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valanvir.bsky.social

@valanvir.bsky.social
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Prof Gavin Yamey MD MPH @gavinyamey.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Holy shit FOUR members of the ethics committee in Denmark that gave the green light to allow the widely-condemned RFK Jr-funded trial to proceed in Guinea-Bissau have now resigned in protest This quote is 🔥 Great reporting by @melodyschreiber.com www.theguardian.com/society/2026...
Stig Børsen Hansen, a founding member who was one of two reviewers who presented the study to the Danish committee, resigned from the group in protest on Friday, citing major ethical issues with the study.

“You are now enrolling newborns in a lottery to test a hypothesis,” Hansen said. The children who are randomly selected not to receive the birth dose of the vaccine, those who “lost the lottery”, face in their earliest days the risk of contracting hepatitis B, which can cause irreversible lifelong damage. “They contract hepatitis B in the context of being part of a research project,” Hansen said, which made their infection happen, in effect, “by design”.

Three other members of the committee have also resigned in protest.
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Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD @elizabethjacobs.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
This is a disaster. The ethics committee in Denmark that approved the Guinea-Bissau study which will withhold the birth dose of HepB vaccine “had never considered medical studies before but it changed the rules in order to vote on this one”. Four members of the committee have resigned in protest.
theguardian.com
Controversial vaccine trial touted by RFK Jr gets go-ahead in Guinea-Bissau
Recommended dose of hepatitis B vaccine will be withheld from thousands of newborns by Danish researchers
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Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Another super piece by @philipcball.bsky.social! This one on the enduring impact of "Waddington's landscape"! www.quantamagazine.org/how-does-lif...
quantamagazine.org
How Does Life Unfold? A Landscape Metaphor Comes Into Its Own. | Quanta Magazine
C.H. Waddington’s powerful image of embryonic stem cells specializing on a rolling landscape has captivated biologists since the 1950s. Experimental data is finally confirming, and complicating, his v...
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BK. Titanji @boghuma.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
This study was unethical when it was announced last year and it remains unethical today. The birth dose of the hepatitis b vaccine prevents perinatal acquisition of the infection. You cannot randomize a group of newborns to not receive it while giving it to others. www.linkedin.com/safety/go/?u...
linkedin.com
Hepatitis B vaccine study condemned as unethical wins approval from Danish university
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Kristian G. Andersen @kgandersen.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
"... “We’re not funding Kristian Andersen and that virologist crew,” the [HHS] official was quoted as saying [...] Science has confirmed that Andersen’s team applied for continued CREID funding but did not get a new award." Indeed. With a specific focus on Ebola, Hantaviruses, Mpox, and Lassa.
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Toby Buckle @polphilpod.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
back of the envelope math: a ship of the line was 100 times* more expensive than a trireme leading to the obvious question, could 100 triremes take a ship of the line?
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Matthew Cobb @matthewcobb.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
The Betteridge’s Law is strong with this one www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...
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Matthew Cobb @matthewcobb.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
A lot of excitement on here about the article in Science summarising the discoveries of @alistairsponsel.bsky.social and Brian Sutton, just published in the Journal of the History of Biology. Some people have asked, so here is what I think they show, and what are the implications:
link.springer.com
Photograph 49 is the Key to Understanding the History of Rosalind Franklin’s DNA Photograph 51 - Journal of the History of Biology
This essay, co-authored by a historian of science and an X-ray crystallographer, sheds new light on Rosalind Franklin’s Photograph 51. We refute the infamous claim that, unlike James Watson, Franklin ...
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Laura Howes @laurahowes.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
👀
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Hensley Lab @scottehensley.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
This is a really important development. It appears H1N1 cases are rising in the western part of the United States, and these viruses have a key HA substitution that @jbloomlab.bsky.social recently demonstrated is targeted by antibodies in young people. 1/4 www.kuow.org/health/2026-...
kuow.org
The flu has arrived early in Washington state
Flu cases are surging in Washington state, much sooner than when health officials usually expect the illness to peak in winter.
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c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Omigod, this is the most heartwarming story possible! Backpack (bear 89) is the son of the 2019 winner of Fat Bear Week, Holly (bear 435). In 2007, he injured his foot & a practice of riding on momma's Holly's back had a new meaning: he was mobility-restricted while it healed. So Holly moved him.
From DISCVR blog's Facebook page, a momma bear & a yearling cub on her back in the shallow water.  I think the background has been swapped out, and I can't rule out some AI use there?  God, Facebook has become the social media for AI slop : (

The title of the article, which I link below, is "How Bear 89 earned the name Backpack"
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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Just the latest example in what the “disease emergence hotspots” framework can’t prepare us for
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c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The obvious conclusion (to me): if you have proprietary research & you upload it into the Plagiarism Nexus, it's not YOUR proprietary research anymore. Behave accordingly.
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Meg Haney, PhD @meghaney.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Cannabis potency is not dose. Here we describe ways that principles of behavioral pharmacology are essential to understanding the science of this complicated plant! authors.elsevier.com/a/1noE3Kt2qH...
authors.elsevier.com
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Comfortably Boo @numb.comfortab.ly · 28/09/2026
Claude making a scientific discovery
Black-and-white three-part comic. In the first scene, one simple cartoon figure holds out a small round handmade-looking object and says, “I MADE THIS.” Another figure replies, “YOU MADE THIS?” In the second scene, the second figure is shown alone holding the object. In the final scene, that figure holds it proudly and says, “I MADE THIS”
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Waggoner Lab @labwaggoner.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Escape of the BC200 gene to a human poxvirus reveals its persistent transposition in primates @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Putting aside all the ways the quiet racist part is said aloud, it’s also a bad analysis of power. The truth is: we’re paying to cut down the rainforest in Ebola hotspots - even U.S. universities www.thelancet.com/callback?red...
thelancet.com
Financial influence on global risks of zoonotic emerging and re-emerging diseases: an integrative analysis
Although commodity supply chains and financial markets are highly globalised, a small number of investors and countries could be viewed as disproportionally influential in sectors that increase EIDs r...
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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Thought of something else. This is one of the last areas of environmentalism that really traffics in the idea that stupid Africans don’t know how to manage their rainforests / disgusting Africans and Asians just can’t help but eat wildlife when alternative proteins are right there.
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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
My entire fucking career. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
thelancet.com
Overselling wildlife trade bans will not bolster conservation or pandemic preparedness
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic will be among the most significant global health crises of several generations. The causative virus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is almo...
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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I am not going to spend another twenty posts discussing how this is an exploitive, neo-colonial policy frame shamelessly used by conservationists to exploit global health for their own objectives, because I've been writing about it my entire fucking career. www.carlsonlab.bio/thoughts/rou...
carlsonlab.bio
Is a river cleanup a vaccine? — The Carlson Lab
This and other questions posed by the One Health approach, on the twentieth anniversary of its first adoption.
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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Viral persistence is believed to be the origin of the 2021 re-emergence of Ebola virus in Guinea, five years after the end of the previous outbreak. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Resurgence of Ebola virus in 2021 in Guinea suggests a new paradigm for outbreaks - Nature
The viral lineage responsible for the February 2021 outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Guinea is nested within a clade that predominantly consists of genomes sampled during the 2013–2016 epidemic, sug...
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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
David Quammen's essay in The New York Times today closes with this paragraph. It's both a scientific falsehood, and an incredibly dangerous narrative. If you're willing to give me five minutes of your time, I'd like to explain why.
The Ebola virus doesn’t need to spill back. It abides in its reservoir host, and awaits its next opportunity. A virus can’t climb out of a bat or a monkey and fly off in search of human prey. It can only spill over. If humans left the reservoir host alone — not hunting it, not capturing it, not eating it, not exporting it live, not disturbing its forest habitat — the virus wouldn’t re-emerge in humans. It would remain where it is, harming no one. But of course that’s not what happens. And when viruses spill, they often spill into us, because the human population is such a big, busy target.
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Aris Katzourakis @ariskatzourakis.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Genetic trove aims to unlock bats’ secrets to long life (illustrated by the photogenic Hypsignathus monstrosus) www.ft.com/content/7aa3...
ft.com
Genetic trove aims to unlock bats’ secrets to long life
Genomic and fossil records could offer clues to the mammal’s ability to kill damaged cells that might eventually improve human health
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Matthew Cobb @matthewcobb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
So this is the news @bat1kgenomes.bsky.social was hinting at yesterday! Amazing (and a lovely hammer-headed bat in the pic)
theguardian.com
Bats originated in Europe, rewriting mammals’ family tree, study reveals
Biggest study of its kind provides insights into bats’ evolution – a potential gamechanger for research into human virus and cancer treatment
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Richard McKay @ramckay.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Reposting an article I wrote for The Conversation in 2020 about the history of the slippery phrase “patient zero.” Just because. theconversation.com/patient-zero...
theconversation.com
Patient zero: why it’s such a toxic term
Why we should wash our hands of this unhealthy phrase.
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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
First, our global team of collaborators pulled together the largest dataset on emerging infectious disease outbreaks - two orders of magnitude larger than the best-cited study in our field.
A global map of infectious disease outbreaks, and graphs of data over time and by disease
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Richard Lenski @relenski.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
"Philosophy of Biology: The power of theory in the life sciences" elifesciences.org/articles/112... @zdblount.bsky.social shared this thought-provoking paper with the lab group.
elifesciences.org
Philosophy of Biology: The power of theory in the life sciences
Theory can help address cell and molecular biology’s major challenges, particularly those arising from large omics datasets.
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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
"The use of PGT-P risks assigning greater value to some children than others. This shift aligns with the selective pronatalism that promotes not simply having children, but particular kinds of children." www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Embryo screening and the new reproductive divide - Nature Human Behaviour
Nature Human Behaviour - Embryo screening and the new reproductive divide
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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
If that's having "two brains", then why not call the spinal cord a brain and say we've got three? Why leave the forebrain out of this entirely? They have equally distinct developmental histories.
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Financial Times @financialtimes.com · 19/09/2026
AI chatbots give wrong answers to financial queries ‘most of the time’ ft.trib.al/oImlEFY
ft.trib.al
AI chatbots give wrong answers to financial queries ‘most of the time’
Report finds some chatbots ignored upcoming tax changes and hallucinated rules
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Scott Kennedy @scotttkennedy.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
This was a bonkers read.
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Derek Lowe @dereklowe.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
How far can AI get you in designing and optimizing new antibodies? Not as far as you might have thought:
science.org
The State of AI Antibody Design
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Chemjobber @chemjobber.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Lol cool
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
"eLife has been without an impact factor for just over a year...and [has] an overall 21% decrease in revenue" newsletter.journalology.com/p/journalolo... Perhaps the only more stark illustration of academia's addiction to Impact Factor is this:
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Aris Katzourakis @ariskatzourakis.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Wrote up a piece for @theconversation.com on whether ancient smallpox can be brought back from 500 year old smallpox DNA (I wouldn't worry about that) and what the smallpox samples from the Chilean burial sites show us. theconversation.com/can-an-ancie...
theconversation.com
Can an ancient virus be brought back to life? What 500-year-old smallpox DNA reveals
Smallpox DNA from two people buried in Chile reveals the virus’s arrival through European colonisation – but recreating it would require deliberate laboratory work.
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Michael Baym @baym.lol · 13/09/2026
Here's a link the video: youtu.be/plVk4NVIUh8?... and the paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
youtu.be
The Evolution of Bacteria on a “Mega-Plate” Petri Dish (Kishony Lab)
YouTube video by Harvard Medical School
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Kristian G. Andersen @kgandersen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Let me bring up one example from Anthropic's report and compare the proposed research to a paper we wrote: "Genomic and phenotypic analyses suggest moderate fitness differences among Zika virus lineages". See the difference? Yeah, except the virus, me neither. journals.plos.org/plosntds/art...
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Kristian G. Andersen @kgandersen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Good read. What truly baffles me seeing this "AI-designed-printed-in-the-lab-bioweapon will kill us all" guff is the fact that we have *the* biggest, out-of-control, Gain-of-Function experiment, in BSL-0, already running rampant in the US. In cattle 🐮. Yet, 🦗. www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/...
theatlantic.com
The AI Pandemic Isn’t On Its Way
Yet plenty of others might be, thanks to evolution.
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
would you say the first case study cited here in the bio section is something to be concerned about given the proposal and the military connection - or, like the others, spurious? www.anthropic.com/threat-intel...
anthropic.com
Countering misuse of AI: September 2026 / Anthropic
Case studies from threat actors disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026 across seven areas of harm, from cyber operations to biological misuse.
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Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I just yesterday read 750 words on this very question by a bona fide patent attorney and I STILL DO NOT KNOW. But... in case it's useful: cen.acs.org/policy/intel...
cen.acs.org
Artificial intelligence is causing a reckoning in the chemistry intellectual property community
As artificial intelligence drives breakthroughs in chemistry, the intellectual property community is struggling to keep pace
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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Vaccine conspiracism is overwhelmingly clustered among the religious, white and affluent. It’s a function of conservative ideology and bad faith media. Being nicer to MAHA types will not ‘bring them into the fold,’ it will only increase their sense of entitlement.
Objective: Strengthening of antivaccination movements in recent decades has coincided with unprecedented increases in the incidence of some communicable diseases. Many intervention programs work from a deficit model of science communication, presuming that vaccination skeptics lack the ability to access or understand evidence. However, interventions focusing on evidence and the debunking of vaccine-related myths have proven to be either nonproductive or counterproductive. Working from a motivated reasoning perspective, we examine the psychological factors that might motivate people to reject scientific consensus around vaccination. To assist with international generalizability, we examine this question in 24 countries. Methods: We sampled 5,323 participants in 24 countries, and measured their antivaccination attitudes. We also measured their belief in conspiracy theories, reactance (the tendency for people to have a low tolerance for impingements on their freedoms), disgust sensitivity toward blood and needles, and individualistic/hierarchical worldviews (i.e., people's beliefs about how much control soci hould have over individuals, and whether hierarchies are desirable). Results: In
order of magnitude,
antivaccination attitudes were highest among those who (a) were high in conspir-
atorial thinking, (b) were high in reactance, (c) reported high levels of disgust toward blood and needles, and (d) had strong individualistic/hierarchical worldviews
. In contrast, demographic variables (including
education) accounted for nonsignificant or trivial lev
f variance. Conclusions: These data help
identify the "attitude roots" that may motivate and sustain vaccine skepticism. In so doing, they help shed light on why repetition of evidence can be nonproductive, and suggest communication solutions to that problem.
Keywords: vaccination, conspiracy beliefs, health communication,
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Roger Highfield @rogerhighfield.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Yes! Conscious AI is unlikely in digital computers because… … the brain is analogue news.mit.edu/2026/cogniti... & digital computers run on an impoverished set of numbers blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-problem-...
news.mit.edu
Cognition and consciousness arise from analog computations, says new theory
The brain's ability to generate quick, nimble volitional thought — and a unified awareness of thought and experience — arises from analog computations carried out by electrical waves, MIT neurosc...
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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
And here's the UniProt structure for protein H - which is apparently highly disordered. So it raises the question of just how well such AI models are going to work at all for disordered proteins. cc @scurry.bsky.social
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Christiaan Triebert @trbrtc.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
This is reporting of the Visual Investigations team (@malachy.bsky.social + editors) and NYT international and DC colleagues: Farnaz Fassihi, Erika Solomon, @johnismay.bsky.social, Sanam Mahoozi, Adam Rasgon, Leily Nikounazar and Josh Holder. Gift link to article: www.nytimes.com/2026/09/02/v...
nytimes.com
In Small Iranian Town, a U.S. Attack Turns a Wedding Into a Tragedy (Gift Article)
The bomb that hit the residential area was American, according to a weapons expert and a visual analysis by The Times. It killed five people and wounded 67 others, the Iranian authorities said.
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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 02/09/2026
I wrote briefly on the recent antibody image scandal for our weekly round up www.abundanceandgrowth.org/p/california...
Can antibody explain these images? — Saloni Dattani
Back in May, science sleuth Sholto David came across a suspicious image from the major life-sciences supplier Thermo Fisher. It was a Western blot showing the performance of one of their antibodies that is commonly used in cancer research. On the blot, four apparently separate protein bands were copies of the same shape, duplicated and flipped or rotated to produce the others.

Since then, Reese Richardson, a metascience and computational biology researcher and other sleuths uncovered many more by increasing image contrast and searching suppliers’ catalogues for repeated visual fingerprints, partly using image-search tools. According to Nature, they have now found over 18,000 questionable images across 15 commercial suppliers, with digital alterations such as repositioned bands, painted-over regions, and reused background noise. For the last category, Elisabeth Bik (who some say has forensic laser eyes) told Nature, “That particular type of image alteration or manipulation suggests that these antibodies were never tested at all in the lab.” Weirdly, identical images were sometimes used by multiple suppliers, which suggests that they came from the same third-party manufacturers.

The images don’t necessarily mean the antibodies themselves are flawed, but since other research has found that commercial antibodies are commonly unreliable, I wonder whether this is just the tip of the iceberg, and how much of scientists’ time has been wasted chasing false leads. One takeaway is that researchers should avoid relying on suppliers’ images and independently validate their antibodies. But given how time consuming and repetitive it would be for individual scientists to validate them, a wider effort seems worthwhile. For example, the Canadian open-science company YCharOS tests some commercial antibodies head-to-head and publishes their results openly, and the University of Leicester’s ‘Only Good Antibodies’ hosts this data on a searchable database, though neither are comprehensive. The sleuths themselves also host a Zenodo repository with their findings.
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Jamin Speer @jaminspeer.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
1. Since the 1970s, college student goals have shifted away from "finding meaning" to financial and family goals. Most of this shift occurred in the 70s and 80s. Finding meaning used to be the #1 goal in our data, now it's last.
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Infectious Diseases @infectiousdz.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Petting zoo rabies and transplant transmission, there's likely a lot more rabies in the US. Perhaps only 7% of rabies deaths are diagnosed. - and every undiagnosed case is a death, as most cases are. www.nature.com/articles/s44...
nature.com
Substantial under-detection of human rabies cases in the United States - Communications Health
Based on multiple instances of human-to-human rabies transmission via organ or tissue transplantation from initially undiagnosed rabies-infected donors, we estimate 856 (213–2220) human rabies deaths ...
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Admirable Women @admirablewomen.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Virologist/molecular biologist Dr. Flossie Wong-Staal altered the trajectory of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. First to clone HIV-1 & complete its genetic mapping, directly leading to life-saving antiviral drug cocktails. Most-cited female scientist of the 1980s. Born #OTD in 1946. #WomenInSTEM
A black-and-white portrait of Dr. Flossie Wong-Staal (1946–2020), the pioneering Chinese-American virologist who first cloned HIV-1 and mapped its genome. Sitting in her research laboratory, she faces forward with a composed, direct, and confident expression. Her dark hair is styled in a short, neat bob, and she wears long, slender dangling earrings. Over a dark, patterned blouse, she wears a crisp white laboratory coat. She rests her left forearm on a lab counter beside her, while her right hand holds a dark binder resting on her lap. The background shows a busy lab setting filled with shelves of scientific glassware, chemical bottles, and equipment, all slightly out of focus to draw attention to her. The composition places her slightly off-center, capturing an professional and scholarly mood that underscores her historical significance as a leading figure in molecular biology during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis.
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Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
This study did not control for demography & drift, the most critical thing for a selection. It's also an exemplar of this common problem. So it combines unreliable measures of differentiation & no actual link to the trait of interest. Congrats on finding a paper I haven't seen before though
academic.oup.com
A Critical Assessment of Storytelling: Gene Ontology Categories and the Importance of Validating Genomic Scans
Abstract. In the age of whole-genome population genetics, so-called genomic scan studies often conclude with a long list of putatively selected loci. These
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