Global cough radar sleepcycle.com/coughradar?l...

On the first day of Christmas (in about 2014), @duckswabber.bsky.social gave to me - a partridge in a pear tree. Happy Christmas everyone!

Bike-couriered by the editor himself. An illustrious publication!

'Beer stein icons indicate roughly five-day dosing windows' www.sciencenews.org/article/vacc...

This smells distinctly like collider bias and/or selection bias and/or regression to the mean... You simply can't select teen prodigies, and world class athletes rom databases, and go run regressions without serious consideration of the selection process!

NEW: Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook has just announced the BIGGEST EVER reforms to national policy to deliver more homes! Here are the five biggest: 🧵

To Opus 4.5: "Artifact, no react, with an interactive explainer of how octaves work - should include buttons to press to make sounds and frequency visualizations, make the design minimal, but have a lot of subtle puns" tools.simonwillison.net/octave-expla...

3/ Jean Pierre Musabyimana (Rwanda Biomedical Centre) welcomed the addition, saying: “Having Pathoplexus support the inclusion of the Marburg virus will tremendously benefit our work in Rwanda and the region.”

In light of record submission rates and a large volume of AI-generated slop, SocArXiv recently implemented a policy requiring ORCIDs linked in the OSF profile of submitting authors, and narrowing our focus to social science subjects. Today we are taking two more steps: /1

Supreme confidence that someone else isn't finding something genuinely useful does get my goat

Imagine you lived in the 18th century. Smallpox kills 1 in 3 cases. Yet you can’t culture pathogens, don’t know germ theory, and have no idea what a virus is. How would you invent a vaccine? In a new episode of HARD DRUGS, we trace the history of vaccines!

Hinkley Point C is set to be the most expensive nuclear plant ever built. The numbers below reveal they spent £700m on fish protection. Based on the latest estimates that’s £280,000 per fish.

Nano banana Pro: “i need a flowchart for how to toast bread, make it as wacky and over the top and complicated as possible.“ Not absolutely perfect, but I can’t believe how much there is a coherent through-line, how clear the text is, and also parts of it are actually funny?

#AMR #Klebsiella cause >100,000 neonatal deaths globally each year. Our new preprint shows more than half of #Klebsiella pneumoniae neonatal sepsis cases in African and South Asian are nosocomial, acquired through transmission in neonatal units. #WAAW doi.org/10.1101/2025...

I read the caption first and thought the illusion might be because the y-axis was on a log scale, but it's not! My brain was bamboozled regardless.

A new tab on Google Scholar??? scholar.google.com/scholar_labs...

Pathoplexus is growing not only in terms of new sequences, but also integrating into the larger ecosystem of pathogen surveillance by joining WHO's IPSN and expanding membership. This is the way a pathogen sequence database should work! (Lessons learned from GISAID/SARS-CoV-2...)

gemini 3 living up to the hype for me

Another plug for the excellent ourbike.co.uk, which just helped me finish up a move. Cargo bikes across London for £5 per hour.

I want to spell this out in case the implications aren't clear: This means all public tools/webapps of GISAID data (all the ones you've been used to seeing thru the pandemic, as far as we can tell) are prohibited. The file allowed this. Cut that - cut off all tools the public & others were using.

Nextstrain's daily-updated tree of SARS-CoV-2 genomes was my gateway into the world of viral phylogenetics in early 2020, and Nextstrain's beautiful interactive tree display is crucial to making usher.bio results usable. GISAID cutting off data harms global surveillance efforts. 🧵👇

If you are looking for a PhD in the UK, please check out the LIDo program - www.lido-dtp.ac.uk/apply. If you are interested in viruses and making genetically edited salmon, please look up my icase project. International students are welcome to apply! Please reach out if you have questions.

Closing these public analyses puts the world more in the dark and concretely harms surveillance as it becomes more difficult for variant spotters to contribute to global situational awareness. 4/5

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

GISAID on providing data to @Nextstrain.org: "After consulting with our staff and advisors on the feasibility of keeping your global tree up-to-date, there was a clear consensus that continuing to generate, zip and move big files back and forth is not sustainable and a waste of resources." 🙃

@andersonfbrito.bsky.social and I are seeking input from the community on hosting/sharing arbovirus sequencing data (DENV, CHIKV, OROV, ZIKV, & YFV) on @pathoplexus.org. Please consider filling out this VERY SHORT survey about your interest and/or concerns. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

How certain is certain enough? This is probably the last public London talk I'll be giving on Proof in 2025 – and it's free – so see you there at 5.30pm on 24th November if you're around! www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/e...

Tune in to find out: - how to go from hallucinated cat pictures to hallucinated proteins - whether @jacobtref.bsky.social can do photosynthesis - whether we can make tiny protein straws for tardigrades to drink from

I built a free tool to try to embarrass British police into doing their job cctv.numpad.io. More info here: onodi.co/bisect/

The first mostly-AI-rendered film to gross >$100m worldwide will be released in 1️⃣ 2026-2027 2️⃣ 2028-2029 3️⃣ 2030-2035 4️⃣ 2036+ 📊 Show results

The Mercator projection if it weren’t cropped (click to view full size)

#UKHSAVirusWatch is back, a summary of our weekly winter surveillance report .🦠🧵 This week's data shows an increase in COVID-19 activity, which is circulating at medium levels. Flu activity has also increased, particularly in those aged 15 to 24, but remains at baseline levels.

“The Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) shows signs of containment, with no new confirmed or probable cases reported since our last update” Some cautious good news from @who.int #IDSky hq_who_departmentofcommunications.cmail19.com/t/d-l-ggllll...

seems like we'll still have a job for a year or two #sora

this is real fiasco

🤫

Do you guys remember when they created a neuron-level model of a fruit fly’s brain and they made it sense something sweet and it stuck out its tongue

enjoyed the bento lab in one battle after another

(not intended as serious analysis!)

No, you are not our product. Our product _is_ the code that we write and distribute for others to use. For others to take and build their communities. Making the users the product is exactly the model that never works and continues to never work.

Amazing breakfast this morning. I love waffles

In 2030 what proportion of the video content the average American watches will be directly AI-generated? (normalised by watch-time) 1️⃣ <10% 2️⃣ 10-30% 3️⃣ 30%-60% 4️⃣ >60% 📊 Show results

WAFFLES

Most graphs of the fertility rate depict the 'period fertility rate', which is based on a single year's data and doesn't necessarily reflect how many children women actually have across their lifetimes. I've used data from the Human Fertility Database to show the cumulative number instead:

I'm giving a free public talk asking 'How certain is certain enough?' at @lshtm.bsky.social on Monday 24th November at 5.30pm, as part of the Global Health Lecture Series. From epidemic response and clinical trials to online misinformation and AI, I'll look at how truth emerges – and why it falters.

HHMI adopts Plan U journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

The science is, in fact, clear. Good studies [1] consistently show a weak association between tylenol & autism. Those studies are very careful to say they can't establish whether this is causal. A huge Swedish study used a clever sibling design to address this, and showed zero causal effect [2].