Willem van Schaik

Man with underpants on his head tries to rob Belgian supermarket, then flees in a stolen hearse. euroweeklynews.com/2026/10/26/m...

A plasmid that’s 1.58 million base pairs long, about 30X the size of a typical E. coli plasmid. Its relatives were found in hundreds of microbiomes worldwide. #MicroSky

New pre-print and tool alert ! This one addressing a long-standing viromics issue: we were missing a tool that can reliably assign broad host categories (e.g. prokaryote vs eukaryote) to novel viruses. VHAMSTeR is now available for this thanks to very talented postdoc @susiegriggo.bsky.social !!

Great post by @marcbonten.bsky.social on the silent pandemic of AMR and the difficulties of attributing mortality to AMR mbonten.substack.com/p/amr-the-si...

💯 this is my takeaway. Both APACHE and Charlson Comorbidity Index were top-ranked predictors. Old age was also one of the top predictors for poor outcomes. The key thing was if strains were carbapenem or cipro resistant, mortality skyrockets. If you can't treat the infection timely, patients succumb

If I need to sum up the experience of living in Britain, it might be this sign

Great preprint by @bananabenana.bsky.social & colleagues 'Canonical Klebsiella pneumoniae virulence factors and strain lineage are not primary drivers of patient mortality' 'Patient outcomes (...) are primarily determined by host demographic and clinical features' www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

Happy 54th anniversary of the day Roger Moore recorded this in his Live and Let Die filming diary www.google.co.uk/books/editio...

Had this idea in lockdown, half-built it, forgot about it, remembered it again, though might as well finish it.

Interesting paper: 'Protein malnutrition facilitates intestinal colonization with highly resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae through disrupted intestinal microbial metabolism' journals.asm.org/doi/full/10....

I scored 3/12 and thought the £1750 gilet would cost £25. I work at UBS apparently.

I just typed the phrase 'ASM (the organisation formerly known as the American Society for Microbiology)' @asm.org

What's up with the number 4 today?

It's a double-edged sword. We just had a trainee give a Claude-supplemented (html format) presentation in our joint journal club. Slides were indeed dense, but the live animations of mutation-rate evolution simulations were extremely helpful in teaching the topic to non-experts.

The last AI driven ppt I saw was technically correct but so vapid that no one asked a single question the entire journal club. It was a discussion killer.

Nice letters you don't get every day

I have spent 20 years telling myself, and the people I work with, to not put too much text on slides, and use at least 20 picas font size. But now it looks like ChatGPT's integration with Powerpoint is destroying scientific presentations. Insanely complex slides, poor visuals and so much text.

'Vibe-coded alternatives for Adobe products are surprisingly good' www.xda-developers.com/tried-replac...

and now for something completely racist

Isn't Liz Truss looking for a job?

"...no one is ever really interested in anyone else’s AI output. ... It is like listening to someone else’s dreams. No one cares." Spot on, from @gilesyb.bsky.social gileswilkes.substack.com/p/can-you-tr...

Birmingham University students' meal deal society goes viral - BBC News share.google/WsRLcsx766AE...

Great post.

Mark Zuckerberg trying to drink Guinness like a hoo-man.

'Up to' doing a lot of heavy lifting here

Andy Burnham says UK authorities are “clear” there was Russian interference in the Brexit referendum as @catneilan.bsky.social reports in today’s @theobserveruk.bsky.social observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

Shocking news. I thought Denmark (and its ethics review boards) would be better than this. www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

Things I saw today (Apparently, the first thing represents the second)

This man will go far in the current global political climate www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Six months ago:

Fascinating insights into the early history of Zotero, including the fact that the name is the Albanian word for "to learn well or master". Hats off to everyone involved in this project. Also if you're not using Zotero, why not? Dump that closed rubbish you're using now and switch.

This

Great paper 'Synergy between Enterobacteriaceae and diet mediates competition between dominant Bacteroidales in the human gut' 'Enterobacteriaceae synergized with dietary components to promote Segatella dominance in human and mouse gut communities.' www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Today marks 20 years since I started at the University of Birmingham @unibirmingham.bsky.social as an absolutely terrified PhD student. At that point I assumed I'd be here for the three years and then leave but I've not quite got around to that yet....

'A spokesperson for the state of Tennessee told us, “We’re all praying for Christa and we really hope she makes it, so that we can kill her properly next time."'

NEWS! US doctors battling to save the life of woman so government can kill her properly newsthump.com/2026/10/01/u...

From a discussion of updating a department website...

This article from a month ago puts the victim in context. Abused by people and system that should have cared. This is upsetting reading, sorry. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

"An ambulance was seen arriving at the prison where Pike was to be executed and then leaving. Medical aid was being administered, according to online federal court records." The utter absurdity of the state trying twice to kill someone and then calling an ambulance. We must end the death penalty.

Barbaric. Capital punishment has no place in a civilised nation.

Nobody could have foreseen this.