Rob Smith

AI-powered nimbyism could grind UK planning system to a halt, experts warn Tools that help people scan applications and find grounds for objection have potential to hit government’s housebuilding plans

Tech democratisation narratives in action...(obv. 'nimbyism' is such a stupid hook for this)

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

From the University of Woeville: Alternative FAQs for British academics facing redundancy Given that the Senior Management Team (SMT) of the University of Woeville (UoW) is now planning large scale academic redundancies, we’ve updated our FAQs for all those staff facing imminent career …

Wowowow 🔪 🦴

juliecupples.wordpress.com/2025/11/02/f...

DISCARD - The aim is to combine gene segments to create a new genome, but recombination events will cause localised or system-wide death.

Also, perhaps 'an' approach is a typo for 'any'. Or perhaps it's an STS approach that we're peddling...

Book cover at the link below

Also our new book came out! It's technically a textbook, but should be a good primer for anyone trying to work out how to understand synbio in society using an approach

global.oup.com/ukhe/product...

#synbio #engbio #sts #governance

The Soba Restaurant and the Oyster Bar: Peripheral Spaces for Responsible Research and Innovation As STS researchers working closely with scientists and engineers, we have been invited into, created, reluctantly entered, and stumbled upon many kinds of spaces, some of which might be considered ...

So happy this is finally out.

The first paper in our attempt to begin to think about spaces for responsible innovation beyond the tired tropes of ELSI panels etc. #sts #rri #soba

Oooh, thanks!

In Boston public gardens there is a statue to ether. Is this strange? Or are there actually loads of monuments celebrating chemicals and medical technologies?

a collaborative researcher's packing list.

Synthetic Human Genome Project gets go ahead Scientists start a controversial project to create the building blocks of human life, in what is thought to be a world first.

Sigh. This is such a terrible take on synthetic human genomes that just repeats tropes of the past.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

A photo with textures in the foreground and a sign saying eat crab in the background

100% my motto

A photo of Blue from Pigeonwing dance company digging a hole on a beach

I'm still not sure what to make of a meeting that in many ways replayed the meeting it was thinking with (and all the tired tropes we've learnt since then), but I am VERY into it accommodating our weird events on the beach. #asilomar #sts #synbio

www.science.org/content/arti...

No Compulsory Redundancies at The University Of Edinburgh! — UCU Edinburgh Financial mismanagement at the University of Edinburgh continues. On 11 February 2025, Peter Mathieson wrote to all staff threatening “restructuring, possible closures of programmes or even Schools, m...

The Edinburgh Joint Unions finance working group continues to do amazing work dissecting Edinburgh Executives' financial claims....and doing #sts in the process

www.ucuedinburgh.org.uk/blog/3fzpaa5...

a grey squirrel

Then on Tuesday at 3pm UK time, Sarah Hartley and I will be talking about our squirrels work (↓↓↓). That's online as part of the Biological Engineering Collaboratory and very much open to all. (Send me a note if you want to come)

a castle in tuscany, surrounded by clouds. The text on it says 'Conferences as sites of governance, or haunted by dreams of a tuscan castle'

Some promo! On Monday I'll be talking about Asilomar, why old visions of governance repeat, why it's so tiring and whether there's any way out of that loop. That's in Exeter at the wonderful Egenis Centre.

What a line: "Big Potato controls 97% of the frozen potato market"

pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/p...

Watching grownups pretend not to recognize a Nazi salute flashed three times is...expected in an authoritarian takeover.
Next, they'll do it en masse to "own the libs."
Refuse to normalize or be gaslit.
We know what they meant all along.
#ElonNaziSalute

Of all of those, the cybertruck safari felt the sketchiest by far

I just drank a GMO enhancement to prevent my hangover, went on cybertruck safari and caught a robot to the airport.

now we're queuing for the human to check our passports

These two points -- tech *is* the solution vs tech as part of solutions, and full amnesia about how that went before -- are really important, and I think part of my and my friends beef with all the chat in the U.K. about engineering biology atm.

Concluding paragraph of the page I linked to above

Big Tech in the UK Dorothy Bishop’s attempt to get The Royal Society to oust Elon Musk has crystallised political dilemmas of sweeping consequence

Long but useful Christmas reading on the Tony Blair Institute's slightly weird infatuation with tech

williamcullernebown.substack.com/p/big-tech-i...

a large body of water with waves coming in and out of it ALT: a large body of water with waves coming in and out of it

In my latest piece for @science.org, I ask how we should think about experiments that take place outside the lab. It begins here, in St Ives, Cornwall. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

yes, and actually lots of big journals look like (and sometimes say) they want qualitative work, but the qualitative reviewers want widely relevant, transferable, pre-registered experimental studies, ie they're all still positivists.

....because they want thee impact factorrrrrrrr? 🦖

screenshot of the final section of a science paper available at the link in the post

This is really rare! Synthetic biologists saying the path forward is 'don't do it'.... obvious parallel is rDNA in the 60s/70s, but that's probably a red herring...

www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

ASU president Michael Crow talks to Cynthia Selin about the original motivation for the Centre for Science, Policy and Outcomes. Giant US inequalities, and innovation appeared to be implicated

thanks to all the #synbio folks for joining. now i can stop reading all your scientific papers again.

is he doing a severance cameo?