Figure showing number of competitive grants mentioning women from 2015-2025. The number was rising until recently, with a precipitous drop in the last year.

At the end of 2024, the National Academies put out a report concluding the NIH has woefully underfunded women’s health research, and they suggested $15 B should be invested over the next 5 years.

Here’s what’s happened instead. Hard to study women’s health if you can’t say “women.”

wapo.st/4euUt1c

Pregnancy vaccine reduces baby hospital admissions for RSV by 80% A study confirms the vaccine gives excellent protection for babies against life-threatening chest infections.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Nine-Valent HPV Vaccination and Related Cancers This cohort study examines associations of the 9-valent human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine with HPV-related cancers in males aged 9 to 26 years.

Boys should also get the HPV vaccine, not only to help eliminate cervical cancer through building herd immunity but also because in this latest study it cancer risk in men by about half (in 10 years of follow up; the reduction may be larger with longer follow up)

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Started this project years ago, but now everything is deposited on @addgene.bsky.social and a short @protocolsio.bsky.social is online. Try it out to make your own (cheap) homemade nuclease/Benzonase!

dx.doi.org/10.17504/protocols.io.261ged7xov47/v2

Thank you @jcoker10.bsky.social and Michael Lim!

Mankind can't even escape from terrible work-mandated microsoft products in space

Great tribute to Robin from the Microbiology Society.

We are delighted to share that our NIHR-funded project in Kenya has been featured as a flagship impact case study by The University of Manchester. This partnership exemplifies how international cooperation can bridge the gap between laboratory research and life-saving clinical care.

NIH Fellowship awards for FY2025 by race The NIH Data Book page reporting Research Project Grants (RPG) and Fellowship awards by race has been updated for FY2025. Completely unsurprisingly, despite the impression that may have been convey…

NIH Fellowship awards for FY2025 by race drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/03/19/n...

This guy? Whose website seems to still be offering medical services for $$$ makiscancerconsult.com/faq?

Imagine being a student in his lab now, knowing that he thinks your value isn't emerging fast enough for his taste, and that he'd likely prefer a chatbot instead

Amplifying African voices to lead science for better health Despite making up 19% of the world's population, Africa contributes only 1–2% to global knowledge production across multiple fields of research. The terminology of Majority vs Minority World countries...

"Yes, Africa has challenges; we have multiple and complex disease burdens, and we have systemic resource and infrastructure issues. But we also have lessons and innovations to share with the rest of the world."

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

That column on the far right is the death of American biomedical science.

🚀 Registration is now OPEN for AIRR Community Meeting VIII: Decoding and Recoding Immunity! Join us June 8–11, 2026 at Yale University (USA) or attend virtually. 💸 Early-bird rates available until April 15! 🔗 Register: tinyurl.com/airrcmeeting8

#AIRRC8 #immunosky

You ever look at the human TCR gamma chain locus and ask why the constant region's so silly? It's doing stuff! www.science.org/doi/full/10....

(Very gratified to see this, having once spent an afternoon making my tool stitchr make sure it can handle the different TRGC isoforms, now feels justified)

This won’t come as a surprise to the TCR-antigen gurus, but I did want to share some lessons we learned re: partial TCR sequence alignments as predictions for antigen specificity from this study 1/

As mentioned in another thread, four UKRI leaders spoke to journalists this morning about changes to research council funding

They addressed stories broken by RPN that STFC has to find £162m of costs savings by 2029-30, and that major physics infrastructure projects have been shelved

...

Update from MRC re funding

My brain tried to read this like a Lou Bega song

image of the OpenFlexure Microscope on the left. On the right, our adapted live-cell imaging openflexure microscope with cradle to negate vibrations inside an existing incubator

Unleashing live-cell imaging for the masses!
Adapting the OpenFlexure Microscope for Affordable Live-Cell Imaging www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Fits into existing incubators for time-lapse experiments & feeds into existing bioimaging analysis pipelines.
Thanks @wellcometrust.bsky.social funding

Antibody escape drives emergence of diverse spike haplotypes resembling variants of concern in persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections Snell et al. develop sequencing methodology to identify full-length spike haplotypes and show that persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections drive divergent haplotype emergence, accelerating viral evolution an...

This is finally out.

Very short take home. All the variation in spike that produced the immune escape characteristics of Omicron can occur in one single persistently infected individual over the period of a year.

This is why persistent infections matter

www.cell.com/cell-reports...

I have a 3-year postdoc position available at University of Manchester for a mass spec expert in proteomics. The person will be involved in exciting projects in single cell proteomics, drug discovery and innate immunity - on timsTOF Ultra AIP & HF & Astral Zoom.

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQJ093/r...

There is a cost to science denial.

This should be a source of great national shame, and a spur to action.

I sadly suspect it will be neither.

Delighted that our latest paper is out at @mucosalimmunol.bsky.social. Here, using bronchoscopies and scRNA- and TCR-seq, we found that T cells isolated from bronchoalveolar lavage versus the airway mucosal are surprisingly distinct. Summary of the original preprint below. #Immunology #PCCM

Assuming this is the right one: www.boom-power.co.uk/content/uplo... ...

... looks like these panels have their axis ~2m off the ground, so the tops of the panels will be that height at sunset/sunrise, when they're at maximum tilt.

Me before: "this is fun but silly"

Me after: "I think there's something to this you know"

Is that one sheet stuck to the shaker, with matching cutouts stuck to the bottom of the clamps? Looks like a decent bit of force applied - can you go faster, or do they start to move around? (Wondering what stuff I can start to magnet together)

Death rates rise when NHS cuts back on nursing Using lower-paid workers to plug the gaps left by a failure to hire registered nurses damages safety, new research has shown

🚨 EXCLUSIVE: English hospitals that cut registered nurses saw more deaths while those hiring nurses saw more patients survive. Even when hospitals tried to fill gaps with non-nurses, deaths still went up. Major new study exposes dangerous NHS variation:
www.thetimes.com/article/7eed...

A copilot button has appeared in all of my work Office programs, without need, want, or license, and without any way to get of it. Not only does IT not have a clue why it's there, no Microsoft resource can explain how to remove it.

At least Clippy had the decency to get lost when you told him to.