If you're a scientist our journalist writing a piece about Watson and his "complex and nuanced character", you're deliberately ignoring the fact that his views made him one of the most extreme racist and sexist scientific "leaders" of his time. liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/j...

James Watson died yesterday. He was a bad man with many bad ideas. We owe a debt of gratitude to the unknown hero who uploaded this picture of him to Wikipedia.

Dear funding agencies, I know we all want to discover the wonder drug that will cure the horrible diseases, but to do that, we need to invest in basic, unsexy, foundational research on how the systems work. Funding can’t all be drug development. Sincerely, Looking for basic research grants.

Model organisms, in particular non-mammalian model organisms, such as yeast, Caenorhabditis elegans, #Drosophila and zebrafish, have long stood at the centre of biological discovery www.nature.com/articles/s41...

People point to the Tories broader record in government but them leaning on Ofcom to leave GB News alone despite its repeated regulatory breaches & its star presenter being a political rival of theirs may actually be the thing that dooms them Naturally, Labour are refusing to correct this mistake

"The work I was involved in had no obvious therapeutic benefit. It was purely of scientific interest. I hope the country will continue to support basic research even though it may have no obvious practical value." - John Gurdon

Hm is it bad if the industry somehow propping up a trembling economy is based almost entirely on our collective willingness to let it do crimes

This country made significant progress against racism in my lifetime - but we did not do so by chance. There is a visible visceral regression in experiencing of overt racism because the toxic fringe with the most extreme views have a sense of permission & impunity www.easterneye.biz/racism-in-uk...

Amongst pro-migration voters - i.e. Labour's base last year and the easiest votes to recover in future - support for this policy is...0%. Nil. Nada. Zip. Zero. Goals don't come more open than this. Labour should be attacking this proposal at every opportunity.

Farage’s proposal to create a permanent underclass of migrants has 3% support. *3%*. If ever there was a golden political opportunity for Starmer’s Labour-whose support base let’s not forget is *pro-migration* - this is it. Is this mealy mouthed accountant language the best they can do?

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪 Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students. I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:

Shot, chaser Young men more likely to vote Green than Reform. Young men second most progressive group of any demographic. Combined right-wing vote barely bigger than Green vote alone for young men

Mix of cowardice and failing to understand the way racists have forced the agenda. This has to come to an end.

Keir Starmer should be old enough to remember that we didn't use to call them patriots, we called them football hooligans.

If I were the UK Government I would simply not route all my communications through the platform whose owner just called for regime change in Britain and said "fight back or die"

This is how you protect your democracy. The US is a demonstration of what happens when you don't. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

I find it grimly hilarious that I now cannot stop reading "ACAB" as "assigned cops at birth"

Post a perfect album from the 90s that isn’t Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, or Alice In Chains

so, as I understand it, the position here is that if you had a hard upbringing, you're allowed extrajudicial executions

It's far too long a story to fit in 300 characters, but—having done something similar*—I find this entirely believable. * I didn't lose my shoe

He was only 83. A man who famously protested segregation was only 83 and has just passed. 👁️👁️

'On the afternoon of Feb. 1, 1960, Mr. McNeil and three classmates from what is now North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro approached the whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth’s, sat on the turquoise- and salmon-colored vinyl seats and nervously ordered coffee.'

My entire feed rn is Senator: Do you think heart failure causes death RFK: Senator, medicine doesn't work, we all need to be drinking raccoon blood

RFK Jr., leaving Rudy Giuliani beside a broken bicycle in the middle of Central Park East Drive at 2AM

'Early on in her life, Esther defied societal conventions by pursuing biochemistry, against recommendations from her teachers who believed that a career in science was too difficult for women' academic.oup.com/genetics/adv...

somehow we are in a world where Goebbels the Lesser imagines himself competent to judge the scientific credibility of the stupidest Kennedy

In which we are reminded that Lucy Lawless is great. "Q. Which living person do you most despise and why? A. I currently have a special enmity for Stockton Rush of the Titan submersible disaster. Whoops. He’s dead." www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

signs reminding restaurant workers to wash their hands after they use the toilet are just another way the state crushes the human spirit

"Christmas card from a hooker in Minneapolis" is one of the great American literary works of the 20th century

It's wonderful to see an MP coming out clearly and forthrightly against the xenophobic bigots. It would be even better to see this message coming from Downing Street.

it's been a little while since I spent any time in NYC but this is making me miss it

The 2024 rankings of bacterial threats

preach

A day of shame for the UK. A political party proposes mass deportations and the response from other political parties is not to condemn this as going further than even Mosley or the National Front.

Still no NSF GRFP announcement for this year. Another week or two and the program is going to be effectively cancelled, because students will not have time to prepare. Any chatter out there about whats going on???? www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

All the evidence suggests that no one at the top of the Labour Party has read Mother Night. They should. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_...

Fly labs — Now is the time to show some solidarity and chip in support for this vital resource!

As an immigrant to the UK I endorse this sentiment unreservedly.

Chilling: “Mr. Orwoll recently gave The New York Times a limited tour, allowing entry to the property through a gate that had a lock. He sat on a folding chair… Before a photographer could snap pictures, he pulled a copy of “Mein Kampf” from a bookshelf and turned it around to hide its spine.”

As an anthropologist, I'm inclined to try to understand stuff that looks like magical thinking rather than mock it, but proposing to build a God and then expecting him to tell you how to get rich is really testing all of my professional training...

🔭 The first female Astronomer Royal in the 350-year history of the role: hubs.ly/Q03CVjfx0 🛰️ @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social Professor Michelle Dougherty has been appointed to the influential and important position, reflecting a lifetime of amazing research and her leading role on space missions.

I saw something amazing this morning: someone riding a Lime bike who wore a helmet, stopped at red lights, tried to avoid scaring or injuring those around her, and generally behaved responsibly. It was as if I'd seen a cryptid, right down to the knowledge that my report would not be believed.

If you're trying to communicate with me by DM, you should be aware that I can't see your DMs, because I can't be arsed to deal with age verification.

Evergreen

Found him

Embryology! Neural crest! Looking for a postdoc? Job closes 25 Aug. Informal enquiries welcome, and anyone hanging out at the Xenopus meeting come say hi. #mouse #human #development #neuralcrest #chromatin @the-node.bsky.social @marcotrizzino.bsky.social

Come be my colleague! We have three open positions at the Assistant/Associate Professor level for candidates in all areas of the biological sciences. www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

If you run a fly lab and have not yet contributed to save FlyBase, please look at our wiki page for the latest information!

A screaming comes across the sky

You cannot be truly creative if it is not safe to fail. Yet modern academic science requires constant short term success. To survive, you must win grants & 'deliver' on those grants by publishing lots of papers. That leads to a culture of low risk, iterative research oversold as 'groundbreaking.