John O’Donoghue

No, Joe Wicks, reading lists of ingredients will not solve our health problems Food fear is the most toxic ingredient of all, and the new breed of supermarket scarers are making a living from it

Link to original article form Richie Kirwin www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm...

But I must thank Joe Wicks because this is going to make a great case study for discussion with our PhD students in @tcddublin.bsky.social for my Science Communication module!

Screenshot of Joe Wicks documentary

Good article from Richie Kirwan about the Joe Wicks health/protein bar documentary which had plenty of ridiculous dark lab imagery & scaremongering. I also witnessed someone tell a stranger on the #London tube this week that they should check the ingredients of a bar they were eating #SciComm #Food

Infographic on the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi for the development of metal-organic frameworks. The infographic explains that metal-organic frameworks are molecular sponges built up from metal ions and organic compounds that act as linkers. Small molecules such as gases can move into and out of cavities in these frameworks. The graphic highlights some of the MOFs the laureates have developed and concludes by looking at possible future uses of MOFs, including gas storage and extracting water from air.

The 2025 #NobelPrize in Chemistry was awarded today for the development of metal-organic frameworks, molecular sponges with applications in gas storage, water purification and more: www.compoundchem.com/2025/10/08/2...

#ChemSky 🧪

The 2025 chemistry Nobel goes to MOFs Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi win the prize for developing metal–organic frameworks

The 2025 #NobelPrize in Chemistry has been awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi “for the development of metal–organic frameworks.” Stay tuned for the full story to come! cen.acs.org/people/nobel...

#ChemNobel #Chem #Chemistry #chemsky 🧪

UPEN (the Universities Policy Engagement Network) just published my piece on Slow AI.

Encouraging to see academics & policymakers valuing reflection over speed.

upen.ac.uk/resources/th...

How do you pause with AI?

#GenAI #AI #SlowAI #SciComm #Policy

A great round up the issues in academic publishing, particularly the metrics. I feel AI is also highlighting these issues since many AI models have been inadvertently trained on retracted papers. Goodhart's law states: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." #Research

Journals infiltrated with ‘copycat’ papers that can be written by AI Tools such as ChatGPT can be used to generate almost-identical research papers that pass standard plagiarism checks. Hundreds are thought to have been published.

'In a preprint posted on medRxiv on 12 September1, researchers identified more than 400 such papers published in 112 journals over the past 4.5 years'.

Link to preprint: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Self-Consuming Generative Models Go MAD Seismic advances in generative AI algorithms for imagery, text, and other data types has led to the temptation to use synthetic data to train next-generation models. Repeating this process creates an ...

There’s already a name for it which is a play on the original use of “MAD”… Model Autophagy Disorder (MAD) arxiv.org/abs/2307.01850

You couldn’t make it up! 🤣

I've shared this quote before but I'll share it again, as it's one I've been thinking about a lot as I've watched how our oligarchs have been behaving over the past few months.

Getting close to 50k views and I'm wondering is it just everybody is scared to say this and pleased I did? Because if there's so many of us who agree, trust me I'd know if 1k people disagreed with me let alone 50k, why are we letting AI ruin our universities?

Together we can turn back the tide.

Spot on, and so glad @cenmag.bsky.social published this piece. I consider myself extremely lucky — in my PhD, I was well resourced, had a lot of freedom, and I worked in a mostly positive group culture. Still, I was horribly overworked and had severe mental health struggles. #AcademicSky ⚗️ 🧪 (1/4)

Absolutely - but my main issue is what the cold spots implies when used without context…. “If only a uni closer to them did the course they wanted, they would do it”… it ignores the institutional, class and generational barriers to higher Ed & certain subjects. Accessibility is not just geography

So even though there is a great chemistry course only 30mins from me, it’s completely inaccessible without a car. So the only realistic option for a student from a low-income background is the 4 hour daily commute on the bus to Dublin…

Basically it doesn’t matter where you live or how far, but are the supports in place to make it accessible? I live 30mins drive from a Uni, but there’s no public transport options there from where I live (i.e. you need a car), yet there is a regular bus option to all the Dublin universities (2hrs!)

Closures are terrible and accessibility to courses are affected and should be highlighted - but I’m not sure if “commutable distance” is a great way of highlighting this when many people commute long distances already. Feels like a bit like an ivory tower way of looking at it

Oh thank you, the @rsc.org have also used the term “cold spots” and I was curious if it’s a term that has been defined or not. I guess “commutable distance” can be very subjective

This is now the second use of the term “cold spots” I’ve seen in relation to commuting to university in the UK. What is the definition of a cold spot? Is it time or distance based? Either way, we have freezing spots in Ireland! 🤣 we have students & staff commuting across the entire country #HigherEd

This is spectacular 👏

Niamh and myself at VicePhec

Our poster

Opening talks

We presented two posters, one about the public engagement aspect of our hugely successful @researchireland.ie Discover project (Current Chemistry Investigators) and the other about our training programme for our PhD’s at Trinity #Vicephec25 #SciComm #ChemEd #ChemEPE #ChemSky

The research ambassadors for Day 1

Getting busy at Dublin Maker

You’ll find us upstairs

We need more fliers

After presenting the feedback from our project at the Variety in Chem Ed & Physics HigherEd conference in Liverpool this week, we’ve collected a LOT more at @dublinmaker.bsky.social! Our research ambassadors are engaging with hundreds, while I cut up fliers #DublinMaker #VicePhec25 #ChemEd #SciComm

This is one of the origins of the term “green room”. It may also be due to the huge popularity of green wallpaper & paint in the early 19th century following Carl Wilhelm Scheele's invention of copper arsenite green in 1775, which was removed a century later due to toxicity! #History #stage

Limelight

A lens was used to concentrate the light from the flame into a beam to illuminate the performers. This is the origin of the phrase “in the limelight”. The resulting intense light had a slight green hue, and it is claimed that a room painted green would allow the actors to adjust their eyes #theatre

A limelight

His limelight consisted of a cylinder of calcium oxide onto which an oxyhydrogen flame was directed. Calcium oxide is obtained by calcining calcium carbonate from seashells or limestone and is better known as “lime” - commonly used in agriculture for increasing soil pH #Science #ScienceSky

Old theatre lit using candles

Candles on stage

I was just reminded of an interesting “chemistry from theatre” nugget. Before electric lighting, candles were the only way to light up theatres and stage shows. Then, in 1816, Thomas Drummond invented the “limelight”, which he originally designed for lighthouses #Chemistry #Thread #ChemSky

I removed the comment about colonialism because I felt it was a little harsh - but after reading Douglas Murray’s article, I’m amazed that many in the UK still can’t see the colonised perspective. Nobody can annoy the privileged parts of UK society like the Irish 🤣

“All we need now is for Starmer to take a dislike to The 2 Johnnies, and he’ll have alienated every different genre of Irish person between the ages of 25 and 35” 🤣

300 years of chemistry in Trinity

Onscreen Chemisyry Book

Silver mirror Coke bottle

This time last week we had a great time in @rsc.org Burlington House #London for my book launch. Thanks to everyone who joined us, especially @andrestrujado.bsky.social for this absolutely fantastic silver mirror coke bottle! Onscreen Chemistry is available now in bookstores #BookLaunch #ChemSky