Aidan Maartens

[We see a close up of a young white male, tanned, white teeth, coiffed hair clearly an influencer on social media. It is an image such as you see when social media posts are shown on the news. In the corner of the screen is named a location: DUBAI. He is staring slightly off-camera for several silent panels of the comic strip. His eyes move slightly. He is having a thought.] From off-screen a newsreader’s commentary comes: NEWSREADER: Extraordinary images here of an expat in Dubai [The influencer’s eybrows raise slightly] …Having their first ever geopolitical thought. [CUT TO a BBC news scene. The BBC newsreader CLIVE MYRIE is talking to an interviewee next to the screen showing the social media influencer’s face. The interviewee’s name is David Jones]. CLIVE MYRIE: To explain the significance of this moment we’re joined by David Jones, our Expat Thoughts correspondent DAVID JONES: Clive, this is momentous It was caught on film at the end of an Instagram post titled: ‘Dubai Is Brilliant’. [Pointing at the screen, the influencer’s expression still the same] You can clearly see in the eyebrows here, the dawning realisation that there *might* be something in the world beyond his dickhead self. It marks a *huge* departure from all the Dubai Expat’s previous thoughts. CLIVE MYRIE: Which are…? DAVID JONES: You've Got To Get Yourself Out Here Mate, Everything Is So Clean, I Don't Have To Pay Taxes, I Am Incurious As To Why I Do Not Have To Pay Taxes, and Spa. CLIVE MYRIE: And might we see an expansion of these new Thoughts in coming days? DAVID JONES: I think we can expect to see: “I Deserve To Be Airlifted By A Country I Pay No Tax To” CLIVE MYRIE: Mmm. [Ends]

Thus far it's still somehow a less chaotic leadership rollout than Your Party.

Blue square graphic, with black and white text which reads, ‘Cancer Grand Challenges announces £100 million funding for new research’

Today, Cancer Grand Challenges awarded a record-equalling total of up to £100m to five research teams with the vision and expertise to push the frontiers of cancer research further than ever before.

Meet the teams: cruk.ink/4rKCvvr

Portrait shots of two people looking into the camera.

Two Crick group leaders are joining Cancer Grand Challenges teams to tackle big questions in cancer research.

Leanne Li leads a team studying how tumours interact with the nervous system, and Vivian Li joins a @ucl.ac.uk-led team working to rewire cancer cells.

🔗 www.crick.ac.uk/news/2026-03...

I almost did my thesis in Baskerville (switched to the slightly more modern Cambria)

"We called London a war zone and moved to Dubai by mistake"

Screen shot from the UKRI Funding Finder. Title: Fundamental AI Research Lab. Timeline Open 2nd March, intention to submit date 16 March, Closing Date 31 March 2026.

Can anyone think of an example of government spend of this magnitude and speed (excluding covid)??

4 weeks from call announcement to submission (no advance warning) and within that only 2 weeks to flag your intention to submit.

£40M total - individual awards £9.4M

www.ukri.org/opportunity/...

Trump has told four different journalists completely contradictory things about his aims.

It's going to be over in three days or four weeks... it's about regime change but he also wants to start talks again with the current regime...he's killed all the possible replacement leaders...

Total chaos.

There's a lot of mean-spiritedness about people who have gone to live in Dubai. We need to help, and ensure they have secure accommodation in the UK for 91 days of the next tax year.

Reform win a seat: The true Volk have spoken and we all must listen.

Greens win a seat: Early reports that Muslims may have ‘voted’ (an ancient Islamic practice designed to steal elections). How severely should the franchise be limited in response?

As the analysis starts of the Gorton and Denton result, I wanted to flag some aspects that my experience yesterday suggests are being over or under-played

(Caveats - I went to Longsight, Gorton and Denton town centres and spoke to as many people as I could, but it was mostly during the working day)

Our party has just come third in Gorton and Denton, a previously safe Labour seat - an area where we haven't lost an election since 1931.

It is those running our party who are to blame. We need change at the top and serious lessons need to be learnt:

New version of our preprint on bioRxiv about bioRxiv up. Now that’s what I call a revision – 6 years after the first version!
It has new data about our progress and highlights from a massive user survey. 1/n
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

When I think on the timescale of days and weeks, progress can be frustratingly slow.

Shifting to the timescale of years, the progress is spectacular: Often faster than expected.

Living through the arc of technology development has been awesome.

The best is yet to come 🚀

Just published: chemotactic sperm cells become phototactic 💡- by loading photo-activatable second messengers. This allows to "reverse-engineer" chemotactic signaling dynamics and expose cells to signals they would never see in the wild. Honoured to be part of this collaboration with the Kaupp lab.

Useful piece on animal experimentation and alternate models in today's Nature. It always tickled me that my beloved Drosophila (indeed any invertebrate, aside from cephalopods) were not deemed animals in these discussions! Out in the 'who cares' zone with the yeasts

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

Congratulations to all GSA winners and especially Judith Kimble, who I had the pleasure of meeting for an interview for @dev-journal.bsky.social in 2019. Funny and generous person

journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Tom Cavalier-Smith in Cornwall UK 23 August 2017, photo by Neal C-S

I am happy to share the unfinished but nevertheless fascinating autobiography of the late Thomas Cavalier-Smith, written in 2020, shortly before Tom passed away in 2021. I thank Ema Cavalier-Smith for sharing the text with me. I recently finished curating […]

[Original post on biologists.social]

A week ago, we had an open conversation amongst senior academics in leadership roles and their use of LLMs (in both their leadership capacities and individually). Small group, not representative, but it already taught me a great deal about the diversity of perspectives (& their consequences). 1/

The allosteric landscape of the Src kinase Comprehensive allosteric mapping prioritizes all possible druggable surface pockets in the Src kinase for allosteric inhibition.

The allosteric landscape of the Src kinase
by Toni Beltran, @ajfaure.bsky.social , @crg.eu @sangerinstitute.bsky.social @alloxbio.bsky.social
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Labour minister falsely linked journalists to ‘pro-Kremlin’ network in emails to GCHQ Exclusive: Josh Simons pressed intelligence officials to investigate reporters, in emails described as ‘McCarthyite smear’

Josh Simons says he was "furious" at how the PR firm Labour Together hired smeared journalists

But he handed its baseless 'reports' to the security services

The minister's comments don't stack up

As Jon Cruddas told me weeks ago: "this is dark shit"

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Mammalian cells form hibernating disomes akin to those in bacterial cells - but connected via ribosomal RNA

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

co-first with: @andschwarz.bsky.social

with: @lea-dietrich.bsky.social, @sgiando.bsky.social, @erin-schuman.bsky.social and many more

🧵 0/6
#MolBio 🧪

Tissue phase transitions in development: more than just mechanics Summary: Tissue material phase transitions are classically thought to regulate tissue deformability. This Review emphasises their unexpected roles in directly influencing growth and patterning signall...

Excited to share our new review in @dev-journal.bsky.social on tissue phase transitions during development!

@karengrace12.bsky.social @nicolettapetridou.bsky.social

🔗 doi.org/10.1242/dev....

Missing microbes in UK infant gut and probiotics highlighted by global microbiome atlas Experts have created a global atlas of over 4,000 bacterial genomes from two key bacteria found in the infant gut. It highlights one that is often used in infant probiotics is rare in Western babies a...

A global atlas of two key babybiome bacteria has found one of these is missing in UK babies, despite being common in children from other countries.

This atlas is 15x larger than other studies and lays the foundation for more effective, tailored infant probiotics.

www.sanger.ac.uk/news_item/mi...

Ancestry and somatic profile indicate acral melanoma origin and prognosis - Nature Analysis of the somatic and transcriptomic profile of 123 acral melanoma samples from Mexican patients helps understand tumour origins and prognosis, and highlights the importance of including samples...

We are very happy to see our study finally appear online @nature.com! This has been work of nearly 10 years in collaboration with the National Institute of Genome Medicine 🇲🇽, the National Cancer Institute 🇲🇽, the @sangerinstitute.bsky.social and others ⬇️

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

Mechanisms linking cytoplasmic decay of translation-defective mRNA to transcriptional adaptation Transcriptional adaptation (TA) is a genetic robustness mechanism through which mutant messenger RNA (mRNA) decay induces sequence-dependent up-regulation of so-called adapting genes. How cytoplasmica...

This is a fascinating paper that reveals defined and clear mechanism for a phenomenon that for some seemed unbelievable- the up regulation of genes paralogous to those with specific types of inactivating mutations. This is called transcriptional adaptation 1/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...