there's so much bad in the world but there's also people who lift up and carry an elderly bat around every day so he can pretend he's flying again, and that's the part of the world I think is worth fighting for
Graph of award probability of R35 and R01 from NIH factbook as a function of review rank percentile. As is apparent, 2025 is a significant departure, with lower award probabilities at all scores <40 and significant departures from norm, where even being in the top 10% is no longer a nearly certain indicator of success. Data source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302
The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted.
What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards.
Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.
Can’t believe I’ve never seen this great Collatz conjecture visualisation before…
As Paul Erdős once put it: "Mathematics may not be ready for such problems”
Image by github.com/dkobak/colla...
Judging from the prose, the Pentagon appears to be using AI to announce the death of soldiers. If it’s not AI, it’s a person who simply does not care.
Complete moral bankruptcy
Heating oil prices have more than doubled in the UK since war broke out: that’s 4.5m people living off gas grid, no they haven’t all got Agas, and in places like Cumbria and Scottish islands that’s a lot of anxious pensioners. (Difference with post-Ukraine is oil as well as gas spiking this time)
3/3 Did you drive the pink Cadillac hired by Nathan Gill who last year got ten years for taking bribes from a Russian spy?
Do get in touch: johnsweeney.co.uk
2/3 So I'm asking the Great British public to help because NF is seeking to be our master.
Were you at school with NF? Worked with him in the City when he was a tin trader? Met him through politics?
Do get in touch: johnsweeney.co.uk
1/3 I'm writing a book about Nigel Farage for Headline.
Some of his pals are blanking me.
Is it because after I reported on the killing of a Polish man in Essex in 2016, he said that I had caused him "more misery than any other in 25 years in politics"?
Do get in touch: johnsweeney.co.uk
Asgard #archaea: have we found our microbial ancestors?
New review (also for newcomers to the field!) by Christa Schleper and Thiago Rodrigues-Oliveira
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Targeted advertising gives your location to the government—just ask CBP. eff.org/deeplinks/2...
Is it too early to call it a world war?
literally zero reason this is happening. a mad king that the rest of the government could stop at literally any time and just don't feel like it.
Your regular reminder that the UK is in fact a high trust society and anyone who implies it isn’t is either selling you a pup or has bought one.
PUBLIC TO HELP DOG BITE VICTIMS --The Jersey Journal, 18 Mar 1915
I feel like the dog doesn't need any help.
It is inherently newsworthy that a sitting US senator is invoking Nuremberg.
Why are most metabolites barely detectable in wild-type cells — biology or technology?
A new study from the Link lab shows it's biology: cells actively maintain minimal metabolite pools to avoid unwanted effects.
www.cmfi.uni-tuebingen.de/en/news-even...
A preview of the MicroSoc2026 pyani-plus hex sticker. It shows a red and blue chequered background (ANI comparison output generated by pyani-plus), over which lies the genomeRxiv logo - two kidney-shaped genomes with base-pairing between them - and white text reading "pyani-plus MicroSoc2026"
We'll be at the
@microbiologysociety.org
Annual Conference in Belfast this year, with a poster describing the new features in pyani-plus, and a talk about benchmarking genome comparisons. There will also be stickers!
See you there 🦠
#microbiology #genomics #pyani #ANI
საფერავი 👍
First week in the BBC graphics department and already thriving
Torpedoed by the US. It's a war crime as it's outside combat area. But then it was a war crime when they killed people on boats in the Caribbean.
The ISCB platform is an excellent place to advertise and find positions in computational biology!
careers.iscb.org/jobs
Predictable, but worrisome www.404media.co/ai-translati... #aislop #ai #hallucination #wikipedia
Phylogenetic and functional analyses across 34 Lepidoptera and 183 plant species show that hexenal isomerases found in Lepidoptera exhibit functional convergence with those found in plants despite having evolved independently from unrelated enzyme families 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Buried lede: Meta sends all your nudes to Kenya where humans annotate it and feed it to AI
🧵 UKRI has changed their budgets from considering by disciplines (as bounded by Research Council remits) to by buckets. The inability to see the magnitude of change to disciplinary funding over the spending review period is creating uncertainty.
VACANCY - We’re searching for a Postdoctoral Researcher to join the newly appointed group of Dr @hassansalem.bsky.social, to explore the developmental biology of host-microbe symbiosis
www.jic.ac.uk/vacancies/po...
Deadline - 25 March 2026
Salary - £37,500 - £45,350
Contract - 3 years, full-time
It’s actually FEWER Misérables
Weird how some random guy on Substack is the first to report this thing that apparent happened in dozens of rooms full of people
"we propose that the protoribosome was a parasite (...). If this view is correct, then like the spliceosome in the stem eukaryote, a repurposed host-parasite interaction led to a dramatic change in cell biology at the base of the tree of life, in this case leading to the exit from an RNA world"
