Behind the Paper
The real stories behind the latest research papers, from conception to publication, the highs and the lows
Med-BERT: Pre-trained Embedding for Structured EHR
Behind the paper: Rasmy et al: Med-BERT: pre-trained contextualized embeddings on large-scale structured electronic health records for disease prediction
Expanding deserts drove mammals and hominids out of Eurasia into Africa
The emergence of deserts in Arabia had a decisive impact on the evolution and migratory movements of mammals including our human ancestors. This is one of our conclusions after studying a 10-million-year climate history of Arabia, respectively Mesopotamia.
Know thy enemy: Resolving the SARS-CoV-2 gene set and understanding COVID-19 variants using evolution
Can comparative genomics resolve the protein-coding gene set of SARS-CoV-2? Yes! We compared 44 Sarbecovirus genomes to determine which SARS-CoV-2 candidate genes encode functional proteins and which mutations are likely functional, so future efforts can focus on real genes and important mutations.
Measuring the effect of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) on mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic using global mobility data
Evaluating the efficacy of government interventions used to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 has been challenging. Mobility data from phones can be used as a low-cost and standardised mechanism to observe the change in the aggregate movement of populations in response to interventions stimuli.
