Nick Loman

I'm surprised this hasn't been covered in the international media because it 💯 should - and is a taste of what's to come re. AI and hacking. In a nutshell - millions of Danish social security numbers + personal data were stolen. All enabled by AI and vibe coding. politiken.dk/danmark/art1...

I am shocked and deeply saddened by the loss of Helen Branswell. I tried to read everything she published because of her mastery in distilling complexity without sacrificing accuracy. She always asked the best questions and I learned a great deal from her work. May her memory be a blessing.

From @alexbateman1.bsky.social in #OUP 's @bioinfoadv.bsky.social journal | Peer Bork (1963-2026): pioneer of #ComputationalBiology, architect of #Bioinformatics #Resources, and visionary #Microbiome researcher | #OpenScience CC/ @embl.org @ebi.embl.org | 🧬🖥️🧪🔓❤️ ⬇️ academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

If #AI companies really believed these models were conscious then they'd have to explain why it's ethical to keep them imprisoned and force them to answer inane questions and generate junk images 24/7 but they don't believe it so let's just move on

Huge congratulations to @hannahtriv.bsky.social and the team on this fantastic work! 👏 Brilliant to see long-read metagenomics revealing new insights into the gut microbiome and antimicrobial resistance in advanced liver disease. Highlights the potential role of MDR Enterococcus in cirrhosis! 🧬🦠

As AI increases both productivity & ease of creating slop, there's a big challenge for those of us disseminating science. This from @pracheeac.bsky.social is an essential read. [disclaimer: she & I've spent 10+ years a̶r̶g̶u̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ discussing this stuff] 1/n pracheeac.substack.com/p/arxiv-is-k...

Nature: AI biohazard hype must not divert attention from the real risks we face now by Saskia Popescu @nature.com @saskiapopescu.bsky.social bit.ly/4AQkwZo

I am assuming there’s a similar problem at @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social @medrxivpreprint.bsky.social ? It’s worrying. cc @richardsever.bsky.social #AcademicSky #AI

It makes no sense to me that Microsoft do Office365 2FA through WhatsApp.

While the news & white papers breathlessly cover the idea of a threat of a future AI bioweapon, an Ebola outbreak is escalating, having killed nearly 4,000 people so far. The Trump admin has diminished US support to control it w/travel bans, an eroded CDC & a hobbled WHO www.who.int/emergencies/...

How do Burkholderia multivorans bacteria adaptively evolve during infections of the cystic fibrosis airway? A longtime collab and intensive study of 8 patients links bacterial adaptations to disease progression. Our findings also unite prior studies. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

David Quammen's essay in The New York Times today closes with this paragraph. It's both a scientific falsehood, and an incredibly dangerous narrative. If you're willing to give me five minutes of your time, I'd like to explain why.

Here are my first thoughts as a phage person about the @anthropic.com announcement about a novel enzyme on a phage: www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-tho...

This is spectacular: kudos to whoever did it meridian-ai.info

Anthropic's new biology lab released a technical report on using AI to discover new enzymes. Experts I talked to say "discover" is doing a lot of work here. Story: nyti.ms/4xOGWI7

Lab leak people on X are demanding that the editor of Nature be fired because we said Covid-19 is zoonotic in the first sentence of our paper

Steve Busby's scientific family. An impressive career achievement.

Celebrating 40 years of Steve Busby’s exceptional research career today @imibirmingham.bsky.social

baltic v1.0.0 is live! Get it via pip or clone from Github repo. Now with documentation (baltic.readthedocs.io) & a gallery of tutorials & examples (phylo-baltic.github.io/baltic-gallery, still WIP). Huge thanks to @barney-potter.bsky.social for all the initiative & help along the way. #ViroSky

baltic: the Backronymed Adaptable Lightweight Tree vIsualisation Code https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.20.752947v1

Scientist here: It is widely known inside science that this—top-down imposition of a research agenda—leads to mostly rote, boring, non-innovative work. Building an institute to do discovery science is hard: you hire young people, put them together, hope synergies arise and ideas fall out.

Take a look at the examples Antrophic provides for research that they blocked, and it's immediately clear almost much all of it is just basic research - but research that has gotten scary-sounding names via the media. An example, put Ebola genomes into Claude Science and ask for a TMRCA > blocked!

From @wkhuber.bsky.social and colleagues comparing foundation models against simple baselines. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Controversial, not so controversial, take - the dangers posed by AI are real, current, and well-documented. Those do not include human extinction within a decade, nor do they include AI-manufactured-printed-out-in-the-lab bioweapons, yet, those are the ones we chose to focus on. Good lord.

AI acting more like a real academic than we’d like here

CHATGPT AND CLAUDE ARE DOWN!! Teachers, time for an exam

Top artificial-intelligence models failed to predict the biological consequences of rewriting a virus's entire DNA code. go.nature.com/4rbHdmN

What if post-Trump America is even *worse*? 1/

New post, on why your vibe-coded dashboard looks terrible:

Glad to share StrainSpy, a new method developed by Sudaraka and co which identifies strain-level associations in metagenomics using ANI estimates from tools like Sylph. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Cool preprint about strain-level metagenome association studies using k-mer containment. Mallawaarachchi et al. from @gerrythill.bsky.social's group. I tried tackling this in our original paper for sylph (sylph-docs.github.io), but this seems to be much more sophisticated. Excited to read!

🎯 "Personally, when I see GenAI images in a talk or paper, I treat the rest of the talk or paper with more scrutiny and skepticism than I would have otherwise."

This morning we remembered four computational biology pioneers, who the world sadly lost over the past year. Thank you to all speakers for your moving tributes at ECCB. #ECCB2026 #Bioinformatics

Have you ever seen this iconic image of the Ebola virus, from the first known outbreak in DRC in 1976? An electron microscopic image, it was captured by #CDC 's Fred Murphy, a virological giant and a very kind interviewee. He died yesterday. He will be missed, but his scientific legacy lives on.

'Our findings illustrate a curious paradox: despite universities being key producers of evidence and seeking the use of their research to inform public policymaking, they are less adept at using evidence to inform their own decision-making.' blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

I'm really frustrated by the constant fear-mongering about AI-designed superviruses. Can we focus on the things that should actually worry us, such as measles? blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/im-sorry-y...