iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Elizabeth Spiers @espiers.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

Me three months ago:

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Dr. Lucky Tran @luckytran.com · 01/08/2025

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.

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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

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...

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Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans) @iwriteok.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

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?...

youtu.be

Tom Lehrer - We Will All Go Together When We Go

YouTube video by The Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel

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Gerome Breen @psychgenomics.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

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.

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Ewan Birney @ewanbirney.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

<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

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Helen Branswell 🇨🇦 @helenbranswell.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

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.

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Tim Bale @timbale.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

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"

psa.ac.uk

Is Citizenship Education the key to unlocking young people’s political engagement? | The Political Studies Association (PSA)

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Jonathan Sebat @sebatlab.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

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? 🧵

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Ian Dunt @iandunt.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

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...

inews.co.uk

Shockingly, the Tories did the right thing on secret Afghan asylum plan

The initial error was egregious, but the response was, at least, morally clear-sighted and practical

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Mark James Adams @markjamesadams.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

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...

biorxiv.org

Principled measures and estimates of trait polygenicity

The 'polygenicity' of traits is often invoked and sometimes quantified in quantitative, statistical, and human genetics. What do we mean by the polygenicity of a trait? We propose a principled definit...

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Arula Ratnakar @arula-ratnakar.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

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

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Aaron Milstein @neurosutras.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

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.

drugdiscoverytrends.com

NIH announces end to funding for animal-only studies - Drug Discovery and Development

Drug Discovery and Development covers strategies and technologies related to pharmaceutical research and development and drug formulation.

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Cian Ó Muilleoir @rugbykino.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

Someone's been up to some quality work here.

BBC mockup with headline: Andy Farrell names himself and handsome son Owen as the test halfbacks, and punches all the Scottish players 'hard'

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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

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.

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Tim Bale @timbale.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

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

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Matt Shipman (he/him) @shiplives.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

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.

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Javier Santoyo @jsantoyo.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

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...

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Paul Pharoah @paulpharoah.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

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.

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Kew Gardens @rbgkew.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

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

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Stephen Turner @stephenturner.us · 25/06/2025

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

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 25/06/2025

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-...

The drug, an antiviral that combines a small molecule with a protein fragment, met its main and secondary goals in a Phase 2b trial. A single shot of the highest dose of the therapy was 76% effective compared to a placebo at preventing flu symptoms over 24 weeks. No unexpected treatment-emergent adverse events that would limit higher dosing were observed either, Cidara said.
Cidara will provide detailed results at a future medical meeting and intends to meet with the Food and Drug Administration to discuss the design of a Phase 3 trial. Study success could open the door to an alternative to seasonal influenza vaccines, which some Wall Street analysts view as a multibillion-dollar sales opportunity.

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Albert Vilella, PhD. @albertvilella.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

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...

genomeweb.com

UK Biobank Proteomics Project Receives £20M From UK Government

The project, which follows a pilot project profiling 54,000 individuals, will use Olink's Explore HT platform to measure up to 5,400 proteins in 600,000 blood samples.

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Žiga Avsec @avsecz.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

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

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Gerome Breen @psychgenomics.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

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.

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Shawn Baker @sandiegomics.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

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

illumina.com

Illumina to acquire SomaLogic, accelerating its proteomics business and advancing the company's multiomics strategy

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Meg Skelton @megsk.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

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

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Alexander Arguello @alexander-arguello.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

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

Photo of the skeletal remains of a man buried about 8000 years ago in Turkey (Photo credit: JACOB ROODENBERG)

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Ian Dunt @iandunt.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

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.

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Tits McGee @scientits.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

Remembering this great tweet on the Summer Solstice

Tweet from @tomgara

Randomly on this subject, my (Egyptian) wife had never heard of Stonehenge when I mentioned it recently, so I showed her photos of it, assuming she’d recognise the look but not the name etc, and she was just like, this is pathetic, your ancestors were small and weak

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Albert Vilella, PhD. @albertvilella.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

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

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Antonia Bance MP @antoniabance.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

Amid everything yesterday you may have missed this. It is absolutely massive. At last the local government funding formula will recognise that Sandwell, top ten most deprived in the country, with mostly As and Bs on council tax, has to get more help than somewhere that can raise more locally

gov.uk

Fairer funding for councils across the country in major reform

An overhaul of the outdated and complex council system will bring fairer funding, more stability and improve lives of people across the country

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Gerome Breen @psychgenomics.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

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

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Matt Zoller Seitz @mattzollerseitz.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

"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.

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Abigail ter Kuile @abiterkuile.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

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

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Gerome Breen @psychgenomics.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

@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.

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