Hayley's book is genuinely brilliant. Funny, poignant, compelling - go check it out.

Telling an untrue story about an area of science for politically expedient purposes leads to people being harmed or dying. How many times are supposedly enlightened civilisations going to have to learn this lesson the hard way???

Honestly @mjrobbins.com's story about Bristol this week is absolutely mental and is a perfect case study in how Britain can't seem to do... anything.

I strongly second this! 👏🏾 When talking about science communication, I also always stress that *all* forms and forums of communication matter 🔄 Whether it’s a big, factually correct but details-lite TV show or movie…or just chatting to granny or your mates in a pub 🗣️

Reform are now coming after people with permanent residency. It'll be citizens next. No one is safe from authoritarian governments.

This is art.

The joy of being my own boss is that I can knock off at 3pm on a Friday after a gruelling week and then feel intensely guilty about it due to still having too much work to finish before I go on holiday 😬

"Thrill" The best-ever description of spirochete movement, likening the bacteria's flexing to a shiver down the spine when feeling thrilled. R.C. Rosenberger, 1908, "The spirochaete found in syphilis", Am J Med Sci #MicroSky 🦠🧫🔬

Good. It's high time they kicked him out.

Jonas Salk is sad when you let your kids get polio

Love* that university finance departments land microbusinesses doing small projects for an individual department for a few grand with the same admin and Ts & Cs as those required for huge ££££££ projects. It's so disproportionate and a massive waste of time & money all round *very much Don't Love

Just awful, dumb behaviour that will slow down progress for patients not just in the US but everywhere.

Something I talked about in the post I did over the summer on radicalisation. It's an important factor in elite radicalisation. samf.substack.com/p/the-radica...

“AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor,” said Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute based in Bremen, Germany. “These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable.” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

The only fusion going on here is me facepalming so hard that my atomic nuclei merge

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

TLDR: Want drug research in the UK? Build more.

If you want to know why a major drug company chooses not to locate in the UK, look at property prices for cities with leading scientific universities. Cambridge: £6,591 per square metre. Lyon: £4,909 In other words it's 34% more expensive to be in the UK.

Not cool.

Well this seems quite positive?

Listen to our Executive Director @aliciagreated.bsky.social on the latest The Abundance Agenda podcast discussing CaSE’s work exploring skilled immigration to the UK and industrial strategy policy. 🎧 www.abundancepod.com/p/reshuffle-... @jamesomalley.co.uk @mjrobbins.com

British NIMBYism is truly a sight to behold. “We are rejecting this solar farm, because one time I saw an electric vehicle on fire, which reminded me that decades ago a coal mining disaster killed lots of children”.

My latest: How Reform are accidentally building a bat tunnel in Lincolnshire, and what it might mean for 2029.

Including this genuine exchange from the council’s oversight board 🤯🦇:

I pretty regularly get to watch companies making international moves and investments and it is *frikken weird* how the UK keeps actively sabotaging them bringing investment and jobs to the UK because of myopia on immigration. Utterly surreal and perverse

The flip side is also that by focusing on net migration, the UK counts its own brain drain of young talent *as a positive* in its own numbers. It's like the economic version of a death cult

My Bluesky feed is 50% people lambasting RFK and 50% "OH MY GOD LOOK AT THESE ANTS", and I'm OK with that.

Nigel Farage just repeatedly denied – under oath! – to @raskin.house.gov ever banning journalists he doesn’t like from his party’s conventions. This happened to me *literally today*.

Cool. Cool cool cool.

A lesson for us all on why you should not promise the impossible to the terminally insane

Martin asks why the local BBC always tries to see the bad side of things....

Cory Doctorow explains how (I'm paraphrasing) "The internet became 5 giant websites filled with pictures of the other 4" How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century, and How We Can Overthrow It www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ai-...

I once got into a conversation with a taxi driver who *didn't believe gravity was real* and there was another explanation for how things stayed in orbit. He couldn't articulate what the alternative was, just that the received explanation was not true. Distrusting experts is conspiracism 101

Anecdotal, but I’ve now lost count of how many men I’ve treated for massive heart attacks with minimal risk factors for heart disease except being on testosterone therapy that they never needed. They’re buying it online or getting it from functional doctors who convince them it’s a panacea

However bad you think things are at the CDC they are worse. That's the takeaway from this well-reported story from Daniel Payne w/back-up from an all-star STAT team. Must-read. www.statnews.com/2025/08/28/c...

JOB ALERT 🚨 We are hiring TWO principal investigators in cell, molecular, systems, or chemical biology in Toronto, Canada at @sinaihealth.bsky.social. We provide a generous startup, fully funded salary and academic appointment at U of Toronto. www.nature.com/naturecareer... Please repost!

America is very much not OK.

#ThrowbackThursday: In 1980 the 🌍🌎🌏 was declared #smallpox free, thanks to mass vaccination efforts. Smallpox was an acute contagious disease caused by the variola virus. It was one of the most devastating diseases known to humanity. #VaccinesWork

The enshittification of LinkedIn is happening - I've been thinking about what life science companies should be doing to counteract it: firstcreatethemedia.com/blog/linkedi...

Today I learned... (Just in case any other Brits are also plagued by every Google doc defaulting to US English)

Horrific story that shows the need for local journalists being able to check out tips and ask questions about stuff that might otherwise just have floated around local WhatsApp groups. www.northantstelegraph.co.uk/news/people/...

At last!

Fans of the pod/Substack will be delighted to know we've been protesting at Old Bridge Way this morning...

Making them wear high-visibility vests over camo is such a good joke you couldn’t write it

Frankly it’s also reckless - you have growing numbers of people exhibiting delusional behaviour toward chatbots, and this straight up encourages it.

My ex was a doctor in the early 00s and we ended up with lsome excellent swag in the house - the vertical Viagra pen holder was a stand-out, for obvious reasons.

“High visa fees are putting off some of the world’s most talented scientists from coming to the UK,” said Foulkes, with “We need to be able to compete for the world’s best scientists.” research institutes forced to divert funds from labs to pay fees.” observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

Totally forgot this absolutely fantastic “god forbid a man has hobbies” leaflet in the pub last week.