Bede Constantinides

"Both bugs resided in the respective languages' C code. So any advice like 'move away from PHP' is misdirected. What is needed is a push away from C." @joaxcar.bsky.social

Can you tell whether the #ideas in a piece of writing came from a human or an AI? As AI writing becomes common, policies on AI use focus on who came up with the ideas in the text rather than who wrote it. AI detectors answer the latter, not the former. We release #IdeaLens, a detector of AI ideas.

The Conservatives want more road injuries and slower public transport.

"An estimated 2.3 million new cancer cases were attributable to infections globally in 2024… Equivalent to 12% of all cancer cases" www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Celebrated road cycling world champs with a mates race of ~20 riders in a double breakaway scenario. Podium secured for team Norway inc @nickdsandy.bsky.social 🇳🇴

We are looking for someone with a strong background in metagenomics and epidemiology to join our team for ~2 years at UKHSA to work on the mSCAPE programme. Please see (and share) the link below and feel free to message me with any enquiries. www.healthjobsuk.com/job/Canary_W...

1/ 🧬 A big #Pathoplexus milestone: you can now optionally include raw sequencing reads alongside your consensus sequences! Hosting raw reads alongside consensus data helps improve reproducibility & allow in-depth analyses. 📰 Read more: pathoplexus.org/news/2026-09...

Folks - if you're interested in how machine learning/AI can be used for microbial genomics, microbiome and metagenomics studies - please join us for a workshop in Birmingham on Thursday 8th October organised with CLIMB & NVIDIA. www.climb.ac.uk/blog/2026/09...

"All corners of academia will soon be flooded with AI-generated research....Maths and CS go first because their entire output is symbol manipulation...Biology comes later not because biologists are cleverer but because the rate-limiting step is physical" giorgio.gilest.ro/the-weimar-o...

Does an AMR gene on a plasmid diversify differently to an AMR gene on a chromosome? We are looking for a PhD student to work on this question in Bath!

More than a decade since Mykrobe first came out - v happy @martibartfast.bsky.social has developed a Go version, which means we could revive the old app, which always made it much more accessible. Same results as Mykrobe but faster.

I wanted to submit a grant proposal this week and ended up not doing it precisely because of this. I have no idea how in a project that, say, lasts from 2027 to 2032, I can promise results that cannot be achieved by an LLM in 2031 with one person prompting.

This is a VERY big one. (And yes, the fights over academic credit and what happened in the race for the proof needs to be resolved, but it is still appears that this is a big one, if true.) openai.com/index/navier...

Reason #617 cyclists don't use cycle lanes

$3.7 billion spent on APCs in 2025. That's ~1000X more than it costs to run bioRxiv/medRxiv. Worth thinking about as we consider how to fund infrastructure... arxiv.org/pdf/2608.16322

1/ 🦟 New on @Pathoplexus: Zika virus (ZIKV) is now supported! Share your ZIKV sequences as Open or Restricted-Use, just like our other pathogens. Read more: pathoplexus.org/news/2026-08... 📰

"Load-bearing"

In 2026, there is no longer any lab leak hypothesis you can state consistently with the available evidence. Despite this, it has been the dominant media narrative for six years. Read my new data-driven investigation: www.protagonist-science.com/p/biased-med...

"Smoke test"

Awful news: "Tarling was hit by ​a non-race car driving in the opposite ​direction."

David Taggart, Cardiovascular Surgeon and ‘Staunch Truthteller,’ Dies at 69

I get that airlines oversell flights, but should it not be illegal to pretend that check-in failed due to "technical issues" rather than running out of seats due to overselling? And then to advise checking in at airport when there's negligible chance of flying. Easyjet.

HIV's hidden history: New study reveals much deeper roots stretching back millions of years sciencex.com/news/2026-07...

This will make indexing k-mers in e.g. HPRC (human) and GTDB (bacteria) a breeze

I've been working on Pandedup the past weeks: a tool to quickly dedup the k-mer content of a pangenome (read: HPRCv2). Just uploaded a k=64 SPSS (k-mer spectrum preserving string set) as well: zenodo.org/records/2172... This reduces the ~1.5Tbp input to just 10.6Gbp. github.com/RagnarGrootK...

HPRC2: A human pangenome reference with near-complete coverage of common genetic variation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.21.739710v1

Also, Deacon was the motivation for engineering the k-PHF Hash Set! bsky.app/profile/curi...

My secret 4th ALGO paper is out! We show a tight space lower on non-minimal k-perfect hash functions, generalize PtrHash into a non-minimal k-PHF, and then use it to develop a hash set implementation that is up to 1.6x faster than other hash sets! With Stefan {Hermann, Walzer} and Peter Sanders

Preprint alert! arxiv.org/abs/2602.03525 TLDR: ZOR filters are STATIC filters with false positives. -Almost memory optimal: <1% overhead over the theoretical lower bound (!!!) -Fast queries: ~100 ns -Construction cannot fail A thread:

139 genomes now sequenced from the ongoing 2026 Bundibugyo virus disease outbreak in DRC, spanning 16 Health Zones. Led by INRB with support from the ARTIC network (Wellcome Trust and Gates Foundation). Full analysis: virological.org/t/genomic-ep...

"You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions. Then, somewhere in the second hour, the room quietly gets worse at making them. Not the people. The room."

Important read from ARTIC PI Placide Mbala (INRB) and @krutikakuppalli.bsky.social in @statnews.com, on what the Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak reveals about the limits of pathogen-specific diagnostics, and why we need pathogen-agnostic systems for the next emergency www.statnews.com/2026/07/01/e...

Excellent update from @pathoplexus.org this month. Pathoplexus has been central to data sharing during the ongoing Bundibugyo ebolavirus outbreak response, with ARTIC contributing developer time to Loculus, the platform behind it.

Air conditioning is not ventilation. Crisp and dry conditioned air feels fresh but often isn't. Beware of this sensory trickery.

Are you a computational immunologist or bioinformatician interested in impactful vaccine research? We're hiring a postdoc to join @psioxford.bsky.social work in vaccine immunology and evaluation, working on the ChAdOx1 Nipah vaccine. Please get in touch! my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

🧬 New preprint! We clustered 5.6 million bacterial genomes into genomically cohesive units (GCUs) 500× faster than existing tools. (In just 14 hours, 16.5 GB RAM using 48 CPUs). 🦠🐙Meet gemsparcl 💎✨! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Emergency hospital admissions fell after introduction of London’s T-charge and Ulez, study suggests

Never have I seen the car/road metaphor pushed this hard