Tootfinder

In ant colonies infected by a tapeworm parasite, uninfected workers show signs of stress-related gene activity, in part because they're caring for infected nestmates (Photo by Matt Hamer, via AntWiki)
Parasite prevalence in a social host has colony-wide impacts on transcriptional activity and survival
https://doi.org/10.1093/ev…

Scientific Advice Mechanism to the European Commission
December 2025
SAPEA (2025). Artificial intelligence in emergency and crisis management: Rapid evidence review report.
Downloadable from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17737962

Weekend #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
Since 2011, millions of tons of a brown algae called Sargassum has washed onto beaches in the Caribbean. The rotting seaweed releases toxic hydrogen sulfide, smelling of rotten eggs, impacting tourism and shore access. It was initially thought Saharan iron dust was the cause, but new #science

Xia & Lindell have also published a response (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2518837122) – unsurprisingly, we don’t agree with most of their arguments. What puzzles us most is their claim that the re-analysis (their Table 1) "strengthens [their] conclusions." On the contrary:
In the Polysynthesis analysis, Small_Family has a minuscule averaged effect estimate (0.02) with a standard error more than four times larger (0.085). Together with a posterior inclusion probability (PIP) of just 0.085, this means the variable is rarely included in the best-supported models and its estimated effect is highly uncertain – essentially indistinguishable from zero. We therefore still struggle to see how this could be taken as support for their earlier statement that "different measures of language isolation – social, physical and *phylogenetic* – are important predictors of polysynthesis."

🦠📈 Ein Vierteljahrhundert Daten zeigt, dass die Übertragung von #Wildtier-#Malaria in Nord-Europa ist stark angestiegen.
Der Treiber ist der #Klimawandel. Bei

Unveiling ignis fatuus - #Microlightning between microbubbles: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2521255122 -> New theory may at last explain a swamp’s ghostly will-o’-the-wisps: https://www.snexplores.org/article/swamp-gas-methane-will-o-wisp-chemistry = https://www.sciencenews.org/article/spark-will-o-the-wisps - methane bubbles spark tiny zaps of electricity that may ignite cool flames of the gas. (Has nothing - obvious, at least - to do with astronomy ... but fun nonetheless.)

Day 10: Stacey Mason
Another academic, but this time one of my compatriots; we overlapped at UC Santa Cruz as advisees of Michael Mates, and even collaborated on a Twitch stream called ScholarsPlay for a bit, although we never coauthored any papers. We did chat about our research, and I had many good discussions with her about agency in interactive fiction, a topic we both published on. Her paper "On Games and Links: Extending the Vocabulary of Agency and Immersion in Interactive Narratives" (#20AuthorsNoMen

Winding Motion of Spirals in a Gravitationally Unstable Protoplanetary Disk
Tomohiro C. Yoshida, Hideko Nomura, Kiyoaki Doi, Marcelo Barraza-Alfaro, Richard Teague, Kenji Furuya, Yoshihide Yamato, Takashi Tsukagoshi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19761

Winding Motion of Spirals in a Gravitationally Unstable Protoplanetary Disk
The discovery of wide-orbit giant exoplanets has posed a challenge to our conventional understanding of planet formation by coagulation of dust grains and planetesimals, and subsequent accretion of protoplanetary disk gas. As an alternative mechanism, the direct in-situ formation of planets or planetary cores by gravitational instability (GI) in protoplanetary disks has been proposed. However, observational evidence for GI in regions where wide-orbit planets are formed is still lacking. Theoret…