Pierre Foucault

Microbial ecology PhD Student @Sorbonne_Univ_ @Le_museum. Microbiome and Multi-omics. @Igemsorbonne @YRLS_federation Tidyverse addict

[AlertesInfos @AlertesInfos]

🚨🇫🇷 ALERTE INFO | Des perquisitions sont en cours dans l’enquête visant le RN pour des soupçons de détournement de fonds européens. (AFP)

[Brèves de presse @Brevesdepresse]

⚡️🇫🇷INFO -#Léon le média anti-LFI à l’origine du montage truqué sur #Mélenchon, diffusé par Guillaume #Erner puis retiré par France Culture, est soutenu par le Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France (CRIF), révèle Libé. Le média ne possède aucune mention légale…

[Elodie Dvt @Elo_Dvt87]

France info c'est :

- 3 élus RN invités dans les matinales mais 0 question sur les appels aux meurtres d'insoumis ou l'apologie du nazisme révélés il y a quelques jours
- 0 question sur l'élue RN qui a frappé une policière
- quasi aucune interruption.

Quand c'est un insoumis c'est :
- une interruption toutes les 20 secondes
- 15 minutes d'interview sur des fausses polémiques.

Le respect des temps de parole est une chose, l'égalité de traitement en est une autre...

[Loïc 🇫🇷🇮🇹 @_ilpartigiano]

Le JT de France 2 a perdu 700.000 téléspectateurs au moment où Jordan Bardella est arrivé.

C'est la pire audience réalisée à la fin du journal.

C’est bien de le faire savoir.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Everyone's celebrating. And they should be. But buried in the press conference is a detail that tells you what actually kept NASA engineers up at night.

The Orion heat shield has known flaws. NASA identified the issue after Artemis I's uncrewed test. They couldn't fully fix it before Artemis II. So instead, they redesigned the entire reentry trajectory to reduce thermal stress on the shield. They flew a modified path specifically because they knew the shield wasn't perfect.

They sent four people around the moon knowing the heat shield had problems, and compensated by being so precise on the entry angle that they hit their target within 0.4%. The margin wasn't in the hardware. The margin was in the math.

That's the real story of Artemis II. The engineering wasn't flawless. The execution was so precise it didn't need to be.

[Joe Kent @joekent16jan19]

After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.

I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.

It has been an honor serving under @POTUS and @DNIGabbard and leading the professionals at NCTC.

May God bless America.

[Pall Melsted @pmelsted]

Excited to share this preprint that describes my latest work on using GPUs to accelerate processing of RNA-seq data.

The title says it all: "RNA-seq analysis in seconds using GPUs" now on biorxiv https://t.co/2JrOfsxNFV

Figure 1 shows they key result

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The 22M+ people who saw this tweet are missing the real story here.

This research is from 2019. Dr. Eva Ramón Gallegos at Mexico’s National Polytechnic Institute published these results six years ago. It went viral then too. Salma Hayek posted about it on Instagram. ABC News ran a fact check. It resurfaced in January 2025 across Mexican media. And now it’s recycling through your feed again as “BREAKING” with 22 million views, because an engagement account slapped a siren emoji on six-year-old science.

The actual study treated 29 women in Mexico City using photodynamic therapy, a technique where you apply a light-sensitive chemical to the cervix, wait four hours, then hit it with a laser. HPV cleared in 100% of patients who had the virus without lesions. In patients with both HPV and premalignant lesions, it cleared in 64.3%. Those numbers are real and published in peer-reviewed journals.

Here’s what 22 million people aren’t asking: why hasn’t this scaled in six years?

Three reasons. First, the sample size. Twenty-nine women is a pilot study. The FDA requires thousands of patients across multiple sites before approving a therapy. Gallegos ran earlier studies on 420 women in Oaxaca and Veracruz with similar clearance rates, but nobody has funded the Phase III trials needed to move this toward approval.

Second, PDT has a physics limitation. The light that activates the drug can only penetrate about one centimeter of tissue. That means it works on surface-level cervical HPV, but the virus also hides deeper in tissue and in other parts of the body. The National Cancer Institute flagged this exact constraint years ago. You can clear what you can see. You can’t guarantee you’ve cleared what you can’t.

Third, 50% of high-risk HPV infections clear on their own within one to two years without any treatment. A 100% clearance rate in 29 patients with no lesions, measured at six months, sits in a window where spontaneous clearance is already happening. Without a proper control group, which this study lacked, you can’t isolate how much the therapy did versus what the immune system would have done anyway.

A separate Chinese study in 2024 randomized 60 patients and found PDT hit 100% HPV clearance at six months versus conventional treatment. That’s more rigorous. Multiple research groups worldwide are now publishing PDT results for cervical HPV. The science is real and progressing.

The gap between “promising pilot results in 29 women” and “successfully eliminates HPV” is about a decade of clinical trials and a few hundred million dollars in funding. Gallegos has been doing this work for 20 years. The bottleneck was never the science. It’s that nobody writes the check for Phase III trials on a non-patentable therapy that competes with a multibillion-dollar vaccine market.

That’s the actual story worth 22 million views.

[Nature Microbiology @NatureMicrobiol]

Out Now! Large-scale analysis of bacterial genomes reveals thousands of lytic phages https://t.co/CON9U4GSKO #BacterialGenomes #LyticPhages #Microbiology

[Aaron Parnas @AaronParnas]

This is the ad Donald Trump woke up furious about.

Would be a shame if it went viral.

[Protect Kamala Harris ✊ @DisavowTrump20]

🚨NEW: RFK Jr. has fired a top scientist at the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, after she filed a whistleblower complaint about anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.

RETWEET if you stand with Dr. Marrazzo against RFK Jr!

[Pierre Foucault @microbialPierre]

@Tala__Darwish .

[Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump]

Barring a tourist over a meme mocking the VP? This is what authoritarianism looks like

[Ilan Gabet @Ilangabet]

🚨 JORDAN BARDELLA PERD SON PROCÈS EN DIFFAMATION CONTRE LIBÉRATION

On peut donc affirmer que Bardella était un collab FANTÔME et qu'il a produit de FAUX documents pour ÉCHAPPER à la justice au cas où il serait poursuivi

THREAD : Retour sur les faits révélés par Libération ⬇️

[Pierre Foucault @microbialPierre]

@Adrian_Jacobo @bielleogy Using cp sometimes helps ! Compiling into a tar.gz might help too ?

[Pierre Foucault @microbialPierre]

@CJoly_Kukla @Tickmicrobes @INRAE_DPT_SA @Occitanie @umontpellier @Anses_fr @Env_Alfort @Cirad Congrats 🦠🍾

[Giulia Foïs @Giulia_Fois_]

En fait, on parle à la gauche comme on parle aux femmes : infantilisation, déni, paternalisme de surface, mépris de fond, inversion de la culpabilité, injonctions contradictoires etc. C’est fou.

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

How to stay calm (without any hacks)

This is all you need.

[Carnegie Ecology @CarnegieEcology]

@SaLevasseur is visiting @ElenaLitchman's lab! Her research blends experimental and computational methods to study freshwater phytoplankton's temp-dependent resource needs, with an aim to understand phytoplankton dynamics and succession in the context of climate change.

[Didier Mazel @amazeld]

I'm really outraged by the French govt's decision to cut almost €1 billion from the research and higher education budget. We're already far behind Germany, Austria, Belg., USA, etc. (2.22 vs 3.14, 3.26, 3.43, 3.46, etc. Wd Bk data) in terms of % of GDP devoted to research & dvpt