Congratulations to Professor Lorna Dawson, who has been named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in New Year Honours List! 🤩👏 She was recommended for the award by His Majesty the King for her services to innovations in soil and forensic science.

An aerial view of Christmas in central London.

I love this website, particularly now when Earth's tilt is so dramatically visualized. Left shows that the center of sunlight hitting the earth is well below the equator, and right shows dawn and dusk at this moment - revealing just how short N hemisphere days are! . www.die.net/earth/hemisp...

UnigeneFinder: An automated pipeline for gene calling from transcriptome assemblies without a reference genome

The one validated intervention to slow aging and extend healthspan is not for sale. It's exercise. sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

“Waiting for Trump is as futile as waiting for Godot, without the jokes.” www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Great @yorkshirebylines.co.uk write up of my recent talk about Trump for grassroots Europe yorkshirebylines.co.uk/politics/tru... Thanks @colinngordon.bsky.social for inviting me back!

Attention Nicotiana benthamiana users! Certain strains of Agrobacterium (e.g. GV3101-pMP90) induce glandular trichomes because of cytokinin production by Agrobacterium. As this can influence assay outcome, we recommend testing several strains. See our preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Just wrapped up my last lecture of 2025. Interested in plant biochemistry and molecular biology? Slides are on GitHub: github.com/bpucker/teac... #OpenEducation #PlantSci @puckerlab.bsky.social

I have to say how happy I am that at least one of the disasters due to Brexit has been undone! Erasmus was always an amazing way to bring talented students to my lab to gain experience, great to see it will be possible again in the future! www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c4...

Humanity:

Increase in productivity since 1979: 87% Increase in hourly pay since 1979: 32% Just so happens that ~25% of workers were unionized in 1979. Today? 10%. As unions declined, the super-rich have taken a larger share of wealth generated by labor. We must build back union power.

Can one map the genome-wide binding (1) and its protein partners (2) simultaneously from the same sample? Yes, one can. with CUT&ID ✂️🪪 Spearheaded — singlehandedly — by @annanordin.bsky.social No need of transgenesis, cloning and overexpression. Check it out, it's fast and its works.

Trump is threatening the ICC with yet more sanctions if they do not ensure Trump & his administration are never prosecuted. U.S. is demanding the ICC drop its investigations into Israeli PM Netanyahu over charges related to Gaza, as well potential war crimes committed by U.S. in Afghanistan.

Compassionate and thoughtful design: seat for old people in Sakuradamon station has a pole to help you stand up and a small notch at the side to hold a walking cane so it doesn’t fall over. Simple small touches that make a huge difference to usefulness.

This is brilliant! AI for Science Strategy @GOVUK www.gov.uk/government/p...

Elon Musk wants to end the EU because X has to pay a fine that corresponds to 0.03% of his wealth. Ban X in the EU now!

📣Plant Meiosis Meeting is back for its second edition‼️ Save the date: 9–11 September 2026, Poznań, Poland🌱 More details coming soon🤩

This afternoon, I will give a public lecture about #ResearchIntegrity and #ImageForensics, at the University of Bern, CH, where I will receive an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Science tomorrow. Thank you for your support ❤️

Fascinating, take a look at the thread

On ridiculous metrics in academia. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

How Do Regulations Shape the Future of Gene-Edited Crops? The next BEST CROP talk brings leaders from science, policy, breeding & industry together to explore how innovation + regulation are steering gene-edited crops under the evolving EU NGT framework. 🔗 www.eventbrite.it/e/best-crop-...

As the war in Ukraine grinds on and Europe advances its Re-Arm Europe agenda, what’s the real endgame? Join me and Ukrainian sociologist V. Ishchenko this evening (17.00CET) for a chat on the fast moving developments 🔗 youtube.com/live/g4tCzTJ...

One for all vs All for one in scientific endeavour. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Education in the era of AI. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Dr Sarah McKim, Deputy Director of the International Barley Hub (IBH) and Head Developmental Biologist at the James Hutton Institute, shares an overview of IBH’s mission and her role within it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Riz_...

New work form our lab shows that loss of function of HvST1 — a grass-specific E3 ubiquitin ligase — increases chromosome recombination up to ~2.5-fold by boosting distal synapsis and crossover formation. #meiosis #betterbarley nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Terrible!

The International Barley Hub is an initiative seeking to create a platform for the translation of barley research into economic, social, environmental and commercial impacts for the breeding, farming, malting, brewing, feed, food, health and related industries. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3j1...

What do these corporations have in common? Netflix Ford Tesla T-Mobile Duke Energy DISH Network Metlife Dominion Energy United States Steel In recent years, they all paid their execs more than they paid in taxes. This is what a corporate-rigged system looks like.

AI model Helixer predicts eukaryotic genes ab initio, directly from a plain text FASTA file. No RNA-seq. No protein homology. No repeats, hints, or curated evidence. Raw genome → accurate gene models. Deep learning + HMM, published in @natmethods.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The reductionist days of "good" and "bad" cholesterol are over. We've learned so much more about Lp(a), APOB, HDL and more economist.com/science-and-... as I reviewed in Super Agers tinyurl.com/3w76us9a

🚀 A long-requested feature just landed in #OpenCloning 🔬🧬 You can now manually annotate sequences and create primers right from the editor ✨ Hope it makes your workflow a bit smoother! 📨 If you want to stay updated with upcoming features, subscribe to the mailing list (link in the comments)

I just published: Gene Editing: Precision Breeding Regulations Now Live On 13 November 2025, UK regulations for precision bred plants came into effect. We can now register precision bred plants, such as those with disease resistance and reduced reliance on fungicides. medium.com/p/gene-editi...

The bulk of Gaza's agricultural land, water processing sites and natural resources are in the Israeli occupied area. The 2 million Palestinian population is contained within the rubble of the urban areas

Beyond criminal … www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

#OpenCloning is a an Open Source alternative to SnapGene/Benchling that supports automation and integration with other software ✅ Free 🔓 Open Source 🧬 More cloning methods than SnapGene 🤖 Can be automated with python 👨‍🔬 Built by a researcher — for researchers! 👉 Check it out at opencloning.org

See opportunities to join us as a PhD student: @hutton.ac.uk 🌾

A huge effort finally coming to fruition for B and their group. So excited to give this a whirl esp now that my cloning projects have ramped up substantially. Check this out 👇👇

Can we please discuss accessibility at conferences? When organizers and schedules assume that everyone can walk fast and climb stairs, people with mobility issues (visible or invisible) might feel excluded. /

How the Avalanche of Academic Papers Threatens Scientific Research, by Vince Bielski 'Editor-in-Chief Anna Stilz at @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social led a revolt that culminated in the mass resignation of the journal’s entire editorial staff and board.' www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/202...

Just been trying out Nature Research Assistant beta, which analyses your manuscript drafts and suggests "improvements". Strong sub-editor vibes for me and I worry it will homogenise the literature - anyone else had a look?

Listening to music into old age could reduce the risk of dementia by almost 40%, a new study has found. www.sciencealert.com/listening-to...

𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗹𝗮𝘄𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀? Thought-provoking piece on properties of systems. Including the Law of Increasing Functional Information, which applies to both biological and non-biological systems. Physicists will probably not like this at all... doi.org/10.1073/pnas... #complexity

IF THIS IS NOT HOSTAGE TAKING, WHAT IS? Israel refuses to release Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya who insisted on staying with his patients in his bombed hospital even after his own son was murdered. Since then he has been held in one of Israel's torture facilities.