I totally agree about vigilance. In fact, I've published a couple of papers backing this up: www.thelancet.com/journals/lan... www.thelancet.com/journals/lan... Although, these underpin how hard it is to go from a "mishap" to a significant outbreak.
@valanvir.bsky.social
Local Idiot To Post Comment On Internet https://theonion.com/local-idiot-to-post-comment-on-internet-1819569981/
For a disease as spectacularly scary as smallpox, its history is remarkably mysterious. Here is my look at what ancient DNA from the viruses is revealing. Gift link: nyti.ms/4vTU11D
‘This Is Very Strange’: Ancient Smallpox May Have Been Less Deadly (Gift Article)
Scientists have found smallpox viruses in the remains of people in Chile from around 500 years ago, revealing how the virus may have evolved into a global killer.
nyti.ms
Very interesting paper on smallpox sequences from when they were ibtrocuced to South America, capturing the complex evolutionary forces at play in the pathogen city of this virus. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
The genomic identity of early smallpox in South America
Smallpox was a major driver of population collapse in the Americas after European contact, yet the genetic identity of the causal strains remains unknown. Here, we report the first ancient smallpox ge...
science.org
Yet another way to jailbreak LLMs: When asking them for forbidden information, make them think the request is part of their chain-of-thought: arxiv.org/abs/2603.12277
Prompt Injection as Role Confusion
LLMs see the world as a single stream of text, partitioned into roles like <user> or <tool>. We trace prompt injection to role confusion: models perceive the source of text from how it sounds, not its...
arxiv.org
"This topic is not so trivial to be left to the instincts of commentators paid by the word or media outlets seeking the next titillating headline." www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
COVID-19 origins: plain speaking is overdue
SARS-CoV-2 is a natural virus that found its way into humans through mundane contact with infected wildlife that went on to cause the most consequential pandemic for over a century. While it is schola...
thelancet.com
Given the recent COVID-19 origins revival and Fauci witchhunt, just a reminder that I have written a book that answers to the best of our knowledge the question; and dismantles the many disinformation campaigns around the various lab leak narratives. Free access: open.substack.com/pub/protagon...
Lab Leak Fever
The COVID-19 Origin Theory that Sabotaged Science and Society
open.substack.com
The evidence supports the alt theory of a spillover from animals sold at the market. Spillovers also happen to account for all other novel infectious disease epidemics. I'm tired of writing about this since I'm tired of the harassment. Pretty much every science writer I know feels the same.
Continue to be glad we wrote this about 1977 flu. I would like to also write something about Sverdlovsk sometime but it keeps staying on the to do list
Flo Débarre@flodebarre.eurosky.social · last wk.Rand Paul talking about 1977 flu again. (he also did last time) Likely a bad example with respect to gain of function, see journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... by Rozo and @ggronvall.bsky.social ▫️43/ #faucihearing
TL;DR: Today, Anthony Fauci appeared before Rand Paul's committee. In the previous days, Paul shamefully published private documents about Fauci, to attack the person since he had nothing else. Fauci pleaded the 5th and did not answer questions; yet the hearing lasted for three hours. #faucihearing
Flo Débarre@flodebarre.eurosky.social · last wk.THE END ▫️50/50 #faucihearing
I am sick of some media uncritically repeating Rand Paul's misrepresentation of Fauci's journal about the Huanan market. In late Jan 2020, it was a common commentary that the market may not be the origin of the outbreak, b/c of a Lancet paper on early cases ▫️1/6 www.paul.senate.gov/wp-content/u...
“While everyone was safe in the end, the class did experience quite a scare and underwent unnecessary interventions. State and federal health officials conducted a subsequent investigation to figure out how a dangerous pathogen was stored in the same freezer as harmless bacteria for lab classes”
College lab class ends with 32 people on antibiotics for deadly germ exposure
Lab students were supposed to ID a mild germ. They all identified a deadly pathogen.
arstechnica.com
Sure, but there is a gulf of difference between learning through fixing mistakes and never learning deeper principles and always debugging. It's the core issue behind in cognitive science what we call "you can't play 20 questions with nature and win". www.coli.uni-saarland.de/crocker/docu...
coli.uni-saarland.de
(Sphere eversion is a mathematical construction where one turns a sphere inside out without introducing cuts or sharp creases. Here is a marvelous explainer by @rreusser.bsky.social. The animated procedure is carried out step-by-step as you scroll down the page.)
Sphere Eversion
rreusser.github.io
A fourth transmissible cancer this time in fish. The other known types are in dogs, tasmanian devils and clams. There will surely be other examples to be found in nature. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Brown bullhead catfish melanoma represents a novel transmissible cancer - Nature
Whole-genome sequencing analysis of tumour and matched non-tumour host tissues of the brown bullhead catfish reveals a type of naturally occurring transmissible cancer.
nature.com
Tragic and - according to scientists quoted in the article — avoidable.
Exclusive: Death of girl in Chinese gene-editing trial was never made public
Parents want accountability after study went disastrously wrong, Science and Retraction Watch investigation reveals
science.org
The talk that was making the rounds a while back is out as a preprint!
George Davey Smith@mendelrandom.bsky.social · 2w agoDoes the (live) shingles vaccine protect against dementia? Fergus Hamilton and colleagues provide important evidence in a new preprint using hospital data from the whole of England in a regression discontinuity design from which we *don't* show evidence of a meaningful protective effect /cont
‘Mono’ Virus Found to Broadly Influence Human Genes @cincyresearch.bsky.social scienceblog.cincinnatichildrens.org/mono-virus-f... www.cell.com/cell-genomic...
Twice a year, Hawai'i experiences a strange moment where the sun appears to be exactly overhead & anything that is completely vertical casts no shadow. Let's learn about Lāhainā Noon, subsolar points & 'Kau ka lā i ka lolo', meaning "the sun rests on the brains."
perceptions of Black leaders but I don't think it is particular to tech. Porumbescu, G. A., Piotrowski, S. J., & Mabillard, V. (2021). Performance information, racial bias, and citizen evaluations of government: Evidence from two studies. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory,
A cautionary note for those seeking a shortcut to publication--from a very authoritative source.🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive
There’s a saying in the management world, popularized by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin in the 1990s, that the goal of technological improvements is to make products faster, better, and cheaper. Alt...
science.org
Biologists pinpoint how common virus triggers multiple sclerosis www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Biologists pinpoint how common virus triggers multiple sclerosis
A connection between Epstein–Barr virus and MS has long been suspected, but the underlying mechanism was unclear until now.
nature.com
Basically an ad for a Google product, written by Google employees, presented as a scientific paper in Nature. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Accelerating scientific discovery with Co-Scientist - Nature
Co-Scientist is an AI system for structured scientific thinking and generates research hypotheses for experimental verification.
nature.com
*especially* also because of this bsky.app/profile/jper...
Jeffrey Perkel (he/him)@jperkel.bsky.social · 3w agoResearchers increasingly use #AI agents to mine online resources for new insights. New @nature.com, @dalmeet.bsky.social reports on a study that documents how easy it is to 'poison' these datasets to support false conclusions. 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Tim Harford writes about me in the Financial Times. He claims I think it’s hopeless for scientists to try to explain their work to the public. That’s false. I suspect link rot and Harford’s faulty memory are to blame. I’ll explain my actual view below. 🧪 1/10 giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...
Explain it to me like I’m 10
Simplifying how we explain complex concepts can lead to surprising benefits
giftarticle.ft.com
Virologist Theo Sanderson @theo.io was inspired to create the Up Goer Five Text Editor. Now anyone could play the game. You paste some writing into the text box. If it contains a word that’s not in the top ten hundred, you get an error message. Again, all good fun. 4/10 splasho.com/upgoer5/
The Up-Goer Five Text Editor
splasho.com
...the teeth developed not as mouse-like, but as conical reptilian teeth: the developmental program still latent in birds from their dinosaur ancestors tens of millions of years ago. 🤯
Fascinating article. Next, someone please explain why AI agents love to generate "rm -rf *"
Will Oremus@willoremus.com · 3w agoI set out to understand why AIs love negative parallelism. The answer wasn't just surprising—it was illuminating. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...