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Ian Sudbery

@iansudbery.bsky.social
520 followers 834 following 933 posts

Senior Lecturer in Bioinformatics at the University of Sheffield. Likes gene regulation, 3' UTRs, non-coding RNA and dancing. He/Him/His Also at IanSudbery@genomic.social

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Ian Sudbery @iansudbery.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Two things surprise me about this: 1. People aren't more mad at Apple. Surely it should not be possible for an app to ignore a permission set at the OS level. That does not sound like secure OS design. 2. People think that not using anything by Meta makes them safe from this.
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Melissa Johnson, PhD @ladyhistorian.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I am tired of having to pretend that the value of studying my discipline solely rests on the "marketable skills" we teach. Sometimes things are just worth knowing and doing because they make your life bigger and richer.
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Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 27/09/2026
Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc
nyti.ms
Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (Gift Article)
An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.
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Ian Dunt @iandunt.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The chipping away at citizenship, which started with Shamima Begum, is utterly poisonous. Anytime now, Restore will support the removal of citizenship on the basis of race or religion.
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Stephen Turner @stephenturner.us · 26/09/2026
Personal essay, weekend edition. My relationship with AI is changing. 1.8k words, 8 min reading time. doi.org/10.59350/bh7...
doi.org
My relationship with AI is changing
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
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Tan G. @tangandhara.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
The section on reading was very relatable, especially this line: “Part of the reason I read the things I read is to understand how another person thinks.”
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Caroline Bartman @cbartman.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Ok what is the most death metal biology term? Cytokine storm? Programmed death 1? Executioner caspase? Other?
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Duncan Sproul @sproullab.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Reposting this postdoc opening in our lab. We also now have an opening for a graduate research assistant for the same project. Deadline 23rd October 2026 and details here: elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...
elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com
Research Assistant
We are looking for a self-motivated, enthusiastic research assistant to join the laboratory of Dr Duncan Sproul at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Genetics and Cancer and support research i...
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Ian Sudbery @iansudbery.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
The interesting question here is to what extent was the model here following a prompt, and to what extent was it asking its own questions? At the top of the article it seems like they just said "find an interesting new enzyme family", a little further down it was "find an interesting new RT family"
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Frances Yap @ribo1214.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
TT faculty opening at Indiana University-Bloomington. ⬇️
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Lyndsey Stonebridge @lyndseystonebri.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
You're going to be needing specialists in: languages, narrative, history, psychology, information, mythology, conspiracies, etc, etc. then? #humanities #socialscience
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Matthew Cobb @matthewcobb.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
This is true of many places - higher education is not only a cultural good, it is a massive driver of economies in otherwise left behind places that politicians and journalists rarely visit. What will happen if/when the financial crisis in HE leads to closures?
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The Empty City @davidallengreen.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Too late to change now, but the above should really be: Criminal law should be enforced against those committing criminal acts, says minister responsible for enforcing the criminal law against those committing criminal acts
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Ian Sudbery @iansudbery.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Why do all these AI generated infographics all looks the same? Down to their blue backgrounds and glowing 3D lines? Outs not like it would be hard to all for something different in the prompt.
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Robin Moira White @robinmoirawhite.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Curiously unreported by mainstream media. Carried by a show of hands with no opposition. labourlist.org/2026/09/tuc-...
labourlist.org
TUC Congress backs motion opposing EHRC guidance and calls for gender self-ID - LabourList
Unions have backed calls to campaign for gender ‘self ID’ and for a change in “discriminatory and unworkable” guidance around transgender rights.
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merritt @merrittk.com · 15/09/2026
god, i was born in the wrong era. imagine being around in the Cambrian period. you could just evolve something simple like shell or legs that nobody had thought of before and coast on that your whole life
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Kristian G. Andersen @kgandersen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
There is absolutely nothing to support that any of these scientists were "trying to weaponize pathogens". While I don't have access to the underlying data, reading the examples given by Anthropic, they all appear to be basic virological research.
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Harmit Singh Malik @harmitmalik.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I don’t know which is greater: my inertia at getting going on Monday morning or my disappointment at all that I accomplished (or did not accomplish) in that week on Friday evening. Probably equal I would say.
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Dr Radu Zabet @raduzabet.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Great lab and excellent project. Highly recommend
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Joanna Hardy-Susskind @joannahs.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Well. Would you look at that.
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Ellie Mae O'Hagan @elliemaeohagan.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
The anthropic whistleblower is like "no other activity has the potential to create human extinction." Well, speaking as someone who works for a climate think tank, I can think of one
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Nick in NC @nicknc.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
Kids born the same year that the term “RNA-seq” was coined are heading to college this fall. We are all unspeakably ancient.
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Ian Sudbery @iansudbery.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Holy moly, @ensembl.org killed biomart! Hope many R scripts are there out there that depend on biomaRt? How many people have informatics practicals, or undergraduate project instructions that depend on a web interface for bulk selection of data?
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Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology @natrevmcb.nature.com · 11/09/2026
New Online! PRC2–RNA interactions through the lens of bioinformatics pipeline choices
dlvr.it
PRC2–RNA interactions through the lens of bioinformatics pipeline choices
Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, Published online: 11 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41580-026-01028-1Four recent studies that have differently assessed PRC2–RNA interactions reveal key technical pitfalls underlying research in the field.
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Ian Sudbery @iansudbery.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
I have to say I don't get this. If grants were fewer and longer, that makes each application higher stakes. That means academics will spend more time on each application, not less. And because award rates will necessarily be lost, they'll write more applications, not fewer.
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Ian Sudbery @iansudbery.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
This post applies far beyond mathematics. It applies rip rescuing in almost any subject, but also applies to any discipline that concerns it self with the elevation of humanity and the human experience.
In many fields and activities, years of training have traditionally served not only to produce a final answer or product, but also to develop understanding and the ability to formulate new questions and ideas. However, building on a vast body of previous human work, AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of producing the results of such work directly, and these goals cease to align. The issues the mathematical community faces now are similar to issues that other scientific and creative professions are facing, and indicate issues that all of humanity might face: how to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place.
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Rob Patro @robp.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
There are some silly, but unfortunately, not unsurprising takes on the mathandai.org statement. I'm decidedly not anti-AI & not opposed to "disruption". But if you think you know the point of math better than these people, or their concerns are silly, you're just wrong.
mathandai.org
Declaration — Math and AI
Read the declaration and add your name.
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Ian Sudbery @iansudbery.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
People who sit in the back of conferences, taking photos of every slide of talks (but only those of the big names), when the audience has been reminded multiple times not to take photos make me unreasonably agitated.
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MadScientist @mads100tist.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I bet you money you can't predict the next word as you're reading this title
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Neil Young @elderpegasus.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
One of the many risks with The Damn Hype Bubble is that actual machine learning use in healthcare may end up suffering due to the overly vague "AI" label, either due to short term deprivation of attention or long term loss of confidence after the bubble bursts.
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Gro-Tsen @gro-tsen.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Yes, this is moving the goalposts, but as someone rightly pointed out on the bad place, “moving the goalposts” is precisely the way science works. Moving the goalposts is only bad if you treat the world as a game to be won: whom did you think you were playing against?
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John Marshall @johnm.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Today's pysam 0.24.1 release bundles htslib, samtools, and bcftools 1.24 and has pre-built wheels on PyPI for Python 3.9 through 3.15. Wheels are much smaller than in previous releases. It includes type hint fixes, some speed optimisations, and a new reverse_complement() utility function. 🧬🖥️
github.com
Release v0.24.1 · pysam-developers/pysam
This minor pysam release wraps htslib/samtools/bcftools version 1.24. It has been tested with Python versions 3.9 through 3.15 (RC2) and wheels are available via PyPI for all of those Python versio...
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The Empty City @davidallengreen.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Seems the difference between ‘protestors’ and ‘terrorists’ is that protestors wear balaclavas while terrorists hold placards.
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Nick Stroustrup @nstroustrup.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Did you know that the cells of old animals contain much less mRNA than the cells of young ones? Let me share with you some results from an ongoing project in the lab, where we are finding that a progressive depletion of total mRNA abundance is a crucial part of aging 1/22
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Mike Morgan @mdmorgan.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Come join us in Aberdeen! We have two exciting postdoc positions working on cardio-immunology with Prof Dana Dawson in collaboration with the fantastic @kelvintuong.bsky.social. (1) www.abdnjobs.co.uk/vacancy/rese... (2) www.abdnjobs.co.uk/vacancy/rese...
abdnjobs.co.uk
Research Fellow in Cardio-Immunology (IMS336R) | University of Aberdeen
We seek to appoint an enthusiastic, motivated immunology postdoctoral fellow with top of the range knowledge and ability and demonstrated aptitude in cardiovascular sciences. The successful candidate ...
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Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Been reflecting some more on how for a decade+ there's been a whole outcry about how replications weren't published. Part of it is based on misleading data as it's now made clear (see the thread I'm replying to). But another part was that standalone replication studies weren't being published.
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Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Interesting thread and paper about replication in the psych literature pre-2012. It turns out that replication was a pretty common (20%+) study goal, and reproducing existing methods was a part of psychology.... pre-2012. Setting aside Makel's paper; Why was the opposite so widely believed?
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Willem van Schaik @wvschaik.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
'Doctors’ AI scribes get names of drugs and diagnoses wrong, NHS watchdog warns' www.theguardian.com/society/2026...
theguardian.com
Doctors’ AI scribes get names of drugs and diagnoses wrong, NHS watchdog warns
Exclusive: Patients identify errors in consultation transcripts that are missed by GPs, Healthwatch England finds
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Prof Gavin Yamey MD MPH @gavinyamey.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
When Salk developed the polio vaccine, “Church bells tolled, factory whistles blew. People ran into the streets weeping…Eisenhower invited Jonas Salk to the White House, where he choked up while thanking Salk for saving the world's children” Today we have RFK Jr 😢 www.npr.org/sections/npr...
npr.org
Defeating Polio, The Disease That Paralyzed America
On April 12, 2015, the world will celebrate the 60th anniversary of Jonas Salk's vaccine that helped defeat a contagious, crippling virus.
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Ian Sudbery @iansudbery.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Flooded out of the lab. Half the department underwater. Who knows how much damage or how long before will be up and running again. But *sure* let's spend tens of millions replacing our perfectly good teaching spaces, rather than fixing the research spaces and staff offices.
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Alice Roberts @profaliceroberts.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
The fallout from the collapse of this glacier - a torrent of mud surging down the valley - killed hundreds of people. Gone, in a flash. Those people were wiped out by anthropogenic climate change. Our governments are simply not responding quickly enough to this disaster which is already upon us.
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Tyson @lscpunk.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
If Dolly was our constant reminder that it was Good to be Good, Tim Curry was our reminder that it was Good to be Weird. Embrace your strangeness, sing with Muppets, wear your lingerie with a leather jacket, and fuck with uptight people who hate anything that makes them remotely uncomfortable.
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Alex Prichard @profalexp.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
It also became clear that Uni exec were leaning on the advice of a consultancy firm that has been shaping HE policy in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK: Nous (or Nousferatu, as they’re now known). The fact VCs and others are delegating policy to consultants, despite £400k salaries, is disgusting
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Reese Richardson @reeserichardson.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
A massive update: At least ~15 companies~ are selling scientists antibodies using faked validation data. We've documented 18,000+ manipulated images on 17,000+ products sold by leading laboratory suppliers including Thermo Fisher, Abcam, Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Millipore Sigma and Bio-Techne. 1/🧵
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some-rss-feeds.bsky.social @some-rss-feeds.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
[some-subscribed-rss] New Post: What if publication bias isn’t that? At least not always?, by Jeremy Fox dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2026/0…
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Igor Ulitsky @igorulitsky.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
One of the (well, >1) problems in the lncRNA field is that some of the lncRNAs are not real genes, i.e., do not represent a standalone locus that produces independent transcripts. Some cases are more 🤔 than others, e.g. lncDACH that Matt Bennet from Andy Baker's lab took a deep dive into. 🧵
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Mark Peifer (He, him) @peiferlabunc.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
I found this piece exceptionally helpful in thinking about many recent events--I'd urge you to read it
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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
How to do science in the age of AI.
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Brian Wasik @brianrwasik.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
So when people engage with the signers on the horrendous detail (and shallow lack of any professional scholarship) of the work -- they act confused and dismiss and claim people are just harassing them. But people are simply following *your* words! You invited people to engage with you in this way!
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Glen O'Hara @gsoh31.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Strong feeling that a lot of colleagues are missing the existential rather than the more manageable danger to our universities right now. Just an inability to focus on what so many academics think will never happen to them.
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