Zoe Vance

A new 2 year post in our team at the Milner Centre in Bath - single cell transcriptomics, non-coding RNA, stomatal physiology and evolution, all rolled into one. Really exciting project and excellent collaborators in Sheffield too! Please share, details here: www.bath.ac.uk/jobs/Vacancy...

Micheál Martin has been a TD for 37 years. He’s been in government for 25 of those years and in cabinet for 20 of those years. He’s been either Tánaiste or Taoiseach since June 2020.

And every time he’s asked to anything other than build a data centre, he acts like he’s just been handed the job

The #WGDip team kicked off 2026 with an in-person meeting hosted at the Wellcome Genome Campus✨. We had a fun, science-packed two days that strongly advanced our plans to work together across both our research and science outreach plans - it's going to be an exciting year!

This was honestly my most unexpected culture shock moving to the UK from Ireland, where are my nice lottery ads about installing water slides, why are you trying to get me to go to war

I find it astonishing that the idea that children should upload selfies to X as part of a state-mandated age verification scheme is still being floated.

all this is both foolish and unnecessary

Also, even if it *were* a case of the tech is moving faster than the law, I really don't think "even if we did something about it now, we'd only have to do more things about it in the future" is a valid response 🫠

Is... is he suggesting there are potential tech advances that would render creation of CSAM legal under current laws, or even hypothetical new ones explicitly outlawing these AI created images? What exactly would the law need to "respond" to here? Absolute non answer

Meanwhile, MEP Billy Kelleher says the powers exist right now to temporarily suspend Grok while the Commission investigates.

"Our political leaders must grasp this issue once and for all. We have the power to act but it seems we don’t have the bravery to act."

Happy Nollaig na mBan! Here's a piece celebrating some of Ireland's most interesting women, with a thread about each of them here:
bsky.app/profile/ciar...

Prints also available (currently on sale):
www.ciaraioch.com/artprints/p/...

My pre-Christmas self watching me read the January to-do list she left me

How likely is ‘likely’? Does ‘likely’ have a higher probability than ‘probable’? I put together a quick quiz so you can see how you interpret probability phrases, then see how you compare with others: probability.kucharski.io

That whistling sound you hear is all of the things I said I'd circle back to in January getting ready to crush me like Wile E Coyote.

Oh and drunk driving of course. Essential to rural Ireland, they say

I think when these guys say "rural Ireland" you can mentally swap it for the words "me and my friends" and things start to make more sense

4 extra seconds of daylight let's goooooo

Americans & Europeans needlessly exposing African babies to preventable diseases just to see if they can find something that would justify their preexisting antivaccine beliefs is not only unscientific and actually anti-science, it is very much reminiscent of colonialist, racist human rights abuses

Saoirse McHugh: There is no urban-rural divide on a fox hunting ban Polling conducted by Ireland Thinks shows that 72% are against fox hunting, while only 2% of us have ever engaged in it, writes Saoirse McHugh

If only 2% of people polled have ever taken part, just *who* wants to retain fox hunting, asks Saoirse McHugh

www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm...

In my case, this painstaking labor in the process through which the science gets done. Science isn't measuring stuff in a lab. It's thinking deeply, extracting the heart of idea from the soup of thoughts running through my mind, molding it, and finding a way to communicate that idea to others.

They've done it again, they've cut more rail projects. The most criminal one for me is cancelling the reopening of the Waterford-Wexford/Rosslare line. On the left is the All-island Rail Review published by the last government and on the right is the plan published today.

This is f*cking disgusting Rewarding property owners for letting their assets rot destroying our beautiful city "it has been confirmed that this money (the €5m outstanding) will not be chased after the Revenue Commissioners take over its collection in 2027" #DerelictIreland

This is f*cking disgusting
Rewarding property owners for letting their assets rot destroying our beautiful city

"it has been confirmed that this money (the €5m outstanding) will not be chased after the Revenue Commissioners take over its collection in 2027"

#DerelictIreland #speirgorm #corkcity

On this, the last day of Michael D. Higgins' presidency, I think it's important to acknowledge that a 5'3 man deciding to be followed everywhere by two enormous Bernese Mountain dogs was a great bit.

biology is so cool because like every week someone is like "Dr. Smith is coming to campus! She is the world expert in blargyblarg!"

And i'm like A) never heard of blargyblarg, B) look it up, it's super important and interesting

Do they just presume everyone will have left the country by then?

If a PBP TD said that there were too many foxhunters in Ireland and then there was a arson attack on a hunting lodge that night, you can be damn sure that Simon Harris could join the dots.

He really should resign.

Microsoft hates computers AND everyone who uses them, whereas Apple only hates computers, and Linux only hates the people who use them. In this essay I will

They’ll tell you that the arts & humanities aren’t practical and then …

People shouldn't study rip off degrees like English, all you do is get to explore the towering beauty of the human spirit, how is that going help you slog away at a job you hate, working for vicious idiots until you die?

Measles cases have soared by 20% worldwide in the past year, with 742 cases in the UK alone. In August, shortly after a 10-year-old girl in Liverpool died from the disease, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health stated that the UK’s child vaccination rates have not met the World Health Organisation’s target of 95% since 2021. This rather undersells the situation. Sky News reports that “the England-wide rate for the final quarter of 2024/25 for MMR was 88.8%, down from 92.7% 10 years ago” and that “uptake in some local authorities is as low as 60%”. Far be it from me to weigh in on an issue that has become so politicised, as merely a parent who wants my children and those of others to stay alive, but I have a sinking feeling. A feeling exacerbated by a single red box on a perfunctory form and the idle chatter of concerned parents who no longer get their vaccine sceptic news from insane websites and specialist cults, but from prime-time appearances by the country’s most prominent politicians and journalists. A feeling that our children might wonder how we all lived through a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime global virus that killed millions, was effectively cured by the single most rapid and successful vaccination programme in history and which, immediately afterwards, gave way to anti-science posturing that drove vaccination rates to historic lows.

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