The destruction of short courses and continuing education departments in UK universities did enormous harm to the ability of these three realms of archaeology - amateur, academic, professional - to overlap and interact, and destroyed longstanding alternative career paths.
Statement from the University on the future of the vet school. www.cam.ac.uk/notices/news...
Cambridge University has just announced that the proposal to close its undergraduate course in veterinary medicine, which would have led to the end of its Vet School and Hospital, has been dropped.
The vets will carry on with the reforms they had already launched and the course continues. Victory!!
I don't think that the reviewers asking me for higher animal numbers really understand how many 40 goats are. Do you know the CHAOS that comes with dealing with 40 GOATS in an experimental setting!
Mice people cannot comprehend.
3 goats alone ate a tarp, a clock, and 2 expensive accelerometers!
[Lindisfarne]
Me: (chanting) teeth, teeth-
Other fossil hunters: teeth, TEETH
British Geological Society: [pounding its clipboard] TEETH, TEETH, TEETH!
Bit different from our usual work
A PhD applying metagenomics to identify microbial plastic degradation and metabolism, fully funded studentship (UK students only).
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
A card imitating the cover of a book. The background has a monstrous cartoon face. The title is in a 1920s style: "THE TERROR that came to town AND NOW ITS ON MY FACE and I'm INSANE because THE TERROR is on MY FACE and it's not a METAPHOR" by Otis Plonkerton.
My brother draws and prints custom cards and they're always amazing. This one apparently honours my taste in books
New paper out with colleagues from Malaysia www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour... #microsky
The collapse of curiosity driven research has occurred in STEM too. Everything has to be outcomes focused - cure disease, grow better crops, etc. But so much of what humanity has discovered is from "basic" curiosity-driven science. I'm hugely in favor of funding curiosity in every discipline.
We publish a wide range of articles relating to the science-policy interface, ranging from Climate Change to Emerging Technologies to Health Policy. For more information, head to our website: cjsp.org.uk The journal is part of the Cambridge University Science and Policy Exchange (www.cuspe.org.uk).
Accepted article types are policy briefs, perspectives, reviews, or reports. Please contact me at sjs263 (at)cam .ac. uk if you would like to pitch or submit an article, or if you have any questions!
CJSP is a student-led peer reviewed science policy journal, published both online and in print.
I'm the current Chief Editor at CJSP, which is why you're seeing this thread ๐
For this issue we welcome diverse topics within scope, for example, the impacts of disease on conservation efforts, pandemic preparedness, vaccination policy, or agricultural pathogens and food chain resilience.
๐จSubmissions open for the Cambridge Journal of Science and Policy (CJSP)! ๐จ
CJSP invites submissions for Volume 7, Issue 1 under the theme "Infectious disease policy: research, surveillance, and resilience".
Manuscripts for the themed issue must be received by 6th March 2026.
Now that is an excellent idea
Ugh, gross ๐ฎโ๐จ
"Metascience Novelty Indicators" sounds super scammy? Does anyone know what it's all about? The paper of mine they cite qualifying me to contribute seems... pretty unlikely
PhD projects in microbial engineering now up, including one with @whelanfj.bsky.social @willpjsmith.bsky.social and me! ๐ฆ
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
'to treat peer review as a throughput problem is to misunderstand what is at stake. Review is not simply a production stage in the research pipeline; it is one of the few remaining spaces where the scientific community talks to itself.' 1/3
I only just wrote to reviewers "so sorry the underlying taxonomy changed since submission" ๐
BREAKING NEWS: UK loses its #measles elimination status
@benk-d.bsky.social highlights failure to reach 95% measles #vaccine coverage target in UK
+ need for secure funding for vaccine outreach efforts & joined-up #PublicHealth response
Read more: www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/n...
At first glance I thought it was trying to convey that trump was also a penguin, like the batman mobster ๐คทโโ๏ธ๐ง๐ฆ
If youโre in/around London next week & want to hear me speak about lots of fun early medieval isotopes + aDNA come along on Tuesday! โ๏ธ๐งฌโ ๏ธ
Me too but apricot muffins ๐
The publishers of Frontiers are very proud of their fraud-detection software and have appointed themselves as "Guardians of Research Integrity". Also, they publish stuff like this.
Title section of a journal article: The Legend of Ea-Nasir: How a Babylonian Businessman Became an Internet Meme. By Gabriel Moshenska, UCL Institute of Archaeology, UK, g.moshenska@ucl.ac.uk https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCA/article/view/30204 https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.30204
Just published a paper on the complaint tablet to Ea-nฤแนฃir meme, the decade-old tumblr in-joke that continues to impact the public understanding of the ancient world. Paywalled but email me if you want a copy. ๐บ
Paper accepted! ๐ฅณ๐ป
The coolest finding of my PhD is finally out! E. coli has a 7th RND pump that is present in phylogroups B2/D/E/F but absent in A/B1/C. As a result EefABC has been absent in all K-12 RND studies! Co-authored by the very talented Dr. Lizzy Darby. @jessicamablair.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1099/mgen...
Great idea thank you! I'll have a closer look at the phage contents... have genomes but not analysed yet.
A back-lit blood plate with three antibiotic disks: cotrimoxazole, penicillin, and azithromycin. The latter two have large zones of inhibition that intersect. The bacterial growth around the azithromycin disk has a ring of enhanced haemolysis about 5mm wide, not present around the other antibiotics.
I have a question for people who do a lot of disk diffusion assays... have you ever seen enhanced haemolysis around azithromycin specifically? Does it damage RBCs so that bacterial haemolysis is more rapid, or is it maybe a stress response from the bacterium?
