I made an animation which shows the effects of air pollution on pedestrians waiting to cross the road, along with what can be done to reduce its harmful effects: stepback.gregdev.com Thank you to @ianwalker.bsky.social for the inspiration for doing so during a conversation a couple of weeks' back!

By Julia Marshall as first author and led by Professors Kate Baker and Henrik Salje as co-leading authors (@hsalje.bsky.social @ksbakes.bsky.social), please see our new article about the genomic epidemiology of the spread of sexually transmitted #Shigella: www.thelancet.com/journals/lan... 🛟🧪🧬🖥️🦠💉🧫😷

Must find a way to play these. Where is my MD player?!

What are your favorite papers that linked patients, traced outbreaks, or distinguished epidemiological hypotheses on the careful basis of just a few SNVs? Like ~ <20? Bacterial best, viruses OK too

Sabbatical year in France is HAPPENING !!

This is possibly the best thing I have read on Bluesky since I joined a few years ago. It is that on-point. What we are observing isn't "polarization", it's "radicalization". This can be applied not just to politics, but also many other things in the public discourse - COVID being one close to me.

🚨The program for MEEHubs2026 is now online, as is more detailed information about the hubs! Check it out at meehubs.org and register‼️ Less than a month before the conference kicks off! 🦠

Built a proof-of-concept interactive map based on the news stories I collected: 2,202 incidents involving 1,724 pedestrians, 400 cyclists, 279 others, and 252 structures. diazale.github.io/death_by_car/

New for @undark.org: Mathematicians have signed the Leiden Declaration for AI. I argue that the life sciences needs one: built for noisy, context-dependent systems, w/ disclosure, human accountability, wet-lab validation, & rules that evolve as fast as the tools do. undark.org/2026/07/02/o...

Today is Moving Day in Quebec. Every year on this day, thousands of Quebec residents load up trucks and vans to move residences. The origin of Moving Date dates back centuries to the era of New France. This is the story. 📸 Montreal Gazette Archives 🧵 1/7

I am now old enough that perspective pieces are being written about articles I read in grad school the day they came out (and which definitely changed how we think about the world)

I really value: the dynamics of community assembly on 2 contrasting C sources. Daily sampling of communities derived from compost & maintained over 8 wks. No difference in diversity maintained on simple or complex C. AmaZinG. 🙏 all enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Evolutionary rescue in a phage community! New paper from former PhD student, Sam Greenrod, with brilliant colleague @craigmaclean.bsky.social : academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc...

Any other weirdo/luddites like me listing to the game on TSN radio are being treated to delightful Scottish-accented play-by-play

Love the #worldcup flag combos that appear in Canada but I doubt would be viable in their home countries…

Bonne St-Jean tout le monde!

We are advertising a 3-year Evolution Education Trust funded #PhD studentship at @ugiatucl.bsky.social UCL to investigate the genomic history of infectious diseases preserved within historical pathology collections. Details: www.findaphd.com/phds/project.... #findaphd #EET

alright, who did this? #hatm

Green roof at the local library is so cheerful on a rainy day

1/ Deep-time phylogenetics is hard: overly simplistic substitution models can mislead tree estimation at the billion year timescale. Our new preprint introduces GTRspmix, a protein modeling framework designed to more realistically model site-to-site heterogeneity in amino acid replacement. 🧵

The top scorers at the World Cup right now, with 3 goals each, are Jonathan David and a guy named Messi.

Charlie Demers: "I mean the match up hardly seems fair… a sparsely-populated petro-state cowering in terror of its neighbours versus Qatar."

Potential postdoc opportunity! We're looking for someone to do Good Work Fast at the interface between zoonotic disease ecology and global climate and land-use projections. Strong skills in statistics and geospatial modeling are the non-negotiable here. In-person in New Haven. More essential info 👉

Ever wanted to use metagenomic data to infer oxygen levels (or the oxygen preferences of whole bacterial communities)? We have the tool for you: journals.asm.org/eprint/9GUIR...

Make Algae Grow Again

Uh, what?!

I'm incredibly proud to share our paper on the preclinical evaluation of the BNT164 mRNA tuberculosis vaccine candidates. Now online in the final version at Nature Immunology. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Beyond ecstatic! A huge thanks to the editors @alejandrofabregastejeda.com @ennofischer.bsky.social, the reviewers, and the wonderful team at @philinbiomed.bsky.social for all their feedback!!

Can we use ecological principles to increase coexistence in synthetic bacterial communities? Our new paper is now out in @isme-microbes.bsky.social: "Environmental complexity shapes maintenance of bacterial diversity through context-dependent interactions among niche axes" doi.org/10.1093/isme...

How useful are phages in explaining cholera disease severity? Accordingly to our latest little paper, possibly quite useful — up there with patient age and hospital location, and possibly more important than antibiotic exposures!

Applied Math

🚨Our collaboration with the Bar Yaacov lab on A-to-I mRNA editing in #Vibrio is online🚨🦠 Exciting findings on what genes are edited and the physiological implications. Hint: It affects #T6SS activity and reveals a possible new role for CqsA. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @rinatcp.bsky.social

Re-upping for morning phage phriends. Hope you will find Brenna & Patrick's method useful! Here they are, with some other lab members, on a rock. They are rock stars.

It's out! The LIN code approach for genomic taxonomy of microbial strains and its applications in genomic epidemiology journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Cheap and easy method for nanopore sequencing phage DNA directly from plaques. Proud of lab members Brenna and Patrick for doing this work *with absolutely no help from me* !! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is extremely chilling - virologists being targeted for what appears to be minor (if any) "offenses". We all know _why_ this is happening, so I'm not going to belabor that point - but I want to provide some context on the technical details. 🧵 www.science.org/content/arti...

Why we’re concerned about “Getting Major Projects Built in Canada” 👀 and its impact on nature and a healthy environment. Have your voice heard - read the govt’t proposal www.canada.ca/en/one-canad... and email feedback to [email protected] by June 7, 2026 🙏@baumlab.bsky.social

Excited to share this new paper from the lab: academic.oup.com/ismej/articl...! See thread below

Vibriophiles! Come join us in Berlin this September! Still time to register and submit your abstract

On OMB's proposal to make all grants political: "Speak up! Now’s the time! Standing by the side of the room, glancing around nervously and hoping that somebody else does something will lead us to disaster. These are not normal times, so stop acting as if they are." www.science.org/content/blog...

Happy Pride Month y'all!

This little fella shook my house. www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/...

Hard to stay sad about the Habs with these vibes! Let’s go Victoire! Championnes!!

once again vanilla ice is under pressure

Listerine Leaves 0.1% Of Germs Alive To Spread Message Of Terror Throughout Microbial Community https://theonion.com/listerine-leaves-0-1-of-germs-alive-to-spread-message-of-terror-throughout-microbial-community/

The headline sounds silly but Jérôme is awesome and this is great news for science in Québec. Félicitations Jérôme, you rock!! montrealgazette.com/news/quebec-...

Our NIH-funded research - including as part of CREID - developed, deployed, and established capacity for many of the core tools and countermeasures used during outbreaks. Diagnostics, sequencing, monoclonals and vaccines. As we're facing a new foe with none of those, all that work, defunded. Gone.

Convocation season is officially ON 🎓✨ Big smiles, proud moments, and the start of something new! Congratulations to all #McGillGrads of the Class of 2026! 🎉

A very important preprint to check out: The holobiont is not a useful model for most host-microbiome interactions By Gavin M Douglas an S. Andrew Inkpen ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...