This is a slightly different type of newsletter, but yesterday, a paper I (and others) had been working on for several years finally, came out: Towards the biogeography of prokaryotic genes (non-paywalled link)
Instead of repeating myself, I will link here to a thread here with the most important findings:
as well as this thread with more background on how we got here
Links of the Week
Computer scientists like to point out that all sorts of things are Turing complete, meaning that you could use them to compute whatever you liked. Normally, these things are very impractical, but here is a particularly technically-impressive example (even if used for evil): “A deep dive into an NSO zero-click iMessage exploit: Remote Code Execution” (/ht @dave_universetf)
Linked within the link above, is a cool story of compression gone bad
Tweets of the Week
kind of scary how casual the admission of scientific fraud is: “I left out of my books… as they posed a real danger to my theoretical agenda.”