Fact-checking Matt Ridley’s “Scientific Freedom Lecture” at NIH (Part II) The first part of this rebuttal can be read here; the third part will be posted later. Ridley’s lecture is available on Youtube; I also generated a transcript, available here. The same disclaimer as i...

In March, invited by Jay Bhattacharya, Matt Ridley gave the inaugural "Scientific Freedom Lecture" at NIH, on a lab leak origin of COVID-19.

There was a lot to debunk; here is Part II:
pandemonium.hypotheses.org/1108

🧪 #covidorigin

I have been really impressed with @beaconbio.bsky.social, and find myself using it more and more. Excellent resource to replace ProMED.

There was literally a pangolin that flew combat sorties with the CIA in a dirty war in Laos that then died after drinking too much gin, so there’s at least one pangolin whose record is morally ambiguous

@ucuedinburgh.bsky.social @ucu.org.uk Sounds familiar?

Draft report into ANU's controversial cuts critical of university's council ANU's council approved a massive $250 million cost-cutting program without clear evidence it was needed or achievable, according to an assessment in a draft audit office report.

Do you know a university cutting roles because 'urgent financial crises'?

Don't believe them: ANU made up their crisis & forced massive cuts for NO reason & with NO plan.

So many friends and colleagues suffered (& still do) because of this malice. Criminal.

www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03...

Screenshot of peartree with a tree and a root-to-tip plot

New feature for PearTree - root-to-tip plots. Web version at peartree.live | desktop apps to follow at github.com/artic-network/peartree/releases/latest

One of the best debunks of Ridley's theories was by 2018 Matt Ridley. He is now promoting what he mocked then: the creation in a lab, in secret, of a new human pathogen

web.archive.org/web/20190922...

#covidorigin

Research Fellow (Postdoctoral) - School of Biosciences - 107071 - Grade 7 This post-doctoral position will contribute to both complementary programmes, developing ‘broadband’ metagenomic sequencing capabilities for rapid detection and characterisation of emerging and unknow...

ARTIC are hiring! Postdoctoral opportunity in metagenomics at the University of Birmingham

edzz.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

A screenshot of the new Pathoplexus homepage showing all viruses now supported, including Dengue and Yellow Fever, which are circled in red

1/ 🦟 Big news: #Pathoplexus now supports Dengue virus & Yellow Fever virus - two arboviruses responsible for over 400 million infections and up to 94,000 deaths per year.
Here's what’s new in our latest update 👇🏻

Read the full update: pathoplexus.org/news/2026-03... 📰

EMF - Unbelievable (Official Music Video) HD YouTube video by EMFtheband

I have just realised that 'Unbelievable' by EMF was a stark warning to the future about the use of LLMs by students to do their course work. www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfCL...

Second prize is two days.

Yes. It definitely wasn’t me that committed a broken build.

Coincidentally, the newly minted icon...

Submit an issue at github.com/artic-networ... and provide an example and some background and I will look into it.

I guess you mean you won't be using any programs where the developer tells you they used AI?

Post one as an issue and Claude and I will see what we can do: github.com/artic-networ...

Damn. Will rename it BearTree now.

Transit data? Where did it get that from?

I haven't even had time to design an icon.

For this sort of app – where bugs are apparent because you can see them and it is low-stakes because you are creating visualizations of scientific data rather than doing science – LLMs seem an extremely effective tool. PearTree was created in two weeks and I was doing other stuff at the same time.

This experience has been in interesting one - I think it helps that I know JavaScript quite well and feel I could have written this if I had had the time (with endless trips to StackOverflow). The code base is now large but generally easy to follow and well annotated.

Finally, I would like to be able to say this is the product of years of work but it certainly wasn't. I designed it, specified exactly how it should work, how the code should be structured and the frameworks to use but most of the actual code was generated by Claude Sonnet 4.6.

artic-network/peartree Contribute to artic-network/peartree development by creating an account on GitHub.

But happy to have requests and bug reports through GitHub issues github.com/artic-networ... and it is all open source code etc. so PRs also welcome. Including new themes and palettes.

artic-network/peartree Contribute to artic-network/peartree development by creating an account on GitHub.

There are features from FigTree that are missing some of which I plan to implement, some I am not (I am looking at you circular trees).

It can also handle unrooted trees such as those produced by the lovely IQ-TREE (iqtree.github.io) including bootstrap values. And you can do various re-rooting operations on these 'unrooted' trees.

For obvious reasons it is quite orientated towards BEAST trees (i.e., MCC or HIPSTR trees with posterior summary information about the nodes). You can calibrate a timescale, draw node bars etc. Colour things based on annotations etc.

These should work like normal desktop apps (whatever is normal to your OS, at least) but I haven’t tested the Windows or Linux versions because I haven't.

Releases · artic-network/peartree Contribute to artic-network/peartree development by creating an account on GitHub.

Whilst web apps are quite handy as they don’t need installing, they can be annoying (e.g., when you accidentally close the window). So you can also download desktop apps here: github.com/artic-networ...

There is a tutorial here if you want to take your time: artic-network.github.io/peartree/doc...