Today I learned that there is a deep-sea bacterium that apparently can do photosynthesis independent of the sun. It uses infrared light from hot hydrothermal vents. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

This is bad for medicine too www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I will look forward to reading this in detail - the use of kinetic asymmetry and input chemical energy to allow detection under conditions where equilibrium binding would not be sensitive is fascinating. Congratulations to all the authors!

Might be the greatest opening paragraph of anything ever.

Fresh installs of Win 11 are their own special kind of hell. Every boot up: "hey, use one Drive! What do you mean no? You really should, you know..."

In @cp-chem.bsky.social tinyurl.com/3vmzatbh Maria @benjaminoacid.bsky.social @stefanborsley.bsky.social Fabio & @zashbridge.bsky.social show that driving a receptor out-of-equilibrium through chem fueling allows quantification of binding at concentrations where receptor is saturated at equilibrium😃

These people have a funny way of saying "Environmentalists have been proved right yet again."

Genius bit of web design, putting the useless chat bot directly over the "place request" button for raising IT tickets. (can be circumvented by making the window teeny-tiny but in any normal window size, this happens)

Obviously so many things wrong with this on a philosophical level. But practically, I wonder if the cost of hiring people to check the eligibility of visitors will be outweighed by the income from the entrance fees?

Nothing matters anymore obviously, but in the old world of - oh I dunno - a couple years back, this would have been career ending. You'd either have to settle into obscurity or go to the US and start again.

Sharing this 🎯 paper from a few years, for no particular reason, with the apt metaphor that academia is a hostile obstacle course. It’s a paper that seems to become more relevant as time goes on, not just in the US, but also in the far reaches of the academic map.

Anyone ever written to an instrument manufacturer tech support with a question, only to be told "I asked AI, your question and I have attached the answer. I would be very interested to know if it helps you"? Not impressed... (v. expensive kit & service contract!)

Today I read an article about a guy who robbed a Belfast lingerie shop & claimed in court he did it because he thought he was an elf from Shadowrun & they ridiculed him at the time but it was in 2007 *4 years* before the canon date of The Awakening so now I'm not so sure

Was going to grumble about the experience of flying from Bonn/Köln airport, but seeing what folk are going through in the US I feel pretty lucky in comparison

I ran 15 years of my own against a list of word "tells" for AI, will my esoteric vocabulary and my love of the em dash be my undoing? And yes, my writing was part of the training sets.

Human beings are innate storytellers. This editorial from an outgoing EiC is a beautifully written piece about beginnings and endings in scholarly communication. Save this article to refer to the next time you're asked to attend an "article of the future" workshop.

I defended my PhD 10 years ago today. That was the least remarkable thing that happened that day. Sharing something I wrote about it last year. Since then "the horrors persist but so do we." And with dignity.

There are very good reasons why our strongest scientific norms prohibit deliberately* deceptive data fabrication. Such behavior is literally career-ending. How anyone can endorse working with a system that does this, let wish to add it as a co-author? *not truly volitational but act as if etc.

An unaccounted for part of the economy is how much young people virulently hate AI, despite how aggressively it's being forced on them. They realize it's making their friends dumber and ruining the world and they want nothing to do with it. From the Penn student paper: www.thedp.com/article/2026...

Simple reality is so long as Labour focuses its attention on trying to attract Reform voters who will never support it, and alienating progressives who are leaving for Greens and Lib Dems, via a constant raft of hostile policies and rhetoric against marginalised groups they are toast, and rightly so

one of my favorite early pentiment memes

Letter to Sex Matters from M&S calling out their bulshit claims.

My god... It's full of snacks

NEW MEME JUST DROPPED

Very proud to hear my previous PhD student, Anna Barnard, now an academic @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social, talking about the online trend for the use of 'grey-market' injectable peptides by 'biohackers' for supposed health benefits. www.theguardian.com/science/audi...

"Anyone for dodgems?"

‘We chemists tend to idealise atoms as hard spheres that may exist independently or connected by sticks with other atoms to form molecules, chains or networks,’ says inorganic chemist Santiago Álvarez. @philipcball.bsky.social www.chemistryworld.com/news/the-que...

All this injustice and racial profiling in the vain hope it'll appease Reform voters. It won't. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

The latest AI/ML tools for co-folding proteins around small molecule ligands can produce impressive results. Until you start looking at them closely.

Online now: The supersymmetric origin of chaos and its hidden topological order #newton #physics

Made a huge mistake and brought only one book on my trip to Germany/NL. And now I finished it and have 48 hours to go. What am I going to do?!

One of my favourite streets in the UK. It's beautiful and you feel like the city is stacked on top of you and there's a good brunch place (Hula). What more can you want?

since everyone's sharing/dunking on the latest Helen Lewis Atlantic piece, I am contractually obligated to re-up the time Helen Lewis debated AI hallucinations of my work (I contacted @theatlantic.com about it but they never provided a correction): juliaserano.medium.com/why-do-helen...

🚨We bring the following external events to your attention as they may be of interest to the MASC community 📣 See thread below👇🏻 (1/6)

This article is darkly fascinating as an example of how transphobia infects your entire ideology. The core argument is that we should not believe people when they say they are trans, were sexully abused or have a mental disorder.

Hey #chemsky and 🧪 - if you want to know what’s going on in the world of academic publishing then James is definitely worth a follow! 👇

Big fan of this woman already, just from the way she writes! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Exactly the same article (same text, same authors) published in a range of journals at roughly the same time. Number of citations correlates (somewhat) with impact factor of the journal it was published in. Except in Croatia...

This seems excellent. "The Slow Science Movement challenges the prevailing "publish or perish" culture in academia & research institutions. We believe that the current pressure for rapid publication & high citation counts undermines the quality, integrity & societal value of scientific work."

A lot of people are doing scientific sleuthing, finding faked scientific articles. But can we do something similar with labels of food supplement? Well, in some cases, yes, we can - let me show on the example of so-called magnesium glycinate. #ResearchIntegrety #chemchat #chemsky 1/n

This is a great list of techniques for getting real information out of a Google search and avoiding AI slop and paid results. (One thing not included is that if you add "-ai" to a search, you block the AI summary) cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/google-has...

2006 internet: RSS feeds, forums, communities of hobby blogs, where people post about interior design, fashion, and music for free 2026 internet: sponsored content, paid partnership, buy my merch, try my supplements, invest in my crypto, click link in bio to unlock the secrets of life for $30

Reminder that Chuck Norris was... Not an ally, to put it mildly. (Hopefully I'm safe to say this. He can't roundhouse kick me from the afterlife. Right?)

You could say that Rock n Roll was born 111 years ago today in Arkansas, but probably not where you'd think. Before there was a Chuck Berry or Little Richard, there was those who wanted to be like her. Rosetta Nubin better known as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the godmother of Rock was born on this day

This skeet raises something important from Unicode (arguably a ruler of the internet). The existence of both 🌭 and 🥪indicates that a hotdog is *not* a sandwich, since the rules for emoticons state they should be categorical instead of nuanced classifications (e.g. 🐸 represents all amphibians).

Your regular reminder of the extent of the problem

Last call for abstracts for oral communications at ISMSC2026 ! (closes 23rd March) for registration and abstract submission www.ismsc2026.com

Why are these people so afraid of modern medicine? Sure, let's wait until the situation is dire before acting...Good plan, doc. [Overuse of antibiotics can be an issue but this approach seems, shall we say, flawed.]