Amanda Moehring

Really proud of this work led by Luana Branco @luana-branco.bsky.social and contributed to by Will Yeung and Josh Isaacson!

Cool new paper on the evolution of new sex chromosomes. academic.oup.com/evlett/advan...

Researchers find 180,000 giant tortoises living on island in Seychelles

Most animal species pack sperm DNA with protamines instead of histones. Protamines are essential for male fertility. They are among the fastest-evolving genes in animals. That makes little sense. We think we know why, in a new paper led by @ching-hochang.bsky.social. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Some glass sponges may be the oldest animals on Earth. Individuals of Monorhaphis chuni are estimated at over 11,000 years old, and they build a single skeletal spike up to 3m long, the largest natural glass structure any animal makes. 🧪 #SpongeThursday #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife

Sigh.

Cool paper on temperature sex-reversing frog species and whether they have greater likelihood of extinction with climate change.

📣 📣 📣 UPDATE: The 2026-2027 list of faculty and postdoc positions in ecology and evolutionary biology is out! Be sure to check out this active and helpful community run resource! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel – awarded the 2026 medicine prize – discovered a remarkable protein, channelrhodopsin, in a single-celled alga. Hegemann wondered how Chlamydomonas, a single-celled alga, is able to swim towards a light source.

BREAKING NEWS The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.”

Cool new paper from @joshdubnau.bsky.social Early life social isolation primes flies for rapid neurodegeneration later in life. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

First time I’ve had this happen. On a 4 hour flight in Europe and they charged for water. FOR WATER.

The closer I look at this bar in Greece, the worse it gets.

What an amazing gift from Margaret Atwood to my department!

Retrotransposon has gained viral-like cell-to-cell transmission capability, further blurring the conventional boundaries between transposons and viruses www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... (Tiukkaa tekstiä, vaikka ois joskus tehnyt gradunsa retrotransposoneista niin kuin mä)

Cool. 🧪🌎 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

I love how many weird sexual reproduction things there are. Here’s another one!

Dinnertime! #AGoodPlace Source: www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmil...

Oooh the days of embryo injections to make transgenic flies may soon be over!

Researchers from the University of Georgia have developed a light-sheet microscope that can image seizure propagation in zebrafish, in three dimensions and in real time. 🧪⚛️ physicsworld.com/a/fast-3d-im...

One of my favorite Fun facts to introduce people to is that the average number of skeletons in the human body is greater than 1

The hippocampus is considered the “memory center” of the brain, but these mice without a hippocampus rapidly learn mazes!

Find the moth.

Hey #Drosophila folks - the #flycross #mentee survey is open for #grad students, #postdoc and #pretenure faculty. ~95 mentors from across the world, with diverse expertise. The co-chairs @shyama13.bsky.social and @jocmcdonald.bsky.social have done a phenomenal work in taking the program forward 🎉

Here are some nice mushrooms

I’m proud of my department that a couple of years ago we fired a tenured prof for having a sexual relationship with his grad student. Do not fuck your students.

Cool new paper! They find both XY and ZW systems with different species using different sex chromosomes for each.

🧪🧵 🪰 🐜🪲🐞🦗🐛🦋🪳🦟 How many species of insect are there?  A seemingly simple question, but one that has been 'bugging' scientists for years.  Our work out today suggests that there are millions more than we had previously expected.  doi.org/10.1073/pnas... @gdfcf.bsky.social

If you care about academic freedom, but kept silent up until an instance of academic freedom to express racism, then it appears like what you really care about isn’t the academic freedom part.

Scientific databases are critically necessary for research.

WHAT?

We are on day 5 without power in our building. Our 5th major power outage in the past year.

While both nori & wakame are edible seaweed, they are separated by >1 billion (!) years of evolution. Nori is red algae, which acquired its chloroplasts via primary endosymbiosis; wakame is brown algae, which acquired its chloroplasts from another algae. They are about divergent as human vs yeast.

Cool new paper! We have known for a long time that mating reduces lifespan in females. Here. we show that producing a small amount of "bad" protein surprisingly increases lifespan, *particularly* in mated females. academic.oup.com/g3journal/ar...

Also, new this year: MolCellDevBioJobs! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

EcoEvoJobs 2026-27 just opened for business and we've already got 79 faculty / permanent jobs listed. Please repost! ecoevojobs.net

Fixed it

Avocados come in 2 varieties - A-types start each day female and switch to male midday. B-types do the reverse. In work just published from the last chapter of my PhD, we show this system evolved 40+million yrs ago and is regulated by alleles of 1 transcription factor www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

'It's absolutely exciting!': Astronomers discover an atmosphere around an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone for first time ever www.livescience.com/space/exopla...

I just met someone who is going back to school to get their PhD in psychology … at 71 years old. 🤯

Big thumbs-up for the ScreenZen app. Best one I’ve used for addictive apps I want to keep but limit my time on.

This is really cool.