Must feel so good for text after you hit ctrl-x, floating in liminal space, before ctrl-v thrusts it back onto the desolate page

Why Britain’s privatisation experiment is so extraordinary by international standards. www.arguably.uk/p/can-andy-b...

"Our findings likewise suggest that scientific impact does not translate into happiness. This gap reflects a deeper misalignment: the external recognition conferred by citations may not satisfy researchers’ intrinsic psychological needs" doi.org/10.1093/rese...

We’re rapidly approaching a situation in which it becomes legally hazardous to express any criticism of “gender critical” views. The combination of well-funded lawfare and well-funded media moral panic is extremely dangerous to free speech for everyone, as well as obviously to trans people’s rights.

Or much of a drop in public support. Fascinating example of elite consensus switching despite popular opinion.

Anyway the World Cup final between these two…. Quite a thing.

Messi goes super saiyan in the last 20 of every match and every opposing coach is like, what if he didn’t and we could just defend a narrow lead until the whistle

VolcanoPlotR: a new package for visualising proteomic data in R. Explainer: quantixed.org/2026/07/15/e... Code: github.com/quantixed/Vo... Docs: quantixed.github.io/VolcanoPlotR/

The noise I made on reading the final line was frankly Lovecraftian.

🧠 New paper, Avezov lab @ukdri.ac.uk: Problems with cell’s ‘plumbing’ linked to signalling issues in neurodegenerative conditions. The geometry of the endoplasmic reticulum can cause issues with the supply of calcium in neurons www.clinical-neuroscience.cam.ac.uk/news/problem...

*sits filing receipts for the ltd company* *realises I genuinely could submit a doodle to HMRC, hope I'm not one of the 330, and hire three extra reporters with the extra money* *goes back to writing about all the small businesses just submitting doodles and opting out of tax*

If I was Andy Burnham, I’d devote resources to this mystery commensurate with the billions of pounds at stake. A special working group headed by an experienced (near-retirement or recently retired) HMRC officer, and reporting directly to a minister.

Over the next few days we're going to highlight our McIlvanney Prize long-listed authors - starting with last year's winner. @tariqashkanani.bsky.social returns with The Hollow Boys and you can hear him talk about it on the 'Across the Pond' panel on Sat 19th Sept: bloodyscotland.com/event/across...

I will be blunt, at the point you are asking “but why should Labour MPs stop using a product owned by someone who endorses their own murders?”…you’d think “self-respect” would be on there.

I am curious about AI and have tested many forms including QED, I continue to be unsurprised so far by its normative outputs. All of this is normal development; it will get better over time. This unsolicited exploitation however must stop.

Exploiting the preprint system that many of us value and cherish, which when used right bring communities together instead of separating them into the 1 vs 99%, is clearly done with an eye for future profit.

to challenge it, to revolutionize it as claimed, then this effort (do we call it an effort when you turn electricity into a one-sided metric that unsurprisingly lacks creativity and any conceptual novelty?) would be directed towards the published literature.

something that has taken so long to build is destroyed in no time mixed with the feeling of being exploited. I won't even talk about how damaging the 1% rhetoric is to science (I mean, just read the room). If the purpose were to find a better alternative to the current publishing system,

I have been thinking since yesterday about why I find the 1% thing so, so disturbing. It's a visceral reaction of 'just no', which goes beyond the general yuck towards the enshittification of/via AI. I have finally put my finger on it: it is the feeling you get when

So grateful for the new Kathy Matthews Endowment for the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center. A wonderful tribute by Kathy's husband, Lawrence Washington, that will help preserve Kathy's legacy and support the fly community for years to come. biology.indiana.edu/news-events/...

Sexually dimorphic behavioural signatures of tau toxicity in adult Drosophila https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.22.733697v1

Sexually dimorphic behavioural signatures of tau toxicity in adult Drosophila https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.22.733697v1

I wanted to like QED's new 1% preprint ranking. I really did. But the more I looked at the data, the more uncomfortable it made me. Here is my full peer review. open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

🚨New preprint! 🚨 We used adult-onset human tau expression in Drosophila and found striking sex-specific behavioural effects: females became inactive, while males initially became hyperactive. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

my kind of Jubilee, the Japanese national team vs. 100 kids

And there it is… www.desmog.com/2026/04/30/r...

Big congratulations to James Catterson et al on a Major Project Grant Award from @alzheimersresearchuk.org. Approx. £500k for 'A translational approach to untangling tau toxicity.' The research aims to identify new avenues for therapeutic development in Alzheimer's and related dementias. 🧠 🪰 🐁.

Pass this on. You never know who might need it and it could make a huge difference if someone is struggling for whatever reason

Since the 1960s, the genetic code has been used to predict protein sequences from DNA and mRNA sequences. Our @nature.com article demonstrates that these predictions miss thousands of protein sequences present in human tissues. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/

We will be playing Olivia Rodrigo's Daisy Chain Fields Festival on August 29th. Presale starts this Wed at 10am, sign up for presale code at www.daisychainfields.com

France will be at the epicenter of the most significant heat anomaly on the planet over the next few days. The sheer extent of the country that could experience temperatures above 40°C is nothing short of astonishing.

What *is* the point of public funding if it's not to subsidise things we need but commercial broadcasters won't do?

Happy Summer solstice. This is a pinhole camera 6 month exposure photo I took from Winter solstice 2024 (bottom line of the photo) to Summer solstice 2025 (top line of the photo). The lines are the Sun as it appears to move across the sky and gets higher and higher until we get to Summer solstice.

It seems a good day to remind people that in the UK 3 times as many people work in Indian restaurants or for McDonalds as in the whole coal and steel industry. 5 times as many are academic staff at universities. If Labour does not understand its electorate, there is no way to appeal to it.

Now a reviewed preprint in @elife.bsky.social elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Following recent posts about my attempts to secure prosecutions for those failing to register the controlling interest in land, I am pleased to see that the Ferret has published an important analysis of the Register of Controlled Persons in Land. 1/7

Simpsons scriptwriter John Swartzwelder: I wrote the boring soccer match into “The Cartridge Family” as a cautionary tale. The Netherlands and Japan: At last we will recreate the iconic soccer match from “The Cartridge Family”:

I have a small confession which is that when I read a menu and see (gf) next to something I still read it as being for your girlfriend

Meet Eyewire II: a new connectomic resource for the mouse retina. ~1 mm² of retina at nanometer resolution, with synapses and circuits of ca. 100,000 neurons, plus visual responses from the ~400 neurons shown in the video! Preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202... Data: eyewire.ai 🧠📈 🧠💻🧪 #VisionScience

I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇

Kraftwerk in Edinburgh tonight. All the hits…

One adult female fly: dissected, cut into 7,010 slices, EM-imaged, aligned to 3D @mindyisminsu.bsky.social @jasper-tms.bsky.social. Neural nets (zetta.ai) segmented cells, synapses and transmitters; SixEleven and Aelysia (aelysia.eu) teams proofread over ~3.5 years. 3/18

Connectomes are accelerating, from the ~300 neurons of C. elegans 40 years ago to the fly brain last year (FAFB, bbc.com/news/articles/c0lw0nxw71po). The BANC is the next big step, a full CNS, brain and nerve cord together, a powerful hypothesis-generation engine. 2/18

Now published - the #BANC! A full central nervous system (CNS) connectome of a limbed animal at single-synapse resolution, enabling us to follow sensory-motor arcs and understand how the CNS controls the body. rdcu.be/fncjS. #neuroscience. Video by @quorumetrix.bsky.social 1/18

The #ThermoFisher #antibody scandal is an ugly reminder, I think, of how few people (including those at TF, it seems) are trained to properly validate antibodies before use. Some advice on antibody validation in the posting 👇 totalinternalreflectionblog.com/2022/09/18/h...

Have been watching from a distance & been appalled at the descent the US has taken - but for some reason the fact that the authoritarian govt feels secure enough to harass/attack middle class academics, who are protesting in a reasoned & civilised manner, so openly seems in some way more chilling.

JFC

The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)

Here's a snippet of the live debut of the Basement Tapes super-deep cut "Baby Won't You Be My Baby" I believe this marks the longest gap EVER between Dylan recording a song and playing it live. 59 years. The previous record-holder was "Outlaw Blues" (42 years).