there is a very excellent exhibit at the san francisco Exploratorium museum that illustrates this. there is a black background, and you push a button, and a swatch of white paint flips up in front of it.

Really excited to be able to share our latest preprint, describing how during its evolution in cattle, H5N1 has got better at using a type of alternative receptor that's abundant in cows, but not found in humans and birds. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Artemis Real-time Orbit Website: www.nasa.gov/missions/art...

artemis toilet drama rabbit hole ttu-ir.tdl.org/server/api/c...

You are *not* going to guess the explanation for this one.

Further details on the meningococcal genome and genomic epidemiology including data release info from the recent explosive Kent outbreak: www.gov.uk/government/p...

Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Some provisional analysis on one of the genomes from the menB outbreak detailed below: johnlees.me/posts/menb-o...

I did my PhD on bacterial meningitis, finding whether there are genetic factors which make meningitis more likely. Wrote down some initial thoughts on the current outbreak in Kent: johnlees.me/posts/menb-o... I tried to think of factors and their likelihood to explain why this is happening now

You can now view a tree of 2,399,238 bacterial genomes we made from AllTheBacteria (on the great Taxonium): taxonium.org/atb That's a big tree! (unless you're used to SC2 trees)

is anyone still listening to notebook lm podcasts?

Last year, a mathematician discovered that you can derive pi by flipping a coin. They discovered this by asking ChatGPT random questions between reps at the gym mathenchant.wordpress.com/2026/03/12/i...

New OpenFold3 preview out! (OF3p2) It closes the gap to AlphaFold3 for most modalities. Most critically, we're releasing everything, including training sets & configs, making OF3p2 the only current AF3-based model that is functionally trainable & reproducible from scratch🧵1/9

1/ 🦟 Big news: #Pathoplexus now supports Dengue virus & Yellow Fever virus - two arboviruses responsible for over 400 million infections and up to 94,000 deaths per year. Here's what’s new in our latest update 👇🏻 Read the full update: pathoplexus.org/news/2026-03... 📰

Holy smoke. What ultimately happened???

1/5 Introducing SimPlot-CL! 🧬 Recombination plays an important role in viral evolution. Similarity plots are a great way to visualize recombination patterns, but generating them across many genomes can be cumbersome (Work with my student, Keno Strotjohann!) 📂 github.com/hodcroftlab/simplot-cl

"Rain"-style showers (i.e. with the showerhead vertically above your head).. 1️⃣ .. are good 2️⃣ .. are bad 📊 Show results

Explore the bluesky universe with 🔊. (Not suitable for mobile connections) bluesky-map.theo.io?live=1&reada...

Bluesky map, now with posts read aloud 🔈 - pretty trippy bluesky-map.theo.io?live=1&reada... Chrome recommended. Uses significant bandwidth to download TTS voices.

hadn't thought/known much about CO2 seasonality until now

made some tweaks to @iambic.bot recently so it never sends the same text twice; it's been on good form since

🤔

Added live likes from the firehose to the map too. Rather pretty. bluesky-map.theo.io?live=1&likes=1

You would prefer that the pace of AI improvement was: 1️⃣ Faster 2️⃣ At the current rate 3️⃣ Slower 📊 Show results

"The defining goal of the academic endeavor is to establish a single perfect value that completely summarizes entire careers’ achievements. Such an index would allow the academic community to formally and uncontroversially determine the best researchers by simply comparing their respective scores."

@russcd.bsky.social ushers in a new era of academic metrics with the core-pivotal author index, which assigns all credit to authors that occupy the exact center of the author list, while non-central peripheral authors receive no credit whatsoever. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag026 #evobio #molbio

tried giving claude and gemini the ability to control my robot arm but both were reassuringly bad at it

So I pleased to announce the conceptual spawn of FigTree: PearTree (acronym still to be finalised). If you want to dive right in it is hosted as a web app here: artic-network.github.io/peartree (click the “Example...” button for immediate candy and then click every button you can find).

ssh is an obscure but widely-deployed command. It stands for Secure Snake Home and was made in the 90s to securely play snake online I made a massively multiplayer backend for it with support for thousands of concurrent snake players ssh snakes.run to join!

So delighted that Mark is pushing for PAF liberation! 👊

@wytamma.bsky.social 's WASM tools have transformed my experience of teaching Python to first year undergraduate biologists this year. Since last year, I've been teaching ~400 undergrads how to code (functions, lists, dictionaries, loops) over (one hour intro lecture +) two 2-hour practicals. 1/n

👀

Realised I can display live posts on the map bluesky-map.theo.io?live=1 (there's also an option under the settings cog to display post text, in case you really want to be overstimulated)

In 2025, GISAID cut off access to many critical SARS-CoV-2 resources, incl. our outbreak.info. A month ago, GISAID leveled accusations against us, Cov-Spectrum, Nextstrain, and members of COG-UK, which are false and misrepresent known facts. Our joint response: blog.outbreak.info/joint-respon...

@pratikkatte.bsky.social and I just released Lorax 🌲, a tool for interactive exploration of biobank-scale ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs). If you’ve ever wanted to scroll across the ancestries of thousands of genomes… this is for you.

Went to lidl to buy broccoli etc and nearly walked out with a plasma cutter. Dastardly bargains

huge

Wat

Such a good piece today from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com which shows that the declining graduate premium is very much a UK problem rather than a general (or inevevitable) consequence of more people going to uni www.ft.com/content/649d...

somewhat terrifying chatjimmy.ai

Hypothesis: AI writing is bad primarily because in general what makes writing good is the specificity of what it communicates and its information density, so the prompt that produced good AI writing would be as long as the output.

This is a rare case where if you give a screenshot of this post to ChatGPT/Claude and ask it to explain the joke, if any, it doesn't get it

sick claude is rather tragic

Oh this is what it feels like to be a reactionary

Here is a very rough version of the For You Stats dashboard: linklonk.com/foryou It shows you 3 things: - how much you've been using For You - how many views and likes your posts got in For You - how your likes/reposts helped surface posts to other people in For You Feedback welcome

seems bad

Ok, clicking through to the blog post that this blog post is referencing, the author makes this point directly: theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...

Genuinely very impressed by the SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle I just got out of Google's new Gemini 3 Deep Think model simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/12/...

Gemini Deep Think Oneshot! Note the Oxpecker bird on the hippo! gist.github.com/theosanderso...

See paper in Nature, looks interesting, read it, the latest model they evaluated was o1 preview. This needs to stop. I understand publishing timelines are long but at least change your headline or the abstract.