Reminder: a large (2.5M+) sibling control study found "no evidence of increased risk of autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability associated with acetaminophen use". Precisely the kind of data that requires serious consideration before declaring mission accomplished. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-react... Hard to know what to say really Fortunately Sci Media Centre is on hand.... @sciencemediacentre.bsky.social

See our ELP winner Dr Joe Grove discussing his work with Dr Chris van Tulleken at 9pm tonight on BBC2, or right now on BBC iPlayer: bbc.in/47WjAXM Joe and his team at @cvrinfo.bsky.social @uofglasgow.bsky.social are using #AI to better understand how viruses evolve and function.

Automated, almost-error-free consensus #assemblies with Autocycler Impressive benchmarks in Fig 2B (below): ≤10 median errors PER genome Once again, incredible, landmark work from @rrwick.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/bioi... Tool here: github.com/rrwick/Autoc... #bioinformatics #genomics

A bit like spiralling publication costs we need to start having a proper discussion around lab equipment servicing costs. These are often completely disproportionate to the cost of instrument and the service that is provided and seem to serve as a cash cow for vendors.

If this is right, it should prick the #AI bubble. I wouldn't want to be diagnosed by 'someone' who hallucinates, i.e. makes up stuff that looks like an answer, but isn't. [ht @goonerismspeek.bsky.social ]

Just bought!

Yeah man we should really fight back by staying on X

Universities. Rural hospitals. Tech companies. Several sectors are going to be profoundly hurt by this. Not to mention the chaos of the moment as current H1-B owners scramble to get back to the U.S., cancel travel, etc. due to the uncertainty. An absolute mess. As intended.

To "accelerate high-impact, curiosity-led research and innovation, and to facilitate breakthroughs" - let me tell you my students using genAI are NOT curious and what it is accelerated so far is lying, cheating and data fabrication

More microbiobollocks

Prediction: Sticking AI on end the name of your startup is going to age about as well as all those companies called things like Micro 2000 in the 90s.

Terrific new feature presented by @theo.io on @pathoplexus.org called SeqSets for generating DOIs for sequence subsets used in publications, that can then be tracked for impact via CrossRef that will allow data generators to track impact! #IMMEMXiV

6 months later

We’re very happy to support the Microbial Bioinformatics Hackathon with @climb.ac.uk resources at #IMMEMXIV - lots of useful projects being born!

✨Célia Souque just showcased the outcomes of the 12th Microbial Bioinformatics Hackathon at IMMEM XIV. She brilliantly presented the first sneak-peek of PORT – Plasmid Outbreak Reporting Tool! 🧬 Looking forward to continuing this collaboration with PORT! #IMMEM #Hackathon #Plasmids #ESGEM #ESGMAP

Never work with children, animals or AI

And it’s goodbye from me. Final GigaBlog from outgoing EiC @scedmunds.bsky.social on the major changes at GigaScience Press gigasciencejournal.com/blog/and-its...

Mini-scoop: After resisting pressure to strip Elon Musk of his fellowship for months, the Royal Society is meeting on 1 October to discuss his removal – following his decision to address Tommy Robinson's far-right rally on Saturday. www.thenewworld.co.uk/james-ball-r...

Such a delight to share our work on the evolution of a cheese rind fungus in @currentbiology.bsky.social. This is the fantastic PhD work of @nicolasleonlouw.bsky.social and resulted from amazing collaborations, a wedding proposal(!), an undergrad course, & more! 🧵 www.cell.com/current-biol...

X-Mapper 🦠🧬🧪 - a sequence aligner developed for microbes, now on Bioconda! 🚀 • 11–24× fewer suboptimal alignments (same for human genome) • 3–579× lower inconsistency • improves on ~30% of reads aligned to non-target species github.com/mathjeff/map... bioconda.github.io/recipes/x-ma... #microsky

Larry Tesler, inventor of the cut, copy, and paste commands, dies at 74

A reminder that Elon Musk is still a Fellow of the Royal Society. Surely THIS is the point at which he is expelled @royalsociety.org

Today people went around my neighborhood in north east London spray painting St George’s crosses onto people’s homes. Many of these houses have non British people living in them. This is getting very dark, very quick.

Elon, speaking at the Tommy Robinson march today: “This is a government against the people and not for the people, this is why everyone is gathered here today…we don’t have another four years…there’s got to be a dissolution of parliament” And the government just…continues to use X.

"We will never know what diseases might have been cured or what advances in technology might have been invented had the lights not gone out in the labs." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/o...

This is an important article and a key reminder that, while tech companies can't be held responsible for content on their platform, they can, and should, be held responsible for how they serve and amplify said content. www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

If you are UK-based and working on any aspect of microbiomes (human, plant, insect, soil, animal, ...), please do sign up to Microbiome-Net for details of networking, funding and training opportunities. forms.office.com/pages/respon...

The 3 stages of grief: denial, anger, ballroom

New blog post – A quick look at Roche's SBX lh3.github.io/2025/09/11/a...

Sometimes you meet absolutely incredible bioinfo-magicians. It was a huge privilege when @shenwei356.bsky.social joined our group for a year on an @embl.org sabbatical. While here, he developed a new way of aligning to millions of bacteria, called LexicMap 1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Amid the concerning news of a new Ebola Zaire outbreak in DRC, teams on the ground have already managed to sample, sequence, and share data. This rapid turnaround is a testament to their commitment and capacity to respond. Read more: virological.org/t/the-16th-e... 1/7

Preprint out for myloasm, our new nanopore / HiFi metagenome assembler! Nanopore's getting accurate, but 1. Can this lead to better metagenome assemblies? 2. How, algorithmically, to leverage them? with co-author Max Marin @mgmarin.bsky.social, supervised by Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social 1 / N

How do you long-read sequence metagenomes? I would argue it starts with the right sample storage & DNA extraction, to enable efficient @nanoporetech.com /@pacbio.bsky.social sequencing, which we investigated in our new paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Massive thanks to Klara for driving this

People reacting to the news that BLAST now outputs CSV files?

My feed just now

Confused writing is usually a symptom of confused thinking. As we struggle to clarify writing, we clarify our thoughts. AI writing aids rob us of that struggle, leaving clean-looking text and thoughts still confused for lack of inspection. Writing is not just a product; it is a diagnostic tool.

Just announced: @who.int is ending the public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) over the spread of #mpox in Africa. It was declared in August 2024. (AfricaCDC has announced it remains a Continental Emergency.) #IDsky 🧪

Sequence data from the new Ebola outbreak in DRC suggests it is indeed a new spillover. And just incredible to see the virus sequenced and the data publicly shared less than 24 hours after confirmation of the outbreak. #IDsky 🧪 virological.org/t/the-16th-e...

And here’s confirmation from @WHO: “Health authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have declared an outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Kasai Province where 28 suspected cases and 15 deaths, including four health workers, have been reported as of 4 September 2025.” #IDsky 🧪

judge your date by how they treat their agentic assistants

The four UK higher education funding bodies confirm the pause in the criteria setting and publication of final guidance for REF 2029 for a short period, as announced by the UK Science Minister Lord Vallance today at the Universities UK conference. 2029.ref.ac.uk/news/pause-t...

We have a position for an Assist Prof in Microbial Genomics in our School of III. Hod Joan Geoghegan will be happy to field questions if you are interested. No specific area of microbial genomics preferred so please do consider it www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOO184/a...

Each year I set my intro bioinformatics class a group exercise where they reconstruct the root sentence (usually a notable quote) on a phylogenetic tree, where the sentence "mutates" along each branch like a game of "Telephone". I used to just use a dictionary for this. This year I switched to LLMs

It is infuriating that weather reports consider hot dry and sunny weather as de facto good and wet and cold weather as bad regardless of season and with little regard for impact of climate change

99% of meeting rooms are not adequately set up to facilitate hybrid meetings - time to bin this format imho (go full virtual or full IRL)

Before COVID we didn’t even know a virus causes multiple sclerosis. They just figured out how it does it. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This should be the lead story in all major national news outlets. Public health people prefer to stay out of the limelight unless there is no other choice. I can’t overstate how bad things have to be for 9 former CDC directors to band together and pen an op-ed in the NYT warning the entire country.

Wow, big news over at EIT: www.eit.org/news/profess...