In a discussion about what decisions are, John Krakauer emphatically pronounced that “decisions happen for reasons”, in answering ‘no’ to my question if it wasn’t a decision with which foot to start walking from a stand-still. A recent article from the laboratory of Carolina Rezaval in Birmingham studied a decision-making process in male Drosophila fruit flies where the reasons for each decision seemed apparent.

Ethan White’s lab at the University of Florida has an opening for a PhD student starting in Fall 2025 to study ecological forecasting of wading birds in the Everglades.

GigaScience’s T2T Series has now launched, with our first papers showcasing new Telomere-to-Telomere methods and genomic data sets. While the first draft of the Human Genome was declared complete in April 2003, it took a further two decades for the publication of the first complete, gapless sequence of a human genome in March 2022.

To share things we’re excited about in a less platform specific, more discoverable, way we’re going to do semi-regular posts sharing a few things we like. To start: A paper led by Laura D’Acunto &

The June issue of The Atlantic includes a deep profile of the accomplished but not-very-well-known comedian Albert Brooks. Here's a glimpse of his view of writing: I found a few interesting nuggets in that paragraph. His vision of writing as something you don't stop once you've started seems odd at first. The architect metaphor is funny, sure, but I wonder if his view is rare among writers.

Today begins Blaugust 2024, an annual blogging festival that is fun and challenging. Last year I made it halfway through August with a post every day—this year I'm aiming for 20 posts for the month. The festival aims to create and maintain a community, and so the main theme this year is for everyone to write an "introduction to me and my blog" post.

One of weecology’s newest projects involves monitoring wading birds in the Everglades using drones. We need to quickly turn this imagery into data to drive ecological forecasts & guide management decisions. We do this in near real-time using computer vision models to detect birds in imagery & automated workflows to update this data as soon as new imagery is available.

I was very excited when our latest research paper came out, after all, I was confident our 30-year-long search for the sites of plasticity in the form of motor learning we study was coming to an end. In this work, we were fairly confident that underlying the type of learning we study was a novel form of plasticity in a very specific set of motor neurons in the ventral nerve cord of the flies we use for our research.

We just published a dataset of canopy tree maps for 100 million trees in the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) with information on location, species identify, size, and whether the tree is alive.

Opening a Cabinet of Curiosities in Montreal Readers of this blog must know every summer the GigaScience Press team gathers at the ISMB (International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) conference, where the great and good of computational biology gather for the largest bioinformatics conference of the year.