Zamin Iqbal

If Reform had won Starmer would be on his knees to those voters begging for forgiveness. Greens win and it's like "Fuck off cranks"

Not even hiding the belief that there are Real Voters (white, male, perhaps working class when politically convenient) and Fake Voters (graduates, Muslims, people in cities, anyone on the left regardless of class or ethnicity). A belief shared by many on the Labour right

This is terrible from Starmer. Just absolute trash. And any normal voter looking at the new MP and then reading this description will think him mad.

The man who brought you “Island of Strangers” has views on divisive politics

Nobody here needs to be told that Reform's claims of cheating are utterly absurd but it's worth noting that the anti-Reform vote was so large that even if the Greens and Labour had split it 50/50 Reform would still have lost — in fact they would have come third. They only value democracy if they win

There are millions of people who have that stomach. We just need to get them into public office.

Article - Nuffield Politics Research Centre

@martamiori.bsky.social and I have been writing, since 2024, about why Labour's 'Reform' challenge and emphasis was based on a misunderstanding of Labour's vote. Here for anyone interested: politicscentre.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

Unrooted phylogeny indicating the major clades of Mycobacterium bovis found in Ireland.

The genomic diversity and spatial patterns of Mycobacterium bovis in Ireland revealed by whole genome sequencing rdcu.be/e50zT

This could be true, I don't know how we'd know really. What do you mean by load/requirements for ENA - they are under load, and submission has tricky requirements?

YouTube video by Comptoir IA ⚡️💪Energym⚡️💪

This spoof is fantastic, not least for the aging choices they’ve made for the tech broligarchs. youtu.be/zdkBUuWCZg4?...

One interesting thing we did is look at rate of submission bacterial sequence data to INSDC. Logistic fit is surprisingly good - inflexion during the pandemic. So, the data no longer looks like exponential growth. Projected to 2035 just for the hell of it, let's see.

Cheers Ewan! Was very glad to see our protein structure predictions get into EBI AFDB! Open databases FTW!

I should have said, this takes us to about 2.8 million genomes in total. We don't have annotations, etc for the latest data yet, this will be an ongoing process

Courtesy of @martibartfast.bsky.social , we have a new release of AllTheBacteria which adds another 322,920 assemblies, covering all ENA (illumina, isolate) prokaryotes to May 2025.
allthebacteria.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ov...

The fact that there’s a secret network of doulas going around Minneapolis to help with home births for parents afraid of ICE should be front-page news.

These children, born in secrecy, are American citizens.

The purpose of a car or carriage is to get from A to B. The purpose of education is to learn intellectual skills. Advait Paliwal's comparision of the mechanisation of transport to using AI for school/college/university work misses the point entirely. And most likely deliberately.

Students are as varied in personality and motivation as humans are , so I feel there will always be some who don't want to learn, but many arrive feeling they don't have the 'right kind of brain', and i think a lot if that is managing expectations (its normal to be confused when you learn).

Great!

Yes!

@wytamma.bsky.social 's WASM tools have transformed my experience of teaching Python to first year undergraduate biologists this year. Since last year, I've been teaching ~400 undergrads how to code (functions, lists, dictionaries, loops) over (one hour intro lecture +) two 2-hour practicals. 1/n

Trump Administration Withholds $259 Million in Medicaid Funds From Minnesota

Trump Administration illegally Withholds $259 Million in Medicaid Funds From Minnesota in continued retribution attack on MN
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/u...

What even is truth? Seems like it should be the purview of philosophers and poets — clearly not people (me) designing snakemake workflows.

So I started looking into this to outline the conspiracy theory. But what I found was a genuinely beautiful piece of practical idealism. A small, attainable progressive change that would hugely improve people's lives. I was inspired by it.

Photo of a pan pizza. Text says “Worse than you remember, or your money back.” And the Pizza Hut logo

Incredible ad in my digest email from The Onion

I'm about 1.5 seasons behind you! Can never reply

I think about this film all the time

...this time about 10% came in actively not wanting to code, and 80% had never done any. Next year I'll try and track whether people feel their attitude has changed

Although, the most rewarding thing is seeing the (many) people who find they enjoy coding, after coming in assuming it was not for them. I struggle trying to decide what success is, I think I need to do a systematic poll at the start of whether people have coded, and whether they want to.This time..