Performative Outragemas seems to come earlier every year 🫠

New York, London, Paris, Munich, everyone talk about, poppy music. Off key #Respectival entertainment 👌

This is a very good listen. It's funny that everybody saying "Crick & Watson just stole Franklin's work" aren't really dunking on Watson like they think, they're basically repeating a myth he invented to make himself look cool.

Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of DNA. Stop saying that they discovered DNA! This was done by another guy you probably haven't heard of! And therein lies a story. academic.oup.com/genetics/art...

What did Watson and Crick discover in 1953?” “Rosalind Franklin’s notes!” Now would be a good time to listen to my interview with the brilliant @matthewcobb.bsky.social about Franklin, Watson, Crick and the discovery of the double helix. geneticsunzipped.com/blog/2023/8/...

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...

I think we can all agree that you can publish a game-changing bit of science (especially if you have more than a bit of help with the tricky crystal structures) but also be a massive fucking prick. We contain multitudes, yeah?

If you're following the playbook of someone who appears to have become wildly rich and successful from teaching people how to become wildly rich and successful by teaching something else to other people, then I'm sorry to tell you you're not an ‘empowered online entrepreneur’ - you're a mark.

A #Micronaut in a prior #microbiology #Bio350 course at @univpugetsound.bsky.social made this for me a couple of years ago. I will miss working with students very much. @asmicrobiology @microbe.tv

I gave up trying to pull the best quote from this. Just go and read the whole thing.

Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:

And I do recommend the accompanying YouTube video for fans of drone footage, infrastructure, beards, and Debussy. Complete with end blooper where the drone autonomously targeted the car windshield 😬. www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNPF...

Absolute marmalade-dropper, this. Well worth a read.

In a move that critics are calling ‘ill-advised’ I’ve made a mini video documentary to accompany this post, featuring sexy drone footage and less sexy Martin footage. m.youtube.com/watch?v=qNPF...

My latest: Move over bat tunnel, here’s the wild story of how HS2 were forced to build a multi-million pound bridge for a road that… doesn’t actually exist.

An incredible, infuriating scoop from @mjrobbins.com - the multi million pound HS2 bridge to nowhere. How inflexible legislation and obstructive local councillors insisted a high spec bridge was constructed for a road that doesn't even exist open.substack.com/pub/martinro...

Only dog people will understand

'The night the sky showered us with stars" by Sarah Morgan, contemporary artist and printmaker #WomensArt

Who are you and why are you inside my brain?

This may be my most cringe LinkedIn post so far. In the spirit of sharing the horror, you get it too.

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.

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

Social media encourages chasing dopamine, and Musk's decisions award that dopamine most readily for views he likes. ChatGPT also gives it to you, but too easily which devalues it compared to the applause of strangers.

Inside a Cello Charles Brooks Photography

We selected the laziest mouse at each round to inoculate the next batch of germfree mice: over rounds of selection and passaging, behavior shifted without changes to the mouse genome: rdcu.be/eM3rO 🦠🧫

File under "stop expecting 15 years of Tory wasteland to be fixed in 2 seconds" - Labour ARE doing big, progressive things that will help millions. Then wonder why you're not hearing about it in media. (this does not need any caveats about other things they've not yet done or are doing badly etc)

We will fight them on the quiches

there's an old joke about somebody's work being "both original and good, but the parts that were good were not original, and the parts that were original were not good"

Just so much ahistorical bollocks here. Also, last time I checked my copy of 1066 And All That, the Anglo Saxons got conquered by the Normans.

Just re-set all 3 oven clocks in less than 30 seconds. I feel like some kind of Time God.

If you are starting to think about your garden next year, I have a growing archive of plants by month of interest here: www.wildway.info/p/seasonal-g... (this archive is for people with a £25 annual paid subscription)

Any Billy Cobham fans want two tickets for his gig at Union Chapel tonight? I’m too ill to go :( Gutted but so it goes.

If this post gets 100 likes I'll barricade Martin in his office until he does this.

If you’re still on the fence about whether you want to buy my book, maybe this will help. #cansky 1/7

Lovely bit of Bluesky logic: scolding someone for using a generative AI image to make a point by using someone else's copyrighted and uncredited art instead.

Small businesses being notoriously immune to cash flow squeezes.

Fuck right off and come back to me when the CEO of [big co] is happy to hold his own salary payment back for a fortnight so he can make payroll because that invoice that makes up 25%of their income for the month hasn't been paid yet.

In 2022, wild polio made a shocking return to Malawi -- the first case in 30 years. The virus travelled thousands of kilometres and landed in the body of a little girl who’d never left her own neighbourhood. But how?

Recently came across Lisa Taylor's amazing work on coloration in jumping spiders, including using eyeliner to give them teenytiny makeovers to see whether these colors helped them attract mates/avoid sexual cannibalism. Sometimes in science, there aren't standard tools for the thing you want to do🧪

Just as you thought manels had finally died out...🧪🧪🧪🧪🧪🧪

Imagine going back in time even 30 years and trying to explain this.

Best poster in this incredible thread of panto posters, and it's not even a panto. Genius bit of marketing.

A majestic thread in the current world of madness.

'Fishing Otter' linocut and silkscreen print by Angela Harding, contemporary artist based in the UK #WomensArt

Nice little break from transcribing letters: found these doodles of Faraday @rigb.org and Herschel in a letter from novelist Maria Edgeworth (1802-1869) in 1844 @bodleian.ox.ac.uk, writing about Faraday’s Xmas lectures on electricity - pretty solid likenesses to be honest!

Johannes Hartmann of UCL summarizes the central problem in cell & developmental biology - very nice! #GenerativeBiology

This is a Pixar movie. The little moon (Sabrina Carpenter) comes in to work-shadow the veteran actual moon (Meryl Streep). Streep is grumpy about it for the film’s first thirty mins. But by the end they’re inseparable and when 2083 comes we cry. While also learning about the need to let someone go.

There's a slot car racing place in town that was open briefly ("temporarily closed" since 2022) and... I think I can see why it wasn't a success.

The cow story is another classic of the '@mjrobbins.com somehow digs up another insane story about dysfunctional local authorities' genre. A must-listen.