I originally wrote and published this essay at The Connected Ideas Project, an excellent newsletter by my good friend and colleague Alexander Titus. If you’re not reading TCIP you’re missing out. After I finished my postdoc I was faculty in academia for eight years before moving to a consulting firm for five years, then joined a biotech startup two years ago.

Click to embiggen White rami are usually thicker than gray rami, and sometimes they are visibly different in color, but they are always the more lateral connections between the sympathetic chain and the intercostal nerves, and the ones you’ll see first when you peel off the parietal pleura. You may even see the white rami through the parietal pleura if it’s thin enough.

Collection #28

Depending on your exact definition of doing science, keeping track as precise as possible of your observations is an essential part of doing science. The precision should be high enough that mistakes are obvious. This pattern is, of course, not limited to doing science and we see this in open source development too. Unfortunately, in the modern way of doing science, this is not getting the attention it should get.

The exam marking is over, and a glorious Cambridge summer awaits! This year, we have a sizeable cohort of undergraduate and graduate interns joining us from next week. This note serves as a point of coordination to keep track of what's going on, and I'll update it as we get ourselves organised.

This week’s recap highlights the new Datavzrd tool for interactive visualization and communication of tabular data (I’m genuinely really looking forward to trying this one), tracing the shared foundations of gene expression and chromatin structure, PISA for visualizing cis-regulatory rules in genomic data, fast protein structure searching using structure graph embeddings, and a review/perspective on intrinsically disordered regions as

InvenioRDM is the open source turn-key research data management platform, with detailed documentation available here. InvenioRDM Starter facilitates deployment and configuration of InvenioRDM, allowing you to run InvenioRDM on your local computer within 15 min. This is achieved by providing a) a prebuilt Invenio-App-RDM Docker image, and b) a Docker Compose configuration file with sensible defaults.

Am 26. Juni 2025 durfte ich an der Fachhochschule Münster über ein Thema sprechen, das vielen Wissenschaftler*innen unter den Nägeln brennt: Wie publiziere ich sinnvoll, sichtbar und nachhaltig? In meinem Vortrag „Publikationsstrategien für Wissenschaftler*innen“ ging es unter anderem um: Warum überhaupt publizieren? Zwischen Publish or Perish und echter Wissenschaftskommunikation: Reputation, Karrierewege

Richard Wallis and Christa van Raalte argue for greater honesty and pragmatism in addressing the talent pipeline. The prominence of the creative industries in the UK government’s industrial strategy as one of eight growth sectors to be prioritised will be welcomed by most of us involved in screen education. It is as yet unclear, however, how the proclaimed undertaking to develop an appropriately skilled workforce will manifest itself.

A world in crisis: wildfires as examples of the climate crisis in the BBC News documentary looking at Heatwaves: The New Normal? In this second podcast, David and Elke are looking at Governance in Crisis – as governance that is troubled but also governance in a period of crisis.

Some stories stick with me. This one’s been in my bones for a long time. I hope it lands with you the way it did with me.