I notice more 'AI voice' in my colleagues' writing. It's jarring and anytime I catch it, my eyes glaze over or I just skip it. I've been thinking about what this means for the writer/reader relationship --> dncrwlye.github.io/blog.html
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if i had enough money, could I place a bet that bitcoin will go up in the next 5 minutes--- then buy enough bitcoin to make the price go up?
I made a website dncrwlye.github.io/blog.html I wrote a short blog post about it and some brief thoughts on A.I. Feel free to email/message me if you have thoughts on what I wrote or suggestions.
I'm so excited to have the last chapter of my PhD OUT!! Based on a longitudinal study of captive fruit bats in Ghana, we show that a decline in the population density of bat flies resulted in decreased Bartonella prevalence, which then rebounded when flies were restocked.
doi.org/10.1017/s003...
Results suggest juveniles are not driving winter spillovers, pointing instead toward the hypothesis that food-stressed adults are the cause.
However Bartonella, a bacterial infection we used as a control pathogen, told a different story: juveniles acquired it at the same rate every year (i.e. contact opportunities were stable and something else was driving the Hendra variation).
We didn't find what we expected: no consistent maternal antibody waning, and no clear wave of juveniles becoming infected.
We tracked antibody development across multiple birth cohorts using new serological tools, including the first anti-IgM measurements in bats.
Every winter, Hendra virus spills over from Australian flying foxes to horses and humans. We wanted to know if the annual birth pulse of juvenile bats, losing their maternal antibodies, could be driving these events.
New paper from our Australia Hendra virus project! Juvenile animals often drive seasonal pathogen transmission. In our case, we find no evidence juvenile bats drive seasonal Hendra virus spillover events in Australia. besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
The future looks bright! @samlearner.bsky.social
Because having opinions that challenge us are useful. Nobody needs an article that documents Richard Ebright being a pile. We all know that.
Why does the covid origins debate remain so polarising & acrimonious?
What does this say about the state of science & the public discourse of science?
My @theguardian.com op-ed debut, from a sociological perspective
Include backstory behind the film Blame
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www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Sure but the WIV was built in 1956, multiple decades prior to SARS-1 . Also, if you wanted to do that, you might build it where SARS-1 spilled over. Or where bats that are reservoirs for SARS-1 live.
Ok sounds good
There is evidence a lab was interested in GOF on bat coronaviruses and furin cleavage sites. That's not a common research project. How can we argue that is not evidence?
Again, I would argue there's good evidence for the market. Plus, f it was a lab leak, why did a super spreading event happen at this random market? That's why I lean to the market hypothesis. However, you are claiming that there is NO evidence of a lab leak and I strongly disagree with that.
i was talking to a virologist two hours ago about this very topic. paraphrasing, but essentially "we often write grants to fund work we've already done"
again, let me emphasize, i think a natural origin is more likely. but i think it's naive to claim there's 'no evidence' of a lab leak.
I've never found the grant not being funded convincing. When a grant is funded, it's often pretty typical to use funds to run a pilot of that grant to get more preliminary data to convince reviewers the project is feasible.
I read it again yesterday
Sure. A spillover event is more likely to happen/be detected in a large city. But natural origins proponents (and I am one) should acknowledge that this large city also had a bat coronavirus lab (which is NOT common) with grant proposals to do GOF-like work on bat coronaviruses.
We can't choose to pay attention to Worobey et al and ignore the DEFUSE grant.
I'm sorry but I disagree. I lean towards the market spillover theory, but there is real evidence of a lab leak. There has also good evidence of a spillover event.
I had this amazing experience with Claude where it had mis-learned some important formulas from Bishops "Patterns in Machine Learning." Specifically, it took the matrix inverses to be matrix transposes. It was very pushy on this topic and insisted it was right.
Congratulations to @colinparrish.bsky.social, on his well-deserved election to the American Academy of Microbiology! www.cornellsun.com/article/2025...
We simply had to intentionally destroy the world’s strongest economy while dismantling our scientific and educational infrastructure to ensure that a team with a trans girl would never finish second place in the Mountain West volleyball standings again
