Introduction Following the success of our first in-person Bioconductor course in Nairobi earlier this year, we continued building momentum across the continent with Ethiopia’s first Bioconductor workshop, held in Addis Ababa from 25–29 August 2025.

Earlier this week, a question was asked on OBO Foundry Slack on where to find semantic mappings to terms in the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT). While some are available in the SeMRA Disease Mappings Database, there are many more available within BioPortal, which has access to the entire SNOMED-CT source data and has produced semantic mapping predictions using LOOM.

Hype, slop, craft: the evolutionary ecology of AI There’s a patch of ground near Chernobyl that botanists call Рудий ліс, the Red Forest. In the immediate aftermath of the 1986 disaster, ¹ the radiation killed mostly everything, turning the pine trees a rust-red colour before they died. That’s poetic, but hardly unexpected – not even Polesian pines can withstand a firehose of low enriched uranium decay products.

There are two things I try to keep in mind when preparing or delivering teaching. Helpfully, they are both described in xkcd comics. Ten Thousand Average Familiarity The first comic (Ten Thousand) is a reminder that, as teachers, we are privileged to teach a topic we know well to people who are new to it. To me, this suggests two things for us to do: First, learn to enjoy that feeling of taking someone through a process of discovery.

Abandoned Appalachia A stone schoolhouse above a future lake If you drive up Yellow Creek toward Building Mountain today, you can still spot it. Before the road tips over the ridge, a stone building sits on the flat ground across from where Roosevelt Honeycutt once kept a store.

Abandoned Appalachia On a narrow side road off U.S. 460 at Millard, an aging brick school sits behind a chain link fence and tall grass. Locals still call it Millard Grade School or “the Rocky Road school,” after its address at 20 Rocky Road in Pikeville. For generations this was where Millard’s youngest students learned their letters, lined up for class pictures, and watched Christmas plays in a low ceilinged gym.

Abandoned Appalachia If you stand at the Baxter Coal Monument and look toward the river, a narrow lattice of riveted steel still rises above the trees. That is Baxter Bridge, a Baltimore through truss that once carried U.S. 119 over the Cumberland River’s forks and now hangs quiet over the reengineered channel and floodplain.

Appalachian History Series High above the coal camps of Cumberland and Benham, a narrow road climbs onto the crest of Pine Mountain and enters a landscape that feels older than the highways that reach it. Kingdom Come State Park is Kentucky’s highest state park, perched around 2,700 feet on the thrust-up backbone of Pine Mountain and protecting roughly 1,283 acres of cliffs, forests, and wind-scoured rock.

Substituting a deuterium isotope (2H) for a normal protium hydrogen isotope can slow the rate of a chemical reaction if this atom is involved in the reaction mode.

While my feelings about it are somewhat mixed, Murderbot (Apple TV, 2025-), the streaming adaptation of the wonderful The Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells, expands upon one of the key elements of the book series: the serial-within-the-series called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon (SM). For those unfamiliar with any of these texts, […]

For the first half of November, I’ve been in Peru to do some hikes close to Cusco with friends: First, we did a 5 day trek to the Inca site of Choquequirao and back. After a day and a half of rest back in Cusco, we then did the 4-day Inca trail to Machu Picchu as well. Of course, I wanted to use those opportunities to do some surveying and mapping for OpenStreetMap (OSM) along the way as well.