Just published! Pasca & Greely (1st, last, & corresponding authors) The Need for a Global Effort To Attend To Human Neural Organoid & Assembloid Research, SCIENCE 390(6773):574-577 (Nov. 6, 2025) We think it's a big deal! Other authors on next post-too many to fit. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Oh dear. More worries about the consequences of CRISPR. The basic step - cutting both strands of DNA, which are then repaired, is not anodyne and has lasting effects.

Come check out the #MCCS25 debate on November 14! Drs. André Fenton & Yaniv Ziv will be debating a hot topic: are memory stability and representational drift opposing or complementary processes? Moderated by Dr. @sarahrobins.bsky.social 🧠 Register now: event.fourwaves.com/MCCS25/pages

Long-term impact and biological recovery in a deep-sea mining track www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In 1979, a Mining Test Ravaged the Pacific Seafloor— 44 Years Later, New Evidence Reveals It’s Likely Forever dailygalaxy.com/2025/11/in-1...

Understanding geometry through model making

THIS IS THE POWERFUL KNOWLEDGE

Beech by the Cam

It’s not only CRICK that is published today!

The opening paragraph to Crick’s thesis - about protein structure - from July 1953. Ok, he was 37, but even so the writing is so clear. Those last two sentences effectively set out a global research programme that would last decades.

UK publication day for this wrist-spraining beauty! Appropriately, I’m travelling to Cambridge, where I’m doing a book launch talk at the LMB tomorrow afternoon.

Would be ideal for storing all that DNA sequence data we are collecting!

During my Oxford interview, Jeffrey Gray asked me to discuss the idea that El Greco suffered from strabismus and that this was why he painted long thin people. I was nonplussed. "Think, boy, think!" hissed Gray, wearily. I thunk and eventually got the answer. But failed the interview.

The draft of the never-completed 'Scale' book included a poem that Crick composed in the bath, about the Moon and Earth seen from the point of view of a lunar colonist who lived on the far side. Here is the beginning and the end.

Crick bemoaning (to children) the absence of a poetry of the vast gulfs of space.

Draft of part of Crick's planned children's book on 'scale' (1975).

Some good guessing here. The announcement was made two days later…

I missed this last week, but holy mola, China has approved the High Seas Treaty: dialogue.earth/en/digest/ch...

Nice, intelligent review of my book "The Tree of Life" in Nature Ecology and Evolution by @bethanyjallen.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.amazon.co.uk/Tree-Life-So... Out in USA next Tuesday! www.amazon.com/Tree-Life-So...

In my first-year #EarlyModern class this week at @bbkhistorical.bsky.social, we did primary source analysis focused on the age-old problems of sex, drugs and rock n roll (comic adultery, disorderly alehouses, and unlicenced musicians). Still buzzing from such an engaged group of students! 🗃️

A Map Of Britain After The 2029 Technology Crash, by me and my dad.

Other work of the Ladybird artists ‘Bonfire Night’ (1951) Artist: Ronald Lampitt

This is the surface of Saturn's giant icy moon Titan, photographed by the Huygens probe on 14 January 2005. It is the farthest place from Earth where we have so far landed.

A 3rd (?) germline editing co announced @antonioregalado.bsky.social in @technologyreview.com, www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/31/1... I mainly share Fyodor's reaction, quoted in story—"In his email, Urnov said the launch of still another venture into the area made him want to “howl with pain.”

This gold spray of myrtle was found in a tomb, inside a bronze vessel, resting atop the cremains of the tomb's occupant. Gold myrtle wreaths were buried with the dead to signify the deceased’s importance or as an offering to the gods for safe passage into the next world. 🏺 1/ Greek, 400-350 BCE

Not only thieves but (incompetent) lying thieves, too. What a surprise.

The EV Battery Tech That’s Worth the Hype, According to Experts. Solid-state batteries is effectively the game-ender for deep-sea mining, so I am excited to see any progress made on developing and implementing solid-state batteries into EVs.

No one seems to bother that Hawkman (and Hawkgirl), Air Man, The Angel and many medieval angels (as well as the Welsh Dragon) were actually hexapods.

Brenner's copy of a New Yorker cartoon that was repeatedly moved around various noticeboards (note the pin holes)

If you are a Kindle person and like hard sf, I can't recommend Something Coming Through and Into Everywhere highly enough. Witty, dark, surprisingly profound. Also the first two books in the Quiet War sequence are amazing value for $5.99 www.amazon.com/Into-Everywh... www.amazon.com/Quiet-War-Om...

One I missed because I didn't know it existed until after the book was finished – a B&W scan of the cover of Nature marking the 'coming of age' (ie 21st anniversary) of the double helix. I am trying to find a colour image of the original (most libraries stripped off the covers when binding...)

Crick in a sombrero, with an unidentified man, in Italy, July 1955, where he was at a meeting in Pallanza on macromolecules.

Here's Sydney Brenner, talking on BBC TV to Raymond Baxter about molecular biology in 1960. Behind him are some of the exhibits made for the 1958 Brussels Expo (l-r: TMV, polio, DNA). The polio structure was supervised by Rosalind Franklin, who died before the Expo took place.

A load of minor Crickiana came up for auction last week, mainly lab books ('diaries') for his first abandoned PhD on the viscosity of water, and various signed reprints. Not sure what they went for, but the guide prices seemed low to me:

Award alert! 🎖️🚨 Every other year, the Ethologische Gesellschaft awards the Niko Tinbergen Award to outstanding post-doc level researchers in Behavioural Biology (<=6yrs post PhD exam). ...and this year is one of these years! Please send us your nominations! 🫵 Infos: www.etho-ges.de/wordpress/aw...

I want these musicians to be performing forever on MY ceiling! And their parrot. And dog! Great painting by Gerrit van Honthorst, born OTD 1592.

A 2,000 year-old blue glass wine cup inscribed in Greek ‘EYΦPAINOY EΦωПAPEI’ “Be glad that you are here” Roman drinking cups like this were used to welcome guests at social gatherings. 1st century AD 🍷 📷 Corning Museum of Glass #EpigraphyTuesday #Archaeology

Peter’s epauletted fruit bats roosting under the thatched eaves of one of the buildings at our lodge near Victoria Falls. Watched them feeding on nectar from “sausage tree” (Kigelia) flowers last night 🦇

New @nhm-london.bsky.social 5-day course on integrative biodiversity discovery! Learn how to collect specimens, obtain genomic data, and interpret biodiversity using cutting edge phylogenomic analysis. It's free, and aimed at early career researchers: www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/...

What amazing things! See the whole thread!

You are what you #wheat. #wheat provides 1 in 5 calories humans consume 🌾 This primer traces its evolution, domestication and looks at future challenges for. www.cell.com/current-biol...

My favourite movie with my name in? Dave The Jackal.

Language models cannot reliably distinguish belief from knowledge and fact #AI Failure to make such distinctions can mislead diagnoses, distort judicial judgments and amplify misinformation. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Cambridge graffiti, late 1960s. This kind of slogan was generally used for guitar heroes (Clapton, Alvin Lee, Hendrix). In this case, it appears the same person also scrawled 'Keep the lefties out' and 'Enoch is right' (amended by another hand to 'Enoch is a right pratt').

Another one that didn't make it. Francis and Odile on their wedding day, 1949. Odile made her own dress.

A photo that didn't make it into the book, sadly, though it is described. Francis carrying his granddaughter, @kindracrick.com on his shoulders in the 1970s.

This sketch of Francis in the Green Door flat (so 1948-51), reading Nature or Vogue or some other magazine, was sold at Christie's for $17,500 in 2013.

One of the plates that appears in the UK edition of CRICK, but sadly not the US edition. A sketch of Francis by Odile, drawn in 1948-9 in the tiny Green Door flat they lived in on Thompsons Lane.