old man done good

Apple will try and persuade you to update Keynote. Don't! The new one is foul, the equivalent of a budget airline, advertising everywhere and nudges to try and extract more of your cash and embed their AI. I'll give htem a month then find a new program.

The "Friends Don't Let Friends Make Bad Graphs" list is great... BUT I STRONGLY disagree with the suggestion to use log scaled axis on barplots. (the absolute worse being "stacked barplots on logscale") Just don't use barplots if the values are on different orders of magnitude. Who's with me?

I think Ian Chapman's focus throughout this process has been excessively PI-centred and ignores early career researchers and training. A big funding pause doesn't cause them to worry about their jobs. It causes them to lose their jobs. And to be unable to get new ones. Their careers will be ended.

Today, we're sharing an open letter from our Chief Executive, Professor Sir Ian Chapman, outlining changes to UKRI investment approach, and addressing concerns about research funding and the financial position of STFC. Read his letter here: www.ukri.org/news/open-le...

Wiley: "We’re supporting responsible research assessment practices" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1520... Also Wiley: "Prove that your article is a good fit for this journal 😉😉😉😉😉 by citing at least two of our articles in your manuscript before we will even consider reviewing it" 🤡

At least the physicists are standing up for themselves. Still waiting for the senior leaders of biological sciences to say anything at all about MRC/BBSRC actions.

Have a look at our latest preprint, "Nuclear plasticity regulates macrophage phagocytic capacity in vivo". #apoptoticbodies #efferocytosis #nucleus #Drosophila #macrophages #mechanoresponse #InVivo #LiveImaging doi.org/10.64898/202...

I'm seeing relatively little chatter or outcry about what is happening at the MRC, the UK's biomedical research funder. Before Christmas MRC paused the acceptance of many of its grants, including the standard applicant-led research grant. There has been no public information on what is happening 🧵

My phone has started giving "low confidence transcripts" when my dad calls. 😂

This is extremely good. Exemplary, even.

They're actually dis-recommending meningitis vaccines? They must really hate human beings. In RFK's favour, he will be dead when lots of them die of meningitis in college. But that really is a foul game to play.

You can see some of these stereotypes - the simple, morally pure countryside vs. the morally compromised, inauthentic city - play out in Greek and Roman literature. So this is a very old idea that recurs regularly.

Just making sure that 2025 is definitely over

Extraordinary narrative about weaponized ignorance

The Gothic arms were less fatal to the schools of Athens than the establishment of a new religion, whose ministers superseded the exercise of reason, resolved every question by an article of faith, and condemned the infidel or sceptic to eternal flames. -Gibbon #DeclineAndFall

Nice image from Anamul Hoque "tidied up" a bit by ChatGPT - won us the "best image" prize at UCL Life Sciences. Ernst Haeckel, eat your heart out.

“A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress - though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known" - Bertrand Russell, 1976. Time-lapse video of Vampyrella lateritia eating Spirogyra algae from Science Source/Oliver Skibbe. 🦠

Contact Inhibition coordinating tissues made sparsely of mesenchymal cells. From Alex Grigas @ ManningGroup and @mongeralab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

YASSSSSS!!!!!

Great quote Waddington Seen @DBT_inStem #Embryo #CellsRUs #NotInTheGenes

Looked on Twitter/X for news on the Brown shooting and to check if any of my many colleagues and friends has been harmed. And my lord has that place ever become a cesspit. Awful.

Hahahahahaha They've realised the disaster they've directly brought to the country, wilfully promoting antivax propaganda and propagandists, but they manage to blame it on BIDEN? Spectacular mental gymnastics.

Excellent final sessions to complete an excellent #cellbio2025...

Finally got fed enough up with Google that I shifted everything to a different search engine. We'll see if it sticks...

they became a verb, but unfortunately it was an ad verb.

Gorgeous work by Jamie Whitelaw - loss of CYRI equates to giant, elongated focal adhesions. Yet another connection between WAVE complex dynamics & integrin-based adhesions journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

I wonder why #REF2029 is proving so spectacularly useless? Different groups want it to assess "research culture", stop unis getting an advantage when people move, promote geographic diversity, stop individuals from being impacted, make publication open, etc... Few seem concerned about research.

Yay! Congrats to SFB1348!

At last! Someone doing some real science. On matters of fundamental interest and importance.

So very funny. Utterly predictable. Like those funny @ScienceGuardians rants. But still utterly hilarious when it happens.

Absolutely extraordinary. UCL management, in their godlike and infinite wisdom, have decided it's a good idea to remove all waste bins from all offices and replace them with occasional big 4-way recycling things plonked in the middle of corridors.

As someone who looks at a lot of Manhattan plots, I can say that an under-appreciated cause of false positive GWAS hits is stuff stuck to my computer screen.

Dylan Burnette lab excelling themselves with lovely microscopy, even more than ususal.

The science literature used to be more fun

fine-looking meeting

Very excited to share an advert for a new lecturer position in Computational Cancer at UCL! Permanent position at assistant professor level- join a growing community at UCL in a cutting edge discipline. Please share widely! www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Ahhh, the glory of UK research electronic forms.

In May 2024 we had a great workshop on chemotaxis in the MPI PKS in Dresden! The social impressions are in the picture below, and the scientific discussions are summarised in Angewandte Chemie lnkd.in/d6ymRhGK What a nice way to remember!

Will shouting "STOP CHANGING MY TEXT INTO THINGS I DIDN'T MEAN" at my phone help? Asking for a friend.

We hiring! Please share this post with your talented ECRs We're looking for a postdoc interested in the formation and function of tertiary lymphoid structures - project funded by Wellcome Based at @lmcb-ucl.bsky.social at University College London Apply here: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPD418/r...

This morning my ChatGPT quota was inexplicably exhausted. It took a while but I pieced it together. Voice mode somehow got activated when I went to bed. The bot then engaged in a 10 hour conversation with my snoring dog, answering questions the pup wasn’t asking and praising him for his insight.

Thanks for any data. i want Scar/WAVE complex scroll waves you see...

testing the exact 3D printer settings to retain a #makerbeam

Read this today. All of it. It will make you happy.

Ooooh coool

Yikes. Interesting paper but a terrible news report. Skin cells are chock full of mutations. It's brilliant to show that you can use skin cell nuclei to make an embryo, but you'd have to be insane to make a human out of one. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The excellent Lucija Mijanovic & I write a piece musing on electrotaxis, collective migration, and @calinacopos.bsky.social & the Mogilner lab's nice PNAS paper. Have a look! authors.elsevier.com/a/1lpaB3QW8S...

University manager confuses "quality" and "being funded". Shock horror. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...