Yassine

Rwanda’s Marburg response is a masterclass in how to prevent pandemics Today marks the official end of the outbreak. Swift action saved many lives and helped protect the rest of the world from potential disaster

Lots to learn from Rwanda

www.telegraph.co.uk/global-healt...

📌

Parking and Public Health - Current Environmental Health Reports Purpose of Review Parking is a ubiquitous feature of the built environment, but its implications for public health are under-examined. This narrative review synthesizes literature to describe pathways...

We have turned America into a parking lot—1.31 billion parking spots or 4.76 for every car, to be precise—and it has made us sick and poor.

Public health policy has a real stake in parking policy.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

We’re hopping to add this pipeline as an option in EAGER. 3/3. Amazing work by Shyam and the seed idea from Divon Lan.

We show that this reduces the number of contaminant reads falsely aligning to the target reference, and as a nice bonus, this reduces the overall processing time of aDNA and helps getting a first glimpse at what’s in the bycatch 2/3

Checkout our latest manuscript where we use kraken2, a k-mer based read classifier, to identify putative contaminants and endogenous reads prior to aligning with bwa-aln. 1/3

Filtering out the noise: metagenomic classifiers optimize ancient DNA mapping Abstract. Contamination with exogenous DNA presents a significant challenge in ancient DNA (aDNA) studies of single organisms. Failure to address contamina

Congratulations @shyama-mama.bsky.social on a great piece of work! academic.oup.com/bib/article/...

Morphological variability is a weak speciation criterion, as you run into the question of where to draw the line? Also, why do we even need to draw the line? This is one of the reasons we are having so many stupid conservation argument about bears, canids, etc.

In re:

Universities are continuing to retaliate against staff for participating in Gaza campus protests Columbia University staff are being suspended and terminated for participating in last Spring’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment, even if they were off the clock at the time. Similar cases are being seen...

Columbia University staff are being suspended and terminated for participating in last Spring's Gaza Solidarity Encampment, even if they were off the clock at the time. Similar cases are being seen across the country.

https://mondoweiss.net/2024/12/universities-are-continuing-to-retaliate-against-…

Illustration of a Neanderthal holding up and contemplating a skull

Why did we think Neanderthals weren’t smart? 🏺🧪
Early studies of Neanderthals were fundamentally flawed
with Paige Madison @fossilhistory.bsky.social
www.vox.com/unexplainabl...

Historically, our stories about Neanderthals have revealed a lot more about ourselves than about these early humans.

There’s another huge waste in the number of highly trained people who just leave because they can’t get funding, dried up support, and burnout

Research thrives on innovation and the diversity of ideas, yet our funding system often penalizes both. In our new study published in PNAS, we explore the hidden costs of competition in allocating scarce research funds. (1/10) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

😄📌

The tech bro fascination with eugenics is so on brand. The idea that you could make accurate, actionable predictions from individual genotypes (with all their complex, non-linear interactions) from averaged, linearly modeled population-level genomic statistics is just another big data fantasy

Detection of exotic biosecurity threat ribgrass mosaic virus and novel tobamoviruses through metatranscriptomic sequencing of animal gut content Ribgrass mosaic virus (RMV) and related viruses of the genus Tobamovirus (Virgaviridae) are cruciferous plant pathogens that represent a threat to global horticultural systems. In Australia, they are ...

Turns out that metatranscriptomic sequencing of animal gut contains can identify exotic plant viruses that are biosecurity threats. Work led by Jackie Mahar and Solomon Maina. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Transposable element exonization generates a reservoir of evolving and functional protein isoforms Transposable element exonization by unannotated splicing events produces stable protein isoforms with acquired functions that are subject to evolutionary selection.

It was only a matter of time.

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

The encampments are gone and with them the TV crews but some folks have spent the months since working overtime to criminalize every single thing about them and any possible association with them. The behind the scenes retribution and score settling would shock you.

The postdoc 'big mac plus' index Which university in Europe has the best postdoc package? In order words, which university is perhaps 'undervalued'? This blog considers salary, cost of living, life satisfaction and uni reputation.

Another week, another blog:) this one is for my academic friends entering the European postdoc job market. laurenleek.substack.com/p/the-postdo...

Looking for reviewers before Christmas

AaRC TikTalk Seminars - Expression of Interest Please let us know if you are interested in presenting at the AaRC TikTalks Seminars. The seminars are held on the last Friday of every month. Speakers are currently open to graduate students (PhDs an...

Are you an Early Career Research (PhD, postdoc, new group leader) working in Animal Ancient DNA? Want to present your work to the @aarc-community.bsky.social community? Express your interest in participating in our AaRC TikTalk Seminar series with the link below! #aDNA

I hate seeing Bluesky becoming overrun with follower-chasing accounts that post a mix of unattributed photos, AI dreck, and bad photoshop jobs.

Fortunately, there are block lists:

bsky.app/profile/maur...

And this is excluding marine...so the number eould be higher 🧪😭

An interesting question that came up going over a comps proposal: do sweeps without introgression bias ABBA-BABA based D or F statistics?

A subset of a pancake stack.

A message for the #AcademicChatter folks out there: at some point in their careers, all great artists suffer from impasto syndrome. You're doing fine.

#NewPI #PhDchat

📌

Congratulations to the #USA you brought back the bourgeoisie, let’s see how long it’ll take the proletariat to wake and do something about it.

Very excited (and a bit nervous) to announce that I will be hiring two Postdocs for my new group(!) in Copenhagen to study the Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA which survives in present-day humans. Retweet will be much appreciated :)

Link for application:
candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...