9 years on twitter

twitter tells me I've been on there for 9 years now - hover over the line where it says "joined in July 2009" and it will reveal the precise date and time. So many things have changed since then, but one thing I found surprisingly constant is the ratio of posts to followers, i.e. how many tweets to I have to send out to increase the number of followers by one. This ratio has been around 15 for as long as I can remember. Checking today, it is 15.04 posts per follower.

More intriguing still, the number is very similar on tumblr (15.98) where I do very different things. Much bigger on blogspot though (47), where the culture of following people never really took off. And smaller on flickr (7.13).

Obviously, for people who are more famous than I am this twitter impact ratio will be smaller, for others it may be bigger - so maybe it's a useful parameter for sociologists to study the social media pecking order (both figures that go into it are public)?


Another thing worth noting is that, since I started obsessing about the Galician language and occasionally tweeting in Galician or linking to Galician sources, these relatively rare ventures tend to spread very widely. Whenever I look at my stats, there's a Galician tweet in the top three. See for instance, from yesterday:

two years on

Open Archive Day

We certainly live in interesting times now, in the sense of the famous Chinese curse. As I write this Brexit still means chaos and Trump says Russia didn't meddle with elections because Putin told him so. Oh well.

Not sure if it's much use to look back how it went wrong, but here's my first relevant feature written just after the Brexit referendum.

Angry voters may turn back the clocks

The feature warned of a possible Trump victory, so here's one of my photos from last Thursday's anti-Trump demo at Blenheim Palace:

sequence everything

It's three decades since the Human Genome Project was organised and 15 years since it published the draft sequence, so it may be worth asking what could be the next big thing for biology.

One possibility that is being looked at is to sequence the genomes of every single eukaryotic species known to science. The Earth BioGenome project, which promotes this idea, has calculated that this could be done within 10 years and would cost no more than the first human genome did.

A crazy idea? Find out in my latest feature which is out now:

The genome sequence of everything

Current Biology
Volume 28, Issue 13, 9 July 2018, Pages R719-R721

FREE access to full text and PDF download




Beetles account for a substantial part of eukaryotic diversity and will keep genome sequencers busy for a while. (Photo: Tim Sackton/Flickr.)

chemistry stories

These days, I don't write as much about chemistry as I used to as the features for Current Biology keep me reasonably busy, but here's a couple of news stories I did for Chemistry World. The one that came out today involves Harry Anderson's lab at Oxford - I consulted him about something else and asked what he was up to these days, so I found out about this:

Most complex reaction ever triggered by atomic manipulation makes molecular wire
Chemistry World August 2018, vol 15, issue 8, page 32

And the other was something that Chemistry World commissioned while this one was sitting around waiting for the original paper to come out. This is about new ways of predicting how several elements may be combined to form new materials:


AI teaches itself to identify materials – and predict new ones too
Chemistry World August 2018, vol 15, issue 8, page 38






Image source

plight of the primates

Open Archive Day

We all know that orangutans are in trouble, and the other great apes are also having a rough time in the anthropocene. While these are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, our extended family, the order primates, is endangered across the board, with over 60% of the species listed as threatened.

In a paper based on literature review and modelling of land use until the end of the century, researchers from the German Primate Centre (Deutsches Primatenzentrum, DPZ) highlight the plight of the primates and paint an even darker future for them.

Which chimes with the take-home message of my feature from a year ago, which is now on open access (and which happens to have the same title as the DPZ press release, but I admit it wasn't a terribly original title anyway):

Primates in peril





a male mongoose lemur (Eulemur mongoz)
Image source: Wikipedia

knickers in a twist

Open Archive Day

I'm still struggling to understand the discussion about upskirting that's been raging around here - can't really imagine that any photos taken that way will be of a quality that could get anybody excited. Also, if a paraphilia focused on such pictures exists, it won't help to send the people affected by it to jail. (If anybody asked me, I'd just suggest to un-invent smartphones and selfie-sticks.)

Wikipedia seems to think that underwear fetishism is not in fact a paraphilia, which explains why it doesn't turn up in this list of paraphilias. (Which serves as a reminder that deviant desires can be a lot worse than the issue in question. There are more than 500 that have a name, and I spotted some that involve rape, cannibalism and other horrible things.)

Still, the whole area is still insufficiently understood, and our society, which only recently stopped regarding homosexuality as one of these perversions, is poorly prepared to deal with the issues which in some cases can become a life-and-death problem.

So I guess my 2014 feature on paraphilias may still be a useful starting point for those who want a scientific angle on these things:

Paraphilia or perversion?

For anybody who wants to spend more time on the issue I recommend the book that inspired the feature, namely

Perv - the sexual deviant in all of us, by Jesse Bering.




Detail of "The swing", by Fragonard - just paint a smartphone into the guy's hand and it's totally up to date ... (Still on view at the Wallace Collection, London, but who knows for how much longer?)


PS re. the title of this post - I love female-specific metaphors, so I'll take any excuse to let my hair down and get my knickers in a twist ...

Najla Shami

We were treated to an amazing concert from the Palestinian/Galician singer-songwriter Najla Shami (with guitarist Sérgio Tannus) this week, organised by the university's Galician Studies Centre as part of this year's Forum for Iberian Studies.

I do love a bit of Arabic influences mixed into my music (see also: Shakira), and I may have lost count but I think I heard Najla singing in seven different languages that evening, so this hit all the right spots. Oh, and she's an amazing singer as well.

So, anyhow, here are some videos with the some of the songs she played here:


Camiño Branco official video

A lingua que eu falo live with Sérgio Tannus

Coração Estaladiço live with Sérgio Tannus

There's also lots of good stuff on her SoundCloud page.

And here are a couple of photos I took towards the end of the show:

origins of Indo-European languages

I've always been obsessed with languages (Romance ones preferably, but will also consider others), so it's only natural to take any opportunity to write about science-language interface. There haven't been all that many (the 2012 feature on the evolution of writing and my ancient paper on the linguistics of protein folding spring to mind), but recent work on ancient DNA has yielded a good excuse to revisit the family tree of Indo-European languages, comparing results from archaeology, genetics, linguistics and cultural history.

The resulting feature is out now:

The Indo-European ancestors' tale

Current Biology Volume 28, Issue 12, 18 June 2018, Pages R679–R682

FREE access to full text and PDF download




Statistical analyses can show that ancient fairy tales have likely evolved from common ancestors of the Indo-European language groups or even from the culture that spoke the Proto-Indo-European language. (Image: From The Folktales of Bengal illustrated by Warwick Goble.)

desalinate this

When I prepared the blog entry for the fusion feature, I realised I forgot to toot my horn for the previous one which was about desalination of sea water. So without further ado, here goes:


A growing thirst

Chemistry & Industry 2018, vol 82, no 3, pp 30-33

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled)

SCI (members only)

I can send the PDF file, just drop me a line.

fresh fusion

I really should go out more and explore more of the exciting science going on all around me, so it was a great opportunity when I was asked to write about new approaches to fusion energy, as there is a start-up company doing that up the road in Yarnton, called First Light Fusion.

So I visited them and marvelled at their huge supply of gunpowder (some seriously old technology used to facilitate the new ones) and at the workshops where they are building what could become a revolution in energy technology. We'll see.

The feature is out now:

A new dawn for fusion energy

Chemistry & Industry 2018, vol 82, no 4, pp 30-33

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled)

SCI (members only)

I can send the PDF file, just drop me a line.

and here's a sneaky preview of the first page:

virtual worlds

Open Archive Day

A year ago I immersed myself in virtual reality for my feature on the use of VR technology in science and medicine. While this was all very interesting and impressive, I haven't felt the desperate need to put the goggles back on in the twelve months since. Real reality is hard enough to keep up with ...

Anyhow, my VR feature is now in the open archives, so you can immerse yourself completely free and maybe get ideas for virtual realities you want to explore ...

Exploring virtual worlds






Life in tropical environments like the Amazon rainforests can also be experienced through VR. (Photo: Valdemir Cunha/Greenpeace.)

life in the city

Urbanisation may well be the most dramatic global change happening today, with obvious effects on environment and wildlife. One aspect that biologists are only beginning to appreciate is that this is a large scale pseudo-experiment with similar alterations of habitat happening in many places, across climate zones, so it makes sense to study how those species that don't disappear on impact cope with the change and adapt to life in the city.

Urban ecology as a steady state has been studied for a while, but the scale and evolutionary nature of the adaptation to city life is only beginning to be appreciated, and the field still has some catching up to do to make the most of this unprecedented global experiment that has already begun.

My feature covering all this is out now in today's issue of Current Biology:


Adapting to life in the city

Current Biology Volume 28, Issue 11, 4 June 2018, Pages R635–R638

FREE access to full text and PDF download





Urban robin, own photo.


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update 28.2.2019:

story in the Guardian about Rob Dunn, whose work on the biodiversity inside our homes is mentioned in my feature.