Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿
#bioinformatics at @SANBI_SA, building bioinformatics workflows for (Pan-)African PH. health & justice! married. @pvanheus@mstdn.science
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿Thanks BridgeCrossBio for asking me to contribute to this piece on the rise of Chinese research outputs (papers + data), and where to find them. Read more (and subscribe to them) to find out. substack.com/home/post/p-...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿"Ethical research requires that participant safety remains central, not subordinate to hypothesis testing....Vulnerability should never be seen as an opportunity to advance research at the expense of those it claims to serve." @natureportfolio.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿Three days into conflict in Tigray, the warring factions are either silent, or issuing vague statements. Following a call for restraint by the African Union, the chairman of the TPLF, under whose command Tigrayan rebels are fighting, responded expressing a willingness to engage in dialogue.
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿Pretty extraordinary to think about how much cardiovascular researchers figured out, and how that turned into public health campaigns, medicines, surgeries, and emergency care that changed millions of people's lives. ourworldindata.org/cardiovascul...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿UPDATE: according to reports from Tigray regional state television, drone strikes targeted trucks in two north-east Tigray towns at 4AM local time. A driver was killed, another is injured. These would be the first civilian casualties of drone strikes in Tigray, since the Tigray war ended in 2022.
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿“Bin Chicken” is now published in Nature Methods! It substantially improves genome recovery through rational coassembly 🧬🖥️. Applied to public 🌍 metagenomes, we recovered 24,000 novel species 🦠, including 6 new phyla. doi.org/10.1038/s415... @benjwoodcroft.bsky.social @rhysnewell.bsky.social 🧵1/6
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿FoldMason is out now in @science.org. It generates accurate multiple structure alignments for thousands of protein structures in seconds. Great work by Cameron L. M. Gilchrist and @milot.bsky.social. 📄 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🌐 search.foldseek.com/foldmason 💾 github.com/steineggerla...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿Reuters reports the Trump adminstration wants to condition any future funding to @gavi.org on the organization agreeing to phase out use of vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal. I wrote late last year about how unnecessary & impractical that would be. www.statnews.com/2025/11/19/r...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿1. From lung cancer to climate change, capitalist governments are notoriously slow to recognize and remedy the negative externalities generated by corporate activity. Generative AI is no exception. Large language models are proving a disaster in numerous spheres of public life.
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿Can ever-increasing sequence databases improve phylogenetic reconstruction of a gene family? Our new preprint introduces AmpliPhy, a pipeline that automates homolog enrichment to improve gene tree inference, built on a robust phylogenomic benchmark scheme. 🧵1/n 📃 doi.org/10.64898/2026.01.26.701724
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿"The lesson is not that eradication is no longer possible because science has failed us. It is that eradication depends on a vision of public health that we have steadily abandoned." bktitanji.substack.com/p/reflection...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿This is state terror. The sides to take now are clear for all civic leaders: politicians, business leaders, media executives & editors, university presidents, partners in law firms. You stand with the people or you stand with the brutes & thugs. We will all remember. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/o...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿The chair of a federal vaccine advisory panel charted a new course for the committee in a podcast released Thursday, suggesting the public might want to reconsider the use of polio vaccines. www.statnews.com/2026/01/22/v...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿"Living Hell: the israeli prison system as a network of torture camps: 'Living Hell' follows on B’Tselem’s August 2024 report 'Welcome to Hell.' Building on the extensive research & analysis carried out for the previous report, it provides updated figures & new testimonies from 21 Palestinians ...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿The US's withdrawal from the WHO today makes it a good time to reflect on their shifting relationship over the years (article from March 2025) www.statnews.com/2025/03/07/u...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿My latest www.hauntologies.net/p/getting-us...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿I'm going to say something that might get me yelled at: while it is certainly true that America has taken a nasty turn in the last year, the return to great powers politics has been coming a long time, and plenty of other countries - including Canada! - have been part of making that happen
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿On the turning away From the pale and downtrodden And the words they say Which we won't understand Don't accept that what's happening Is just a case of others' suffering Or you'll find that you're joining in The turning away -Gilmour and Moore, Pink Floyd
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿“But what deeply troubles me now is that for all the steps we've taken toward integration, I've come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house." Dr. King said this famous quote on March 27th, 1968, mere days before his murder. But the context around the quote is interesting...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿For all those involved in drafting so-called AI guidelines, but being overwhelmed with nonsense, this is a lifesaver. Great work by Dagmar and Ariel! Resisting Enchantment and Determinism: How to critically engage with AI university guidelines. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿Inside the Doctors Without Borders Clinics That Israel Is Closing in Gaza www.nytimes.com/2026/01/17/w...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿Do you study disinformation or want to start working in that area? Come to the DSI June 15-18th with @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @katestarbird.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, @rcalo.bsky.social, @naomioreskes.bsky.social, @emmaspiro.bsky.social, and many more. disinfoinstitute.org
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿This photo was taken in 1911 using glass plate technology by Herbert Ponting who was part of Scott's Antarctic expedition, The composition and detail are exquisite with the band of white snow/ice creating a perfect frame around the two people and the ship in the distance Iconic imo
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿NY is considering a Medical Misinformation Task Force to counter the misinformation coming out of HHS and its lunatic leadership. The idea is to have a group experts that evaluate & respond to federal recommendations... Interesting. legislation.nysenate.gov/pdf/bills/20...
- Prof Christie was the DVC for Research when I joined the University of the Western Cape some decades ago. The struggle against Apartheid was brutal but also cultivated the "ethical muscle" of people such as Renfrew Christie, people we can be genuinely proud of as South Africans and as humanity.
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿Phold's manuscript is now available @narjournal.bsky.social thanks to @susiegriggo.bsky.social @npbhavya.bsky.social @vijinim.bsky.social @linsalrob.bsky.social @martinsteinegger.bsky.social @milot.bsky.social @eunbelivable.bsky.social & others not on bsky #phagesky academic.oup.com/nar/article/...
- Stoked to finally have a preprint out for Phold, our tool that uses protein structural information to enhance phage genome annotation #phagesky 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿There’s a big story everyone is missing—but this article hits on it. We aren’t just seeing public health dismantled bc we’ve been taken over by conspiracy theorists and lunatics. What we’re really seeing is the giant, predatory, underegulated wellness industry come to Washington.
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿Venezuela attack, Greenland threats and Gaza assault mark the collapse of international legal order theconversation.com/venezuela-at...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿#Libya #Chad #Sudan @emadbadi.bsky.social 'In weakly governed borderlands, the market for #mercenary labour and the market for #weapons interact to entrench a regionalized economy of insecurity.. networks in which weapons, fighters, fuel and [ICT] move together' globalinitiative.net/analysis/imp...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿
How China Curbs Free Speech Beyond Its Borders: Legal Strategies Of Transnational Censorship. Dr Ge Chen, Associate Professor in Global Media and Information Law, Durham Law School. www.swlaw.edu/sites/defaul... - Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿A lot of the times it’s because 1) they just don’t like crowds not under their control and/or 2) they see the vigils as a form of resistance, since they most likely had a hand in those deaths
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿If the Palestine Action hunger strikers die - which they could do at any moment, as they are now very close to the end - it will be the government that killed them. Today’s column explains why. Please share, and write urgently to your MP. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿I want people to realize prosecuting the police is always a long shot and even when successful that it hasn’t produced any observable change in behavior from the police in general.
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿"An elder is someone who is older than olive trees" is about asking why does the Israeli state harm olive trees, and reflecting on how I came to loathe state borders as someone who grew up in Lebanon to a Palestinian grandfather -- plus my love of trains. www.hauntologies.net/p/an-elder-i...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿CIDRAP Op-Ed: Quiet dismantling: How ‘shared decision-making’ weakens vaccine policy and harms kids by @jakescottMD The category sounds reasonable, even collaborative. It is neither. And it will put children’s health and lives at risk. www.cidrap.umn.edu/c...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿I have no interest in trying to dunk on anyone but there is absolutely no evidence for this at all. SARS-CoV-2 has not been demonstrated to make you more susceptible to other infections by impairing the function of your immune system.
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿PSA: twitter, X, is doing new terms of service that basically make it so that any comtent you share on there including DMs and photos is theirs and they can use it for "any purpose" including commercial use. So, if you have a page you’ve left up and don’t want them there’s time to act 1/
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿If you made a Venn diagram of every weird person I knew in Silicon Valley during the first dot-com boom, centrifuged it, extracted the pellet, and re-suspended it in high-proof eugenics with a splash of AI, you'd end up with something like this. It'll take a strong stomach to read this "gift" link.
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿If you want to explore the data further, I've put together a dataset and code to create these heatmaps for any country or childhood vaccine: github.com/saloni-nd/mi...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿👇👇
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿1/6 Our paper today – www.nature.com/articles/s41... work from Kenya - shows protective antibodies against falciparum malaria sporozoites work against sporozoites injected into the skin, not against sporozoites injected into veins. Why does this matter?
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿Writing this I had to look through Grok's mentions. Earlier I counted around 8 requests PER MINUTE featuring "bikini" and "her". Thousands of women and girls stripped each day. I found users stripping dozens of women per hour, from female celebrities to gym selfies. www.thetimes.com/uk/technolog...
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿Children will die with RFK Jr.'s new vaccine recommendations. We're NOT doing the "experts disagree" game. The US vaccine schedule was painstakingly constructed through a deep & thorough process by experts with unquestionable expertise. This is policy by fiat. It is pre-meditated murder. 1/
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿The resistance in Myanmar isn't always easy to donate to directly One place is: www.liberatemyanmar.net There are also orgs doing humanitarian aid work in areas the Junta won't allow aid to get to which also helps! Kachin Relief Fund: kachinrelief.org.uk Karen Women's Organisation: karenwomen.org
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿Sak passe! Happy Independence Day to the Haitian homies & thank you for lighting the way to Black liberation! 🇭🇹
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿There has been genocide in each year of the 2020ies so far, what a cursed decade. A decade we kicked off with a deadly pandemic, lest we forget. Here's to bucking the trend in 26. Wishing you a happy new year friends.
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿The rumors about daycare centers are extremely "fit" for virality: having both novelty & familiarity (drawing on anti-immigrant tropes of criminality & exploitation); making emotional/identity appeals; are *participatory* in that ppl can create their own “evidence” by investigating local centers.
- It is never a bad time to stand against oppression. This is me with Dr Louis Reynolds (retired associated professor of paediatrics and long-time activist) #hcw4palestine #palestineaction #freethehungerstrikers #hcw4p
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s tweets were wrong, but he is no ‘anti-white Islamist’. Why does the British right want you to believe he is? | Naomi Klein
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿Working with big spatial data sets in #rstats? You should try {duckspatial}. The dev version of #duckspatial (soon on CRAN) uses #duckdb to perform super fast and memory efficient spatial operations cidree.github.io/duckspatial/... In a benchmark against, {sf}....
- Reposted by Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿The Post interviewed almost 100 sources for this comprehensive, revelatory account of how RFK Jr. has disrupted public health in America. It's the capstone to a year of extensive reporting by @rachelroubein.bsky.social, @lenasun.bsky.social & @laurenweberhp.bsky.social. Gift link: wapo.st/48YSPC1
