2. But Anthropic researchers say they see patterns that suggest that Claude can. The employees at Anthropic are telling themselves stories based on the words they input into the software and the words that come back out. >>

„Liability is a powerful incentive to behave responsibly. It speaks to corporations in a language they understand: Money. Artificial intelligence is an industry in need of incentives to behave responsibly, to judge by the litany of transgressions […] in recent months.“ #giftlink

Opinion | Hold A.I. Companies Liable (Gift Article)

A.I. companies must operate under our laws.

nytimes.com

I'm delighted to kick off a new project from the @nytimes.com science desk called Unknowns. My contribution is an essay on the consciousness of babies. Gift link: nyti.ms/4jDfXLU

Are Babies Conscious? (Gift Article)

By pinpointing when it begins in young humans, scientists hope to better understand what consciousness is, and how it arises, in all of us.

nyti.ms

Postdoc position available in my group to work on ERC funded project on evolutionary biology of antibiotic resistance. Looking for someone with expertise in bacterial genetics, AMR, and evolutionary biology. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DSZ416/p...

Postdoctoral Research Associate at University of Oxford

Explore an exciting academic career as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. Don't miss out on other academic jobs. Click to apply and explore more opportunities.

jobs.ac.uk

This is spectacular: kudos to whoever did it meridian-ai.info

Thoughts and prayers for research data managers everywhere. You are not alone. We will get through this together techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/excelbl...

Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell | Microsoft Community Hub

Lists, arrays in cells, and nested arrays introduce new ways to store and organize related information, helping you keep data together without sacrificing...

techcommunity.microsoft.com

"In a leaked document, the Irish Presidency proposes to EU Member States that the interest of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and SpaceX to make profits should take precedence over the fundamental right to data protection" noyb.eu/en/ai-eu-mem...

AI: EU Member States plan “digital expropriation” of Europeans in the interest of AI companies

In a leaked document, the Irish Presidency proposes to EU Member States that the interest of AI companies to make profits should take precedence over the fundamental rights of Europeans.

noyb.eu

if you are reviewing an unpublished manuscript and you have the sheer unmitigated audacity, cheek, gall and laziness to upload it into an LLM to generate a review, let me tell you, you should be shunned and tarred and feathered

Let me get this straight. There's a title. There's a commentary article. There's an abstract. There's a set of bullet point highlights. There's a graphical abstract. AND YOU STILL THINK I NEED YOUR AI AGENT TO SUMMARIZE THE ARTICLE FOR ME?

💡 Out now in Nature Reviews Genetics! Genomic insights into natural selection in recent human history go.nature.com/3T3JKT5 #Review by @pontus-skoglund.bsky.social & @iainmathieson.bsky.social Free to read here: rdcu.be/MgjB7Jgsy2Fa

www.the-scientist.com/wellcome-s-5...

Wellcome’s $50M Microbiome-Autism Project Gets a Serious Gut Check | The Scientist

A massive research program investigating causal links between the gut microbiome and autism sparked fierce pushback from scientific critics and advocacy groups.

the-scientist.com

This will be an amazing opportunity for the right person. The Department of Veterinary Medicine in Cambridge is recruiting for an established chair who will also be our Head of Department. Your research can be in any area of veterinary science. Please circulate. www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/profess...

Scientist here: It is widely known inside science that this—top-down imposition of a research agenda—leads to mostly rote, boring, non-innovative work. Building an institute to do discovery science is hard: you hire young people, put them together, hope synergies arise and ideas fall out.

Jeffrey Mervis@policyhound.bsky.social · 4w ago

A deep dive into the memo that marks the end of how NSF has done business for 76 years www.science.org/content/arti...

Interested in using genomics, big data and AI to tackle future pandemic threats? The @cvrinfo.bsky.social is recruiting two PhD students through the DETECTIVE Doctoral Network 🦠🕵️‍♂️ shorturl.at/iLrfP

An abandoned quarry in southwestern China has given scientists an unprecedented glimpse into the lives and abilities of the mysterious ancient humans called Denisovans go.nature.com/4duLDza

Who were the Denisovans? Rich trove of fossils and tools paints new picture

Nature - Objects found in a cave in southwestern China suggest that these enigmatic ancient humans were accomplished hunters.

go.nature.com

Question for virologists: Does anyone sample bat respiratory tracts for viruses? Seemingly all the coronavirus samples from bats are intestinal/fecal/abdominal cavity, etc. Genbank search for BetaCoV bat samples > 2000 nt show only 1 respiratory sample. All others unlabeled or else feces/GI tract.

Did you know that the cells of old animals contain much less mRNA than the cells of young ones? Let me share with you some results from an ongoing project in the lab, where we are finding that a progressive depletion of total mRNA abundance is a crucial part of aging 1/22

The current NIH director is a grievance-driven weasel, a sycophant so desperately out of his league that he lacks even the most basic of bureaucratic reflex arcs: the impulse to protect if not expand his own domain.

Harmit Singh Malik@harmitmalik.bsky.social · last mo.

The current NIH Director’s animus against NIAID to sign away much needed research funds so we can continue bombing another country is… a staggering betrayal of Congressional intentions and authority. Not surprising but still staggering.

🚨 The NIH is moving to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars in infectious-disease research projects to the DOD under a secret 10-year pact. Here’s what’s happening inside “Operation Prevailing Edge” 🧵👇 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Revealed: inside the US military's plan to tap huge sums from the NIH

An agreement paves the way for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of projects to be transferred from the NIH’s institute for infectious diseases to the Department of Defense.

nature.com

eupha.org/articles/in-... Such an admiral individual. Time and wisdom for everyone. I was fortunate to have worked with him briefly. RIP.

EUPHA - In Memoriam: Prof. Anthony Staines, a public health leader for the people we serve

eupha.org

I'm really frustrated by the constant fear-mongering about AI-designed superviruses. Can we focus on the things that should actually worry us, such as measles? blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/im-sorry-y...

I'm sorry, you're not going to die from an AI-engineered supervirus

God save us from economists who think they can competently talk about biology

blog.genesmindsmachines.com

I see this as essentially accepting the ethical logic of hereditarianism, and a variant of Hume's 'is-ought' problem. As it happens, most hereditarian claims about biology fall into the category of 'not even wrong', being founded on misconceptions about genetics that date back many decades.

Doctors say that measles can kill young children. A guy who snorts cocaine off toilet seats and drives around with dead bear cubs in his car says they'll be fine as long as they eat enough beef tallow. For busy parents, it can be hard to know who to trust.

A massive update: At least ~15 companies~ are selling scientists antibodies using faked validation data. We've documented 18,000+ manipulated images on 17,000+ products sold by leading laboratory suppliers including Thermo Fisher, Abcam, Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Millipore Sigma and Bio-Techne. 1/🧵

My new book, Phylogenetic Biology, is now published. Available online for free at dunnlab.org/phylogenetic... . Physical copies can be purchased at shop.lightningsource.com/b/085?params... or your favorite bookstore.

4) It's cowardly virtue signalling (I phrase I loathe): so few are willing to address the inherent bastardisiation of scholarly principles that allows cosplayers like Cofnas as scholars in the first place. 5) Cofnas' work is crap, and should never have been granted scholarly credibility.

Things that are simultaneously true: 1) Academic freedom is sacrosanct 2) The reasons given for Cofnas' suspensions are spurious 3) Academics love signing petitions 1/n

Denisovan leg bones from Taiwan reveal large body size🏺🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Shows Denisovan population at northern circle had larger body size than earlier H. erectus and Late Pleistocene H. sapiens in east Asia Study also suggests large Denisovan brain resulted partly from body size

Both the Economist and others suggest this study demonstrates that AI can help students. So I contacted the lead researcher to figure out how many. Answer: Out of ~26,000 kids, a total of 20. And five months after starting to use AI, only four continued to spend 65 minutes on homework. Four.

Benjamin Riley@benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I mean, c'mon. What this data shows is (a) there's a huge number of students using AI and not studying for very long compared to peers; and (b) negligible "benefits" for students who did study for comparable time periods and used AI.

I‘m far from an AI doomer, but it is amazing how many serious voices — on LinkedIn, no less! — are sharing stories about how AI slop is quickly becoming one of the top problems they see in academic writing and research “AI will 10x our research!” doesn’t seem to be surviving encounters with reality