'The DHSC is launching a chickenpox vaccination programme which will protect around half a million children each year. And, from January 2026, eligible children will get an MMRV vaccine to protect against measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox.' Report @mirror.co.uk www.mirror.co.uk/news/health/...

Me three months ago:

NEW: The bipartisan Senate Appropriations Committee has rejected Trump’s proposed $18 billion, 40% cut to the National Institutes of Health budget and endorsed a $400 million increase. DO NOT GIVE UP! Our advocacy is working. Keep speaking up and calling your elected officials.

Add a new drug, CETP inhibitor, to the ways beyond lifestyle that we can reduce p-tau 217, the key biomarker for risk of Alzheimer’s disease ir.newamsterdampharma.com/news-release...

#Japan Meteorological Agency has issued a #tsunami warning and advisory for the Pacific coast from #Hokkaido to #Okinawa. The estimate of maximum wave height is now expected to be 3 meter. japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/society/gene...

Tom Lehrer died today. He was one of the great comedians our culture ever produced. Without Tom, there's no Weird Al, probably no that entire branch of comedy. He went alone and beat the odds. youtu.be/frAEmhqdLFs?...

Spot-on from @nixonsimon.bsky.social

Yes - I think the one exception is the first time you study a phenotype as black swans may be found. When that not found (unfortunately they are rare). So suggests standard nested - from initial small core multi-modal, then larger and lighter clinical, then online remote sampling population level.

<big sigh>. As a rule of thumb, if you gather more multi-modal data, you are going to need more samples (patients) rather than less to be confident of results. Importantly you need some sort of credible belief that for the measurements you propose to do you have some hope of the analysis working

1. The pediatric death toll from #flu for 2024-25 continues to climb, with #CDC informed of 5 more deaths last week. That brings the season's total so far to 266, which is only 22 fewer than during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic! Of kids eligible for vax & for whom vax status is known, 90% weren't vaxed.

Answer would appear to be yes! "An overwhelming 82% of those who had taken the GCSE CS confirmed that the additional study of Citizenship topics had increased their democratic literacy and confidence about political issues"

Structural variants are significant contributor to autism. But many SVs & TRs are hard to detect with short reads. Long read sequencing with @pacbio.bsky.social and @nanoporetech.com captures and maps out alot of what short reads miss. So what can LR-WGS tell us about autism? 🧵

Some good news from this week! - Rough sleeping is decriminalised in England - Brazils murder rate has dropped 20% in the past 10yrs - Solar power was Europe's biggest electric production in June - Huge pride march in Budapest after Hungary outlawed it There are good things happening. Keep hope.

Can rightwing press now please agree on the fact that trying to publicise the locations of current Afghan asylum seekers is a stupid idea. www.thetimes.com/article/7a64...

This is quite a big deal and references the Asset Recovery Incentivisation Scheme (ARIS) that POCA-enabled law enforcement orgs receive to boost their funding - after HMT has taken its cut and victims of crime receive compensation. www.telegraph.co.uk/business/202...

We should be having a debate about how British incompetence put the lives of thousands of Afghans at risk. Instead we're having a debate about 'how many criminals they let in'. Tells you everything you need to know about where we're at as a country inews.co.uk/opinion/tori...

Comparison of different ways of measuring trait polygenicity, and what properties a "measure of polygenicity" should have. Authors have a really useful section on how to interpret deviations between the measures for a specific trait www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Bad news for dev bio research ... it needs animal models. A total ban would utterly devastate science. Mathematical modeling is NOT a replication of biology, it's an abstraction. It cannot replace experiments! But, luckily looks like animal research rn can continue as long as modeling is included

This will devastate all of my colleagues that do neuroscience in mice. Drugs don't always translate from mouse to human, But 90% of our genes are shared. They allow recordings and manipulations that cannot be done in humans. We will cede discovery to Europe and China with this unnecessary handicap.

Someone's been up to some quality work here.

Exciting, but wish the hype was dialled back. "This will enable identification & intervention for individuals at high risk of developing common diseases" probably better as "cheap once in lifetime test will nudge many people over & under certain thresholds for interventions.

Quite enjoyed the book and the film, but bloody hell....

I’m recruiting: 4-year BBSRC-funded PhD studentship in computational genomics of human skin, nutrition & ageing at @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social in collaboration w Unilever; co-supervised by @kerrinsmall.bsky.social Fully funded stipend & tuition fees Deadline 13 July 2025 tinyurl.com/2edmve5p

An important thing to bear in mind re: midterm elections is that the Medicaid cuts don’t kick in until after the elections. That’s not an accident, and it’s crucial that folks understand what they’re going to lose. Keeping this front of mind for folks will be difficult.

Uh oh

Nanopore duplex sequencing reveals patterns of asymmetric states of 5hmC and 5mC in the medaka brain genome. #AsymetricMethylation #5hmC #5mC #MedakaGenome #Nanopore #LongRead #Sequencing @biorxiv-genomic.bsky.social‬ 🧬 🖥️ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Grant reviewers, before writing "the proposal is not hypothesis driven" (a tired old trope) , ask yourself whether the funding of Copernicus or Newton or Doll was not appropriate because their fundamental science was not hypothesis driven. Observational science is valid and important.

BIG NEWS! We’ve found that ash trees are fighting back against ash dieback disease! 🌳💪 Scientists at Kew & QMUL ‪@qmul.bsky.social have discovered that young ash trees are evolving resistance to this devastating fungus - & fast 🌍 Read the story👉 www.kew.org/read-and-wat... #PlantScience #SciNews

AlphaGenome deepmind.google/discover/blo... 🧬🖥️🧪 API: github.com/google-deepm... Docs: www.alphagenomedocs.com Community: www.alphagenomecommunity.com

Long-acting antivirals for flu seem like the future to me. I hope this pans out in phase three trials! www.biopharmadive.com/news/cidara-...

Nice! Superb work.

This is great news: UK Biobank Proteomics Project Receives £20M From UK Government for Olink HT characterization of 300k samples www.genomeweb.com/research-fun...

Another post from @genomeweb.bsky.social that didn't make it on Bluesky, about the expansion of the UK Biobank Olink Next-Gen Proteomics project to cover all the 500,000 samples for the Pharma Proteomics Project. www.genomeweb.com/research-fun...

Excited to launch our AlphaGenome API goo.gle/3ZPUeFX along with the preprint goo.gle/45AkUyc describing and evaluating our latest DNA sequence model powering the API. Looking forward to seeing how scientists use it! @googledeepmind

Fairly big news below - SomaLogic is being purchased by Illumina and this is a big and risky play by the leading genomics company to try to become just as dominant in proteomics. Will be very interesting to see what happens.

Illumina goes “all in” on proteomics by purchasing SomaLogic (from Standard BioTools). Can they overtake Olink? www.illumina.com/company/news...

Delighted to see the preprint up for our genome-wide meta-analysis of panic attack and panic disorder 🎉 This was a solid team effort!

Last week the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research met and approved a new initiative: ancient DNA for Modern Genomics (aDMG). You can watch the presentation and discussion here at the 1:54:00 mark. videocast.nih.gov/watch=56826

Yes exactly. It does what AI promises and what Google used to do: provide actual answers. Whatever I need to know, I simply add Reddit to the end of the search term.

Remembering this great tweet on the Summer Solstice

@andywatson on the NGS Sequencing market and the prisoner's dilemma

At the #dumpthescales march at Westminster Square in London, met a very purple @vanessalongley.bsky.social from BeatED

Intervention needed

"A lot of the time, when people ask if they can go off the record, they’re trying to sabotage your reporting by contradicting what others have told you on the record. They may even be lying to you." -- lots of wisdom in this one.

Pleased to share our new preprint on the 1st large-scale GWAS meta-analysis of panic attacks and panic disorder 👇

@edgiuk.bsky.social EDGI UK paper alert - in this paper RA and PhD student Saakshi Kakar worked on using the free text responses in EDGI and also the GLAD study @gladstudy.bsky.social to find new information about eating disorder symptoms.

🚨New paper alert! In my first first-author paper for my #PhD, we explored free-text responses from 1,600+ people with #eatingdisorders to better understand the diverse behaviours used to lose weight, many of which fall outside diagnostic criteria Here's what we found👇