Elisa Fadda

New version of our preprint on bioRxiv about bioRxiv up. Now that’s what I call a revision – 6 years after the first version!
It has new data about our progress and highlights from a massive user survey. 1/n
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The girls of my Himalayan valley are not victims – education is the only bridge they need out of their isolation | Amreen Qadir In my tribe, the Dard Shin, girls’ dreams are often over by 13. It is time we cleared a path towards them all fulfilling their potential

The girls of my Himalayan valley are not victims – education is the only bridge they need out of their isolation | Amreen Qadir

YouTube video by UK Research and Innovation UKRI update from Professor Sir Ian Chapman

youtube.com/watch?v=osnq...

The Conservatives are, after all, well placed to know a lot about this morass, since they introduced it. In 2012, the coalition government launched the Plan 2 system of student loans and raised university fees across Britain to £9,000 per annum. To put Plan 2 in simple terms, loan repayments were laid out via a seemingly innocuous series of calculations. The first to consider is the threshold at which repayments begin. If you left education with, say, £27,000 worth of debt, you would only start paying it back once you met a predetermined salary. On its face, this might not seem like a particularly onerous demand. “Low-earning” graduates would avoid being saddled with repayments before they were financially able to begin making them, while their “high earning” peers could start chipping away at their debt, and provide an income stream for the state.

As any of my fellow literature or history graduates will tell you, however, the devil is in the details. For one thing, the threshold at which someone becomes a high earner was never particularly high and, following years of inflation, is now preposterously low. Rachel Reeves’ announcement that the government are freezing the threshold at April 2026 levels (£29,385) for a further three years only makes this worse. The real living wage for London is currently calculated at £28,860, which means that any London-based graduate making just £40 more per month than the minimum needed to live there will automatically begin paying their debt. In real terms, this means practically any graduate in any form of full-time work will be paying as much as 9 per cent of their income to the state, and for a very, very long time. Worse still, the amount owed by those graduates below the threshold does not remain static – it accrues interest, year on year, whether you’re working for low wages, volunteering, taking a career break or on maternity leave, ensuring that if you do pass the threshold some time later, you will be returning to find your original £27,000 much enlarged.

If the state’s attitude to what constitutes “high earnings” makes you think it’s oblivious to the concept of inflation, let me put your mind at ease. When it comes to the calculation of student loan interest, they are very conscious of inflation indeed. Each year, the interest charged on student loans is calculated by two components. The first is the Retail Price Index (RPI), which generally records a higher number than the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Governments prefer the latter, lower figure for many of their other calculations, just not when it comes to adding extra debt to every graduate in the country. To this is added a second component, a percentage tied to each graduate’s earnings, meaning that as your salary increases so too does the interest you’re paying on the loan you took out. If you think this seems like a predatory and punitive way to bilk students for as much money, and over as long a period of time, as possible, then you’re just about up to speed on this scandal, which amounts to a regressive stealth tax on every graduate in the UK. One which, it’s calculated, you would need to be earning £66,000 per year to pay off in anything like a timely fashion.

The debt burden of UK students is one of those things where, the more you look into the details, the more insane and predatory it is. So I tried my best to explain the numbers involved without making my, or your, head explode.

Bar graph comparing emissions from Grok's fossil-fuelled data centres to avoided emissions from Tesla's products for the years 2023 and 2024.

Comparison of emissions from manufacturing xAI's chatbot responses (5,127,553 tonnes CO2e) versus all Tesla products (1,056,000 tonnes CO2e) with respective analyses.

*New short blog* - finally (with help) got around to getting a total estimate of Grok's climate pollution 🫠

- Once all fossil gas online, = to between half and all of Tesla's ANNUAL GLOBAL avoided emissions

- Currently, 5x the emissions of Tesla's total manufacturing

ketanjoshi.co/2026/03/02/m...

The picture shows two dolls with movable shoulders, elbows, hips and knee joints. The legs of both dolls are partially broken off. One doll's arm is almost completely missing. The limbs and torso are very long, the breasts small. The faces are largely destroyed. The hair is combed back behind the ears, reaching down to the shoulders at the nape. The ivory, which is actually white, has turned brown over time.

Beloved #toys: a pair of #Roman ivory #dolls with articulated arms and legs found in a tomb of a little #girl from a wealthy family in Emona, Ljubljana/Slovenia.

The majority of the dolls in Roman times were made of less valuable materials such as clay, wood or linen. 🧵1/2

🏺 #archaeology

Is there a specific German word for the feeling of dread you have whenever you (an academic who does core work the university exists to do) have to engage with parts of central admin for whom helping you is not high on their list of priorities.

Super smart of the US government to rename the Dept. Of Defence to the Dept of War, so now when the headlines read “THE DOW HAS COLLAPSED”, people won’t know if it’s about the invasion or the stock market

Maybe I am deluded but I am convinced that the key is always a good editor. I would hate to see peer reviews going to a machine, while I do see the point for it linked to bioRxiv for example, for authors to check their own work

True, but IMHO fact checking is a needless pain. The point I make with colleagues who use AI (and sometimes different ones to cross ref as "this is better than that for XYZ") is "wouldn't it be quicker (and fool proof) for you to read/write the thing yourself?" I find that it generally is...

2/2 it is also true that people cannot always see problems in a paper, and that's why there are editors and 2 to 3 reviews. I agree that this system doesn't always work, but it seems to run ok when the editors in charge do their job properly. I side with humans to publish science and everything else

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge Cite as: van Rooij, I. (2025) AI slop and the destruction of knowledge. This week I was looking for info on what cognitive scientists mean when they speak of ‘domain-general’ cognition. I was curio…

Hi Oded, this would be true and helpful if we could rely on AI to make consistently good decisions about what problems in a paper may be, but yet we can't... See the example below irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a... 1/2

Rapid directed evolution guided by protein language models and epistatic interactions Protein engineering is limited by the inefficient search through a high-dimensional sequence space to find combinations of synergistic mutations. Traditional approaches use stepwise mutation stacking,...

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

From frog saunas to medicated baths: Scientists battle a global amphibian plague | CNN What may sound like a spa day for frogs is all part of a global effort to fight the chytrid fungus — the deadly pathogen responsible for what scientists have called the largest disease-driven loss of ...

"On a bright afternoon under the hot Australian sun, small, dewy faces peer out from the holes in masonry bricks, enclosed by a simple greenhouse. These frog “saunas,” offer more than just a warm refuge; they’re also helping frogs fight off a deadly fungus" 🐸🧪

www.cnn.com/science/chyt...

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge Cite as: van Rooij, I. (2025) AI slop and the destruction of knowledge. This week I was looking for info on what cognitive scientists mean when they speak of ‘domain-general’ cognition. I was curio…

What happens when you don't catch a hallucination in a translation?

Regarding summarization, there is this great post by @irisvanrooij.bsky.social irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...

In praise of 'The Mountain' by Gorillaz The ninth studio album by British virtual band Gorillaz is out and deals with death and grief by merging Indian classical instrumentation with the group's eclectic pop influences. It's an ambitious meditation that stands as an early highlight of 2026.

In praise of 'The Mountain' by Gorillaz

Cryo-EM structures of prefusion HSV-2 gB in complex with human antibodies.

Our fourth installment on prefusion herpesvirus gB proteins is available as a preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202.... Working with Ivelin Georgiev's group, we isolated and characterized prefusion-specific HSV gB antibodies from humans!

Ffs!! 🙄🙄🙄

Had a manuscript desk rejected because it didn’t have longitudinal analysis although it did and it has the word “longitudinal“ in the title, so that’s a nice way to start the week.

Thanks Matt! 😎

Lectins are known to be low affinity binders with relatively broad glycan target preference. In this work live in @commsbio.nature.com we show how Siglecs change this paradigm, acting as molecular precision tools required to fine tune immune response 🤯 #glycotime 🧵⬇️

doi.org/10.1038/s420...

Wee thread 🧵⬇️ on our new #glycotime with @siglecdude.bsky.social John Klassen and @glycocode.bsky.social 🥳 where we show Siglecs as molecular precision tools, able to recognise sialylated glycans with surgical precision in their natural environment, not bad for a lectin! 😎

doi.org/10.1038/s420...

Oh Christ not in my name.

“We cannot say that the United States’ actions are against international law, but we condemn Iran’s retaliatory actions as against international law,” is neither a coherent nor a compelling position.

The cover of The Complete Persepolis by Marianne Satrapi.

Now would be a good time for anyone who wants to learn about recent Iranian history to read this. It is well worth your time and money (I am sure your local library has it if you don’t want to purchase it).

Donald Trump is a global chaos generator. He couldn't give a damn about the Iranians and will walk away the moment things get difficult, leaving a trail of pointless death and destruction.
It's all about spectacle for him. Once that's achieved, job done.

That's right. Worse than Pointless
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/o...

People are drowning in disinformation on a social media site run by a Fellow of the @royalsociety.org

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

20 injured in direct strike in Tel Aviv, one in critical condition Emergency crews said the wounded, among them a man seriously wounded by shrapnel and another critically wounded, were evacuated to nearby hospitals as teams continued searching damaged buildings for p...

A direct strike hit Tel Aviv late Saturday during a missile barrage from Iran, wounding at least 20 people and igniting fires at the scene. www.ynetnews.com/article/bj3s...