I Am The God Of Your Children. I Am The Final Parent. Hi, friends! Today, I’d like to talk to the grown-ups. I know it’s not easy raising children. Looking after little ones is a lot of work, and sometimes you just need a moment to breathe. So you plop y...

Commentary: I Am The God Of Your Children. I Am The Final Parent.

So I pleased to announce the conceptual spawn of FigTree: PearTree (acronym still to be finalised). If you want to dive right in it is hosted as a web app here: artic-network.github.io/peartree (click the “Example...” button for immediate candy and then click every button you can find).

I love Big Bend also. What stays with me 10 years since I last visited was how bright the stars were due to the lack of light pollution. I would hate to lose this gem as well.

Predictably didn’t see a lot of the migratory birds we had expected we might see. The constant whir of a CBP helicopters and ATVs buzzing around the park also completely ruined the experience.

In 2020 my husband and I visited Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park and the border wall was being built through the park. You registered to go in the park and then had to walk past the wall to access most of the park. All the noise from the construction seemed to disrupt the wildlife.

surprised it took 4 months since I made this

Super great conference and great community. ❤️ Highly recommend to anyone interested in STEC/VTEC, I always come away with a wealth of info.

New blog post: ONT read QC strategies for assembly
rrwick.github.io/2026/02/05/r...

Mini-study comparing a few QC/subsampling approaches, plus practical notes from my experience.

Accurate plasmid reconstruction from metagenomics data using assembly–alignment graphs and contrastive learning - Nature Biotechnology PlasMAAG uses cross-sample information to improve plasmid reconstruction from metagenomic samples.

Accurate plasmid reconstruction from metagenomics data using assembly–alignment graphs and contrastive learning www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

It’s awful and almost certainly an undercount, we lost a lot of great folks at CDC due to non renewal of ORISE fellowships for example which wouldn’t be captured in the FTE totals.

Curious, what's the best-practice tool at this point for taxonomically classifying long reads from metagenomes from less well-characterised environments?

My impression is that Kraken will give lots of false positives and mis-classify taxa not in its database.

Please share around for visibility.

Jobs View the current job vacancies at the Microbiology Society.

We are looking for new editors for Microbiology, the flagship journal of @microbiologysociety.org

Deadline for applications is 16 Feb 2026

microbiologysociety.org/who-we-are/j...

The disputed identity of Pseudomonas putida KT2440: when taxonomists rename your favorite microbe | mBio Names matter; they are not mere labels. They operate as anchors of memory, social coordinates, and references of collective identity. When a name becomes established through long-term use and broad ad...

How do you react when your favorite microbe is renamed by taxonomists who are completely outside your field—and who ignore the community that actually works with it? Here is our clear answer re the case of Pseudomonas putida KT2440 👉🏻 journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

⏰ Don’t miss out!
📢 The TARGetAMR Annual Conference 2026 is coming 14–15 May to Birmingham.
🦠 Connect with experts & shape the future of AMR research.
👉 Register now: www.targetamr.org.uk/hdrevents/ta...
#TARGetAMR26

Incident at Emory Point near CDC in Atlanta cleared, officials say

www.fox5atlanta.com/news/police-...

We've got ISSUES. Literally.

We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?

arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563

A 🧵 1/n

Amazing news!

GLP-1s are a game changer for those who can tolerate them and it’s great to see all the evidence around their effectiveness. I’ve personally been on a GLP-1 for a little over two years and have lost 50 lb, prediabetes is in remission, and my anxiety for whatever reason is greatly decreased.

Such a horrible thing we have grown to accept, I’m glad you are okay though.

So terrifying. I’m very sorry this happened to you. Glad you were able to come back to photographing birds. ❤️it’s such a joyous hobby.

3 panel-comic of a black cat that is sitting close to the number 2025, then looks at it and then pushes it down, so that 2025 drops from the table.

bye 2025👋

14th century painting of St. Margaret of Antioch attacking a devil woman in a virid dress hitting a demon with a hammer

Just making sure that 2025 is definitely over

Sliding into the last 2 weeks of 2025 with this energy.

Where’s Kristi Noem? Figured she’d be there if they were putting a dog down.

A happy lady standing in front of a purple house with the light future she just changed illuminated in the background.

i changed a light fixture and didnt electrocute myself!!!!

I love her! Happy Thanksgiving!

Had to sprint to the shuttle this morning. Man I’m out of practice in this getting to work thing….

BIOLOG question: is there a good pipeline or program to compare biolog results (either in terms of absorbance reads or carbon sources/antibiotics/etc) to KEGG outputs from whole genome sequencing? Right now our tech is doing am manual comparison but there has to be an easier way. 🦠🧬

A woman in a gray shirt wearing a half mask respirator.

Furlough day, I’ve lost count. More sanding.