Jon Read

@PaulNuki It'll be kettles next, and then there will be no going back.

Progress shocker. Americans discover roundabouts

@alexcdot @GoogleDeepMind @Meta @MIT @Cambridge_Uni You can't blame peer review entirely, the principal blame lies with the supervisors and PIs that either (a) allow use of genAI in this way or (b) fail to read their own papers carefully!

Okay so, we just found that over 50 papers published at @Neurips 2025 have AI hallucinations I don't think people realize how bad the slop is right now It's not just that researchers from @GoogleDeepMind, @Meta, @MIT, @Cambridge_Uni are using AI - they allowed LLMs to generate hallucinations in their papers and didn't notice at all. It's insane that these made it through peer review👇

@EricTopol @BMJMedicine Here's the BMJ link: bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/5/1/e0…

The @BMJMedicine was supposed to post this paper 2 hours ago but has failed to do. It is being covered by other means #google_vignette" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-p… Someday the link will be active! dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjmed…

Physical activity and the reduction of all-cause mortality, from 2 very large prospective cohorts 1. The relationship is non-linear, suggesting a threshold effect for many types of exercise as seen below

A new, long paper on evolution - natural induction - split into 2: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsfs/article/1… royalsocietypublishing.org/rsfs/article/1… @RichardWatson90 and Tim Lewens "It is conventionally assumed that all evolutionary adaptation is produced, and could only possibly be produced, by natural selection. Natural induction is a different mechanism of adaptation. It occurs in dynamical systems described by a network of interactions, where connections give way slightly under stress and the system is subject to occasional perturbations. This differential adjustment of connections causes reorganization of the system’s internal structure in a manner equivalent to associative learning familiar in neural networks. This is sufficient for storage and recall of multiple patterns, learning with generalization and solving difficult constraint problems (without any natural selection involved). Various biological systems (from gene-regulation networks to metabolic networks to ecosystems) meet these basic conditions and therefore have potential to exhibit adaptation by natural induction. Here (and in a follow-on paper), we consider various ways that natural induction and natural selection might interact in biological evolution. For example, in some cases, natural selection may act not as a source of adaptations but as a memory of adaptations discovered by natural induction. We conclude that evolution by natural induction is a viable process that expands our understanding of evolutionary adaptation."

@LongCovidHell It's common for most health systems to do further PCR tests to determine type/subtype of influenza (H1N1,H3N2,B), and anything that is negative for those would be investigated further particularly if causing severe disease. This is how most human avian influenza are picked up.

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but given how unusually severe flu is this year across the world, and they’re testing positive for influenza A… Could this be bird flu? Bird flu is A, isn’t it? Are hospitals specifically testing for avian flu or just flu?

@adamjkucharski Classic shape, better than most outbreaks.

Turns out interest in metaverse had about a ~9 month half life.

@AJamesMcCarthy @BlackGryph0n Incredible.

Immense planning and technical precision was required for this absolutely preposterous (but real) view: I captured my friend @BlackGryph0n transiting the sun during a skydive. This might be the first photo of it's kind in existence. See a video of this moment in the reply 👇

Help me out, I’ve got another wastewater virus mystery. This one really blows my mind. 1/

@lenssketcher @mark_lj Eskdale, Lake District

Looking left and right this afternoon.

@BuDs_UK How are you estimating the community prevalence?

As of 5 October, around 1 in every 111 people in England were infected, and the risk of encountering an infected person in most indoor places remains High. Unless the indoor air is fresh, or filtered/purified, good quality PPE respiratory masks are needed to protect yourself.

The Covid wave in England continues to grow, with infection levels up 11% in the last week. The risk level is hovering just below Very High. If you do not wish to catch Covid, please take precautions including getting boosted now. buds.org.uk/covid-19-risk-…

@CHPhotography15 Great use of the format.

Cul Mor, northwest highlands, Scotland.

@overlandertheb1 Pronounce Milngavie.

Right. Ideas for a Scottish citizenship test? 1) Can a citizen properly throw their grandmother from a moving bus?

@cakiepig @gina_scot Turf war, surely?

@gina_scot Sadly golfers will become collateral damage in this culture war

If this government push through legislation to sell off allotments there should be a counter movement to re-wildlife golf courses. it's only fair.

🚨 Workshop Alert at #RSS2025 📅 Tues 2 Sept, 14:00–16:00 🗺️ Model-based Geostatistics for Public Health in R With Emauele Giorgi & myself Learn to go from spatial data to predictions with RiskMap using real case studies. 👉 rss.org.uk/training-event… #RStats #Geostat

@TheTimidToucan @vipintukur Exactly. Interesting finding, but little in the way of evidence. More studies needed.

@vipintukur I need to see more than 10 people in the experimental group. Show me 300 and then I’ll pay attention.

A common virus once thought harmless to humans might be linked to Parkinson's disease, a new study says. The germ, Human Pegivirus (HPgV), was found in half the autopsied brains of patients with Parkinson's, but not in any brains from healthy people. 1/

@DrCJ_Houldcroft Extremely interesting, and useful knowledge, but what a strange study. The subjects must be known to, related to, or are paper authors?

What a gem this paper is journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.11… Healthy infants, breastfed, no travel, no daycare, shed enteric viruses *nearly every day* from ~100-400 days of life! Children catch enteric viruses ALL the time and often show no symptoms of infection. Hard to stop transmission.

@SolidEvidence Very cool.

This is cool. I was poking around at the Rhinovirus (common cold) data and realized that my perception about these viruses was completely wrong. 1/

@DrToniHo @CEPHR_UCD @CVRinfo Let's hope the audience showed up!

Many thanks to @CEPHR_UCD for inviting me to give a seminar on my group’s work at @CVRinfo! 🦠🫁🧬🏥

@PaulNuki Wow.

Trump administration cancels multi-million dollar bird flu vaccine contract with Moderna telegraph.co.uk/global-health/…

@Profbeakercbe @ojmason @andyp1599 @miffythegamer Dear Prof, it's very simple: SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind covid, spreads much more readily than influenza. The combination of reduced social mixing, masking and other measures reduced transmission of flu enough that one of the strains has gone extinct.

Tell my dead uncle that. Tell my neighbour’s late husband that, you fucking piece of shit.