Voting for Brexit or Boris Johnson did not, in the great scheme of things, demand support for anything truly toxic. Voting for Farage, by contrast, absolutely & obviously does. This is why the people who brought you the first two disasters are working so hard to detoxify him, in two main ways… 1/2

Trying to hold demons to account over in Never Never Land.

Just in case you’re feeling even vaguely optimistic about anything right now, please note that two UK political parties populated & led by profoundly racist people are currently being described as merely ‘right-wing’ in pretty much every corner of the UK media. This is how the worst stuff happens…

In normal times, the fact that government officials at HHS blatantly lied to the public and got caught would be a scandal of unusual size. Everyone involved in this disinformation scheme against the people of the United States should be held accountable.

#RIP Pierre Chambon (1931-2026) 1963 PARP 1970 RNA Pol II 1975 Nucleosome 1977 Split genes 1980 Promoter 1983 enhancer 1986 Nuclear receptor

Don’t. Outsource. Your. Morality. To. “How is this playing in a West Midlands marginal”. It is corrosive.

Two (or more) PhD student positions are open with me in protein structure evolution (using AI). Please apply/spread the word. su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

Germ cells have their own versions of core transcription factors and fertility depends on them. We're hiring a PhD student to figure out how! 📢 Fly genetics + proteomics + genomics. Fully funded. Aarhus University 🇩🇰 Deadline May 1 👇 Please share with anyone who might be interested!

The very aggressive marketing of “dietary supplements” to healthy people by the supplement industry (an industry that was worth around $200 billion last year) is a scam

May 5th: if you are around London, please join the London #EvoDevo symposium at QMUL / Charterhouse campus, as usual we will have selected talks and post-event 🍻. A warm up for #EED2026 in Glasgow. Registration £0, more info here: londonevodevo.co.uk

The Great Barrington Declaration is one of the most wrongheaded, shortsighted, cruel, callous, and villainous arguments ever made. Literally ever. Representing the interests of big business, its authors ought to be remembered in infamy. So too should their allies.

Transformer-based AI has boosted @nanoporetech.com sequencing accuracy, but at a cost to portability due to GPU demands. Our new work, spearheaded by Sara Bakic, introduces Campolina link.springer.com/article/10.1... to improve nanopore signal segmentation for event-based mappers.

Delighted to see this published: H3K115 acetylation is associated with fragile nucleosomes at CpG island promoters and active regulatory sites. Great work from all contributors; Yatendra Kumar, @illingworth-lab.bsky.social @eliasfriman.bsky.social @helink.bsky.social doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Reform: Stop the boats! Deport people! Starmer: OMG we have to beat the Reform Party! STOP MORE BOATS! DEPORT MORE PEOPLE! ISLAND OF STRANGERS! Hannah Spencer: Everybody deserves a nice life. Starmer: Hannah Spencer is more interested in dividing people than uniting them.

The @steinaerts.bsky.social lab is looking for a postdoctoral researcher to develop next-generation sequence-to-function models for glioblastoma, one of the most aggressive brain cancers. More info & how to apply 👉 https://vib.ai/en/opportunities#/job-description/130090

New paper from my group in @science.org : "A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesise itself and its complementary strand" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Outstanding work by @edogia.bsky.social

We've removed the paywall from this guide so everyone can access it. 👇 Stay safe.

I call on my party and my government to remove themselves entirely from X and communicate with the public where they actually participate online and can be protected from such illegality.

The current situation of NIH science is a tragedy. So much was lost in 2025. Many of us are struggling to keep afloat. I only hope that in 2026 more people wake up to the fact that USA science has been deeply damaged. We are resilient, but we are in grave danger of losing ourselves./end

There should be literally no circumstances, ever, where citizenship is can be revoked. If you literally sign up to fight for an opposing army in a war, then we should prosecute you for treason not revoke citizenship

Lovely review by @adrianwoolfson.bsky.social of my book ‘The Tree of Life’ in the Wall Street Journal today. Free guest link if you’re interested. www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

Interested in cell adhesion, evolution of multicellularity, or developing tools for emerging marine models? My lab at UM is hiring a postdoc, and the application is now open: 🔗 tinyurl.com/28jvu4aa If you know anyone looking for a postdoc, please pass this along!

I am delighted that my group will be a part of this.

Good to see the peer reviewed version of this in print The cis-regulatory logic integrating spatial and temporal patterning in the vertebrate neural tube A global temporal chromatin program operates across the vertebrate nervous system to control neural cell diversity www.cell.com/developmenta...

Our study on mdka transcriptional regulation during zebrafish brain regeneration has been accepted in FEBS Journal and will be online soon! 🚀 A related review from our group on immunity & inflammation in zebrafish brain regeneration is also available in FEBS Journal: doi.org/10.1111/febs...

@andreaserio.bsky.social and I are recruiting a postdoc to lead an exciting MNDA-funded project using multi-omics to study long axons in motor neurons and how they shape susceptibility to #ALS. Get in touch for any questions and apply by 2 December: my.corehr.com/pls/kclrecru...

Why far from being a disadvantage, hostility to people from different races and cultures has now become an active requirement for career advancement on the right of British politics www.adambienkov.co.uk/p/the-racism...

Tl;dr: The first sentence.

This is the state in which waste collectors have left the bins at 14-19 Lichfield Gardens this morning. It has been like that for the past several weeks, after years of (mostly) no issues. This is not haste. This is passive aggression. @richmondcouncil.bsky.social Please report to Serco.

It turns out that "Idiocracy" was way too optimistic.

new lab preprint 👇

First work on kinases from my lab! Working on this project, I often remembered the late Cyrus Chothia who said that if the data doesn’t fit a beautiful model, maybe it’s not the model, maybe you just need more data. :)

“Let’s call it for what it is: bullshit. The truth is, politicians have talked about little else but immigration for decades and in the most dehumanising ways. Polanski added: “Stop the boats’ is all we hear. Well, today I'm saying ‘stop the bullshit’.” www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

Vichy Labour. Deliberately and repeatedly affirming and amplifying the inflammatory far right *lie* of "uncontrolled migration".

Useful reminder from Peter Kellner on the problems we refuse to acknowledge are getting better, and the politics of hopelessness that this breeds open.substack.com/pub/kellnerp...

Retrospectively removing indefinite leave to remain would be immoral and economically damaging. It would tear families apart. Attacking it as ‘potentially illegal’ is completely beside the point. Argue with the (awful) idea. Don’t try ’well, actually you can’t do that’.

mRNA vaccines are one of if not the most studied human inventions in history at this point. It's madness to say that they are somehow not well-understood!

Interested in a sabbatical in Lyon? The Collegium de Lyon provides accommodation and attractive interdisciplinary environment for 1 or 2 semesters. Open to all disciplines. You can be affiliated with any local department/lab. Apply now for 2026-27. collegium.universite-lyon.fr/2026-2027-un...

And now government doctors got my entire channel removed. Don’t worry. I won’t base my entire identity around this or claim it is worse than covid. 😂

If anybody needs advice on good fountain pens, I’d be happy to help.

The guest is David Collum, a rabid conspiracy theorist who is still a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Cornell. Tenure should probably not be able to protect academics against the consequences of lunacy such as this.

Archaea are often surrounded by bacteria. But is there ever active conflict between the two? Can archaea kill bacteria? If so, how do they do it? Work by @romainstrock.bsky.social shows that some archaea can kill bacteria by secreting peptidoglycan hydrolases. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

After nearly twenty years in the making, our attempt at understanding what makes the chaetognath phylum so unique has finally been published! www.nature.com/articles/s41... with #LauraPiovani @dariagavr.bsky.social @alexdemendoza.bsky.social @chemamd.bsky.social and others /1

Wrote a big review with my friend and colleague @varshneylab.social on the state-of-the-art in CRISPR used experimentally in vivo. We wanted to focus on their use in experimental vertebrate animals (apparently passé now but we persist).

Of all the bullshit positions, the one I loathe most is "yOu LiBz mAdE tEh fAsCiSmZ hAppEn" as if fascism is not a cyclical political phenomenon that always has behind it the same violent insecure inadequate men who yearn to dominate and those that support it have no agency or moral responsibility.

There is a growing violent movement which senior politicians and media organisations are now not only seeking to justify, but actively encouraging. Why it's time for politicians to instead start standing up to the wholly illegitimate concerns of the far right www.adambienkov.co.uk/p/illegitima...

I am glad to announce that the #DANIO-CODE Data Coordination Center is back online at a new home: danio-code-dcc.genereg.net Thank you all for your patience and sorry for any inconvenience!

#IZFC2025 #zebrafish #DANIO-CODE data coordination centre is back online. Note changed address: danio-code-dcc.genereg.net

Weight loss improves health but What happens to cells in the fat during weight loss? Intriguingly, immune cell numbers decrease but their activated states persist w chronic inflammatory potential. Beautiful work from neighbors @mrc-lms.bsky.social Will Scott et al www.nature.com/articles/s41...