iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Thank you for highlighting this - it looks excellent, really looking forward to it. @akellyucc.bsky.social this might be of interest

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

Nail on the head, why would anyone include a citation that wasn’t “checked”? Every citation in every paper I’ve ever published is there for a reason, because it’s relevant and useful for the work. That’s research

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Royal Irish Academy @ria.ie · 23/04/2026

Thank you to our fantastic panellists, @drclairemurray.com , @akellyucc.bsky.social , @irishspacegal.bsky.social , @jessamynfairfield.bsky.social , and the wonderful moderator, @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social , for last night's dynamic discussion about community engagement in science.

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Royal Irish Academy @ria.ie · 16/04/2026

Join us next Wed, 22 April to be part of our 'Good Science' discussion about finding the scientist in your community. Book your tickets: www.tickettailor.com/events/royal...

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John Rogers @johnrogers.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Bloody hell. Researchers invented a disease, published two fake papers to see if LLM’s would ingest them and kick them up as fact — and then it broke containment and all the major AI’s bought in. Information pollution. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

nature.com

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

Bixonimania doesn’t exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional illness?

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

I’d love to see them do a similar piece on the tech industry in Ireland - I would say it’s twice the size of the pharma industry but it’s very difficult to measure since tech “exports” are not tangible like medicines

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

Delighted to recieve funding from the @researchireland.ie Discover programme. We have set ourselves a major challenge to see if we can co-create, deliver and evaluate a new inquiry based intervention to help engage everyone in the scientific process #InformalEd #IrishResearch #ChemSky #irishSky

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Royal Society of Chemistry @rsc.org · 11/03/2026

The Royal Society of Chemistry is at #LBF We’ll be showcasing our latest books and connecting with the publishing community. 📍 Come visit us at stand 7D81 #ChemSky

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

Looking forward to chatting with everyone at my @niscifest.bsky.social talk on Friday in @qubelfastofficial.bsky.social The @rsc.org have kindly provided a 30% discount for all attendees for my book! So if you don’t have a copy, come along! #Booksky #ChemSky nisciencefestival.com/event/onscre...

nisciencefestival.com

Onscreen Chemistry: | NI Science Festival

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Excellent 👌 if you ever feel disheartened by arguing with idiots, know that someone else at the table (or social media feed) will hopefully appreciate you

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Looking forward to this day next week for my return to #Belfast for the 2026 NI #ScienceFestival. Come and join me for an interactive talk about chemistry in the movies and TV, open to all ages with plenty of video clips #ChemSky #Chemistry #Science #BookSky nisciencefestival.com/event/onscre...

nisciencefestival.com

Onscreen Chemistry: | NI Science Festival

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Joshua W. Cotter @joshuawcotter.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

Make Art (1/4)

A rabbit in overalls and a goat in pants are sitting on the ground drawing pictures. The rabbit is saying “ART POSES A THREAT TO CORPORATOLRATIC SYSTEMS BECAUSE A PURPOSE OF ART IS TO REMIND THE INDIVIDUAL OF THEIR INHERENT AUTONOMY.”, the goat adds “THEIR HUMANITY.”

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

Looking forward to the day when a banner pops up before you open a social media app and again every 30mins while you use it WARNING: Social media seriously harms you and others around you Come on EU! Do it

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

As a native of Kerry.. I’ve some questions…

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Hannah Daly @hannahdaly.ie · 05/02/2026

There is an abundance of wind on the Irish electricity system this morning and the network operator is imploring me to use energy. Wouldn't it be nice if it was cheaper? My column today is an "explainer" on dynamic tariffs, which are coming this summer. www.irishtimes.com/science/2026...

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

In fairness, at least he left his work at the office 😉 and didn’t invade every other facet of life!

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Kevin Morgan @drkevinmorgan.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

And the following week (20th Feb), why not see chemistry jump off the page (and screen) and into conversation with @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social from @tcddublin.bsky.social and @rsc.org Hosted in the David Keir Building, you can book for Onscreen Chemistry here: nisciencefestival.com/event/onscre...

nisciencefestival.com

Onscreen Chemistry: | NI Science Festival

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

We’re hiring! Come join us to setup, lead and evaluate a new Education and Public Engagement (EPE) project. We want someone who will make this project their own and we will provide them with all the guidance they need #ChemSky #educationsky #researchsky universityvacancies.com/trinity-coll...

universityvacancies.com

Research Fellow in Chemistry Education and Public Engagement (EPE) | University Vacancies Ireland

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

I’m a mini-disk player… a niche hybrid technology in a world of MP3 Players… so niche.. it will be cool again one day 🤣

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Fantastic, necessary and timely - well done all

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 04/01/2026

I agree, the more AI content I see from someone, the less I want to engage with them… if social media doesn’t adapt to encourage authentic human content, it’s going to lose all relevancy … which will have widespread consequences for digital advertising & promotion

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Ciara | Ciaraíoch 🎨 @ciaraioch.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

Don't think I've spoken to a single artist who didn't struggle this Christmas, and I spoke to a lot, so even if it's not my work I'd really encourage people to try to support a local artist that you like instead of big corporations - every single sale makes a real, tangible difference to their life.

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Ciara | Ciaraíoch 🎨 @ciaraioch.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

First year selling my art at Christmas without the Other site, where most of my sales came from, as well as losing US orders to new tariffs, so it'll be a tough one - I put huge work into every order, so even if you can't buy, shares help get them in front of eyes. GRMA! www.ciaraioch.com/artprints

Collage of prints from my site

#SpéirGorm #SpéirGhorm #Ireland

One of the handwritten gift notes that I can include for free with all orders, if desired.

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

Once again struggling to part ways with the lovely packaging from @ciaraioch.bsky.social! It always comes so beautifully packaged ☺️ #Christmas #IrishArtist #supportirish

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Dr. Katja Thieme (she/they) @katjathieme.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

„CSU—US’s largest public uni system—went all-in with a $17mill partnership with OpenAI. . .CSU unveiled its grand technological gesture just as it proposed slashing $375mill from its budget. While admin cut ribbons on AI, they were cutting faculty positions, academic programs, student services.“

currentaffairs.org

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself

Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.

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Ciara | Ciaraíoch 🎨 @ciaraioch.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

📌 ciaraioch.com is now taking Christmas orders for prints, cards, and vouchers - each archival-quality print on heavy art paper is made in Ireland, ships internationally in eco-friendly packaging with discount tracked postage, and comes with a FREE card and treats for every customer 🎁 #SpéirGorm

Photograph of a display of prints, surrounded by Christmas decorations and fairy lights, against a white fluffy background

#SpéirGorm #SpéirGhorm #Ireland #Art #Christmas #ArtistsOnBluesky #BuyLocal #ShopIrish

Cartoon of a little rook building a snowman in the shape of a crow, and a photograph of the same image as Christmas cards against a red brick background - there's one free with every order.

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 06/09/2025

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Josh McCrain @joshmccrain.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

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Erik Derycke @derycke.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

“Universities are not tech companies. Our role is to foster critical thinking, not to follow industry trends uncritically.”

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

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!

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

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

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Compound Interest | Chemistry infographics @compoundchem.com · 08/10/2025

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 🧪

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.

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C&EN (Chemical & Engineering News) @cenmag.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

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 🧪

cen.acs.org

The 2025 chemistry Nobel goes to MOFs

Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi win the prize for developing metal–organic frameworks

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Prof Sam Illingworth @samillingworth.com · 01/10/2025

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

upen.ac.uk

The Case for Slow AI in Academic and Policy Engagement – UPEN

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

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

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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

'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...

nature.com

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.

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Neil Lewis, Jr. @neillewisjr.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

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.

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.” Enough. I was stunned by the simple eloquence of that word—stunned for two reasons: first, because I have been given so much in my own life and, second, because Joseph Heller couldn’t have been more accurate. For a critical element of our society, including many of the wealthiest and most powerful among us, there seems to be no limit today on what enough entails.

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 21/09/2025

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.

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Evan Spotte-Smith (they/them) @ewcss.info · 11/09/2025

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)

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

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

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

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…

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

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!)

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