Kane Foster

Our sister died because of our mum's cancer conspiracy theories, say brothers Paloma Shemirani’s brothers say she refused chemotherapy because of their mother’s beliefs.

Horrific story of a young woman dying of cancer complications after refusing cancer care under the guidance of her influencer mother who charges £70/y for an annual membership to her site & £195 for a consultation & personalised 12-week programme. Thanks to @profstevegriffin.bsky.social for sharing

In 2015, researchers Limb, Limb, Limb and Limb found that British doctors have surnames related to their specialties more often than expected by chance. Reproductive medicine had the largest proportion, with 1 in 52 doctors having specialty-relevant surnames including Horn, Hussey, and Woodcock. Second was Urology, with 1 in 59 related names such as Burns, Waterfall, Ball, and Koch.[96] "Dr Pain" appeared most commonly in general surgery.[96]

Specialty Surname frequency Surname examples Cardiology 8 (1 in 213) Hart, Pump, Payne Dermatology 4 (1 in 243) Boyle or Hickey General medicine 63 (1 in 101) Mysore, Safe, Warning General surgery 56 (1 in 91) Gore, Butcher, Boyle, Blunt Paediatric medicine 46 (1 in 119) Boys, Gal, Child, Kinder Plastic surgery 7 (1 in 140) Carver, Mole, Price

it's the 10 year anniversary of a very important study

Vibe Coding Is Coming for Engineering Jobs Engineering was once the most stable and lucrative job in tech. Then AI learned to code.

Vibe coding www.wired.com/story/vibe-c... #coding #programming #vibecoding

There is a false dichotomy drawn between "the ivory tower" and "the real world," and I'm here to report that in a post-industrial society, your real-world economy absolutely hinges on the university.

University towns are factory towns. Universities drive economic activity, not the other way around.

Patient-Specific In Vivo Gene Editing to Treat a Rare Genetic Disease | NEJM Base editors can correct disease-causing genetic variants. After a neonate had received a diagnosis of severe carbamoyl-phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency, a disease with an estimated 50% mortality ...

A lipid nanoparticle–delivered base-editing therapy was custom designed for an infant with a ureacycle disorder. The affected infant was treated at approximately 7 and 8 months of age. Read the Brief Report: nej.md/42XF03F

#ASGCT2025 #MedSky @asgct.bsky.social

A screenshot of the termination notice showing "Outstanding Investigator Grants"

A screenshot of the termination notice with "This award is terminated effective the date of this award, due to unsafe antisemitic actions that suggest the institution lacks concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students." highlighted

Yesterday, the NIH R35 “Outstanding Investigator” grant to fund scientists in my lab studying antibiotic resistance was terminated for reasons not related to the content of the science, or any actions taken by me or members of my lab

The Price of Remission When I was diagnosed with cancer, I set out to understand why a single pill of Revlimid cost the same as a new iPhone. I’ve covered high drug prices as a reporter for years. What I discovered shocked ...

A depressing article about drug pricing for cancer patients, specifically for multiple myeloma. The good news in this case is that generic competition should be coming next year. The bad news is there will be another case jaut like this. www.propublica.org/article/revl...

Figure 4 from "How persistent infection overcomes peripheral tolerance mechanisms to cause T cell-mediated autoimmune disease" by Arup Chakraborty

1/ A long standing paradox in my mind (from always seeing immune "strength" or reactivity drawn as a spectrum from immunodeficiency to autoimmunity) was resolved this year at #AAI #Immunology2025. WHY do SO many people have both simultaneously? Each infection brings risk of developing autoimmunity!!

Is the UK paying the price for world’s most expensive visas? | The Observer Competing political and economic goals on immigration are resulting in the loss of valuable skills and talent in the UK

“The visa fees are so exceedingly high that it makes coming here very difficult for some people. We are fishing for the best scientists in the world. They want to come and work here because we are such an effective country at science, but if we have these high costs, they can and will go elsewhere.”

Great collection from one of the best paper hounds out there!

Now this is the future La Guin and Wells imagined

This is a breakthrough in multi-modal single-cell technology

*pronouncing leo XIV like arXIV*

Wow, just implemented the new Cellpose-SAM from @computingnature.bsky.social in NimbusImage and it's *awesome*! Give it a try!
nimbusimage.com

NEW Preprint Watch from Annette Wu & @wenjiang-nano.bsky.social @preprintclub.bsky.social reporting on @biorxiv-immuno.bsky.social preprint by @colinraposo.bsky.social et al. showing that checkpoint blockade drives expansion of exhausted T cell clones that develop functional memory
rdcu.be/ek1kY

On a Nature news article reporting that NIH planned to suspend subawards for foreign collaborations: “No, that’s false. There’s going to be a policy on tracking subawards. The NIH and the government should be able to see where the money’s going.” “I’m really uncomfortable with this conversation, because you’re like, actually spreading rumors that you don’t know anything about. … Nature also is spreading rumors. Halt foreign collaborations, that’s not true.” “We’re working on the policy, Jocelyn. You shouldn’t be reporting rumors. I know there’s leaks all over here, but the leaks don’t actually reflect what’s happening. Don’t write about rumors. It actually makes the things that you and I care about worse. Like it spreads panic.” Later that day, NIH released a policy that halted future subawards to foreign scientists and said they will need to apply directly for money under a system still in development.

With NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya dismissing my reporting as "false" and "spreading rumors" hours before releasing a policy that confirmed said "rumors," I feel compelled to respond.

Here's an inside look into how this story was reported. It was a weird one. 🧵

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

UK wins £500m in science grants from EU Horizon scheme after Brexit lockout Exclusive: British scientists ‘over the moon’ with re-entry to funding scheme after losing out for three years

British scientists are “over the moon” to be back in the EU’s Horizon funding programme after a 3-year Brexit lockout.

New data reveals they have been awarded about £500m in grants since re-entry.

International isolationism never works well.

🧪🔬⚛️🔭

www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Hahaha

Regulatory T cell depletion promotes myeloid cell activation and glioblastoma response to anti-PD1 and tumor-targeting antibodies Glioblastoma is invariably lethal and responds poorly to immune checkpoint blockade. Here, we examined the impact of regulatory T (Treg) cell depletio…

Really happy to share this amazing story from my talented colleague Felipe Galvez-Cancino and many others. Really interesting work about the nature of anti-tumour immunity in the brain and how it can be modulated, in mice and humans!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Why biotech is booming in Barcelona World-class research institutes and university hospitals, a culture of groundbreaking science and a thriving investment ecosystem make Barcelona a rising star in the life sciences industry, as these t...

www.nature.com/articles/d42...

But their defense also hinges on the argument that the individual books themselves are, essentially, worthless—one expert witness for Meta describes that the influence of a single book in LLM pretraining “adjusted its performance by less than 0.06% on industry standard benchmarks, a meaningless change no different from noise.” Furthermore, Meta says, that while the company “has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in LLM development,” they see no market in paying authors to license their books because “for there to be a market, there must be something of value to exchange, but none of Plaintiffs works has economic value, individually, as training data.” (An argument essential to fair use, but that also sounds like a scaled up version of a scenario in which the New York Philharmonic board argues against paying individual members of the orchestra because the organization spent a lot of money on the upkeep of David Geffen Hall, and also, a solo bassoon cannot play every part in “The Rite of Spring.”)

Nasty work. www.vanityfair.com/news/story/m...

You call it an ifelse statement, I call it a lightweight, agentic decision module operating within a deterministic inference framework

Why ‘de-extinct’ dire wolves are a Trojan horse to hide humanity’s destruction of nature Extinction is, for the time being, forever – and a symptom of our global economic system.

'What’s the problem? Well, pretty much everything. These aren’t species returned from extinction.'

@oxfordgeography.bsky.social's Dr Richard Grenyer argues that extinction is, for the time being, a symptom of our global economic system ⬇️

Dear US researchers: break the outrage addiction. I survived the besieging of science. So can you As I watch US researchers respond to threats against science, I’m reminded of when scientists in Brazil navigated a similar storm.

"...remember: your work is an act of resistance. Every experiment, every line of code, every collaboration defies those who would silence science."

Dear US researchers: break the outrage addiction. I survived the besieging of science. So can you www.nature.com/articles/d41...

How Trump 2.0 is slashing NIH-backed research — in charts Nature analyses which fields of science and US states are being hit hardest by grant terminations.

Sobering analysis by @nature.com on the Trump administration's NIH cuts. ~ 800 research projects have been terminated with research on HIV/AIDS, health disparities, transgender health, vaccines and COVID-19 being hit hardest, with some labs forced to close entirely. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Spatial multi-omics reveals cell-type-specific nuclear compartments - Nature A genomic barcoding scheme called two-layer DNA seqFISH+ enables the simultaneous mapping of more than 100,000 loci and has been used to identify cell-type-specific subnuclear compartments in the mous...

Amazing 🚀 study w/ DNA seqFISH+, enabling mapping of 100,049 genomic loci, together with the nascent transcriptome for 17,856 genes, yielding unpredented insights into subnuclear structures in single cells www.nature.com/articles/s41...

George R. R. Martin on @biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social!

What if TCRs didn’t need to see peptides to bind MHC?
A newly identified human TCR docks sideways onto HLA-DQ2.5—like an antibody.
This could reshape how we think about antigen recognition 🧐🧐 @niclag.bsky.social @naturecomms.bsky.social

China is beating U.S. in biotech advances, report warns Beijing's ascendency in the sector could allow it to weaponize biotechnology against the U.S., the report warns.

China is beating U.S. in biotech advances, report warns
www.axios.com/2025/04/08/c...