paul g higgins

🚀 As Artemis II astronauts journey around the Moon right now, our new paper asks a critical question: What if a respiratory virus spreads inside a spacecraft? 📄 doi.org/10.1038/s41526… #ArtemisII #NASA

Schnelltestentwicklung zur Diagnose schwer behandelbarer VRE-Bakterien: Das Team von Dr. Alexander Klimka arbeitet an einem Antikörper-basierten Schnelltest, der VanA & VanB zuverlässig erkennt. Mehr: uk-koeln.de/kliniken-insti…

Interview with CNN this morning

Our study on tracking Plasmodium knowlesi through fecal DNA

Tracking Plasmodium knowlesi Through Fecal DNA for Monitoring Zoonotic Transmission in Wild Macaques Across Southeast and South Asia ✅ Just Accepted 🔗 bit.ly/3PvzAIU

Moderate Injury to the foot. Still need surgery. Nevertheless still "Wounded Child No Surviving Family " When children are injured in war they are never only physically wounded. They are also psychologically wounded, socially wounded and existentialy wounded...their world is irrevocably destroyed. Not yet a teenager.

I remember when hepatitis B was a major problem for surgeons - getting stuck in the operating room. In fact a famous surgeon died from cancer caused by chronic hep B infection. So - here is the tea (I am not really cool but someone said this is the thing cool kids say). Hepatitis B is a liver virus that spreads through blood and body fluids. Decades ago we saw it all the time—chronic infection, cirrhosis, and liver cancer. The problem is worse in infants: when babies get infected, up to 90% develop lifelong infection. And babies don’t get it from sex or drugs—they get it from caregivers and household exposure to infected blood or body fluids. That’s why the U.S. began universal newborn vaccination in the 1990s: protect the child before exposure happens. We now have 40 years of data from carefully followed U.S. populations—including Alaska Native communities—showing what happens when you vaccinate early: childhood hepatitis B infections drop by >95% and liver cancer in children essentially disappears. That success is why hepatitis B is now rare in U.S. kids. And after billions of doses and decades of study, the evidence is clear: the hepatitis B vaccine does not cause autism. It prevents a lifelong viral infection that used to fill hospital wards.

For times like this, a cool rhythm with a pertinent message is needed. William Onyeabor. youtu.be/uRXl0EGCUZw?is…

New preprint out! @AnjaliSapre @luluScience and co. mapped the evolutionary routes of convergence in K pneumo. Pop analysis of >1,400 global genomes & 7,500 closed plasmids to see how #AMR & virulence genes come together and impact phenotypes. researchsquare.com/article/rs-861…

Poo, Spew, Richer Than You, Cuntface, Dribble, Twat.

@susanstorm62 @balcjos Plasmid assembly is often difficult when using sequence data from a single isolate. I'm curious just how accurate this assembly would be from the mess of metagenomics

nature.com/articles/s4158… Accurate plasmid reconstruction from metagenomics data using assembly–alignment graphs and contrastive learning

🦠🧬🖥️ Bakta v1.12.0 is out with tons of tiny improvements and bug fixes, too many to list all: - partial genes on linear seqs - improved errror handlings & runtimes - support Python 3.12 & 3.13 - ... Thank you to all bug reporters and contributors! github.com/oschwengers/ba…

We are happy to share this paper about LafB's biophysics analysis and this protein role in Enterococcus faecium virulence: mdpi.com/1422-0067/26/1…

@DrNeilStone Gunpowder

Name one human invention that has saved more lives than vaccines

@HansMahncke USSR?

The insanity of this is that a foreign family visiting Disneyland for a week has to prove hotel bookings, return flights, enough money for the entire stay, and a stable job back home. That is for a few days. You would assume that the bar for people who want to stay forever would be far higher. Instead, it effectively does not exist at all. This is a complete inversion of basic logic.

@implausibleblog Its the racists and their control over the narrative that are creating division

Left: Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood saying asylum seekers are creating division across our country Right: Keir Starmer criticising the very rhetoric that Shabana Mahmood just used to justify her new, harsh, divisive, asylum seeker policies Just a few weeks ago Mahmood and Starmer both stoked division in society by conflating public safety with antisemitism; they literally caused division in society Neither of them are suitable for public office, certainly not when they're aping far right anti asylum seeker narratives @UKLabour should be ashamed of how far they have fallen, and I fear it'll only get worse before it gets better The sooner Mahmood, Starmer, and Lisa-lies-in-parliament-Nandy are out, and voted out and replaced with MPs with a little more integrity, the better

wow. @drNeilStone clearly doesn't understand what odds ratios are. Neil: 100% of the kids with autism ate food, drank water, and breathed air. Do us all a favor and study up on odds ratios and PAR.

@Channel4News There are two types of British, flag shaggers, and non flag-shaggers. To the flag shaggers there is only one type of Britishness and you must adhere to this, or you are not really British. Starmer is a flag shagger. There are also Scots, but we align with non flagshaggers

The prime minister has described plans for pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the UK today as 'un-British' and has called for them not to go ahead. Students from several universities are expected to gather in London and other cities.

@DrNeilStone You'll need a placebo moon to satisfy the knuckle dragging class

Some say the moon is made of cheese Let's find out! Why not invest 100 billion dollars and 20 years into answering this question??? What's wrong with doing a study? Why can't we challenge "settled science"? Why can't we just ask questions?

@TedUrchin @JMPSimor This abour government is staffed by eunuchs

@JMPSimor Scary times. We must meet them head on. I sincerely hope this government has the direction and the balls. Please forgive me. I truly despair.

No one should be in any doubt about what is going on.