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Online Medical Advice.
Clinical virology, epidemiology, bio statistics, genomics, bioinformatics,

[ilyas sahin, MD @ilyassahinMD]

The complexity inside a single human cell is almost impossible to comprehend…

[Christine Ross DVM @AnimalHRV]

@GeniusGTX https://t.co/BTH1DYGAnI

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

A visualization showing how gravity curves spacetime

[🎞️ Daniel Ibarra]

[Science Magazine @ScienceMagazine]

Homing pigeons orient themselves by the Sun’s position under sunny skies and rely on their magnetic sense when it is cloudy.

Under overcast conditions, homing pigeons with their normal liver macrophages had little issue flying a 19-kilometer route for which they had been trained.

When injected with clodronate liposomes that knocked out the liver macrophages, the pigeons could navigate the route without issue when it was sunny.

Under overcast skies, however, homing pigeons with depleted liver macrophages struggled mightily to find their way home��suggesting the immune cells play a role in the birds’ magnetic sense.

Learn more: https://t.co/hM3HS8K5Kl @NewsfromScience

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

10 WEBSITES THAT WON A WAR AGAINST BILLION-DOLLAR COMPANIES

Every one got taken down, sued, or buried. Every one came back stronger. Bookmark them before they "disappear" again.

1. https://t.co/eCHA5IoZef
The free Netflix Hollywood couldn't stop. It fuses Jellyfin, Radarr and Sonarr into one Netflix-style screen you browse, you click, it streams, all from a server you own. No subscription, no account, no one to bill you.

2. https://t.co/1oR0fCxbK4
Publishers spent years getting Tachiyomi killed. So someone turned it into a server you host yourself. Thousands of manga sources, running on your own machine, that no legal team on earth can touch.

3. https://t.co/oGvSFqW3yz
Mozilla killed Firefox Send because it was too private. The community brought it back from the dead. End-to-end encrypted files with self-destructing links answering to no company.

4. https://t.co/OAhaYocdxH
The library so big it made Elsevier's legal team cry. 40 million books, 98 million papers. They've chased it across domains for years. It's still here. It's still growing.

5. https://t.co/92NhR6TmDI
Google delisted the entire site from search. It didn't matter. The biggest free-tools wiki on the internet just kept going every tool, every guide, one page.

6. https://t.co/sylORxDadP
A Chromium browser with an ad-blocker Google can never disable no Manifest V3 crippling, no tracking. It does exactly what Chrome made illegal. Still shipping.

7. https://t.co/fPZaWKS40J
Downloads your entire Spotify library full quality, album art, metadata straight to your drive, so you actually own it. They keep trying to break it. It keeps working.

8. https://t.co/BVi18RdZyf
A community archived thousands of concerts artists never officially released shows that exist nowhere else on earth. Free, organized, and growing every single day.

9. https://t.co/VXFiMyanRS
Midjourney-quality image generation on your own PC. Unlimited, uncensored, zero settings, $0. No company can revoke it, rate-limit it, or "update" it away.

10. https://t.co/CG5ZANosXI
Google Photos, but on a server you own. Face recognition, AI search, albums all private. A dev built it because he was done with Google training AI on his family photos.

The pattern is always the same: they take it down, the internet rebuilds it. You can't sue open-source. Bookmark all 10.

[Jesus Rodriguez Baño @jesusrbano]

First reported case of Andes hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome treated with a combination of favipiravir, ribavirin, icatibant and baricitinib
@CMIJournal @ESCMID
@SEIMC_ @javimembrillo
https://t.co/6Uc0vJ27wd

[CaliforniaHeartBavariaHome 😷📯 @lgoshen]

Can the poorly-"quarantined" cruise ship contacts spread Andes-Hantavirus to local rodent populations (e.g., via wastewater, household waste bins)? Remember when half the white-tailed deer population in the USA suddenly had SARS-CoV-2, and zoo animals died from it in 2021? Oops?

[CryptoGoos @cryptogoos]

🇨🇳 CHINA JUST ROLLED OUT A NATIONAL ID SYSTEM FOR HUMANOID ROBOTS.

They built the global standard.

Every robot now carries a 29-digit ID.

Modeled on China's citizen ID, but with cross-border tracking baked into the first 2 digits.

This isn't surveillance. It's a passport system.

The play: set the framework domestically, scale the install base, export the protocol as the global default.

Same playbook that made Huawei the backbone of 5G.

While the West argues about whether AI needs rules, China is already writing them.

[Clash Report @clashreport]

Putin has launched a $26 billion state-backed longevity initiative, driven by his personal obsession with aging. It includes organ bioprinting, growing human organs inside mini-pigs, gene therapy, and cryotherapy.

His daughter and a close ally lead the effort, though critics say it has produced little peer-reviewed science and may be more about securing funding than real results.

Source: WSJ

[Patient LIGODI @Ligodi]

L’OMS a publié les recommandations de ses groupes d’experts réunis pour évaluer les candidats vaccins et traitements contre le virus Bundibugyo.

Sur les traitements

Trois candidats sont prioritaires pour des essais cliniques : les anticorps monoclonaux MBP134 et Maftivimab, ainsi que l’antiviral remdesivir. Une combinaison anticorps monoclonal et remdesivir est également recommandée pour évaluation.

Sur la prévention des contacts

L’antiviral oral obeldesivir est identifié comme candidat prioritaire pour la prophylaxie post-exposition. Les experts notent que cette approche dépend d’un suivi des contacts efficace, ce qui reste difficile dans certaines zones affectées de la RDC.

Sur les vaccins

Le candidat le plus prometteur est le vaccin rVSV Bundibugyo, développé par IAVI. Sept à neuf mois seront nécessaires avant un essai clinique.

Le second, ChAdOx1 Bundibugyo, développé par Oxford et le Serum Institute of India, pourrait être disponible pour des essais dans deux à trois mois. Mais des données animales supplémentaires sont encore nécessaires.

Sur l’Ervebo

L’OMS est claire : l’Ervebo ne doit pas être utilisé hors d’un cadre de recherche strictement contrôlé. Les preuves de protection croisée contre le Bundibugyo restent limitées et non concluantes.

En attendant, la riposte repose sur les outils disponibles : surveillance, isolement, suivi des contacts, enterrements sécurisés et engagement communautaire.

Sur le candidat vaccin russe

Africa CDC a annoncé avoir reçu un message du ministre russe de la Santé indiquant que la Russie avait développé un vaccin susceptible de protéger contre le Bundibugyo. Ce vaccin est développé par l’Institut Gamaleya à Moscou. Il cible la souche Zaïre et non spécifiquement le Bundibugyo. Aucune donnée scientifique publique n’a été publiée. Africa CDC a prévu des réunions avec l’Institut Gamaleya pour en savoir plus.

PL

[Science Magazine @ScienceMagazine]

When it comes to assessing breast cancer risk, most datasets that inform existing models come from white women.

Now, an emergent #AI-based predictor trained on people from diverse demographics can evaluate breast cancer risk accurately regardless of patients’ race or ethnicity. https://t.co/xRx2GKRVAG @ScienceAdvances

[Seth Howes @SethSHowes]

I just sequenced a human genome to 30× coverage entirely at home.

As far as I know, this is the first time this has been done.

I didn’t step foot in a lab once. Every step - from saliva collection, to running the sequencer - took place in a single room with a dining table + kitchenette.

Six weeks ago, I had never done wet lab biology before.

I used an Oxford Nanopore P2 Solo - the only commercially available sequencing device portable enough to do 30x human genome sequencing at home.

Biggest takeaway - I could build something that combined software, hardware, and molecular biology far faster than I thought was possible.

I can name >100 specific instances where AI helped me solve a technical problem that would previously have blocked me because I lacked access to a domain expert.

For example: how do I save my sequencing run when my DNA extraction yield is 4x lower than I need it to be, and I have this limited set of reagents to hand?

To make this work, I had to navigate multiple disciplines:

- writing software to monitor sequencing runs and orchestrate remote GPU infra for basecalling
- learning + executing 5 hour long molecular biology protocols
- building a hardware device to quantify DNA concentration

Apologies for the hyperbole, but I feel super lucky to be living in 2026.

A few weeks ago I decided to sequence a human genome to 30x at home.

Then I actually did it. And I did it really quickly.

[Yusuf Abramjee @Abramjee]

The South African Health Products Regulatory Authority and the South African Pharmacy Council have intensified action against the unlawful manufacturing and distribution of unregistered GLP-1 and GIP medicines used for weight loss and diabetes treatment.

The crackdown follows a joint investigation and inspection conducted on 11 May 2026 at iDexis (Pty) Ltd in Silverton, Pretoria.

During the operation, authorities seized all injectable GLP-1/GIP products found at the facility, including products containing semaglutide, tirzepatide, and combination formulations.

According to SAHPRA and SAPC, the company was allegedly producing and supplying these medicines under the pretext of “compounding”, but outside the legal framework allowed under South African law.

Compounding is only permitted for preparing medicine for an individual patient based on a valid prescription and cannot be used for large-scale manufacturing, advertising, or commercial distribution.

Investigators uncovered serious regulatory and safety concerns at the facility.

Findings included the alleged illegal importation of semaglutide and tirzepatide active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), lack of analytical testing to confirm the medicines’ identity, potency and purity, poor sterile manufacturing conditions, contamination risks, inadequate equipment for aseptic preparation, and the absence of a proper HVAC system required for safe pharmaceutical production.

Authorities also found that the room used to manufacture the GLP-1/GIP products did not meet the standards required for sterile injectable medicines.

In addition, no pharmacovigilance system was in place to monitor or respond to adverse drug reactions.

SAHPRA said it has already received reports of adverse events, including hospitalisations, linked to the use of these products.

As part of the enforcement action, SAHPRA ordered the seizure of all finished products found on site and instructed the company to conduct a full recall of affected medicines distributed through pharmacies, healthcare providers, and other channels.

SAHPRA CEO Dr Boitumelo Semete-Makokotlela warned that unlawful manufacturing, importation, advertising, and distribution of unregistered medicines pose a serious threat to public health and said the regulator would continue taking decisive action against entities violating the Medicines and Related Substances Act.

SAPC CEO Vincent Tlala said pharmacists and pharmacy support staff involved in the unlawful sale, compounding, or distribution of unregistered GLP-1 medicines could face severe disciplinary action, including possible removal from the professional register.

Members of the public have been urged to consult qualified healthcare professionals for advice on weight management and diabetes treatment, and to report any suspicious medicines or adverse reactions to SAHPRA.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A 22-year-old graduate student in Kazakhstan got so angry at journal paywalls in 2011 that she built a pirate website holding 88 million scientific papers, and last month she turned the whole thing into an AI that lets you ask one question and get the actual research as the answer.

Her name is Alexandra Elbakyan, and the website is called Sci-Hub.

The AI she just launched is called Sci-Bot. It lives at https://t.co/6w0IBtOEYB and almost nobody outside academia knows it exists yet.

Here is the story, because it is one of the strangest things to happen in science publishing in the last 50 years.

Elbakyan was born in Almaty in 1988, the year the Soviet Union started to collapse. She taught herself programming at 12. She read Soviet science books that explained things her family used to call miracles. She got into computer security at university and graduated in 2009 with a degree she barely needed because by then she was already a serious hacker.

Alexandra moved to Moscow that fall. Then Germany. Then a research internship in the United States. She was working on brain-computer interfaces, the kind of research that requires you to read hundreds of papers a year just to keep up with the field.

And every single one of those papers was locked behind a journal paywall that cost between 30 and 50 dollars to read once.

She did the math. A graduate student in Kazakhstan could not afford to read science.

The first thing she did was learn how to get around the paywalls one paper at a time. She passed the trick around to other students. They asked her for papers constantly. She got tired of doing it manually.

So in September 2011, in three days, she wrote a script that automated the whole thing. A user pastes a DOI. The script logs in through a donated institutional credential. The paper comes back free. The website caches it.

The next person who asks for that paper gets it instantly because the previous request already saved a copy.

That was Sci-Hub. Three days of code. One graduate student. Done.

15 years later, the cache holds 88 million scientific papers. Almost every piece of scholarly literature published before 2020 is sitting on her servers. Researchers in 190 countries use it. Studies in Nature have shown that roughly half of all academic paper downloads worldwide now go through Sci-Hub, not the publishers who actually own the copyrights.

Elsevier sued her in 2015 and won a 15 million dollar judgment. She did not pay. The American Chemical Society sued her and won an injunction. She did not comply. Courts in India, France, Russia, and the UK have tried to block the domain. She just moves it. https://t.co/3sAWJzNe8I. https://t.co/tGIETesZ8i. https://t.co/H5WQ1f9lqR. The site has had over 20 domains and is still up.

Nature put her on its list of the 10 people who mattered most to science in 2016. The New York Times compared her to Edward Snowden. The Verge called her the pirate queen of science.

She has not been to the United States in over a decade because she would be arrested at the airport.

The Sci-Bot launch in April 2026 is the part that nobody is talking about.

She took the 88 million paper database and put a small language model on top of it. You ask a question in plain English. The model searches the entire shadow library, pulls the relevant papers, synthesizes an answer grounded in real citations, and links you to the full text of every source. Free. No login. No institutional credential. No paywall.

Three real scientists tested it for a Chemical and Engineering News article last month. They asked it medical and chemistry questions. The radiologist said the answer he got was usable. The chemist said the gaps in recent literature were obvious but the older science was solid. The publisher community is furious.

What she built is what the paid academic AI tools are trying to build. Except the paid ones are limited to what their parent publisher legally owns. Hers is limited to almost nothing.

Alexandra still lives somewhere in Russia. She does not give her address. She does not do video interviews. She gives talks over Skype with the camera off. She runs the largest illegal library in human history from a laptop and a donation page.

A graduate student who could not afford to read science built the system the entire scientific community now quietly depends on.

The publishers have spent a decade trying to shut her down.

She just shipped an AI that makes their entire business model outdated.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

An anonymous developer built a library so big it made Elsevier's legal team cry.

It's called Anna's Archive.

This got 99 million books and papers. Every shadow library on earth mirrored and searchable in one place. Domain takedowns bounce off it. It just moves to a new URL and keeps going.

Here's the story behind it.

In November 2022, US law enforcement seized Z-Library's domains and arrested its operators. The largest ebook library on the internet was gone overnight.

A pseudonymous developer going only by "Anna" had already seen it coming.

She had spent months as part of an anonymous group called the Pirate Library Mirror, quietly making full copies of every major shadow library before they disappeared. When Z-Library fell, she had the entire thing backed up.

Days later, Anna's Archive went live.

Here's what makes it unkillable.

It does not host a single file. It indexes metadata and links to third-party mirrors. Legally, there is nothing to seize. Technically, there is no central server to shut down.

The entire codebase is open source. The entire dataset is distributed via torrents and IPFS, a decentralized file system where data lives across thousands of nodes simultaneously. If every domain gets blocked tomorrow, anyone can spin up a new mirror in minutes from the same data.

Italy blocked it. Germany blocked it. Publishers sued it. The US Trade Representative put it on their notorious markets list.

It added new domains and kept going.

What you get for free:

→ 99M+ books and academic papers
→ Sci-Hub, Library Genesis, Z-Library, Internet Archive all mirrored in one search
→ No account required
→ No subscription
→ Download via IPFS, torrent, or direct link
→ Works across multiple mirror domains when one goes down

Elsevier charges universities $2 billion a year for journal access. A single anonymous developer with a pseudonym and a backup drive just made that business model look embarrassing.

100% Opensource.

https://t.co/HCUQBVrpUu

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

8,000 Meta workers got fired by email this morning. Singapore got the notice at 4 AM. The moment the email arrived, their laptops, work email, and accounts went dark. That is how a $1.7 trillion company tells you it is over.

Inside Meta, this round has a name. They are calling it "Pralaydin," which is Hindi for "day of catastrophe." Reuters reports this is the third firing round of 2026, and the full year could end with 22,000 people gone. About one in five Meta employees.

Analysts at Evercore say firing these 8,000 people will save Meta around $3 billion a year. That sounds like a lot. Zuckerberg has been writing much bigger checks for AI hires. Last summer he paid an ex-Apple engineer named Ruoming Pang $200 million to come work on AI. He paid another AI researcher, Andrew Tulloch, a reported $1.5 billion over six years. He wrote a $14.3 billion check just to get the CEO of an AI startup called Scale to join the team.

The same week Meta laid off 8,000 office workers, the company is still planning to spend somewhere between $125 and $145 billion this year on AI data centers and the chips to run them. The firings save about 2% of that.

Two days before the layoffs began, Meta picked 7,000 of the survivors and moved them onto brand new AI teams. The people getting hit in this round are mostly engineers and product managers. Another wave is already planned for later this year.

Meta is not in trouble. Far from it. The company made $56 billion in revenue in just the first three months of 2026. That was up 33% from a year ago. Pure profit in those same three months was nearly $27 billion. The stock is off its September high but Meta is still worth $1.7 trillion.

The severance is good on paper. 16 weeks of base pay, plus two extra weeks for every year you put in, plus a year and a half of health insurance. The average payout works out to about $360,000 per person.

The money does arrive. But finding a new job is brutal. Engineers who got cut in earlier Meta rounds say they have sent out hundreds of job applications and heard back from almost nobody, even with Meta on the resume.

So a wildly profitable company is firing 8,000 office workers via 4 AM email and instant lockout, while writing checks worth hundreds of millions of dollars to a small group of new AI hires. The Singapore workers reading their termination email at 4 AM were paying for the next $200 million hire.

[Mau @Mau10415616]

Los genomas iniciales del brote de la enfermedad del virus Bundibugyo de mayo de 2026 en la República Democrática del Congo y Uganda revelan un nuevo evento de transmisión.
https://t.co/VHwwD4qQiO

[Euan Arnott @Nucleocapsoid]

Glad people have been planning ahead & working hard to develop MULTIVALENT vaccine against filoviruses - including Bundibugyo Ebolavirus.

Chad-OX Adv-vector vaccines were significantly pioneered for Ebola, but aren't the only avenue being researched here.
https://t.co/rrUwGmlKo9

[K-in-CT 😷😷😷 @KinCONN]

#hantavirus
[⚠️⚠️ They really buried the lede on this one. The symptomatic medic on Ascension Island has been repatriated to a specialist London hospital unit. And UKHSA has sent a full mobile lab to St. Helena per the island’s request. It’s too, too, quiet out there in the Atlantic.]

➡️🇬🇧 UKHSA gives update on hantavirus contacts returning to UK

- ➡️ Nine asymptomatic hantavirus contacts ➡️ from St Helena and Ascension Island are expected to arrive in the UK this evening, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has said in an update.

- Upon arrival, the group will be ➡️ transferred to Arrowe Park hospital in Wirral, Merseyside, where they will be closely monitored.

- ➡️ On Saturday, one person left the Wirral hospital to complete their 45-day isolation period at home, after a clinical and public health assessment deemed this safe, the UKHSA said.

- ➡️ A further six people returned home from the hospital to continue their self-isolation on Thursday.

- The UKHSA update on expected arrivals comes a day after ⚠️ a medic from Ascension Island was taken to the High Consequence Infectious Diseases unit in Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust in London.

- ⚠️ The medic was brought to the UK for a "specialist assessment" after developing symptoms, with the UKHSA describing it as a "highly precautionary measure".

- ⚠️Meanwhile, the UKHSA announced on Friday that its Rapid Support Team ⚠️ has deployed a fully functioning mobile laboratory to St Helena, a UK overseas territory of which Ascension Island is a part, after the nation's government asked for help.

https://t.co/u6rvavpJEv

[Craig Spencer MD MPH @Craig_A_Spencer]

There's a new Ebola outbreak in the DR Congo.

I'm already getting lots of questions, so let me tell you what you should know:

* This one is already big — "over 246 suspected cases and 65 deaths have been reported". This means we're just learning about this outbreak long after its already been spreading. This makes it harder to find contacts and all the cases. Most outbreaks don't get this big by the time they're over, let alone this big by the time we even recognize them.

* This one is in a really tough place — the outbreak is centered around the east of DR Congo, in a place with a lot of conflict, cross-border traffic, and instability. There may also be cases in the big city here, meaning worry for more/faster spread in an urban environment. I've worked up here, it's a tough spot to get to and work in, due to transport and conflict. There was an Ebola outbreak here in 2018-2019 that grew to over 3,000 cases.

* This is on a few borders — this outbreak is close to the Uganda and South Sudan borders. Uganda has a lot of experience with Ebola outbreaks, South Sudan less. Very possible there's already been cross-border cases, given size of the outbreak already. WHO and countries will be stepping up surveillance, but again, this is a place with a lot of conflict and instability.

* This is not your normal Ebola — most outbreaks have been of the Zaire strain of Ebola. That's the one we have vaccines and treatments for. But this outbreak appears to be due to the Bundyibugyo strain. This has caused a few outbreaks in DR Congo in the past, as well as over the border in Uganda. BUT there is no vaccine, and no treatment for this strain.

My initial reaction here is that this isn't good, at all. I'm glad Africa CDC is on it, as is WHO. But delayed recognition means this has already gotten big, at a confluence of borders with a lot of instability, and for a strain that we don't have any vaccines or treatments for.

I'll share updates as I hear them