🚀 Elon Musk has shifted focus from SpaceX to UK politics, amplifying far-right voices to his 240mn followers. We found a third of Musk's recent posts focused on the UK, a 10-year high, raising concern about his political influence ahead of a critical by-election. as.ft.com/r/b1cb096a-e...

Please vote for which animals you would like on bank notes. The Bank of England have a list: you can’t just be annoying and write in capybaras or Boaty McBoatface or whatever. But OMG this is so difficult. ALL THE ANIMALS ARE GOOD

This #PrideMonth take a look around the Museum with our Pride In Nature trail. It's about how queer perspectives help us to understand the natural world & how 'science' has actively hidden same-sex behaviour in animals. Trail & Museum entry FREE #PrideUK #Pride2026 University of Cambridge Museums

This, just down the road from me, is some of the worst I've seen. Portrayed as a community movement, it is in fact a national push, with Laurence Fox, Tommy Robinson, and Nick Tenconi here. The Nazi White Vanguard and other far right groups have also travelled.

I've done Pride and LGBT+ events in libraries, they've always been lovely & a space for people to meet over books that are often so important in revealing non-heterosoc lives past and present. This news from Essex's Reform council is chilling: www.dunmowbroadcast.co.uk/news/2616114...

New PDRA role at Aston - come work with me for 9 months on a project working with the police to improve their approach to LGBT hate crime. Info here : jobs.aston.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

Relieved to see more coverage of the grip Nous is getting on #UKHE. Thanks @privateeyenews.bsky.social! A million pound @cardiffucu.bsky.social alone. That’s a lot of money for the very same PowerPoint…

if you are "using AI for writing," you are not writing. i do not know how to make this any simpler

So much covered by @sarahoconnorft.ft.com in this great piece on AI and work. Metaphors such as ‘AI wave’ suggest something unstoppable. But we have choices as workers and as societies to collectively shape technology, as we did in the Industrial Revolution www.ft.com/content/acea...

New invited commentary piece in Archives of Sexual Behaviour, led by @liamwignall.bsky.social - doi.org/10.1007/s105...

'Recent data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) shows that English members of Universities UK (UUK) took in £9.9 billion in tuition fee income from overseas students in 2024-25.' 1/2

"On our panel tonight: Genghis Khan, Vlad the Impaler, Mr Blobby, Joseph Goebbels, Joseph Stalin - and our first question tonight is on net zero"

Oof

Interesting that the idea of another EU referendum is regularly discussed on broascast media as something that would cause division and thus a bad idea. But plans to deport literally millions of people are discussed as administrative questions.

The other thing I find off with social media ban discussion is that we don't ban alcohol to under 16s. You can drink with family etc but the SM ban afaik is that youth shouldn't access social media at all.

A "crackdown" on teenagers using... social media... It doesn't seem to me that the problem generation with social media literacy is teenagers

'The University of Hertfordshire’s decision to “suspend” five humanities undergraduate courses is a further stark warning about how readily higher education has jettisoned its former commitment to such subjects.' 1/4

The other problem is... Whatever the harms of social media may be for young people, they are categorically not the same as a drug that is consumed. The addiction language doesn't make it so.

This is insane self harm. A Labour government is doing this. Alone it justifies Starmer's removal.

Just cancelled my Microsoft subscription. Maybe it was a waste of money because I can access it via work, but interesting to read "You'll lose access to AI-powered experiences in productivity" when that's the reason I'm cancelling....

This is insane.

Good grief.

New ONS data: net migration has fallen to 171,000. Our @sundersays.bsky.social said: “This is the lowest net migration since Covid yet only 1 in 6 people know the numbers fell at all last year. “These misperceptions are fuelled by an immigration debate that hasn’t kept pace with reality."

Maybe this is because you can't turn on the radio without hearing hourly updates on the number of people arriving in small boats.

❗ Something we should all be mindful of going forwards. Eradicating peer review is bad for authors and bad for scholarship as a whole

Today @drjogrady.bsky.social wrote to the University of Reading. Trans staff and students are being forced into formal grievances just to find out why policies that affect their daily lives exist. That is not legal compliance. It is institutional opacity. We’re calling on Reading to act.

Such an awful debate in every respect. We don't want young people with aspirations. University might be bad for you. Was good for us the successful ones but you don't deserve the same. Mostly because governments have made a mess of financing.

"Scientists surveying the area found three times more seabed organisms and twice as many species compared to nearby unprotected waters" news.mongabay.com/short-articl...

It is astonishing that 20 years ago the fear was that your minor indiscretions would impact you for life, but now the issue is so much of it could all just... disappear

The Internet is disappearing before our very eyes and it’s why we should all support that absolutely critical work of @archive.org

Registration for the 2026 AUAC Conference is now OPEN. Consider joining online or in person for a fantastic programme! www.aston.ac.uk/research/bss...

Goodness

Petition to save the Humanities at the University of Hertfordshire: c.org/9JLppW5tMS

Hooray they recognise the key role of universities as local economic anchors! Somehow this has been hugely absent from policy discussions (eg the post 16 white paper)

I feel somewhat the same!

Given how popular this is in regular meetings and particularly in research projects that use workshops, focus groups, or other conversational approaches, it's really important to recognise and respond to these problems. Not least given increasing organisational pressures to cut corners and speed up

"This will transform historical research!" Cool but it's already being transformed out of existence by the same forces pushing these transformative technologies. Forgive us if we're skeptical of a moment that's telling us "This will help you do your work--which we despise--faster and better."

I know we all know that the police could, in fact, track down mobile phones if they thought it was worth their time, but it is nonetheless galling to have it confirmed.

2014 REF: 2026: closing UG History

Interesting new article: Bridging Borders with an Intersectional Approach: Intimate Partner Violence Experiences among Bisexual Women in Brazil and Italy link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Wonder what the role of "jokesters" is here. In sexuality research, there's always a percentage that give jokey answers and health research sometimes fails to recognise this. Suggesting Ed Davey is Bruce Willis is a funny answer....

Today was perhaps the worst journey Ive ever had to Birmingham. Only supposed to be on 2 trains but somehow I had 4 trains cancelled... Of course only the last train had workimg internet

Awful. Also; "Infant-sleep consulting is a growing unregulated industry, they say, fuelled by limited post-natal support for new parents."

This policy, the replies to this, Keir Starmer’s ‘the petrol retailers are being naughty’ statement, Ed Davey’s fuel duty tax cut, Kemi Badenoch’s fuel duty tax cut, John Swinney’s price controls…is there anyone in British politics who understands “the Iran war means we have less stuff”?

Sounds like they got the "crazy ideas" bit right at least

I understand the value of LLMs in particular applied contexts, but this is why I don't get people regularly using GenAI models for general "chat". When this is the endpoint, how can you trust any of the steps along the path ?

AI produces MORE editorial labor, not less. “[To weed out slop] the journal doubled its deputy editors from 6 to 11 & nearly doubled its sr editors from roughly 30 to 60. All of this is volunteer labor, unpaid academics donating time to maintain scientific quality.“ www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

Here we go again. Every so often tech makes an incursion into history, completely ignores that history is a rigorous discipline with a methodology, and then claims that a mystery or issue that historians have grappled with can be solved with an algorithm. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This is really bad.

8. The stuff that Stock complains was silenced was actually on the reading list. You couldn’t make this up: