Phil Ashton

@DrCJ_Houldcroft @bmay My 7 year old hasn’t had it (were living overseas), reckon he should get it?

@bmay It's a little bit more complicated than that! You need to vaccinate at the times of greatest risk (infancy and approx going to university age) because the immunity from the vaccine wanes after 2-5 years in anyone teenage upwards.

Whatever sound reasons existed for not jabbing against Meningitis B before 2015 were obviously later rejected. Why? It’s obvious @NHSEngland should urgently roll out a Covid-style vaccine programme for all kids over 10 who have been left unprotected, some of whom are now dying.

Oh hi FungiDB

South Africa's surveillance infrastructure caught this. Malawi's didn't exist to. This gap is not just a technical problem, it's a global equity problem. We cannot fight AMR without investing in surveillance capacity in low-resource settings.

It's also a reservoir for AMR determinants that could transfer to dominant invasive Salmonella lineages like Typhimurium. ⚠️

🚨 New preprint: We've characterised one of the most drug-resistant Salmonella lineages we've ever encountered; Salmonella Isangi ST335, causing healthcare-associated bloodstream infections across southern Africa. medrxiv.org/content/10.648…

It was a wonderful honour to be awarded an honorary doctorate by my alma mater today - all the more so because my fellow honorands were such lovely and brilliant people. Thank you @UniofOxford and @WilliamJHague. It was an unforgettable day. ox.ac.uk/news/2026-02-2…

📣New pre-print alert! 🦠We sequenced S. Typhi from a vaccine trial in Malawi🇲🇼 📊No genomic differences between vaccine and control arms, but short follow-up. 💡That’s why ongoing genomic surveillance after vaccination is essential to detect escape. medrxiv.org/content/10.648…

Alison Gopnik's insight: babies learn like scientists. Tyler's question: are scientists actually good learners? New episode on childhood cognition, the ‘intuitive apprenticeship’ model of teaching older kids, AI as a cultural technology, and why she thinks nature vs. nurture is a misleading framework. Timestamps: 0:00:00 - How children—and scientists—learn 0:14:35 - Consciousness, episodic memories, and aphantasia 0:23:06 - Freud’s and Piaget’s theories about childhood 0:27:49 - Twin studies and nature vs. nurture 0:39:33 - Teaching strategies for younger vs. older children 0:44:07 - AI's ability to generate novel insights 0:53:57 - What Autism and ADHD diagnoses do and don’t reveal 0:58:02 - The success of the Gopnik siblings

Delighted to announce that this work is now published in Microbiome! link.springer.com/article/10.118…

@sentientist How many people could ~double their salary just by adding focus from decreased caring responsibilities?

Agree it’s usually not rational for parents to keep 2 full-time jobs and leave money on the table instead of one person leveling up and the other doing more care work. People may love their jobs or keep them for feminist reasons. But two incomes keep exit options open and are easier to split in divorce. I suspect this is a common unspoken motive.

@SpencerKlavan I felt like this about Alex Honnolds girlfriend hassling him not to do free solo. Lady, date one of the billions of other people and leave us our fearless freak.

Isaac Newton once shoved a needle into his eye socket to figure out how seeing works. Pretty sure if he had had a wife she would very sensibly have said Isaac, do not do that. Some guys just have to stay single for science.

@emollick Heard an interesting idea recently to just use the api for a “raw model” experience, without the built in chatgpt system prompt. I wonder what it’s like

This is why I never use a custom system prompt. They’re fine for projects but not for your main LLM use, since you may get degraded results and not know it. All the accuracy tricks are being built into the model, your prompts are probably not adding much.

@paulg Love it! The kids book version is Anne Seuss

The artist who occupies the most space in my brain is Stanley Badmin. Almost every day I look at the world and think "Badmin."

@gunsnrosesgirl3 Answering an unexpected phone call

those born before 2000, what's a small or once-common skill you have that hardly anyone uses today

Was there any need to underline the word Nature in the text body?

@CapelLofft Erm, have you not seen Hamilton? King George obviously the baddy.

This whole 'No Kings' thing gets on my nerves. The actions by Britain that so provoked the rebel colonists were acts of *parliament*. Attacking George III is absurd: what did you want him to do, overrule his own parliament? Isn't that the very definition of tyranny in their eyes?

@AdamClery any thoughts on why Elanga and Gordon have been quiet for Newcastle so far this year?

I thought my son said his bum was hurting so I got him to bend over and I put some cream on it, turns out he said his thumb hurt 😭