Barbara Jennings

ChatGPT 5 boasts it can function at PhD level, “ask me anything”. Spouse inputs the title of his own PhD, says please write me a PhD on this topic. ChatGPT5 immediately crashes. Recovers, then produces a page of articulate garbage citing plausible-sounding but incorrect sources.

Initial findings from the DecodeME genome-wide association study of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome DecodeME collaboration

Initial findings from the DecodeME genome-wide association study of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome - University of Edinburgh Research Explorer share.google/jgC6CCe6i8wq...

Whole-genome sequencing of 490,640 UK Biobank participants - Nature A study reports whole-genome sequences for 490,640 participants from the UK Biobank and combines these data with phenotypic data to provide new insights into the relationship between human variation a...

In another milestone for human genetics, the world's largest set of whole-genome DNA sequences now encompasses data from nearly half a million people, described in this new @nature.com paper from @ukbiobank.bsky.social: 🧪👇

🚨 Our parent-of-origin study is out in Nature! 🧬
Maternal and paternal alleles can have distinct — even opposite — effects on human traits, revealing a hidden layer of genetic architecture that standard GWAS miss.
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Highlights below!

This study with @ukbiobank.bsky.social will deepen our understanding of the human genome, support the development of more effective treatments, and pave the way for precision medicine 🧬

Learn more about our journey with UK Biobank here: sangerinstitute.blog/2022/09/26/o...

Gorillas seek out old female friends when they move A study in Rwanda reveals the significance of a social connection between female mountain gorillas.

'Moving around is something that is also crucial in shaping human society. And the researchers say that studying its roots in other great apes can shed light on the evolutionary driving forces behind it.'

Link to original research article: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Gender under attack The Lancet Commission on Gender and Global Health lucidly highlighted how attacks on the concept of gender, and on gender equality and women's rights more broadly, are not new. As Sarah Hawkes and her...

"Fuentes’ encomium to the diversity of sex in nature... easily explains why the gametic definition of sex is wholly insufficient to characterise sex-related biological diversity." www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Percy Bysshe Shelley, born 4th August, 1792

#protest #resist #rise

Marking telomeres on a simple ideogram in R How to make a basic telomere-marked ideogram using just ggplot2.

💬 "There are a couple of #Rpackages that can produce ideograms, but in this case, I wanted something even simpler... and instead made a very basic telomere-marked ideogram using just #ggplot2." - @rowenahill.bsky.social

📝 Marking telomeres on a simple ideogram in R: buff.ly/nyGwY5g

#coding #R 💻🧬

It's clear now that there will be whole regions of England and Wales, and likely Scotland too, where a wide range of post-18 subjects are not offered in Higher Ed. The post-16 review that's due in the autumn will come far too late to stop that. A tragedy.

AI thrives where education has been devalued | The Observer A culture that views knowledge as a means to an end invites the misuse of new technology

'It is less that AI is the cause of degradation in reading and thinking, and more that the creation of a culture that views knowledge primarily in an instrumental manner has made it easier to misuse AI.'

Image of an old building in Oxford with the heading 'postdoc opportunities' and the text 'computational approaches to improve rare disease diagnosis and treatment' and 'Big Data Institute, University of Oxford'

📣 We are recruiting! Please share!!

Are you a bioinformatician / computational scientist who wants to apply your skills to understanding regulatory biology and improving rare disease diagnosis and treatment? 🧠 💻 🧬 🩺

We have two roles available 👇

🧵 1/4

Darkly funny: signs appearing across central London, protesting Starmer’s use of anti-terror laws against peaceful pro-Palestine protesters.

Cell cycle duration determines oncogenic transformation capacity Danian Chen, Suying Lu, Katherine Huang, Joel D. Pearson, Marek Pacal, Phillipos Peidis, Sean McCurdy, Tao Yu, Monika Sangwan, Angela Nguyen, Philippe P. Monnier, Daniel Schramek, Liang Zhu, David Santamaria, Mariano Barbacid, Nagako Akeno, Kathryn A. Wikenheiser-Brokamp & Rod Bremner https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08935-x

A recent paper reveals a surprising insight. The length of the cell cycle in a particular tissue determines the oncogenic transformation capacity of particular oncogenes, with tissues with shorter cell cycles most susceptible 3/n

All famines are man-made, all famines are political. Historians of empire and humanitarianism have known this forever. Gaza is not starving, Gaza is being starved, by Israel, and this starvation is enabled by our government and by every other government that does not step in to force food and aid.

'Is this real?!': America reacts to The National's viral front page

Our viral front page today was very simple. We told the facts about Donald Trump, a man who doesn't like the facts 👇

Very pleased to say we have an Assistant Professor job opening (tenure track) in the Department of Genetics at Trinity College Dublin! 😀
www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOA399/a... - deadline is August 19th! Please repost!

The most complete view of the human genome yet sets new standard for use in precision medicine What if scientists unlocked the most hidden, hardest-to-read regions of our DNA?

New research, published today in @natureportfolio.nature.com, decodes the most elusive, difficult-to-sequence regions of the genome from populations around the world, rewriting knowledge of human biology and setting a new benchmark for precision medicine. 🧪🧬🔬

IF YOU HAVE THE POWER, YOU MUST USE IT. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention is calling on every single leader in the world: DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN TO GET FOOD and WATER INTO GAZA RIGHT AWAY. JUST DO IT. Just do it. Genocide must not be allowed to continue while we all watch.

IF YOU HAVE THE POWER,
YOU MUST USE IT.

Closure of UEA mental health courses ‘deeply concerning’ University says NHS and apprenticeship changes make programmes ‘no longer viable’ but union calls move a ‘dereliction of civic responsibility’

Closure of UEA mental health courses ‘deeply concerning’ www.timeshighereducation.com/news/closure...

Print featuring a night scene with a central path through a wheat field leading to a hedgerow and tree under a full moon

'Moonshine' by contemporary UK printmaker Janis Goodman #WomensArt

A compilation of terrorists, by Blake Morrison | Letter Letters:

A compilation of terrorists, by Blake Morrison | Protest | The Guardian share.google/yUomXCJmAhqG...

Minimum student income needed to combat ‘crisis’ poverty levels MPs call for reintroduction of maintenance grants and stepped loan repayment system as student poverty reaches new levels

'After hearing from students’ unions, universities, sector bodies, and individual experts, the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Students has identified student poverty as one of the main challenges facing universities today.' 1/2

"i asked grok" "i asked chatgpt" yeah well i asked carl sagan and he said the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge 🧪

Kashana Cauley's latest book conjures a new villain for our times: the debt police We talked to the author, TV writer, and social media wit about "The Payback"—and finding humor in darkness.

Well, here is basically my whole life story, and a couple of jokes, and some love for Bluesky the website, and how “humor shakes me out of the constant depression that is the news and our politics.” Thanks @motherjones.com!

It is depressing that we keep having to say this. But we do, and we will. (Companies offering these services do generally say that they are probabilistic, but public understanding of, and intuition about, probabilities are notoriously poor.)

#home

I think you're underestimating the value of LLM answers for many. It's so confident!

For a lot of problematic use cases, LLMs are not providing insights to well informed people, they're providing answers to the naive who are incentivised to come up with "right" answers -college students and CEOS

Four UEA graduates in caps and gowns are seen standing in the graduation hall, with the UEA sign in the distance.

A graduate is standing in front of a UEA sign, holding flowers and smiling.

A graduate and their family are standing together and smiling. The graduate is in the middle, with her parents either side, and other members of the family beside them.

A graduate is kneeling down in front of the ziggurats with her two dogs. One of them is wearing her graduation cap.

Con-grad-ulations to everyone who graduated today! 🎓

#Graduation2025

Human de novo mutation rates from a four-generation pedigree reference - Nature Analysis of more than 95% of each diploid human genome of a four-generation, twenty-eight-member family using five complementary short-read and long-read sequencing technologies provides a truth set t...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...