Gunnar De Winter
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gunnardewinter.bsky.social
Gunnar De Winter
@gunnardewinter.bsky.social
1.6K followers 270 following 1.2K posts
Biologist and semi-philosopher | science (and fiction) writer | plays with words and ideas

🌍 Belgium (for now)
🙋‍♂️ gunnardewinter.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Gunnar De Winter
kazu-maeshima.bsky.social
🧬 Our “Behind the Paper” is now online at Nature Communities:
“Active chromatin is not simply open—it forms compact domains that cohesin keeps from mixing.”

📖 A short story behind our recent @natgenet.nature.com paper.
communities.springernature.com/posts/active...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
September 18, 2026 at 3:36 AM
Reposted by Gunnar De Winter
pawelburkhardt.bsky.social
Lovely to see several pieces of our ctenophore work featured in this beautiful new story from @quantamagazine.org 🪼

Great piece by @mstarling.bsky.social, also featuring work by @stevehaddock.bsky.social, @arnausebe.bsky.social & @hejnol.bsky.social.

www.quantamagazine.org/ctenophores-...
Ctenophores Aren’t Just Beautiful. They’re Biological Wonders. | Quanta Magazine
Comb jellies are helping answer fundamental questions in biology, from how the earliest nervous systems evolved to how bioluminescence works.
www.quantamagazine.org
September 16, 2026 at 10:33 PM
gunnardewinter.bsky.social
"The narratives typically used by AI doomers also misdirect responsibility."

This does not get enough attention.
September 15, 2026 at 8:04 AM
gunnardewinter.bsky.social
Title.

That is all.

#science #reading #writing
Reading for pleasure boosts memory, empathy and mental health | New Scientist
Fewer people are reading for pleasure, but getting lost in a good book has repeatedly been linked to substantial cognitive benefits
www.newscientist.com
September 15, 2026 at 7:15 AM
Reposted by Gunnar De Winter
chikichanka.bsky.social
Japanese team have observed directly, for the first time, noctule bats hunting birds
The images they provide astonishingly resemble that painted by Brueghel over 400 years ago... maybe he had actually seen the hunt!!
Paper: esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
@ebdonana.bsky.social
September 13, 2026 at 7:03 AM
Reposted by Gunnar De Winter
ricardsole.bsky.social
Where are all the intermediate forms between animals & plants? Our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social suggests evolution can split sharply between sessile, photosynthetic and mobile, sensing strategies. If so, what does this imply for claims of plant intelligence? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
September 12, 2026 at 5:49 PM
gunnardewinter.bsky.social
Hear hear!
ricardsole.bsky.social Ricard Solé @ricardsole.bsky.social · 9d
I’m getting a little tired of seeing dozens of social-media posts with Sam Altman’s face and the line “OpenAI solved the Millennium Problem.” Tired of billionaires who know nothing being cast as geniuses. And tired of low-quality journalism talking about “how AI solved...”
September 9, 2026 at 4:01 PM
Reposted by Gunnar De Winter
philipcball.bsky.social
OK, so AI can apparently solve the puzzles of the Navier-Stokes equation. But can it solve the puzzles of the universe, in the way that Einstein did? My latest news feature for @nature.com looks into the question of how far AI can go towards scientific discovery.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
The Einstein test: what happens when AI tries to rediscover relativity?
Scientists are probing whether language models trained on historical data can reproduce creative breakthroughs.
www.nature.com
September 9, 2026 at 11:05 AM
Reposted by Gunnar De Winter
philipcball.bsky.social
LLMs are cognitive viruses that can depress collective cognitive competence. But by the same token, immunization is possible.
arxiv.org/abs/2609.03344
Large-Language Models as a Cognitive Virus
Large-language models (LLMs) are rapidly becoming part of human culture, reshaping how information is produced, transmitted, and used. Here we propose that their diffusion can be understood through a ...
arxiv.org
September 7, 2026 at 8:20 AM
gunnardewinter.bsky.social
Yet another tantalizing clue that our ancient roots may be found in Asgard(ian archaea)!

#science #biology #evolution #microbiology
An Asgard archaeon from a modern analog of ancient microbial mats
A novel Asgard archaeon, Nerearchaeum marumarumayae, is present in microbial mats in Shark Bay, Australia. Combining genomic and structural analyses, together with high-resolution electron cryotomogra...
www.cell.com
September 4, 2026 at 9:04 AM
Reposted by Gunnar De Winter
ellecordova.bsky.social
Rough Draft vs Final Draft
September 3, 2026 at 1:52 PM
Reposted by Gunnar De Winter
quantamagazine.org
Sarah Demers, chair of the physics department at Yale University, sees potential for the use of AI in physics. But she refuses to use it to write her emails. Read her interview: www.quantamagazine.org/in-an-age-of...
In an Age of AI, a Physicist Seeks What Endures | Quanta Magazine
Sarah Demers, chair of the physics department at Yale University, sees the potential for large language models to both help and harm her field.
www.quantamagazine.org
September 3, 2026 at 1:40 PM
gunnardewinter.bsky.social
Somehow, this one went from genetic drift to superferrets and caffeinated gremlins.

#science #biology #evolution #psychology #mentalhealth
Drift
Lightning, leaves, and anchors
subtlesparks.substack.com
September 3, 2026 at 12:07 PM
gunnardewinter.bsky.social
Snake embryos are little spirals!
That is all. Carry on.

#science #biology #animals #development
How snake embryos coil
Snake embryos coil, but how and why they corkscrew remains unexplored. Weber et al. find that the embryos wind up clockwise via buckling of the rapidly elongating axial body against the slow-growing, ...
www.cell.com
September 2, 2026 at 9:22 AM
Reposted by Gunnar De Winter
science.org
When stressed, this comb jelly reverts to a larval form, then matures again when favorable conditions return.

Learn more: https://scim.ag/4gmdt2J #ScienceMagArchives
August 29, 2026 at 5:20 PM
Reposted by Gunnar De Winter
plosbiology.org
Why do some #bacteria #evolve #antibiotic resistance more readily than others? This study shows that naturally occurring single nucleotide polymorphisms in the PhoQP system change how readily E. coli evolves trimethoprim resistance and which mutations enable it.
🧪 #AcademicSky
plos.io/4qCDXQM
Proposed model for the contribution of polymorphisms towards evolvability of resistance, and the role of fitness cost of TMP resistance in determining the optimal level of PhoQ activity during evolution. A: Polymorphisms influence evolvability under drug pressure if they have epistatic interactions with adaptive mutations. Positive epistasis between pre-existing polymorphisms and adaptive mutations promotes the evolution of resistance, i.e., enhances evolvability of resistance. In contrast, negative epistasis diminishes evolvability. In addition, polymorphisms with negative epistasis can also drive adaptation to antibiotics through novel mutational paths. B: PhoQP signalling pathway across different mutants from the present study. The impact of PhoQ activity on trimethoprim resistance due to DHFR expression is correlated with fitness cost due to RpoS cross-activation. Genetic variation in the pathway is brought about by naturally occurring polymorphisms or drug-selected adaptive mutations. These genetic changes in the pathway activate signalling to different extents at the molecular level, thereby altering global transcriptome to different extents. Scaling of trimethoprim resistance level and fitness cost leads to changes in the concentration of antibiotic required to select for different levels of PhoQ/PhoP pathway activity. The presence of a hypersensitising allele of DHFR drove E. coli towards a high activity, high cost PhoQ mutant demonstrating how polymorphisms can change the mutational landscape of adaptation to antibiotics
August 29, 2026 at 12:00 PM
gunnardewinter.bsky.social
New obsession unlocked: ghosts in our DNA.

#science #genetics #evolution
Recovering signatures of archaic hominin introgression using ancestral recombination graphs
Admixture between modern humans and extinct hominins has shaped the genomes of present-day individuals, but reconstructing this history has been constrained by the scarcity of archaic samples and unad...
www.science.org
August 29, 2026 at 11:23 AM
Reposted by Gunnar De Winter
nature.com
Geochemical clues hint that worm-like creatures in the Ediacaran period benefited from symbiosis with bacteria

go.nature.com/4gDTwTU
Animal-microbe partnerships date back to the dawn of complex life
Geochemical clues hint that worm-like creatures in the Ediacaran period benefited from symbiosis with bacteria.
go.nature.com
August 28, 2026 at 10:03 AM
gunnardewinter.bsky.social
This is an unacceptable timeline.
August 27, 2026 at 6:18 PM
gunnardewinter.bsky.social
"... what I do want to rescue is the sense that the future can be different: the sense that science-fiction writers have always had that yesterday and tomorrow don’t need to be the same. Capitalism has captured the future, and is now commodifying it and selling it back to us..."
Superlative projects are made possible by great collective efforts | Aeon Essays
Superlative things were done in the past century by marshalling thousands of people in the service of a vision of the future
aeon.co
August 27, 2026 at 8:03 AM
Reposted by Gunnar De Winter
rashmi-priya.bsky.social
A perspective in @natmethods.nature.com on Why forces are fundamental to understanding how life comes into being - by us, @campaslab.bsky.social @yanlanmao.bsky.social @sarawickstrom.bsky.social
Miguel Concha, Alba Diz-Muñoz and @streichan.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The physics of sculpting a living creature - Nature Methods
Cell biologists have long known that mechanical forces, such as tension and compression, influence tissue differentiation. Now, advanced methods are letting them observe and manipulate these forces in...
www.nature.com
August 25, 2026 at 6:20 PM
gunnardewinter.bsky.social
This is neat! Mapping chromosome mix-ups to find evolutionary 'highways'.

Also, for some reason, I'm not surprised that ctenophores are being weird again.

#science #biology #evolution #genetics
Topological mixing and irreversibility in animal chromosome evolution
Animal chromosome homology can persist over hundreds of millions of years, despite fusions and translocations. The frequency, pace, and impact of these changes remain unclear. We develop a multiscale ...
www.science.org
August 26, 2026 at 8:21 AM
Reposted by Gunnar De Winter
jenteo.bsky.social
🚨New paper in Biology Letters! 🥳

Hybridization events in Squamata support the viviparity-driven conflict hypothesis
royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article...

Based on the MSc thesis of David Broek. Hybridization is also interesting in other taxonomic groups, not just birds. 😉
August 26, 2026 at 6:37 AM
Reposted by Gunnar De Winter
plosbiology.org
What are the genetic mechanisms for the #evolution of novel traits? This study by @brhopkins92.bsky.social &co links #Drosophila sex comb teeth to expression changes within ancestral cells, leading to diverged metabolic/developmental rates, and a novel structure.
🧪 #AcademicSky
plos.io/4gQOnZK
Graphical abstract on the gain of a novel trait in Drosophila. The teeth of the recently evolved, male-specific Drosophila sex comb evolved from a more ancient organ, the mechanosensory bristle. We show that changes in the expression of genes that are shared between mechanosensory bristle and sex comb teeth cells lead to changes in a variety of fundamental cellular processes that together enable the morphological transformation. The photo, phylogeny, general design are those of the corresponding author(s). They made the bristle schematics in biorender and the fly silhouette is their modified drawing of D. melanogaster from SciDraw (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3925939).
August 25, 2026 at 8:00 AM