Ben Krishna

Houses without lounges are a reality for renters Nearly a third of homes advertised on a property sharing website had no living room.

Oddly was discussing this last night, I don’t think I rented a place with a living room between 2009 and 2017. I doubt it’s got better!

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I love how you can word a sentence clearly, but reviewer 1 and 2 don't like the sentence so you carefully reword. Then it comes back and gets carefully reworded again. Months of back and forth before acceptance.

Then the copyeditor says "correct for clarity" and it goes back to how it was!

Tidying out my parents place, this folder has every western blot I ran during my PhD

I'd love to know whether...

1. I'm just getting old
2. UX no longer exists
3. UX as a concept has changed

...because I really struggle to log into websites these days

Hope you're doing well! I don't have the same compulsion to come on here as I did with twitter.

I opened this app just to see if you'd say this, and you didn't disappoint!

I'd love to understand why my local neighbourhood's section of NextDoor needs so many posts about Jeffrey Epstein

... so the public-facing literature seems really convincing UNLESS you're in the field and chat with researchers. But I have no idea how many people have failed to find X in disease Y. Maybe it's just my mates?

Publication bias muddies academic fields a lot more than people realise.

I'm reading a very persuasive review linking disease Y to mechanism X. The issue of publication bias is so interesting though as I've spoken with plenty of people who failed to find X in disease Y. The negative data is either unpublishable or goes into small journals that people don't read....

Google AI informs me that Ken Watanabe is not a herpesvirus and has nothing to do with herpesviruses

Google AI tells me that Ken Watanabe works on the herpesvirus HHV-6

Helpful

My favourite part of #ihw2025 was the student explaining their poster who said: "This is the mechanism we propose, which is supported by the data. I don't think we have it right really but its the best explanation we have". Quite appreciated the honesty!

Having to explain Yu Gi Oh to an Emeritus Professor #ihw2025

…I got an email today from the SLC asking why I paid my student loan in 2021 when I wasn’t earning anything

Back in 2021 I was unemployed so I asked the SLC if I could stop repaying my student loan until I got a new job. They would only recognise me as unemployed if I took unemployment benefits. I actually got a job before I managed to get unemployment benefits….

YouTube video by James Leith How to tackle a laboratory spillage.

Doing chemical safety training today, not sure why the videos all have a jazzy intro but I'm thoroughly enjoying it

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyxB...

This is probably the most exciting result I’ve had in about 18 months!

Update, I asked them to discuss similar work in the field. They said no! What a weirdly convoluted way to get your manuscript rejected

I'll be honest, I've read this so many times and can't work out what you mean!

I’m amazed how many papers I read which don’t compare their data to similar studies. “We found xyz”. Ok but similar studies found wxz, why?

It feels so fundamentally incurious that you wouldn’t discuss this after doing 2-3 years of work?

Adobe's stupid AI agrees with me

I note that when you agree to review a paper within a week, they don't tell you how long the paper is beforehand

The apheresis cone price has gone up. Feels weird that the cost of human blood is subject to inflation

It feels so tacky now that the queen’s death was first announced on twitter. It shows how important boring, stable institutions are

If you'd like to see more of my Dad's work, he's on Flickr (www.flickr.com/photos/18841...)

I think it came out really nicely AND it was chosen for the front cover of Pathogens! My Mum's convinced this is his breakthrough into the big leagues.

And after quite a bit of back-and-forth, given I have no creative skills and Dad didn't quite get what information needed to be conveyed, he made this! I think it's a really nice art/science collaboration. 3/4

The last paper I was writing (tinyurl.com/bkback5290), I realised how useful it would be to put in a diagram showing the evolutionary tree. Pictures say thousands of words and frankly, I don't know how best to explain how things are related....

...so I asked my dad. 2/4

My dad's pastel drawing of a Portugese cistern in El Jadida, Morocco

When my father retired, he decided to take up art as a hobby. I don't know much about art and he doesn't know much about science so we both just sort of nodded and said "very nice" at each other's work. The most I can say is that he seems to like chalk and pastels, like the piece I've attached 1/4

30 years after the end of the Cold War and Greece is still considered Western Europe and Poland Eastern Europe

Luckily in this case it turned out the English was a pretty minor problem compared to the data!