Back to work next week after 7 months maternity leave. I'm both excited to return to a job I love and worked hard to get. But dreading it: how am I going to manage a tough academic career and two wonderful babies? How did you academic mamas do it?
"faster, reproducible science across disciplines through UKRI‑supported national AI testbeds and shared methods"
Forgive me for expressing scepticism that AI will magically fix the reproducibility crisis.
Important too to validate in the tissue/ sample/species you are using! Some sample processing may modify antigens and antibody binding.
"Here, we show that this Ab appears to be unreliable due to providing false-positive signals at the expected molecular weight of Bax in immunoblotting experiments and likewise provides false-positive signals in immunofluorescence-based detection of Bax expression"
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Openness means more than access. That's why we encourage submissions of Replication Studies.
Learn about publishing your replication study with us in our author guide: buff.ly/rcI0oAY
Measles is one of those nightmare diseases that, if it hadn't been killing people for hundreds of years, people would ABSOLUTELY be pushing conspiracy theories about right now. It's too nasty in too many different directions to seem natural. But oh, boy, it sure is.
First-rate analysis.
Strong agree that ‘someone needs to own disciplinary health’ . At present, a fatal flaw of the UK system, centred in England on the separation of functions between DfE (and OfS) and DSIT, is that no one does.
"Science — especially curiosity-driven research — is, at its heart, a creative act. It needs space to breathe and the capacity to fail. Often, government-mandated programmes lack that flexibility" .
www.nature.com/articles/d41... Excellent summary by @prof-tregoning.bsky.social @natureportfolio.nature.com @ukri.org
Also: shifting scientific funding towards "government priority areas" is a surefire way to kill creativity and innovation.
Generating scientific knowledge is not like ordering a takeaway. You can't just tick the 'science' that you want and expect anything useful.
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.
Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).
Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.
Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
All I hear from ukri is blablabla... In the meantime we're left in limbo not knowing how to prepare (because projects take months if not years to be ready for funding application).
Their answers to this fiasco is unimpressive. It makes no sense and they're just throwing us all unde the bus. I'm starting to think they're hiding something worse.. Why else would they do something so drastic and destructive.
As the political climate around animal research becomes less supportive in the UK, it is our interest to argue for & protect organismal biology.
BBSRC opened a survey, which gives us a timely platform. Please fill & share link among colleagues. Deadline: 9/2
engagementhub.ukri.org/mrc-bbsrc/la...
Last week, RPN broke a string of stories on significant changes to funding across a number of research councils (see thread below)
This morning, UKRI chief executive is appearing at the Commons science committee, where he is being asked about them by MPs
Here are some key moments so far 🧵
An imagine explaining that OpenAI is Trump's largest donor
One more reason my soul shrivels up every time I hear someone say "I just used chatgpt to ____"
That would be catastrophic
Sending babies to nursery completely reshapes their microbiomes.
Socializing at a young age helps to develop greater diversity in children’s microbiota, according to an analysis of baby-to-baby transmission of gut bacteria.
🧪👶🦠 #medsky @medsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
I agree, University education (like education in general) should be free. But at the very least student loans should be interest free until repaid in full...
WHO graphic titled “Measles can be fatal – Know the symptoms.” A child’s face and body are shown with red spots. Labels point to symptoms: rash starting on the face and spreading over the body, fever, red and watery eyes, runny nose, small white spots inside the cheeks, and cough.
Measles can be fatal.
Do you know its symptoms?
🔴 Rash that starts on the face and spreads over the body
🔴 Fever
🔴 Cough
🔴 Red and watery eyes
🔴 Small white spots inside the cheeks
Seek health care if you suspect you or your child has measles. 🔗bit.ly/4iq4nkD
Honored to share our new paper, Osteoarthritis as a Systemic Disease, in @natrevrheum.nature.com, out today: rdcu.be/eSXLW - thanks to Ida Haugen, @tuhinaneogi.bsky.social and @farsh-g.bsky.social for your input on gaps and opportunities.
Unless the figure legend explains it well?
I've no idea what I'm looking at 😅
Merry Xmas everyone!!!
I can't resist posting this picture of my beautiful 6 days-old angels 😍😍😍😍. Maternity life! Their first hug since being separated at birth for NICU treatment
I am very happy to announce that maternity has now officially started with the premature birth of my 2 beautiful girls. 😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍
1) Despite the chaos, I am very pleased to present the terrific research conducted by my post-doc @clarissacoveney.bsky.social. acrjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
On the responsibilities of intellectuals and the rise of bullsh*t jobs in universities.
"Corporate academia is subverting academic life. It’s destroying academia from within."
🧪👩🏼🎓
academic.oup.com/brain/articl...
Excited to share our work on the small but mighty microRNA-126-3p in @naturecomms.bsky.social! We found this microRNA is elevated in four knee osteoarthritis cohorts and show in an animal model that it reduces the severity of knee osteoarthritis - at least in part via angiogenesis. rdcu.be/ebycj
• Skills and learning. Universities in the UK play a crucial role in equipping graduates with high level skills. The UK is facing a shortage of 11 million graduates by 2035, when 88% of new jobs will be at graduate level. • Opportunity. The expansion of the higher education sector has afforded more people the opportunity to realise their ambitions, with 33% of the disadvantaged students progressing to university. • Economic growth. Higher education makes £130 billion contribution to the UK economy, supporting over 700,000 jobs in regions across the UK. R&D is one of the long-term Registered Charity No. 233176 sources of UK competitive advantage and growth and every £1 invested in university research and innovation returns £10 for the UK economy. Soft power. Over 50 world leaders received higher education in the UK and by educating large numbers of international students we develop our relationships around the world.
In light of the major cutbacks at universities - especially in the arts, humanities and social sciences - we have written to the Chancellor to make the case for investing in research and higher education through the Spending Review
www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/56...
