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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 28d

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...

Figure 3 of our paper, which shows viral coinfection networks at the virus level

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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · Jul 25

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...

The attribution of human health outcomes to climate change: transdisciplinary practical guidance - Climatic Change

For over 30 years, detection and attribution (D&A) studies have informed key conclusions in international and national assessments of climate science, providing compelling evidence for the reality and...

link.springer.com

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Timothée Poisot @ctrlalttim.com · Jun 30

🦠🌿🐦🧪 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...

Biodiversity science and biosurveillance are fellow travelers

The failure to meet the Aichi targets to alleviate global biodiversity decline (Nature 2020) was a wake-up call to the biodiversity monitoring community (T

academic.oup.com

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Rory Gibb @roryjgibb.bsky.social · Jun 2

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

Verena @viralemergence.org · Jun 2

An update from the team on the uncertain future of our program and the impact of NSF budget cuts. Please share and reach out 🦠

Some difficult news from the team:

In NSF's FY25-26 Budget Request to Congress, we learned that our program will take a whopping 50% cut - meaning that in September, we'll be $1.25m short of an operating budget that currently supports a cohort of seven PhD students, four postdocs, and three full-time staff.

Verena is one of the largest and last pandemic prevention-focused programs in the United States: since 2020, we've supported the training of over 60 postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates. Our researchers have established unique laboratory resources for studying animal immune systems, and discovered new antiviral immune adaptations in bats; developed risk assessment algorithms for wildlife and livestock viruses, and diagnostic algorithms for viruses like dengue, Ebola, and Zika; and quantified the effects of climate change, deforestation, and factory farming on spillover risk. Everything we develop is 100% open source, and our data has supported the research of nearly 150 external researchers in 21 countries to date.

We have three months to make up our budget shortfall. Every dollar spent on Verena supports not just our team, but the community of researchers who use our data, code, and resources. You can help us by sharing this post, and reaching out if you're able to support a unique and vulnerable program. Or just head over to viralemergence.org, and take a look at what we do. 🦟 🦇 🦠

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TheBlindboyPodcast @blindboyboatclub.bsky.social · May 28

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...

Jeremy Corbyn

The Blindboy Podcast · Episode

open.spotify.com

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Gregg Gonsalves @gregggonsalves.bsky.social · May 26

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/

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · May 8

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)

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Rory Gibb @roryjgibb.bsky.social · Apr 29

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...

Jayna Raghwani @jraghwani.bsky.social · Apr 18

📣 Excited annouce that the next London Infection Ecology Network (LIEN)🦠🌎🧪🌳🌤️ in-person event is taking place on April 30th at the RVC (Camden)!

If you’d like to attend, please register for a free ticket via Eventbrite:
🔗 www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/london-inf...

London Infection and Ecology Meeting

LIEN fosters interdisciplinary collaboration between ecology and health sciences, supporting inclusive research and innovation.

www.eventbrite.co.uk

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · Apr 24

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.

Hank Green @hankgreen.bsky.social · Apr 24

There are a lot of critiques of LLMs that I agree with but "they suck and aren't useful" doesn't really hold water.

I understand people not using them because of social, economic, and environmental concerns. And I also understand people using them because they can be very useful.

Thoughts?

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Adam Kucharski @adamjkucharski.bsky.social · Mar 18

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

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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · Mar 17

Lungfish xkcd.com/3064

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · Mar 17

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.

Justin Weinberg @dailynous.com · Mar 17

Sandra Harding, a philosopher well-known for her work in feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and philosophy of science, has died.

Sandra Harding (1935-2025) - Daily Nous

Sandra Harding, a philosopher well-known for her work in feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and philosophy of science, has died. Professor Harding was recognized for her development of standpoint t...

dailynous.com

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Tim Newbold @tnewbold31.bsky.social · Mar 11

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

UCL – University College London

UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

www.ucl.ac.uk

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · Mar 5

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”

Three AI-powered steps to faster, smarter peer review

Tired of spending countless hours on peer reviews? An AI-assisted workflow could help.

www.nature.com

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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · Mar 4

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...

Elon Musk is a proven danger to good science, but the Royal Society won’t say so. That’s why I resigned | Kit Yates

It is vital to act, and I urge colleagues to do so. How can we stand by and laud this man while he undermines scientific integrity? asks academic and author Kit Yates

www.theguardian.com

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Steph N. Seifert, PhD @stephseifertphd.bsky.social · Mar 3

🚨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...

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Taal Levi @taaltree.bsky.social · Feb 24

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?

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Julia PG Jones @juliajones.bsky.social · Feb 25

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

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Boze the Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · Feb 23

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

[“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the know-nothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.”]

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Moritz Kraemer @mugkraemer.bsky.social · Feb 20

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...

Artificial intelligence for modelling infectious disease epidemics

Nature - This Perspective considers the application to infectious disease modelling of AI systems that combine machine learning, computational statistics, information retrieval and data science.

rdcu.be

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Stephen Curry @scurry.bsky.social · Feb 13

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...

Open letter to the President of the Royal Society – time to stand up for your values

If you wish to show your support for the letter below regarding apparent inaction by the Royal Society in the face of breaches of its code of conduct by Elon Musk FRS, please sign below. I invite anyo...

docs.google.com

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Rory Gibb @roryjgibb.bsky.social · Feb 12

you really have to dig deep into the methods to discover that their new method takes 32 mins to boil an egg

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Simon Cauchemez @scauchemez.bsky.social · Feb 11

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...

RSero: A user-friendly R package to reconstruct pathogen circulation history from seroprevalence studies

Author summary Antibodies are immune markers of past infections. Seroprevalence studies that characterize the seropositivity status in the population have been used for decades in epidemiological stud...

journals.plos.org

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Rafa Lopes @rafalpx.bsky.social · Feb 11

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!

Otavio Ranzani @otavioranzani.bsky.social · Feb 11

Does heat have a short effect on Dengue, increasing risk for severe cases?

We know meteorological factors affect dengue incidence, with lag effects on weeks/months.

Here, led by @rafalpx.bsky.social, we found also a short effect of heat for Dengue Hospitalisation

journals.lww.com/environepide...

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The Ferrari Lab @theferrarilab.bsky.social · Feb 10

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)

Dismay as UK poised to cut funding for global vaccination group Gavi

Exclusive: Aid charities alarmed as decision would come in wake of Donald Trump’s decision to freeze USAid activities

www.theguardian.com

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