My institution is considering (further) reducing the times at which one can access the building. Would be interested to hear from other academics as to whether you have 24/7 access to your labs/office or what the hours look like (thanks!)

My institution is considering (further) reducing the times at which one can access the building. Would be interested to hear from other academics as to whether you have 24/7 access to your labs/office or what the hours look like (thanks!)

The contrast between the number of media requests I got when rich people on a cruise were facing a deadly, but contained outbreak versus now that some of the poorest people in the world are facing a deadly and devastating epidemic is just so so stark and it just really annoys the hell out of me.

Teams in the Democratic Republic of the Congo & Uganda have now shared the first sequences from the current Ebola (Bundibugyo virus) outbreak using Pathoplexus, just days after cases were confirmed. Read more about the response to Bundibugyo virus here: pathoplexus.org/news/2026-05...

First genomes from the current Ebola outbreak. A very rapid response from teams in the DRC and Uganda. virological.org/t/initial-ge...

Here we go: Official declaration from the DRC that "laboratory analyses conducted by the National Institute of Biomedical Research on May 14, 2026, on 13 blood samples, have confirmed 8 positive cases of Ebola virus disease, Bundibugyo strain" 5 samples had too little volume to be analyzed

1/ 🚀 Pathoplexus now supports Bundibugyo virus (BDBV), a species of Ebolavirus. BDBV has been associated with past outbreaks of Ebola in the DR Congo and Uganda, & a case has been reported today during response to the current Ebola outbreak. pathoplexus.org/ebola-bdbv #ebola #bdbv #ebolaoutbreak

Since launching support for the Andes virus species of hantavirus two days ago, we have already received submissions from four countries' sequencing teams. This is a testament to the rapid response of researchers, sharing real-time data. Read more in our news post: pathoplexus.org/news/2026-05...

and in case anyone was wondering, yes there are currently exactly 500 sequences.. just a coincidentally round number that happens to result from grouping INSDC segments, and applying our QC

1/ 🚀 Pathoplexus now supports the Andes variant of Hantavirus (ANDV). ANDV is the variant identified in the recent MV Hondius cases, & the Hantavirus variant previously identified as having occasional human-to-human transmission. pathoplexus.org/andv #hantavirus #hondius

First genome sequence from Andes hantavirus strain from ongoing ship outbreak posted on Virological: virological.org/t/complete-s... courtesy Swiss National Reference Centre for Emerging Viral Infections, Geneva University Hospitals, University of Zurich

You have really interesting things to say, but the way you post is very annoying. Could you change your personality so I could more easily engage with your content?

UK Biobank has my data, but I’m not worried. I know the benefits are too great to consider pulling out www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Amazing thread on how social media is no longer what you choose, from humans you selected, but algae content, from strangers and LLMs, selected on the basis of your twitches.

TIL that robot vacuum cliff sensors have a non-zero false negative rate :/

is there an explanation of why frontier LLMs, across multiple companies, love the name Elias so much (and Maya, I think)?

ChatGPT Images 2.0 graph of dataset overlaid on the real data. Pretty close.. I fear we might see these starting to pop up

even "sequence a monoclonal antibody" gets a consistent refusal from opus 4.7 on the web 😢

Claude Code became very reluctant to do anything remotely connected to viral sequence data some time in the last few weeks. (I'm quite sympathetic, but also I will now have to use Codex)

Introduction, Methods, Results papers are much less readable than Introduction, Methods-And-Interleaved-Results papers

More than I thought howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com

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!