Don't remember this episode of Red Dwarf.

Horse owners, animal staff, neurodivergents, veterans, humans – finally, a consultancy on fireworks! www.gov.uk/government/c...

"DeepMind’s AlphaFold was trained on the Protein Data Bank, a repository filled over decades by synchrotron crystallography. Without the beamlines there would have been no training data and no AlphaFold."

He’s busy

Indeed we do! docs.google.com/document/d/e... I would add a line about the stupidity of cutting even further in the Strategic Priorities Grant, but may need to stop seething about that first. Do contact your MPs, many of them are too reliant on deeply stupid briefings from the DfE.

Bluesky this morning:

British Academy President's statement on the UK's higher education crisis, July 2026.

#UKHE! You know how we're told that 'students want less choice' against what we know to be reality & against pedagogical & disciplinary needs? Finally found the Nous report that supposedly backs that up, & it's based on a survey that asks about the *choice of major* nousgroup.com/assets/docs/...

Research confirms that the more skilled professionals like doctors and software engineers rely on AI, the more their skills degrade. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Analytically, this is why it's important to consistently talk about the political media class, to treat them as a single ecosystem of shared & mutually reinforcing interests, rather than as members of different parties & discreet professions that also overlap or interact

Brianna ghey has become the face of a social media ban for young people Despite the fact that her killers knew her in real life, at school, and she was socialising with them outside when they killed her And the reason they killed her was the traditional print media moral panic Truly sickening

Every pitch I’ve heard for how AI can make my job more efficient starts like this

Yowser. 'Edinburgh’s response goes even further. Any staff member not partaking in the boycott but who refuses to take on extra marking will have their pay deducted by 100 per cent.' Being financially punished for other people’s strike action?! Draconian.

how many cars are on fire

What a guy

Please Use AI

Absolutely craven and pathetic. A disgrace.

Remember that according to @royalsociety.org this kind of behaviour is apparently acceptable conduct for a Royal Society Fellow.

If these AI tutors are so good, why not give them to the kids of rich people, and let the kids on free school meals slum it with human tutors?

🌟2026 BSG Annual Conference is now open for abstracts!🌟 Join us in Lincoln between 1st and 4th September 📆 Find out more about conference preparations (including. the Cuchlaine King symposium on biogeomorphology🍃🦫) here www.geomorphology.org.uk/annual-confe... ⬇️ for the abstract submission...

Mocking early career researcher's exploitation while arguing for their replacement is absolutely vile.

It's an event like no other, and I'm delighted that: 1) it's coming back! Nov 2026 at Queen Mary University of London! And free! Sign up! Do it! 2) I'm giving a talk! Come hear about how we queer up conservation science sites.google.com/view/lgbtqst... #PrideMonth #QueerInSTEM

last year the UN "ai for good" flagship conference mistreated me and censored my talk because i made the link between the ai industry (their sponsors) and genocide explicit. this year, ITU issues "content guideline" that, on a close read, sounds like a licence to silence criticism of ai/the industry

In Rip off Britain, education has been treated as yet another commodity. And those who work in education are treated badly over and over again. Awful for educators and awful for students. I'll be speaking tonight at the University and College Union 👇🏼

ja fragt euch mal

Yet more evidence of the malicious incompetence of MPs and the government when it comes to higher education policy. Staff and unions have been screaming about this issue for years and we are constantly ignored and sidelined. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

“Westminster needs to wake up…” An important statement from the RHS today on the unfolding situation in UKHE.

It's almost as if not destroying the university sector might be good for the economy?! www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-i...

I'm deep in marking at the moment, and I'd like to make two observations: 1) Not enough students are thanking their pets in their dissertation acknowledgements. 2) Where students do this. It should be compulsory that they include a photo of said pet.

This is deeply depressing

Yet another sign that the sector is in massive trouble. Remember when people thought that a labour government might do something about this?

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

ah they got this all screwed up, there

this graduation speech moment is notable, and her amazed shock at having failed to read the room feels instructive. when you're inside the bubble, you think everybody else is. but everybody isn't.

Predicting that if I bring this up at my institution in response to the push for more AI in education, the response will be to ignore it and plow on regardless.

Reform want to use detention centres as political weapons against opponents. Worth remembering we already have detention centres, outsourced to Serco and Mitie, barely discussed in parliament or the press. Yarl’s Wood have been holding women indefinitely, for profit, since Labour opened it in 2001.

There are 15 (!) PhD positions available to join the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin mission science team. Funded through the MSCA EXODOCS doctoral network: www.exodocs.eu Apply here: euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/432752

Some useful public speaking tips from Freud here.

NO NO NO NO NO - dashare.zone ADMIN

The trouble of reducing international partnerships to just the fancy photo-op and PR campaign about internationalisation, @qmul.bsky.social, is that you have no interest in listening to what happens after with the people on those scholarships, or dismiss those ringing alarm bells as trouble-makers.

Peatlands store more carbon than the world's forests yet fundamental questions remain unanswered. Today we publish 50 priority research questions, identified by 467 participants from 54 countries #PeatQuest #Peatlands www.nature.com/articles/s43...

mind boggling response from a Labour MP. She either: does not have a clue how important universities are to the local economy; knows but doesn’t care because of some sort of ‘anti-elitist’ brainworm; or knows but is too worried to admit it lest it upset Reform voters. none reflect very well on her!

Happy anniversary of this not happening

The RGS higher ed section is now on bluesky!