🔥The 9th Round of Easy Loan, Earn $40 Reward is in progress❗️ ⏰ Promotion Period: January 15th - Feburary 15th, 2025 👉 Register now and check more details at gate.io/campaigns/358

Wow! Great work from Joseph Matheson! TL;DR: If this holds, contrary to Kondrashov's suggestion that we ought to be dead 100 times over, mutational load accumulation due to increasing paternal age or relaxed selection might not be as much of a dysgenic risk as once thought.

Kavita Jain and I are organizing a symposium entitled "Genomic diversity in nonequilibrium populations" in the AsiaEvo Conference (phylorf.org). Come hang out with us in Singapore in December! Submit an abstract by Sep 15th!!!

Daniel Smith and [email protected], members of the "Universal principles of evolutionary adaptation" project, wrote "The Interaction Between Exploitative and Interference Competition: Limits to R * Theory" in Ecology. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Our retrospective on digital contact tracing, why it didn’t live up to our hopes, and how we could make it work next pandemic is now officially published at JMIR Public Health and Surveillance doi.org/10.2196/49560 James Petrie Jason Bay Scott Leibrand Andreas Gebhard Sam Zimmerman

New in nature: we used digital measurements for 7 million people exposed to confirmed COVID-19 cases to determine risks for virus transmission, captured well by NHS COVID-19 app. We found that number of hours of exposure is a major predictor, along with proximity.

A "journal club" in PNASNews highlighted our recent analysis of digital contact tracing implementations: pnas.org/post/journal-c…

Interesting and important article on how Apple and Google contributed to the failure of a promising startup: "In [the] future, if companies like Apple and Google are to be gatekeepers of such tech, governments should devote urgent attention to aligning their incentive structure."

Hey, we have a new paper out proposing a new hypothesis to explain why bacteria and archaea have never evolved "complex" multicellularity. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Episode 3 of The Purpose Podcast is out now In this one, [email protected] talks about a trend that stretches all the way back to beginning of life Website rss.com/podcasts/purpo… Spotify open.spotify.com/episode/5yNczq… PurposeProject

Our latest paper on background selection is out at GBE (Genome Biology and Evolution). doi.org/10.1093/gbe/ev…. Thread explainers at other 2 sites. Briefly: the 1-locus model of independent sites is dead when the deleterious mutation rate exceeds 1. Joseph Matheson

Our latest preprint doi.org/10.32942/X2V61T explains why fitness can be defined in so many ways, and which version(s) you should use for what. See threads in other places for explainers Frozen account of Guilhem Doulcier Pierrick Bourrat

Close reporting on H5N1. bovinevetonline.com/news/industry/… Why do I think this article is worth promoting? It’s for the industry—written to inform people with skin in the game and who know their cows and farms well. Strong incentives for honest reporting.

Olgotrelvir significantly shortened symptom duration in Covid compared to placebo (8.5 vs 11.0 days) -- something that Paxlovid failed to do. Still think we need a good antiviral for this illness, even with low rates of hospitalization. evidence.nejm.org/doi/full/10.10…

I'm hiring a postdoc, for bioinformatics work on amino acid substitution models. I think they are key for understanding biophysics of selection on proteins, mutation patterns, and ancient life, as well as improving phylogenetic methods. evol.mcmaster.ca/brian/evoldir/…

Our latest paper elifesciences.org/articles/87335 is up at eLife - the journal. Catherine Weibel @phylowheeler Jenny James Hanon McShea. Explainers at other two sites.

We have a new version of this preprint now up. It was depressing to add discussion of lack of testing for H5N1, in new developments while the manuscript was in review.

Our latest preprint finds that a shortage of beneficial mutations does more to drive small populations extinct than mutational meltdown does. Explainers elsewhere Walid Mawass Joseph Matheson Ulises Hernández Jeremy J. Berg doi.org/10.1101/2024.1…

I'm hiring a postdoc! To use substitution models to understand protein evolution and/or improve phylogenetic methods. evol.mcmaster.ca/brian/evoldir/…