On the first day of Christmas (in about 2014), @duckswabber.bsky.social gave to me - a partridge in a pear tree. Happy Christmas everyone!

New result: you can build a universal computer using a single billiard ball on a carefully crafted table! More precisely: you can create a computer that can run any program, using just a single point moving frictionlessly in a region of the plane and bouncing off the walls elastically. (1/n)

On a Wensleydale pilgrimage - geographically and back in time - to where and when epidemiology was about fieldwork (or practice) amongst real people in actual populations, and involved literally crossing fields … check out his beautifully written papers as a seasonal treat to yourself …

H0 H0 H0 😂

This headline is wrong and misleading, and the brief text below it is not much better. Whatever might constitute a full explanation of the differences between sapiens and other hominins, we remain confident that 'genes' will be central to it. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Happy holidays to all!

We’re excited to announce the "Toward Trustworthy AI Modeling for Computational Healthcare" @elsa-ai.eu workshop, a one-day in-person event focused on building private, fair, robust, reliable, and accountable AI systems for healthcare. Register now. 📅 March 9, 2026 📍 EMBL, Heidelberg, Germany

The EMDB wishes you a very Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year and we are delighted to share our jointly designed EMDB/PDBe Christmas card with you. It has been a busy year, we look forward to seeing you in the New Year here! Card: A mixture of #cryoEM and X-ray diffraction structures.

Dear UK Energy transition experts on bluesky - I read that by the end of this year there should be enough synchronous condensers for the last piece of grid services to allow fossil free operation - does anyone know if this is true? In the inevitable christmas demand dip is this likely? Or foolish?

It’s out! Using cryo-ET in Dicty cells, we take a fresh in situ look at vaults. Surprisingly, we uncover vaults associated with ER and NE membranes, and find that many vaults enclose ribosomes in defined orientations, opening new avenues to their cellular function! www.biorxiv.org/lookup/conte...

Vaults. They are cell biology's greatest puzzle! This preprint from Martin Beck's lab shows them docked on ER membranes with a ribosome inside. What on earth is going on there?? #CellBiology #WTFology www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It burns. It burns. My eyes.

I missed this the first time and lovely to see it published from Rob Finn's group and Toby Spribrille's group on the complicated (so complicated!) world of Lichens. They are complex communities which... are sort of a bit like species. (but not)

I wrote about ethnicity, genetics and football here: www.linkedin.com/posts/ewan-b...

Earliest sunset of the year today in London - for now on the evenings get longer (but the mornings getting shorter - and a bit more - until 21st)

Schwineshaxe 2025! Achievement unlocked! Plus - no need to eat for 48 hours

I was interviewed by Chirag Patel from Harvard Medical school and the Nexus exposomics project on large scale cohorts, multi-modal data, exposomics and AI. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uARz...

The Australians are fundamentally better at Cricket than the Brits (at least at the moment). Ashes away is harder for the visitors but there is too big a gap. Sigh. Lots of talk for next test for avoiding the whitewash

Just a reminder that Large Language Models is just one type of AI. It is not synonymous with AI and indeed the key aspects which make LLMs work - big attention networks, very large embedding spaces - have many applications.

Honestly, this is a great question. First off most my letters start with the fact that the people in the institution know this person better than me, and, all things being equal, trust their judgement. Then I copy and paste the criteria (always a little bit different) and answer it honestly >>

The latest update to the AlphaFold Database (AFDB) is now published in NAR. The release aligns AFDB with UniProt 2025_03 and introduces a redesigned entry page with integrated annotations, domains, summaries, and a 3D viewer. 📄 Read more: academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

This movie of a consensus model for endocytosis is very cool. This process is happening all the time in your body now...

Exciting new #Zebrafish research from the #WeinsteinLab, led by Jong Park! “Specialized gas-exchange endothelium of the zebrafish gill” — www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Amazing to see red blood cells moving through the gills! Don’t forget to check out the supplemental movies ;-)

Join EMBL's Interdisciplinary Postdoc Programme! 3 years funding, self-designed interdisciplinary project co-led between EMBL PI and PI in one of EMBL's actual, prospect or associate member states. In particular: AI&Theory, use mathem. models, physics principles and AI www.embl.org/about/info/p...

Five years ago, researchers at Google DeepMind unveiled AlphaFold2 go.nature.com/3M1Tvxx

Our Ensembl 2026 paper is out! Learn about 1,900+ new genomes, expanded pangenome support, new regulation interfaces, and what’s coming in our 2026 releases. doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkaf1239

Dear American friends and colleagues - I hope you have had a lovely thanksgiving. I still remember my first thanksgiving in the US - invited by some Boston Brahims worried about two young British kids having nowhere to go - and ... the food ... all the food. So much food.

NEW: Postdoc with @epetsalaki.bsky.social @juliosaezrod.bsky.social and Tamas Korcsmáros Benchmark and integrate state-of-the-art network contextualisation methods, combining large-scale transcriptomics, proteomics, and single-cell data Apply by 17 Dec embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/EMBL/j...

Featuring “cameos” from Janet Thornton and yours truly from @ebi.embl.org

Last call! Applications for the @crg.eu International PhD Programme 2025 in beautiful Barcelona close next week! Join us and our inspiring colleagues at the CRG - an exceptional environment for discovery, creativity, and scientific growth. Apply here: www.crg.eu/en/content/t...

This is true. Also: a clip from Crick ON Start the Week from 1994. The other guests were Salman Rushdie, Maya Angelou and Tom Stoppard, Melvyn the host.

North London is red. And Eze a legend

The UK Government Department for Science, Innovation & Technology published its national AI for Science strategy. We’re pleased that EMBL-EBI is highlighted for the strength of our data foundations and look forward to seeing how this strategy supports future discoveries. www.gov.uk/government/p...

Ashes cricket...wow. Clicking live updates. What a day.

The world’s most studied half a million humans humans … just got measured in yet another clever way … looking forward to diving into the data

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a growing health threat, making infections harder to treat and complicating routine medical care. EMBL-EBI’s new AMR portal brings together laboratory resistance data and bacterial genomes in one open platform. #WAAW2025 #ActOnAMR www.ebi.ac.uk/about/news/t... 🧬💻

My account's upload and bulk download access were terminated permanently in 2021 without explanation after I published *checksums* of GISAID genomes. GISAID and its SAB have since ignored a dozen emails seeking explanation. 4 yrs on, even Nextstrain has lost access. GISAID has rotted from its core.

A PhD project on historical genomics in the declining red squirrel in Britain is available in my group, through the @aries-dtp.bsky.social. Use historical genomes to track the effects of decline and genetic rescue in this charismatic species. aries-dtp.ac.uk/studentships...

The golden age of diversity and democracy in Oz.

On this day in 1988, Canadian alt country heroes Cowboy Junkies released their out now debut 'The Trinity Session' and in 2025 its quiet pulse still feels like a secret you lean in to hear.

MISO: microfluidic protein isolation enables single-particle cryo-EM structure determination from a single cell colony. Or from a single dish of HEK cell culture in the case of two membrane proteins. Out in Nature Methods now! lnkd.in/gpyBSceg Wonderful collaboration with the Efremov lab.

Richard so deserves this - a legend in bioinformatics and computational biology - work genome, human genome, Pfam, 1,000 genomes, Sam/bam format, bwa, vcf, psmc… and so many more

Heute zum Antrittsbesuch bei Karl Lauterbach, dem Vorsitzenden des Bundestags-Forschungsausschusses. Ein wertschätzender Austausch in angenehmer Atmosphäre. Danke für das offene Gespräch und den freundlichen Empfang.

Like a boss😅👍

Please yes. Lumberjack song from Monty python remake definitely a winner

Giving a talk to the Cambridge scientific society tonight - should perhaps have posted earlier - slightly thin audience …

Ugh. Microsoft Teams identity management can get very Kafkaesque

Today, on World #ScienceDay for Peace and Development, we are joining our EIROforum partners in celebrating how science contributes to society 🌎 Thanks to you, we are able to develop new technologies and make discoveries that help address some of today’s most pressing challenges.

Just starting a “House of Guinness” binge, please tell me there is a Student’s T-test plot line?

Inspired by the AI conference hosted by the Danish Presidency of the EU I've written a probably too long piece about my own shift from a multi-variate/bayesian genomicist to an AI aligned genomicist / biologist. www.linkedin.com/pulse/though...