V useful piece dispelling myths about NIH policy on open access upstream.force11.org/cost-of-conf...

It’s 10 February, which can only mean one thing. YES, OF COURSE! It’s the 671st anniversary of the townsfolk and students of Oxford marking Saint Scholastica’s day by... er, hammering shit out of each other until over 90 people were dead 🧵

xckd 1217

While this absolutely sucks, we are going to see a lot more places implementing universal global age verification over this next year, because the number of states and countries legally requiring it has gotten to the point no one can keep up anymore.

Today, in news that shock nobody: "We found that none of the tested language models were ready for deployment in direct patient care. Despite strong performance from the LLMs alone, both on existing benchmarks and on our scenarios, medical expertise was insufficient for effective patient care"

This is why we need to stop looking at metrics (number of papers, citations, h-index, whatever) for hiring and promotions. Applications need to be “list 5 (or 10) major works you have performed” (incl. open software, data sets, etc).

Sir Guenter Treitel came to the UK on the Kindertransport. He became the foremost authority on English contract law. Famously, he held the Rolling Stones to their contract to play the Magdalen Ball in 1964 for £100 - they had suddenly become superstars after being booked as unknowns in 1963.

I do want to shout-out my fellow sociologists, who have collectively created a discipline so woke that not a single one of our introductory textbooks can make it past Florida's censors. Great work everyone.

We won’t take instruction on freedom of expression from a regime that censors research, attacks universities, deploys lawfare against the media and kills protestors in broad daylight.

Context: this speech is from SIR THOMAS MORE, a history written, as near as scholars can tell, in the early 1600s by 6 or 7 people including Dekker, Heywood, Chettle, Shakespeare, and Munday. It was never performed, because Jacobean England was a police state and it was banned by the censor.

Is Starmer cooked? Mind blowing to get a whopping majority and achieve so little before being ousted in under two years. If we're very lucky, whoever succeeds him will do, I don't know, literally anything.

Neat paper in @cp-chem.bsky.social by @deanast.bsky.social, Goddard, and the later Sir Fraser, reporting an artificial molecular pump that operates in water and makes some pretty cool rotaxanes. www.cell.com/chem/fulltex...

Frodo at a comedy roast is the lord of the zings

While on the topic of sexism and the Nobels, let us recall how the rightwing British newspapers reported Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin's 1964 prize. Daily Telegraph: "£18,750 Award to Mother of Three" Daily Mail: Hold my beer - "Oxford Housewife Wins Nobel."

Striking paper from researchers at Anthropic using a randomised control trial to look at the effects of AI use on skills acquisition. TL:DR ‘We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.’ www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

'to treat peer review as a throughput problem is to misunderstand what is at stake. Review is not simply a production stage in the research pipeline; it is one of the few remaining spaces where the scientific community talks to itself.' 1/3

hey bluesky is hardcore history cringe asking for a me

I think everyone needs to see an adorable wiener dog.

A detailed write-up of various deliberations surrounding C.S. Wu and a deserved Nobel Prize that she never received

Employers: use LLM at every opportunity, it may save you several minutes across the week! Also employers: you took a day off because you were sick? Spend 20 minutes completing the mandatory self-certification form which requires you to find and duplicate a load of information from the HR system

#photoswitches: How should we determine errors on PSS distributions, and the absorption spectrum of the metastable isomer? We have been discussing this for years and have finally written a manuscript, including a python code to fit your data without human bias. chemrxiv.org/doi/full/10....

I know you've heard that a federal judge ordered the release of 5 year old Liam Conejo Arias and his father, and that they're now home. But did you look at the judge's order? It's less than 2.5 pages and well worth a minute. "Jesus wept." Link to pdf: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

1. The thing about science that these jokers don't understand is that science cannot be vibe-coded. Whatever its flaws, the point with vibe coding is that you're trying to quickly make something that sorta works, where you can immediately sorta see if it sorta works and then sorta use it.

There will be sausage Actually that sounds pretty good

So how do I put my money down on the other side of this prediction? www.quantamagazine.org/is-particle-...

Publishers are already seeing unprecedented quantities of AI slop and unethical AI use by authors and reviewers, and it's terrifying that tools like this will open the floodgates further. Gen AI is a plague and I wish it a swift death.

🎉 As we celebrate #TIBS50, we're highlighting #CitedClassics and revisiting the top cited article from each of the last 50 years! Check out this one from 1978! Read it here 👉 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

tfw your IT team are so eager for you to use their LLM-powered chat bot that they put it over the "submit ticket" button so you can't actually ask them for help

The Scaramucci of course is primarily used in the US. In the UK we adopted the more modern unit lettuce in 2022, defined as 1.1 Trusses (54 days).

"This is the most essential technology ever created in all of human history. Don’t mercilessly ridicule it just because it steals the joy out of your hobbies and creates sexually explicit images of women without their consent. Seriously, please stop! It really hurts my feelings."

New least favourite place to see useless AI features thrust in my face: as a banner over the top of a PowerPoint slide while presenting. No, I don't want you to summarise the slides someone is about to deliver.

wonder how many potholes they could’ve fixed instead with this money

Yes. Absolutely true. Even long after it was over and the writing was EVERYWHERE (450 AD), no one could imagine an alternative. A bit more political violence though.

I wonder how many Reform voters feel really happy to see their party become more of the same crap they seemed to dislike so much in the past 15 years.

Unlike sharks, which are smooth

Remember that the UK has far, far weaker protections against state power than did the US. And the latter folded up like a pack of cards. The US is a warning from the British future.

I feel like we need a five year moratorium on anyone without a degree in neuroscience or similar from using the word 'dopamine' on pain of custard pie right in the fizzog. Also if someone says it on a podcast an airhorn sounds & the hosts get pressure hosed with freezing water

Work IT: gives me 2 TB storage Also work IT: insists all files are stored on the cloud, not locally

“OpenAI’s CFO has floated the idea of taking a cut from your AI-powered discoveries, and enterprise customers are unlikely to be amused.” Wow, leading idea-stealing company wants to steal from its customers now too? Who could have seen this coming?🥲

It has been an honour to be a part of WISC from its beginning and especially during the last 3 years as Chair. I am excited to see how WISC grows under the leadership of @profdraper.bsky.social with its new directions and name. I am looking forward to continue supporting WISC on the Advisory Board

2026: the year so bad that even the Third Amendment is suddenly relevant

On the plus side, more than 45 mins battery life. On the downside, copilot. Copilot everywhere.

Our next vMASC seminar will be from: • Xavi Ribas (QBIS-CAT) • Subhasis Chattopadhyay (Masaryk University, Czech Republic) Date 📆 and time 🕰️: Thursday 29th January 2026 at 14:30 (UK time) Register at mascgroup.co.uk/vmasc-4 to attend! #RSC_MASC #vMASC

Come work with us at Nature Chemistry! We're hiring a locum editor to handle our chembio content in London or Pune.

Asked a stranger in Greenwich to recommend somewhere to eat that wasn't a chain. He walked us to a pub tucked away behind a church, bought us a round, told us his life story about growing up queer in the east end in the 70s, and took his leave. London can be a wonderful city when it wants to be.

I went to Minneapolis last week. What I saw was horrifying and inspiring in equal measure. Gift link to my latest column: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/o...

This is one for all the #WomeninSTEM. If you are happy to, could you share some of the more awkward and unusual questions you have been asked? The ones your male colleagues would never be asked. I'm running an event @helmholtz.de with the awesome Michelle Browne for #IDWAGIS

Even today, some things can be said with absolute certainty. These lines will never cross again. www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations

According to researchers, this ‘curiosity-driven’ work reminds chemists that attributing the effect to one dominant cause oversimplifies a ‘fundamentally complex phenomenon’. CW's Mason Wakley reports.

Don't get any ideas, potential reviewers