How to make your own robot! A review of people making awesome lab robots out of commercial 3D printers. Thank you @vsaggiomo.bsky.social and Sander for inviting me to help write this paper in @digital-discovery.rsc.org. Beep boop! 🤖 #chemsky doi.org/10.1039/D5DD...

FREE TO READ - PERSPECTIVE - OPEN ACCESS: Towards animate droplets: Active, adaptive, and autonomous by Joe Forth, Robert Malinowski and Giorgio Volpe #FreeToRead #Perspective #OpenAccess @uclchemistry.bsky.social @livunisps.bsky.social 👉 iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

New paper! Active Droplets: Active, Adaptive, Autonomous. Me, Rob Malinowski, and Giorgio Volpe pitch droplets as energy converting systems that act collectively. Out in @epljournal.bsky.social @uclchemistry.bsky.social and @livunisps.bsky.social. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1... #chemsky

AIchemy is BUSY 🚀 and the opportunities are stacking up! 💰 1 live funding opportunity (with Frontier Fund announcements coming 👀) 🎓 5 training & internship programmes 📅 14 events open for registration Funding. Training. Community. Momentum. Sign up to our newsletter and be part of it.

Lads the internet is down at work. All my docs and work are "in the cloud" and installed software struggles to open local-only files. Do I: 1.) Persevere and grind out work that I will probably spend at least as long integrating into online versions afterwards OR 2.) Go to the pub? #chemsky

📢 Liverpool delivered. A room full of curious minds, practical problem-solving and some genuinely exciting ideas taking shape. Take a look at our highlights ➡️ buff.ly/8fhonYg A huge thank you to Mike Parkes at UCL and Joe Forth at University of Liverpool for the delivery!

🚀 Liverpool sold out - but we’ve got you covered! Due to popular demand, we’re running another Inator Hackathon at University of Strathclyde on 18 March 2026 🗓️. 📍 University of Strathclyde, Glasgow 🕘 09:00–17:00, 18 March 2026 🎟️ Free, register now before it fills up! 👉

🚀 We’re recruiting a postdoc to join a @ukcatalysishub.bsky.social project at the @liverpooluni.bsky.social. Collaboration with @donnablack.bsky.social, @virtualatoms.bsky.social, @astrazeneca.bsky.social, @glaxosmithkline.bsky.social, @aichemyhub.bsky.social. Please share or apply if interested

📢 We’re hiring! Join us as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in AI/ML-Driven Chemical Discovery Work at the intersection of AI, machine learning & chemistry on cutting-edge research. 📍 Liverpool | ⏰ Apply by 20 Feb 2026 👉

Doing revisions to Reviewers comments and this observation is evergreen tbh.

Fully funded, 3.5-year PhD position with me, Marco Giardiello, and Liam O'Brien developing Magnetic Particle Imaging towards direct imaging of local material properties (rheology, pH, etc). More here: www.findaphd.com/phds/project... @livuninews.bsky.social @livunislsj.bsky.social #chemsky

I'm running a popular romance course at the University of Liverpool... but only if enough people sign up! Come and join us! www.liverpool.ac.uk/continuing-e...

When the Manchester Guardian calls, the people of the North heed the call. And if those people are me, we inject Manchester Liberalism, even from across the Pennines, right back in to the paper of Northern record. Get your fill. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

New pre-print! Giorgio Volpe, Rob Malinowski, and myself discuss the possibilities of making materials from droplets that can move, process information, and make decisions collectively. @livunisps.bsky.social @uclchemistry.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2512.13425 #chemsky

**new blog post** I thought it would be interesting to see what it would look like if tuition fees had grown with the "triple lock" approach of the state pension. www.michaeloneill.org/blog-1/2025/...

There is truly no finer sight than walking into the group office to find a mess of screws, tools, and disassembled 3D-printers being hacked into god-knows-what. Looks like science to me, lads. #chemsky

Opportunity to join us at @liverpooluni.bsky.social as our new Chemistry HoD: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPQ019/p... - lots of brilliant science & exciting plans going on, plus the joy of being my line manager :D

Would you like to be our Head of Department? A unique opportunity to guide some important developments (see e.g., news.liverpool.ac.uk/2025/11/18/u...). Advert now live on jobs.ac.uk. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPQ019/p...

Ytterbium Surprise -a most unexpected paper from a former collaborator of mine, Helen Aspinall Be sure to checkout the 3D animations of various bell ringing peals! Visualisations of Minimus Methods #chemsky www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Hackathon time! Can you build an ML model for sigmatropic rearrangements of allylcatechols in flow? Teams of <=4; total prizes £2000; time limit 09 Jan. 🧪 #Chemsky Competition Link: www.kaggle.com/competitions... Example Notebook Link: www.kaggle.com/code/josepab...

Yeah so just a couple more major iterations and I reckon my grant will be ready submit. #chemsky

I went tonight to see my PhD student Emma Brass’s fantastic AI art exhibit in Liverpool. It features a 4x4 m screen with a giant robot arm (see video below) and the whole thing is really fantastic!

Choose LaTeX. Choose spending 20 minutes looking for a "}". Choose waiting to compile before you can read what you've written. Choose editing decades-old templates so your margins match the current journal style and you can see the page count. Choose collaborating with Physicists. #chemsky

Pleased to announce I've reached the PI stage at which the group actually runs better when I disappear for a week or two. I assume at some point they start switching off experiments when I enter the lab just so I don't mess things up? #chemsky

Heading home after 4 days visiting Chengdu and Sichuan University that were everything my inner @fuchsiadunlop.bsky.social fanboy wanted - might wait for a bit after getting back before weighing myself though.

This morning's breakfast was peanut-butter-stuffed French toast at a cha chaan teng. The white lump? Butter. The accompanying drink? Condensed milk tea, just in case that's not rich enough. About 900 calories for £2.80. [Narrator] _He will not need to eat for some time_

Hull's transformation over the last few years has got to be one of the North-East's great secrets.

MERCH. The real reason for any visit. #chemsky

There's something familiar about the guys they have working the coffee shop at XJTLU...can't put my finger on what it is though. #chemsky

Treating myself to airport pints after a 6am start, an open day, and a train journey down to Gatwick for wee jaunt to China through Suzhou, Hong Kong, and Chengdu.

Thrilled to share my first first-author review paper—now published in @jidjournal.bsky.social Massive thanks to all the co-authors for their time and insights! #InfectiousDiseases #Neuroinflammation #Neuroscience #BloodBrainBarrier #Virology #Research

New paper! Sarah Boardman takes us on a tour of Viral Infection and the Blood-Brain Barrier. Just out in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. From the group of Benedict Michael, with Cordelia Dunai, Adjanie Patabendige, and a host of others including myself. academic.oup.com/jid/advance-...

Our 6-hands review/perspective: "Hacking 3D printers as laboratory robots" is now on ChemRxiv. In there, we show how many robots you can make by simply modifying a 3D printer. #chemsky 1/n with @sandersays.bsky.social and @supersciencegrl.co.uk chemrxiv.org/engage/chemr...

IT IS TIME.

Bruce Springsteen is going to feel silly when he learns about autoignition temperatures

The UK is ‘losing the race’ for investment in R&D, clinical trials, and foreign direct investment, a new report warns. Since 2018, UK pharmaceutical R&D investment has underperformed against international rivals, the report from an pharma industry body said. www.soci.org/news/2025/9/... #chemsky 🧪

So this paper: spj.science.org/doi/10.34133... Aside from some major writing issues, appears to involve injecting *Ni-particle-filled-droplets of dodecane into a living creature*. Science Partner Journal. No ethical approval statement is given. Have @aaas.org just given up or am I misreading?

Can cellular life be created in the lab? We are not yet there, but clearly getting closer! Check this paper where a new scenario for protocell replication is presented by Job Boekhoven and co-workers @manlius.bsky.social www.cell.com/chem/pdf/S24...

Our new preprint 📑 about oscillating chemical reactions ⚗ just came out! arxiv.org/abs/2508.15273 We introduce tools 🛠️ that expand the scope of oscillators that can be analyzed, and use them to extract a lot of new qualitative and quantitative insights about oscillating chemical reactions! 1/3

The Roadmap for Animate Matter is out! From self-building lasers to buildings that breathe, we lay out a vision for materials that are: 1. Active - they move, 2. Adaptive - they switch between dynamical states, 3. Autonomous - they can make a decision. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1... #chemsky

Tell you what lads Alberta's lovely. Go to Alberta.

📢 3 PhD positions available in the Raval group! ⏰ Deadline 1st of September 2025 🧑‍🔬 The selected students will be enrolled in the @ukbiofilms.bsky.social BITE doctoral training programme. Follow the link to apply 👇 www.liverpool.ac.uk/antimicrobia... @livunisps.bsky.social #MicroSky

Crossing off a really big item on the Academia bucket list today lads. #ChemSky

UCL Chemistry Hackathon 2 is running 22nd & 23rd July. How to make Lab Environments FAIR? See www.inator-project.org/Events/event... for details

📢 We’re hiring: Postdoctoral Research Associate in Theoretical Chemistry Join Prof Alessandro Troisi’s group at the Materials Innovation Factory → cutting-edge work on the theory of materials for bioelectronics ⚛️⚡ 💼 £39,355–£45,413 🗓️ Closes 10 July 2025 Apply now 👉 tinyurl.com/z2yp4rff

NEWS | The University of Liverpool is leading GreenNanoBone, an €8.6M EU project using AI and plant waste to tackle MRONJ—a severe jaw condition affecting cancer survivors. Read more ⬇️ news.liverpool.ac.uk/2025/06/17/l...

New paper! Droplets that change shape, move, and divide by incorporating an active magnetic particle cytoskeleton. Collaboration with Tom Russell at @berkeleylab.lbl.gov. Led by Paul Kim. Happy to have played just a little part in this one! #chemsky advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....