"Little Solsbury Camp, near Bath" from Ancient Earthworks & Camps of Somerset (Edward J. Burrow, 1924). #HillfortsWednesday #Archaeology #Prehistory #Watercolour #Monochrome #BlackAndWhite #SolsburyHill #Bath #Somerset

Don't you just hate it when certain academics start to spend a lot of time in Oslo trying to influence their chance of winning a Noble Prize

Interesting paper on superhydrophobic HOFs for selective ethene/ethane separation: pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/A.... We used the same molecule/phase last year to create a superhydrophobic HOF for selective CO2/H2O separation: pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

The 2026 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List has 359 tenure-track positions and 65 teaching positions: docs.google.com/spreadsheets... #facultychemjobs #chemsky Faculty, if you know of tenure-track positions that we should be listing, or see an error, please e-mail me at [email protected]

Under greedy/low-temp decoding, reasoning LLMs get stuck in loops repeating themselves, wasting test-time compute and sometimes never terminating! They find that: - Low temps => more looping - Smaller models => more looping - Harder problems => more looping

An accompanying News & Views by Tong Zhao and Yan Zeng is also available for this paper! www.nature.com/articles/s43... #chemsky 🔓 rdcu.be/eXGQT

🎉 Happy New Year from the AIchemy Hub! The mince pies are gone, the inbox is back… and so are we. Why not kick-start 2026 by joining our New Starters in AI for Chemistry event in Leeds on 27 January? ⚗️🤖 Spaces are limited - book your place now! aichemy.ac.uk/event/new-st...

We combine ML + #DigitalTwins to autonomously design photoreactors with high light capture and uniform irradiation. A virtual photoreactor guides #BayesianOptimization, allowing numerous designs in silico and fabrication only of the best candidates. 🔗 @chemrxiv.org : chemrxiv.org/engage/chemr...

Our first joint paper with @thematterlab.bsky.social is out: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Just took a 10 pm Sunday evening walk through the snowy village fields. It was a bit darker, mistier, and zombie apocalyptic than I’d banked on. Didn’t see a living soul.

Perhaps my favourite album from 2025. And she is from Wales. There’s more than a dash of Cocteau Twins in this, and that’s no bad thing. open.spotify.com/album/1Ce9FP...

Today I made a small but momentous start to work in 2026 by changing a single number. I renamed the file “Papers to write and submit in 2025” to “Papers to write and submit in 2026”. Stay tuned for more file updates on 1st January 2027.

Just brought out the River Dragon

Happy Christmas, everyone

Yeah, well this 55-year-old “senior” is increasingly minded to have them for weekday breakfasts

Still another month or so to apply to work with me: predicting the crystals and their properties on Titan!

More robotics here: www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Our paper is out on what we affectionately called the Capernator-4000 during development. The device is fully steam powered and can be applied in most branches of Natural Philosophy and Physik. link.springer.com/chapter/10.1.... First paper on using this in real workflows is about to be submitted.

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...

More mobile robot chemists, in this case at Tsinghua University: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Orecchiette 🇮🇹

ELLIS & ELIAS Alliance at AIS25 🇩🇰 - exploring how AI is transforming scientific discovery and its commercial potential. ELLIS Members will lead workshops across Life Science, Materials, Climate, Society & AI Policy. 👉 https://ais25.eu/ #AIS25 #RAISE ELIAS - Lighthouse of AI for Sustainability

I’ve had to fly SAS a few times this year and in terms of customer service and general operations they really are exceptional 👍👍👍

L2M3OF: A large language multimodal model for metal-organic frameworks arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20976

Big meeting and a lot of people here in Copenhagen at #AIS25

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!

Sorry to be leaving Toronto today - here is the sunset last night from the apartment where I stayed - many thanks to @accelerationc.bsky.social for hosting me!

This is fantastic, well done Emma, I look forward to seeing this when I get back from Toronto. Co-sponsored by our @ukri.org / EPSRC @aichemyhub.bsky.social & @leverhulme.ac.uk - see news.liverpool.ac.uk/2025/10/24/u...

The legends are true - the new @accelerationc.bsky.social building being constructed in Toronto yesterday

Had to balance out my high brow & my low brow with some post-opera poutine. I think this might be how they resurrected Eurydice #toronto

Beautiful opera house in Toronto

Looking forward to seeing this tonight #opera #toronto

Various degrees of folly

My current routine. And I do indeed get a second cup on my way into my temporary @thematterlab.bsky.social office #toronto

🚨 Three PDRA posts @imperialchemistry.bsky.social with me + collaborators to transform materials discovery. Focus: 💻 Comp Chem 🤖 AI in Chem 🧠 Neurosymbolic Learning 🗓️ Apply by 11 Nov 2025 🔗 jobs.ac.uk/job/DPB378 (click "Apply" to find individual post details) #chemsky #compchem #chempostdoc

Beautiful morning in Toronto today on my walk to @thematterlab.bsky.social @accelerationc.bsky.social

I think I might’ve just found Organa on my way to the washroom @accelerationc.bsky.social

Happy thanksgiving, if you’re in Canada 🇨🇦. (If you’re in the US, please go about your regular business.)

For balance (and I had to go back to evil Tw@tter for this). I’ve never met Richard Robson.

This is the only photo I can find of me with Susumu, in the office of the great Mohamed Eddaoudi, whose contribution to the field of MOFs is also massive #chemsky #chemnobel

Congratulations to Susumu, Omar and Prof. Robson. Particularly delighted for Susumu, who has given me some great advice over the years and served on an advisory panel for one of our grants. 👏

Speaking next week in Toronto at the Acceleration Consortium (@accelerationc.bsky.social). It's possible to join online (link below). In part, I'll be talking about our new work on LLM reasoning for robotic experiments. I've teed this up below with a link to Noam Chomsky, who isn't an LLM fan.

Interlocked covalent organic cages: Design, synthesis, and self-assembly doi.org/10.1016/j.cc...

Come join us in Oxford! Two positions open right now in @oxfordbiochemistry.bsky.social It’s a great place to work. Really supportive colleagues, great students, colleges provide a unique social environment - in summary, it’s a lot of fun.

I don't normally indulge in Chemistry Nobel Prize speculation but this year I'm having a punt. £20 each way on Fréchet and Wilkinson for chemically amplified photoresists

Commercial SDL using a mobile robotic manipulator - I'm told that the company has installed 7 of these so far. I've no affiliation with this, btw, nor knowledge of its performance. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECt1... #chemsky #robots

Great to see @aicooper.bsky.social and @rosseinskygroup.bsky.social representing @liverpooluni.bsky.social at the @euromof.bsky.social 2025 conference in Crete.