🚨 New paper alert!

Sex and smoking bias in the selection of somatic mutations in human bladder

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

by @raquelbmi.bsky.social, @ferriol.bsky.social et al (in collaboration with Rosana Risques lab in @uwmedicine.bsky.social)

🧪 Out in @nature.com: Smoking and biological sex shape healthy bladder tissue evolution, offering clues to #cancer risk.

✍️ #IRBBarcelona & University of Washington

➡️ bit.ly/42wcIN5

📌 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09521-x

#IRBScience #CancerResearch #BladderCancer @bbglab.bsky.social

🧵👇

Stop the genocide!
www.ohchr.org/en/press-rel...

New paper from our lab - ‪@bbglab.bsky.social‬.

Oncodrive3D: fast and accurate detection of structural clusters of somatic mutations under positive selection

academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

Kudos to Stefano, Olivia, @fmuinos.bsky.social and Abel

I wrote about the debate with the Jubilee fascists, the overall idea of the utility of debate and the alleged need for it in order to arrive at truth, and the malicious and corrosive effect this false idea actually has upon the discourse and society.

www.the-reframe.com/boiling-water/

To better treat cancer, we need to understand its underlying biology. Despite decades of research, some fundamental questions remain unanswered. One is why certain key tumor suppressor or oncogenes lead to cancer predominantly in single tissue: e.g. Rb in the retina, or APC in the colon 1/n 🧪

On my country's 249th birthday, I wrote about the problem of sharing a nation with millions of evil people, and how to live a human life in the face of overwhelming inhumanity.

Oh and the Beastie Boys make an appearance.

www.the-reframe.com/so-shines-a-...

Our colleagues Olivia Dove, Raquel Blanco and Ferriol Calvet are attending the #EACR2025. They are sharing their research results with their respective posters and are for sure learning a lot in an excellent Congress with an outstanding list of speakers. @ferriol.bsky.social @raquelbmi.bsky.social

Oh goodness, @dereklowe.bsky.social's response to Hassabis is so on the mark and full of quotable things. 1/n
www.science.org/content/blog...

I read this cool piece by @owlposting1.bsky.social on endometriosis on @scientificdiscovery.dev's recommendation
www.owlposting.com/p/endometrio...
One point is that endometriosis is very common, 10% of women according to the WHO. Which makes the paltry research (funding) even more galling.

"a fascinating case study on the limits of AI in biology and the harms of current publishing incentives" rachel.fast.ai/posts/2025-0...

We're thrilled to introduce PromoterAI — a tool for accurately identifying promoter variants that impact gene expression. 🧵 (1/)

I came across this really compressed, yet understandable explanation of Gödel's incompleteness blog.plover.com/math/Gdl-Smu...

Kudos to @raquelbmi.bsky.social and @ferriol.bsky.social, first authors of the study, for the insane amount of good work put into this.

Heading to day 2 #VariantEffect25
Come by poster 129 to know more about our recent @bbglab.bsky.social joint study with Risques lab at UW Medicine: somatic variation (and selection!) in the normal bladder urothelium.

New evidence @nejm.org today that age-related clonal hematopoiesis (CHIP) has a driver role in evolution of solid cancers
www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....
www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

Just learned that pandas and numpy do not provide the same default calculation of the variance: pandas gives the unbiased sample variance estimator whilst numpy gives the MLE estimator 😱

To get the pandas behaviour with numpy, use the kwarg ddof=1 👌

Hello world! Kicking off my first post with some exciting news 📣 Our study on tobacco smoke-induced mutagenesis in head & neck cancer (HNC) is out today in
@naturegenet.bsky.social! rdcu.be/efNiH 🧬🔥
We uncover the multiple ways tobacco and alcohol drive HNC development. A short thread 🧵⬇️

During apartheid, South African armed forces killed 69 civilians in the Sharpeville Massacre. The world was shocked. This event is still taught in history classes.

On average, Israel has massacred more than 70 Palestinian civilians *every day* for the past 18 months.

Let's talk about this Nature piece in more detail.

I've rarely read something so anti-scientific anywhere short of the National Review.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

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

“‘Science can and should as a community organise itself to maximise its ability to act collectively, ethically and – when necessary – politically.’ The scientific community needs to speak up – not just for the sake of science, but of human decency, dignity and morality.”

"The most abundant nanoplastic was tyre particles (41%), then polystyrene (28%) and polyethylene (12%). Each tyre on the world’s 1.6bn vehicles can lose 4kg during its lifetimes and may be the largest source of tiny plastic pollution."

🎉 I'm thrilled to announce that OpenVariant is finally published! A comprehensive toolkit to facilitate reading, parsing and refinement of diverse input file formats in a customizable structure, all within a single process. @bbglab.bsky.social at @irbbarcelona.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1093/bioi...