Curated Frontline Science & Technology
There’s a fault line running through enterprise AI, and it’s not the one getting the most attention. The public conversation still tracks foundation models and benchmarks—GPT versus Gemini, reasoning scores, and marginal capability gains. But in practice, the more durable advantage is structural: wh...
Engineers at Northwestern University have taken a striking leap toward merging machines with the human brain by printing artificial neurons that can actually communicate with real ones. These flexible, low-cost devices generate lifelike electrical signals capable of activating living brain cells, a ...
Nature, Published online: 17 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01263-8Nature staff discuss some of the week's top science news....
Recently I bought a new car. It’s very fast and very yellow. Here’s a picture of me and Mr ThesisWhisperer with it: I bought my first new car at 50 – a Tesla. Now, four years later, I’ve bought a second electric vehicle, a ridiculously yellow EX30 Volvo with a dual motor. Som...
Scientists have developed a fuel cell that uses microbes in soil to produce electricity. The device can power underground sensors for tasks like monitoring moisture or detecting touch, without needing batteries or solar panels. It works in both dry and wet conditions and even lasts longer than simil...
Working with LLMs in Practice Large Language Models are becoming part of everyday data science work. But using them through chat interfaces is only one part of the picture. In this upcoming webinar, we focus on how to work with LLMs programmatica... Continue reading: Programming with LLMs in R & ...
Translating things between languages reveals how each language approaches different design trade-offs, and I believe it’s a useful exercise. Having something to translate is the first step. I found a plot I wanted to generate, and some code that reproduced it, so off we go! I don’t recall ... Con...
Nature, Published online: 17 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01251-yA congressional hearing covered the rise of paper mills and the costs of open-access publishing — but there was little agreement on what reform would entail....
Global scholarly information systems provide poor coverage for social science and humanities research taking place outside of the anglophone world and in languages other than English. Paul Donner, Stephan Stahlschmidt, … Continued The post By linking national scholarly infrastructures we can b...
Nature, Published online: 16 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01227-yVariations in gene expression could help to explain why brain-disease risks differ according to sex....
Nature, Published online: 16 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01212-5Modelling suggests that the layer beneath the planet’s acidic clouds is comprised of particles from outer space....
A long-running dinosaur mystery may finally be solved: Nanotyrannus, once dismissed as just a teenage T. rex, appears to have been its own distinct species after all. Scientists analyzed a tiny throat bone from the original fossil and discovered growth patterns showing the animal was already mature,...
The Webometrics ranking of universities provides a valuable and more comprehensive open data alternative to traditional university rankings. However, as Vladimir M. Moskovkin shows mirror sites and an emergent market … Continued The post Predatory university rankings jeopardise the value of We...
Zhenguo Zhang's Blog /2026/04/18/r-how-to-modify-the-theme-used-by-blogdown/ -My website is built using blogdown and published on Netlify via CI/CD. Recently, I updated my Hugo version from 0.92 to 0.154.2. Unfortunately, this update broke the deployme... Continue reading: [R] How to modify the them...
A badly mangled dinosaur skull, once forgotten in a drawer, turned out to be a rare and important discovery. Reconstructed by a Virginia Tech student, it revealed a new species of early carnivorous dinosaur with unusual features never seen before. The fossil suggests some dinosaur groups were wiped ...
When the covid-19 pandemic started, Jennifer Phillips thought about the songs of the sparrows. They were easier to hear, because the world had suddenly become quieter. Car traffic plummeted as people sheltered at home and shifted to remote work. Air travel collapsed. Cities—normally filled with the ...
Scientists have captured stunning new insights into one of the universe’s most powerful phenomena—black hole jets—by using a planet-sized network of radio telescopes. Focusing on Cygnus X-1, one of the first known black holes, they measured jets blasting out with the energy of 10,000 Suns and moving...
Our tales of AI developing the will to survive, commandeer resources, and manipulate people say more about us than they do about language models. The post Why Do We Tell Ourselves Scary Stories About AI? first appeared on Quanta Magazine...
Scientists have discovered that methane in the open ocean is produced by microbes under nutrient-poor conditions, solving a long-standing mystery. As warming oceans reduce nutrient mixing, these methane-producing microbes may thrive. This could lead to increased methane emissions from the sea. The r...
The handsome new book Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, by the tech industry legend Stewart Brand, promises to be the first in a series offering “a comprehensive overview of the civilizational importance of maintenance.” One of Brand’s several biographers described him as a mainstay of both coun...
A massive, bus-sized “terror croc” that once preyed on dinosaurs has been brought back to life in stunning detail with the first scientifically accurate full skeleton of Deinosuchus schwimmeri. Stretching over 30 feet long, this ancient apex predator ruled the southeastern U.S. more than 75 million ...
Nature, Published online: 16 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01134-2Many Democrats making the switch to politics are motivated by the Trump administration’s cuts to science — whereas energy and AI are a pull for some Republicans....
Generative AI agents are pitched as being a new gateway to engaging with the Internet. Based on a new study of how AI reads and searches the internet in a … Continued The post Before AI agents act for us, we need to know how AI searches for us first appeared on LSE Impact....
Nature, Published online: 17 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01245-wStudy in mice suggests that B cells help regulate muscle performance....
Roboticists used to dream big but build small. They’d hope to match or exceed the extraordinary complexity of the human body, and then they’d spend their career refining robotic arms for auto plants. Aim for C-3P0; end up with the Roomba. The real ambition for many of these researchers was the...
The five boroughs of New York City can be informally or formally carved up into many different pieces, depending on what it is that you’re doing. As part of an ongoing project, I recently made an R package, nycmaps, that lets you draw maps of som... Continue reading: New York City Hexmaps...
Spectacular cases of data fabrication and manipulation unearthed by dedicated “sleuths” are often seen as evidence of a crisis in science. However, discussing their new book, Thomas Plümper and Eric … Continued The post The real threat to trust in science isn’t outright fraud, but the pervasiv...
I’m often asked if using AI coding agents saves time. Yes they write code very quickly and can complete entire ecological data analyses. Do agents really help when the deadlines are approaching? Do agents really help when the deadlines are ... Continue reading: Do AI coding agents save scientists...
Caffeine doesn’t just perk up humans—it can sharpen ants’ minds too. Invasive Argentine ants given caffeinated sugar learned to find food much more efficiently, taking straighter paths and reducing travel time by up to 38%. They weren’t faster, just more focused, indicating improved learning. This u...
1 A model can run and still be fundamentally wrong Many time series models fail before they even begin. Not because the software crashes. Not because the code is wrong. But because the data entering the model violate one of the most impor... Continue reading: Why Most Time Series Models Fail Befo...
Nature, Published online: 18 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01014-9This year’s winners include hundreds of physicists across more than 30 institutions....
Nature, Published online: 15 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10483-xRetraction Note: The hidden fitness of the male zebra finch courtship song...
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 ...
Nature, Published online: 16 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01213-4Study of gene expression also finds age-related increases in men’s vulnerability to certain cancers....
Most health care economics models are constructed from the perspective of a managed health care system such as those offered in Canada and several European countries, or from the perspective of some other third party such as an insurance company... Continue reading: Stage II OSCC — Health Economi...
This wonderful post from Jonathan Caroll give me idea to play with ggplot2 code and scico color palettes: Also see this toot from Stefan Siegert, inspiring! I took the code from the toot mentioned above, modified it, and used it to have a littl... Continue reading: Fun pictures with ggplot2 and s...
R 4.6.0 (“Because it was There”) is set for release on April 24th 2026. Here we summarise some of the more interesting changes that have been introduced. In previous blog posts, we have discussed the new features introduced in R 4.5.0 and earlier versions (see the links at the end of this post). .....
As a movement, environmentalism has been pretty misanthropic. Understandably so—we humans have done some destructive things to the ecosystems around us. In the 21st century, though, mainstream conservation is learning that humans can be a force for good. Foresters are turning to Indigenous burning p...
With field experiments, studying the correlation between the observed traits may not be an easy task. For example, we can consider a genotype experiment, laid out in randomised complete blocks, with 27 wheat genotypes and three replicates, where sev... Continue reading: Dealing with correlation i...
Digital technologies have democratised the collection of visual evidence. However, as Kamari Maxine Clarke, Jennifer Burrell and Sara Kendall show, how this evidence is translated into evidentiary standards through the … Continued The post More evidence doesn’t mean more justice – The limits o...
Nature, Published online: 16 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01236-xQuantum machines are making inroads into biology but have no ‘advantage’ over classical machines yet....
Economic data are rarely static. Gross domestic product (GDP), inflation, employment, and other official statistics arrive as early estimates, then get revised as new source data arrive, seasonal adjustment is updated, or benchmarking changes are appl... Continue reading: reviser: Analyzing Real-Tim...
The ozone layer has been on track to recover thanks to the Montreal Protocol—but a loophole may be holding it back. Chemicals still permitted for industrial use are leaking into the atmosphere at higher rates than expected. Scientists now estimate this could delay ozone recovery by up to seven years...
Decades of weird experimental results appeared to support the existence of the sterile neutrino, a hypothetical particle that would solve multiple mysteries. But recent experiments have killed hope of finding these phantoms, leaving physicists to wonder what might explain their anomalies. ...
dplyr verbs are descriptive: let’s make them more verbose! Yet another pipe for R. Motivation In SAS, every DATA step prints a log: NOTE: There were 120000 observations read from WORK.SALES. NOTE: 7153 observations wer... Continue reading: logrittr: A Verbose Pipe Operator for Logging dplyr P...
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 ...
Ellie’s Pi Day post: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/pi-day-2026-food-institute/ How Ellie orchestrated the baking of 30 pies: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/behind-the-scenes-of-thirty-pies/...
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...
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...
Nature, Published online: 17 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01067-wA welcome change....
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. Cyberscammers are bypassing banks’ security with illicit tools sold on Telegram Inside a money-laundering center in Cambodia, an employee o...
A new study proposes detecting life in space by spotting patterns across many planets instead of focusing on one at a time. If life spreads and changes planetary environments, it could leave behind statistical clues linking planets together. These patterns may reveal life even when traditional biosi...
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...
The availability of artificial intelligence for use in warfare is at the center of a legal battle between Anthropic and the Pentagon. This debate has become urgent, with AI playing a bigger role than ever before in the current conflict with Iran. AI is no longer just helping humans analyze intellige...
Nature, Published online: 15 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10513-8Cytoplasmic lattices are megadalton storage complexes in mammalian oocytes...
Finding a work in translation is harder than you think. Discussing the creation of Zenòdot, a cross-referencing project for books in translation, Ausiàs Tsel outlines the challenges of creating a record … Continued The post The missing catalogue – Why finding books in translation is still so h...
The growth in global and open research has fuelled structural change in scholarly communications and at the same time created significant challenges in ensuring research integrity. Heidi Ormstad, Rebecca Lawrence, … Continued The post For open research to work, research institutions and publis...
It’s often the way. I posted recently about how to pace a marathon and very quickly received feedback that would’ve improved the original post. Oh well, no going back. This is take two. So, we have a dataset of all runners from the 2025 New York City Marathon. We ... Continue reading: Marathon Ma...
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. The problem with thinking you’re part Neanderthal There’s a theory that many of us have an “inner Neanderthal.” The idea is that Homo sapiens and a co...
Nature, Published online: 16 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01210-7Most of the individuals in a seventeenth-century-Switzerland burial site had performed strenuous manual labour and died before the age of 20....
Nature, Published online: 16 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-00509-9Can you squeeze your graduate programme into a 40-hour working week? These 13 current and former PhD candidates reveal their top time-management tips....
As the Moon swallowed the Sun during the April 8, 2024, total solar eclipse, something remarkable happened on the ground—cities went eerily quiet. Scientists analyzing seismic data found that human-generated vibrations, usually caused by traffic, construction, and daily activity, dropped sharply dur...
I wanted to know: After a little bit of searching, I couldn’t find any answers. So I decided to use R to retrieve the necessary info from Uniprot and calculate it myself. I thought I’d post it here in case it’s useful for others. Human We’ll ... Continue reading: My Domain: proteome-wide scanning...
Scientists have uncovered a surprising twist in how bacteria share genes—including those that spread antibiotic resistance. Tiny virus-like particles called gene transfer agents (GTAs), once ancient viral invaders, have been repurposed by bacteria into delivery systems that shuttle DNA between neigh...
Dozens of new discoveries reveal that defenses evolved by bacteria and viruses billions of years ago still define our own innate immune system. The post The Ancient Weapons Active in Your Immune System Today first appeared on Quanta Magazine...
Astronomers have long been puzzled by a cosmic mystery: planets orbiting two stars—like Star Wars’ Tatooine—are surprisingly rare, even though they should be common. New research suggests the culprit is none other than Einstein’s theory of general relativity....
Some quantum cryptographers want to find ways to keep messages secret even if the rules of quantum mechanics don’t hold. The recently rediscovered idea of quantum jamming complicates things. The post Quantum ‘Jamming’ Explores the Truly Fundamental Principles of Nature first appeared on Q...
Faced with a cost-of-living crisis more students in England are attending university courses hungry. Reporting on new findings, Emma Wainwright and Ellen McHugh reveal the scale of this issue and … Continued The post On-campus food poverty – what can and should universities do? first appeared ...
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...
At rOpenSci, we’re continually grateful for the support and engagement of our community, who help make research open-source stronger, more inclusive, and more collaborative. The software peer review program continues to grow, and today we announ... Continue reading: Expanding the Editorial Team: Ale...
The AI boom has hit across industries, and public sector organizations are facing pressure to accelerate adoption. At the same time, government institutions face distinct constraints around security, governance, and operations that set them apart from their business counterparts. For this reason, pu...
Human societies didn’t just adapt to the planet—they learned to reshape it. From early fire use to today’s global supply chains, our cultural and social innovations have unlocked extraordinary power to transform Earth and improve human life. But that progress has come with serious costs, including c...
Given the sector they are targeting, it is perhaps unsurprising that new EdTech tools often claim to be evidence-based. However, as Natalia Kucirkova outlines, these claims can sometimes be difficult … Continued The post Three red flags for “evidenced-based” EdTech first appeared on LSE Impact...
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...
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...
An increasingly common view in government holds that STEM subjects alone drive growth. Geoff Mulgan argues such positions are fundamentally blind to the value of social sciences and humanities, even … Continued The post The myth of STEM only growth holds back the UK first appeared on LSE Impac...
Feeling mentally “on” isn’t just in your head—it can significantly boost what you accomplish. Researchers found that sharper thinking on a given day leads people to set bigger goals and actually follow through. That edge can equal up to 40 extra minutes of productivity. But push too hard for too lon...
Nature, Published online: 16 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01265-6Data generated by AI ‘teachers’ can subliminally pass on particular traits to ‘student’ models. Plus, sperm-whale communication is structured similarly to some human languages and the success of China’s ‘Great Green Wall’....
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...
AI is being used to prove new results at a rapid pace. Mathematicians think this is just the beginning. The post The AI Revolution in Math Has Arrived first appeared on Quanta Magazine...