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
Join me in signing this petition, thank you @sufs-paris-rp.bsky.social for leading the way 🙏
Dawn Ocean Harmony🎶🌴☀️♿️🐕🦺🦮👩🦽🚶🏻♂️@dawnoceanharmony.bsky.social · 12h ago. 🚨✍️Sign Petition!⬇️ PETITION TO CONGRESS IN SUPPORT OF DR. ANTHONY FAUCI & AMERICAN PUBLIC HEALTH Congress must immediately rescind the contempt resolution referral to the Justice Department & stand up for a future where health is supported by science‼️ ✍️👇 www.standupforscience.net/sufs-fauci-p...
I am all for temporary hosepipe bans but let’s be real: we all know that this is only kicking the can down the road without a serious and painful discussion on what is causing it, how we adapt long term, who should implement the bigger regulations needed.
Federica Genovese@fgenovese.bsky.social · yesterdayIs it gonna rain in England again, like, ever?
After they release this one , they will draft an executive order that declares the geocentric model of the universe is correct.
Jennifer Ouellette@jenlucpiquant.bsky.social · 2d agoReport: White House drafting executive order linking vaccines and autism arstechnica.com/health/2026/...
Sociologist Jason Arday has resigned from Cambridge University after being accused of rampant fraud. Now his very inspiring memoir is about to come out from Simon & Schuster, and it's already an Editor's Pick on Amazon. Something very weird is going on: www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/0...
Icarus in the Faculty Lounge
The Cambridge professor Jason Arday’s unlikely ascent has come to a tragic end.
theatlantic.com
Today is only #Caturday and #InternationalCatDay!! So Salem and I want to highlight Bonnie the gorgeous cat we sponsor. She is in Belfast at Cat Protection and waiting for her forever home 🥰🐱
We lost a giant of #glycotime, John Hanover @niddk 😢 . His pioneering work on O-GlcNAcylation as a modulator of glucose metabolism transformed our understanding of glycosylation as a signaling PTM. In this 2023 podcast he shares his passion for the field. irp.nih.gov/podcast/2023...
Dr. John Hanover — The Bittersweet Study of Glycobiology | NIH Intramural Research Program
irp.nih.gov
"AI-enabled biological misuse represents a profound, near-term threat to global security...frontier AI risks dismantling the historical barriers that prevent catastrophic harm by non-state actors" arxiv.org/abs/2607.18056
An Early Warning of Emerging Biosecurity Risks in Frontier LLMs
Frontier large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into scientific workflows, yet their growing biological capabilities may outpace current safeguards. To assess the biological risks of...
arxiv.org
"Stripping knowledge of its historical or cultural situatedness...[knowledge] gets sucked up by the engine and transformed into a vast network of numbers....remixed and regurgitated as a statistical output where any specificity is erased, encouraging a fascist aesthetic." youtu.be/hPV-Ql_KGzM?...
The 2026 Wiegand Lecture featuring Teresa Heffernan — Literature Versus the AI Industry
YouTube video by Arts & Science - University of Toronto
youtu.be
Emily M. Bender@emilymbender.bsky.social · 3mo agoNot satisfied to cut people off from the important sense-making of looking at information in its context and finding and navigating different perspectives (what "AI overviews" do), Google also wants to tell you what to search for:
Throughout history, persecuting scientists for saving lives is a frightening marker for the collapse of a society.
Here's a new kind of virus that scientists have generated with AI. And here's my story about what it means for us to have gotten to this remarkable moment: nyti.ms/4bBhoWB (Gift link) 🧪
You have definitely heard this at some point: "data centres are driving clean energy growth" The reality is most often they just pretend to be doing this using some offset-style moral trickery. Here's an explainer (using Australia's data centre lobby as a prime example)
Never thought I would see "Google" and "negative cash flow" in the same sentence... WT* are you doing over there?? Oh yeah..... arstechnica.com/google/2026/... #google
Google just had its first negative cash flow quarter due to massive AI spending
Google continues to report big quarterly revenue, but its AI spending has skyrocketed.
arstechnica.com
Yeppers. I am no longer going to conferences in the U.S. And I am not alone.
Detentions of International Scholars at Airports Raise Alarm
A Johns Hopkins University researcher was detained at an airport by immigration officials and later released. Cases like hers make travel fraught for foreign scholars.
insidehighered.com
You can't have it all ...but you can have August, and abundantly so A tonic of a poem: www.themarginalian.org/2019/02/07/y...
You Can’t Have It All
“…but there is this.”
themarginalian.org
Some questions for our structural biology community: What protocols do you think would be useful to have? Do you prefer to watch step-by-step videos, or follow written instructions? Of course, not everything has to be a video, but certain workflows are simply best documented on video #protocols
Structural Biology Communications@actacrystf.iucr.org · last wk.A new type of article for Acta F: Protocols The purpose of this new category is to provide to the reader procedures that are sufficiently detailed so other researchers can reproduce the described workflow. Find out more in 'Show me how it's done: introducing Protocols': doi.org/10.1107/S205...
Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia It's been a year & people tell me they've changed their mind, feel safer now to sign, etc. So I'm sharing it again for them. We're almost at 2k & anybody from anywhere can add their names. openletter.earth/open-letter-...
LLMs simply do what some academics always did - only faster and on scale.
Riboseek has now a WIP Marv Logo!
Martin Steinegger 🇺🇦@martinsteinegger.bsky.social · last wk.Riboseek is a fast RNA/DNA search. More sensitive than nhmmer at 250x speed. Structure-aware realignment produces MSAs approaching rMSA quality. Plus 1.7M precomputed RNA MSAs, and an API to search your own 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 💾 github.com/steineggerla... 🌐 search.foldseek.com/riboseek
"f you are hunting for a COVID villain[,] investigate crooks who promoted quack remedies...sources of anti-vaccine disinformation...No mistakes by the scientific community begin to compare with the [right's] brutal indifference to the well-being of Americans" www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...?
Anthony Fauci Is Not the Villain in This Story
The doctor was thrust into his pandemic-leadership role because of Trump’s deadly dereliction of duty.
theatlantic.com
It's cautionary tale for LLM use though. Data aren't democratic; some are better. Reminds me of something a biologist recently said to me of an AI colleague: "His models are fantastic. It's just a shame he doesn't realize the output's garbage because half the papers fed into it are wrong.." 5/n
I’ve seen a lot of my colleagues’ interactions with Claude working on research problems & it would be easier for me to accept it as a serious scientific tool if it didn’t end every single response with the LLM equivalent of “you want fries with that?” — constantly trying to goad you into asking more
Half the country officially in drought - the 3rd in 5 years. Fires raging across Europe. Battles being fought over AI data centres, New episode of *When Nature Becomes A Security Threat*,my podcast series for @therestpolitics.bsky.social, out now. It couldn’t be more timely. Pls do give a listen
Data Centres vs. Drinking Water: What Matters To Us Most?
Podcast Episode · The Rest Is Politics · 30 July · 16min
podcasts.apple.com
When financial interests rise above common sense and human life ⤵️
Caroline Lucas@carolinelucas.bsky.social · last wk.Shocking to discover designating AI data centres as “National Critical Infrastructure” means water companies are prohibited from restricting water to them even in times of drought. Households will lose water first. Thanks to @olliehayes.bsky.social at @globalactionplan.bsky.social for joining me
Riboseek is a fast RNA/DNA search. More sensitive than nhmmer at 250x speed. Structure-aware realignment produces MSAs approaching rMSA quality. Plus 1.7M precomputed RNA MSAs, and an API to search your own 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 💾 github.com/steineggerla... 🌐 search.foldseek.com/riboseek
Elon Musk is planning to spend at least $100 million to help Republicans in this year’s midterms. That’s just 0.014 percent of his current $702 billion net worth. Oligarchs can rig the system at the expense of everyone else, and only spend pennies doing so. We must get Big Money out of politics.
If this is what happens to a scientific field as a whole when LLMs dominate the workflows of researchers, I can only imagine that the outlook is even worse for any individual researcher who is soldiering on without using them. 😞
Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 3w ago13. Hence our dismal conclusion: rather than finding that LLMs free us to do a better job of what we were doing before they came along, they shift scientific incentives (and the playing field of academic competition) in ways that compel us to do more and more, faster and faster, less and less well.
