NYT obituary of Jim Watson. A long and fairly balanced view of a complicated man who participated in one of the greatest discoveries in biology. [Gift Link] www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/s...

On the event of James Watson's death, I highly recommend this 2023 commentary from @matthewcobb.bsky.social and Nathaniel Comfort with crucial new insights into the discovery of the double helix. (And also check out Cobb's brand new biography of Francis Crick) www.nature.com/articles/d41...

There I was thinking @matthewcobb.bsky.social would have a more nuanced view of the late Jim Watson than most, and he delivers. If only I had a weekly science programme to ask him about it in more depth.

It’s really remarkable how thin the bench of climate change deniers is and how deep the poverty of their arguments. They haven’t come up with anything new in decades and can only fall back on conspiracies to explain their lack of success.

Joe Rogan has one of the world's most popular podcasts. Unfortunately, like nearly all of the most popular online shows, his tends to spread climate misinformation. For @climateconnections.bsky.social I scrutinize his recent episode with octogenarian climate contrarians Lindzen & Happer 🧵 (1/11)

I always like to think the first tentative blooms on chaenomeles are a sign of good things around the corner.

An alarming sidelight on the back doors AI is opening up into scientific publications: not paper factories, but insta-comments for the letters pages.

Oh dear oh dear www.science.org/content/arti...

@cenmag.bsky.social pops up with a reminder of a story I truly regret passing by last June, the cooking up of a benzene-like form of nitrogen. But when the 6th word in this account is 'allotrope', it underlines the gulf between chemists & SinA's audience. Perhaps try in a different format?

It's super informative. It's one of the few books with a permanent place on my bookshelf, because there's nothing else that chronicled the background goings on. I was "in the mix" sort of, but I was oblivious to the wider shenanigans.

I have also had some things to say about this: www.thelancet.com/journals/lan... and www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Australia-based RadioInfo picked up on the demise of Science in Action - ironic, they add, given it was during "Media and Information Literacy week, a UNESCO initiative to make the world aware of how important the media is in communicating truth & factual reporting." radioinfo.com.au/news/in-medi...

Front page of the Science in Action webpage today, with even more feel of finality. On the left hand side: The BBC brings you all the week's science news. On the right hand side: No upcoming broadcasts.

Thread (on the other side) on the earthquake yesterday in northern Afghanistan x.com/shnizaii/sta...

"What's NASA potentially hiding" is NewsNation's big question about 3I Atlas to Avi Loon. The derangement is so infuriating - as I shared last week on a rare outing on BBC Inside Science

Terrific review of CRICK by Georgina Ferry in this week's @nature.com (the print title of the review is less clickbaity):

‘You can’t eat electricity’: how rural solar farms became the latest battlefront in Britain’s culture war - Reform UK is exploiting opposition to solar panels – but most farmers are more worried about climate change. Via @theconversation.com theconversation.com/you-cant-eat...

A major day in history and one that affected my family who lived in Dolgarrog. My Taid (grandad) helped with the rescue #OTD #100yearsagotoday #centenary #dolgarrogdamdisaster

TIL 60 years of progress in computer weather forecasting, with a massive dose of Moore's Law.

Sixty days left to save the Museum of the Earth. Please donate if you can, and share. This is not only one of the most important fossil collections in the world, it also home to the world’s best plushies: Paleozoic Pals! www.priweb.org/mortgage-cam...

Stack of Jacquard loom cards, about two meters in length at Queen’s Street Mill, near Burnley By my calculation about 120kb of data

Holy moly - this glacier detachment in Tajikistan is WILD. It appears that there was a large piece of glacier ice much farther down the valley from a first detachment which then got pushed by a second soon thereafter. 🧵@planet.com @davepetley.bsky.social 🧪⚒️

NOAA’s National Weather Service holds the federal responsibility for tsunami warnings, and has historically been a primary supporter of seismic data collection in Alaska

Having just finished the final episode, I’m filled with both sadness and gratitude. The weekly programme will be greatly missed — a true loss for the BBC and for science communication worldwide.

🧵 Co-author Tony VanDongen has responded on X, arguing that recombination can't explain what they found. His argument: If SARS-CoV-2 acquired one of its BsaI sites from RmBANAL247, it would have acquired the two adjacent sites! While not a good argument, it's worse argument in light of new data.

Such a tremendous honour to be part of this final discussion. Science in Action lasted decades and I’m so grateful to have contributed to its legacy in a small way. I’ll just have to keep putting science in action going forward. ❤️🫡

Dismaying and short-sighted. The world needs more programs like Science in Action.

This is such a crying shame, and so short-sighted. But there it is.

"How science got here, and where next" | Honored to have been part of this panel discussion w/ an amazing panel of experts and the irreplaceable @peaseroland.bsky.social (whom we will all miss listening to on #BBC) www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w...

The were many Science in Action 'regulars' I'd have loved to have on this farewell edition, but with the threat from antiscience as the theme, hugely grateful @michaelemann.bsky.social could join, along with @drdebhoury.bsky.social @angierasmussen.bsky.social & @naomioreskes.bsky.social.

For years Roland has worked tirelessly to inform BBC listeners about societally-relevant science. This is exactly the WRONG time, BBC, to be letting him go! 😠

For 61 years the #BBCWorldService has been broadcasting the latest in science via its weekly Science in Action programme. That dies in the next half hour, with this final edition, reflecting on the fall in trust in expertise driven by malign interests over recent years.

For 61 years the #BBCWorldService has been broadcasting the latest in science via its weekly Science in Action programme. That dies in the next half hour, with this final edition, reflecting on the fall in trust in expertise driven by malign interests over recent years.

Glad that @squigglyvolcano.bsky.social has written about this. It did strike me that as #Melissa battered Jamaica and elsewhere, the seismic signal would be powerful and instructive.

It's the end of the road for BBC Science in Action. But science itself is facing growing roadblocks. For this terminal edition of SinA I'm joined by @naomioreskes.bsky.social @drdebhoury.bsky.social @michaelemann.bsky.social & @angierasmussen.bsky.social for where now? www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w...

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w... ... is nigh

That would have been big news a few years ago, unfortunately the great science that gives important understanding in coronaviruses is now back to the small circle of scientists. Anyway: A fully functional furin cleavage site in a bat betacorarnavirus! Congrats to the authors!

NOAA’s hurricane research division staff has been cut from 52 in 2020 to 28 in 2025, almost a 50% cut. They’ve resorted to using volunteers to man the critical radar and dropsonde stations on Hurricane Hunter flights. Senseless cuts in an era of climate change making the strongest storms stronger.

Debunking bullshit takes an order of magnitude more work that creating it. While all experts who looked closer at the "synthetic origin" bruhaha immediately realised how scientifically unsound it was, it just takes so much work for so little reward to refute it. Zach did anyway, and oh boy.. ⬇️

Carnivorous ‘death ball’ sponge among new species found in depths of Southern Ocean www.theguardian.com/environment/...

More reading for me

Look what the dog fetched up! @matthewcobb.bsky.social’s new biography of Francis Crick. Folks, it’s like no other Crick biog. Full of new research, fresh insights, juicy stories, & it’s a romp. Having watched this develop from the larval stage, it’s a thrill to hear it thunk! on my table

I've had to update the plot of the strongest tropical cyclones by ocean basin all too often in recent years, since climate change increases the number of high-end storms. Melissa has joined the club, tied with Dorian (2019) as strongest Atlantic hurricane recorded outside the Gulf of Mexico.

For the record, Melissa's main targets of Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, and the Bahamas account for, respectively, 0.016%, 0.0089%, 0.064%, and 0.0038% of the global annual total of CO2 emissions.

Indeed

This is cool, 6 million year old ice from Antartica with inferred temperature ~12°C warmer than the late Pleistocene. No CO2 level yet! (That will be highly anticipated!) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

For me this chart (if I've understood it correctly) underlines where the energy for #Melissa comes from - surface waters of the Atlantic down to 70 m depth cooled by up to ~2C suggess a huge amount of heat transferred. Assuming the T profile after is flat because of all the mixing down to that depth

Anthropocene as a biological event - the massive increase in human and domesticated mammal biomass vs the startling decrease in land and marine wild mammal biomass in the past 160yrs, as documented the great team of Ron Milo in Nat Comms. Sobering graph. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

At 185 mph maximum sustained winds, Cat 5 Hurricane #Melissa is now just 7 mph shy of what @michaelfwehner.bsky.social r.bsky.social & Jim Kossin have defined as the cutoff for a prospective "Cat 6" hurricane: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Science operations for @vrubinobs.bsky.social has begun, but science data is not flowing just yet. The observatory will start operations in an engineering mode. The LSST (Legacy Survey of Space and Time) is expected to start no earlier than the December 31, 2025. community.lsst.org/t/operations...