Rupert Overall @rupertoverall@qoto.org

@statto And I guess we would want to know this information at the individual level. Are the people living to an old age those who developed 'life-limiting' illnesses later (presumably there is a very strong relationship between those values!)
It should be possible to dig some relevant data out of long-running cohort studies - I will look around.

@statto Interesting and important thread. However, isn't the rate of lifespan increase higher than the rate of healthspan increase? This would mean than the fraction of the population suffering from age-related conditions would still be rising. [I don't have the numbers to hand to support this, but I thought this was the case]

@statto Bringing up this issue didn't go well for Macron, so I suspect we are not in for major changes any time soon.

@nakdim Yes, I use #Zotero daily for collecting papers (one-click plugin in Firefox), for reading (sync to the excellent iPad app), citing (in Word and RStudio mostly) and working with shared libraries (project-specific literature collections together with my students and international collaborations).

@rlmcelreath That was certainly one of his greatest scientific achievements (especially as the cookie was invented over a hundred years after his death) 😜

The latest update from the COVID-19 Disease Map consortium is now available as a preprint.

In this work, we show how the map can be used for #modelling of #COVID disease mechanisms and #DrugDiscovery. With new winter waves beginning, there is still much to be done in this field.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.17.520865v1?med=mas

#SBGN #DiseaseMaps #SystemsBiology #SystemsMedicine

Skis out in #Dresden today for a truly gorgeous wintry 4th Advent!

That's like the 'Turkey test' - to see if someone can spell it correctly without the 'r'...

RT @hillermich@twitter.com
We have a postdoc opening to integrate TOGA (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.09.08.507143v1) with transcriptomics data to generate high-quality gene annotations for bats, cetaceans, snakes & fish genomes sequenced by us and others. Pls apply and RT. https://tbg.senckenberg.de/hillerlab/jobs/ @LOEWE_TBG@twitter.com @Senckenberg@twitter.com

@darachm @ewanbirney The model fitting in this case would equate to selection - but that is not what drives novelty in evolution. The ‘new features’ come from remixing parental genomes and from mutation. The models just work with that material.

@tonic My idea here was not to replace peer review, but to make the content of the reports more accessible. Not only for machine-readability, but also for re-flowing text (Kindle, web/mobile, variable font size, dictation) and to enable mark-up of semantic concepts (molecules, species, reagents, drugs) that would reduce ambiguity immensely.

Human peer reviewers could certainly use this info to assist them (and no energy-hungry AI would necessarily be needed).

If we forget about politics for a minute and think about the _practical_ side of scientific publishing, we might find that the two are linked.

Imagine how much easier it would be to verify scientific claims if those claims were made in terms of structured statements (which could also be parsed by machine learning algorithms).

My weekend task: extracting sensible machine-readable text from a scientific journal article. Of course, articles are published using PDF - so any text flow has been completely garbled. Why do we do this in 2022?

@ewanbirney
So speciation is just biology overfitting lots of models to local problems?

@vishalkatti I do this regularly - mostly so I can use the help features. I am always forgetting the parameters to my own custom functions! It is so much easier to pull up the man page from within RStudio while coding (than having to inspect the complex source each time).

Also good practice for keeping your code organised and versioned.