Curated Frontline Science & Technology
Overview Do people in red states live shorter lives? This project examines whether state level life expectancy is statistically associated with each state's political climate in t... Continue reading: Does state life expectancy correlate with political party voting?...
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...
An updated view of categorization reflects the modern understanding that the nervous system is more of a prediction engine than a filing cabinet. The post A New Framework for How the Brain Compresses Our Noisy World first appeared on Quanta Magazine...
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...
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...
MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done. Your thermostat may not look like a power plant. Neither does your electric vehicle, home battery, or HVAC system. But utility and energy companies increasingly want to treat them like one. A virtual power plant, or VPP, is a col...
Zhenguo Zhang's Blog https://fortune9.netlify.app/2026/08/30/r-understanding-position-dodge-and-position-dodge2-in-ggplot2/ - In ggplot2, when displaying grouped data along categorical axes (such as grouped bar charts, boxplots, or error bars), horiz... Continue reading: [R] Understanding positio...
Dear rOpenSci friends, it’s time for our monthly news roundup! You can read this post on our blog. Now let’s dive into the activity at and around rOpenSci! rOpenSci HQ Champions Program update Our Champions are making great progress! 🌟... Continue reading: rOpenSci News Digest, August 2026...
arXiv:2608.28797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many observational studies evaluate the risks and benefits of time-varying interventions. In these longitudinal settings, the primary outcome of interest is often a clinical event that is precluded by mortality, which acts as a competing risk. Evaluat...
People with chronic insomnia who used melatonin long term had a roughly 90% higher risk of developing heart failure over five years, according to a large preliminary study. The findings do not prove melatonin causes heart problems, but they raise new questions about the safety of taking the popular ...
arXiv:2608.28949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a class of product-reference diffusion algorithms for sampling from a discrete distribution. We show that their sampling performance can be characterized using a path-based measure of data geometry that we call the interaction growth complexi...
Scientists discovered that human microglia, immune cells that help shape developing brain circuits, can take four to eight years to mature instead of just weeks as they do in mice. The unusually slow process may help explain how the human brain develops its remarkable complexity and cognitive abilit...
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...
Nature, Published online: 01 September 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01985-9An experiment spots an energy flash similar to that of the long-sought weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP....
Adults aged 40 and older performed about 12% faster on a test of executive function after using a HEPA air purifier at home for one month. The findings suggest that cleaner indoor air could offer a simple way to help protect the brain from the effects of traffic-related pollution....
NASA and SpaceX have delayed Crew-13 after finding an oxidizer leak in the Dragon spacecraft’s propulsion system during prelaunch preparations. Engineers are investigating the problem before the four-person crew can begin its journey to the International Space Station....
Peer review faces critical challenges linked to rising submissions and a lack of human reviewers willing to take them on. Considering two experiments in open forms of peer review, Helen Kara and Jenni Guthrie make the case … Continued The post Can we humanise...
NASA’s Roman Space Telescope has launched on a million mile journey to L2, where it will scan huge portions of the cosmos for clues about dark matter, dark energy, and distant worlds. With survey speeds roughly 1,000 times faster than Hubble and a torrent of 1.4 terabytes of data per day, Roman coul...
Can forums like Reddit's r/heat_prep provide contextual and timely knowledge for policymakers grappling with the impact of extreme heat? The post What climate policymakers could learn from platforms like Reddit first appeared on LSE Impact....
The theoretical side of the field doesn’t require computing machines. But many questions would never have been posed without them. The post Does Computer Science Need Computers? first appeared on Quanta Magazine...
For the first time in 30 years, computer scientists have found a better way to allocate objects evenly between two groups. The post ‘Huge Breakthrough’ in the Math of Imbalance first appeared on Quanta Magazine...
A vast plume rising from deep inside Earth may be responsible for mysterious movements along the East African Rift. The discovery reveals how forces deep in the mantle are working alongside shallower geological forces as the continent slowly pulls apart....
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...
I really only wanted to spill some fountain pen ink. Not literally. That would be expensive. 🖋️ I wanted to take colours inspired by Pilot’s Iroshizuku fountain pen inks, drop them somewhere on a blank canvas, and let them flow. That led me to f... Continue reading: Iroshizuku Meets a Flow Field...
Nature, Published online: 01 September 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02119-xDiscovering, triaging and skimming papers before engaging deeply with the right ones has helped Shea Andrews to stay on top of the literature....
arXiv:2608.28852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Under a model-assisted framework, a penalized logistic generalized regression estimator is developed to estimate a finite population proportion from complex survey data and auxiliary data. The proposed estimator controls the impact of unnecessary auxi...
Critics attack academic mega-conferences as too big and too cliquish, favouring smaller, curated meetings as the humane alternative. For Dritjon Gruda, Bex Hewett, Joe Carpini, Kiera Dempsey-Brench, Julian Jonathan Markus, and Jorrit Alkema, scale is what makes … Continued The post Why Mega-co...
A study of people over 90 found that dementia risk remains strongly shaped by sex, race and genetics, with women and black participants facing notably higher risks. Intriguingly, some people stayed cognitively healthy despite carrying major risk factors, potentially offering clues to how the brain c...
Nature, Published online: 01 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-11071-9Author Correction: Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus...
Nature, Published online: 01 September 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02736-6Europe should adapt, not copy, China’s practical PhD...
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. A startup claims it’s found a drug to make your blood young —Antonio Regalado I knew I’d officially become a “longevity influencer” when a company cal...
Nature, Published online: 01 September 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02342-6Learning how to manage your feelings can help you to tackle some tricky situations at work, say organizational psychologists....
Tight academic job markets and the growth of research-intensive jobs outside of academia have made hyphenated careers that combine research and impact skills increasingly common. Sarah Dorr, Birthe Einen and Louise Olsson argue that students and institutions …...
For years, legacy technology has been a problem companies knew they needed to solve, but one they often struggled to tackle. The cost, complexity, and risk of replacing business-critical systems could make modernization feel like a disruption to manage instead of an opportunity to pursue. But with t...
Three hundred fifty-three new packages were submitted to CRAN in July. Here are my Top 40 picks in nineteen categories: Causal Inference, Chemistry, Climate Studies, Computational Methods, Ecology, Economics, Econometrics, Genomics, Geomorphomet... Continue reading: July 2026 Top 40 New CRAN Pack...
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. By now you’ve probably heard about last month’s major AI security incident, in which OpenAI agents escaped their sandbox and hacked into the AI platform Hugging F...
A long-standing picture of brain evolution as newer, rational layers stacked on top of an ancient “lizard brain” may be deeply misleading. Researchers found that evolution instead appears to balance two competing styles of brain wiring, expanding one while shrinking the other depending on what an an...
Nature, Published online: 01 September 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02383-xAstronomy that has long gripped people’s imagination, and a celebration of the health benefits of sunshine and the open air in this week’s pick from the Nature archive....
arXiv:2608.29018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We determine the sharp restricted isometry threshold for recovery at global minima of the rank-restricted matrix LASSO. For target rank $r_{\star}$, if the rank-$k$ RIP constant satisfies $\delta<\delta_{\mathrm{sharp}}(k/r_{\star})$, where $\delta_{\...
Introduction In previous articles, we showed how to test whether two qualitative variables are related thanks to the Chi-square test of independence in R (and how to compute it by hand). Both articles insist on one important limitation: this test requires independent observations. If you have depen...
arXiv:2608.28867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study dependent censoring within a generalized Cox first-hitting-time. framework based on compensator reductions. In the genuinely dependent case, we show that max-stability of the associated survival copula is equivalent to a common operational cl...
Nature, Published online: 01 September 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02743-7US funding uncertainty was a key factor for several of the researchers heading to Canada. Observers predict more will follow....
Mindfulness, gratitude, and optimism training may improve blood pressure, inflammation, and other heart-health measures within just eight to 12 weeks. The strongest programs paired daily practice with regular reinforcement, suggesting that improving psychological well-being could become another tool...
Data sonification offers a novel, auditory approach to exploring complex datasets and a valuable complement to traditional visual representations. Taking the widely discussed findings of research based on the Consolidation-Disruption … Continued The post What does scientific progress sound lik...
To explore quantum phenomena, we must leave the familiar world and enter the abstract realm of Hilbert space. The post In Hilbert Space, All Things Are Quantumly Possible first appeared on Quanta Magazine...
A nonprofit organization called the Fermi Explorer Mission announced today that it intends to launch a spacecraft to our nearest star system by the end of 2029. It’s a hugely ambitious mission—if all goes well, the spacecraft could take up to 80,000 years to arrive at Alpha Centauri, which is ...
Two widely used zero-calorie sweeteners, sucralose and stevia, may have effects that linger far longer than the sweet taste itself. In mice, researchers found that both sweeteners altered the gut microbiome, reduced beneficial compounds produced by gut bacteria, and changed the activity of genes inv...
arXiv:2608.28810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Borrowing external control data can improve the efficiency of clinical trials, particularly when patient accrual is difficult. A persistent challenge is how to prespecify the degree of borrowing systematically and transparently. In practice, prior wei...
arXiv:2608.28760v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow cytometry generates inherently compositional count data: observed cell population counts are constrained to sum to the total number of acquired events, which precludes direct inference about absolute cellular abundance. Despite this constraint, m...
I knew I’d officially become a “longevity influencer” this month when a company called Generation Lab reached out to offer me the chance to write about—and even receive—their new rejuvenation treatment, an injectable combination of two existing drugs which they call 1 Generation. This wasn’t ju...
arXiv:2608.28839v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Incomplete adjudication and endpoint misclassification arise when gold-standard event classification is available only for an internal validation sample. With accurate follow-up times and covariates but error-prone event indicators, naive Cox regressi...
Nature, Published online: 01 September 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02734-8Emissions linked to global warming are higher at sites where feral pigs disturb the soil....
Nature, Published online: 01 September 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02735-7When AI does science, who is accountable for mistakes?...
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 ...
Introduction Portfolio construction often relies on mean–variance optimization or factor models. Yet, recent research highlights the importance of skewness—the third statistical moment—as a driver of asset returns. Assets with lottery-like payoffs (high positive skewness) tend to be overpriced, whi...
Nature, Published online: 01 September 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02636-9Initiatives to attract Indian researchers who are working abroad do not offer long-term income security, some scientists say....
EVs account for under 10% of total new-vehicle sales in the US, and the numbers are declining. From a climate perspective, that’s pretty dismal, especially because the transportation sector is the single biggest source of greenhouse-gas emissions in the country. One thing that could help turn ...
arXiv:2608.28887v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prognostic factor evaluation and prediction model development are central to precision oncology, enabling patient risk stratification and individualized treatment selection. Unified predictions that synthesize information from existing models are valu...
Nature, Published online: 01 September 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02738-4The global plastics treaty must account for conflict-driven energy insecurity...
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. How engineered microbes could help feed the world’s crops Fertilizer is crucial for the global food supply, but making it uses a lot of energy and pro...
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...
Mathematicians found that a broad class of networks will abruptly shift behavior past a critical point. The post ‘Stunning’ Percolation Proof Solves Decades-Old Puzzle About Phase Transitions first appeared on Quanta Magazine...
Nature, Published online: 01 September 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02686-zAs generative AI becomes embedded in research and publishing, the deeper challenge is preserving accountability for scholarly work....
arXiv:2608.28888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modeling multivariate extremes using a geometric perspective leverages the shape of the multivariate point cloud to make inference on joint tail probabilities. While the original statistical framework for geometric extremes was fully parametric, relyi...
Shiny and Streamlit dashboards depend on a live R or Python process, which makes vanilla deployments slow to load. Observable Framework compiles your data pipeline at build time and ships a static, JavaScript-only site — here's how it works, with a small restaurant-tips dashboard as an example. C...
Researchers have produced a form of Spirulina containing biologically active vitamin B12 at levels comparable to beef. By carefully controlling the light used to grow the algae, they overcame a major problem with conventional Spirulina, which mainly contains a form of B12 the human body cannot use. ...
Can bringing art and social science into dialogue place “research facts” and “artistic values” into new and productive relationships? The post Putting art into dialogue with research can reframe approaches to wealth inequality first appeared on LSE Impact....
Universities are opening schools of artificial intelligence that sit alongside logic, economics and communication, with no account of what these disciplinary neighbours share. Mouhamdy M. Dahoud argues the problem is … Continued The post What kind of discipline is AI? first appeared on LSE Imp...
arXiv:2608.28827v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We establish quantitative convergence to the target and uniform-in-time propagation of chaos for Langevin-regularized Stein variational gradient descent. The Stein interaction need not be small relative to the confining Langevin drift and does not gen...
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 inside story on why OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face The models responsible for last month’s agent hack of Hugging Face had been inadvertently tr...
arXiv:2608.28943v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cluster randomized trials (CRTs) can exhibit informative cluster sizes (ICS) where cluster size is associated with outcomes and/or treatment effects. Under ICS, the individual and cluster-average treatment effects (iATE, cATE) can diverge, and the con...
Wild monkeys in West Africa can climb vertical tree trunks using foot flexibility scientists did not realize they possessed. The discovery challenges a key assumption about what the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees looked like and how it moved....
Snake embryos begin life curled into a distinctive right-handed spiral, and scientists may finally know why. Their bodies grow faster than their guts, creating a tether that forces the lengthening embryo to buckle and twist inside the egg. Researchers reached the conclusion after studying more than ...
Using an iterative optimization framework to rethink regression models Continue reading: On the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm and regression models...
Introduction Data Aim and hypotheses Assumptions Variable type and design Independence between subjects Normality Sphericity Outliers Repeated measures ANOVA in R With the {rstatix} package With base R Interpretations Post-hoc tests Summary Ref... Continue reading: Repeated measures ANOVA in R...
Nature, Published online: 01 September 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02370-2Academics worldwide are rethinking their assessment approaches — from developing exams that artificial-intelligence tools can’t pass to sneaking hidden AI prompts into tasks to catch cheating students....
In research articles and reports qualitative work is often reduced to text, which is in turn analysed by human and increasingly machine readers. However, original qualitative analyses depend on a … Continued The post What counts as data in qualitative research? first appeared on LSE Impact....
Despite universities’ important role as evidence-producing organisations, they rarely draw upon research evidence for internal decision making, why? The post Universities rarely use research evidence in their decision-making, so why do they expect anyone else to? first appeared on LSE Impact....
The CredIT taxonomy has become a feature of academic publishing, but has its potential for creating research insights been fully exploited? The post For a decade CRediT has quietly reshaped academic authorship – what comes next? first appeared on LSE Impact....
arXiv:2608.28825v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fifty-seven years of debate have not led to a consensus on Newcomb's problem. I argue that this failure comes from not viewing the problem in concrete terms, for which common-sense intuitions are clearly applicable. If near-perfect predictions are not...
Nature, Published online: 01 September 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02609-yTop artificial-intelligence models failed to predict the biological consequences of rewriting a virus's entire DNA code....
Naming Things by Tom Benner a tiny but neat book about the naming of identifies in code (variables, classes, methods, so not packages or libraries). It had entered my to-read list a few years ago, when I read the blog post Naming Things by Vicki Boykis... Continue reading: Reading notes on Naming Th...
This post estimates potential labor market transition pathways based on the similarity of skills, abilities and knowledge required by occupations. The approach broadly follows Bratanova et al. (2026). Like their research, the considered transition pathways are for workers currently employed as truc...
arXiv:2608.28991v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal representation learning (CRL) aims to recover latent causal variables and their structural relations from high-dimensional observations. Existing CRL methods typically assume that all environments are defined over the same latent variables, or ...
One tiny dataset, another rabbit hole 🐇🕳️ In the previous post, I turned 24 Pilot Iroshizuku fountain pen inks into a tiny shop using ggplot2. But while sorting the inks by colour, I started wondering what it would look like if I could rearrang... Continue reading: Making Iroshizuku Interactive w...
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...
Programmatic Access to Data and Statistics from the World Bank API Continue reading: wbstats 1.2.0 is now on CRAN...
Hundreds of previously overlooked seismic events have been detected beneath Antarctica, including 245 near the marine edge of the Thwaites Glacier. Many appear to be glacial earthquakes caused when huge icebergs break off, capsize, and collide with the glacier. The surge in activity coincided with a...
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 ...
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...
NASA has brought two of Swift’s telescopes back online after technical problems derailed a commercial mission intended to rescue the aging observatory by raising its orbit. With atmospheric drag pulling the spacecraft downward faster than expected, scientists may have only another month or two befor...
I offer turning a set of requirements into a maintainable package or dashboard Continue reading: Do you need a custom R package or Shiny app? I can build it for you...
arXiv:2608.28870v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Curve fitting for physical, biological, and engineering data typically forces a choice between interpretable but rigid parametric forms and flexible but physically opaque smoothers. This paper introduces the Growth-Decay Curve (GDC), a physics-informe...
Fertilizer is crucial for the global food supply, but making it uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of emissions. Some companies hope microbes can help. A growing body of research shows that seeding the soil around a crop’s roots with beneficial microbes can help feed the plant, providing crucia...
Nature, Published online: 01 September 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02737-5China’s regulatory innovation for new biomedical technologies...