusses his research on the threats of evolvsble AI and lessons from evolution in cancer

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Great to have @srishtipatil.bsky.social presenting her new research on early-onset tumours, here at ISEEC 2026. Tomorrow I'll be talking about her previous work with me

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Restoration Oncology as a translation of Restoration Ecology - Janay Fox speaking now at ISEEC 2026. Implies redefining therapeutic success as control, not necessarily cure

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Jill Gallaher's plenary kicks off day two of the International Society for Evolution, Ecology and Cancer in Crete. Lovely venue for it

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

Happy birthday @michaelrosenyes.bsky.social from everyone at Brighton Children's Parade! Float made by Eastbrook Primary Academy.

Float based on Chocolate Cake poem by Michael Rosen

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Each week the MathOnco Newsletter features an artwork linked to a recent paper. My contribution slides Figure 1 of rdcu.be/e62W2 onto the ice of a curling sheet. You can read more and subscribe to this excellent newsletter at thisweekmathonco.substack.com/p/this-week-....

Illustration of the macroscopic model we analyse in our paper, showing the two possible fates of the first surviving mutant within the wildtype population, superimposed on the house of a curling sheet.

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

Same pattern in the website search bar. I guess the main branding challenge is to avoid confusion with the other UCL. So it's weird that they went with purple.

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

I just returned the proof of our paper "Selective sweep probabilities in spatially expanding populations". Google's AI Overview is already reporting the main results (presumably scraped from the November 2023 preprint) as established fact.

$Google's AI Overview says, "Selective sweep probabilities in spatially expanding populations, such as in growing tumours or biological invasions, are generally independent of the mutation rate and determined by the ratio of mutant-to-wildtype radial expansion speeds, with the probability approximated by $(1-c_{wt}/c_{m})^{d}$ (where $d$ is the spatial dimension)." These are new results that we reported for the first time in our preprint.$

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

All advice has been very sensible and conventional. It's helping me prioritise and avoid being overly ambitious. E.g. yesterday I ran a parkrun aiming to beat a target time and missed by a few seconds. ChatGPT put this in context of my more important marathon goal.

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

In 2017 I created the ggmuller R pacakge to draw "Muller plots" combining phylogeny and frequency dynamics. The latest version 0.7.0 fixes deprecated dependencies and includes a few other minor improvements. CRAN: cran.r-project.org/web/packages... Vignette: cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

A Muller plot generated by ggmuller. The horizontal axis is time, and shapes of different colours represent genotypes (or other subtypes), with height corresponding to genotype frequency (or relative abundance) at the corresponding time point. Descendant genotypes are shown emerging from inside their parents. In this example, colour represents relative fitness.

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

Got me some top quality presents by @matthewcobb.bsky.social and dodosocks.com/en

Matthew Cobb's biography of Crick is one of the best reviewed books of the year. Dodo Socks makes great slippers and socks and aid the Ukrainian war effort.

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

I'll be impressed when AI can tell me which naan is which

Three packets containing Indian breads: one peshwari, one cheese, one vegetable. The squiggles leave me naan the wiser.

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

To our surprise, our tree balance index was able to predict disease-free survival in the TRACERx cohort, even after controlling for cancer stage. The index is especially useful for stratifying patients in stage 2. The association is robust to various changes of the data and the method. 4/n

Figure 5: Survival curves showing the difference in DFS for tumours based on their phylogenetic tree balance, 1JN , when split by stage where, a) stage 1, b) stage 2 and c) stage 3.

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

Save the date! On behalf of the Society, I’m delighted to announce that the next International Society for Evolution, Ecology and Cancer conference will be taking place in Hersonissos, Crete, on May 21-24, 2026. Abstract submissions will open soon. More details: www.evocancer.com

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 16/11/2025

Only two weeks left of my three-month stay in France. I'm going to miss a lot of things, not least my weekend long runs in the beautiful countryside north of Montpellier.

A view over vineyards towards Pic Saint-Loup, from my run yesterday morning

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

In her #MathOnco25 plenary, Sarah Brüningk motivates mechanistic learning in mathematical oncology, drawing on her recent review paper: www.frontiersin.org/journals/imm...

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

Bob Gatenby finishes his phenomenal #MathOnco25 talk with this stunning figure and conclusion: "Cycles within cycles may allow metastatic prostate cancer to be converted to a chronic disease". The results are from a new paper: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

Joel Brown at #MathOnco25 draws parallels between the evolution and ecology of cancer and of dogs, elephant shrews and (of course) squirrels. Cancer redefined as "a disease of uncontrolled proliferation by transformed cells subject to evolution by natural selection". aacrjournals.org/mcr/article/...

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

Now @kitcgallagher.bsky.social at #MathOnco25 presents his recent research on predicting treatment outcomes to identify which patients will benefit the most from adaptive therapy. Preprints and papers at scholar.google.com/citations?us...

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

Franco Pradelli presents one of the most beautiful slides so far at #MathOnco25, on the topic of exploiting the cost of addiction in anaplastic large cell lymphoma

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

Fantastic to have adaptive therapy pioneer Jingsong Zhang here at #MathOnco25 talking about a third-generation adaptive therapy trial for metastatic prostate cancer underway at the Moffitt Cancer Center, informed by Jill Gallagher's mathematical modelling. Preprint: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

At #MathOnco25, @rrockne.bsky.social explains why he so loves SINDy (sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics).

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

A man after my own heart! @dwodarz.bsky.social on the importance of spatial structure in tumour evolution #MathOnco25

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

At #MathOnco25, @cancerevo.org talks about how to model the role of the tumor microenvironment in cancer initiation, progression, and treatment resistance. He finishes by advertising the Moffitt IMO PhD program www.moffitt.org/education/re...

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

Now at #MathOnco25, @ceel-damaghilab.bsky.social advocates "3D spheroids as a simplest model of tumor ecosystem". His beautiful data make a strong case.

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

Setting the tone for #MathOnco25, @stroblmar.bsky.social (now based in London) outlines the benefits of theory-experiment integration

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

Excited to be in Florida for #MathOnco25 starting today. Nice place for it.

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

Congratulations @kitcgallagher.bsky.social! It was a pleasure to be your DPhil examiner today. I've also been enjoying catching up with friends and colleagues here in Oxford, including in the beautiful new Life and Mind Building.

Linacre College (left) and the new Life and Mind Building (right), which hosts Oxford's Department of Biology.

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

No matter how much time I spend in Montpellier I will never get over how lovely it is

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

Join @cmaley.bsky.social, @lucielaplane.bsky.social, Joel Brown and Benjamin Spada for a live EvoChat discussion about "How we define cancer matters", hosted by the International Society for Evolution, Ecology and Cancer (ISEEC). Oct 1st at 8am PST, 11am EST, 5pm CEST ucsb.zoom.us/j/8313111375...

Abstract: Current definitions of cancer describe what cancer does but not what it is. Furthermore, they derive largely from human cases and may not apply to other multicellular organisms, especially those lacking a basal membrane. Comparative oncology, however, has shown that cancer occurs across a broad diversity of organisms. What definition should be adopted when framing cancer in a comparative and evolutionary perspective? And can an evolution-based definition be applied in clinical oncology? We will show that a universal definition of cancer not only helps provide a basis for progress in comparative oncology, but can also help to explain the diversity of cancer phenomena within humans.

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

Thanks, @cancerevo.org! Facebook tells me the previous race was 11 years ago today.

Facebook post from this day 11 years ago, with a photo of me collecting an oversized trophy (currently serving as a plant stand).

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

The first race I even won was the Semi des Vendanges, a half marathon on rocky trails north of Montpellier. I never thought I'd get a chance to run it again so was delighted to finish fourth today, having gone up two age categories. This being France, every finisher got a bottle of local wine.

No podium today but at least I got this pretty bottle of Cabernet Franc, Grenache and Syrah from a family-owned domaine in the small town of Teyran, which hosted today's trail race.

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 31/08/2025

My three months in France have begun! Living in the wonderful, scrubby countryside to the north of Montpellier. A paradise for runners

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Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

Len Nunney identifies human cancers that are most common than expected from an evolutionary point of view #ESEB2025

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