Elisa Fadda
@elisafadda.bsky.social
Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Southampton, head chef at https://GlycoShape.org, Salem's butler, fucose fanatic #glycotime everyday! She/Her
Amazon declined to comment on 404 Media’s findings, only providing @arstechnica.com with the same statement it gave to 404 Media “Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use” 🤮 arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...
Hidden Airtag reveals Amazon is trashing rare books to train AI
Amazon’s team uses a T. rex preparing to devour a book as its logo.
arstechnica.com
If you just happened to pick this week to start yelling about the importance of academic freedom, I sure hope you did more than watch silently for the past 18 months as the Trump administration assaulted everything from mRNA vaccine research to gender studies to the very idea of having universities.
Mark Carney: "In recent days. the US proposed new terms that were uneconomic, unfair, and undermine the net benefits for Canada, and called into question the reliability of any deal. In short, they asked too much and they offered too little ... You're at war when you get attacked. We got attacked."
The craziest thing about all this is that U.K. universities are being ripped to shreds by cuts and *this* is the hill these academics are keen to die on democracyforsale.substack.com/p/inside-bri...
Inside Britain's university crisis
As teaching staff face job loss, their bosses have netted pay rises and bought advice from a “vampiric” management consultancy, writes Prof. John Heathershaw of the University of Exeter
democracyforsale.substack.com
roterote@roterote.bsky.social · 2d agoThere are dozens of academics signing this open letter to defend the American Eugenicist Nathan Cofnas from the consequences of his own actions. They are calling him a “whistleblower”
HG Wells is alleged to have remarked "Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race”. You could see this shocking chart as an index of civilisation. A country which gets this issue so badly wrong is likely to fail in many other ways.
Kevin Wilson@kwilsonhfx.bsky.social · 3w agoShocking.
“Nobody can make you feel shame (.) It’s what Gisele Pelicot told the world (.) But it’s a semi-magical quality that some people have (.) perhaps those who struggle most are people whose brains are built differently, like Jason’s" @carolecadwalla.bsky.social broligarchy.substack.com/p/the-jason-...
The Jason Arday Reckoning
The attempts to cover up the complicity of the UK media’s role in his death may be its sickest move yet
broligarchy.substack.com
(AI actually has been used in science and medicine for decades and is incredibly good at doing things like finding cancer that can’t be seen with the human eye but that is a completely different type of AI then we’re all angry about it and we shouldn’t discuss them in the same conversations TBH)
Ben Collins@bencollins.bsky.social · 5d agoTalk to the people who would use this for dream use cases — the cancer scientists, the people who want to make material goods out of it — and they will tell you it’s either a marginally useful if unreliable trick or completely useless. It has produced 0% of the utopian products promised.
Rewilded land remains green amid drought-stricken English countryside, images show
Rewilded land remains green amid drought-stricken English countryside, images show
National Trust’s Holnicote estate says restored wetlands and rivers offer proof of resilience to drought, wildfires and flooding Aerial footage of an estate in Somerset has revealed the benefits of rewilding land in the face of extreme weather brought about by the climate crisis. The area of the National Trust’s Holnicote estate where rivers have been returned to their natural courses and wetlands have been restored have remained green and lush during the five heatwaves across the summer. In contrast, the surrounding countryside has become parched and brown. Continue reading...
theguardian.com
In the New and Notable "Polarizing phosphorylated proteins," Sangram Prusty and Qiang Cui highlight the paper "Drude polarizable force field for phosphorylated polypeptides and proteins." buff.ly/p611yX5
New and notable: Polarizing phosphorylated proteins
Posttranslational modifications (PTMs) are covalent chemical modifications in the protein backbone or side chain that occur after translation. By altering the physicochemical properties of the…
cell.com
Today in the village of Orani in Sardinia, a thermometer melted Next who says that climate always changed, or wants to invest more in oil/coal and gas, wins a summer hollie in Orani (no AC anywhere, btw)
Journal Club: Probes show lipids are far more selective for proteins than once thought. In PNAS Front Matter: https://ow.ly/aeRW50ZBWL8
"Many AI-generated papers feature...drive-by references...assertions about...the topic bolstered by citations from 2023 to 2026. They typically cite no papers between the mid-'90s and early 2020s...Why? Because GenAI models can't get behind publishers’ firewalls" www.chronicle.com/article/ai-i...
AI Is Ruining Scholarship
When we outsource literature review to algorithms, we lose entire sectors of knowledge.
chronicle.com
My apple tree made its first apple 🍎, just the one, and I am absolutely delighted about it 😍🌱
Academia: come join our gym! It’s super great because we let you use robots that can do all the lifting for you so you can all bench press 400lb! That’s right, every student paying to use our gym gets an “I can bench press 400lb certificate!! 100%!! Woohoo!
We do not build the reservoirs needed to store the rain that falls here. We do not build strategic food reserves needed to maintain provision in hard times. We failed to build effective stores of PPE, to protect us in pandemics. This country has long been governed by people who do not prepare.
Full nationalisation of water companies must be at the top of the government’s agenda to prevent catastrophic water shortages in the years ahead. www.theguardian.com/environment/...
UK government ‘irresponsible’ for not publishing emergency drought plans
Campaigners demand greater transparency into water companies’ plans not made public due to ‘security reasons’
theguardian.com
Imagine being the author of the worst take on AI yet published by Nature.
When AI writes the words, who is the author?
After an AI detector classified one of my opinion pieces as entirely AI-generated, I found myself questioning where authorship ends, where expertise begins and what readers deserve to know.
nature.com
Lots of debate about the infamous furin cleavage site (FCS) in SARS-CoV-2 and it's alleged uniqueness. But Paul Bieniasz see "numerous examples of potential FCS acquisition...during normal coronavirus replication", concluding "such events are likely commonplace". www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Genetic innovation in coronaviruses driven by a viral nuclease
Genetic variation in viruses is well known to arise from polymerase-driven nucleotide misincorporation. However, insertion and deletion (indel) mutations that occur at lower, largely unknown, frequenc...
biorxiv.org
Glycopalooza is where connections turn into opportunities! Bringing trainees, new PIs, and mentors together to connect, share, and grow. Add Glycopalooza + Mentoring to your SFG 2026 registration. August 21 is the deadline for Early Bird Rates & Abstracts! sfg.memberclicks.net/registration...
Two new CALVADOS preprints Coarse-grained models for simulations of double-stranded nucleic acids for mixed protein-nucleic acid condensates doi.org/10.64898/202... MEM-CALVADOS: A Residue-Level Model for Flexible Proteins at Membrane Interfaces doi.org/10.64898/202...
Our researchers have developed a powerful AI tool that reveals previously invisible patterns inside breast cancers. It could help identify high-risk patients, predict how breast cancer progresses, and lead to more targeted treatments. Read more 👉 https://tr.pulse.ly/swvsgqec4c
Pretty in pink 💗 This is an elephant hawk-moth, one of our most striking visitors and we think it's really rather beautiful. You may have seen one fluttering around at dusk in your garden. They can also be seen in parks, woodland edges or grassy habitats. 📸 Rob Coleman, Sheringham Park
Happy to share our new preprint on MEM-CALVADOS! Work led by @rsaltutti.bsky.social extending CALVADOS to flexible proteins at lipid membrane interfaces. 🗞️ doi.org/10.64898/202... 🖥️ github.com/gitesei/MEM-... @vetenskapsradet.bsky.social
Searching "Remove summary by" in Google shows all the love for Copilot 😆 And yes, I wanted to know how to nuke Copilot from Outlook (already removed it from Word)
MEM-CALVADOS: A Residue-Level Model for Flexible Proteins at Membrane Interfaces https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.12.743853v1
'Zounds! tis hot. Or as the bard once said "As a fair day in summer, wondrous fair." That's from Pericles - which you can find at 828.3 SHA PER, on thine thirdest floor(est) of yon house of knowledge
