I have started running Claude alongside the book I am writing on ants, as well as just letting Google Gemini do its thing at the top when I do Google search. It is not doing any writing I am using, and I am always checking the results against primary sources.

Deeply irresponsible. We're in a climate crisis. This is such a terrible start. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Burnham to announce plans for new North Sea oil and gas drilling

Drilling has become a controversial topic for the Labour party after the 2024 manifesto pledged to not issue new licences.

bbc.co.uk

So the one minister with Treasury experience is a no-go because he‘ll spook the markets, while a minister with no treasury experience, who hasn’t expressed a single idea on fiscal policy, and whose main contribution to the economy will be negative won’t be? Sorry, this is just ridiculous.

Financial Times@financialtimes.com · 3w ago

Shabana Mahmood set to be named UK chancellor by Andy Burnham ft.trib.al/B8BshzA

Latest work from the group, led by Dipankar… pubs.rsc.org/cc/article/d...

Patriotic duty in making Britain a success, you say?

And that’s the mass-murdering handiwork of Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society. Who is also an inciter of racist violence. But he’s incredibly rich, so the @royalsociety.org giggles, smiles shyly, and looks the other way.

Lauren Dobson-Hughes@ldobsonhughes.bsky.social · last mo.

For the first time in 30 years, child deaths are now rising, in large part due to USAID cuts Lancet modelling shows USAID cuts will cause 14 million deaths including 4.5m children, by 2030. Independent CGDev research backs this up

The world is falling apart, but at least I am getting spam emails from dead novelists who had things to say about situations like we’re in…

Not being dramatic, but this probably signals the effective end of Chemistry in English Universities. An *efficient* Department loses something like £2k per Chemistry student per year; this change will roughly double that loss. Universities would be mad to keep teaching Chemistry.

Research Professional News@resprofnews.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Breaking: Government set to cut strategic priorities grant. The government is on the cusp of cutting public funding for higher education teaching, the head of Universities UK has told MPs, placing institutions under even more financial pressure. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

We need someone to come and run our SAXS facility at Glasgow - brand new machine to be installed, perhaps with your help running it? If interested: www.jobs.gla.ac.uk/job/research...

Watching in real time how any chance for wildlife to exist disappears as people decide it is more important they can park immediately outside their house… at least the tree is so far ok

Since Google revealed its plans for an AI search overhaul, visits to our "No AI" search page have tripled…and they’re still rising! Want to make it your default on Chrome or Firefox? Grab our No-AI extensions and banish AI-assisted answers, chat, and AI images. (1/3)

No or fewer…? What is she doing to get to fewer than zero children??? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

At the risk of being critical, doesn’t this seem like a control that should have been done a bit earlier…

Chemistry World@chemistryworld.com · 2mo ago

‘I remember taking a gloved finger, pressing it against the substrate then looking at it with our instrument & being absolutely shocked,’ says lead researcher Madeleine Clough @umich.edu @rsc.org #ChemSky #Microplastic #Pollution #Environmental #Research www.chemistryworld.com/news/lab-glo...

I am so interested to meet colleagues and essentially find out that all everyone wants to talk about is the issue with students, authors, referees etc using AI whilst also talking about how useful AI is to write grants and papers...

Utterly the wrong call. Weak. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

UK loosens Russian oil sanctions as fuel prices rise

The waiver reflects increasing supply concerns over certain fuels due to the effective blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

bbc.co.uk

If you are into self-assembled dipeptides but having all sorts of issues repeating the circular dichroism data that many papers report, then our latest work is for you... doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

Investigating reproducibility challenges in CD spectroscopy of FmocFF gels

Abstract. Fluorenylmethoxycarbonyl-diphenylalanine (FmocFF) is a widely studied low molecular weight gelator known for its ability to self-assemble into su

doi.org

Stopping this lot is, in many ways, the only UK political project that matters in the next few years. Lots of us are going to have to hold our noses at various points because the alternative doesn't bear thinking about.

Sunder Katwala (sundersays)@sundersays.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Reform Home Affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf advocates a future government would make decisions on locations of detention centres solely/primarily on political grounds.

A long shot due to the general silence here, but does anyone do vibrational circular dichroism and would like to collaborate on something? #chemsky

Our latest work is out led by Dipankar: pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a... As often, lots of help from beamline scientists @evilokapi.bsky.social and Ralf Schweins at the @illneutrons.bsky.social

Just found a perfect description of gel rheology in ‘Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance’…

Our latest work is out - if you are looking for a distraction from the doom, and are interested in gel noodles, how to actually work out how aligned the structures within them are and what you can then do with them, here's the link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Shear‐Induced Anisotropic Supramolecular Gel Noodles for Improved Cell Guidance in Polarized Tissue Engineering

A simple two-stage extrusion aligns supramolecular fibrils into 1D gel noodles. The residual pressure in the viscous pre-gel drives the formation of a thin filament that is locked by Ca2+ cross-linke...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

It is so embarrassing that it has taken nearly a decade for a British minister to say this, a statement of the absolute bloody obvious

New Year, New Paper - work carried out by a visiting student from Italy to look at remediation of a Historic Scotland hill fort - really interesting new problems to tackle... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Assessment and characterization of Origanum vulgare essential oil in highly viscous polymeric dispersions for cleaning cultural heritage stone materials

Stone biodeterioration caused by microbial colonisation poses significant challenges to the conservation of cultural heritage. Here, we investigate hi…

sciencedirect.com

Glasgow, cold but pretty…

Congrats to Dr Simona Bianco (University of Glasgow) and Dr Jiarong Wu @jiarongwu.bsky.social (University of St Andrews/Universität Würzburg) who were awarded the 2025 RSC MASC Group PhD Thesis Award trophy 🏆 given in memory of John Fossey! #MASC2025 #RSC_MASC

Well, this is the first time I have seen an emoji in a reference letter... my grumpy old man status means this is not a positive aspect of the letter even though it has a big smile...

Very proud of Simona and all of her many achievements at @uofgchem.bsky.social - she was a fantastic PhD student!

RSC MASC@rsc-masc.bsky.social · 8mo ago

📣 Announcement 📣 We are delighted to announce that the 2025 RSC MASC Group PhD Thesis Award 🏆, given in the memory of John Fossey, goes to both Simona Bianco (University of Glasgow) and Jiarong Wu @jiarongwu.bsky.social (University of St Andrews/Universität Würzburg). Congratulations both! (1/4)

Interesting we don't seem to get a say in whether our proposals will be used to train the AI and release the confidential ideas into the AI world...

Chemistry World@chemistryworld.com · 8mo ago

UKRI has opened up its archives on grants in the hope that AI can be trained on it and, in future, help reviewers speed up the peer review process.

I need suggestions for a journal that will publish some careful work we have that shows how difficult it is to collect specific data carefully and how to it properly. It accidentally shows key papers in the field are likely wrong. Currently getting referees telling us there is no **impact**…

Another paper out - this one is working with Arthi Jayaraman at the University of Delaware to use their machine learning approaches to understand our small angle scattering - written as a tutorial review so hopefully useful for people to follow: pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Tutorial: Machine-Learning-Based CREASE-2D Analysis of 2D SAXS Profiles to Characterize Anisotropic Nanostructures in Soft Materials

We present a tutorial to guide users on how to extend the Computational Reverse Engineering Analysis of Scattering Experiments-2D (CREASE-2D) framework to interpret their experimental two-dimensional ...

pubs.acs.org