A minor cartographical change.

California, USA: Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease – Over 100 Cases and 38 Cluster Events in Children Under Five https://beaconbio.org/en/report/?reportid=029087d8-228b-414a-b996-fbd611b911fa&eventid=dd3aefac-7d62-4f20-8a23-b5ea209059f9&utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=socialpost

Babies who don’t get their first round of vaccines on time at 2 months of age are much less likely to get vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella by age 2, according to a new study. www.statnews.com/2026/01/02/m...

The energy I’m going into 2026 with.

EXCLUSIVE: @laurenweberhp.bsky.social & I have spent the last year collecting school+county-level vaccination data from across the US and found that only about 28% of counties now have herd immunity for kindergartners from measles—that leaves about 5.2mn kids unprotected. Gift link: wapo.st/49zDc43

Former U.S. senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, the first Native American chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and a leader of the effort to build the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, died Dec. 30. He was 92.

For decades, the FDA made it impossible to know which factory your prescription drugs were manufactured in. ProPublica built a tool to show you. Here’s how we did it.

This seems fine.

💾 mlst 2.25.0 has been released! Fixed a bug that missed alleles in increasingly larger schemes like senterica (thanks @microbiologikat.bsky.social) and updated the databases. #bioinformatiocs #microbiology #genomics github.com/tseemann/mls...

The U.S. will very likely lose its measles-elimination status next month, and Americans will have to confront how difficult this virus can be to control, @katherinejwu.com reports:

The end of an era; a passing of the baton in bacterial annotation. Prokka was one of the first apps that opened my eyes to the potential of well-designed microbial bfx on a local machine. I have pestered the brilliant @torstenseemann.bsky.social ever since. Prokka est mort. Vive le bakta.

🚂

Continued excellence. An absolutely indispensable piece of open source software.

This is how we ride.

Excellent.

die-hard | adjective | strongly or fanatically determined or devoted Die Hard | noun | a Christmas movie

The globetrotting ‘starchitect’ created some of the world’s best-known buildings, from the Bilbao Guggenheim to LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall: on.ft.com/48oRCDN

Excellent news:

Good night, sweet prince.

Thanks to Sesame Street, we have a Knives Out puppet mystery.

The Pledge to the American People was a foundation for Walter Dowdle’s Mountin lecture in 1990, and it used to be as prominent on our website as this 20ft mural in the lobby of one of our buildings. I used to walk past these words every day, proud that we could rise together with these principles.

I miss hiking the dish.

1/ 🚀 Pathoplexus now supports Marburg virus (MARV) and Ravn virus (RAVN) (sister viruses in the same genus). MARV has two main clades and causes severe disease with reported fatality rates of 24–88%. You can read more detail about adding Marburg here: pathoplexus.org/news/2025-11...

As you’re preparing for your Thanksgiving meal, remember the skilled work it took to get that food to your grocery store. Tell us your favorite Thanksgiving dish, and we can share some of what we know about the work behind the ingredients.

This is really cool!

They will take the Biscoff from my cold, dead hands.

As a science major, my favorite course was the Shakespeare elective I took in the drama department.

Yikes.

A Washington resident died of complications from an infection with a bird flu strain never before reported in humans, the state Department of Health said. Read more: https://cnn.it/4o796sL

A majority of U.S. adults (59%) say they don’t want to get an updated COVID-19 vaccine. This is roughly identical to the share who said in October 2024 that they probably wouldn’t get the updated vaccine.

On the ByHeart formula recall: “I have never seen a company so aggressively fight to deny the evidence against them," @cspinet.org's Sarah Sorscher said. Why food safety experts are alarmed by the company's response to the infant botulism outbreak: www.statnews.com/2025/11/14/b...

🚨🚨 🧵1/6 #FedFam, reporters - urgent help needed 🚨CDC Museum (a Smithsonian affiliate) is being shuttered🚨 Staff are being “un-RIFed” just to close the museum permanently — then RIFed again in Jan This is bureaucratic cruelty & cultural vandalism CDC Library is a national treasure #SaveCDCLibrary

Our lab's paper describing the North American H5N1 epizootic is out now in Nature! So thrilled to have this out, and congratulations to @lambod50.bsky.social for all the fantastic work on this: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Yikes.

Veteran Jim Blane, almost 101 years old, sat down with CPR News to detail his experience in one of the most pivotal WWII battles, 80 years later. (via Colorado Public Radio)

ByHeart has recalled two batches of infant formula sold at major retailers after the FDA linked the product to a multistate botulism investigation.

U.S. multistate infant botulism cases with suspected link to ByHeart infant formula; 13 hospitalizations under investigation https://beaconbio.org/en/report/?reportid=de74964d-adc2-4d15-ba5b-d6ef2b24336f&eventid=e2f60af9-d476-4609-921c-2349b601aabf&utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=social

One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

On Oct 1, 2025, GISAID informed us that they had ended updates to the flat file of SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences and associated metadata that we had used to update Nextstrain analyses since Feb 2020. GISAID's stated rationale was that their "resources are limited". 1/5

When #mpox cases surged, California’s VRDL rapidly developed a new molecular test to detect and differentiate mpox clades — helping public health labs nationwide respond faster and stay ahead of emerging variants. Read more in our latest issue of Lab Matters: buff.ly/pbSfxZV

Hellman hollow just won’t be the same.

Today’s visit to the MFA.

A crash on a Mississippi highway gave a group of lab monkeys a taste of freedom. But some were killed, police said, after the driver said the monkeys were infected and dangerous. Tulane University said they had not been exposed to any infectious agents. https://wapo.st/4ntQvqw