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...

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

🦠🌿🐦🧪 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

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

Verena@viralemergence.org · last yr.

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

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

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/

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)

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...

📣 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...

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 · last yr.

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?

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

Lungfish xkcd.com/3064

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 · last yr.

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

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).

ucl.ac.uk

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.

nature.com

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

theguardian.com

🚨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...

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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 · last yr.

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...

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

theguardian.com

Our new paper on bat influenza transmission dynamics is out. Check it out 👀🦇🦠 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Dynamics of influenza transmission in vampire bats revealed by longitudinal monitoring and a large-scale anthropogenic perturbation

Common vampire bats maintain bat-associated influenza virus H18N11 across Peru.

science.org

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

INTRODUCTION

thebullshitmachines.com

what a disaster. if this decision is not reversed immediately, its damage on science & society will be unravelling in infinite nuanced ways for decades to come

Darby Saxbe@darbysaxbe.bsky.social · 2y ago

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

New podcast, I loved making this. It's 51 minutes of me deciding wether or not to lick a window, which delves into transactional analysis psychology and stories of fish landing in forests during the great storm of 1839 open.spotify.com/episode/2XuJ...

In defence of licking dirt off a window

The Blindboy Podcast · Episode

open.spotify.com

Just over week until the deadline👇

Please share widely! We are recruiting a 3-year postdoc at the RVC to develop new methodology to infer epidemic dynamics from wild animal viromes sampled across changeable environments. Further details: jobs.rvc.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx... Feel free to reach out with any questions. Deadline Feb 9th

Interesting updates from Ben Bolker on modelling approaches (see paper) In sum: - Doing hypothesis testing or measuring the strength of effects? Then you can use your fullest, maximal model w/ all covariates* ✅ - Doing prediction? Then carry on w/ AIC model selection & averaging ✅ *wisely chosen!

Ben Bolker@bbolker.bsky.social · 2y ago

I like this paper too, but (horn-tooting alert) alternatively, consider not doing model selection at all? doi.org/10.3390/e260... (FWIW I do feel a bit bad about publishing in an MDPI special issue [!!] - long story, I agreed to do it and then felt uncomfortable backing out - wouldn't do it again)