New paper out this week, open access like usual, go get it for free: Atterholt, Jessie; Burton, M. Grace; Wedel, Mathew J.; Benito, Juan; Fricano, Ellen; and Field, Daniel J. 2025. Osteological correlates of the respiratory and vascular systems in the neural canals of Mesozoic ornithurines Ichthyornis and Janavis. The Anatomical Record. http://doi.org/10.1002/ar.70070.

Roughly 541 million years ago, something extraordinary happened in Earth’s oceans. Over a geologically brief period of perhaps 20 million years, the fossil record explodes with an almost obscene diversity of body plans.

Margery Wace in 1935. With kind permission of Cecilia Johnson. My first visit to the BBC’s Written Archives Centre was in 2002. I was working as a producer on Woman’s Hour and had applied for a three-month attachment to what was then the Diversity Centre, to research and write a history of women at the BBC.

Those of you that have been reading CSTonline for a while will know that I have been in the USA for the past 6 years.  I was employed (as an American TV scholar) to write a Master’s Programme in TV Studies.

Around the world, sports journalism is dominated by men. In 2018, Sky Sports in Britain recognized that: ‘At recent press conferences for the leading football clubs in the Premier League, Championship and Scottish Premiership we counted 310 reporters covering 25 clubs. Nearly 300 were men;

Happy Friday, colleagues. It’s the end of the week and once again I’m going through my long list of idle browser tabs trying to catch up where I can. Lots of R and AI-related news this week. Subscribe now Strengthening nucleic acid biosecurity screening against generative protein design tools. This was a really cool paper published in Science this week from a team at Microsoft, Battelle, IDT, Twist, and others.

On the launch of Book 2 in the Echoes of Tomorrow series — and why storytelling belongs in the rooms where we decide the future of technology.

In the first two parts of this series, I discussed two well-established and widely used sets of principles for contemporary scientific work: FAIR and CARE.

In den ersten beiden Teilen dieser Serie habe ich über zwei gut etablierte und weit verbreitete Sammlungen von Prinzipien zum zeitgemäßen wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten gesprochen: FAIR und CARE.

I had an amazingly fun week at ICFP/SPLASH in Singapore; it was the first time that these two major programming languages conferences were held simultaneously. My submissions turned into a bit of a success disaster; I ended up chairing a workshop, giving several talks and a keynote, and organising a tutorial, and helping out a bunch of colleague and students.

In my blog post from April 2025, I referred to Reijer Passchier’s book (‘The Curse of Big Tech’), which was recommended during the SURF Course on Digital Sovereignty (for Executives in the field of education & research) organised earlier this year.