Don’t deprioritize curiosity-driven research Around the world, governments are demanding that research funding follow broader political priorities. They should be careful what they wish for.

A very important editorial:

Don’t deprioritize curiosity-driven research www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Have just seen a social media post from a Nobel Prize winner about how they are actually not afraid of their core grant renewal interview.

I don't even know from what side to start unpacking this as an insight into the sociology of science...

Happy to have contributed to this exciting study!

Congratulations, @nickywhiffin.bsky.social!

I'm guest-editing a collection on "Enhancer-promoter interactions" at Genome Biology. Please send us your exciting stories!

link.springer.com/collections/...

Voice isn't enough either. I'm going to watch the voting record closely...

ICE-style raids on Britain's streets: that's all Labour's brutal asylum reforms will achieve | Stella Creasy If we want to ‘stop the boats’, we need to stop the BS when it comes to what creates refugees, and how to respond to them, says Labour MP Stella Creasy

Thank you, my local Labour MP @stellacreasy.bsky.social for a bit of common sense.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

A common grant application database would cut the waste of resubmission Financial restrictions oblige funders to reject vast numbers of sound proposals. Why not retain them for other funders to consider, asks Mikhail Spivakov

I elaborated on my proposal for a "grants commons" in an opinion piece for Times Higher Education.

www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/comm...

Totally agree and had been proposing this for a while. Time to join forces and make this happen?

Congratulations Alexi and team!

Researchers applying for the UK's Global Talent visa face high upfront costs Upfront cost of visa to applicant and employer in 2025 UK Denmark £692 India £602 Australia £405 Israel £362 US £305 Italy £235 Netherlands 1 £207 Germany | £170 Spain 1£144 Sweden | £117 South Korea | £98 France £84 Japan £21 £5,941 £O £2,000 £4 Source: Fragomen for the Royal Society • Excludes ongoing costs such as mandatory healthcare premiums or fees such as language tests

The costs of the UK’s Global Talent Visa looks a trifle high in comparison to competitor countries - largely through the Immigration Health Surcharge (which critics say is a form of double taxation as they contribute to the NHS through normal tax on their earnings)

Our departing flight was once moved to a different airport in France, because at the small airport it was supposed to take off from, firefighters went home.

From a sample of over 10 papers (on most of which I'm either not an author or not a senior author), over a year-long revisions in our field are becoming common. Before we accept this as the norm, I suggest we consider the consequences & inequalities this creates, even in the era of preprints.

The PhD opportunities in our group and in many others at @mrc-lms.bsky.social are now open!

lms.mrc.ac.uk/work-and-stu...

If you are interested in studying enhancers, enhancer-promoter communication and/or enhancer-based gene regulatory networks using multidisciplinary approaches, feel free to send an informal inquiry or watch the space on findAphd.com and lms.mrc.ac.uk, where the ads will go live soon!

A quick heads-up that we will have two PhD positions available to start in October 2026. One as part of MRC LMS PhD programme, and one as a transdisciplinary studentship with @srinjan.bsky.social and Thomas Ouldridge at Imperial.

A great collaboration between Marina Nocente and Monica Della Rosa in our lab, and human naive pluripotency experts Maria Rostovskaya and Peter Rugg-Gunn in Cambridge.

Poising and connectivity of emergent human developmental enhancers in the transition from naive to primed pluripotency In primed human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) resembling post-implantation epiblast, numerous lineage-specific enhancers assume the poised chromatin state, co-marked by H3K4me1 and Polycomb-associate...

Many enhancers that drive tissue-specific gene expression are already connected to gene promoters in human pluripotent cells.

In a new preprint, we share some clues about when, how, and why this happens!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Sounds cool, thanks for sharing!

Hi Alexis, not sure if I'm on your list - would love to be added if not. Thanks!

Congrats Arnaud and team, exciting stuff!

...and a welcoming Ryanair check-in gate with no queue!

Translational research is digging for gold. Basic research is learning where and what to dig. The more funding is diverted to translation, the more we deplete the research ecosystem, driving the supplies of "gold" - immediately translatable findings and innovations - to unsustainably low levels.

My colleagues at @mrc-lms.bsky.social are hiring (five postdoc positions in total!).

Congratulations to Will Scott and the team from @mrc-lms.bsky.social on this exciting study!

Philip Kitcher, philosopher: ‘Life is a human project, not God’s’ The British thinker is an advocate of collective progress and laments our contemporary individualism. In an interview with EL PAÍS, he says that there is value in idealism, even when it is absurd

"We’re reaping the fruits of what happened economically 50 years ago, when... decisions began to prioritize efficiency and making as much money as possible over what was ethically correct."

english.elpais.com/culture/2025...

I have no doubt about that - but this in itself is commendable :)

Wow. Saying this as someone trained in classical piano...

Sounds cool!

I got British citizenship via the five-year route. Labour’s new 10-year rule will cause untold pain | Nesrine Malik Starmer claims to want integration. Yet denying people safety, belonging and the right to vote for a decade amounts to the exact opposite, says Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This is all a painful deja vu from 2007. And it's important to remember that despite all the suffering and literal lives lost (www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this...) Labour had lost hopelessly then to the party whose policies it tried to mimic.