NEW ANALYSIS: UK emissions fell 2.4% in 2025 as coal fell to a 400-year low. Incredibly, we used less coal last year than than in 1600, when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne and Shakespeare was writing Hamlet.
All the details in our article: www.carbonbrief.org/...
Not the key point, but all the 'Andrew Mountbatten Windsor' coverage shows how quickly and easily the entire UK media complex can switch to someone's new name/title, even after using their old one for decades, when it's an incredibly pampered white male deviant. So, you know, it's not *that* hard...
Huge cuts to PPAN postdocs, but we can afford an adventure playground.
Christ, this is fucking dystopian.
How about free art classes, language courses, music lessons, sport sessions, further education modules or anything other than this.
This is the antithesis of education it’s a campaign of national brain rot.
Dear Sir Paul, Re: Royal Society Code of Conduct I am sure that many scientists have written to you about the specific question of Elon Musk’s Fellowship and whether, under the Royal Society’s Code of Conduct, his retaining that Fellowship is appropriate. I will not rehash these issues. Instead, as a female scientist with extensive experience of activities aiming to increase equality, diversity and inclusion in the engineering and physical sciences sector, I am writing to you (in a personal capacity) to ask you to reconsider the statements you have recently made in this context to the UK press about the Royal Society’s Code of Conduct and how it is applied. A 2018 report from the joint National Academies of the United States of America, concluded that “sexual harassment is common in academic science, engineering, and medicine” and that “greater than 50 percent of women faculty and staff and 20–50 percent of women students encounter or experience sexually harassing conduct in academia”. This report described codes of conduct that make clear that sexual harassment is unethical and will not be tolerated as a “powerful incentive for change”. The authors also noted that sexual harassment can have significant and damaging effects on the integrity of research. In my own praxis, I have found that clear and consistently-implemented codes of conduct that address these issues make female scientists and engineers safer, and allow them to focus more effectively on their research. For codes of conduct to have such a positive effect, it is vital that sanctions for actions which transgress the code are meaningful and substantial.
I was hence aghast to realise that in an interview with the Financial Times published on 9/1/26, you appear to have suggested that the Royal Society “should only expel fellows if their science proved “faulty or fraudulent or highly defective””. Moreover, in a further interview with the Guardian on 11/1/26 you suggested that the code “may need to be looked at again”, with the implication that your aim would be to remove the option of sanctions on Fellows for reasons not strictly related to faults or defects in their research. I suggest that changing the Royal Society’s code of conduct so that the likelihood of serious sanctions for sexual harassment is reduced, would directly endanger women who interact with the Royal Society at events or otherwise, and would provide a licence to harass to the already powerful people on whom the Society bestows fellowship. The implications of your words - that under your leadership the only infringements of the code which are likely to receive the sanction of the Fellowship being removed are those related to research misconduct - already risk empowering harassers. You stated, in the Financial Times interview, that “there’s many bad people around, but they have made scientific advances”. Given this awareness of the possibility of bad actors in our scientific community, it is wholly irresponsible to suggest that the Royal Society would not act to sanction these people if they harass more vulnerable scientists. I am hence writing to request that you retract any suggestion that the Society’s Code of Conduct should be changed so that the only reason a Fellow might be sanctioned by the removal of their Fellowship is “faulty or fraudulent or highly defective” research. This action is necessary to safeguard female scientists, a requirement placed on the Society by safeguarding legislation and UK statutory guidance. Yours sincerely, Professor Rachel A. Oliver.
Following coverage over the weekend of Sir Paul Nurse's comments that suggested that the only reason that a Fellow should be expelled from @royalsociety.org is scientific misconduct, I have written to him to explain the risks such an attitude poses of increasing sexual harassment in STEM.
So many reasons I could not cut it in politics, but one is I would just laugh inappropriately too much. Imagine, you’re at a meeting of senior leaders and the CEO comes out with this crap.
[disclaimer, I'm a JOSS editor]
Software that has a life beyond a single dump of the code at the end of a project is definitely more valuable to wider research, so although opinionated it doesn't seem to me an unreasonable criteria.
If there's then > 6 months of further development, maintenance, and support after the initial release then software would become eligible.
We've shipped a major update to the JOSS submission scope requirements, affecting what is eligible for submission and what information we require from authors.
You can read more about the changes and our motivations here: blog.joss.theoj.org/2026/01/prep... #joss #opensource #openscience
"international law must be followed" is european for "thoughts and prayers"
Spray paint a plane and they'll detain you without trial and call you a terrorist.
Kidnap a foreign head of state - and Keir Starmer will make it clear we've played no part in it but will wait for the scheduled press conference in a few hours before potentially condemning it
Goodbye, Monkey Cage - not as infinite as I imagined
This article suggests the possibility of training AI on pre-existing proposals and their review reports, scores and related decisions. I.e. training them on a system which is known to preferentially award larger amounts of money to white men. What could possibly go wrong?
Hackathon participants group picture
We had an amazing OME-NGFF hackathon last week, Wednesday to Friday, following the inspiring OME-NGFF symposium. What a fantastic week! It’s hard to describe how motivating it is to be surrounded by so many talented, curious & friendly people who care deeply about open, FAIR bioimaging data.
1/14 🧵
Hey Labour
Remember the majority of voters who believe in treating people decently and not stealing from those who've endured months and years of hardship fleeing war and persecution to seek a place of safety?
We're still over here 👋
Thanks for the feedback! The code was previously licensed under BSD-3, and I've just added a CC-BY 4.0 license for the content, so you're free to use, share, and remix as long as there's attribution
Written by myself @uclengineering.bsky.social and colleagues at @ucl-arc.bsky.social , we're hoping this provides a useful primer on how to use the modern OME-Zarr data format to handle big bioimaging data.
Today I'm announcing a new digital textbook 📖🖥️, "An Introduction to OME-Zarr for Big Bioimaging Data".
ome-zarr-book.readthedocs.io
As LLMs manufacture a form of scholarship, presentation doesn’t mean what it used to. D&S's Ranjit Singh looks at how this threatens the open-access research repository arXiv, how its founder is fighting to sustain its credibility, & what researchers can do to help. datasociety.net/points/on-ar...
A month to go! Will you be at #CBIAS2025?
The program is almost ready, and we look forward to welcoming you in London to discuss all things #BioImageAnalysis, from tool development, to biomedical applications and community building.
Register now! 🔗⬇️
www.crick.ac.uk/whats-on/cri...
Over at `ome-zarr-models` we're working on implementing support for the new coordinate systems too - here's an example of a transformation graph from multiple tiled images that can be transformed into a common "world" coordinate system. 🟥 ➡️ 🌎
My first paper as a journal editor! 🎉😊
For a long time I've been wondering what RSEs can do to help uphold and support the basic human rights of Palestinians 🇵🇸 - today I've launched gitlab.com/rsesforpales... to collect and discuss actions we can take as a community.
Text reads: Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of... naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference. Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false: Displayed is a screenshot of Firefox showing the config search bar with the listed search. The word "false" is circled in red. Text continues: If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false. Doing that turns off the Al chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that's rolling out.
Just a heads up to anyone using Firefox:
The BBC News website has pages & pages of coverage related to farmers protesting inheritance tax, including events where only a few hundred turn out.
In London yesterday 100,000 people marched for trans rights, and nothing.
Imagine if it was 100,000 anti immigrant activists, they'd cover that.
🚀 Big news! The napari hub has been reimplemented and is now community-run! :tada: It's still the go-to place for finding and sharing napari plugins, but the website is now snappier and lighter-weight. Check it out 👉 www.napari-hub.org
"Gender neutral toilets are available on floor 1 and 15 of our London office." I am somehow reminded of the bit in "Hidden Figures" where the brilliant Black mathematician is forced to run across campus on her break to get to a bathroom she is allowed to use...
