Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿

Worth listening to @techwontsave.us on how news is increasingly consumed through social media and now "AI" platforms www.techwontsave.us/episode/288_... and then reading this BBC piece...

Around 10% of your Nanopore reads (SQK-RBK114) are incorrectly trimmed. Here is why, and how our new tool Barbell solves it:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Want to get started? github.com/rickbeeloo/b...

Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory An intensive international study was coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC

Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory. www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...

Three schematic diagrams. The first illustrates selective publishing of internal resection, the second selective causal focus, and the third selective access and funding for researchers.

1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv.

There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.

OpenAI's Sora 2 Can Generate Videos of Celebrities Appearing to Shout Racial Slurs OpenAI's Sora 2 video generation model can be exploited to push misinformation and depict public figures behaving badly despite promised guardrails.

At some point it has to become clear that this tech exists is to create a more toxic society and enrich its owners. These uses are not aberrations but rather the entire purpose.

Semaglutide and cardiovascular outcomes by baseline and changes in adiposity measurements: a prespecified analysis of the SELECT trial The cardioprotective effects of semaglutide were independent of baseline adiposity and weight loss and had only a small association with waist circumference, suggesting some mechanisms for benefit bey...

The benefit of Ozempic (semaglutide) for protection from major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) is independent of weight loss magnitude and baseline adiposity, likely related to the GLP-1 anti-inflammatory effect
thelancet.com/journals/lan...

My friend told me that her 14 year old son started doing laundry on Sundays for some of his elderly neighbors. He doesn't charge for the labor. And now he is the most popular person in the building and has non stop pies, cookies, and cake. The 14 year old should be our model of modern masculinity.

The spread of pro- and anti-vaccine views by coordinated communities on facebook during COVID-19 pandemic - Journal of Computational Social Science The widespread dissemination of problematic vaccine-related content during the COVID-19 pandemic has posed serious challenges to public health and eroded institutional trust. This study investigates t...

New research finds that anti-vaccine networks on Facebook were smaller but more tightly coordinated, spreading emotionally charged misinformation faster, while pro-vaccine networks were larger and more institutional, sharing accurate info but with less engagement.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Israel violating a ceasefire deal as a mob of Israeli settlers attack an American journalist and Palestinian grandma & an Israeli soccer match has to be cancelled because of violent fans is all the worse when you remember the deal calls to "de-radicalize" Palestinians and not Israelis

Last Ebola patient in Democratic Republic of the Congo discharged The last Ebola patient in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was discharged today, marking an important milestone in the efforts to end the outbreak.

The countdown to the end of DRC's most recent #Ebola outbreak has begun with the release from hospital of the last known patient. Of 64 cases (53 confirmed, 11 probables), there have been 45 deaths & 19 survivors. +35,000 people were vaccinated in this response. www.afro.who.int/news/last-eb...

Meet the man who built RFK Jr.’s kitchen cabinet Jeffrey Tucker, who elevated Covid contrarians now working for the health secretary, is building support for Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.

A must-read @politico.com piece about the man behind the Great Barrington Declaration & the Brownstone Institute, two groups that were foundational and central to RFK Jr’s rise and to his MAHA agenda (I was interviewed for the piece; there’s a quote from me)

www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

German far right setting agenda as opponents amplify its ideas, study finds Normalisation of far-right stances likely to affect success of such parties at ballot boxes across Europe, say researchers

German study shows how far right sets agenda thanks to mainstream parties reshaping their communications to respond to what are initially fringe issues, boosting the spread of these ideas and signalling to voters that these ideas and stances were legitimate

shorturl.at/OFfig

They're open with their intentions. They want to provide the only analysis resources themselves.

Exclusive: Assad government secretly moved mass grave to cover up killings, Reuters investigation finds From 2019 to 2021, Syria’s authoritarian government carried out a secret operation to move tens of thousands of bodies from the exposed Qutayfah mass grave to a hidden site in the desert east of Damascus. The goal of the clandestine reburial was to hide evidence of atrocities as Bashar Assad tried to regain international standing

"With at least 34 trenches measuring 2 kilometers long, the grave in the Dhumair desert is among the most extensive created during the Syrian civil war, Reuters has found. Witness accounts and the dimensions of the new site suggest that tens of thousands of people could be buried there."

Aftonbladet

Greta Thunberg: “Israeli soldiers hit, kicked, starved, and tortured me”

• They placed a flag next to me, and anytime the flag touched me, they kicked me
• Whenever I raised my head to look at Ben-Gvir, I was kicked
• She was filmed while stripped naked

Aftonbladet: tinyurl.com/a33vxatc

A Quarter of the CDC Is Gone Another round of terminations, combined with previous layoffs and departures, has reduced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention workforce by about 3,000 people since January.

The CDC's union estimates that a quarter of the agency been gutted under the Trump administration. Here's our story at @wired.com: www.wired.com/story/cdc-te...

And despite the sterling work @olivia.science @timnitgebru.bsky.social and many others have done on critical AI materials, responding to this thing is *yet more* unpaid academic labour drawn from a vanishingly small time budget!

Is this EDS-HAT thing of yours facility specific? Reasons I've heard for not doing similar have included shortages of bioinformaticians, difficulty interpreting results, difficulty building data to action pathways. Can be overcome but how did you do it?

Illustration of Burrows-Wheeler Transform and many auxiliary structures from the input string how$now$brown$cow$#

New tool "bwt-svg" for making illustrations of the BWT and the many auxiliary arrays and other structures related to it. Pyodide-based no-installation-necessary interface here: benlangmead.github.io/bwt-svg/. (H/t to @robert.bio for pointing me to pyodide!) Full repo: github.com/benlangmead/....

Maldives becomes the first country to achieve ‘triple elimination’ of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, syphilis and hepatitis B

hq_who_departmentofcommunications.cmail19.com/t/d-e-gwgjl-...

100%! And for those making out this is some kind of moral failing of Sudanese or other Africans... just nope. No. Not going there.

my biggest beef with bluesky is that I get way more updates on what Curtis Yarvin or Peter Thiel than anything on the African continent

Wiley retracts study stolen by reviewer, following Retraction Watch coverage A Wiley journal has retracted a paper more than a year after a researcher reported the work was hers and had been stolen by a reviewer for another journal. As we reported in July, Shafaq Aftab, now…

Well done Shafaq Aftab. When a reviewer stole her work and published it under his own name, she fought for a YEAR to get the journal to retract the paper. Just wondering why it took Wiley a YEAR to do this. 🧪 #academicsky

retractionwatch.com/2025/10/03/w...

For some context the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly report in addition to being just a good read, to quote wikipedia, "is the main vehicle for publishing public health information and recommendations that have been received by the CDC from state health departments. "

My quote of the day

Nobody ever thanks you for saving them from the disease they didn't know they were going to get.

William Foege

Last month Trump said he wanted proof that COVID vaccines are effective. Yesterday, during his "semiannual" physical, Trump received a COVID vaccine as well as a flu shot.

That's because vaccines — which Trump's administration have made harder to get — work.

Standing in solidarity with colleagues at the CDC who were fired as part of yet another RIF wave.
We are all less safe without their expertise and dedication.

CDC has been a global leader in public health & played a key role in smallpox eradication. Health depts in red states & blue states rely on CDC expertise & support. The CDC EIS program trains the next generation of public health leaders & disease detectives.

They are burning it to the ground.

Trump Administration Lays Off Dozens of C.D.C. Officials

Trump Administration Lays Off Dozens of C.D.C. Officials
“Disease detectives,” high-ranking scientists, the entire Washington office and the staff of a weekly public health journal were among those who learned late Friday that they would lose their jobs.
#GiftLink

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/u...

YouTube video by Forbes Breaking News SHOCK CLAIM: RFK Jr. Says Children Circumcised Early Have Twice The Autism Rate Due To Tylenol Use

🧵RFK "HIV-doesn't-cause-AIDS" Jr. is now linking circumcision with autism.

This nonsense was posted by his anti-vax group Children's Health Defense years ago, and I looked into it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS9D...