Roland Pease

Rail tracks and rising sun in Basel

Early start in Basel for #AMRconference2026 - many of the big players here, they tell me.

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets The US Congress rejected sweeping cuts to science agencies. But the NIH, the NSF and NASA have had their spending slowed.

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers.

The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

Who's Next?

Of course, Tom Lehrer perfectly captured the insane, unrestricted nuclear arms race of the time with Who's Next.
("We'll try to stay serene and calm,
When Alabama gets the bomb.")
open.spotify.com/track/4Ry4xZ...

🚨 It looks like the UK government is gearing up to upend copyright law in favour of AI companies, legalising the theft of their work.

This is despite creatives' huge protests, and despite previous proposals being roundly rejected by the public.

Please spread the word.

🧵 1/4

(I vacillated between almost 60 and over 50 and came a cropper.)

Your reminder that over 60 years ago, in the NPT, the nuclear powers committed to the "cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament".

If France etc need deterrence, why not everyone?

The view out my office window cleanses the soul. And I keep a 📸 handy.

Private jet prices soar as wealthy scramble to leave Dubai People drive to Oman and Saudi in hope of a flight, while most tourists stay stuck in hotels and on cruise ships

Small jets good, small boats bad.
Now you know.

www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

This particular apple is proving v popular with the local bird life.

Full sunlit glory now.

Impressed by the root system developed by this elder twig in just a year, stuck in the soil to mark a seedling.

More springtime activity

I confess, right now the title "Scientific American" reads like an oxymoron. And it's not the publisher's fault.

Forelorn attempt to see Mercury, Saturn & Venus by the setting Sun, Weds.

But be prepared for disappointment unless you have a very flat horizon - Venus eager to disappear below it while Saturn and Mercury still lost in the twilight.

A new (to me) infections-tracking account to follow.

The crisis on the Colorado River — six things to know States are preparing for, while trying to avoid, cutbacks to the water they get from the Colorado River. Here are some key things to know about this moment.

This week's @latimes.com Boiling Point newsletter features must-read climate and environment coverage by @hayleysmith.bsky.social @cvonka.bsky.social @landdesk.bsky.social @ra-becks.bsky.social @brandonloomis.bsky.social & more: www.latimes.com/environment/...

Blue plaque for Chain, Florey & Heatley

Just been to the labs at the Dunn School of Pathology where Chain, Florey and Heatley first grew and isolated penicillin in 1940, heralding the age of antibiotics. The first 'blockbuster' pharmaceutical perhaps. For upcoming series on the sparse antibiotic pipeline and relentless rise of resistance.

It drives me crazy that most people think that COVID-19 vaccines don't reduce transmission. They don't bring Reff <1, but the difference between spreading an infection to 2 people vs 1 person is huge at the scale of the population.

H5N1 continues to circulate with depressing consequences.

Sounds like I should know more of the back story.

"Most of the published government-agency and intelligence reports [...] deliver different conclusions, seemingly on the basis of political rather than scientific arguments."

Indeed. The answers are to be found in the peer-reviewed scientific literature with credible experts doing the work.

The analogy with cold chain is epistemically useful because it's not taken seriously in our society, but is unfalsifiable in the same way as lab emergence.

Except worse, because we do *have* a lot of lab data, SAGO just doesn't really have any political incentive to emphasize it.

COVID’s origins: what we do and don’t know Researchers summarize key insights from the world’s first comprehensive investigation into how a pandemic started.

Short and to the point. An independent team of virologists and experts, most of the SAGO group assembled after the WHO disbanded the original inquiry, finds no reason to favor any hypothesis above zoonosis for the pandemic. Buries the DEFUSE distraction in a few paras.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Signs of spring

This is such a mess.

In 2025, GISAID cut off access to many critical SARS-CoV-2 resources, incl. our outbreak.info.

A month ago, GISAID leveled accusations against us, Cov-Spectrum, Nextstrain, and members of COG-UK, which are false and misrepresent known facts.

Our joint response:

blog.outbreak.info/joint-respon...

"The image shows a shell of thick gas and dust (red) expelled from the outer layers of a star as its core collapsed into a black hole. The inner regions show a heated ball of gas (white) continuing to fall into the central black hole."

🧵1/8
A recent Science paper claims a massive star in Andromeda basically vanished without first exploding in a supernova.

According to the authors, the star’s core collapsed directly into a stellar-mass black hole.

➡️ news.columbia.edu/news/scienti...

🔭🧪⚛️ #astronomy #science #cosmology #universe

New update on the appalling proposed Danish Guinea Bissau child vaccine trial.
bsky.app/profile/gavi...