Dear Member of Congress: The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and HIV Medicine Association (HIVMA) are deeply grateful for the longstanding bipartisan support from Congress for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). We want to inform you of current and likely impacts of delays and changes in funding policies and procedures for NIH grants. Our concerns relate to the following areas within NIH: • Massive reduction in notice of funding opportunities • Delays in funding processes and inadequate capacity to administer grants • Increase in forward funding of multiyear awards in year one • Delays and potential lapses in funding for large clinical trial networks and clinical trial units Lack of transparency around permitted international collaborative partners for research projects • Disproportionate impact of grant terminations on vulnerable populations, especially women and people of color

U.S. infectious disease research is on the brink. Without immediate action from Congress, much of it will cease to exist within a year.

For example👇

1️⃣ No collaborative RFAs posted for >1 year (normal: many / year).
2️⃣ No foreign collaborators allowed on grants.

🧪🪦 www.idsociety.org/globalassets...

Blog post on "The AI Rewrite Dilemma": lh3.github.io/2026/04/17/t...

LLM‑Assisted Software Engineers Can Only Be Mad (And Will Block Smartasses)

An impromptu essay on the impossible equilibrium of AI‑augmented coding

(1)

Comic. [Person and person with white hat facing two boxes stacked with $80 price tag and sale tag on each box.] PERSON 1: They want $80 for this? I could make one myself for $10 in parts, an hour of work, a trip to the hardware store, another $30 in parts, another few hours of work, two more trips to the store for $20 more in parts, another hour of work to redo the first hour of work because I messed up, and $80 to buy this when the one I made breaks.

Make It Myself

xkcd.com/3233/

Unfalsifiable by Design: A Year of Trying and Failing to Reproduce a Human Microbiome and Autism Study The myth of open data, reproducibility, responsibility, and accountability in science, and your role in it

How every layer of science's "self-correcting machinery" failed when Iva Veseli and I simply wanted to reproduce the findings of a high-profile study on gut microbiome and autism:

merenlab.org/2026/04/15/u...

Fact-checking Matt Ridley’s “Scientific Freedom Lecture” at NIH (Part I) Matt Ridley, global warming skeptic and co-author with Alina Chan of a book promoting a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2, was invited by Jay Bhattacharya, the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NI...

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

The talk was so full of misrepresentations, omissions, falsehoods and lies that I will need several blog posts to debunk it. Here's Part I:

pandemonium.hypotheses.org/995

🧪 #covidorigin

The almost best thing about this is that Bioinformatics Twitter is back!

Be funny if she ends up taking him down

A chart from Our World In Data, showing the shift away from coal power in the UK - nearly 70% of electricity production in the late 1980s, to less than 0.1% in 2025.

There's a lot being shared right now about China's incredible shift towards renewable energy - and rightly so.

But this, from the UK, is equally astonishing & encouraging.

It's not just that change can happen. It's that it *is* happening.

(Via climateactapp.substack.com/p/your-daily...)

EFF is Leaving X After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X. This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue.

After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X.

This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue. 🧵 (1/5)
www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

Wildlife trade drives animal-to-human pathogen transmission over 40 years

New in @science.org ‼️ In the most comprehensive study to date, we show that wildlife trade is driving animal-to-human zoonotic spillover at a planetary scale, with +1 spillover per host every 10 years. Live animal markets and illegal trade pose even greater risks. 🔓 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I think I've said this before, but it is absolutely wild to me how many people will contact me on LinkedIn and not attempt to reach out via any other medium. I go there once every few months & always find old messages. "I'm urgently trying to contact you." Urgently? You're trapped on LinkedIn!

Black and white picture of three older people. Text says From 'mad sessions' to a molecular bio revolution

Matthew Cobb's new biography of Francis Crick paints a vivid picture of one of the most fascinating biologists of the 20th century.

The latest issue of The Biologist features an exclusive extract exploring Crick's work with Sydney Brenner:
biologist.rsb.org.uk/crick_book_e...

#FrancisCrick

A systematic comparison of tools for predicting antimicrobial resistance from nanopore sequence data www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...

Phylogenetic tree and map showing the distribution and evolution of US cattle H5N1s

This is a companion piece of work to the in depth evolutionary analysis on the US H5N1 spillovers lead by Jonathan Pekar which several authors were also involved with.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Graph of receptor binding curves showing an ancestral and recent H5N1. The ancestral virus does not bind NeuGc receptor well, whereas the recent virus birds NeuGc and NeuAc containing receptors equally.

Really excited to be able to share our latest preprint, describing how during its evolution in cattle, H5N1 has got better at using a type of alternative receptor that's abundant in cows, but not found in humans and birds.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Incredible

A Reddit user has meticulously kept a diary of Trump’s daily victory claims.

It should form part of every historical archive on the planet.

Brace yourself, here goes 🧵👇

You need to make AI guidelines for your lab Here's why you should, and how to start

I wrote about why every lab should have AI use guidelines, and how to do it.

open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

NASA's Artemis II Live Mission Coverage (Official Broadcast) YouTube video by NASA

I highly recommend putting this NASA #Artemis II mission livestream on and just leaving it playing as you go about your weekend. Live views of the spacecraft, occasional visualizations of the current config, views of the control room, space-ground radio audio. www.youtube.com/live/m3kR2KK...

Why we won’t be funding open access publishing any more - Cancer Research UK - Cancer News The open access movement was bold and promising, but ultimately disappointing. Now is the time to stop and call for a new way to make publishing work…

CRUK goes green [OA] news.cancerresearchuk.org/2026/04/01/w...

🧬 pathotypr is now on Bioconda! @pathogenomics.bsky.social
conda install -c bioconda pathotypr

Alignment-free lineage classification & drug resistance genotyping from WGS. Works with any pathogen bring your own SNP markers.
⚡ Rust, ~1s/sample
🖥️ CLI + GUI
🔗 github.com/PathoGenOmics-Lab/pathotypr

So you're telling me Claude functions by screaming at itself "WRITE GOOD CODE NO BUGS SECURE VERY STABLE", mashes compile button, reads back the error and yells ONLY GOOD CODE NO BUGS at itself again while crying and copying random things from Stack Overflow until it compiles?

it just like me fr fr

US Scientists Sequence 1,000 Genomes From Measles, a Disease Long Eliminated With Vaccines - KFF Health News This week, the CDC began to publish long-awaited data that will reveal the extent of measles’ comeback. While applauding the science, researchers say the Trump administration has done little to contai...

🔔Exclusive: CDC just posted a tranche of genomic data from measles.

1,000 genomes have been sequenced, so researchers expect an answer to the elimination question within the month.

"That we're even talking about this is nuts," said @kgandersen.bsky.social

kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

i'm so sorry we've sent these souls to the moon and they're using outlook?

right now the astronauts are calling houston because the computer on the spaceship is running two instances of microsoft outlook and they can't figure out why. nasa is about to remote into the computer

This 👇

Why bioRxiv

Good one

This is either brilliant or scary:

Anthropic accidentally leaked the TS source code of Claude Code (which is closed source). Repos sharing the source are taken down with DMCA.

BUT this repo rewrote the code using Python, and so it violates no copyright & cannot be taken down!