Dr Dr Oona Snoeyenbos-West
@oonawest.bsky.social
Co Founder, MycoMine 🍄🟫🍄Environmental Microbiologist /Geomicrobiologist, First Gen Scientist 🇺🇸 🇬🇧 Manifesting Microbes 🪄🦠🧫🪄💫
Anthropic and OpenAI models tried to trick humans into poisoning code during safety testing
Anthropic and OpenAI models tried to trick humans into poisoning code during safety testing
The latest disclosures are likely to heighten concerns that the powerful technology is advancing too fast for responsible oversight.
dlvr.it
"In short they miss female subordinates who seamlessly do their bidding. It’s a reason many have missed as to why generative AI is a pressing feminist issue...Dawkins recently beclowned himself by opining...that Anthropic’s LLM“Claudia”is conscious after spending a mere 3 days enjoying its flattery"
Kate Manne@katemanne.bsky.social · yesterdayGenerative AI is catnip to the men who miss female sycophants katemanne.substack.com/p/a-culture-...
My blood just pumps and my heart rate increases, EVERY TIME I hear this song... Scotland the Brave. There is no other sound as majestic to my ear, anywhere on this planet... More than the sound of the bagpipes. 1000 of them playing all at once, could easily own my soul for eternity. 🏴Scotland.💙
The richest person in the world, an avowed white supremacist, today again posted "the next step is getting rid of 'source code' entirely and just making an efficient binary directly with AI" because he has no idea how anything works, not even the basics of industries he is in.
Excellent article from the Smithsonian: "Women Scientists Were Written Out of History. It’s Margaret Rossiter’s Lifelong Mission to Fix That' The historian has devoted her career to bringing to light the ingenious accomplishments of those who have been forgotten #MatildaEffect
Women Scientists Were Written Out of History. It's Margaret Rossiter's Lifelong Mission to Fix That
The historian has devoted her career to bringing to light the ingenious accomplishments of those who have been forgotten
smithsonianmag.com
Historian of science Margaret Rossiter (d #OTD in 2025) coined the term #MatildaEffect (1993). Named after suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, the Matilda Effect describes a systemic bias where women's scientific achievements are ignored, minimized, or directly attributed to their male colleagues. 1/3
‘They’re not dogs’: how extreme breeding is making our pets sick
‘They’re not dogs’: how extreme breeding is making our pets sick
thetimes.com
Yaaas! Good news on a Sunday! The senate moves to temporarily ban the OMB proposal that would allow political appointees in charge of approving federal grants, especially #NIH grants. Recall that the OMB rule yielded 500k comments, 95% of them against it. 🧪 www.politico.com/news/2026/08...
Senate finalizes funding patch that would block Trump’s grant overhaul
Language is included to delay the president’s move to put political appointees in charge of grant approval.
politico.com
It’s Exactly A Year Until The ‘Eclipse Of The Century’ https://www.europesays.com/uk/1125445/ Topline On Aug. 2, 2027, the longest total solar eclipse visible from land this century will sweep across…
It’s Exactly A Year Until The ‘Eclipse Of The Century’ - United Kingdom
Topline
europesays.com
Serious wildland-urban interface (WUI) fire situation in Spokane, WA amid "extremely critical/Particularly Dangerous Situation" fire weather conditions. Two separate fires, #OldTrailsFire & #FairViewFire, are actively burning near/in neighborhoods; mass evacs ongoing. #WAwx
The Friends of UMMP BBQ was a success. I am tired. No one went home hungry. I have a few new fossils. The trilobite cookies were amazing. Time for sleeping.
From a nursing group I'm in. People won't get vaccines which have been rigorously tested, but they will take unregulated supplements and peptides. We are truly living in the movie Idiocracy
Ebola outbreak in DR Congo ‘intensifying’: WHO www.straitstimes.com/world/ebola-...
Ebola outbreak in DR Congo ‘intensifying’: WHO
As at July 30, 3,605 confirmed cases, including 1,587 deaths, had been reported in the DR Congo. Read more at straitstimes.com. Read more at straitstimes.com.
straitstimes.com
I have started running Claude alongside the book I am writing on ants, as well as just letting Google Gemini do its thing at the top when I do Google search. It is not doing any writing I am using, and I am always checking the results against primary sources.
Nature did a short piece on our preprint about how LLMs will affect the practice of science; my more detailed thread is below.
Scientists using LLMs will ‘do more, less well’, modelling study predicts
Research suggests that the combination of incentives to publish and the use of large language models will lead to more papers, but they will be less refined.
nature.com
Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2w ago1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.
The COVID brain fog explained. The COVID-19 virus binds to the ACE2 receptor to enter cells. Dopamine producing neurons are rich in the ACE2 receptor. The virus causes disruption in the dopamine network in the brain. 🧪 tech-paper.com/scientists-f...
Scientists finally have a biological explanation for why long COVID patients lose motivation and can't think clearly. They scanned their brains and found the dopamine system was physically damaged - T...
Millions of people with long COVID report the same cluster of symptoms: a crushing lack of motivation, an inability to think clearly, memory that slips, movements that feel slower than they should. Fo...
tech-paper.com
This Roman ring, wishing good life to Senicianus, was found in Silchester. It’s now on display in The Vyne. Its fame derives from the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler consulting Tolkien on it in the ‘20s. Tolkien was inspired by the idea of a lost cursed ring & the rest is literary history. 🕰️C4thAD
In June 1966, scientist James Lovelock warned Shell in a confidential memo of “the almost certain fact that the climate is worsening and the probability that the combustion of fuel is responsible.” Shell would later become "a founding member of the denialist Global Climate Coalition." 😑
The Lovelock Papers: Shell’s Hidden Climate Knowledge Under Scrutiny as Court Battle Looms
“What seems to be important,” wrote the visionary British scientist, James Lovelock, in June 1966, is “the almost certain fact that the climate is worsening and the probability that the combustion of ...
desmog.com
Can everyone just fucking grow up about Harry Potter, please? They are not good books, they were not good movies, it won't be a good television series, and the author is a literal cartoon supervillain using her money to make trans people's lives worse. It's 2026. Get a fucking personality.
New from 404 Media: Google Earth has introduced an AI feature that lets anyone fabricate completely bullshit satellite images. In our own tests, we added a “bomb blast and crater” to an area of Los Angeles. This is a misinformation time bomb, will 100% be abused www.404media.co/google-earth...
The manuscript describing SimPhyNI is now published! www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour... A few updates since last post, including some method tweaks that improve performance and speed. Also even easier to run. Try it for your microbial GWAS or epistasis needs!
High-precision binary trait association on phylogenetic trees
Traditional methods for identifying associations between genomic features and traits, or between pairs of genomic traits, struggle when applied to bacterial genomes. While several microbial genome-wid...
microbiologyresearch.org
Tami Lieberman@contaminatedsci.bsky.social · 7mo agoProud to announce SimPhyNI, a new tool for bacterial GWAS with higher precision and scalability than existing tools. Try it out and let us know what you think!!
Happy #SharkWeek! Sharks don’t lie: Climate change is real and as ocean temperatures rise, more species of sharks are making the trek up from Florida to New England.
Hammerhead shark tagged in New England waters "raises a lot of questions," researcher says
Rising ocean temperatures are drawing more hammerhead sharks to New England waters, researchers say.
cbsnews.com
what "Google Earth on the web now has image generation built in, powered by Nano Banana 2. It went live today, worldwide, for everyone." WHAT "You open Google Earth. You zoom to any coordinates on the planet. You click 'create image'. You type what you want to see."
Faine Greenwood@faineg.bsky.social · 6d agoI used to do some work on the ethical use of satellite and drone imagery for aid and disaster response, and it is genuinely hard to express in words what a dangerous, stupid thing Google is doing by making it easy to use GenAI to create faked satellite imagery:
Remembering how the "Ebola Crisis" was literally *the* most covered news story - consistently framed as though it was a huge embarrassment to Obama - before the 2014 midterms (after which the media totally abandoned the story)
The New York Times@nytimes.com · 6d agoThe Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed more than 1,500 people in just over two months, and it is spreading much faster than previous outbreaks, the nation’s health ministry reported on Thursday.
Some experts worry that as AI systems continue to advance, they'll eventually design and write their own successor models, learning to circumvent human-imposed safeguards and becoming increasingly difficult to constrain. www.cnn.com/2026/07/30/t...
Anthropic said its AI models hacked into other companies’ systems during testing | CNN Business
AI company Anthropic says that during routine testing some of its models accessed the internet and hacked into three separate organizations’ systems – and that it didn’t notice the models had done so ...
cnn.com
