✊ Solidarity with University of Edinburgh staff taking action for better conditions, and with everyone organising, supporting each other and refusing to be divided.
Video
I am at SOM 2026 - Soil organic matter symposium in São Paulo, Brazil. This is my fourth SOM meeting and I still feel like an imposter soil scientist.
Kate Nevens (she/her)
Q: How do you get "growth" without innovation, and how do you get innovation without funding public research?
A: You don't. The UK has the worst public funding for uni + skills in the OECD, pay for starting lecturers down 25% since 2010, and that's why we are losing to countries abroad.
I'm happy to share the first pre-print of out Lab! 🎉
Introducing ArchaeaHQ
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
We curated 21,644 genomes across all 4 archaeal kingdoms to bridge the gap in public datasets for computational biology
What is inside ArchaeaHQ... (1/2)
Really useful paper explaining why richness/diversity metrics are rarely informative when applied to microbial community sequencing data: enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Ashish Malik
We ran a fantastic campaign! A record number of parliamentarians elected including 4 from Edinburgh. 💚
We did it! Look at that swing. First constituency win in Scottish Parliament for the @scottishgreens.org 💚
Polling station duty and get out to vote campaign. So much green enthusiasm. 🤞🏾💚
What happens to Arctic soils when they thaw? ❄️🦠🔬
We thawed frozen Svalbard soils & identified which microbes grew following thaw. Our results highlight how dormancy, predation & seasonality shape carbon cycling in thawing Arctic soils
@microbemac.bsky.social #ERC_SIESTA
tinyurl.com/4sawn2dj
Ashish Malik
If anyone in government has a few minutes to run the country in between plotting leadership challenges, could they please cast their eye over the devastation of Higher Education in the UK.
www.theguardian.com/education/20...
Microorganisms play key roles in transforming soil carbon into greenhouse gases. As
Arctic soils warm as a result of climate change, greater depths and expanses of permanently
frozen soil are experien...
Breaking: Government set to cut strategic priorities grant.
The government is on the cusp of cutting public funding for higher education teaching, the head of Universities UK has told MPs, placing institutions under even more financial pressure.
www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...
Marker-gene microbiome surveys systematically under-sample rare taxa, causing alpha diversity metrics to reflect dominance rather than true richness. This conceptual mismatch can lead to misleading e...
