HealthByte 035 This week: Oral contraceptives show no clear liver cancer risk, neurons fuel cancer spread by donating mitochondria, and sea slugs use stolen chloroplasts for photosynthesis and nutrition.

This week in HealthByte 035:

Oral contraceptives show no clear liver cancer risk, neurons fuel cancer spread by donating mitochondria, and sea slugs use stolen chloroplasts for photosynthesis and nutrition.

open.substack.com/pub/byteofhe...

Remember when MDPI used questionable practices to siphon traffic from big five publishers’ journals? Never thought I’d see the shoe on the other foot.

Did you remember to subscribe to A Byte of Health?

#Science #substack
@ucph.bsky.social

byteofhealth.substack.com/p/healthbyte...

Opinion | An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive.

Amazing essay on how technological change is forcing us into an evolutionary bottleneck: "a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs and peoples with extinction."

Highly recommend reading.

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/19/o...

The recency and geographical origins of the bat viruses ancestral to SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 Recombination-aware evolutionary analyses of the entire genomes of SARS-CoV-1-like and SARS-CoV-2-like viruses indicate that SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 descend from bat coronaviruses that circulated as...

📄 NEW | Genetic Study shows that Wildlife Trade sparked COVID-19 Virus Emergence in Humans

SARS-CoV-2 arrived in Wuhan too quickly for bat hosts to have carried it there.

cell.com/cell/fulltex...

gla.ac.uk/research/az/...

@davidlrobertson.bsky.social
@spyroslytras.bsky.social
@bljog.bsky.social

A Byte of Health | Mark Khurana | Substack A biweekly newsletter exploring the latest breakthroughs in science and medicine. Click to read A Byte of Health, a Substack publication. Launched a year ago.

A whole year of newsletter'ing!

One year ago, we launched A Byte of Health! Since then, our team has published 27 newsletters with over 3,400 reads 🥳

If you’re interested in concise summaries of the latest breakthroughs in health and medicine, check out the newsletter: byteofhealth.substack.com

Ph.D. and postdoc positions in Data Science for epidemic preparedness at the NERDS research group The NERDS (NEtwoRks, Data, and Society) team at the IT University of Copenhagen welcomes applications from aspiring PhD students and postdocs in the areas of Da

I am hiring PhD students and Postdocs to join me in beautiful Copenhagen. Together, we will develop data science methods to improve epidemic preparedness.

Copenhagen is amazing, salary is good, we have plenty of funding, and a great community.

Read more..: candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

HealthByte 027 This week: A Western diet during pregnancy is linked to ADHD and autism in children, engineered mitochondria may support organ repair, and annual HIV prophylaxis injections show promise.

This week in A Byte of Health 🔬

1. Western diets during pregnancy linked to ADHD & autism
2. Engineered therapeutic mitochondria may aid organ repair
3. Annual HIV prophylaxis injections show promise

🔗 Read the full HealthByte 027 newsletter here: open.substack.com/pub/byteofhe...
#Medsky

Opinion | Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True. A journey through the front lines of global poverty shows that when the world’s richest men slash aid for the world’s poorest children, the result is sickness, starvation and death.

Despite Elon Musk's claim that the foreign aid freeze hasn't killed anyone yet, Nick Kristof finds ample evidence to the contrary.

In South Sudan, HIV-positive mothers and children who lost access to lifesaving drugs have died. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Breast Cancer and Levonorgestrel-Releasing Intrauterine Systems To the Editor We are concerned that some of the methodological approaches in a recent study1 linking use of LNG-IUSs to increased risk of breast cancer may lead to spurious associations and limit the ...

We have raised concerns about the study methodology in a Danish study about hormonal IUDs and the risk of breast cancer in a Letter to the Editor in @jama.com jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

HealthByte 026 This week: Preserving immune function by slowing thymus aging, neurons in the hypothalamus that regulate social needs, and aspirin's potential role in preventing cancer metastasis.

This week in our (free!) research newsletter 📰💊
1. Preserving immune function by slowing thymus aging
2. Neurons in the hypothalamus that regulate social needs
3. Aspirin's potential role in preventing cancer metastasis

byteofhealth.substack.com/p/healthbyte...

HealthByte 025 This week: Vitamin D, omega-3, and exercise slow aging, reduced yellow fever vaccine doses show promise, and less frequent mammograms are as effective as annual screenings for breast cancer.

Need a quick overview of breakthroughs in medical research over the last couple of weeks?

We've got you covered in our HealthBytes newsletter!

Link to this week's edition: byteofhealth.substack.com/p/healthbyte...

New @nature.com
How #AI can play a pivotal role in future pandemic preparedness and mitigation, with caveats
nature.com/articles/s41...
a privilege to join this global collaborative effort led by Moritz Kraemer and Samir Bhatt

Artificial intelligence for modelling infectious disease epidemics Nature - This Perspective considers the application to infectious disease modelling of AI systems that combine machine learning, computational statistics, information retrieval and data science.

AI is poised to accelerate understanding in infectious diseases, but its value needs to be demonstrated through close collaboration between research, industry, society, and policy.

Paper free to read: rdcu.be/eaxEw

Summary here: www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-02...

Looking forward to digging into this. Co-authors include
@mghafari.bsky.social & @mugkraemer.bsky.social.
"Large-scale genomic surveillance reveals immunosuppression drives mutation dynamics in persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections"
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...