Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Nick Loman

Peter Ellis @pjie2.bsky.social · 2h

“ResearchFish isn’t a fish”

Marjorie James Keenan @unenthusiast.com · 16h

In honour of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand.

rm -rf ~/

hammancheez @hammancheez.bsky.social · 16h

"The chancellor approved it"

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Dr David Robert Grimes @drg.bsky.social · 6d

Asked lots about this piece on Chronic Lyme disease, and disappointed in the @guardian (a publication I both subscribe and contribute to) for running it. Short thread explaining the multitude of problems with it, and why I consider it irresponsible to run as is..🧵

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Sheryl Gay Stolberg @sherylnyt.bsky.social · 1d

OOOPS! UPDATE: Two HHS officials tell me that disease detectives, measles response officers, global health officials and the MMWR staff were laid off by mistake and will be reinstated. But Washington office is still RIFed

Sheryl Gay Stolberg @sherylnyt.bsky.social · 1d

BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:

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Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 1d

For more information about the Friday night massacre at CDC, I wrote up an analysis of who got terminated and what that means for public health.

Grateful to @saveamericamvmt.bsky.social for supporting and amplifying. We are in really terrible trouble.

rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/the-death-...

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Nick Loman @pathogenomenick.bsky.social · 1d

“CDC experts actively responding to an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo that has killed 43 people were RIFed in the middle of their deployment.” rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/the-death-...

The Death of Public Health

Another Friday night massacre, but this time it's not just an essential federal public health agency that will die

rasmussenretorts.substack.com

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Sheryl Gay Stolberg @sherylnyt.bsky.social · 1d

BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:

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Nicholas Bauer PhD @bioturbonick.net · 2d

They trained a specialized model on existing bacterial viruses and had it spit out genomes and some of them worked. And they probably could have done the same thing manually.

This was not "put in an English prompt to GPT and get a custom virus out with desired properties" and never will be.

Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 2d

“In September, scientists at Stanford reported they had used A.I. to design a virus for the first time.”

Opinion | The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World

www.nytimes.com

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Nick Loman @pathogenomenick.bsky.social · 2d

Lancelot Microbe?

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Robert Aboukhalil @robert.bio · 3d

Just published an interactive article about a magical algorithm known as the Burrows-Wheeler Transform, which powers sequence alignment tools like bowtie and bwa: sandbox.bio/concepts/bwt

It's also notoriously unintuitive so I'm hoping this article helps you build that intuition.

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Stephen Turner @stephenturner.us · 3d

Efficient and accurate search in petabase-scale sequence repositories www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧬🖥️🧪
MetaGraph: metagraph.ethz.ch
Code: github.com/ratschlab/me...

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UK Health Security Agency @ukhsa.bsky.social · 3d

#UKHSAVirusWatch is back, a summary of our weekly winter surveillance report .🦠🧵
This week's data shows an increase in COVID-19 activity, which is circulating at medium levels. Flu activity has also increased, particularly in those aged 15 to 24, but remains at baseline levels.

Graph showing COVID-19 positive tests rising steadily from spring 2025 after a low in early 2025. Data from October 2024 to October 2025, England only.

Graph showing flu-positive tests peaking sharply in winter 2024–25 before declining and then beginning to rise again in autumn 2025. Data from October 2024 to October 2025, England only.

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Nick Loman @pathogenomenick.bsky.social · 3d

Keeping phone off secret to winning Nobel

Nicholas Whyte @nwhyte.bsky.social · 3d

Dr Ramsdell, whose phone had been on airplane mode, told the BBC's Newshour Programme that his first response when his wife said, "You've won the Nobel prize" was: "I did not."

To which Ms O'Neill replied that she had 200 text messages that suggested he had.

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Scientist on three-week off-grid hike finds out he's won the Nobel prize

Dr Fred Ramsdell was "living his best life" offline when the Nobel committee tried to contact him.

www.bbc.com

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Josie Bryant @josiebryant.bsky.social · 4d

New respiratory 🫁 infection and microbiomes conference in Hinxton with stellar line up of speakers.

🚨 Submit your abstracts now! 🚨

Please RT

coursesandconferences.wellcomeconnectingscience.org/event/air-20...

AIR 2026: Genomic and Systems Approaches to Respiratory Infection, Microbiomes and Immunity — 20260211

Course exploring how genomics, microbiome profiling, and systems biology reshape our understanding of respiratory infections and immune dynamics.

coursesandconferences.wellcomeconnectingscience.org

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Nick Loman @pathogenomenick.bsky.social · 4d

Love this!

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Alan McNally @alanmcn1.bsky.social · 5d

After being with the journal since its very inception, the time has come for me to step back from Microbial Genomics. This is a wonderful opportunity to have a leadership role in one of the leading journals for microbial genomics research

microbiologysociety.org/news/society...

<i>Microbial Genomics </i> Deputy Editor-in-Chief: Call for Expressions of interest

microbiologysociety.org

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Esther Schindler @estherschindler.bsky.social · 6d

I just saw someone use the abbreviation “AI;DR” and I’ll be laughing for a while.

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Adam Rawnsley @arawnsley.bsky.social · 8d

Was curious about JFK’s health so I asked google. TIL he was pregnant in 1960 but only put on 15-20lbs

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Sathnam Sanghera @sathnam.bsky.social · 9d

Please let this be true.

Have we passed peak social media? - on.ft.com/4pTb1Di via @FT

Have we passed peak social media?

As platforms degrade into outrage and slop, users are turning away

on.ft.com

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Dan Portik @dportik.bsky.social · 11d

New pre-print from the Banfield lab, highlighting an interesting case of 1.5Mb megaplasmids found in human gut.

Plasmid genomes were resolved using #PacBio HiFi sequencing with hifiasm-meta for #metagenome assembly. Host association was detected using epigenetic signals.

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Megaplasmids associate with Escherichia coli and other Enterobacteriaceae

Humans and animals are ubiquitously colonized by Enterobacteriaceae , a bacterial family that contains both commensals and clinically significant pathogens. Here, we report Enterobacteriaceae megaplas...

doi.org

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Stephen Curry @scurry.bsky.social · 12d

As the @royalsociety.org council meets on 01 Oct to discuss the repudiation of its core values by one of its fellows, Elon Musk, I respectfully remind them of my proposals for actions that should help the RS recover its standing in the scientific community. occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2025/...

Conduct Unbecoming – how can the Royal Society escape its Musk box? | Reciprocal Space

occamstypewriter.org

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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 13d

As a survivor of the last AI winter, I endorse Cory's take: "Plan for a future where you can buy GPUs for ten cents on the dollar...[and] there's a ton of extremely promising open source models that have barely been optimized and have vast potential for improvement." pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/e...

Pluralistic: The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh (27 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

pluralistic.net

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Tami Lieberman @contaminatedsci.bsky.social · 13d

Precisely calling mutations across hundreds of bacterial isolates has been hard, requiring manual filtering and expertise.

Until now, using AccuSNV.

Herui Liao trained an ML model based on our previous meticulously called SNVs.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

High-accuracy SNV calling for bacterial isolates using deep learning with AccuSNV

Accurate detection of mutations within bacterial species is critical for fundamental studies of microbial evolution, reconstructing transmission events, and identifying antimicrobial resistance mutati...

www.biorxiv.org

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Phase Genomics @phasegenomics.bsky.social · 13d

In this great new paper, the authors use metagenomic Hi-C to show that #phage with broad host range are fairly common, contrary to the prevailing view on their biology. Cutting edge methods like Hi-C are shedding light on our blind spots in the microbial world.

Phages with a broad host range are common across ecosystems - Nature Microbiology

Proximity-ligation-based sequencing from 111 samples and 5 environments reveals that a substantial proportion of phages infect multiple species.

www.nature.com

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Joseph Cherabie MD MSc (They/He) @jncherabiemd.bsky.social · 13d

And the CDC has officially decided to switch back from Mpox to Monkeypox. A reminder, the world still uses Mpox, this disease does not come from monkeys, Mpox is less stigmatizing and racist. Switching back is just meaningless, unnecessary, racist, and homophobic.

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Katie Martin @katie0martin.ft.com · 15d

We worry about Very Online Kids much more than their Very Online Parents, and I'm not sure that's wise

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