'Enough is enough' - New Zealand First wants to ban private fireworks

📢 "The abuse and misuse of fireworks has far outgrown any of the benefits," claims Winston Peters.

Overinterpreting underpowered multi-omics experiments Betaine, Exercise-in-a-pill, Geroprotection

Overinterpreting underpowered multi-omics experiments: Betaine, Exercise-in-a-pill, Geroprotection thecodon.substack.com/p/falling-in...

Sex, drugs and the conscious brain: Francis Crick beyond the double helix A thoroughly researched account of the history and relationships that shaped the scientist who co-discovered the structure of DNA.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Really interesting insight.

Wait- that's all stuff from Pekar 2022, the paper with enormous math errors that you just said was irrelevant. When those errors are fixed, its 2-spill probability becomes low, which undercuts its whole story. Tho P(other zoo stories) is unaffected by market-story errors.

By that token anything by anyone who cites anything by any of the 29 authors of Pekar et al. 2022 would have to be presumed false. Let's stick to the specific points. Here the only relevant one is whether leaving RE sites in eases making a series of partial new clones.

Importance of quantifying the number of viral reads in metagenomic sequencing of environmental samples from the Huanan Seafood Market Abstract. In March 2023, the Chinese CDC publicly released raw metagenomic sequencing data for environmental samples collected in early 2020 from the Huana

It was, in fact, a very good job by Brookings.
See michaelweissman.substack.com/p/an-inconve... for a (long) systematic summary of the evidence. For bite-size published refutations of the key zoonotic claims:
doi.org/10.1093/jrss...
doi.org/10.1093/jrss...
academic.oup.com/ve/article/1...

Dinosaurs were thriving until asteroid struck, research suggests Dating of rock formation in New Mexico casts doubt on theory that species was already in decline Dinosaurs would not have become extinct had it not been for a catastrophic asteroid strike, researchers have said, challenging the idea the animals were already in decline. About 66m years ago, during the late Cretaceous period, a huge space rock crashed into Earth, triggering a mass extinction that wiped out all dinosaurs except birds. However, some experts have argued the dinosaurs were already in decline. Continue reading...

Dinosaurs were thriving until asteroid struck, research suggests

Week in wildlife: a ferocious wildcat, a cheeky seal and a disgruntled lioness The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

Week in wildlife: a ferocious wildcat, a cheeky seal and a disgruntled lioness

It's icky although the implications are hardly any worse than those for AI (mass unemployment, potential extinction).

Bloom again on evidence of bias in the early sequences and why the root of the SARS-CoV-2 tree cannot be conclusively resolved with the current data.
academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Bayesian Re-Analysis of the Phylogenetic Topology of Early SARS-CoV-2 Case Sequences A much-cited 2022 paper by Pekar et al. claimed that Bayesian analysis of the molecular phylogeny of early SARS-CoV-2 cases indicated that it was more likely that two successful introductions to human...

Who is conflicted in this scenario? There are obviously significant limitations with early case data which George Gao acknowledged was biased towards the market. The multiple spillover theory rests on a flawed analysis at odds with the analyses of Bloom, Kumar and Lv et al.
arxiv.org/abs/2510.01484

Very interesting. “one of the greatest lessons of the last five years is that public health needs to step up its game in dealing with uncertainty.”

The Data are Insufficient to Confidently Root the SARS-CoV-2 Phylogenetic Tree Abstract. Several years ago, I published a paper that described the discrepancy between outgroup and date-based methods for rooting the SARS-CoV-2 phylogen

Ultimately the early case data is highly biased and the root of the SARS-CoV-2 tree cannot be conclusively resolved with the current data. academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Darwin's People: How Naturalists Explain Our Behavior Darwin's People: How Naturalists Explain Our Behavior - Kindle edition by Moon, Brian. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Darwin's People: How Naturalists Explain Our Behavior.

Sample read now available at Amazon.

Kindle version shares Front matter, Introduction, and Part of chapter 1.

www.amazon.com/Darwins-Peop...

Bloom again on evidence of bias in the early sequences and why the root of the SARS-CoV-2 tree cannot be conclusively resolved with the current data.
academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Bayesian Re-Analysis of the Phylogenetic Topology of Early SARS-CoV-2 Case Sequences A much-cited 2022 paper by Pekar et al. claimed that Bayesian analysis of the molecular phylogeny of early SARS-CoV-2 cases indicated that it was more likely that two successful introductions to human...

Who is conflicted in this scenario? There are obviously significant limitations with early case data which George Gao acknowledged was biased towards the market. The multiple spillover theory rests on a flawed analysis at odds with the analyses of Bloom, Kumar and Lv et al.
arxiv.org/abs/2510.01484

Bayesian Re-Analysis of the Phylogenetic Topology of Early SARS-CoV-2 Case Sequences A much-cited 2022 paper by Pekar et al. claimed that Bayesian analysis of the molecular phylogeny of early SARS-CoV-2 cases indicated that it was more likely that two successful introductions to human...

A number of those who have argued it is resolved seem unaware of the limitations of the early case data and apparent flaws in much cited papers like Pekar et al. @mbweissman.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2510.01484

The Covid ‘lab leak’ theory isn’t just a rightwing conspiracy – pretending that’s the case is bad for science | Jane Qiu While figures like Steve Bannon have exploited the issue, scientists have done themselves no favours by shutting down legitimate inquiry, says award-winning science writer Jane Qiu

Jane Qui wrote recently about how a lack of transparency and overconfident conclusions in relation to the origin of COVID-19 has undermined trust in science.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The origins of Covid and public health’s uncertainty problem “One of the greatest lessons of the last five years is that public health needs to step up its game in dealing with uncertainty.”

What I will be teaching about this afternoon @hsph.harvard.edu
www.statnews.com/2025/10/21/p...

Michael B. Weissman: Bayesian Re-Analysis of the Phylogenetic Topology of Early SARS-CoV-2 Case Sequences https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01484 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01484 https://arxiv.org/html/2510.01484

Bayesian Re-Analysis of the Phylogenetic Topology of Early SARS-CoV-2 Case Sequences A much-cited 2022 paper by Pekar et al. claimed that Bayesian analysis of the molecular phylogeny of early SARS-CoV-2 cases indicated that it was more likely that two successful introductions to human...

The corrections to the Pekar 2022 Science paper claiming multiple SARS-CoV-2 introductions are factorizable and simple, using data contained in the paper and minimal assumptions. Their data and model imply that a single introduction was more likely.
arxiv.org/abs/2510.01484

Bayesian Re-Analysis of the Phylogenetic Topology of Early SARS-CoV-2 Case Sequences A much-cited 2022 paper by Pekar et al. claimed that Bayesian analysis of the molecular phylogeny of early SARS-CoV-2 cases indicated that it was more likely that two successful introductions to human...

"Here I show that after correcting a fundamental error in Bayesian reasoning [by Pekar et al] the results in that paper give larger likelihood for a single introduction than for two."
arxiv.org/abs/2510.01484

NIH committee green-lighted Wuhan coronavirus experiments despite concerns, emails show Public records for the first time show the NIH "gain-of-function" review committee's informal vetting of a controversial project in Wuhan.

NIH committee green-lighted Wuhan coronavirus experiments despite concerns, emails show
Via @lewiskamb.bsky.social @usrighttoknow.bsky.social
usrtk.org/covid-19-ori...

I'm at #datajconf in Athens this week and one very cool thing we've done is take a tour of the library of Journalists' Union of Athens Daily Newspapers, where they've kept a history of Greek news outlets. This is one of the oldest prints they have of, I believe, a paper called Neos Aristophanes.

Explanation of and Comments on McCowan's Re-analysis of Covid Spillover trying to make it more accessible to those who wish to understand. As for the others....

NIH terminated WIV's subaward for refusal to share electronic files and notebooks. Relman and co's complaint. Current evidence shows biased data. No intermediate host. Double spillover theory flawed per McCowan's preprint. See @mbweissman.bsky.social
michaelweissman.substack.com/p/explanatio...

David Baltimore, Nobel-Winning Molecular Biologist, Dies at 87

Co-discoverer of reverse transcriptase at 32, Nobel Prize at 37, played a key role at the 1975 Asilomar comference.

What you just wrote is untrue, in many dimensions. Anyone who thinks the origins debate is settled in favor of zoonosis on the basis of current evidence is not attending to the evidence.

Discussed by @mbweissman.bsky.social who has also provided a robust Bayesian analysis of the evidence.
bsky.app/profile/mbwe...

Purported quantitative support for multiple introductions of SARS-CoV-2 into humans is an artefact of an imbalanced hypothesis testing framework A prominent report claimed substantial support for two introductions of SARS-CoV-2 into humans using a calculation that combined phylodynamic inferences and epidemic models. Inspection of the calculat...

The author who identified a coding error in Pekar et al (2022) has found a major statistical inference error too. Pekar et al appear to have applied stricter conditions for single spillover than for double spillover. Once corrected the Bayes factor favors single spillover.
arxiv.org/abs/2502.20076

The Data are Insufficient to Confidently Root the SARS-CoV-2 Phylogenetic Tree Abstract. Several years ago, I published a paper that described the discrepancy between outgroup and date-based methods for rooting the SARS-CoV-2 phylogen

Indeed. One argument for Huanan Seafood Market origin is a phylogenetic analysis suggesting dual lineages (A/B) spilled there. However, Jesse Bloom shows the tree can't be rooted reliably due to biased and incomplete data.
academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...