Has anyone ever been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize after threatening genocide? Asking for a not friend.

God it'd be so much funnier if he weren't in charge of anything and no one took him seriously.

If your gut microbiome is plants, you're not having a good time.

I can't...

It has been an unpleasant few months, but the lymphoma is one of the curable ones, so with a little luck I'll be back to regularly scheduled life and science soon 🤞

Note: probably not Nature's fault, just regular old nature.

Natalie is running 2026 EMF 10k for Maggie's Centres Help Natalie Ring McBrien raise money to support Maggie's Centres

6 rounds of chemo and 18 fractions of radiotherapy (ouch!) later I'm hopeful for an all clear soon. A big help to me has been Maggie's Centres who offered so much support. My friend and colleague Natalie Ring is raising money for them running 10k and we'd both appreciate any donations to the cause!

Just over 8 months ago I was on here announcing the publication of my first Nature paper, exactly a week later I found a lump. A lump that alarmingly doubled in 24h. A very stressful few weeks later I was diagnosed with an aggressive lymphoma.

A figure showing a 'Simplot' which plots the similarity of a genome to other genomes across a graph, with similarity on the Y-axis and the genome position on the x-axis. Many coloured lines show the sequences being compared - those closest to the top (similarity of 1) are the closest matches in different parts of the genome.

1/5

Introducing SimPlot-CL! 🧬
Recombination plays an important role in viral evolution. Similarity plots are a great way to visualize recombination patterns, but generating them across many genomes can be cumbersome

(Work with my student, Keno Strotjohann!)
📂 github.com/hodcroftlab/simplot-cl

Wow.

Doctors say that vaccines protect children from dangerous diseases. A nepo baby who barbecues dogs and snorts cocaine off toilet seats says that vaccines make children vulnerable to 5G radiation. For busy parents, it can be hard to know who to trust.

Troublemaker is my middle name.

There is a cost to science denial.

Quickly telling someone you’ve liked something they’ve done (e.g. telling a writer you like their writing, or a researcher you like their research, or a teacher you like their teaching) has a phenomenally high effort-to-impact ratio.

Alex Pretti was a colleague at the VA. We hired him to recruit for our trial. He became an ICU nurse- I lover working with him. He was a good kind person who lived to help and these fuckers executed him.

White. Hot. Rage.

"I know we'll come to (Nato's) rescue, but I just really do question whether or not they'll come to ours"- Trump

Mate, article 5 has been invoked exactly once and guess who it was in aide of...

Not at the moment, seeing his neurologist today for some meds adjusting fun 🤞

Black cat upside down on a beanbag

Very cool work! I have a cat with epilepsy and it is horrible. Awesome that Cronutt is cured and would be amazing for people suffering with epilepsy too 🤩

OctopuSV and TentacleSV: a one-stop toolkit for multi-sample, cross-platform structural variant comparison and analysis. #StructuralVariants #SVs #SVcomparison #SVidentification #Bioinformatics 🧪🧬 🖥️
academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

Spider: a flexible and unified framework for simulating spatial transcriptomics data. #SpatialTranscriptomics #DataSimulation #Genomics #Bioinformatics 🧬 🖥️
academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

I can say that having been working on this for a while, my cats have insurance in place specifically chosen to cover that cost just in case.
There are several international groups working on prevention and treatment for FCoV-23, so hopefully they should have solid data to share in the near future.

GS-441524 is the recommended treatment and has been used successfully in cases of FCoV-23. Unfortunately it is not available for veterinary use in every country, and is expensive. Molnupiravir was used during the outbreak in Cyprus as there were COVID stocks the government allowed use of.

Black cat draped elegantly over a beanbag foot stool

Also, my black cat says hi to your black cat.

I borrowed that tree as I'm on my phone and it was easier than finding my own! The source of that tree is this chapter, which may be of interest. But simply put, they're quite different. www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immun...

A phylogenetic tree showing alphacoronavirus-1 circled in red, and SARS-CoV-2 circled in blue, at opposite ends of the tree.

While this is about a coronavirus, it's not about that coronavirus. They're not very closely related, and while we did see cases of cats catching SARS-CoV-2, it isn't going to give your cat deadly FIP. Most cats that catch SARS-CoV-2 have very mild or no respiratory symptoms.

Loss of FCoV-23 spike domain 0 enhances fusogenicity and entry kinetics - Nature The molecular mechanisms of cell entry for the recently identified highly pathogenic feline coronavirus FCoV-23 are characterized in detail.

Important insights into FCoV-23 cell entry from the @veeslerlab.bsky.social

Freely available: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Grok 4 seems to consult Elon Musk to answer controversial questions | TechCrunch Elon Musk's newly launched AI chatbot, Grok 4, seemed to reference Musk's posts on social media before answering controversial questions.

Grok 4 appears to consult Elon Musk's X posts and news about him when addressing controversial subjects like immigration or the Israel-Palestine conflict. This design choice, aiming to align with Musk's views, raises questions about Grok's stated goal of being a "maximally truth-seeking AI."
#MLSky

I've once again failed to tag appropriately for the various sciency bluesky feeds. 🧪🧬🖥️ #ViroSky #VirEvol

screenshot of a figure from the article, showing the chimeric composition of FCoV-23, with FCoV-1 backbone and spike from CCoVII

A lab is not required to generate chimeric coronaviruses, with a spike of a different virus: they can emerge naturally ▫️1/2

(from newly published paper by Attipa & @amandatron89.bsky.social et al.; preprinted in 2023)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Also interesting that the deletion between TGEV and PRCV tracks so closely with the FCoV-23 deletion!

Coronavirus causes fatal disease outbreak in cats | The Roslin Institute | The Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies A harmful strain of coronavirus has caused a fast-spreading outbreak of a harmful feline disease.

A hybrid coronavirus, formed of cat and dog coronaviruses, caused a severe outbreak of disease among cats in Cyprus, researchers found.

Their work, in Nature, showed how this new virus was able to cause widespread cases of Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP) among the island’s cats.