Rory Gibb

Figure 3 of our paper, which shows viral coinfection networks at the virus level

New preprint! 🥳🎉 We looked at viral coinfection patterns at the largest scale ever in wildlife. We found a strong association among CoVs, PMVs, and influenza A, and higher coinfection rates in wildlife trade; plus, evidence that bats accumulate persistent infections. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The attribution of human health outcomes to climate change: transdisciplinary practical guidance - Climatic Change For over 30 years, detection and attribution (D&A) studies have informed key conclusions in international and national assessments of climate science, providing compelling evidence for the reality and...

New workshop paper out today with 60 of our closest friends, providing guidance on how to design a study attributing health impacts to climate change. Hopefully this helps expand the field and start closing the representation gaps we discuss in our forthcoming work link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Biodiversity science and biosurveillance are fellow travelers The failure to meet the Aichi targets to alleviate global biodiversity decline (Nature 2020) was a wake-up call to the biodiversity monitoring community (T

🦠🌿🐦🧪 How can biodiversity monitoring help global efforts in disease surveillance?

With ✨ fantastic ✨ colleagues from @viralemergence.org and the @geobon.org working group on One Health, we try to identify three key lessons for the future.

🧵 A short thread!

academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

Please read and share, on the US budget cuts now imminently impacting Verena. bsky.app/profile/vira...

Jeremy Corbyn The Blindboy Podcast · Episode

New podcast. I chat with independent socialist politician Jeremy Corbyn about compassionate politics, the history of neoliberalism, kneecap, jenoside, and a United ireland. Dog Bless open.spotify.com/episode/3F7g...

I subscribe to the @newyorker.com, I was part of ACT UP, I knew Larry Kramer well and know Tony Fauci too. Daniel Immerwahr's piece on RFKJr, features this and other passages that need a reponse. 1/

that said, at some point we will have to reckon with the political consequences of putting this scale of wealth at the personal, unilateral discretion of individual human beings (generations ago would've been nice, but I'll settle for now)

The next meeting of London Infection & Ecology Network is tomorrow! 2pm at RVC in Camden with excellent speakers on mosquitoes, viral evolution, climate and more, plus optional pub afterwards. It'd be fantastic to see you there.
bsky.app/profile/jrag...

LLMs are nothing more than models of the distribution of the word forms in their training data, with weights modified by post-training to produce somewhat different distributions. Unless your use case requires a model of a distribution of word forms in text, indeed, they suck and aren't useful.

Nice overview of mathematical approaches to analyse age-stratified serological data: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Lungfish xkcd.com/3064

Harding very much influenced how I think and understand the world, and I met her once and she was great. RIP to a real one.

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

In the UCL Dept of Genetics, Evolution & Environment, we are advertising for people interested in applying for senior fellowship funding. I can say personally that it is a fantastic place to hold a fellowship. Apply at www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/... @ucllifesciences.bsky.social @uclcber.bsky.social

Three AI-powered steps to faster, smarter peer review Tired of spending countless hours on peer reviews? An AI-assisted workflow could help.

Nothing to see here, just Nature advocating LLM peer review.

“Feed your dictated notes into an offline large language model (LLM) to clarify and organize your feedback. A simple prompt such as “Write a critical reviewer letter based on the following notes. Maintain a professional tone throughout”

Elon Musk is a proven danger to good science, but the Royal Society won’t say so. That’s why I resigned | Kit Yates It is vital to act, and I urge colleagues to do so. How can we stand by and laud this man while he undermines scientific integrity? asks academic and author Kit Yates

I wholeheartedly agree with this piece from @kityates.bsky.social. The Royal Society has to take may things into consideration, including what its US members feel - but even so, I think the right course in this instance is very clear, and they ducked it.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

🚨Excited to share our latest research published in @commsbio.bsky.social , where we've developed a predictive model that integrates both host ecological traits and viral genomic features to identify potential reservoir hosts for Orthopoxviruses, including mpox virus.
www.nature.com/articles/s42...

The Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases NSF program has been archived. Huge loss. Does anyone know if the current proposals in the queue for funding will not be reviewed or are panels still happening?

Two really important papers for anyone interested in causal inference in ecology came out recently in Ecology Letters. 1st up (by @lauradee.bsky.social & @katherinesiegel.bsky.social) is this over-view paper. Really useful for both experts and beginners.
https://buff.ly/4gZgTWa

[“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the know-nothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.”]

Ursula le Guin, on the accusation that fantasy is an escape from reality

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...

Open letter to the President of the Royal Society – time to stand up for your values If you wish to show your support for the letter below regarding apparent inaction by the Royal Society in the face of breaches of its code of conduct by Elon Musk FRS, please sign below. I invite anyo...

Thanks to the more than *1100* members of the scientific community who have signed the letter to insist that the Royal Society remains true to values that we all hold dear but that Musk FRS has ridden roughshod over.

Please keep signing & sharing.

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

you really have to dig deep into the methods to discover that their new method takes 32 mins to boil an egg

RSero: A user-friendly R package to reconstruct pathogen circulation history from seroprevalence studies Author summary Antibodies are immune markers of past infections. Seroprevalence studies that characterize the seropositivity status in the population have been used for decades in epidemiological stud...

Serological data provide key insights on pathogen circulation. We introduce a new R package, Rsero, which is a pipeline to store and analyze age-stratified sero data, estimate the history of pathogen circulation and compare different transmission models.
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

This a summary of last part o my Ph.D. We investigated how temperature can affect the outcome of dengue infection.

The study covers a 10y period in all five regions of Brasil and all sub-climates of the country

We conclude that higher temperature makes risk of hospitalizations due dengue bigger!

Dismay as UK poised to cut funding for global vaccination group Gavi Exclusive: Aid charities alarmed as decision would come in wake of Donald Trump’s decision to freeze USAid activities

I can't begin to convey how horrible this would be. The US and UK, collectively, have supported 15-20% of Gavi's budget in the last several funding cycles. To understand the impact here you have to know that Gavi does much more that just buy vaccines 1/ (disclosure - I receive funding from Gavi)

Dynamics of influenza transmission in vampire bats revealed by longitudinal monitoring and a large-scale anthropogenic perturbation Common vampire bats maintain bat-associated influenza virus H18N11 across Peru.

Our new paper on bat influenza transmission dynamics is out. Check it out 👀🦇🦠 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

INTRODUCTION

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines?

Jevin West (@jevinwest.bsky.social) and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take.

thebullshitmachines.com

what a disaster. if this decision is not reversed immediately, its damage on science & society will be unravelling in infinite nuanced ways for decades to come

In defence of licking dirt off a window The Blindboy Podcast · Episode

New podcast, I loved making this. It's 51 minutes of me deciding wether or not to lick a window, which delves into transactional analysis psychology and stories of fish landing in forests during the great storm of 1839 open.spotify.com/episode/2XuJ...

Just over week until the deadline👇