Congratulations to both for securing one in such a competitive round!
13.02.2026 09:24
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Congratulations to both for securing one in such a competitive round!
Check out our perspective in J. Med. Chem. @acsmedi.bsky.social about the Limitations of DCFH-DA for the Detection of ROS and Recommendations for Probe Selection. @ruhr-uni-bochum.de dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs....
I have been experimenting with a lot of different materials for my biomolecules lately, but I always come back to the gummy-worm-style 🐛
Protein colored by b-factor / rendered in Blender / pdb struktur loaded with #molecularnodes
#blender3d #scientificillustration
wow...
In this new paper, simple chemistry controls how stem cells grow on commercially viable molecular gel scaffolds. Such materials have potential applications in regenerative medicine to direct the creation of new tissue and help the human body repair itself.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
This is a wild story
We've got ISSUES. Literally.
We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?
arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563
A 🧵 1/n
How did @Nature become "prestigious" to scientists?
In our opening article of Issue 09, writer Robert Reason traces the journal's history.
By understanding how Nature’s prestige was constructed, we can also clarify which elements are deserved and which are entrenched.
The Mentos challenge just got serious 🧐 See what happens when chem prof Tom Kuntzleman dds Mentos to a bottle of champagne in comparison to a different carbonated beverage. Cheers! #wsuchemistry #ChemSky #mentoschallenge #ChemEd
A Gold-PROTAC Degrades the Oncogenic Tyrosine Kinase MERTK: Insights into the Degradome from a Steady-State System | ACS Chemical Biology pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
Researchers use robotics to find potential new antibiotic among hundreds of metal complexes.
Dr Angelo Frei and his team have used a cutting-edge robotic system capable of synthesising hundreds of metal complexes to develop a possible antibiotic candidate.
www.york.ac.uk/chemistry/ab...
Uhh interesting, will definitely try this!
#chemsky
Great to see some of our recently published research featured in @chemistryworld.com magazine.
www.chemistryworld.com/news/supramo...
Our recent paper in npj Antimicrobials and Resistance is a great example of scientific serendipity: after staring at thousands of bacterial growth curves over many studies, we started wondering whether the curve shapes themselves carry mechanistic information 1/9 🦠🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
🎄An Early Xmas present for the group!🎄
Our work on high-throughput synthesis of triazole-based metal complexes is out now in Nature Comm.!
Read it here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A blog post by David who helmed the whole project, including a Sonnet: www.thefreilab.com/post/naturec...
"How can funders avoid crossing the Szilard point?"
The Szilard point is "the threshold at which the total cost of competing for a grant equals (or surpasses) the value of the available funding."
A new spectroscopic approach reveals how key tuberculosis drug acts inside living bacteria
New research resolves how the critical tuberculosis drug bedaquiline disrupts bioenergetics to attack the pathogen by using a powerful spectroscopic technique.
www.york.ac.uk/chemistry/ab...
Great to see that the Department of Chemistry in York has joined Bluesky! #chemsky
bsky.app/profile/chem...
Great idea, hopefully this will expand! Moving from CH-AUS-UK-CH-UK messed up any pension I had quite thoroughly!
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.
A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:
a 🧵 1/n
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
I would like to move chemistry-related conversations to chemchat, seeing as how chem/sky is basically a promotion place now.
I would have liked that to have moderated, but it's bluntly clear that the publishing houses can't change their spots
We are delighted to introduce our Postdoctoral researcher @jwsouthwell.bsky.social 🙌
#MeetTheTeam #chemistry #research #UZH
I am delighted to share our recent collaborative progress towards drug-like glycomimetics for lectins with @anneimb.bsky.social and Roche. Published in @angewandtechemie.bsky.social #ChemBio #Glycotime onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
We call these mechanism based sirtuin inhibitors SirTraps that trap the enzyme via this ADP ribose adduct onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... 2/
How can we study target engagement and selectivity of covalent inhibitors? Which electrophilic probes are best suited to study a certain amino acid?
Our study on "Profiling the proteome-wide selectivity of diverse electrophiles" is published in Nature Chemistry.(1/7)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Having a PhD means you can find the word “unfortunately” in an email faster that the search function
Congratulations Ronan!
I'm delighted to share that I have joined the School of Biological Sciences at @unisouthampton.bsky.social as Professor in Microbial Biofilms. I'm very excited about this next step in my academic journey and the opportunity to work more closely with all the great scientists at Southampton and
