Curated Frontline Science & Technology
This is a short post to announce the release of an R package, VolcanoPlotR. Background Using proteomics, we often want to compare two experimental groups. A popular way to visualise this comparison this is via a volcano plot, where the enrichment of proteins in one condition is towards the right .....
Can wellbeing economics can make a compelling case for governments to invest in prevention over mitigation? The post Prevention loses budget battles – wellbeing economics can change the maths first appeared on LSE Impact....
The English language has long sat at the top of a prestige hierarchy in academic publishing. Exploring the diversity of multilingual and non-English diamond open access publications, Johan Rooryck and … Continued The post If you want to publish papers in your own language, look to Diamond OA f...
Nature, Published online: 16 July 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02225-wCases have hit record levels, and scientists are racing to pinpoint where the Cyclospora parasite entered the food supply....
Brexit not only took the UK out of the political orbit of Europe, it also disrupted close research ties that existed with the continent. Using Brexit as a natural experiment, … Continued The post How Brexit repositioned UK global science first appeared on LSE Impact....
Nature, Published online: 15 July 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10895-9An ATPγS recycling strategy for practical biocatalytic thiophosphorylation...
Scientists say new technologies have reopened the debate over whether Mars could someday be terraformed, turning a once impossible idea into a serious research topic. Before anyone tries to reshape the Red Planet, though, researchers say we must understand the risks, including what might be lost if ...
Nature, Published online: 16 July 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02214-zAs automated tools accelerate both the discovery and the exploitation of software vulnerabilities, organizations must redesign their defences and workflows to keep pace....
Several popular sugar substitutes may not be as harmless as they seem. Adults who consumed the most artificial sweeteners showed substantially faster declines in memory and thinking, especially if they were under 60 or had diabetes. The highest intake was linked to cognitive aging roughly 1.6 years ...
Credibly Curious Nick Tierney's (mostly) rstats blog I recently gave a talk, The value in teaching is not the content it’s the teacher My main point in this is: Your course materials should be out th... Continue reading: How to Put your Course Book Online...
Today’s computers need safeguards against random energy fluctuations. Thermodynamic computers would put those fluctuations to use. The post Thermodynamic Computers Go With the (Energy) Flow first appeared on Quanta Magazine...
Modern societies rely on models, optimisation systems, and institutional frameworks to interpret complex problems. But how can you tell when technically rigorous systems present an overly narrow interpretation of the … Continued The post Information literacy needs to be more than fact checking...
Nature, Published online: 17 July 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02218-9Astronomers are deeply worried that a planned array of 50,000 mirror-bearing satellites in orbit will severely compromise telescopes....
Nature, Published online: 16 July 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02217-wResearchers used artificial intelligence to design functional CRISPR enzymes not seen in nature....
There’s been a lot of … stuff going on at my university lately (just Google “Australian National University” on the news setting and you’ll see what I mean). People are, to put it mildly, upset. So upset that they’ve taken to writing articles for and against said ...
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. What Anthropic’s latest AI discovery does—and doesn’t—show —James O’Donnell When Anthropic announced last week that it had found a new window in...
A study of 225 newborns suggests prenatal estrogen may have played a role in the evolution of larger human brains. Boys with finger-length patterns linked to higher estrogen exposure before birth tended to have larger head circumferences, which are strongly associated with brain size. The same conne...
Nature, Published online: 15 July 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10897-7Selectivity Emerges from Indiscriminate Photoreduction...
Research Professional News recently announced its impending closure, Adam Golberg considers what is lost when there is no-one to report the "research" news. The post The planned closure of Research Professional News is a loss for the sector first appeared on LSE Impact....
Instacart logo Ben Knight from Instacart has published a great write-up on how they use pyfixest “in production” for measuring the effects of marketplace experiments. For an open source developer, there is of course nothing more rewarding th... Continue reading: Instacart is running fixed effect ...
It feels as if it should be illegal to even think about heating appliances during the height of summer—seriously, these heat waves in New York have been brutal—but we need to talk about heat pumps. The appliances use electricity for heating, they’re incredibly efficient, and they’re on the rise. (Fo...
Author surveys show researchers regularly turn to generic “off the shelf” AI tools to aid with academic writing. Taking stock of this evidence, Akhilesh Ayer argues for a more careful … Continued The post Researchers need dedicated tools, not “off the shelf” AI first appeared on LSE Impact....
Every morning, airline dispatchers, grid operators, and farmers around the world make decisions based on the same thing: a weather forecast. While these forecasts are something that most people glance at for two seconds, weather predictions influence major strategic decisions in many industries, wit...
I recently gave a talk, The value in teaching is not the content it’s the teacher My main point in this is: Your course materials should be out there in public for free online. To help support this, this blog post goes through the technical det... Continue reading: How to Put your Course Book Onl...
Perimenopause has entered the chat. Perimenopause—and its better-known relative, menopause—used to be considered taboo. Not anymore, thanks at least in part to TV doctors and social media influencers. Perhaps it’s my age, but these days, both my algorithm and my conversations with friends increasing...
You can read the original post in its original format on Rtask website by ThinkR here: {golem} 1.0.0 is here After years of powering Shiny applications in production, {golem} — our opinionated framework for building production-grade Shiny apps as R packages — has finally reached a symbolic milestone...
Regulators expect insurance companies, banks, and others not to discriminate by race, but businesses are not allowed to collect the race of their customers. One solution for testing discrimination in the aggregate ... Continue reading: Testing racial predictions with BISG...
Before I start this post – a quick announcement. My business partner and pod cohost, Dr Jason Downs, is visiting the UK in late April. If you’d like to meet and chat with him about the products we have planned for On The Reg Team in 2026, shoot us an email to [email protected] w...
The middle is a hard place to be. The middle of a thesis or a book can be excruciating. Things are underway, but not finished. The end is in sight, but not yet reached. In the middle, it’s easy to lose faith in the direction you’re travelling. One of my PhD mentors, Dr Diane Mulcahy, ...continue rea...
Reposted from the original at https://blog.stephenturner.us/p/turn-new-data-into-quarto-reports-automaticallyThe {watcher} R package monitors your filesystem and run arbitrary code when files change. You can use this to automate things like creating pa... Continue reading: Repost: Automatically c...
An invisible difference in 10% of humans poses deep mysteries in several fields at once. The post Why Am I Left-Handed? first appeared on Quanta Magazine...
Seismic waves have revealed that the oceanic plate beneath the Ontong Java Plateau was dramatically transformed by the colossal volcanic activity that created it more than 100 million years ago. Researchers found a complex structure of horizontal layers cut through by vast swarms of vertical magma c...
So you’ve built your data pipeline, you’ve designed your dashboard and you’ve connected the two through a real app. The screenshots match the designs and you can show it off and wow the stakeholders. Ready to launch, right? Well, maybe. In this post we’ll cover five ... Continue reading: Five pre...
Nature, Published online: 17 July 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02264-3Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks....
Impact agendas are often framed as ways of highlighting and rewarding high quality work that reaches beyond academia. However, as Joaquín M. Azagra-Caro shows the exclusive pursuit of impact can … Continued The post Are high impact researchers less happy? first appeared on LSE Impact....
OpenAI has built an LLM super-hacker called GPT-Red that it uses as a sparring partner to help its other models boost their defenses against cyberattacks. Last week the company released the latest version of its flagship LLM, GPT-5.6. OpenAI says that training it against GPT-Red made the model its m...
Researchers thought that what enabled complex fluids to break apart was their elasticity. But a crack in a nonelastic simple fluid has them questioning that idea. The post We Know Simple Fluids Can Flow. Turns Out, Some Can Fracture. first appeared on Quanta Magazine...
A low-cost antidepressant may offer new hope for people struggling with long COVID fatigue. In a randomized clinical trial involving 399 adults, fluvoxamine significantly reduced fatigue and improved quality of life compared with a placebo, making it one of the first medications to show meaningful b...
A team of mathematicians used whimsical "silly sprinklers" to solve a physics mystery that has puzzled scientists for decades. Their experiments showed that the rotation of both normal and reverse sprinklers is driven by the momentum of flowing water, not by the outside water flow or other long-stan...
A major DNA study has rewritten the koala's evolutionary story, revealing that the species suffered a dramatic population collapse about 100,000 years ago, long before humans arrived in Australia. By calculating the koala's mutation rate for the first time and analyzing hundreds of genomes, research...
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. PsiQuantum has a plan to make a massive quantum computer out of light The machine that could change the world will be housed in a room that looks like...
Lately I’ve been hearing from pissed off PhD students – both people enrolled at my university and others. The cost of living is high, higher education in Australia is in crisis and people, understandably, want Out. Heaps of later stage students are landing nearly finished manuscripts on ...
For many years, this postcard was taped to my office door: It’s funny because it’s true. The machines really do talk about us behind our backs. Machines talking to machines helped me pay for the delicious cardamom buns I bought from the new branch of Under bakery this morning: OK, techni...
Longtime readers will know I have been working on a better understanding of neurodivergence (ND) and PhD study. I’ve just started my third year of this research work and feel more comfortable saying stuff about the topic. At the end of this post I will give you a research update, including the...
A new particle detector called PLATON could replace millions of tiny detector components with a single block of light-producing material. Using a light-field camera, highly sensitive photon sensors, and AI, it reconstructs particle paths in fast, detailed 3D. Simulations suggest it could match or su...
Nature, Published online: 17 July 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02193-1Electrodes that measure brain waves and more cannot be seen or felt....
Nature, Published online: 17 July 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02263-4Nature staff discuss the discovery of a four carbon ‘true sugar’ in interstellar space — plus, a formula inscribed on a wall reveals a Maya mathematician’s name....
Because it’s 2026, the best place to hang out and chat online these days is Linkedin (yes I know, everything is terrible). A week or so ago, I posted a little mini rant there about the humble em dash, complaining that it has become an AI ‘tell’ and that I was self censoring to avoi...
Astronomer David Kipping discusses why claims of extraterrestrial life keep dissolving under scrutiny, why we need a more statistically grounded approach to searching for life beyond Earth, and why it’s rational to believe that we may be alone. The post Will We Ever Find Alien Civilizati...
The biologist’s bold “energetic view of life” looks to the body’s strangest organelles as the link between cells, health, and mind and the foundation of our experience of being alive. The post Martin Picard’s Mitochondrial Theory of Mind first appeared on Quanta Magazine...
We are excited to introduce SummaryTables, a new module available in the jamovi library designed to provide an easy, flexible, and elegant way to create publication-ready analytical and summary tables. Powered by the gtsummary package in R, this module bridges the gap between running your analyses ...
A new review highlights exciting progress in atomically thin quantum materials where light and magnetism work together in ways never before possible. In these materials, light-generated excitons can interact directly with magnetic behavior, creating opportunities to control magnetic states using lig...
Nature, Published online: 16 July 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02226-9Republicans and Democrats worry about research theft and exploitation — but don’t agree on how to solve the problem....
Nature, Published online: 16 July 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01389-9The United Kingdom is gaining influence through its growing AI-safety ecosystem....
Nature, Published online: 16 July 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02089-0Human cells cultured in microgravity produced fewer mitochondrial proteins....
Undertaking doctoral research in India is changing and arguably becoming more difficult. Aanchal Seth and Isha Lakhanpuria outline how funding changes in favour of “technological interfaces” for the humanities and … Continued The post India’s doctoral ambitions outpace support for social scien...
A powerful new AI tool has uncovered what could be one of the biggest integrity problems in modern science. After analyzing 2.6 million cancer research papers published between 1999 and 2024, researchers identified more than 250,000 studies with writing patterns resembling papers suspected of being ...
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Anthropic—currently the world’s most valuable AI company, with a nearly $1 trillion valuation—has a reputation for publishing strange and heady research. It’s loo...
Humans are often described as the planet's ultimate "super-predator," but wild animals do not fear every human the same way. After analyzing three decades of research, scientists found that animals become much more alert and spend less time feeding when people pose a real threat, such as hunters or ...
Nature, Published online: 16 July 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02175-3Project on peer-review platform Pubpeer aims to make replication studies more visible....
Waking up in 2025 is weird. Take this morning as just one example. I open my eyes and immediately fumble for the phone, opening BlueSky and Threads to see what craziness has come out from the USA while I slept here in Australia. Reassuring myself that we are all still alive (well, some of us ...cont...
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Meet GPT-Red: an LLM super-hacker OpenAI built to make its models safer OpenAI has built an LLM super-hacker called GPT-Red that it uses as a sparring...
Nature, Published online: 17 July 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02200-5Astronomers have spotted helium escaping from LHS 1140b, an exoplanet orbiting in its star’s ‘habitable zone’....
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. There’s a lot of hype around perimenopause. Don’t buy it. Perimenopause used to be considered taboo, but not anymore. Thanks at least in part to TV do...
The machine that could change the world will be housed in a room that looks like a data center crossed with an ice cream factory. Inside will be some 100 stainless-steel cabinets, each about six feet tall and connected to a supply of liquid helium that keeps them only a few degrees above absolute ze...
A very short post today. During the global fuel crisis relating to the conflict in Iran, I have been monitoring this chart, every Thursday morning my time: It shows the amount of crude oil in the Cushing facility in Oklahoma and is one of the most t... Continue reading: Crude oil stocks at Cushin...
The way in which empire is taught in schools across the UK is a subject of national debate. Discussing a project designed to link academic research in economic history to … Continued The post Who teaches the teachers? How economic history can enhance teaching of the British Empire first appear...
Recently, some colleagues and I released a paper about the experiences of neurodivergent PhD students. It’s a systematic review of the literature to date, which is currently under review, but available via pre-print here. Doing this paper was an exercise in mixed feelings. It was an absolute j...
In my post at the end of last year, I opened the door to more guest posts. Prof Tania Crotti stepped through that door, offering this interesting and insightful post on an aspect of thesis examination you may not have thought about before. Here’s a bit about Tania before we start: Associate Pr...
JWST has captured unusually detailed images of gas feeding the supermassive black hole at the center of NGC 4696. A vast filament appears to funnel material into an 800-light-year-wide spinning disk, where gas races around at up to 600 kilometers per second. The findings suggest black holes may recy...
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a widely used measure of the prices of goods and services purchased by households. It’s the primary tool for tracking inflation and changes in the cost of living over time. The index is built from monthly price collections on a “basket” of goods ... Conti...
I started working on a deliberately tiny alternative to Shiny Continue reading: Tabler Server A minimal framework to create web dashboards in R...
Nature, Published online: 17 July 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02191-3Testicle sample removed from a ten-year-old before chemotherapy and frozen proves viable 16 years later....
The referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU was a watershed moment for research communication. Despite a near total academic consensus on the negative economic consequences of a vote … Continued The post Did Brexit make us better at communicating economics? first appeared on LSE Impact....
The U.S. Census Bureau publishes the rent that a typical household pays in every county in the country, updated every year, and gives it… Continue reading: Mapping U.S. Rents by County in R with tidycensus, sf and ggplot2...
A distant Sun-like star appears to have devoured one of its planets, leaving behind a surprising chemical fingerprint. Researchers found an unusually high concentration of lithium, a strong sign that planetary material was mixed into the star. Careful comparisons with dozens of similar stars confirm...
Getting Involved with rOpenSci I first came to rOpenSci in 2022, though at the time I barely knew what it was. I was getting a statistical package of mine ready to submit to the Journal of Statistical Software, and that is how I was pointed toward rO... Continue reading: From Peer Review to Mentorsh...
My last R posts: How conformalization helps weak models, fast conformal prediction with jackknife+ (and no refitting), and sklearn in R. Continue reading: My last R posts: How conformalization helps weak models, fast conformal prediction with jackknife+ (and no refitting), and sklearn in R...
A new experimental treatment may have found a way to outsmart glioblastoma’s toughest defense: the blood-brain barrier. Researchers used sugar-coated nanoparticles to ferry genetic instructions that restore a key tumor-suppressing protein directly into brain cancer cells. In mouse studies, the thera...
A catastrophic asteroid breakup may have triggered a huge wave of impacts across the inner solar system about 800 million years ago. The debris was launched from near a gravitational gateway controlled by Jupiter, sending fragments toward Earth, the Moon, and Mars. The bombardment may explain ancien...