Looking for ways to keep your excitement for science?! Come to the NYC Postdocs Night Science event September 24th! @kelseymonson.bsky.social will lead this one, so join her in Mount Sinai for a night science session to improve and practice your creative process! Free RSVP: forms.gle/ruTJHuzfLDiE...

Do you want to work with us in New York on the Night Science mission to change the culture of science? We will soon advertise an administrative position at NYU Langone Health, jointly with the Night Science Institute. If interested, you can already contact me with your CV.

PhD students: this is happening tomorrow so there is still time to sign up (already 90 participants registered!).

Itai Yanai@itaiyanai.bsky.social · 4w ago

Doing a PhD is - at heart - one long discussion with your mentor. The discussion changes over time - with unexpected turns and ups & downs - but through it all is two people discussing a topic endlessly to make sense of it. PhD students: choose someone you like to talk to.

Do you think you would have discovered a gorilla hiding in plain sight in your data? In our 2020 paper, we found that you're 3 times less likely to find it if you have a specific hypothesis. A hypothesis is a liability - keep looking for the gorilla in the data! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🔥Does academia stifle creativity? This new perspective argues that academia is currently structured to select against creativity, intellectual risk-taking and bold ideas. Young scientists – best positioned for new ideas – are particularly incentivized to play it safe. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Doing a PhD is - at heart - one long discussion with your mentor. The discussion changes over time - with unexpected turns and ups & downs - but through it all is two people discussing a topic endlessly to make sense of it. PhD students: choose someone you like to talk to.

Sad news. Yonath was/is a legend indeed. Now there are only 4 living female @nobelprize.org laureates in chemistry. There are 20 living Nobel Prize winners just at Stanford right now.

Itai Yanai@itaiyanai.bsky.social · 4w ago

Nobel Prize winner Ada Yonath sadly passed away today. She was a legend for her pioneering work on the structure of ribosomes.

Nobel Prize winner Ada Yonath sadly passed away today. She was a legend for her pioneering work on the structure of ribosomes.

Advice for new PhD students: choose a mentor who is committed to your training, not just your project. The most important product of your PhD - even more important than the science - is YOU, a newly trained scientist.

Thank you to everyone who made the first session of the #NightScienceScotland club a success! We had @itaiyanai.bsky.social introducing the concept of Night Science to us and then jumped onto our first lection on the use of language in creative processes - Night Science and Day Science language. 🌙☀️

Friends in Israel! I'm looking forward to giving a talk at the Weizmann on how cancer cell state transitions facilitate drug resistance according to developmental constraints.

We just sold out this one, but let us know where we should set up the next ‘train the trainer’ event for teaching the creative scientific process! night-science.org/train-the-tr...

How to do science in the age of AI.

The future of AI should not be determined by the dreams of a small group of technologists, but by democratic choices about the kind of society we wish to build. –Daron Acemoglu, Nobel Prize-winning MIT Professor

A.I. hallucinations can be remarkably useful. They are dreaming up riots of unrealities that help scientists track cancer, design drugs, invent medical devices, uncover weather phenomena and even win the Nobel Prize. Gift article: www.nytimes.com/2024/12/23/s...

How Hallucinatory A.I. Helps Science Dream Up Big Breakthroughs (Gift Article)

Hallucinations, a bane of popular A.I. programs, turn out to be a boon for venturesome scientists eager to push back the frontiers of human knowledge.

nytimes.com

There's a museum in Amsterdam called "Micropia" that's all about microbes. How cool 😎

Science at its best is organized chaos. We teach young scientists how to be organized and robust, but not the night science creativity that’s needed for discovery. Come train with us in how to teach the tools of the creative scientific process in our EMBO train the trainer event.

🔥The NIH has funded our R25 grant to bring Night Science training to all 40,000 US postdoctoral fellows! It all started with discussions at the Radcliffe Summit we organized 2 years ago at Harvard where the question was how bring creativity training into the sciences.

If you’re letting AI do a review of a manuscript for you, just know that (A) it’s super obvious to anyone reading it, (B) it’s dishonest - as you’re explicitly instructed not to do so, and (C) it’s careless - because you’re uploading someone’s confidential material to an AI app.

Night Science sessions are popping up everywhere! Contact me for support in setting one up in your area. Our NYC club has been going strong for nearly two years with so many amazing sessions!

How would you let the LLM dream? [...] In a sense, to replay things, organize them, think about them so that tomorrow when we wake up, our thoughts are more organized than just input-output-input-output. –Jure Leskovec, Stanford Professor

🔥A new episode comes out today! We talk with Stanford professor Jure Leskovec about how AI dreams up new science.

There is where I disagree with Professor Bill Martin: "If you follow the data, then you've completely lost control... you're putting the data where your mind should be. For me, the scientific process is one of questions.. But if you go into data driven science... seek and you shall find."

I actually don't mind being wrong.. we said this is what's happening on the Millennium Bridge.. what we proposed doesn't work. But it was interesting. We really did stick our neck out and unfortunately got our head chopped off. –Steven Strogatz, Cornell Professor @stevenstrogatz.com

I said to my PI, I want to go do my postdoc, will you write a letter for me. And he wrote in my letter that I wasn't very creative .. I finally met with Magda and she told me she saw straight through the letter. –Samantha Morris, Harvard Professor

Science funding has still not reached gender equality: "Projects led by male PIs received roughly twice the mean funding compared to female PIs." www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

There is a big misunderstanding about “the linear model” – the notion that there is a pipeline in science that goes from research to development – in the White House's report "Science A New Golden Age".

Creativity is ultimately rooted in the individual –Ruth Lehmann, Director of the Whitehead Institute, MIT

Science would be more trustworthy in the public eye if scientists were more open about the creative process behind scientific discovery. – Tom McLeish, on the Night Science Podcast, episode 10

I'm excited to be featured on one of my favorite podcasts!! I binged @nightsciencepod.bsky.social during my PhD. Listen to this episode to hear about how the crop rotation system can be applied to the scientific creative process. And learn about our beloved Stentor in Every School program!

The Night Science Podcast@nightsciencepod.bsky.social · 3mo ago

🔥New Night Science Podcast episode! We talked with PhD students & postdocs about finding ideas in art museums, making sketches, transferring concepts, going to unrelated seminars, swimming, hiking, talking in pubs and letting ideas lie fallow like in a crop rotation system.