📢🌱 Job alert: Assistant Professor in Plant Molecular Genetics (Tenure-track) Join our interdisciplinary research environment, in Montréal Botanical Garden! 📅 Deadline: October 13, 2025 📍 Université de Montréal, Canada Please share! 🌿 drive.google.com/file/d/1Sxkt...

Ohhhh, Lanky Lanky! Lanky Lanky Lanky Lanky And I Cannot Stress This Enough Lancashheeeeeer! Season double! What a team! Hugely thrilled for them and Crossy and Ellie T in particular. 🌹🏏 #OneDayCup

Over the weekend, the world's richest man appeared on screens in central London to call for a race war and for the UK government to be overthrown. No arrests were made in connection with that communication.

New preprint! "Understanding Shape and Residual Stress Dynamics in Rod-Like Plant Organs" 🌱 with @merozlab.bsky.social and @routierlab.bsky.social 👉 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Labour won't be using First Past the Post to choose its new Deputy Leader. So why does the government keep telling us that it's the best system for electing MPs? 🤔

Entertaining final from Lord's and well deserved for the Superchargers, though absolutely wild that the result is nowhere to be found on the BBC Sport homepage #TheHundred

On the train to a conference and adrenaline is pumping with the final day of the test match, cricket and drama at its best #EngvInd

Game Changer pride stickers are out now 🎉 (with massive thanks to @samreich.bsky.social for giving me permission to sell them!) UK: canopyrobin.sumupstore.com/product/game... International: canopyrobin.etsy.com/listing/4333...

Listened to the fantastic feature on the 2005 Ashes with music at lunch on TMS on the bus to work and was reminded of the magic as cricket captured the nation. Clearly test cricket on free-to-air TV contributed a great deal, and such a feeling seems unlikely in current times.

To celebrate my PhD defence, I entered into a new obsession—here are some film shots from my post-thesis trip to the Canadian Rockies 🇨🇦🏞️ #filmphotography

Please don’t ignore this the next time you’re told “it’s either these guys or Reform” coz this is also what Reform would do and you should rail against it no matter what colour the tie is.

Building a #Lego #microscope #mmc2025 @royalmicrosoc.bsky.social‬ @virajalim.bsky.social @niamh-deburca.bsky.social

I created a thing! I was inspired by @gamechangershow.bsky.social to create these loop-de-loop stickers which celebrate trans identities and the fact that We've Been Here The Whole Time!

Fab opportunity here, great lab in a vibrant city! 🌱

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Important thread from Adam here. Public space - especially in towns and cities - isn't just there for the fast, efficient movement of motor vehicles and we mustn't let that motonormative thinking enable another generational landgrab as automated driving slides in

Every day I ask myself: what the hell is happening in Starmer's inner circle? It seems determined to stamp out every spark of hope.

The modern condition of waking up to horrible news from all over the world and just having to shove that all back down and get on with your silly little job 😞

Appalling to see how quickly this is spread from the US (the British term is EDI) and it’s telling that people always use the acronym so they don’t have to spell out that what they are against is literally just “equality”…

On the morning of the final week of my doctorate, reading the headlines from home mired in MAGA-esque rhetoric from the so-called Labour party and lobby groups, it's no wonder my desire to return to the UK is at an all-time low

Dear breathless, gullible types in the UK eager to jump on the populist RW bandwagon: It’s illegal in the UK to hire anyone on any grounds other than merit. And it’s EDI, not DEI. HTH

Enough of this racist fiction. Enough. Not a single non-white person in England is in a job in the NHS *because* they are non-white. Not a single one. And as for the idea that England's criminal justice system goes easy on non-white people because they are non-white. Well. Just think about that.

Why would you be afraid of DEI? Worried you won't get the job if obstacles that are placed in front of your competitors are removed? These ppl just tell on themselves, daily

Discworld QOTD, from Feet of Clay

I, for one, would be damn happy to celebrate being Video Game-Music Industry-University Island. That sounds like a great island to live on. We should invite more people. We could have a party. Why this steadfast refusal to enjoy the good things in life?

Exactly a week until my thesis defence, and the scaries have begun

"I don't know what to say. If you can't afford to run your business while paying for the raw materials from which you make your product, YOU DON'T HAVE A BUSINESS. What you have on your hands is either an imperial project or a crime. Possibly both." @alicefraser.bsky.social on The Bugle, 05.03.2025

It is getting quite tiresome spending every weekend working on my thesis/defence whilst Middlesex consistently falls apart. At least this month should see the end of both of those things, if only temporarily for Middlesex.

There's nothing like waking up to Aggers on the radio talking euphonium baths #EngvZim

In the UK, the creative industry adda 124 billion to the economy and employs approximately 1 in 30 people. What's more, the UK is a big cultural exporter on the world stage, probably in the top 5 or so. Like, smothering AI in it's sleep to protect all that should be an *easy* decision.

Nick Clegg really is the quiet villain of the past decade. A man very evidently motivated by nothing more than individual personal gain but his avoidance of ostentation and utter lack of charisma has essentially kept him off the radar. A dull poorly-suited pillar of feckless greed.

#BiaisAutomobile 🧠🚗 Titre alternatif: «La saison des rues vivantes et ouvertes aux humains est lancée à Montréal»

Excited to share that our work previously shared as a preprint is now out today in it's final peer-reviewed form in PLOS One! #OpenAccess Canadian natural science graduate stipends lie below the poverty line, by Fraass et al. 2025

Stark figures here which correlate with my experience as an international graduate student in Canada. I have colleagues who undertake several TAships per year in order to pay the bills which just lengthens the total time in the programme (and the total time being underpaid).

I genuinely find this very shocking. Paul Nurse isn't a fringe figure or a random academic. Astonishing that government wasn't *approaching* the Crick for support with testing, even more astonishing that they ignored his frequent attempts to get in touch to offer expertise essentially for free.

One of many things that’s been bothering me about that speech is the focus on language. Because fundamentally so many people don’t give a shit how well immigrants (of any generation) speak English. Any trace of an accent or daring to speak another language in public triggers their xenophobia

Just ten years ago the UK was top of the list - the best place in Europe for LGBT rights. We are now 22nd The only country to drop faster in one year than us is Hungary The government needs to act in a major way before this becomes their entire legacy

It's a bad sign when allegedly intelligent columnists in purported liberal publications spend more energy defending Starmer's clumsy, ugly and gratuitously populist attack on immigrants than they spend defending immigrants.

Kind of isn't the point whether Starmer deliberately referenced Powell. The point is that the rhetoric is the same. Being so ignorant of far-right dog whistles you'd use this line, or deliberately blowing them, are both failures in a progressive PM. Both are worse.

Just reading about the Labour press conference and feeling incredibly down about where we are in the UK 🙁

Nothing illustrates how cooked we are than the fact our own Parliament just voted down an amendment that simply proposed that companies should have to obey the law. Joke of a country.

Utterly mental. They've gone fully mad.

Is this the moment that Hellebuyck's playoff form finally turns around...? #Jets

Dear Labour (cc @ianmurraymp.bsky.social ), please stop trying to appeal to right-wing voters. The people who voted Reform or Conservative in recent elections aren't waiting for Labour to move further right. The people who *did* vote for you at the 2024 election are on the left: you're losing them.

The death of freedom. Cheered on by a whole generation born in the 1960s who think they fought in the war.

Unbelievable. Labour campaigners say that again and again they were told on doorsteps that WFA, PIP and retaining the two child benefit cap were turning Labour voters away. What is it that prevents Starmer and McSweeney from understanding that people voted to end Tory cruelty, not perpetuate it?

The Green Party now have 200 more councillors than Reform … you’d never know that from watching the news, listening to the radio, or reading the papers!!! We don’t have an intolerant, xenophobic majority of the population problem … we have a right wing media problem.

This wet, waxy little pellet slips quietly out of Trump’s wrecked arsehole and slithers in the direction of the incurious British voter… They like his shiny little hat.

All kidding aside, the biggest reason to keep Poilievre out of Parliament is to change the tone. We can't operate as a civil nation when one party leader exists only to attack the other. Civil debates and factual discussions, not personal attacks and three-word slogans, please.

Reform have currently won more seats than all other parties and independents put together - all those people who through complacency or complicity have drawn us closer to being a far right country being run for the benefit of a few super wealthy people should be ashamed - but they won’t care