Balancing Open Science and Fair Research Assessment: The push for Open Science and the reform of research evaluation are colliding, with metrics meant to encourage openness often undermining efforts to move beyond simplistic assessments. This tension highlights the challenge of balancing transparency, accessibility, and collaboration with fair, meaningful evaluation systems.

As discussed in recent posts, the appearance of massive galaxies in the early universe was predicted a priori by MOND (Sanders 1998, Sanders 2008, Eappen et al. 2022). This is problematic for LCDM. How problematic? That’s always the rub. The problem that JWST observations pose for LCDM is that there is a population of galaxies in the high redshift universe that appear to evolve as giant monoliths rather than assembling hierarchically.

Chimpanzees: Bonding Through Group Urination Chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, have always fascinated researchers and animal enthusiasts alike with their complex social behaviors. One of the more peculiar behaviors witnessed among these intelligent creatures is group urination, a seemingly simple act that carries significant social weight.

Academics often feature a few selected papers on their home page. Typically these represent big projects or work published in prominent venues. What I’d like to see more of is “niche papers”: work to be proud of even if it has managed to remain a bit obscure. What are your niche papers?

Ya está disponible la colección de la bibliografía para el curso de Fundamentos de biología comparada de la licenciatura de Biología del nuevo plan de estudios de la Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM aprobado en el 2024.

References are an essential element of scholarly publications.

The 32nd Plant and Animal Genomes (PAG) Conference 2025 was a whirlwind of fascinating talks and innovative research! As in previous years (see previous blog posts here & here), the event spanned 5 complete days, this time the organisers reporting 2349 registered attendees from 64 countries. The top 5 represented countries were (highest number of participants first); USA, Canada, UK, Germany and China.

Die CC BY-Lizenz ermöglicht es, mit ihr versehene Werke kostenlos unbegrenzt zu nutzen, solange die Urheberin genannt wird. Auch Portraitfotos von Personen können mit einer CC BY-Lizenz versehen sein. Doch was sagt die Lizenz darüber aus, ob die abgebildete Person mit der Verbreitung „ihres“ Fotos einverstanden war?

In 2024, we remained committed to open science and open source software.We continued to build a welcoming andinclusive community, through innovation and collaboration. Here are the highlights of the year: 🔗R-Universe R-Universe, rOpenSci’s platform for finding and publishing R packages,saw major advancements in 2024,making it an increasingly useful and trusted resource for the wider R community.

Get a glimpse into the captivating world of mutualistic relationships in nature and discover how these partnerships shape ecosystems.

I remember the first time I heard the term sovereign AI . It was one of those buzzwords that feels equal parts thrilling and ominous—a promise of autonomy wrapped in the shadow of isolation. Now, it’s a concept reshaping not just how nations think about technology but how they define themselves in a world where identity increasingly lives in code. The United States just made its stance clear.