Thomas Crow

An interesting feature about thinking of public discourse in terms of malicious hacking. As many have said, exhaustion is the point.

Cool fact I learnt from Siddhartha Mukherjee's 'The Emperor of All Maladies'.

When penicillin was first released for use in WW2, it was so rare that after giving it to patients, doctors would extract it again from their urine for reuse.

What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure Franklin was no victim in how the DNA double helix was solved. An overlooked letter and an unpublished news article, both written in 1953, reveal that she was an equal player.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

An interesting read today.

New from me: just a quick primer for kids and newbies about what coding does and why we bother with it.

In Melbourne for the Australian Biocommons Biohackathon. It was immediately cold and raining when I arrived, despite being mid spring. Melbourne is on-brand.

Demonstrating my first lab at my new uni in a couple of hours! They'll be using chromatography to learn about photosynthetic pigments in plants.

‘Google for DNA’ brings order to biology’s big data MetaGraph compresses vast data archives into a search engine for scientists, opening up new frontiers of biological discovery.

"Google for DNA" -- this sounds incredible!!
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

New from me: how scientists use a philosophical concept to make maps of meaning.

Science communication is a conversation, not a script | Particle How science is told matters as much as what it says.

How science is told matters as much as what it says.

Thomas Crow investigates science communication.

particle.scitech.org.au/people/scien...

#SciCom #ScienceForAll

Science communication is a conversation, not a script | Particle How science is told matters as much as what it says.

New from me: looking at how science communication has changed since the COVID years and what scientists now need to think about when talking to the public.
@particlewa.bsky.social

particle.scitech.org.au/people/scien...

"I ain't been dropping no eaves sir, honest!"

Good heist stories do that. Mistborn:Final Empire was great because you felt like you were in the planning room. Lies of Locke Lamora was pretty strong but had the inverted structure where you only find out the plan once it goes off, which I enjoy less (it was still a great book though).

Proposed name: The Watcher on the Waves

This is a great article on how to make better data visualisation for your research. There's even a cool little test to see how well you can interpret different data.

knowablemagazine.org/content/arti...

Even anti-vaxxers who might agree with his approach should be generally be concerned that a doctor was lying to them and injecting their children with saline. It's textbook malpractice. Vaccines will make a comeback, it's just how much human life we waste before society realises they're necessary.

My pet peeve: when people ask a question on social media and someone will answer it with what ChatGPT/Copilot said.

Folks, LLMs are handy but treat them how your teachers treated Wikipedia. They can be a starting point, but you've got to then use your brain and find real sources.
#LLM #ChatGPT

Also it's intracellular fluid, not intercellular fluid, just in case you were writing something to publish.

By abundance do you mean concentration or variation? I don't think it's true in either case.

Image from Extrarenal Potassium Homeo-stasis 10.1038/ki.1986.160

Ion concentrations in various oceans:
www.lenntech.com/composition-...

TL;DR Ocean ion conc is much higher. Ion types partly differ too.

Going to an international conferences with US researchers is wild. They're all saying "Yeah I got fired two days ago," or "My research is under attack by the Trump administration."

The script goes from early career researchers to literal world experts. Incredible how fast it has deteriorated.

Everyone on Earth just be cool for, like, a week. Clean this crap up. We have guests.

Writing a feature about universe expansion and it's gone a bit off the rails. I'm currently working out how far away you'd have to drive Sabrina Carpenter to get her to sound like Metallica's James Hetfield.

Joondalup, Midland hospital staff encouraged to wear masks as high flu and COVID cases hit. Claire Sadler The West Australian Sat, 21 June 2025 4:00AM

Western Australia: "Joondalup and Midland hospital staff encouraged to wear masks as high flu and COVID cases hit."

"It comes as The West Australian this week revealed the number of people in hospital with the flu had more than doubled the same time last year."

Source: archive.md/iTHiq

Particle 101: Solid state batteries | Particle Solid-state batteries are big news at the moment. What are they and why are people so excited?

Recent feaute of mine where I talk about solid state batteries and why we don't have the miracle batteries we were promised 20 years ago. Also my dodgy explanations of chemistry.
particle.scitech.org.au/tech/particl...

I would love night clubs if the music was quieter and better and the surfaces were less sticky and there were less people and I could be in my pyjamas and read a book and didn't have to travel far from home to get there.

Say what you will about Adam Nevill, the man can write deranged hippies with Eldritch powers like nobody's business.

#horror

a cartoon character from spongebob squarepants is screaming with his mouth wide open . ALT: a cartoon character from spongebob squarepants is screaming with his mouth wide open .

MY EYES

Absolutely would not have thought of you as a Radiohead guy. As a sometimes fan I can say it's a very specific strain of hipster. You'd be closer to a Motorhead guy to me.

This feels like something Rob Zombie said to himself just before the 2000s hit.

I was going to say genomics but I feel like both genomics and biostats kind of count as statistics. They're very closely aligned.

Regeneron to buy bankrupt DNA testing firm 23andMe for $256 million | CNN Business Drugmaker Regeneron Pharmaceuticals will buy genetic testing firm 23andMe for $256 million through a bankruptcy auction, the companies said Monday.

I study genomic prediction and one of the biggest headaches is that you never quite have as much genome data as you'd like.

That said, be careful when you give your genetics away. You never know where it will end up. Businesses merge, institutions change hands.
edition.cnn.com/2025/05/19/b...