Zach Hensel
@zachhensel.bsky.social
š¤ 921
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single-molecule microbiology lab @ ITQB NOVA in Portugal
https://zach-hensel.github.io/
pinned post!
Now out in JBact -- congrats to João and Ruilan!
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...
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8 months ago
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Top result; searching from Portugal and not USA. FYI
@developers.google.com
4 days ago
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0ļøā£ Don't take advice from the guy who promoted a movie saying HIV, Ebola, and more were lab leaks, too:
www.the-gallop.com/from-fauci-t...
Utterly disqualifying and a complete embarrassment.
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10 days ago
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A ghost draws near!
14 days ago
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I added a short section to this preprint describing another simple and inexplicable error that Bruttel et al. have repeated for years.
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19 days ago
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reposted by
Zach Hensel
Flo DƩbarre
21 days ago
Two weeks ago, a paper came out, claiming that the 2019 Brucella leak in Lanzhou, China, could have been detected months before it was publicly reported. Problem: no proof was provided to support this extraordinary claim, as we explain in a letter to the editor. Details follow ā«ļø1/6š§µ
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Correspondence regarding āGeospatial analysis of open-source intelligence data to early detect laboratory-acquired infections, using the 2019 brucellosis laboratory leak in China as a case studyā - In...
Infection -
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s15010-025-02675-w
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23 days ago
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š§µ Co-author Tony VanDongen has responded on X, arguing that recombination can't explain what they found. His argument: If SARS-CoV-2 acquired one of its BsaI sites from RmBANAL247, it would have acquired the two adjacent sites! While not a good argument, it's worse argument in light of new data.
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24 days ago
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First author Valentin Bruttel has responded over at X. Here's my quick take: a) Mutation rates are irrelevant; I show there aren't any mutations at all, so this part of Bruttel et al, which is also nonsense, is irrelevant. bāe) Four things that are irrelevant to analysis in his paper.
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26 days ago
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š§µRemember the preprint claiming SARS-CoV-2 has a "synthetic fingerprint"? It said a restriction map was "extremely unlikely to have arisen by random evolution.ā I took its claims seriously. The "synthetic fingerprint" hypothesis collapses. My new preprint explains why.
arxiv.org/abs/2510.23833
26 days ago
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Really valuable and very normal feedback from Dr. Ebright the last two months.
29 days ago
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Response from
@philippmarkolin.bsky.social
www.statnews.com/2025/10/25/s...
I was in high school in Kansas when this happened! Rumsfeld said: there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. He oddly excluded unknown knowns which are important to consider for complex topics.
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about 1 month ago
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it's true
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about 1 month ago
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The FBI report concluding a "lab leak" origin is out by FOIA, mostly redacted. What's not redacted is a silly conspiracy theory in place of actual evidence. First picture is the FBI report. Second picture is the DoS cable it's likely referencing here.
about 1 month ago
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reposted by
Zach Hensel
bioRxiv Biophysics
about 1 month ago
AF-CALVADOS: AlphaFold-guided simulations of multi-domain proteins at the proteome level
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.19.683306v1
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CBS News finally has a story on it... I fact checked a few state capitols in states with Republican governors. Four out of the first four alphabetically was enough to know you'd blow by any definition of "several".
about 1 month ago
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reposted by
Zach Hensel
Greg Folkers
about 2 months ago
Lancet: Offline: Those one should not forgive (Makary and Bhattacharya) by Richard Horton
bit.ly/3IPC0PD
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Sigrid Bratlie posted a response. It doesn't dispute anything that I wrote.
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about 2 months ago
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HUD with a pop up ON top of a giant red banner. Interesting to see NIH, FDA, DOD (all I checked) admins not agreeing to do something illegal.
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about 2 months ago
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Who says LLM is such a problem? Thanks, Gemini, for the very unearned compliment.
about 2 months ago
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Hereās an op-ed I wrote arguing to get back to a focus on the relevant facts when it comes to pandemic origins. I wrote it in response to a debate thatās played out over the last year in Norwegian media that rarely slows down to check whatās true and false.
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about 2 months ago
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The *original* standard?
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about 2 months ago
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reposted by
Zach Hensel
Carlos M Morel
about 2 months ago
Excellent paper on the origins of SARS-CoV-2!
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40905595/
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I guess itāll be some time before the DOGE guys making the tax avoidance card website get an AI video generation model that doesnāt hallucinate how birds blink.
2 months ago
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reposted by
Zach Hensel
Dave Levitan
2 months ago
Any rich dems want to fund an independent science news and commentary outlet, hmu (climate, vaccines, energy, public health, biomedical research, assults on science writ large, etc)
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I guess I'm a day too late, but here's what I sent in as a comment on the NIH policy for publication fees. TL;DR Why is the guy from the Hoover Institution running the NIH selecting from a menu of price controls?
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2 months ago
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Regarding the call to reform publication with a paternalistic policy to save scientists from themselves by banning resources going to some publishers, now is not the time in my opinion.
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2 months ago
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Asher salivating at finally breaking into US media from Australian conspiracy docs.
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3 months ago
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reposted by
Zach Hensel
Flo DƩbarre
3 months ago
@zachhensel.bsky.social
and I have a new paper on the origin of SARS-CoV-2! š§Ŗ There are a lot of reviews on the topic already, so we tried to do something different: characterize "lab leak" scenarios, and directly address those on SARS-CoV-2's furin cleavage site.ā«ļø1/9
doi.org/10.5802/crbi...
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https://doi.org/10.5802/crbiol.183
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Turns out all those people who spent 2020-2024 backseat driving while other people dealt with messy realities of public health are only competent at ignorantly sniping from their home podcast studios.
3 months ago
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NASAās primary mission is presumably the first objective listed in the law that established NASA, right? Itās atmospheric and space science, not space exploration.
www.nasa.gov/history/nati...
3 months ago
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7 months into the job. Empty shelves; office full of podcasting gear.
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3 months ago
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Commissioner Gomez's dissent to the FCC approval is worth a read:
docs.fcc.gov/public/attac...
Scientists frustrated with inefficiency of journals who see a silver lining in exploiting this assault on the first amendment e.g. to ban paying publication fees from grants could take a step back.
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4 months ago
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We stealing plots from Mr Show now?
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4 months ago
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This lie is always near the top of the list when Makary and company try to justify cutting science research funding. Makary starred in and endorsed a movie that says Ebola, Lyme, and HIV were lab leaks, too --
www.the-gallop.com/from-fauci-t...
-- opportunistic fraud.
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4 months ago
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Good to see a few people sticking their necks out today by simply writing what's true.
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4 months ago
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"To the dispassionate reader the findings of this report [June 2025 SAGO report] only point in one direction, so these attempts to soften the conclusions are jarring." Yup.
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4 months ago
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Apparently Robert Kadlec, who thinks SARS-CoV-2 was a biological mind-control weapon, is on track to be Assistant Secretary of Defense š¤Æ
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4 months ago
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Here's an example of how weirdly bad this is. Kadlec implies that some suspicious vaccine disappeared off the face of the earth. In reality, development on this vaccine continued. There's even a paper on an omicron-targeted version of the vaccine from 2023:
doi.org/10.1080/2222...
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4 months ago
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Here is what I mean by this from Kadlec's report. Kadlec imagines that it will take 40 days after a booster to get data. Data in the patent application is +12 days from a single dose. FYI
@katherineeban.bsky.social
why not correct this?
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4 months ago
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Robert Kadlecās latest report on COVID-19 origins is out. And itās dumber than anyone can imagine.
@eddieholmes.bsky.social
evergreen prediction proves right again.
4 months ago
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Colbert 2028 would be interesting
4 months ago
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reposted by
Zach Hensel
Chris Geidner
4 months ago
100% agree with this. I have fought that idea my entire time in journalism. I donāt dumb down my reporting. People might need things explained, but itās almost always because the system/law is poorly devised ā not because people are dumb.
www.lawdork.com
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The movie opens with a video that's odd to juxtapose with "It was named SARS". It's stock footage --
www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-1...
-- here is some of the artist's equally realistic other work.
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4 months ago
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New "lab leak" documentary out. Producers hand
@ayjchan.bsky.social
the SARS2 genome on a giant sheet of paper so she can dramatically highlight 15 nucleotides coding for PRRAR (insert is only 12 nucleotides). The filmmakers' sources are so solid that no one noticed all of the zeros in the sequence
4 months ago
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FYI to reporters
@3sat.bluesky.com.de
and
@sciencesetavenir.bsky.social
-- read the bioRxiv comments before you publish creationist theories. The "endonuclease fingerprint" preprint was disproven a month before it was published and
@acritschristoph.bsky.social
explains why in the comments.
5 months ago
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The "news" from X yesterday was inevitable. This has been the trajectory of every Internet community that's rewarded racism. Over on X, a bunch of 100k-follower monetized accounts exclusively dedicated to racism are celebrating what they got the LLM to write and cashing checks from Musk.
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5 months ago
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reposted by
Zach Hensel
Nikolai Slavov
5 months ago
The 3-decade-old competition that enabled the emergence and evaluate of AlphaFold has run out of NIH funding. The program will be terminated in weeks. This is terminating success.
www.science.org/content/arti...
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reposted by
Zach Hensel
Alex Crits-Christoph
5 months ago
Quick thread on the WHO's SAGO report on the origins of COVID-19, highlighting key points and even *new* data. Their summary is that a zoonotic origin of COVID-19 is best supported by available data. This is consistent with most scientific reviews and statements in the rest of the literature.
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SAGO report says all the evidence points in the same direction. Some weird logic in a couple places when it comes to rebutting conspiracy theories. Sneaking cherry picked nonsense through peer review isn't a reason to take someone's underpants gnomes origins theory seriously.
5 months ago
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Did
@nytimesoped.bsky.social
make an infographic to support "lab leak" and accidentally leave out the data point that was once the very best evidence there was against origin in a wildlife market?
5 months ago
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