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John O’Donoghue

@drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social

3.2K followers 1.7K following 220 posts

Chemistry Educator, Researcher & Author at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) | RSC Education Coordinator | New book out now: Onscreen Chemistry https://books.rsc.org/books/monograph/2272/Onscreen-ChemistryThe-Portrayal-of-Chemical | Views my own

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · Feb 6

In advance of my book release next week, here is an article I did for @chemistryworld.com about the image of “mad scientists”… I’m particularly proud of the article title 🤣 expect many more puns in the book #ChemSky #SciComm www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/expl...

Exploring the on-screen image of chemists

From Frankenstein to Breaking Bad and beyond

www.chemistryworld.com

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Reposted by John O’Donoghue

C&EN (Chemical & Engineering News) @cenmag.bsky.social · 12h

The 2025 #NobelPrize in Chemistry has been awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi “for the development of metal–organic frameworks.” Stay tuned for the full story to come! cen.acs.org/people/nobel...

#ChemNobel #Chem #Chemistry #chemsky 🧪

The 2025 chemistry Nobel goes to MOFs

Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi win the prize for developing metal–organic frameworks

cen.acs.org

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Reposted by John O’Donoghue

Prof Sam Illingworth @samillingworth.com · 7d

UPEN (the Universities Policy Engagement Network) just published my piece on Slow AI.

Encouraging to see academics & policymakers valuing reflection over speed.

upen.ac.uk/resources/th...

How do you pause with AI?

#GenAI #AI #SlowAI #SciComm #Policy

The Case for Slow AI in Academic and Policy Engagement – UPEN

upen.ac.uk

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 7d

A great round up the issues in academic publishing, particularly the metrics. I feel AI is also highlighting these issues since many AI models have been inadvertently trained on retracted papers. Goodhart's law states: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." #Research

Betty C. Jung @bettycjung.bsky.social · 7d

Citation cartels, ghost writing and fake peer-review: Fraud is causing a crisis in science — here's what we need to do to stop it www.livescience.com/human-behavi... @elisabethbik.bsky.social

Citation cartels, ghost writing and fake peer-review: Fraud is causing a crisis in science — here's what we need to do to stop it

Thousands of scientific papers are retracted every year because of fraudulent activity, with both authors and journals gaming a system to gain academic acclaim through deceit, dishonesty and false rep...

www.livescience.com

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Reposted by John O’Donoghue

Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 14d

'In a preprint posted on medRxiv on 12 September1, researchers identified more than 400 such papers published in 112 journals over the past 4.5 years'.

Link to preprint: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Journals infiltrated with ‘copycat’ papers that can be written by AI

Tools such as ChatGPT can be used to generate almost-identical research papers that pass standard plagiarism checks. Hundreds are thought to have been published.

www.nature.com

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 14d

There’s already a name for it which is a play on the original use of “MAD”… Model Autophagy Disorder (MAD) arxiv.org/abs/2307.01850

Self-Consuming Generative Models Go MAD

Seismic advances in generative AI algorithms for imagery, text, and other data types has led to the temptation to use synthetic data to train next-generation models. Repeating this process creates an ...

arxiv.org

John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 15d

You couldn’t make it up! 🤣

Kevin Gannon (now a Moo Deng fan account) @thetattooedprof.bsky.social · 15d

Lmaooooooo

Education report calling for ethical AI use contains over 15 fake sources

Experts find fake sources in Canadian government report that took 18 months to complete.

arstechnica.com

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Reposted by John O’Donoghue

Neil Lewis, Jr. @neillewisjr.bsky.social · Dec 27

I've shared this quote before but I'll share it again, as it's one I've been thinking about a lot as I've watched how our oligarchs have been behaving over the past few months.

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.” Enough. I was stunned by the simple eloquence of that word—stunned for two reasons: first, because I have been given so much in my own life and, second, because Joseph Heller couldn’t have been more accurate. For a critical element of our society, including many of the wealthiest and most powerful among us, there seems to be no limit today on what enough entails.

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Reposted by John O’Donoghue

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 17d

Getting close to 50k views and I'm wondering is it just everybody is scared to say this and pleased I did? Because if there's so many of us who agree, trust me I'd know if 1k people disagreed with me let alone 50k, why are we letting AI ruin our universities?

Together we can turn back the tide.

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Reposted by John O’Donoghue

Irish Examiner @irishexaminer.bsky.social · 23d

Why OpenAI’s solution to AI hallucinations would kill ChatGPT tomorrow

Hallucination is built in — if ChatGPT no longer provides definite answers, people will stop using it

dlvr.it

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Reposted by John O’Donoghue

Evan Spotte-Smith (they/them) @ewcspottesmith.bsky.social · 27d

Spot on, and so glad @cenmag.bsky.social published this piece. I consider myself extremely lucky — in my PhD, I was well resourced, had a lot of freedom, and I worked in a mostly positive group culture. Still, I was horribly overworked and had severe mental health struggles. #AcademicSky ⚗️ 🧪 (1/4)

C&EN (Chemical & Engineering News) @cenmag.bsky.social · 28d

The scientific community must value mentorship, enforce accountability, and make graduate students’ well-being central. cen.acs.org/education/Op... #chemsky 🧪

Opinion: Exploitation persists in academic science—here’s what we can do

The scientific community must value mentorship, enforce accountability, and make graduate students’ well-being central

cen.acs.org

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 28d

Absolutely - but my main issue is what the cold spots implies when used without context…. “If only a uni closer to them did the course they wanted, they would do it”… it ignores the institutional, class and generational barriers to higher Ed & certain subjects. Accessibility is not just geography

John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 28d

So even though there is a great chemistry course only 30mins from me, it’s completely inaccessible without a car. So the only realistic option for a student from a low-income background is the 4 hour daily commute on the bus to Dublin…

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 28d

Basically it doesn’t matter where you live or how far, but are the supports in place to make it accessible? I live 30mins drive from a Uni, but there’s no public transport options there from where I live (i.e. you need a car), yet there is a regular bus option to all the Dublin universities (2hrs!)

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 28d

Closures are terrible and accessibility to courses are affected and should be highlighted - but I’m not sure if “commutable distance” is a great way of highlighting this when many people commute long distances already. Feels like a bit like an ivory tower way of looking at it

John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 28d

Oh thank you, the @rsc.org have also used the term “cold spots” and I was curious if it’s a term that has been defined or not. I guess “commutable distance” can be very subjective

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · 28d

This is now the second use of the term “cold spots” I’ve seen in relation to commuting to university in the UK. What is the definition of a cold spot? Is it time or distance based? Either way, we have freezing spots in Ireland! 🤣 we have students & staff commuting across the entire country #HigherEd

Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 28d

Hot off the press, the British Academy's Cold Spots: Mapping Inequality in SHAPE Provision in UK Higher Education report. Read it if you care about universities or access to the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences for the rising generation. 1/5

Cold spots: Mapping inequality in SHAPE provision in UK higher education

This British Academy report reveals that many parts of the UK are becoming subject cold spots – areas with no provision in a subject within a commutable distance. These are often in rural, coastal or ...

www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · Sep 2

This is spectacular 👏

Mike Dickison @adzebill.bsky.social · Aug 31

Wikipedia editors trying to fend off the onslaught of AI crap have crowdsourced some telltale signs of LLM-generated writing; it might be handy for editors and proofreaders generally. Thanks to @ellenrykers.com for pointing me to it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · Aug 31

We presented two posters, one about the public engagement aspect of our hugely successful @researchireland.ie Discover project (Current Chemistry Investigators) and the other about our training programme for our PhD’s at Trinity #Vicephec25 #SciComm #ChemEd #ChemEPE #ChemSky

John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · Aug 31

After presenting the feedback from our project at the Variety in Chem Ed & Physics HigherEd conference in Liverpool this week, we’ve collected a LOT more at @dublinmaker.bsky.social! Our research ambassadors are engaging with hundreds, while I cut up fliers #DublinMaker #VicePhec25 #ChemEd #SciComm

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · Aug 26

This is one of the origins of the term “green room”. It may also be due to the huge popularity of green wallpaper & paint in the early 19th century following Carl Wilhelm Scheele's invention of copper arsenite green in 1775, which was removed a century later due to toxicity! #History #stage

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · Aug 26

A lens was used to concentrate the light from the flame into a beam to illuminate the performers. This is the origin of the phrase “in the limelight”. The resulting intense light had a slight green hue, and it is claimed that a room painted green would allow the actors to adjust their eyes #theatre

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · Aug 26

His limelight consisted of a cylinder of calcium oxide onto which an oxyhydrogen flame was directed. Calcium oxide is obtained by calcining calcium carbonate from seashells or limestone and is better known as “lime” - commonly used in agriculture for increasing soil pH #Science #ScienceSky

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · Aug 26

I was just reminded of an interesting “chemistry from theatre” nugget. Before electric lighting, candles were the only way to light up theatres and stage shows. Then, in 1816, Thomas Drummond invented the “limelight”, which he originally designed for lighthouses #Chemistry #Thread #ChemSky

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John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · Aug 23

I removed the comment about colonialism because I felt it was a little harsh - but after reading Douglas Murray’s article, I’m amazed that many in the UK still can’t see the colonised perspective. Nobody can annoy the privileged parts of UK society like the Irish 🤣

John O’Donoghue @drjohnodonoghue.bsky.social · Aug 23

“All we need now is for Starmer to take a dislike to The 2 Johnnies, and he’ll have alienated every different genre of Irish person between the ages of 25 and 35” 🤣

Carl Kinsella @carlkinsella.bsky.social · Aug 23

“You can’t simply proscribe Sally Rooney and be done with it. You can’t reach into the London Underground and pull her books out of the hands of commuters who want to live vicariously and cathartically through her throuples and hunks on the verge of tears.”

This week’s Surrealing.

Surrealing in the Years: Starmer has chosen the wrong opponent in Sally Rooney

The Irish author will make mincemeat of the UK’s prime minister should it come to that.

jrnl.ie

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