More zoo creatures. We’ve detected 3 different penguin species across our 12 sampling sites.

The first site was Boise, where we detected a banded penguin (matches Humboldt, African, or Magellanic).
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GitHub - FlowmapBlue/flowmapblue.R: Flowmap.blue widget for R Flowmap.blue widget for R. Contribute to FlowmapBlue/flowmapblue.R development by creating an account on GitHub.

There is an R Widget working in similar ways github.com/FlowmapBlue/...

What are the diverse funding providers saying about this? E.g., @astar-gis.bsky.social @rockefellerfdn.bsky.social to name just a few recent ones.

Made a site comparing the sizes of living things :)

The great Julius Csotonyi spent 5 months painting over 60 illustrations for the site, no ai used

> neal.fun/size-of-life/

How do large language models interpret words relating to probability like “unlikely,” “probably,” or “almost certain"?

The below shows what happens when we compare judgements from different models to a benchmark dataset of human judgments (data from: github.com/zonination/p...).

Polio virus found in the wastewater in Hamburg, Germany. This is wild type - much more likely to cause paralysis than the outbreak in New York State in 2022. (Estimated paralysis for 1 in 200 un-vaccinated infections.)
www.reuters.com/business/hea...

Alles geschriebene mag stimmen. Trotzdem, eventuel hilfreicher fuer ihren Sohn: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googolp...
Meinen Kindern hat dieses Wort ganz neue Argumentationsmoeglichkeiten eroeffnet.

West Nile Virus surveillance and current situation in Austria: Seminar by Georg G. Duscher and Barbara Seebacher (AGES) – LBI for Science Outreach and Pandemic Preparedness at the Medical University o... LBI for Science Outreach and Pandemic Preparedness at the Medical University of Vienna

OneHealth Seminar LBI-SOA mit AGES-ExpertInnen zu Stechmücken und West Nil Viren 👉 soap.lbg.ac.at/events/west-...

West Nil Fieber Fälle in Österreich beim Menschen sind zuletzt deutlich angestiegen 📈all-time-high 2024 -unsere Studie dazu erscheint demnächst in #Eurosurveillance!! #OneHealth

Whole-genome sequence of 19 Listeria monocytogenes, isolated from municipal wastewater in State College, Pennsylvania | Microbiology Resource Announcements Wastewater-based surveillance (WBS) is a powerful tool for public health monitoring, offering a more comprehensive view of pathogen prevalence than traditional methods (1–6). Listeria monocytogenes, a major foodborne pathogen, infects ~1,600 Americans annually, leading to 260 deaths (7).

New from OHMC faculty Edward Dudley & @kovaclab.bsky.social & colleagues:

Whole-genome sequencing of 19 Listeria from State College wastewater.

3 isolates closely matched human cases, highlighting wastewater surveillance as a tool for tracking outbreaks.

🔗 journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

The 16th Ebola Virus Disease Outbreak in Bulape Health Zone, Kasai, Democratic Republic of the Congo: A new spillover event from an unknown reservoir host Background The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is currently facing concurrent outbreaks including mpox, cholera and malaria (1-4). The Ministry of Public Health, DRC has declared the 16th Ebola...

In under 24h following the newly identified outbreak of #Ebola in the DRC, the virus has been isolated, sequenced and the virus sequence data made publicly available.
virological.org/t/the-16th-e...

I am looking forward to the online seminar by @peterdaszak.bsky.social on #OneHealth and #pandemic prevention organised by @lbg.ac.at aiming for a broad general audience

soap.lbg.ac.at/wp-content/u...

A genome-wide map of hyper-edited RNA reveals numerous new sites - Nature Communications Common methods to detect adenosine-to-inosine RNA editing sites rely on mapping short RNA reads to the genome while allowing only a limited number of mismatches. Here, Porath et al. present a novel RN...

At least hyper edited sites are a thing doi.org/10.1038/ncom...
Could be worth checking if RNA secondary structures support the hypothesis. ADAR typically act on A in bulges.

Augmentation of wastewater-based epidemiology with machine learning to support global health surveillance - Nature Water Wastewater-based epidemiology has already proven to be a powerful tool to monitor the spread of a number of diseases. This Perspective discusses the integration with machine learning, highlighting its...

Out now: our perspective on using machine learning in wastewater-based epidemiology @natwater.nature.com.

We review the current state of the field and discuss next steps such as method development and evaluation, benchmarks, integration frameworks etc.

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Update zu den COVID-Abwasserwerten

Ticks carry decades of history in each troublesome bite Changes to forests, and how close people and their livestock live to them, have changed tick habitats and the risks humans face of Lyme disease and other illnesses.

A fascinating story.

theconversation.com/ticks-carry-...

Unifying human infectious disease models and real-time awareness of population- and subpopulation-level intervention effectiveness | Royal Society Open Science During infectious disease outbreaks, humans often base their decision to adhere to an intervention strategy on individual choices and opinions. However, due to data limitations and inference challenge...

1/ 📄 “Unifying human infectious disease models & real-time awareness of population- & subpopulation-level intervention effectiveness”

📣 Research article now published in Royal Society Open Science. #EpiSky #IDsky #PublicHealth 🧪

✍️ Authors: Rachel Seibel | Michael Tildesley | @edmhill.bsky.social

🖤 #graz1006

Some difficult news from the team: In NSF's FY25-26 Budget Request to Congress, we learned that our program will take a whopping 50% cut - meaning that in September, we'll be $1.25m short of an operating budget that currently supports a cohort of seven PhD students, four postdocs, and three full-time staff. Verena is one of the largest and last pandemic prevention-focused programs in the United States: since 2020, we've supported the training of over 60 postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates. Our researchers have established unique laboratory resources for studying animal immune systems, and discovered new antiviral immune adaptations in bats; developed risk assessment algorithms for wildlife and livestock viruses, and diagnostic algorithms for viruses like dengue, Ebola, and Zika; and quantified the effects of climate change, deforestation, and factory farming on spillover risk. Everything we develop is 100% open source, and our data has supported the research of nearly 150 external researchers in 21 countries to date. We have three months to make up our budget shortfall. Every dollar spent on Verena supports not just our team, but the community of researchers who use our data, code, and resources. You can help us by sharing this post, and reaching out if you're able to support a unique and vulnerable program. Or just head over to viralemergence.org, and take a look at what we do. 🦟 🦇 🦠

An update from the team on the uncertain future of our program and the impact of NSF budget cuts. Please share and reach out 🦠

In this evaluation of AlphaFold3 (and other methods), we show that (i) accurate predictions are limited to RNA structures/complexes with structural similarity to PDB and (ii) that current methods are bad at estimating the accuracy of the predictions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Comparative wastewater virome analysis with different enrichment methods https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.25.645222v1

Zoonotic potential it should read. Please share if you know suitable candidates. If you are interested yourself, feel free to DM me.

RNA xkcd.com/3056

Wir sind Grippeimpfung

That sounds exciting. may I ask what are the anticipated criteria to select the patients which are subjected to metagenome sequencing?

SARS-CoV-2 evolution on a dynamic immune landscape - Nature A modelling approach predicts SARS-CoV-2 variant dynamics on the basis of immunity and cross-neutralization, which was shaped by a region’s SARS-CoV-2 infection history.

📖 Neue @nature.com Publikation: Wie schnell verbreiten sich #SARSCoV2 -Varianten?

Ein vom #RKI und Berliner Forschenden entwickeltes Modell zeigt, wie viele Menschen in bestimmten Regionen über einen gewissen Zeitraum empfänglich für verschiedene Virusvarianten sind.

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

Identification and characterization of novel bat coronaviruses in Spain The zoonotic transmission of bat coronaviruses poses a threat to human health. However, the diversity of bat-borne coronaviruses remains poorly characterized in many geographical areas. Here, we recov...

🚨 New preprint alert 🚨

We searched for the presence of coronaviruses in >200 bat individuals across Spain 🦠🦇. We recovered 6 complete coronavirus genomes, including 3 novel species. One of them could use bat and human ACE2 for entry.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Front cover of Philip N. Cohen's Citizen Scholar: Public Engagement for Social Scientists.

A few months ago I read @philipncohen.com's Citizen Scholar in proof. It's now available in print.

To restore public trust in expertise, professors can’t just profess—they need to engage. Citizen Scholar explores how contemporary academics can do this, and why they might choose to.

The decline is impressive and it's cause seems obvious. Are there any theories what caused the increase from the 1940ies to 50ies?

Interested in the lineages driving this? Well, it’s 50 shades of black…
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