Archive on 4 - The Evolution of The Naked Ape - BBC Sounds Ella Al-Shamahi revisits Desmond Morris’s controversial book The Naked Ape, six decades on

Can a book be scientifically flawed & still transform how we see ourselves? The Naked Ape is proof that connecting with your audience matters, even when it ruffles academic feathers. Loved joining @ellaalshamahi.bsky.social & fellow guests to unpack this on BBC Radio 4 www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Trump administration orders dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service Late Tuesday afternoon, with the subtlety of a wrecking ball and the morality of a foreclosure notice, the Trump administration announced the most devastating attack on the U.S. Forest Service in the ...

Amidst everything else, the Trump regime has quietly killed off the U.S. Forest Service 🌲

“One hundred and ninety-three million acres of your national forests… just handed, on a silver platter, to the people who’ve spent their entire careers trying to destroy it.”

www.hatchmag.com/articles/tru...

📣 New preprint: Plasma proteomics improves prediction of recurrent cardiovascular events www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

Wonderful work with Yang Liu, @sritchie73.bsky.social, and many at @cambridge-ceu.bsky.social

UK and EU finalise agreement to bring UK into Erasmus+ in 2027 Thousands across the UK set to benefit from re-opening of the historic Erasmus+ programme

The UK rejoining Erasmus is the best science news for a while! #AcademicSky

www.gov.uk/government/n...

Analysis Finds That Google's AI Overviews Are Providing Misinformation at a Scale Possibly Unprecedented in the History of Human Civilization A new analysis commissioned by The New York Times suggests that Google's AI Overviews are wrong an astonishing percentage of the time.

This is catastrophic.

Genetic predictors of GLP1 receptor agonist weight loss and side effects - Nature Identification of genetic variants associated with the efficacy and side effects of GLP1 medications could underpin development of precision medicine approaches in the treatment of obesity.

New GWAS in Nature to investigate why people respond differently to GLP-1 weight loss drugs. Authors find different alleles for GLP1R (targeted by semaglutide drugs) and GPIR (semaglutide and tirzepatide) linked to both, incl. to side effects of nausea/vomiting.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Why do schizophrenia GWAS signals look so flat across the genome?

In our recent preprint, we explored why psychiatric disorders — and, more broadly, brain-related traits involving the central nervous system — appear to have unusual genetic architectures.

🧵1/n

Hacking 3D printers as laboratory robots The emergence of affordable and reliable 3D printers has enabled laboratories to optimize setups, print custom parts, accelerate research, and rapidly prototype. A new movement has emerged in the past...

How to make your own robot!
A review of people making awesome lab robots out of commercial 3D printers. Thank you @vsaggiomo.bsky.social and Sander for inviting me to help write this paper in @digital-discovery.rsc.org.

Beep boop! 🤖 #chemsky
doi.org/10.1039/D5DD...

This is the situation we find ourselves in

Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content “In recent months, more and more administrative reports centered on LLM-related issues, and editors were being overwhelmed.”

after much deliberation and giving AI the benefit of the doubt, Wikipedia editors have had enough of AI slop. New policy bans LLM generated content, periodt www.404media.co/wikipedia-ba...

"The AI Grad Student": A Harvard professor describes working with Claude.

Early on, he describes misconduct that would cause any student to be terminated: "It faked results, hoping I wouldn't notice."

But he ends the essay with "Now I'm doing 100% of my research with LLMs".

Am I losing my mind?

New paper in mSystems! 🧵 - how much of your metagenome is actually bacterial/archaeal DNA? For many samples, nobody knows.

We built SingleM prokaryotic_fraction (SPF) to answer this, then ran it on >100,000 public metagenomes. 🧬🖥️🦠

Here's what we found 👇
doi.org/10.1128/msystems.01062-25

Noteworthy from the blue skies — end of March 2026 Not as often as I would like and fewer entries this time than in the last post, but this is the latest update of my reading list gathering some noteworthy recent publications in the field of microb…

Short new blog post with some of the papers that I stumbled across recently in the field of microbiome science and others (and mostly shared here on bluesky). Hope this is useful to some!
mericlab.com/2026/03/23/n...

Convergent extreme reductive evolution in ancient planthopper symbioses - Nature Communications Symbiotic bacteria can have exceedingly small genomes. This study finds that ancient bacterial symbionts of planthoppers have repeatedly evolved the smallest known genomes, losing most biosynthetic fu...

Madness. A bacterium with a 10kb genome, lost replication initiation, translation.., relies on symbiotic host.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I have a gut microbiome joke, but it's actually pretty shit.

Thymus health is a predictor of lifelong well-being and immunotherapy effectiveness It was thought that the thymus serves its purpose for the immune system early in life. Insights about the organ in adults reveal its importance for later well-being.

Big news about our thymus gland and extending healthspan
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
We thought our thymus gland involutes and has little function after teenage years
But...
As determined by AI, thymus health is adulthood is quantifiable and very importantly linked to MANY health outcomes

AI Keeps Failing at Microbiome Prediction Why simple models keep winning, where deep learning still shines, and where the field is headed

AI has huge promise for genomics -- but it has consistently failed at microbiome-based prediction.

My new post on why simple models keep winning, where deep learning actually earns its place, and where the field is headed

blekhman.substack.com/p/ai-keeps-f...

Clostridia from preterm infants metabolize human milk oligosaccharides to suppress pathobionts and modulate intestinal function in organoids - Nature Microbiology Clostridium perfringens lacking perfringolysin O toxin isolated from preterm infants metabolizes human milk oligosaccharide disialyllacto-N-tetraose to produce metabolites that promote the growth of c...

🚨 A new piece of the preterm gut microbiome puzzle just fell into place!

Bifidobacterium metabolise human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) in early life — shaping immunity, supporting gut development, and protecting against diseases like necrotising enterocolitis (NEC).

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Interesting human study here on material immunity protecting neonates from E. coli sepsis...with an interesting preclinical mouse piece showing that probiotic E. coli Nissle 1917 introduced preconceptually into intestine can prime useful IgG protective response in neonates

#MicroSky #UTISky #IDSky

One of my favorite papers of past few years!

Our work with Lena Takayasu and @dwmckellar.bsky.social in Iwijn De Vlaminck's lab is now out in @natmicrobiol.nature.com ! 🎉

Spatial transcriptomics maps host–gut microbiome biogeography at high resolution

rdcu.be/e7i7o

Intriguing! New study linking gut microbiota to ovarian health in mice. FMT between young and estropausal influenced ovarian transcriptomics and inflammation, with effects on fertility.
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s43...

A comprehensive new tool for exploring how genetic variation influences outcomes, of relevance to everything driven by phenotypes, which encapsulates many domains, from how drugs work to how natural selection works ... / cont

Gene-environment equivalence: The fundamental principle of Mendelian randomization In this Perspective, George Davey Smith and colleagues outline how and why gene-environment equivalence, the fundamental principle of Mendelian Randomization (MR), must be properly applied and critica...

Failure to understand that the fundamental principle of Mendelian randomization (MR) is of gene-environment equivalence contributes to the flood of nonsense MR papers that are appearing; Shah Ebrahim, Gib Hemani and I explain why in this short commentary. journals.plos.org/plosmedicine...

Exposing people to creative content believed to have been created by gen-AI (vs. a human peer) increases people’s self-confidence in their own relevant creative abilities.

This effect emerges for jokes, stories, poetry, and visual art, even when it's unwarranted.
psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Empiric azithromycin alters the upper respiratory microbiome and resistome without anti-inflammatory benefit in COVID-19 - Nature Microbiology Longitudinal metatranscriptomics in a prospective cohort of 1,164 adults hospitalized for COVID-19 reveals that azithromycin offered no apparent anti-inflammatory benefit but enriched the respiratory ...

Lessons still being learnt from the COVID19 pandemic 💡 🦠

While it was widely used in hospitalised patients, Azithromycin didn't offer a significant anti-inflammatory benefit but enriched the respiratory microbiome with potential pathogens and AMR genes.

#MicroSky

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Clostridia from preterm infants metabolize human milk oligosaccharides to suppress pathobionts and modulate intestinal function in organoids Nature Microbiology, Published online: 16 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41564-026-02297-4Clostridium perfringens lacking perfringolysin O toxin isolated from preterm infants metabolizes human milk oligosaccharide disialyllacto-N-tetraose to produce metabolites that promote the growth of commensal bifidobacteria, inhibit pathogens and suppress inflammation in an organoid model.

Out Now! Clostridia from preterm infants metabolize human milk oligosaccharides to suppress pathobionts and modulate intestinal function in organoids #MicroSky

This is figure 3, which shows antibiotic use and its associations with abundance of gut microbiome species.

An examination of the association between oral antibiotic use over eight years and the gut #microbiome in Swedish individuals found evidence that antibiotics can have long-lasting impacts on the gut microbiome. go.nature.com/40sw4kU #medsky 🧪

MenACWY vaccine Find out about the MenACWY vaccine, including what it’s for, who should have it, how to get it and possible side effects.

Dear students in the UK, if you haven't had your teenage meningitis vaccine or aren't sure if you have had it, PLEASE arrange with your GP to get vaccinated www.nhs.uk/vaccinations... It helps prevent tragic deaths like those that have occured recently in Kent.

Announcing StrainVis! 🦠🧫🧪

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

This nifty web-based tool allows you to visualize your strain level analyses. You can combine ANI and synteny based analyses and it will make all kinds of cool publication ready plots for you - examples follow. By Hagay Enav and Inbal Paz: