Aww, thanks!

Better yet, donate.

This takes you to a GWWC page that says:

You can donate to several promising programs working in this area via our donation platform. For our charity and fund recommendations, see our best charities page.

But if you click through those links you can see there isn't a biosecurity fund, and the list of biosecurity-related programs you can donate on GWWC are just NTI and CHS. Which are not bad options, but as someone in the field they're not where I think funding would go farthest.  It would be really great if there were a bio fund, or a bio evaluator!

(Disclosure: I run a project that would plausibly be funded by such a thing)

@fezzy🔸 one important difference (especially important to me!) since we last talked is that the NAO just opened a position for a software engineer; consider applying? https://securebio.org/careers/bioinformatics-engineer-2025/

I wouldn't recommend getting into cybersecurity as a path to biosecurity.  From the outside, the main thing that transfers in the actual work is the mindset, but a very large majority of skills in both areas are domain specific.  On the other hand, I do think there are valuable things that need doing in cybersecurity, and biosecurity efforts nearly always also have cybersecurity needs.

I'm guessing support for upper room UV would be even higher than far UVC because there is very little exposure of people for upper room?

Maybe? Or maybe people would be worried about whether we'd deploy it properly.

And in-room filtration would be high support as long as it's not loud?

I don't think anyone has an objection to in-room filtration, and this is something I'd be happy rolling out without polling the community. But the real problem isn't the noise (though that is significant, and I'm excited about the Big Quiet Fan project), it's the sheer number of purifiers we'd need around the room to handle ~200 people.

The smallest one I know of is the kids' Flo Mask.

Thanks! I'll pass this along to Simon who leads our swab sampling work.

On reusable respirators, they're worse to significantly worse for intelligibility than disposables. If you're only talking about what to wear when not talking (ex: listening to talks) then this doesn't matter, but if you're considering masking for 1:1s or group discussions it becomes pretty important.

This is probably a regional thing: I don't see the 3M 4251 or other disposable respirators for sale in the US. My guess is the cost difference you're seeing is due to comparing a US-market (6200) vs UK-market (4251) masks on UK Amazon?

Definitely! Storing replacement filters in addition to the masks themselves seems good.

If you're trying to flag something engineered, I think the general public makes more sense than people who work with animals. What we do at the NAO (we really need to write up a page on this!) is visit busy public places, put out a sign, and ask if people are interested in swabbing their nose for science. People swab their own noses, drop them in a shared container, and we pay a small amount per swab. It's under IRB, and if you were looking to do something similar we could share our IRB documentation?