Sean McMahon

Excited to see the final version of the @cdbu.bsky.social Code of Ethical University Governance in the public domain, and looking forward to the launch event in Parliament later today. cdbu.org.uk/cdbu-code-20... #UKHE #governance

An image taken by the Perseverance rover on Mars

Sol 1705: WATSON Camera, imaged at 16:07:03.552 (local mean solar time)

Sign the Petition Save Geology at the University of Leicester

It seems the benighted halfwits running @uniofleicester.bsky.social want to gut one of the best geology departments in the country and fire some of the UK's most accomplished and important palaeontologists. Please sign the petition to save geology at Leicester. #paleontology

Looking forward to speaking at unibremen.bsky.social next week: www.uni-bremen.de/en/universit...

As perfect a rebuttal of current policy on the funding of the Arts and Humanities in Australia, the UK and the US as I've ever seen. #HigherEducation #AcademicSky #UKpolitics #USpolitics #Cancer #Stoppard

Phew!

Yulia Lemeshchenko, 42, Russian citizen and Ukrainian powerlifting champion, has been sentenced by Russia to 19 years in prison on charges of treason, sabotage, and preparation of a terrorist attack. Here is her closing statement in court:

en.zona.media/article/2025...

Oh my

I had the undeserved pleasure of being taught by Lynn during her time in Oxford. A unique talent whose love for the microbial world shone out of her like sunshine.

Big (moon) if true!

It was a great pleasure this week to welcome renowned astrobiologist Dr Frances Westall back to her alma mater @edinburgh-uni.bsky.social to receive the honorary DSc degree in recognition of her many contributions to astrobiology (Photographs by www.andrewperry.co.uk).

Looking forward to this important @cdbu.bsky.social event and very grateful to my MP @ianmurraymp.bsky.social for booking a room for us in parliament.

Geologists in the field in Namibia: a wide brown desert and a clear blue sky

My friend Alex Liu is offering TWO postdoc positions in #paleontology and #sedimentology at Cambridge focused on some spectacular new Ediacaran-age localities in southern Namibia... www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...
www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

Amazing.

Members of Rachel Wood's research group conducting geological fieldwork in Namibia. Geologists in hats gather around a rocky outcrop under a clear blue sky, with a hilly, sparsely vegetated Namibian landscape in the background.

‼️New PhD project in Edinburgh: "Animals, traits, and oxygen in the Ediacaran Nama Group, Namibia". Supervised by Rachel Wood (Amelia Penny and I co-supervising) — big UK+Namibian team — help us understand early animal evolution! Apply by Dec 14th #paleontology
e5-dtp.ed.ac.uk/project?item...

A university without arts and languages is not a university.

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

My 11-year-old sitting with her pile of Halloween candy, sorting it into a bar graph

We have progressed from data collection to data analysis.

Why is life the way it is? YouTube video by The Royal Society of Edinburgh

Why is life the way it is? It was a pleasure to share a stage with Nick Lane, @mamaphysikerin.bsky.social, and Cait MacPhee yesterday evening for the @royalsoced.bsky.social seminar event preceding Nick Lane's Gifford Lecture. You can watch the recording here: #astrobiology #evolution #biochemistry

Congratulations to Ruby Allen-Brown for winning the UKCA-Harding Essay Prize 2025. You can read Ruby's winning entry at: www.astrobiology.ac.uk/opportunitie...

Yay. Priceless. The right column at the right time. And a gleefully English two fingers to the haters.

We need to begin to tell these stories about universities as well. So — what did university mean to you? Contact @cdbu.bsky.social at cdbupress@gmail.com with your story. You can read some previous submissions here: cdbu.org.uk/stories/

... but they are also places that foster the messier and less quantifiable aspects of understanding ourselves, each other and the world around us. They are places whose value we only really come to understand years after we have left them.

So often universities are spoken about in instrumental language: as institutions that confer skills and training, and as engines of economic growth. Universities are both these things of course...

What a beaut!

A Flash, a Boom, a New Microbe Habitat - Eos After an asteroid struck Finland long ago, microscopic life colonized the impact site within a few million years, new research reveals.

A mere 4 million years after an asteroid slammed into what is now Lake Lappajärvi 🇫🇮, microbes showed up to colonize the place.

I recall that Martin Brasier liked to use this phrase precisely to get people motivated to figure out reasons why it wasn't boring :-). Personally I like to teach histories of the Earth that skip over the boring Phanerozoic...

Yet more lay-offs at JPL. MAGA = Making America Geocentric Again?

That's true, but the individual VC is the tip of an iceberg. More than sixty employees of my university receive higher salaries than the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Senior "leadership" salaries are inflated across the board, and it adds up to a really serious waste of money.

Ordovician Star Cluster 8/17 24" X 20" Colored Pencil on Paper #sciart #gawoski #fossil