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When I was a kid, a friend rejected evolution because he equated "mutant" with "diseased" and didn't want to descend from a "sick monkey". But now that "sick" has a positive slang meaning, maybe we should embrace the term. I'm proud to be descended from a sick (complimentary) monkey!

iNaturalist just updated the genus Bison to merge with Bos, as in cattle, reflecting recent genetic analysis and the fact they can readily interbreed. In fact all living American bison are directly descended in part from domestic cattle; the original wild bison is gone, and only Bos hybrids remain.

In a single generation, the default repetitive melody associated with sharks has changed from dun-dun dun-dun dun-dun to doo-doo doo-doo-doo-doo.

Background info for the audience prior to a production of Taming of the Shrew

A suctorial organism lives by sucking. That is, its whole strategy for life is just to suck. Consider adding this word to your regular vocabulary.

Two of the most iconic Pacific Northwest species are the Pacific chorus frog (Pseudacris regilla) and the Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii). Both are “false” (pseudo-). It’s the land of real organisms with fake names.

Hello, I am a brain. I crave dopamine above all things. I can freely administer dopamine to myself and I alone control it. However I can only do this according to arbitrary rules I have made up. Sometimes my rules don’t allow me to give myself as much as I want. This is the source of all anguish.

With cyclosporiasis in the news, note that the only treatment is trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, an antibiotic, i.e. something that targets bacteria and shouldn’t even work on a eukaryote but somehow sort of does. It will probably evolve resistance, so we need more options tailored to this taxon.

I mourn poetry's prominent role That internet acronyms stole. Because I don't know how To pronounce "lmao" So I can't write a verse with it, lol.

I just commented on the OMB's Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance and you can too (due TODAY)! If enacted, I'd lose my first amendment right to even make these comments, since I'd live in fear that I'd lose my grant-supported salary if I said the wrong thing. www.aps.org/initiatives/...

Yellowstone used to hand these out

I enjoyed Percival Everett's “James” (Huck Finn from Jim’s viewpoint). Has anyone done this with Kipling’s “Kim” from Teshoo Lama’s view? The two classic novels are very similar, but Twain’s story was already anti-slavery while Kipling’s is pro-colonialism so there is more room to subvert it.

Got my beach reading

Two separate congressional candidates in my district, one Democrat and one Republican, have hit upon an issue to unify Americans on both sides of the aisle: Aliens. I say we need to rule out whether any organism currently on Earth is an alien, so fund basic biology research and we'll go from there.

Read about cyclosporiasis outbreak? Wondering what exactly is this organism causing an uptick in explosive bathroom visits? Cyclospora is in the Weed clade as I define it here: adaptivediversity.wordpress.com/2026/06/13/t... So think of it alongside malaria parasites, seaweed cousins, and plants. 🪴

The Energetic BranchesI recently attended a parasitology conference, which has me thinking about ancient evolution. A lot of medically important parasites come from far-flung branches in the tree of life, weird groups o…adaptivediversity.wordpress.com

“Mammoth” (well, “maimanto”) originally meant the animal not “generically large” and the coiner was a Russian who have known these fossil tusks for centuries. The person who popularized the “large” meaning also wrote some other words we celebrate today: “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

Throwback to the time I met Gene Cernan after writing an article about him

Three excellent books about fungus I've read this year: 🍄The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 🍄How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics by Michael Pollan 🍄Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

A got to deliver a UU sermon last week, and you can hear my words here: uucvan.org/services/the...

Another excellent Anopheles pop genomics paper! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The origin, history, and resistance architecture of an invasive urban malaria mosquito in AfricaThe invasive urban malaria vector Anopheles stephensi threatens 126 million city-dwellers in Africa. Controling An. stephensi requires greater understanding of its origin, invasion dynamics, and insec...www.science.org