I got annoyed at this over-hyped misleading report about the gut microbiome, see my take on it @forbes: forbes.com/sites/stevensa…

Kind of bizarre editorial at The Lancet Microbe, belittling anyone who suggested a lab leak as "fanciful ideas put forward by self-described free thinkers" who shouldn't be taken seriously. Seems like a political hit piece, not a scientific argument thelancet.com/journals/lanmi…

My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best

Excellent piece in today's The New York Times about the new rules (finally!) that impose some limits on dangerous gain-of-function research in viruses and other pathogens, from Tom Inglesby, MD Marc Lipsitch Anita Cicero. They're not perfect but it's a start nytimes.com/2024/07/23/opi…

looking forward to this paper on 6 great ape genomes, "great" in both the traditional sense and for assembly quality. From Adam Phillippy EichlerLab Arang Rhie et al; just finished the first 3 pages which means I'm at the end of the author list! 🤣 biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

OMG, this paper claims "a healer can harness the inherent intelligent energy from the universal energy field and transmit it anywhere on the planet through neutrinos (biophotons)." And this was peer reviewed? 🤣😂 h/t Retraction Watch The Neurocritic onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…

This opinion piece by 41 scientists is a blatant effort to shut down all debate on the origins of COVID. It's disturbing to see this. Shutting down debate is anti-science, whatever their protests to the contrary journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jv…

RIP J. Robin Warren, who together with Barry Marshall proved that H. pylori causes ulcers, which overturned centuries of misunderstanding about ulcers and won them a well-deserved Nobel Prize in 2005. Lovely obit in The New York Times nytimes.com/2024/08/09/hea…

Tennis players everywhere will understand this. Draper's shot hit the ground and he should have lost the point and continued serving at deuce, but instead the match was over. No good reason why they couldn't use the replay video.

I skimmed the source for this article, in @natureag by Mike Snyder's lab, and I don't find any of it even remotely credible. Tons of complex correlations that are probably meaningless or just chance. No, humans don't 'age dramatically in two bursts' theguardian.com/science/articl…

If you've never heard of the Hayflick limit, or even if you have, I hope my explainer in @forbes is of interest #longevity #Immortality forbes.com/sites/stevensa…

ha! This describes exactly what the new Nature Aging paper (nature.com/articles/s4358…) from Mike Snyder's lab did. I'm pretty sure that's what Genomics Cow was referring to 🤣

So cool: a comprehensive search identified 144 “lost” birds, worldwide, that might still be out there. The full list is Table S1 in the appendix, screenshot here esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…

Sad but also kind of funny: a list of 500+ papers whose authors obviously used ChatGPT to write their papers, and didn't even bother to remove obvious signs such as "As of my last knowledge update" or "As an AI language model" (!!) h/t Retraction Watch academ-ai.info/#category=

Former FDA commish Scott Gottlieb, a call for "curbs on pointlessly perilous activities such as gain-of-function studies involving deadly respiratory viruses — research so dangerous to humanity that the potential harms far outweigh any possible benefits." wapo.st/47jHYQN

in a rare move, @nih slightly reduces the unneeded amount of paperwork for grants, and (very) slightly reduces the pain of those whose grants don't make the cut. TL;DR they won't send automated JIT requests in the future

Good piece in The Wall Street Journal today by Nidhi Subbaraman, about the unraveling of the cancer microbiome hypothesis, incl quotes from me and others in the field wsj.com/health/healthc…

Amazing. The one thing that both sides agree on is that we have to stop the spread of polio. And we do! Glad to see the fighting stop so we can vaccinate nytimes.com/2024/08/30/wor…