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...

Julie Ahringer from @gurdoninstitute.bsky.social @geneticscam.bsky.social @cam.ac.uk gives talk on decoding genome regulation during development. Exploring how chromatin accessibility changes throughout development enable single cells to become multicellular organisms.

Our CEO Prof Sir Rory Collins was speaking at an event at the Labour Party Conference with @zoegrunewald.bsky.social, Andrew McCracken, Nadeem Sarwar & @joshfg.bsky.social MP, a member of the Health and Social Care Committee. 🗞️ Read here: www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/he... by Phin Foster

💬 “The data is already there, we just need to bring it together.” The @newstatesman1913.bsky.social reports on the incredible potential of bringing hospital and primary care data together for preventative medicine - and how it could transform healthcare. 🔽

Excited to share our latest work on the factors that determine what genes we find (and don't find!) in GWAS and burden tests. We describe a critical concept that we call *specificity*. Led by Jeff Spence and Hakhamanesh Mostafavi:

The rapid growth in Mendelian randomization studies. Gibran Hemani, Stefan Stender, Frank J. Wolters, Albert Hofman & George Davey Smith. European Journal of Epidemiology. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Great work by Nicola De Maio and Nick Goldman - not just scaleable to "pandemic scale" trees but - if I have got this right - arguably more valid than traditional column based bootstrap in the context of very tight evolution.

New 🧬✂️ pre-print! We show that paired prime editing can efficiently generate large deletions — even >1 Mb — with high precision and at scale. We use this to perform the first pooled prime deletion screen across the human genome. 🔗 biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A short thread (by Juliane Weller)👇

Good morning Heidelberg!

Brenner's copy of a New Yorker cartoon that was repeatedly moved around various noticeboards (note the pin holes)

Have you registered for our annual Scientific Conference on 8th December? Join @jeffbarrett.eu from @nightingalehealth.com and many more researchers, industry experts and the UK Biobank team for a day of innovation and discovery.

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Oocyte-like mouse cells made from stem cells even without the guiding signals from ovarian cells. Another step towards in vitro gametes. www.cell.com/developmenta...

Bonjour! Masters students in France 🇫🇷, we’ve got an internship for you, in collaboration with the French Embassy in London. Aimed at students of computer science, statistics or bioinformatics. Deadline: 7 December 2025 Find out more and apply: www.ebi.ac.uk/about/jobs/i...

Exciting day for the lab: our 1rst paper is officially out in @currentbiology.bsky.social 🥳 Wonderful collaboration wt @gautamdey.bsky.social showing how Cryo-ExM achieves consistent immunostaining in diverse diatoms, from the lab and the natural environment 1/n #ProtistsOnSky tinyurl.com/2zxaund7

British electricity grid is on a real renewable (windy) roll this week and at the moment, during the day, we're exporting more electricity (to Norway, Ireland, Belgium and Denmark) than we're producing in fossil fuel generation. We often do this overnight - during the day is ... a bit more novel!

Four feet higher and rising: Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia becomes world’s tallest church

I'm tracking down #SciFi stories where genetic manipulation is used to modify species, for obvious reasons, and found Proteus Island; this remarkable novella from 1936 explores how artificial manipulation of chromosome number and X-rays can create new species by a mad scientist in 1918 🧪 1/n

Can an AI tool help us better understand the origins of cancer? Researchers from EMBL's Korbel Group have developed a new AI method – MAGIC – which, through a game of molecular laser tag, is shedding light on how chromosomal abnormalities form in cells. www.embl.org/news/science...

Join us for an extraordinary evening with Nobel Laureate Svante Pääbo! Prof Pääbo will present a FREE public talk titled “Of Neanderthals and Denisovans, and how they live on in many of us” at the @crick.ac.uk. Register here: genetics.org.uk/events/of-ne...

Depressingly there is more talk in many places about race and ethnicity, and how certain visible characteristics - most obviously skin colour - define people. This is squarely in the identity discussion; ie, people defining their own identity via these visible characteristics

Looking forward to going to York on Friday, giving a talk at the York Biomedical Research Institute www.york.ac.uk/biomedical-r...

Learn more in the open access Nature Genetics paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

For over 20 years, the mouse model organism has helped scientists uncover the biology behind human health and disease. But the mouse reference genomes still have missing pieces. The first collection of telomere-to-telomere mouse genomes are now available for two key mouse strains. 🧬💻

There was a point last night where the GB grid was exporting twice as much electricity as being produced by fossil fuels. Last couple of days has been bumper renewables (predominantly wind)

I know that Galton called out for sharing data in 1901

Are there earlier occurrences of groups being established to archive biological data to make them available for future analyses by researchers than this, which is from The British Association Committee on Biological Measurements, 1927?

Are you interested in mechanics in biology? Ever wondered how to measure them in 3D & high-resolution? Come and learn all about the emerging field of Brillouin microscopy! Our Course will teach the necessary background & expose you through hands-on practicals. Deadline Nov. 3rd. Apply now!

How does life evolve to adapt to modern cities? Out now in Science, my PhD work with @lindymcbr.bsky.social uncovers the ancient origin of the “London Underground mosquito” – one of the most iconic examples of urban adaptation. 🧵(1/n) @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady4515

I am genuinely impressed by large language models - they can absorb disparate components of text into some consolidated view, they can produce extremely good language and - with the right model - translate pretty well between languages and they are an excellent text based UI for humans to use. But..

Researchers at EMBL Barcelona highlight malaria-induced disruption of pericytes, bringing us a step closer to understanding how cerebral malaria damages the brain, and how these damages could be prevented or reversed. www.embl.org/news/science...

It is windy in the north sea and so the British grid is awash with wind power unlike a week ago where dark and still days dominanted. But - the politics of renewables looks like it might shift

Petition for more counterexamples to plausible mathematical conjectures to contain the word "Nope". This is very cool in other ways too ofc. www.quantamagazine.org/first-shape-...

After exploring Europe’s coastlines, EMBL’s TREC expedition is moving inland! 💧 The new Traversing Ecosystems phase focuses on freshwater habitats – studying how human activity and environmental change affect life at the molecular level. www.embl.org/news/science...

Shielding Chart xkcd.com/3158/

Je vais conseiller ces stages à nos étudiants, c'est une belle occasion de découvrir un environnement très spécial en Europe

Loved doing this, with clever people, and Brian, talking ancestry, ancient DNA coalescence theory: these are some of my favourite things.

Vous êtes étudiant(e) en informatique, ingénierie ou mathématiques dans une université ou une grande école ? La biologie et le fonctionnement du vivant vous intéressent ? Envie d'élargir vos horizons ? Ce stage pourrait vous convenir. www.ebi.ac.uk/about/jobs/i...

Congratulations to @andreas-t-schaefer.bsky.social on receiving a £3.8 million @wellcometrust.bsky.social Discovery Award, working with @esrf.fr, to chart the brain circuity behind the sense of smell in mice. www.crick.ac.uk/news/2025-10...

Tomorrow, Jordi Rambla, Team Leader of the EGA - @crg.eu, will participate in the #EOSC-ENTRUST Sustainability Workshop: 💬 Perspectives and lessons learned from #FederatedEGA and the Genome Data Infrastructure (GDI) project 📍 October 23, 15:40-15:55 CEST More info: eosc-entrust.eu/news/eosc-en...

🤔 Did you know that over 22,000 researchers from more than 60 countries now work with UK Biobank data? Learn more about the researchers across the globe who are harnessing the data of our participants to make scientific discoveries that improve public health: www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/about-our-da...

Happy Birthday, PDB! RCSB PDB is celebrating the announcement of the PDB archive #OTD in 1971.

Want to understand bio-mechanical properties of cellular/tissue effects? Without killing cells/tissues? Astound your friends and colleagues that you can even do this and work out why life is more than many bags of lots of proteins, RNA with some DNA somewhere in the bag... apply to this course!

Time for 2025 updates to my annual “opinions about solar” thread. If you like these, you might like the second edition of my book, Solar Power Finance Without The Jargon. A 30% discount code WSQ0437 is valid on publisher website until end of November 2025. www.worldscientific.com/worldscibook...

This remains the funniest way to hear about an internet outage, though.

Dear German (and non-German!) colleagues - does anyone know a good book in English about German / Holy Roman Empire history middle ages to Bismark - I realise my understanding of this is the "the maps are crazy complicated with lots of religious wars" and I am sure it is a bit more structured ...