People with bladder cancer who are also colour blind may have a lower chance of survival than those with normal colour vision, according to research in Nature Health. go.nature.com/49VoYuC #medsky 🧪

In 2017 I created the ggmuller R pacakge to draw "Muller plots" combining phylogeny and frequency dynamics. The latest version 0.7.0 fixes deprecated dependencies and includes a few other minor improvements. CRAN: cran.r-project.org/web/packages... Vignette: cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

Serious official vibes for my Research Skills tutorial this morning. Timetabling have put me in the Law Department's moot room!

"you can give the whole setup to the students and let them [... practice] multiple times. [...] here the questions are generated fresh each time. The more you practice, the better you get. That is... actually how learning is supposed to work." #AI www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2025/12/figh...

PCA is one of those techniques that sounds unreasonable (yeah sure we all want to fit a p-dimensional ellipsoid to our data) but turns out to be a reasonable solution to a wide range of problems. Also: I do hope stackexchange has been archived, because it is my gen's library of alexandria

From nuclear klaxon to passive-aggressive flatmate. Lock screen greets me every morning on laptop and desktop with "Have you turned equipment off? It's everyone's responsibility."

For my #popgen nerds out there, I've finished building a Python package called hapnet - an easy to use, straight out the box tool for building #haplotype networks. Just plug your data in, run a single line of code and voila! A pretty color coded network. Still beta testing! pypi.org/project/hapn...

Nurse is the one being naive here. Surely we should move beyond toddler essentialism of the concept of a "bad person"? EM is a person that does bad things. He is control of himself, he can choose not to do those things.

Sigh. For the hundredth time, we are not judging his character, we are judging his actions. The RS position would be fine if it was a gentlemen's club, who can have who it damn well pleases. But it positions itself as represnting British science and scientists. Now an embarrassment, to be frank.

Don't get too excited. Great work, I'm sure, but it's APOE.

This went under the radar but answers a fundamental question in Epigenetics... From many hundreds of olfactory receptor genes, each neuron selects expression of only single one (near-randomly). How? Outstanding work from Mathieu Boulard and colleagues www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Saying X and Grok created these lets Elon Musk FRS off the hook. How far does he have to go for for the Royal Society to expel him? Or is it just an "opinion"?

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... It's finally out! Meriam Guellil expertly led this project from the first HHV6 detection to the final paper. We found both human herpesviruses 6A and 6B in ancient remains going back 2500 years.

Lost Science: She Wanted to Improve Genetic Medicine: Brenna Henn had a long-term grant to study the genetic diversity of Africans and people of African descent. Then her N.I.H. funding was cut. 🎁🔗 www.nytimes.com/2026/01/02/s... 🧪

Trump is probably focused on the money he wrongly thinks he'll make from Venezuelan oil. But he's not a details guy and nobody has thought through the details. Essentially, the US has taken over Venezuela by mistake. Stranger things have happened, but not many. open.substack.com/pub/arthursn...

How well does TWAS estimate a gene’s direction of effect on a trait? We think of this as an important stress-test for the accuracy of TWAS. In a new pre-print, we find that TWAS gets the sign wrong around 20-30% of the time! doi.org/10.64898/202... 1/n

We present a 5-step framework & call on researchers, funders, and community leaders to take it up, ensuring local voices shape & benefit from the accumulating genomic knowledge that will direct future conservation actions ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

the fact that journalists keep asking chatbots to comment on responses they gave to a different user in a different context window on a different computer is so weird. it's like booting up mario and asking mario why he fell in a pit on your friend's nintendo in 1998

30 years ago today, December 31st 1995, the last ever Calvin & Hobbes comic strip was published. Even now, I still find it so poignant & moving.

📢 We're hiring a postdoc (33 months) in human evolutionary genomics / paleogenomics / statistical genetics, Paris 🇫🇷 Project on selection on disease-associated variants, integrating ancient genomes, GWAS, and Ancestral Rec. Graphs. Start May 2026 (flexible). Apply here: emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U...

There’s nothing wrong with common sense until you dig a little and learn that common sense is wrong. Thanks @profgalloway.com for providing a great example of common sense that I’ve gotten a kick out of doubting. Thanks @prosocialworld.bsky.social for hosting. www.prosocial.world/posts/whats-...

Make a Bond movie more academic. Dr No: developing your skills as reviewer 2.

Fifteen of those twenty years were spent writing unsuccessful grant applications.

No contest. Just read the first two sentences of the abstract. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Out of office on. If those three ghosts turn up again this year, each of them is getting handed a bundle of exam scripts and a red pen and told to get on with it.

I guess the preprint came out in 2024 but it was published this year so I'll say this paper from @jeffspence.github.io and @hakha.bsky.social which is probably the paper that pleiotropy-pilled me the most. Really got me to think about what GWAS means www.nature.com/articles/s41...

THREAD. My parents' cat Bridget vanished. As the weeks dragged on they became ever more worried, so to distract himself my dad began to paint Bridget's adventures, imagining her travelling through time and popping up at some of art & music's most important moments. I've collected his work here...

"How can funders avoid crossing the Szilard point?" The Szilard point is "the threshold at which the total cost of competing for a grant equals (or surpasses) the value of the available funding."

“A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress - though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known" - Bertrand Russell, 1976. Time-lapse video of Vampyrella lateritia eating Spirogyra algae from Science Source/Oliver Skibbe. 🦠

Bioinformatics frameworks for single-cell long-read sequencing: unlocking isoform-level resolution academic.oup.com/bib/article/... 🧬🖥️🧪

There are upsides to lectures being recorded, but a downside is that phyclsical attendance is seen as unnecessary. Lectures used to be an opportunity to see friends and your student colleagues, they are a social activity, broadly speaking. Watching Panopto in your room is not. 1/2

For your collective delectation this holiday season: Quite possibly the silliest thing I've ever written (and definitely the most ridiculous graph I've ever made!) loreandordure.com/2025/12/16/j...

How does population size shape the dynamics of structural variants across the genome? Check out our new paper in @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Screaming in ** I did an actual PhD on lactase persistence **

An amazing goal yesterday for Foxes fans @lcfcsupportersclub.bsky.social but especially fantastic for Leicester Hospitals Charity, as the club had donated the shirt sponsorship to them. Great publicity. youtu.be/eOJavD5tIOM?...

I wrote about the bizarre case of Herasight, the embryo selection company going all in on eugenics.

Our latest preprint revisits the classic model of mutation-selection balance. Do human recessive genes fit Haldane's 100-year old model? This work is by the wonderful @jonj-udd.bsky.social, and co-mentored by @jeffspence.github.io www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Faking it without making it: The de-extinction disinfo campaign manager’s history of hype. How Colossal Biosciences’ CEO Ben Lamm keeps the hype cycle going. gmwatch.org/en/106-news/...

Ongoing decimation of British universities part 252: Apx. 1000 academic staff at University of Essex just received formal ‘risk of redundancy’ letters via email. Please share @ucuessex.bsky.social @ucu.org.uk

Ftom angry PE teacher to emergency klaxon in nuclear facility. Lock screen is now "All staff are required to report a personal data breach immediately". Presumably only if one has actually occurred, but such detail is omitted...

REF2029 pause ends today, with UUK conference talks starting at 10:00 and embargo lifted at 11:00. Register to listen online. (There is also a Q&A session).

Next manuscript :"Some have even said they have never seen such Strong results."

Pouring a DGGE gel...

An excellent piece here. ' It can sometimes look as though the biggest crime in science is to create an unseemly fuss, especially on a topic deemed “political”. ' Indeed.

Recently I've read a number of books and articles expressing net-nostalgia, about how better everything was online in the 90s. For those who missed it, let me explain how literature searches worked back then. Thread 👇

My wife has been HIV+ for 34 years. She’s alive today b/c work of activists who destigmatized the virus, pushed medical science to adapt & find ways to treat it, & advocated for gov health programs that helped fund her care. The current U.S. regime may want to go back in time, but we won’t let them.

Hey @erinbiba.bsky.social I hope this finds you

"An old saying about such follies is that “six months in the lab can you save you an afternoon in the library”; here we may have wasted a trillion dollars and several years to rediscover what cognitive science already knew." garymarcus.substack.com/p/a-trillion...

Taken together, CIRdb presents a valuable resource of exome-wide genetic variation in a population at the edge of Southwestern European genetic diversity. Check it out! www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

“Analysis of 87 ancient & modern cat genomes suggests that domestic cats did not spread to Europe with Neolithic farmers. Conversely, they were introduced to Europe around 2000 years ago, probably from North Africa....“ De Martino et al in @science.org. Ancient DNA + cats = science purrfection. 🧬🐱🧪