Alex Crits-Christoph

The github quote you show above is rather remarkably deceptive. Note how it claims to confirm Istvan's story, but then leaves out directly mentioning whether the *sequencing* date was confirmed, which is of course all that actually matters. A subtely that fooled folks for 3 years

another day, another L for the WSJ

The Microflora Danica atlas of Danish environmental microbiomes - Nature Microflora Danica—an atlas of Danish environmental microbiomes—reveals that although human-disturbed habitats have high alpha diversity, species reoccur, revealing hidden homogeneity.

Microflora Danica: What can you learn from collecting and sequencing 10,000+ samples from a single country? Check out our new paper in @nature.com to find out. Incredible work led by Caitlin Singleton, Thomas B. N. Jensen, and Mads Albertsen from @aau.dk. 🦠🧫🧬
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We had all of the scientific arguments why this data didn't seem to fit right, and wasn't important for origins, but we never really considered the simpler solution that a well regarded white male scientist or two were just making something up!

The thing was, and this really is the thing: none of us - not me - ever actually really thought to question the person(s) who made it up. The entire western world took their word for it!

Worth reflecting on how cultural and social narratives influence who we lend our trust to.

It's just crazy how this entire viral story was because someone made up a sequencing date that wasn't true.

And the thing is, they may have almost got away with it!

When something is a (partially) unsolved mystery for years, you risk losing the chance to ever solve it....

The Antarctica sequences The “Antarctica sequences” episode shows once again how a wrong date can turn a mundane event into supposed evidence of a cover-up.  The story of the Antarctica sequences is one of those narratives in...

If you want more details, I wrote up the story as a blog post here ⬇️
(I am trying out a new format to preserve some of the work behind my threads) ▫️9/9

A few weeks ago, I contacted the sequencing company (Sangon Biotech) and scientists who had generated and published the Antarctica sequences.

Both told me, independently, that the samples had been received by the company in June 2020. ▫️5/9

Dynamic protrusions mediate unique crawling motility in Asgard Archaea (Promethearchaeota) Crawling motility is a hallmark of eukaryotic cells and requires a dynamic actin cytoskeleton, regulated adhesion, and spatially organized signalling pathways1–3. Asgard archaea (phylum Promethearchae...

A collaborative project that began with the Osaka Expo has just been released as a preprint!
Here, we show Promethearchaeota (Asgard archaea) “moving” under anaerobic conditions.
The videos capturing this unique behavior are so fascinating you can watch endlessly.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

wow... crawling motility in Asgard #archaea!! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

look at these crazy moves!! Let's face it, what these cells want for Christmas is #cilia... the best type of motility appendage...

CryoET of microbes inside an animal organ? Yes it’s possible! Check out our new preprint showing how we did it! What an amazing collaboration with amazing scientists who made this possible!

BMJ’s Coverage of Kennedy’s Vaccine Reforms Amounts to Character Assassination by Peter C. Gøtzsche Abstract: The reactions to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s initiatives to improve vaccine safety have been almost uniformly negative. I studied how the narratives were framed in a cohort of 33 articles in the BMJ of which 30 were written by journalists or the editor. I focused on whether the reporting was balanced and informative, and whether the articles saw any merit in Kennedy's reforms in his role as Secretary of Health and Human Services or supported the status quo. The reporting in the BMJ was highly biased. Much of the information provided in Kennedy's disfavour was misleading, and some was wrong. All initiatives at improving vaccine safety were condemned, without any analysis of their merits in an evidence-based fashion. Instead, the BMJ cited people who had their own agendas and who condemned Kennedy without providing any evidence in their favour while expressing faith in vaccines, with the industry mantra that they are safe and effective, although all drugs will harm some people. The BMJ did not take any interest in the widespread and lethal corruption in US healthcare institutions - one of Kennedy's focus points - but toned it down. Despite the constant ad hominem attacks, Kennedy has succeeded to introduce important changes and plans related to vaccine safety, guidance about how vaccines are used, and about avoiding neurotoxic metals in vaccine adjuvants.

The grievance blog masquerading as a "journal" founded by Trump HHS appointees (The "Journal" of the "Academy" of Public Health) is now publishing lengthy screeds about how HHS secretary RFK Jr is being treated unfairly by the BMJ and calling it a literature synthesis...

Longer term this technology must be open, decentralized, and decorporatized. I think driverless cars as a public good ot driverless car independent co-ops are good future models, and possible as the tech gets cheaper and universal.

But the tech itself is good even if it is currently corporate!

Opinion | The Data on Self-Driving Cars Is Clear. We Have to Change Course.

"There were car gods there: a powerful, serious-faced contingent, with blood on their black gloves and on their chrome teeth: recipients of human sacrifice on a scale undreamed-of since the Aztecs."

Ending road deaths will be one of the greatest public health wins.

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/o...

The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine (Gift Article) A quiet policy change means the government is making fewer bets on long-term science.

While the administration has said it is cutting “woke programs” that “poison the minds of Americans", it actually funded fewer grants in every area of science and medicine.

“They brought everything to a stop,” said Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the N.I.H.’s National Cancer Institute

Thanks nature news for featuring our recent preprint on 𝘐𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘦𝘣𝘢 led by @hbrappap.bsky.social

(check out preprint here: doi.org/10.1101/2025...) #protistsonsky

How does a caterpillar completely dissolve inside its chrysalis, before reconstructing itself in the shape of a butterfly?
“Metamorphosis is wild,” marvels historian Oren Harman in his beautiful new book, which I reviewed for this week's @nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

pLAST - a tool for rapid comparison and classification of bacterial plasmid sequences https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.27.689987v1

The worst nightmare I have is not simply that it happens, but that everyone sees it happen, and the question is not simply whether it is unfair (we all agree), but whether I handled it right: should I have said less? Chosen words more carefully? Been more paranoid about who I was speaking to?

and "but democracy is wrong sometimes" actually isn't a good argument at all, because individuals are wrong a lot more of the time

Totally disagree! Science is and should be democratic. What data we collect and use, how we analyze that data, what we infer from it, and what studies are deemed methodologically sound are in fact opinions.

The only way to consistently get at that accurately is consensus opinions of experts.

Here's the most important piece of data (as far as I am concerned). Comparing Earth Microbiome to the new ones (V4EXT) for major phyla. V4EXT by @ppjevac.bsky.social et al cover more diversity than current gold standard😱 Lot's of work, the entire field will benefit! My lab's gonna try V4EXT soon!

Scientists: don’t feed the doubt machine From climate to COVID, naivety about how science is hijacked promotes more of the same.

And as a blast from that terrible past, the motivations are sadly often backed by interests that reward this behavior with power and money. I still think we have not done enough to train scientists to counter the doubt machine... www.nature.com/articles/d41...

So for those who are skeptical of the use of e.g. JIF as a quality metric, the challenge will be to work towards *alternative and competitive* metrics that quickly convey a less biased and more accurate correlate of article quality. Without that, AI will force folks to rely on the metrics that exist

Ahh!

(1) yes in my opinion literate+initially-convincing writing was "rate-limiting" for a lot of bad science

(2) I think high JIF journals will successfully (relatively) filter AI-slop, while preprint servers and low-JIF journals will be less successful - that's been the trend so far.

Hmm must admit, I can't say I follow your point(s) here!

Our point here is that with more noise out there, people will default to reading and trusting papers in high JIF journals and from labs and institutions they know, unless we build new systems of communicating the quality of research

Just pointing out how grim the funding situation is. If an institution fights you have no idea where future grants are coming from. Harvard won in court and is still telling researchers to cut everything 20% because they don’t know what happens next. Somehow everybody has to make it to Jan 2029

So apparently the administrators at Northwestern have caved to the extortionist demands of the Feds. Faculty voted 595-4 AGAINST this measure.

So the issue is that AI has made it easier for people to create works that appear convicing but aren't. This means that there's more noise, and it takes longer to dissect. So people will have to lean on traditional signals: who they know, author institutions,l, and journal name- now more than ever.

New preprint: 🚀🧬 Starship in the genome of the lichen fungus Xanthoria. Discovery of giant transposons Starships challenged what we thought we knew about fungal genomes. But what about Starships in #lichen fungi? Let us present Tangerine! 🖥️ 🧪 🦠 🧫 #SymbioSky doi.org/10.1101/2025...