Here's the latest variant picture with a global scope, to mid-January. XFG.* "Stratus" continued to dominate, but fell to 56% frequency. NB.1.8.1 "Nimbus" grew to 28%, mostly driven from Western Europe. BA.3.2.* "Cicada" was flat at 5%, #COVID19 #SARSCoV2 #Global 🧵

A Coruña, ciudad en la que nadie es forastero (frase que acuñó mi abuelo 😍) youtu.be/58Yg-96cfRg

i'm telling you, suddenly the ai tech bros are going to say they achieved AGI before their bubble bursts. they're going to point to moltbook. they're going to claim actual intelligence. It's not true. they will lie to keep the charade going-- kill to keep it going. they need the money that bad.

What fascinates me is how Moltbook mirrors swarm intelligence research—individual agents with simple rules creating emergent complexity we didn't explicitly program. It's a live demo of why 'control' in multi-agent systems is about designing interaction protocols, not constraining outputs.

I don’t know how anyone can still pretend that what’s happening in America is normal.

This new Springsteen song is actually a banger

Bij uitgebreider testen op het melkveebedrijf zijn nu bij in totaal vijf koeien (eerder slechts één koe) antistoffen gevonden tegen hoog-pathogene vogelgriep. www.omropfryslan.nl/nl/nieuws/18...

I certainly would not have been able to write my story about all the bravery I witnessed in Minneapolis without the access I was given! bsky.app/profile/whst...

In today's COVID-19 vaccines are safe news. A large study out of Sweden found no association between the vaccines and effects on fertility. www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/lar...

European alternative apps and softwares to American ones: www.eupedia.com/forum/thread...

Addio a Paolo Cendon, giurista dei diritti dei più fragili. Aveva 85 anni 

Bavaria was the last region to receive BA.3.2 , in the second half of December BA.3.2 has been already 30% there from 0% in November. In UK in January we are seeing higher % of BA.3.2 in Scotland and Northern Ireland

Leading up to that.. Eric Lee Atty Kids screaming "Let us out! Let us out!"

There's a prison revolt at a concentration camp in Texas in solidarity with Minneapolis:

There it is - nothing suspicious about that going offline at exactly the same time it became clear that a novel pneumonia similar to SARS was being linked to the very same market selling those animals...

🙈 web.archive.org/web/20191019...

Op een melkveebedrijf in Friesland, waar eerder een kat aan hoog-pathogene vogelgriep is doodgegaan, is bij een melkkoe antistoffen tegen hoog-pathogene vogelgriepvirus H5N1 aangetoond. Lees de brief van de minister van LNNV aan de Tweede Kamer voor details. www.tweedekamer.nl/downloads/do...

Voor de eerste keer zijn er in Europa aanwijzingen voor besmetting van een melkkoe met hoog-pathogene vogelgriepvirus H5N1.

Really excited our paper about how H5N1 rapidly adapted to cattle (and how these adaptations also increased its ability to infect cells from the human respiratory tract) is now published! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Agree with Josette here. There are only 10 sequences from Germany collected after December 23. Needless to say, this is not sufficient to base a forecast on. I think it's possible (though uncertain) that the loss of ORF7a might mean there's a ceiling to the current incarnation of BA.3.2. But... 1/3

ORF6 is only 61 AA long, but its primary known function (shutting down nucleus-cytoplasm trafficking) is mediated by its C-terminal domain (i.e. the last few AA). This stop codon slices off those AA. This is the last variant I ever expected to see an ORF6 loss-of-function mutant in. Weird. 3/3

For people treated with MOV who do not clear the virus shortly after infection—which we know to be a common occurrence—this is a bad. MOV is supposed to cause so many harmful mutations that the virus dies out quickly. Instead, it's clearly abetting adaptive mutations. 2/3

Another day, another sequence displaying undeniable evidence of positive selection of molnupiravir-induced mutations (i.e. adaptive mutations—good for the virus, bad for the infected person). G->A is the classic MOV mutation—and the vast majority of the positive selection is in G->A muts. 1/3

I think there's a good chance this is why, in by far the best & largest molnupiravir trial we have, outcomes among immunocompromised patients treated with MOV were worse that for those not treated with MOV. And this is of course the exact population most likely to receive MOV now. 3/3

No, there is no Euclidean proof here. There is enough evidence to take the possibility seriously though. There are >15 case studies documenting repeated negative NP-swab PCR tests followed by positive BAL samples in chronically infected symptomatic patients.

"All else does not count" seems pretty dismissive. I'm not making any claims with certainty here; I'm pointing out that evidence from multiple sources suggests the possibility that persistent LRT infection could explain some proportion of Long Covid.

There were healthy controls, i.e. uninfected macaques. When they say "compared to HC," this is what they are referring to.

They found evidence of infectious virus in BAL samples from in 21/25 macques. I thought this was pretty clear. Not clear to me what you think is dishonest about any of this. bsky.app/profile/ryan...

I was pointing out that my very next post directly addressed your objection that viral RNA/antigen ≠ infectious virus. Not sure how your post from 2023 has any relevance to this, unless it's just a reminder that you once read the paper but have now forgotten they found infectious virus.

...they had chronic infection in the alveolar compartment. A majority of macaques tested + for viral RNA (68%) or antigen (80%). The typical explanation for this is that these are fragments of lingering viral material and that no viable virus remains. But...

It's also consistent w/the findings of a non-human primate experiment in which macaques completely cleared all viral RNA from from their nasal tract & trachea within 3 weeks—like the typical human—but who nonetheless had elevated inflammatory markers for >1 yr (duration of study). It turned out...

This isn't a new preprint; it came out about 4 months ago, when I wrote a 🧵 on it. Not sure why there's a sudden resurgence in interest. I find it extremely interesting because the findings are consistent with a pattern I've discovered in chronic deep-lung infections. bsky.app/profile/ryan...

One SARS-CoV-2 variant (B.1.616) displayed the same mutational pattern as BAL-sample chronic-infection sequences, and it also resulted in repeatedly negative NP-swab PCR tests but severe lung pathology and positive BAL-sample tests. bsky.app/profile/ryan...

New Pango lineages RE.2.2.7 w S:K300R and Re.2.2.8 with S:T827I , both BA.3.2 descendants.

BA.3.2 reaches dominance in Netherlands

Trump appears to now be posting a private text from the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte. Rutte’s message congratulates Trump on his work in Syria, says he will highlight Trump’s achievements in Davos this week.

French President Macron, in what appears to have been a private text to President Trump, posted by Trump on his Truth Social account: “We are totally in line on Syria. We can do great things on Iran. I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland.”

Know your penguins. AFP Infographic on 11 of the world's 18 species of penguin

This raises issues.

Star Trek Starfleet Academy is damn good. It's new & a bit different. It's about learning. About working with others. It's about respecting differences. Acceptance. Inclusion. Sharing. Real leadership. Adaptation. Tolerance. Humour. Being open to new things. Happiness But then it is Star Trek.

In Zurich on Monday evening? Want to hear about #opendata & data sharing, and how critical it is for preparing for and responding to infectious diseases? 🔓🧬 Come hear me speak at Karl de Grosse Debattierhaus Winterreden! 🪟💬 👉🏻 19 Jan, 18.00, 20 mins, English www.karldergrosse.ch/programm/ver...

There hasn't been a report of a dairy herd infected with #H5N1 #birdflu in the past 30 days. Does that mean there've been no infected herds? Or no reported herds? 🤷‍♀️ Since the virus was first discovered to have moved into cows in spring 2024, there have been 1,086 infected herds in 19 states.

#MusicSky #MusicChallenge #DavidsMonthOfMusic Day 13 : A song that starts with the letter M Margin Walker www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiEe...

#nowlistening @superscience is on untidyradio.com now, bringing you some of the best #blackmetal of 2025 on Edge of the Abyss. No fascist shit. All metal. #metal #metalsky #music #musicsky

ACE2 is more scarce in the lower-lung than the upper-respiratory tract (URT) or GI tract.... Anyway, I could go on for 40 posts on more detailed ideas I have on this topic, but I'm too exhausted right now. Some other day. 9/end

But I think there's more to it than that. It seems likely to me that high ACE2 binding would be more important among cells with little ACE2 surface expression. (Not many receptors, so best to grab tight to those that are there). 8/

But if a virus is not vulnerable to antibodies (for whatever reason), there is no tradeoff, so higher ACE2 affinity is more often favored. This seems to be the case with deep-lung sequences. 7/

Spike is a trimer, so it has 3 RBDs (the part that binds ACE2). The more often one RBD is up (instead of all 3 being down), the more likely spike is to bind ACE2 (higher ACE2 affinity). But this leaves the virus more vulnerably to antibodies. 6/

Non-RBD spike mutationss that increase ACE2 affinity basically all do so by favoring the RBD-up conformation of spike. See @bdadonaite.bsky.social + @jbloomlab.bsky.social paper & thread below for discussion on this point. 5/ bsky.app/profile/jblo...