This week we had a wonderful community call, From Novice to Contributor: Making and Supporting First-Time Contributions to FOSS, where Sunny Tseng, Pascal Burkhard, and Yaoxiang Li shared with us their experiences with, and advice for, first time contributors, with the excellent moderation of Hugo Gruson.This was a perfect start to our special series of activities to support first time contributors to Open Source Software.

What are other people doing and what can you do to secure funding for software projects?

Hatcher (1903a) gave a very brief description — two pages and no illustrations — of the new sauropod Haplocanthus , basing it and its type species H . priscus on the adult specimen CM 572.

The DataCite Metadata Store is a rich source of information and insights about research outputs, resources, and activities. Discovery systems and services worldwide rely on this metadata to build and enhance their platforms and workflows, forming critical pieces of scholarly infrastructure.

I’ve recently worked with clinical studies from ClinicalTrials.gov and other international registries.

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?

He iniciado una colección de la bibliografía para el curso de Introducción de la biología comparada de la licenciatura de Biología del nuevo plan de estudios de la Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM aprobado en el 2024. Esta colección tiene cómo propósito gestionar la literatura en una colección digital, abierta, interoperable que permita integrar todas las fuentes, generar bibliografías y producir citas y referencias.

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.