Our genome assembly broke @ncbi! We recently submitted the genome of the endangered White Bark Pine, which has 4 scaffolds that are longer than > 2,147,483,647 bp, which is the largest integer for a 32-bit int (2^31 - 1). So we have to break them and re-submit

suggestion: don't trust the interpretation of scientific studies from an AI bot. It can be wildly off

I see that #AACR has a special symposium on the cancer microbiome this year. Attendees, please be skeptical! Recent reports of a microbiome in 32 different types of cancer are simply wrong, as we showed last year: journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mb…

I've been a Linux user for 30 years, and this is pretty cool. A software engineer at @microsoft found a backdoor in ssh, probably planted there by a nefarious government actor, and alerted the world. It's being fixed nytimes.com/2024/04/03/tec…

and the answer is: still not sure yet. Close to 20,000 protein-coding genes but more like 100,000 different protein isoforms. And noncoding RNAs? Who knows?

My friend and colleague James Taylor (James Taylor) left us far too early, 4 years ago today, at just 40 years old. See the note from Michael Schatz below, and consider supporting the James Taylor Foundation for Open Science, jxtxfoundation.org

nice to see The Washington Post crossword today including as an answer the name of my very favorite entomologist, Annika Salzberg! Good day

two cars passed over the #BaltimoreHarbor bridge just seconds before the ship collided, collapsing the bridge. I imagine those drivers are thanking the stars today twitter.com/i/status/17725…

just a reminder that when you're looking at a LOT of data, be careful of false positives. Like this fMRI of a dead salmon: wired.com/2009/09/fmrisa…

check out the new paper from my PhD student Hayden (Hyun Joo) Ji, in which she uses #AlphaFold , splice site predictors, and other tools to identify hundreds of novel isoforms of human genes. Well done Hayden! biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

a large new study says Vitamin D and calcium supplements slightly *increase* death rates, contrary to popular belief. See my take on this at @forbes: forbes.com/sites/stevensa…

excited to learn that my friend and JHU Computer Science colleague Greg Hager has just been named head of the CISE Directorate at U.S. National Science Foundation. Well done Greg! new.nsf.gov/news/nsf-selec…

it seems that taking Vitamin D and calcium might have an effect on risk of both cancer and heart disease - but the effectts are opposite, with death rates going up for heart disease but down for cancer. Net effect: slightly negative (more deaths) on supplements, not signif.

Amazing results for cystic fibrosis patients with Trikafta. And yet it also illustrates the problems with our patent system: patients outside US and Europe cannot get this super-expensive drug theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

wow. The level of fraud from Didier Raoult is far larger than I imagined. 50+ papers retracted or with editorial notices. And in 2023, 'the largest unethical study performed for years—in France, maybe in the world. … It’s incredible' science.org/content/articl…