New preprint! 🥳🎉 We looked at viral coinfection patterns at the largest scale ever in wildlife. We found a strong association among CoVs, PMVs, and influenza A, and higher coinfection rates in wildlife trade; plus, evidence that bats accumulate persistent infections. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New workshop paper out today with 60 of our closest friends, providing guidance on how to design a study attributing health impacts to climate change. Hopefully this helps expand the field and start closing the representation gaps we discuss in our forthcoming work link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🦠🌿🐦🧪 How can biodiversity monitoring help global efforts in disease surveillance? With ✨ fantastic ✨ colleagues from @viralemergence.org and the @geobon.org working group on One Health, we try to identify three key lessons for the future. 🧵 A short thread! academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

Please read and share, on the US budget cuts now imminently impacting Verena. bsky.app/profile/vira...

New podcast. I chat with independent socialist politician Jeremy Corbyn about compassionate politics, the history of neoliberalism, kneecap, jenoside, and a United ireland. Dog Bless open.spotify.com/episode/3F7g...

I subscribe to the @newyorker.com, I was part of ACT UP, I knew Larry Kramer well and know Tony Fauci too. Daniel Immerwahr's piece on RFKJr, features this and other passages that need a reponse. 1/

that said, at some point we will have to reckon with the political consequences of putting this scale of wealth at the personal, unilateral discretion of individual human beings (generations ago would've been nice, but I'll settle for now)

The next meeting of London Infection & Ecology Network is tomorrow! 2pm at RVC in Camden with excellent speakers on mosquitoes, viral evolution, climate and more, plus optional pub afterwards. It'd be fantastic to see you there. bsky.app/profile/jrag...

LLMs are nothing more than models of the distribution of the word forms in their training data, with weights modified by post-training to produce somewhat different distributions. Unless your use case requires a model of a distribution of word forms in text, indeed, they suck and aren't useful.

Nice overview of mathematical approaches to analyse age-stratified serological data: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Lungfish xkcd.com/3064

Harding very much influenced how I think and understand the world, and I met her once and she was great. RIP to a real one.

In the UCL Dept of Genetics, Evolution & Environment, we are advertising for people interested in applying for senior fellowship funding. I can say personally that it is a fantastic place to hold a fellowship. Apply at www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/... @ucllifesciences.bsky.social @uclcber.bsky.social

Nothing to see here, just Nature advocating LLM peer review. “Feed your dictated notes into an offline large language model (LLM) to clarify and organize your feedback. A simple prompt such as “Write a critical reviewer letter based on the following notes. Maintain a professional tone throughout”

I wholeheartedly agree with this piece from @kityates.bsky.social. The Royal Society has to take may things into consideration, including what its US members feel - but even so, I think the right course in this instance is very clear, and they ducked it. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

🚨Excited to share our latest research published in @commsbio.bsky.social , where we've developed a predictive model that integrates both host ecological traits and viral genomic features to identify potential reservoir hosts for Orthopoxviruses, including mpox virus. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

The Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases NSF program has been archived. Huge loss. Does anyone know if the current proposals in the queue for funding will not be reviewed or are panels still happening?

Two really important papers for anyone interested in causal inference in ecology came out recently in Ecology Letters. 1st up (by @lauradee.bsky.social & @katherinesiegel.bsky.social) is this over-view paper. Really useful for both experts and beginners. https://buff.ly/4gZgTWa

Ursula le Guin, on the accusation that fantasy is an escape from reality

AI is poised to accelerate understanding in infectious diseases, but its value needs to be demonstrated through close collaboration between research, industry, society, and policy. Paper free to read: rdcu.be/eaxEw Summary here: www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-02...

Thanks to the more than *1100* members of the scientific community who have signed the letter to insist that the Royal Society remains true to values that we all hold dear but that Musk FRS has ridden roughshod over. Please keep signing & sharing. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Serological data provide key insights on pathogen circulation. We introduce a new R package, Rsero, which is a pipeline to store and analyze age-stratified sero data, estimate the history of pathogen circulation and compare different transmission models. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

This a summary of last part o my Ph.D. We investigated how temperature can affect the outcome of dengue infection. The study covers a 10y period in all five regions of Brasil and all sub-climates of the country We conclude that higher temperature makes risk of hospitalizations due dengue bigger!

I can't begin to convey how horrible this would be. The US and UK, collectively, have supported 15-20% of Gavi's budget in the last several funding cycles. To understand the impact here you have to know that Gavi does much more that just buy vaccines 1/ (disclosure - I receive funding from Gavi)

Our new paper on bat influenza transmission dynamics is out. Check it out 👀🦇🦠 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? Jevin West (@jevinwest.bsky.social) and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take. thebullshitmachines.com

what a disaster. if this decision is not reversed immediately, its damage on science & society will be unravelling in infinite nuanced ways for decades to come

New podcast, I loved making this. It's 51 minutes of me deciding wether or not to lick a window, which delves into transactional analysis psychology and stories of fish landing in forests during the great storm of 1839 open.spotify.com/episode/2XuJ...

Just over week until the deadline👇

Interesting updates from Ben Bolker on modelling approaches (see paper) In sum: - Doing hypothesis testing or measuring the strength of effects? Then you can use your fullest, maximal model w/ all covariates* ✅ - Doing prediction? Then carry on w/ AIC model selection & averaging ✅ *wisely chosen!

Foundations and future directions for causal inference in ecological research, forthcoming w/ @katherinesiegel.bsky.social: tinyurl.com/4mm57zzd. We wrote it based on our experience teaching causal inference to ecologists w/ some stuff we wish other papers had reviewed to share w/ the students 1/n

Just as there is "no such thing as a fish", there is no such thing as a "human pathogen" if you set put your evolutionary timescale goggles on. Supplementary Note 1 does a nice job of articulating and framing the ancient history of virus host jumps! static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10...

Special edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society published, which includes UCL research highlighting the threat to biodiversity from global warming and arguing for a better understanding of the effects of biodiversity loss on infectious diseases. www.ucl.ac.uk/biosciences/...

Job Alert! Lecturer/Assoc Prof in Biodiversity, Climate Change & Health Deadline 18th Feb 2025 Join us at UCL People & Nature Lab to lead innovative ‘One Health’ research & teaching to tackle ecological & public health challenges. tinyurl.com/4s2j7fyj

Pandemics, global change, and biodiversity loss? In a new paper published in the first issue of @natrevbiodiv.bsky.social, we argue that these are three facets of an ongoing polycrisis, with common roots, and hopefully common solution. A short thread. 🧪😷 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Great thread by @colincarlson.bsky.social summarising our new paper in @natrevbiodiv.bsky.social 🦠🦟🧪😷 bsky.app/profile/coli...

🚨New paper out @natrevbiodiv.bsky.social on how pathogens and parasites are responding to global change, and implications for pandemic prevention and biodiversity conservation. Check it out below!

If you take one thing away from our paper, I hope it's this: there's no safe path through the Pandemicene without action on environmental protection, sustainable development, and health system strengthening. Single-issue advocacy and siloed solutions put the world at greater risk from pandemics.

Here we go! The first issue of Nature Reviews Biodiversity is now live🥳🎉🥂. Thank you to our authors, reviewers, and community for the support! We hope you enjoy the reading. www.nature.com/nrbd/volumes...

Second: We need more evidence on causal relationships between human activities, ecosystem function, and infectious disease risk - especially for pandemic threats, but also for other priorities like neglected tropical diseases. We also need observational studies on which interventions work, and why.

Lucid insights on where we’re at on actually understanding pandemics, and where we’re not (yet) at:

How are pathogens and parasites responding to planetary change, what does this mean for people and biodiversity, and what is to be done? New @viralemergence.org synthesis out today in Nature Rev Biodiversity (@natrevbiodiv.bsky.social) with a fantastic author team🧪😷 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

doi.org/10.1098/rstb... This new paper asks us to alter the paradigm of disease ecology to integrate ecological with socio-economic data. Humans are not separate from the ecosystem, yet most research treats humans as the endpoint. This perspective shift can create more equitable outcomes. 👩🏻‍🔬🧪🌎

New paper from #MosquitoScotland project led by Dr Georgia Kirby @uofgsbohvm.bsky.social - a review of Ecological risk factors for the establishment of West Nile virus in Britain. Article reviews the ecology of British mosquitoes to assess risk of WNV establishment. ⏬ doi.org/10.1016/j.pt...

NEW: 2024 has just been confirmed as the warmest year on record, and the first to breach the 1.5C threshold. We used a ridgeline (Joy Division inspired) chart to visualise daily temperature anomalies since 1940. 2024 clearly stands out with 100% of its days above 1.3C and 75% above 1.5C.

We’re on the cusp of the next pandemic starting in the USA, and journalists are still cherry-picking data to tell this tired, racist story about spillover being a problem of the Global South (because scientists keep telling them that story) www.ft.com/content/a714...

Thank @roryjgibb.bsky.social for the opportunity to contribute toward building a 'people and nature' paradigm for biodiversity-disease research and action as part of this new special issue.

This is a really fantastic read - a great tour of modern views on conservation, and how they can help us move beyond 'longstanding scientific narratives of human involvement in zoonotic disease systems, which have largely framed people as ecological disruptors' and look to solutions. 🌸🤝🦠

🚨New paper 🚨We argue that abrupt biodiversity losses can be driven by populations sharing similar tolerances to warming 🦋🌎🥵. Out now in @royalsocietypublishing.org. Summary thread below 🧵 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10....

‘Bending the curve towards nature recovery: building on Georgina Mace's legacy for a biodiverse future’ - a special issue of Phil Trans R Soc B in honour of a very special biodiversity scientist - is published today by @royalsociety.org. royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...