iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Quanta Magazine @quantamagazine.org · 10/09/2025

The cells of your body follow simple rules and play off one another to form a complete organism. The researcher Alexander Mordvintsev has developed “neural cellular automata,” building blocks that can self-assemble into any form. @georgemusser.com reports: www.quantamagazine.org/self-assembl...

quantamagazine.org

Self-Assembly Gets Automated in Reverse of ‘Game of Life’ | Quanta Magazine

In cellular automata, simple rules create elaborate structures. Now researchers can start with the structures and reverse-engineer the rules.

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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

“Overall, the message from this survey is positive; evolutionary biologists are readily employable outside of academia, generally well-prepared for those jobs, and report high levels of satisfaction” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.org

Leaving Academia: Insights from Evolutionary Biologists on Their Career Transitions and Job Satisfaction

Many who have obtained PhDs in evolutionary biology will ultimately pursue careers that fall outside a narrow definition of an academic career. At the same time, PhD students and supervisors of PhD st...

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Eduardo Rocha @epcrocha.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

Willing to join us @pasteur.fr for a PhD for a project on how interactions between mobile genetic elements shape bacterial adaptation? Subject to be tailored to candidates with keen interest in evolution, genomics, computational biology, microbiology. Check www.pasteur.fr/en/education...

pasteur.fr

Pasteur-Paris University International doctoral program (PPU)

OverviewIn 2009, the Institut Pasteur, the world leading biomedical research institute founded by Louis Pasteur in 1887, inaugurated the Pasteur Paris-University (PPU) international doctoral program i...

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Román Zapién-Campos @romanzapien.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

Este Julio tuve el privilegio de organizar el club "Enzymath: Entendiendo a las Enzimas entre Genes y Ecuaciones" 🧪👨🏻‍🔬🧑🏼‍🏫 para Clubes de Ciencia México 🇲🇽. Fue una bonita experiencia de la que me llevo muchas alegrías y que espero repetir pronto. (1/2)

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Martina Dal Bello @martinadalbello.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

📢 We're seeking a postdoc to work on a project funded by HFSP @hfspo.bsky.social at the intersection of bacterial physiology, ecology and evolution. You can find more details about the project, the position, and how to apply here www.dalbellolab.com/hfsp-project! #bacteria #ecosky #MevoSky #microSky

dalbellolab.com

HFSP project — dal bello lab

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Tivadar Danka @tivadardanka.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

Behold one of the mightiest tools in mathematics: the camel principle. I am dead serious. Deep down, this tiny rule is the cog in many methods. Ones that you use every day. Here is what it is, how it works, and why it is essential.

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Insta Science @instascience.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

A NASA Astronaut on ISS caught this sprite over Mexico and the U.S. this morning.

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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

Many such cases - be on guard against DoPRA (science is complex, but let's not fool ourselves that pre-pub peer review functions in these situations; need a year of post-pub to read these things)

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Alex Browning @apbrowning.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Interested (or know anyone interested!) in pursuing a PhD in applied mathematics? Come and join us at Melbourne! A/Prof Doug Brumley and I are advertising a maths + biology project looking at adaptation of bacteria. Find out more 👉 www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

findaphd.com

Mathematical models of biological adaptation in fluctuating environments at University of Melbourne on FindAPhD.com

PhD Project - Mathematical models of biological adaptation in fluctuating environments at University of Melbourne, listed on FindAPhD.com

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Manuel Razo @mrazo.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

1/n 🧵 Excited to share our new paper! We developed a framework to reveal hidden simplicity in how organisms adapt to different environments, particularly focusing on antibiotic resistance evolution. #EvolutionaryBiology #MachineLearning

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Adam L @adam-lg.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

Neat looking paper: "Are Statistical Methods Obsolete in the Era of Deep Learning?" The answer seems to be "no," at least in the case where there's a mathematical structure to the model. arxiv.org/abs/2505.21723

In the era of AI, neural networks have become increasingly popular for modeling, inference, and prediction, largely due to their potential for universal approximation. With the proliferation of such deep learning models, a question arises: are leaner statistical methods still relevant? To shed insight on this question, we employ the mechanistic nonlinear ordinary differential equation (ODE) inverse problem as a testbed, using physics-informed neural network (PINN) as a representative of the deep learning paradigm and manifold-constrained Gaussian process inference (MAGI) as a representative of statistically principled methods. Through case studies involving the SEIR model from epidemiology and the Lorenz model from chaotic dynamics, we demonstrate that statistical methods are far from obsolete, especially when working with sparse and noisy observations. On tasks such as parameter inference and trajectory reconstruction, statistically principled methods consistently achieve lower bias and variance, while using far fewer parameters and requiring less hyperparameter tuning. Statistical methods can also decisively outperform deep learning models on out-of-sample future prediction, where the absence of relevant data often leads overparameterized models astray. Additionally, we find that statistically principled approaches are more robust to accumulation of numerical imprecision and can represent the underlying system more faithful to the true governing ODEs.

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TransEvo @transevo.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

7 PhD positions in Translational Evolutionary Research available @uni-kiel.de Application deadline is March 27, 2025 Please spread the word! www.kec.uni-kiel.de/news_events/...

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Quanta Magazine @quantamagazine.org · 22/03/2025

Partners in both life and research, the physicists Roger Guimerà and Marta Sales-Pardo recently developed a “machine scientist” algorithm that is proving to be a powerful tool for scientific discovery. (From the archive) buff.ly/0dgSvHG

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Aida Andres @aidaandres.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Interested in a starting PI position at University College London to work on Genetics, Evolution or the Environment? My department has opened the call for expressions of interest for sponsorship of independent fellowship applications. www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

ucl.ac.uk

UCL – University College London

UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

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Richard D. Gregory @richgreg3.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

New 🗒️led by Alex Pigot - Macroecological rules predict how biomass scales with species richness in nature -Standing biomass increases with richness when large-bodied spp are numerically rare but independent when spp size & abundance are uncoupled. @ucl.ac.uk - Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

science.org

Macroecological rules predict how biomass scales with species richness in nature

Despite advances in theory and experiments, how biodiversity influences the structure and functioning of natural ecosystems remains debated. By applying new theory to data on 84,695 plant, animal, and...

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YouGov @yougov.co.uk · 21/03/2025

Let's try this again... 7 is the LEAST "random" number. When we asked Britons to think of a number from 1-10, 33% chose 7 - this isn't the first time this phenomenon has been observed How Brits respond... 1: 2% 2: 4% 3: 7% 4: 9% 5: 8% 6: 14% 7: 33% 8: 14% 9: 6% 10: 4% yougov.co.uk/society/arti...

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MPI for Evolutionary Biology @mpi-evolbio.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

We offer 2 PhD Positions in Evolutionary Biology! 1️⃣ Evolutionary Developmental Biology – Craniofacial evolution. (March 31, 2025) 2️⃣ Evolution of Polygenic Traits – Genetic adaptation in Drosophila. (April 30, 2025) More here: www.evolbio.mpg.de/1639156/Job_... #PhD #EvoDevo #Genetics

evolbio.mpg.de

Current job offers

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Mark A. Anthony @anthomycota.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Lower survival rate among trainees in labs with highly productive mentors raises important concerns about what we value in academia. Many interesting things to stew over with this paper! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Academic mentees thrive in big groups, but survive in small groups - Nature Human Behaviour

Using longitudinal genealogical data on mentor–mentee relations and their publications, the authors find that mentees trained in larger groups tend to exhibit superior academic performance compared wi...

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Román Zapién-Campos @romanzapien.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

I have been preparing a lecture on Parameter Inference for undergrad students 📊. The experience has been particularly fulfilling because I did not learned from a textbook 📖 but by doing 👨🏻‍💻. At the end, apart from teaching others, structuring knowledge in a lecture is a newly discovered joy for me 😄 🙌

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International Initiative for Theoretical Ecology @iite-ecotheory.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

📆Join us next Tuesday for our online seminar: Hal Caswell (Woods Hole) will present on: ⭐The formal demography of kinship: Demographic stochasticity in the kinship network⭐ Free for all to join! Zoom Link: iite.info/seminar/ Global Times: www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/f... NB Euro time shift!

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Doran Goldman @goldmandoran.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

I’m thrilled to share my first ever publication, now published in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... With mentorship from the amazing @ksxue.bsky.social, I looked at how the outcomes of species introductions to microbial communities are influenced by the number of introduced microbes.

pnas.org

PNAS

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

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Adam MacLean @adamlmaclean.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

"...applications of model discovery in biology are among the most exciting, precipitated by the astounding quantities of biological data and the extent to which we do not know the structure of most biological networks; there is a lot to learn." #SingleCell #MLsky journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

journals.plos.org

Data-driven model discovery and model selection for noisy biological systems

Biological systems exhibit complex dynamics that differential equations can often adeptly represent. Ordinary differential equation models are widespread; until recently their construction has require...

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Andrew Perfors @perfors.net · 19/12/2023

I have a bunch of things I have to get done, so naturally I decided to procrastinate by making an alignment chart of mathematical models

Lawful good: Bayesian models
Neutral good: Social network analysis
Chaotic good: Dynamical systems theory
Lawful neutral: Drift diffusion
True neutral: Information theory
Chaotic neutral: Agent-based models
Lawful evil: Symbolic logic
Neutral evil: Neural networks
Chaotic evil: Quantum mechanics

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Will Ratcliff @wcratcliff.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

1/46 Hey folks, we have a new paper out on the MuLTEE. Strap in and I’ll tell you the story of how this “little paper on polyploidy” turned into the most data rich paper our lab has produced, largely thanks to the leadership and work ethic of @kaitong25.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Genome duplication in a long-term multicellularity evolution experiment - Nature

In the Multicellularity Long Term Evolution Experiment, diploid yeast evolve to be tetraploid under selection for larger multicellular size, revealing how whole-genome duplication can arise due to its...

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Royal Institution @rigb.org · 07/03/2025

It's our birthday! 🎂 The Royal Institution was founded on this day in 1799 for "the teaching by courses of Philosophical Lectures and Experiments, the application of Science to the Common Purposes of Life". In this 1985 video, George Porter shows us Faraday's lab, which you can still visit today

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Jamie Hall @jpjhall.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

I'm delighted to announce that the 2025 @microbiologysociety.org meeting on "Understanding and predicting microbial evolutionary dynamics" will be held in Liverpool 26-27 November 2025! Abstract submission will open soon... #microsky 🧪🧫🦠 microbiologysociety.org/event/societ...

microbiologysociety.org

Understanding and predicting microbial evolutionary dynamics - 2025 meeting

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Sara Mitri @saramitri.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

Two (!) perspective pieces published today involving people from our lab! @adelpanta.bsky.social on spatial patterning in microbial communities www.nature.com/articles/s41... and @salazarafra.bsky.social on microbial communities as evolutionary individuals www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

nature.com

Disentangling the feedback loops driving spatial patterning in microbial communities - npj Biofilms and Microbiomes

npj Biofilms and Microbiomes - Disentangling the feedback loops driving spatial patterning in microbial communities

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Ricard Solé @ricardsole.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

Are complex systems predictable? Can we use (un)predictability to measure complexity? Here's a great review by A. Vulpiani and co-workers on how chaos, Lyapunov exponents, information theory and statistical physics get together to answer these questions denali.phys.uniroma1.it/~cencini/Pap...

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

Re-posts appreciated! We have an open PhD position w/ Prof Harold Auradou on #microswimmers/#protists in complex media! Students get to spend at least 12 months in Paris, and will receive their PhD from both Exeter and Paris-Saclay! Apply by 31st Mar. More details: adum.fr/as/ed/voirpr...

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