Andrew Bissette

vMASC Call For Abstracts (for 2025/26) vMASC Early-Career Seminars: Call for Abstracts The organising committee of the virtual Macrocyclic and Supramolecular Chemistry (vMASC) seminar series are inviting abstracts from all early-career …

📣 Call for Abstracts - vMASC 📣

We are currently inviting abstracts from all early-career researchers (Master’s, PhD, PDRA) for oral presentations in 2025/2026 as part of our monthly vMASC seminar series.

Submission deadline 📆 18th Aug 2025

Find out more on mascgroup.co.uk/vmasc-4/vmas...

Graduate students!
Lecture or poster at the 39th Annual RSC Heterocyclic and Synthesis Group Postgraduate Symposium?
Thursday 18 Sept 2025 in Oxford
8 lectures by final-year postgraduate students
Attendance is free (registration mandatory)
www.rsc.org/events/detai...
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Join us in Newcastle this September for the International Solar Fuels Conference.

Registration closes in a week's time, the 11th, and there is still the opportunity to (submit abstracts to) present last minute posters.

#solarfuels #photocatalysis #chemsky

"failure" implies a good faith effort to educate rather than the reality, which is decades of deliberate and sustained disinformation by sections of the media

I've seen reddit flame wars more coherent than this

Fantastic new paper by @reeserichardson.bsky.social et al.

An enormous amount of work showing the extent of coordinated scientific fraud and involvement of some editors.
The number of fraudulent publications grows at a rate far outpacing that of legitimate science.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

With that kind of attitude how will the child grow up to contribute to society (by which I mean briefly increase the stock value of a company by a fraction of a percent)

But these bros exist on a temporal island. The past is useless to them. "Old books" are Good, Actually. Spending time with an author whose worldview is radically different to your own is Good, Actually. Since books from the future aren't available yet, that means reading old books now and then.

Even microfishe is a telling example. Not saying it should be standard curriculum for toddlers, but dismissing it as a relic really betrays a total lack of curiosity in the past. Our library has a collection of local history largely accessible only via microfilm.

Wait til he finds out that they use it to sort this genre called "YA" and the demographic it's aimed at

Also wait til Conor finds out what libraries use to sort books

One perk of not teaching your kids to read is they'll never have to read this kind of galaxy-brained shit.

Janus-Faced Reactivity of Heterobimetallic Al–Zn Complexes p-Block complexes containing unsupported metal–metal bonds can activate small molecules via mechanisms that complement and contrast with those of d-block metal complexes. Within this compound class, A...

Our groups first foray into heterobimetallic Zn/Al chemistry. Congratulations to Jake, Josef, Avantika, George, Nik and @millsgroupchem.bsky.social.

chemrxiv.org/engage/chemr...

She set the speed run record for British governments collapsing.

To be fair, Truss is the world's foremost expert on Tory failures.

how i mine for chemistry

Digital ID is a Blair obsession. ‘Solving immigration’ is simply the latest spin on it.

But it *is* spin. Blair has taken hundreds of millions of tech money to push a corporate AI agenda on Starmer’s government with huge success. This is part of a vast massively resourced big tech lobbying op
2

A recipe for synthetic cells: non-biological components, a pinch of evolution and then... life? The Boekhoven Lab recently engineered a cell-like system capable of producing offspring, a key prerequisite for Darwinian evolution.

How to build life from non-living components? Or perhaps a blueprint of #MatterToLife!
syntheticcell.eu/a-recipe-for...
Check out the recent study from @boekhovenlab.bsky.social and @hniederho.bsky.social, @tum.de
www.cell.com/chem/fulltex...

Congratulations!

Further updates on that "there's no way the UK would ever possibly come for VPNs" thing

COLBERT: You warned everyone…he would prosecute political enemies, cut Medicaid, alienate our allies, give tax cuts to the rich. I know you're not here to say 'I told you so' but would you like to?

HARRIS: You're correct. I did predict a lot of that. But what I did not predict was the capitulation.

2025 MASC Prize Calls MASC: The Macrocyclic and Supramolecular Chemistry Interest Group 2025 MASC Prize Calls 2025 RSC MASC Group PhD Thesis Award given in memory of John Fossey: The RSC MASC Group P…

✨Spotlight✨

The MASC Interest Group and WISC Network @wisuprachem.bsky.social announce the inaugural 2025 MASC/WISC EDIA Award for “excellence in equality/equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility (EDIA)”.

Application deadline 📆 5th Sep 2025

More on mascgroup.co.uk/2025-masc-pr...

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It feels like we should be making a bigger deal of “we actually did in fact find a cure for AIDS”

Fellow motorists, follow the roadmap for an exciting journey! Many thanks to Samuel Sanchez and others for their insights:

Feels like an age since our last journal club - it's conference season so the team have been out and about. But today three of us got together to take a look at recent papers. Quick thread of some highlights! 🧵

I can't get over how queeny the DOE social media is.

like, it was at least consistent for the Biden admin to have some hapless they/he policy fellow posting about how residential heat pumps were ✨iconic✨.

but now some 23-y/o groyper digital media intern thinks that lignite is slayyyyy qween 💅?

World Athletics introduces one-time genetic test for athletes wanting to compete in female category for world ranking competitions Athletes who want to compete in the female category for world ranking competitions will have to take a one-time gene test, says World Athletics.

Transphobia as justification for subjecting all women athletes to intrusive medical tests and someone else's definition of who they 'really' are. Cursory searches online indicate presence of the SRY gene has a complex range of effects, including none. This is nonsense.

www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athlet...

I still can't get over that phobes are claiming a woman openly saying racist slurs at a tribunal made a media circus by THEIR interest & promotion of it, paid for by mystery money (lol, we all know who) is a 'witch hunt'. She wasn't tricked! It's not heresay! She stood up there & said the P Slur!

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...