All journalists should bend the knee to the work of the obituarist, the one discipline which enables the practitioner to get a byline from beyond the grave. Ronald Bergen predeceased his subject Robert Redford by 5 years, but left behind a truly masterful obit. www.theguardian.com/film/2025/se...

@mariasecrier.bsky.social & I are looking for an enthusiastic & excellent data scientist for a 4-year postdoc to understand cell cycle dysregulation in cancer. Deadline 15th October. Get in touch if you have any questions. Please repost! More details: www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

Angela Rayner (MP) deprived taxpayers of £40 grand. She lost her job. Michelle Mone (Baroness) deprived tax payers of £136m, according to the government. She's enjoying life on the yacht you paid for.

This infuriates me: Thames Water should be nationalised at a value that factors in the costs to turn it back into a functioning _public service_. The creditors should f* off and learn that ransoming a public good like water comes with a risk. Grow a spine, Labour!

'[...]analysis of platelets can potentially improve screening tests, including for cancer.' @bethpsaila.bsky.social comments on newly published research findings that could transform approaches to the early detection and prevention of #Cancer. www.oxcode.ox.ac.uk/news/platele...

Short-read technology Ultima Genomics (not on Bluesky) published the technical details of their ppmSeq double-strand sequencing method for highly accurate short-read sequencing.

New paper out today in @science.org! Very proud that my team was able to contribute to this fantastic work from @bethpsaila.bsky.social's group. In short: platelets contain a fair amount of cfDNA taken up from the surrounding! Read the summary by lead author @l-cmurphy.bsky.social:

❗Applications are now open for up to two Medical Research Scotland funded Daphne Jackson Fellowships. 🕛Deadline: 12 noon, Monday 29th September 2025. 🔗 Apply now: daphnejackson.org/fellowship/m... #ReturnToResearch #MedicalResearchScotland #DaphneJacksonTrust #FellowshipOpportunity

R35 suspended. One senior postdoc, one senior graduate student, one postdoc who started this week, one rotation student doing well and planning on taking on in our lab. Fingers crossed things get resolved soon and so thankful for all the great people I have that I didn’t have to make my lab big…

It has been the honor of my life to serve as Commissioner of BLS alongside the many dedicated civil servants tasked with measuring a vast and dynamic economy. It is vital and important work and I thank them for their service to this nation.

The massive list of suspended UCLA grants came out today: 300 NSF and 500 NIH grants. I am miraculously not on the list, but this is devastating. Science will be lost, progress will be frozen, people will lose jobs, and careers in science and medicine are being destroyed. This is not ok.

Wow Karolinska Institutet is recruiting 20 outstanding early-career researchers for assistant professor positions ki.se/en/about-ki/...

Become our colleague! Tenure-track Assistant Professor position at The Center for Integrative Genomics, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. unil.ch/cig/en/home.... More details for how to apply are here: www.nature.com/naturecareer...

We're recruiting a postdoc to join my lab at @oncology.ox.ac.uk & @oxcio.bsky.social to understand immune regulation in cancer and develop new approaches for cancer prevention and metastasis. Deadline: 11 August 2025 my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru... Lab info: www.oncology.ox.ac.uk/team/jie-yang

🎉 Excited to share my first paper as 2nd author! From the Barr & Gruneberg labs, this work explores the structure of the Chromosome Passenger Complex (CPC) and suggests a ‘pivot–tether’ model for how it binds H3pT3-phosphorylated nucleosomes @oxfordbiochemistry.bsky.social @dunnschool.bsky.social

We congratulate Ludwig @ox.ac.uk’s Helen Byrne on her receipt of the Naylor Prize and Lectureship in Applied Mathematics from the London Mathematical Society for her incisive modeling of the heterogeneity, topological features and immune landscapes of tumors. bit.ly/4eysUlG #CanSky #OncoSky

Over recent weeks I have heard about some trials struggling with the phenomenon known as “Lasagne’s Law.” I’ve flagged this issue before, but always good to revisit it and discuss what can be done to minimise it 1/7 #MethodologyMonday #121

Nikkei found academics had written "give a positive review only" and "do not highlight any negatives" in white text or tiny font on 17 preprints to combat AI peer reviews. asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tec...

Postdoc position in our group at @ebi.embl.org about analyzing single cell data sets to better understand and treat neurodegen diseases, in collab with A Bassett, M Lotfollahi, @bayraktarlab.bsky.social, M Strauss and others within Open Targets. Deadline 20/07. Please share tinyurl.com/87wj466m

Please share: I'm still looking for a postdoc in computational genomics to join my team in Oxford. If you want to help develop better ways to detect AML from epigenetic profiles in blood, then get in touch! Great team and environment, 3-year secured funding, ideal for transition to independence.

Please share: I'm still looking for a postdoc in computational genomics to join my team in Oxford. If you want to help develop better ways to detect AML from epigenetic profiles in blood, then get in touch! Great team and environment, 3-year secured funding, ideal for transition to independence.

Preprint on "Improving spliced alignment by modeling splice sites with deep learning". It describes minisplice for modeling splice signals. Minimap2 and miniprot now optionally use the predicted scores to improve spliced alignment. arxiv.org/abs/2506.12986

Now I've had a chance to read Andrea Sella's article in @chemistryworld.com on why he returned his Royal Society Faraday Medal. I recommend that you read it too. It's inspiring, though inevitably also disturbing, in these troubled times. www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/why-...

Something wonderful for the weekend! About 40,000 years ago, during the #IceAge, an ancient artist skilfully sculpted this tiny head of a cave lion from mammoth ivory. It is one of the World’s oldest known works of figurative art. 📷 by me #Archaeology

Seagull drinks coffee, steals mug of man installing anti-bird spikes www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Deep Learning

I love reading serious stories about guys who believe AGI is real, it feels like a bunch of millionaires plotting to find and capture Santa Claus

Prompt injection means email viruses are back. A researcher found a security vulnerability where you send an email with hidden instructions which when CoPilot scans the email, executes and then hides the source of the instructions. It took Microsoft 5 months to fix the issue.

Apple has published a research paper claiming LLMs outperform large reasoning models on simple tasks, LRMs outperform LLMs at medium complexity tasks and they both totally fail at handling very complex tasks. The optics of Apple publishing a paper saying LRMs don’t work has been the common take.

Great talks and lots of familiar faces at the @qmulepigenetics.bsky.social Launch Conference today - thanks for putting together a great program!

Andy Moore @hhmijanelia.bsky.social created this video showing a cytoskeletal mechanism called an actin wave in a so-called HeLa cell. In orange are the actin filaments and in blue are the mitochondria, some of which appear to move with or be shifted by the active wave.

What an absolute disaster, and I don't even work in flies!

Out of curiosity: how does the Irish PhD system differ from the UK? "PhD researchers are treated as employees in everything but name without the security, pay or benefits of real employment" sounds vaguely familiar 🙈

Industry friends, now is the time for MUCH more speaking out on behalf of academic colleagues under duress. Here are core open source methods that many of your products doubtlessly depend on either directly or indirectly (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMMER) being abruptly defunded. Make noise.

I started tgv to learn Rust and building it has been unbelievably fun! If you wanna pick up a super fast and fun programming language, tgv is open for contribution! There aren't many bioinformatics tools built entirely by the community. If tgv can become one, I'll be so psyched

⏰ Deadline approaching for postdoc position in my lab, Dunn School, University of Oxford. We work on how the cell's antenna receives and transmits essential signals through motor protein driven transport. ❄️ Cryo-EM/ET, smTIRF, cell biology methods 🧪🔬 30/5/25 ➡️ tinyurl.com/KToropovaPDRA

‘NO, I AM SPAR TACOS!’

Thank you to @rsb.org.uk for this fantastic feature in The Biologist, where I get to talk a bit about my team and how I got to where I am right now:

Really excited about this new work from Sam Hart (and joint with @kelleyharris.bsky.social) trying to disentangle mutational differences between groups of cancers. Check out Kelley's thread with the major results!

Now online in Cancer Discovery: Human Papillomavirus Integration Induces Oncogenic Host Gene Fusions in Oropharyngeal Cancers - by Nusrat Khan, Keiko Akagi, Shiming Jiang, Maura Gillison, and colleagues doi.org/10.1158/2159... @mdanderson.bsky.social

We have a privately-run care system that costs residents ca. £6000 per month yet only pays a minimum wage to its workers. Solve that problem with some proper regulation of the sector, and you won't need to ban hard-working immigrants, who are the only people stopping care from collapsing completely.

Massively parallel jumping assay (MPJA) enables to test the jumping potential of thousands of transposons. Analysis of >160,000 Alu haplotypes identified transposition-asssociated domains. Amazing work by Navneet Matharu, Jingjing Zhao, Martin Kircher and many others. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Come and join us! We’re hiring a new Group Leader in Generative Biology at the @sangerinstitute.bsky.social Building AI models or the data to train them? Core funding of >$130M a year for a faculty of ~30. www.nature.com/naturecareer... acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:... pls RT!

$500 million is… less than 1.25% of the NIH’s 2024 budget. When I say there is no capacity to absorb the shock, I mean it.

"Cell-free DNA methylome and fragmentome analysis for disease relapse monitoring in patients with Ewing Sarcoma" New #Preprint from @cruknbc.bsky.social and Institute #PhD student Sophie Richardson on using #liquidbiopsies and #cfDNA to track relapse in patients with #EwingSarcoma

Reminder: we have a position open for a computational postdoc to work on the epigenetics of myeloid leukaemia. Interested in liquid biopsy for cancer early detection, and want to join a multi-disciplinary team with a strong clinical angle? Apply before 6th May! Please RT for reach #job #academia

On my way to Oxford - thank you to @whitefishlab.bsky.social for the invitation to visit the Ludwig Institute! I still have such fond memories of my summer internship with Rich and Len Zon at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute! It’s been great keeping in touch across the years and many milestones 🐟🔬🧫

Due to great enthusiasm, we are extending the early bird registration deadline, at a reduced rate, until 25 May. After this date, the rate will increase by 1500NOK (approx. 135USD). We look forward to seeing you in Trondheim! www.endodnadamage.com

Ludwig @fbm-unil.bsky.social’s Douglas Hanahan, who received the Pezcoller Foundation-AACR International Award for Extraordinary Achievement in Cancer research, told three stories @ #AACR2025 about decades-long studies in his lab that have led to new strategies for cancer immunotherapy.

Ludwig @ox.ac.uk's Yang Shi presented at the first Plenary Session of #AACR25 on his recent preclinical study examining the perturbation of epigenetic and signaling pathways to force the differentiation of leukemic cells for the treatment of acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). Read more bit.ly/42hT6g7