This is what the internet is for: UK novelty hot cross buns tested. There are two good ones at the end, but otherwise the vibe is "disgusting" with a hint of "WHY?"

There's a glorious story of the first computationally designed personal mRNA cancer vaccine for a dog. A civilian with no cancer or biology training—but with AI experience—used LLMs to plan and help design a cancer vaccine for his dog. Come on! This is wonderful. It's doubly wonderful because of his persistence and the...

The Guardian report on Biobank data being leaked onto GitHub is either no big deal or a massive screw-up, depending on your point of view. Either way, what I do is have a global gitignore file naming folders for confidential information. I put anything sensitive in there. If I want to push to Git, I have to try really,...

With long-running jobs I want my laptop to stay awake until the job finishes: $ time caffeinate script-name-here When the script finishes, caffeinate will finish, and the laptop will eventually go to sleep. * * * I use #reference for commands and knowledge I keep having to look up!

Reading: Are AI Tools Ready to Answer Patients’ Questions About Their Medical Care?, JAMA, 6 March 2026. OpenAI says that ChatGPT Health is built “to guide patients to health care professionals for diagnosis and treatment.” Unfortunately it currently under-triages emergency conditions and over-triages non-emergency...

Jane pointed this out to me the other day, and she's right. They have huge feet.  But do they really, and can we check? There's the AVONET data set from Imperial with body measurements for all 11,000 bird species. That has the weight of birds in it, and I suppose we'd expect foot length to increase with mass, so perhaps...

Reading: Climate change is speeding up — the pace nearly doubled in ten years, Nature, 6 March 2026. Why? This is mainly because of a reduction in air pollution following the introduction of fuel regulations for international shipping (which has resulted in fewer pollutant particles that reflect sunlight into space and...

From the first appearance of LLMs, the psychology and behaviour community has asked: "Can I use this tech to replace human subjects?" It's now taken off in market research. There are lots of companies doing this, and I suspect that’s partly because it's not that hard in principle. The intuition is that LLMs, by...

Reading: Cold and expensive v hot, cheap and eco-friendly: the contrasting histories of home heating in the UK and Sweden, The Conversation, 16 February 2026. A longish read, describing the 1940s fork in the path that took Sweden and the UK in different directions for heating homes.  Post-war in the UK, the focus was on...

I flew from Gatwick to Edinburgh for a friend's wedding, and had Skyscanner tracking ticket prices for me. It continued to do so long after I bought tickets, but I figured it'd be fun to extract the emails and plot the change in price over time. It did what you probably expected: bobbled along until close to the date....

It was some years ago, our veg box, unannounced, included a poster. We loved it—a beautiful thing, with science and nature—so put it in a frame and hung it: I've only just gone and looked up the artist, Adele Scantlebury. What we seem to have is an A3-version of "Soil Cycle". We're very lucky to have it. What has jolted...

You might not guess it from the title, but Philip Ball's article on "The tech lords’ quest for eternal life" is a balanced take on the science of ageing.  There are interesting experiments in the field, but there's also quackery: What tends to happen instead [of clinical trials], however, is that, at the slightest hint...

I have a handful of static websites which have been living on AWS. They're there because they are too big for GitHub Pages.  But AWS is a slog for this, and I was looking around for alternatives. My criteria: it must be easy.  I was pointed towards bunny.net which is working well. As an increasingly important bonus,...