Georg Otto

Main take-away so far from very interesting presser on #Marburg outbreak in Rwanda: Health minister Sabin Nsanzimana says all cases are linked to known infection chains. The outbreak is one major cluster with three branches.

‘Race science’ group say they accessed sensitive UK health data Exclusive: Fringe network recorded boasting of securing data from UK Biobank trove donated by 500,000 volunteers

Wow, the Guardian journalists who just yesterday published about the network of race scientists getting funding from tech CEOs just broke another story that this group has accessed UK Biobank data without authorization. This is seriously bad for the integrity of science & a massive failure by UKBB

Theodosius Dobzhansky in a dark suit posing near a microscope. He smiles and looks to the side of the camera.

...Without that light of evolution, biology becomes a pile of sundry facts: some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole."
- Theodosius Dobzhansky.

A dynamic plot showing the interactions between validations and implications in evolution.

In the end, I don't especially care if you accept evolution, or if it clashes with your religious dogma.

Teaching it in public schools is the only way to prepare students with the framework they will need for any course in biology, ecology, medicine or genetics.

Use nanoparquet instead of readr/CSV Parquet is interoperable between Python and R, fast to read+write, works well with databases, and stores complex data types (e.g., tibble listcols). Use it instead of CSV. Many pros, few (no?) cons.

After getting duckpilled and writing yesterday about DuckDB and duckplyr as a faster alternative to base R and dplyr, today I follow that up with a look at parquet (nanoparquet) as a better and faster alternative to CSV (readr) blog.stephenturner.us/p/use-nanopa... #rstats

#Marburg outbreak in Rwanda is now up to 41 cases incl. 12 deaths and 5 patients that have recovered according to the Ministry of Health

www.eldiario.es/galicia/adio...

Holy YIKES a redshift of 14.2 is high. That's a helluva long way off. Here's my explainer of the number (from a different galaxy observation):

badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/jwst-bags-...

🔭🧪

This is *and I can’t emphasise this enough* a brilliant podcast episode

As much as we all love our deliciously horrible killer viruses getting ready for the next pandemic, I think the creeping threat of less and less treatable common bacterial infections is actually much worse.
#episky
🧪

The world is facing an antibiotic emergency: a data-led plan of action is needed now | Sally Davies Global leaders are meeting to address the threat posed by antimicrobial resistance – millions will die unless solutions are found, says Dame Sally Davies, the UK government’s special envoy on AMR

www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

If you hate statistics like I do, then you'll love my free lectures. Putting science before statistics, 20 lectures from basics of inference & causal modeling to multilevel models & dynamic state space models. It's all free, made with love and sympathy. 🧪 #stats www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

A hand holding a pinned Dynastine beetle over an entomological collection drawer containing several other pinned insect specimens

some fancy shrimps got a big idea and crawled outta the ocean like 500 million years ago and now we got these jabronis

Engineered E coli determine if a number is prime, if a letter is a vowel, and the maximum number of pieces of pie that can be made for a given number of cuts. "Prints" answers by expressing fluorescent proteins https://www.nature.com/articles/s41589-024-01711-4

‘The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out’ – Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman Saul Newman’s research suggests that we’re completely mistaken about how long humans live for.

It's Ig Nobel season again! This one's remarkably depressing! 😀

[Longevity data.. set everyone’s pension rate - $$ trillions. If data are junk, so are [pension] projections. It also means we’re allocating money wrong. Insurance premiums are based on this stuff.]

theconversation.com/the-data-on-...

I heard about this before and I was horrified, but did they never distance themselves from this or made any comment about it in the meantime?

Dave Grohl is back in the headlines, and you all know what that means: re-upping the "Foo Fighters indirectly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths through medical misinformation" thread.

New virus-genome website seeks to make sharing sequences easy and fair The Pathoplexus database has sequences from Ebola, West Nile virus and another dangerous pathogen. The Pathoplexus database has sequences from Ebola, West Nile virus and another dangerous pathogen.

🧪 Nature reports on #Pathoplexus, a new initiative that incentivizes sharing viral genome data in real-time 🦠🧬. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Six novels about India, perhaps the world’s most interesting place
www.economist.com/the-economis...
from The Economist

Al rescate de dos millones de topónimos a través de una ‘app’ para salvar la memoria de los abuelos La Real Academia Galega impulsa la mayor recogida de nombres de lugar acometida en Europa en una comunidad, Galicia, que suma más de un tercio de todas las entidades de población de España

Al rescate de dos millones de topónimos a través de una ‘app’ para salvar la memoria de los abuelos - elpais.com/espana/galic...

Confused about the mpox outbreaks? Here’s what’s spreading, where, and why With three virus variants on the move in different populations, “it keeps getting more complicated by the day”

I’ve read a lot of stuff about #mpox already that is wrong or at least confused. And it’s not that surprising. The situation is pretty complicated and confusing. I tried to disentangle a few things for Science here (thread to come later):

www.science.org/content/arti...

I really firmly think that even if you don't want to read all of "Moby Dick" you can have so much fun just reading the first chapter

Confounding Fuels Misinterpretation in Human Genetics bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

Paper describing the difficulties of establishing genetic causation in studies of human behavior. @arbelharpak.bsky.social @jedidiahcarlson.com www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My first post. Wednesday Morning's great Saturn occultation by the Moon.

YouTube video by Richard McElreath Statistical Rethinking 2023 - 06 - Good & Bad Controls

As a sparkly citizen of the world, you must defend yourself against research. You need it, but you can't assume peer review works. But a little knowledge goes a long way. Here is a 15 min video of me explaining one of the most common fallacies, "TABLE 2" #stats: youtu.be/uanZZLlzKHw?...

Largest animal genome ever sequenced: 91 Gb. 18 of 19 chromosomes are each individually larger than the entire 3 Gb human genome.

The genomes of all lungfish inform on genome expansion and tetrapod evolution https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07830-1 (free: https://rdcu.be/dRE64)

Using Glittr.org to find, compare and re-use online bioinformatics training materials https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.08.20.608021v1 🧬🖥️

The constellation Aries

As a break from *gestures at it all*, I'm going to rate constellations of the zodiac.

First up: Aries.

Do fuck off. That's a line, mate. You can't just show me an obtuse angle, make bleating noises and expect me to see a sheep. You must think my head buttons up the back

Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Fathers and Sons | Past Present Future The History of Ideas Podcast

FIFTEEN FICTIONS FOR SUMMER - out now!

Episode 4 in our Great Political Fictions re-release is Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), the definitive novel about the politics - and emotions - of intergenerational conflict.

Find out more at: www.ppfideas.com

shows.acast.com/pastpresentf...

Ok, so this looks really bad indeed.

But read the paper to see where they got the data and tell me *that's* not the scarier part of this story.