New Houldcroft lab preprint! doi.org/10.1101/2024.0… What does the landscape of T cell immunity to adenoviruses look like in healthy English adults (and why should we care)?

A map of the itineraries of the 'Holy Roman Emperors', from a political-science style paper on medieval itinerancy.

Studies like this consistently find extremely high heritability of autism. Will this overwhelming evidence that it is a *genetic condition* receive any coverage? Of course not, because we're distracted by microbiome nonsense...

OUT TODAY!!! Editorial on ancestry/ ethnicity/ race and cardiometabolic disease inequalities. Working with stellar colleagues has been brilliantly informative & thought-provoking 🌟 Nish Chaturvedi MRC LHA @ UCL gibran hemani Sarah Watkins Aylwyn Scally george davey smith 🔗 + 🧵👇

⬇ Giant pedigrees connect 100s of ancient genomes from the early Medieval Awars of the Carpathian basin. Strictly patrilineal and avoiding any consanguinity whatsoever! It's mind-boggling what new insights into past social organization aDNA can create 🤯💀🧬

Last week, we released our preprint on Poseidon, which seeks to make archaeogenetic data more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reproducible, by defining a data package standard, software tools and public repositories and cloud infrastructure 1/12

This is wonderful. The Voyager probes have a special resonance for my generation. Their spectacular discoveries inspired us when we were kids, and they are still out there, still in contact with us as they go deeper into space. Thank you NASA for this.

Cultural Revolution in China, Iranian Revolution, Hitler Youth in Germany, Khmer Rouge (which led to the Cambodian genocide) all had student support against the ruling class.
University activists must actually study history at their universities, and not just engage in activism.

1/6. Now the Institute of Economic Affairs, the right wing think tank that understood economic affairs so well that it inspired Liz Truss’ disastrous mini-budget, is getting in on the act of supporting Kemi Badenoch’s historical denialism.

Let’s look at the ‘argument’ here. It…

Further review drama update: I was able to find the preprint on @bioRxiv, so in lieu of anything from the journal I will just review that for now. Maybe journals should think about using this model in future and save us all time and money..

Dear journal, it's _your_ responsibility to get the review files to me, not mine to navigate your busted website, or try to find a contact in a bunch of no-reply emails.

Next time I will just wait until a human mails me looking for the review, and ask them for the files.

I finally read the new preprint by Trevor Cousins , Aylwyn Scally and Richard Durbin on inferring deep structure from human genomes. Fascinating and impressive work! To me, on a technical level surprising was the finding that the transition matrix 1/5

The RTE Player's interval music is a brilliant simulation of a broken CD player.

We find evidence that Harbin, Dali, and Kabwe are likely Denisovans or their close kin! Using gene regulation, which predicts traits with >85% accuracy, we scanned the fossil record and found a remarkable fit to predicted Denisovan anatomy. See🧵👇 biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

I'm very sad to hear that Daniel Dennett has died. I greatly enjoyed his books Consciousness Explained and Elbow Room, and I hope I won't annoy too many people if I express my opinion that what he said in those books was basically right. 1/

Is there a term for a straw man argument about a straw man? Do they cancel out or reinforce?

And for the record, the Human Genome Project absolutely did revolutionize our understanding of how life works and how disease occurs, over subsequent decades.

Two new chapters from my open-access textbook in human population genetics are now online:
- Population structure: I. Ancestry estimation
- Population structure: II. More about admixture
web.stanford.edu/group/pritchar…