#scientificresearch — Public Fediverse posts

'Lawnmower' patterns of Chinese research vessel raising suspicions in Pacific
By Kyle Evans

The strange patterns of Chinese research vessels in the Pacific have raised suspicions China is gathering intelligence for a potential conflict.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-13/chinese-research-vessels-spark-alarm-in-palau/107001038

#SecurityIntelligence #ScientificResearch #ClimateChange #InternationalLaw #Oceans #MiningandMetalsIndustry #War #Navy #NuclearWeapons #PoliticalLeadership #KyleEvans

'Lawnmower' patterns of Chinese research vessel raising suspicions in Pacific
By Kyle Evans

The strange patterns of Chinese research vessels in the Pacific have raised suspicions China is gathering intelligence for a potential conflict.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-13/chinese-research-vessels-spark-alarm-in-palau/107001038

#SecurityIntelligence #ScientificResearch #ClimateChange #InternationalLaw #Oceans #MiningandMetalsIndustry #War #Navy #NuclearWeapons #PoliticalLeadership #KyleEvans

The State Scientific And Technical Library Of Ukraine, and machine-translated from Ukrainian: MES opens interactive dashboard “Specialized publications of Ukraine”. “As part of the work of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine to develop an open and transparent system of scientific professional publications, an interactive dashboard ‘Professional Publications of Ukraine’ was created. […]

The State Scientific And Technical Library Of Ukraine, and machine-translated from Ukrainian: MES opens interactive dashboard “Specialized publications of Ukraine”. “As part of the work of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine to develop an open and transparent system of scientific professional publications, an interactive dashboard ‘Professional Publications of Ukraine’ was created. […]

AI models design viruses not found in nature for first time
By Andrew Thorpe

Researchers from Stanford University have synthesised brand-new, self-replicating viruses using genomes designed by artificial intelligence for the first time, raising the possibility of significant medical advancements but also prompting concerns the technology could be misused.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-07/ai-models-design-viruses-not-found-in-nature-for-first-time/107007854

#MedicalEthics #AIEthics #Viruses #ScientificResearch #Genetics #AndrewThorpe

AI models design viruses not found in nature for first time
By Andrew Thorpe

Researchers from Stanford University have synthesised brand-new, self-replicating viruses using genomes designed by artificial intelligence for the first time, raising the possibility of significant medical advancements but also prompting concerns the technology could be misused.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-07/ai-models-design-viruses-not-found-in-nature-for-first-time/107007854

#MedicalEthics #AIEthics #Viruses #ScientificResearch #Genetics #AndrewThorpe

Two #research teams, one from MIT and the other from the University of California, independently used #OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 #Sol Ultra to solve the same #quantumcryptography problem. Both teams credited the AI model for generating the core ideas behind their proofs, highlighting the growing #influence of AI in #scientificresearch and raising questions about independent discovery and scientific credit. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-helped-produce-two-proofs-for-the-same-cryptography-problem/?AIagents.at #AIagent #AI #ML #NLP #LLM #GenAI

Two #research teams, one from MIT and the other from the University of California, independently used #OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 #Sol Ultra to solve the same #quantumcryptography problem. Both teams credited the AI model for generating the core ideas behind their proofs, highlighting the growing #influence of AI in #scientificresearch and raising questions about independent discovery and scientific credit. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-helped-produce-two-proofs-for-the-same-cryptography-problem/?AIagents.at #AIagent #AI #ML #NLP #LLM #GenAI

“Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations… a community of minds, reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars”*…

The sharing of experimental results and the underlying data is critical to the advance of science. Indeed, when I had the chance to do a scenario planning exercise with a collection of the leading research university librarians in the U.S. a couple of decades ago, the biggest threat/fear they surfaced was the concern that the free and open exchange of ideas and data, as manifest formally in scientific publication and informally in the collegial cooperation among scientists, would be occluded by an increasing proprietary embrace of knowledge.

73% of geneticists surveyed in an article in the 23/30 January 2002 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association agreed that although keeping data private may help the individual researcher, data hoarding is detrimental to the progress of science Still, sadly, that threat has grown since the turn of the millennium.

By way of current (and dramatic) example: as Celina Zhao reports, more than half of AI “unicorns” have never published a paper or preprint…

Today’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) startups make no shortage of bold promises. Their technologies, some boast, will revolutionize software development, drug discovery, and scientific research.

Yet a new preprint posted on 16 July on bioRxiv suggests many of these firms barely participate in one of science’s most fundamental practices: publicly documenting discoveries in scientific literature so other researchers can evaluate and build on them. More than half of AI unicorns—private companies valued at more than $1 billion—have never played a leading role in publishing a scientific paper or preprint, according to the new analysis. Collectively, they accounted for just one in every 1000 AI papers published in 2025.

“For a field that is supposedly reshaping science and is so advanced in terms of scientific potential, not having any scientific documentation seems like a very weird paradox,” says paper co-author John Ioannidis, a metascientist at Stanford University [see here]. “How can you judge that what they say is real, validated, and reproducible?” The scarcity of publications, others say, also makes it harder to assess AI’s social impacts, including energy use and safety.

But University of Alberta AI ethicist Mohamed Abdalla says the findings reflect the incentives facing commercial AI developers, rather than solely a failure to uphold scientific norms. “It’s not the company’s job to advance science, right?” he says. “The company’s job is to advance money.”

Ioannidis has long studied how unicorns, particularly in biotech, engage with the scientific literature. (In 2015, he was the first to publicly scrutinize the lack of peer-reviewed studies produced by Theranos, the blood testing startup that proved to be based on fraudulent data.) He wondered whether AI unicorns would show similar patterns.

To find out, he and his team first identified all 317 unicorn AI companies that have existed from 1998 to 2025. Then, they searched for publications affiliated with these startups—including journal articles, conference papers, reviews, and preprints. They selected those where a company researcher played a leading role as a first or last author, indicating the startup had made a substantial contribution to the work. The final data set included 2077 final publications, comprising 1389 peer-reviewed papers and 688 preprints.

More than half of the startups had never produced a single qualifying paper, the analysis revealed. Scientific influence proved even more concentrated, with the top 5% of firms accounting for greater than 90% of all citations. OpenAI alone was responsible for nearly 40% of all citations in the data set, followed by the Chinese computer vision company Megvii and the platform Hugging Face. And even at the most prolific companies, much of the output came from the same small group of repeat authors. For example, despite OpenAI employing roughly 4500 people, only eight researchers had authored five or more qualifying papers.

The findings are unsurprising to some AI researchers given how the industry is structured. For example, unlike the pharmaceutical industry, where published discoveries can be protected by patents, AI companies have learned they often gain little from publicly disclosing technical advances, says Nur Ahmed, an AI researcher at the University of Arkansas. Google’s landmark 2017 paper on the transformer—the architecture that underpins today’s large language models—has become a classic cautionary example, Abdalla adds. Although Google patented aspects of the technology, “I don’t think anybody’s paying Google for that,” he says.

Startups also operate on much faster timelines than academia, where peer review can lumber on for months or even years. That’s why many AI companies have embraced what Avijit Ghosh, an AI policy researcher at Hugging Face, calls the “blogification” of research: announcing new models and releasing code or data sets through blog posts and technical reports rather than scientific journals. The new analysis didn’t track those outputs, he points out.

For Ghosh, the debate shouldn’t center on publishing in journals versus blogs. What matters is whether companies are releasing enough code, data sets, or model weights (the numbers that determine how a model interprets and responds to a prompt) for others to independently verify and build on their work, he says.

The preprint also found that firms based in China consistently published more papers than their counterparts based in the United States. Whereas leading U.S. frontier labs have increasingly kept the details of their most capable models secret or “closed sourced,” leading Chinese companies have embraced “open-source” models. Moonshot AI, one of the Chinese startups included in the study, recently unveiled Kimi K3—one of the strongest open models to date—and publicly released its model weights through Hugging Face today.

But whether models are open or closed, the rapid pace toward increasingly powerful generalist AI worries Emma Pierson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. She argues AI research—whether published freely or kept secret—risks accelerating models that pose serious societal and safety concerns, including supercharging cyberattacks. “If we were racing forward on cancer-curing AI, I would be like, ’Fantastic, full steam ahead,’” she says. “But that’s not what we’re racing toward, right?”…

The secretive unicorns: “AI’s top startups are barely publishing their research,” from @science.org.

By way of example? In order to have a broader footprint in AI for (default proprietary) scientific discovery, Google moves away from a successful AI effort (that did publish): “Google DeepMind dismantles Nobel-winning AlphaFold team in strategy shift” (gift article from the FT). One wonders: when these LLMs run out of published papers on which to train, where (and how) will they source the knowledge they need to stay useful?

* Neil deGrasse Tyson

###

As we share and share alike, we might recall that it was on this date in 1887 that Chester A. Hodge of Beloit, Wisconsin received patent No. 367,398 for ‘spur rowel’ barbed wire (consisting of spur shaped wheels with 8 or 10 points mounted between 2 wires).  It was one of many patents for barbed wire (e.g., here), which spread across the American West rapidly (thanks, in no small measure to the guy featured in the almanac entry here)– and (by protecting farmers from foraging free-ranging cattle) paved the way for the expansion of wheat (and other kinds of) farming… even as it spelled the doom of a commons– the open range.

“Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations… a community of minds, reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars”*…

The sharing of experimental results and the underlying data is critical to the advance of science. Indeed, when I had the chance to do a scenario planning exercise with a collection of the leading research university librarians in the U.S. a couple of decades ago, the biggest threat/fear they surfaced was the concern that the free and open exchange of ideas and data, as manifest formally in scientific publication and informally in the collegial cooperation among scientists, would be occluded by an increasing proprietary embrace of knowledge.

73% of geneticists surveyed in an article in the 23/30 January 2002 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association agreed that although keeping data private may help the individual researcher, data hoarding is detrimental to the progress of science Still, sadly, that threat has grown since the turn of the millennium.

By way of current (and dramatic) example: as Celina Zhao reports, more than half of AI “unicorns” have never published a paper or preprint…

Today’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) startups make no shortage of bold promises. Their technologies, some boast, will revolutionize software development, drug discovery, and scientific research.

Yet a new preprint posted on 16 July on bioRxiv suggests many of these firms barely participate in one of science’s most fundamental practices: publicly documenting discoveries in scientific literature so other researchers can evaluate and build on them. More than half of AI unicorns—private companies valued at more than $1 billion—have never played a leading role in publishing a scientific paper or preprint, according to the new analysis. Collectively, they accounted for just one in every 1000 AI papers published in 2025.

“For a field that is supposedly reshaping science and is so advanced in terms of scientific potential, not having any scientific documentation seems like a very weird paradox,” says paper co-author John Ioannidis, a metascientist at Stanford University [see here]. “How can you judge that what they say is real, validated, and reproducible?” The scarcity of publications, others say, also makes it harder to assess AI’s social impacts, including energy use and safety.

But University of Alberta AI ethicist Mohamed Abdalla says the findings reflect the incentives facing commercial AI developers, rather than solely a failure to uphold scientific norms. “It’s not the company’s job to advance science, right?” he says. “The company’s job is to advance money.”

Ioannidis has long studied how unicorns, particularly in biotech, engage with the scientific literature. (In 2015, he was the first to publicly scrutinize the lack of peer-reviewed studies produced by Theranos, the blood testing startup that proved to be based on fraudulent data.) He wondered whether AI unicorns would show similar patterns.

To find out, he and his team first identified all 317 unicorn AI companies that have existed from 1998 to 2025. Then, they searched for publications affiliated with these startups—including journal articles, conference papers, reviews, and preprints. They selected those where a company researcher played a leading role as a first or last author, indicating the startup had made a substantial contribution to the work. The final data set included 2077 final publications, comprising 1389 peer-reviewed papers and 688 preprints.

More than half of the startups had never produced a single qualifying paper, the analysis revealed. Scientific influence proved even more concentrated, with the top 5% of firms accounting for greater than 90% of all citations. OpenAI alone was responsible for nearly 40% of all citations in the data set, followed by the Chinese computer vision company Megvii and the platform Hugging Face. And even at the most prolific companies, much of the output came from the same small group of repeat authors. For example, despite OpenAI employing roughly 4500 people, only eight researchers had authored five or more qualifying papers.

The findings are unsurprising to some AI researchers given how the industry is structured. For example, unlike the pharmaceutical industry, where published discoveries can be protected by patents, AI companies have learned they often gain little from publicly disclosing technical advances, says Nur Ahmed, an AI researcher at the University of Arkansas. Google’s landmark 2017 paper on the transformer—the architecture that underpins today’s large language models—has become a classic cautionary example, Abdalla adds. Although Google patented aspects of the technology, “I don’t think anybody’s paying Google for that,” he says.

Startups also operate on much faster timelines than academia, where peer review can lumber on for months or even years. That’s why many AI companies have embraced what Avijit Ghosh, an AI policy researcher at Hugging Face, calls the “blogification” of research: announcing new models and releasing code or data sets through blog posts and technical reports rather than scientific journals. The new analysis didn’t track those outputs, he points out.

For Ghosh, the debate shouldn’t center on publishing in journals versus blogs. What matters is whether companies are releasing enough code, data sets, or model weights (the numbers that determine how a model interprets and responds to a prompt) for others to independently verify and build on their work, he says.

The preprint also found that firms based in China consistently published more papers than their counterparts based in the United States. Whereas leading U.S. frontier labs have increasingly kept the details of their most capable models secret or “closed sourced,” leading Chinese companies have embraced “open-source” models. Moonshot AI, one of the Chinese startups included in the study, recently unveiled Kimi K3—one of the strongest open models to date—and publicly released its model weights through Hugging Face today.

But whether models are open or closed, the rapid pace toward increasingly powerful generalist AI worries Emma Pierson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. She argues AI research—whether published freely or kept secret—risks accelerating models that pose serious societal and safety concerns, including supercharging cyberattacks. “If we were racing forward on cancer-curing AI, I would be like, ’Fantastic, full steam ahead,’” she says. “But that’s not what we’re racing toward, right?”…

The secretive unicorns: “AI’s top startups are barely publishing their research,” from @science.org.

By way of example? In order to have a broader footprint in AI for (default proprietary) scientific discovery, Google moves away from a successful AI effort (that did publish): “Google DeepMind dismantles Nobel-winning AlphaFold team in strategy shift” (gift article from the FT). One wonders: when these LLMs run out of published papers on which to train, where (and how) will they source the knowledge they need to stay useful?

* Neil deGrasse Tyson

###

As we share and share alike, we might recall that it was on this date in 1887 that Chester A. Hodge of Beloit, Wisconsin received patent No. 367,398 for ‘spur rowel’ barbed wire (consisting of spur shaped wheels with 8 or 10 points mounted between 2 wires).  It was one of many patents for barbed wire (e.g., here), which spread across the American West rapidly (thanks, in no small measure to the guy featured in the almanac entry here)– and (by protecting farmers from foraging free-ranging cattle) paved the way for the expansion of wheat (and other kinds of) farming… even as it spelled the doom of a commons– the open range.

Scientific Study Predicts Lunar Impact of SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket

📰 Original title: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Rocket Is About to Crash Into the Moon—and It Could Be Visible From Earth

🤖 IA: It's clickbait ⚠️
👥 Users: It's clickbait ⚠️

View full AI summary https://en.killbait.com/scientific-study-predicts-lunar-impact-of-spacex-falcon-9-rocket.html?utm_source=mastodon_world&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=killbait.mastodon_world

#astronomy #spaceexploration #lunarimpact #scientificresearch

Sloan Digital Sky Survey Releases Major Data Update

📰 Original title: Sloan Digital Sky Survey launches data release 20

🤖 IA: It's not clickbait ✅
👥 Users: It's not clickbait ✅

View full AI summary https://en.killbait.com/sloan-digital-sky-survey-releases-major-data-update.html?utm_source=mastodon_world&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=killbait.mastodon_world

#astronomy #datarelease #scientificresearch

Whale sharks are serial snackers, dorsal fin cameras reveal
By Yousuf Shameel

Footage taken from the perspective of whale sharks on Ningaloo Reef uncovers previously unknown feeding behaviours of the world's biggest fish.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-29/whale-shark-feeding-habits-ningaloo-reef-study/106943584

#MarineBiology #ScientificResearch #Oceans #YousufShameel

Whale sharks are serial snackers, dorsal fin cameras reveal
By Yousuf Shameel

Footage taken from the perspective of whale sharks on Ningaloo Reef uncovers previously unknown feeding behaviours of the world's biggest fish.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-29/whale-shark-feeding-habits-ningaloo-reef-study/106943584

#MarineBiology #ScientificResearch #Oceans #YousufShameel

#Claude #Opus5 is a cost-effective model that outperforms its predecessor, Opus 4.8, in coding, knowledge work, and problem-solving tasks. It excels in #softwareengineering, #knowledgework, and #scientificresearch, and demonstrates improved performance in visual outputs. Early-access customers report that Opus 5 is more thorough, reliable, and capable of handling complex tasks with greater agency. https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5?eicker.news #tech #media #news

#Claude #Opus5 is a cost-effective model that outperforms its predecessor, Opus 4.8, in coding, knowledge work, and problem-solving tasks. It excels in #softwareengineering, #knowledgework, and #scientificresearch, and demonstrates improved performance in visual outputs. Early-access customers report that Opus 5 is more thorough, reliable, and capable of handling complex tasks with greater agency. https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5?eicker.news #tech #media #news

1 in 10 people have such unusual personality trait combinations that researchers call them ‘mutants’

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/1-in-10-people-have-such-unusual-personality-trait-combinations-that-researchers-call-them-mutants/

1 in 10 people have such unusual personality trait combinations that researchers call them ‘mutants’

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/1-in-10-people-have-such-unusual-personality-trait-combinations-that-researchers-call-them-mutants/

Wiley Joins ‘Genesis Mission Consortium’ in Support of U.S. AI Goals

The publisher joins the U.S. Department of Energy's national effort to "support AI‑accelerated innovation and discovery” alongside members including Nvidia, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM, and Advanced Micro Devices.
The post Wiley Joins ‘Genesis Mission Consortium’ in Support of U.S. AI Goals appeared first on Publishing Perspectives.
https://publishingperspectives.com/2026/07/wiley-joins-genesis-mission-consortium-in-support-of-u-s-ai-goals/

#AI #scientificresearch #Wiley

Wiley Joins ‘Genesis Mission Consortium’ in Support of U.S. AI Goals

The publisher joins the U.S. Department of Energy's national effort to "support AI‑accelerated innovation and discovery” alongside members including Nvidia, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM, and Advanced Micro Devices.
The post Wiley Joins ‘Genesis Mission Consortium’ in Support of U.S. AI Goals appeared first on Publishing Perspectives.
https://publishingperspectives.com/2026/07/wiley-joins-genesis-mission-consortium-in-support-of-u-s-ai-goals/

#AI #scientificresearch #Wiley

Scientists Recreate Cosmic Dust to Study Life's Origins

📰 Original title: A tiny universe in a bottle reveals clues to the origins of life

🤖 IA: It's not clickbait ✅
👥 Users: It's not clickbait ✅

View full AI summary https://en.killbait.com/scientists-recreate-cosmic-dust-to-study-life-s-origins.html?utm_source=mastodon_world&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=killbait.mastodon_world

#science #cosmicdust #lifeorigins #scientificresearch

Endangered cockatoos feeding on 'chemical cocktail' in WA's Wheatbelt
By Chloe Henville

Research has found pesticide levels "well above" maximums set for humans and animal feed, in some cases hundreds of times higher than set by regulators.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-19/carnaby-paralysis-pesticide-found-agriculture-grain/106927470

#Pesticides #EndangeredandProtectedSpecies #AgriculturalChemicals #ScientificResearch #Birds #ChloeHenville

Endangered cockatoos feeding on 'chemical cocktail' in WA's Wheatbelt
By Chloe Henville

Research has found pesticide levels "well above" maximums set for humans and animal feed, in some cases hundreds of times higher than set by regulators.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-19/carnaby-paralysis-pesticide-found-agriculture-grain/106927470

#Pesticides #EndangeredandProtectedSpecies #AgriculturalChemicals #ScientificResearch #Birds #ChloeHenville

'Almost certainly new' species of giant earthworms found in SA
By Isabella Kelly

A South Australian ecologist has been tracking giant earthworm sightings for 30 years, despite the species not officially existing in the state.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-19/giant-earthworms-south-australia-new-species-science-sa/106897594

#Animals #ScientificResearch #AnimalBehaviour #Invertebrates #IsabellaKelly

'Almost certainly new' species of giant earthworms found in SA
By Isabella Kelly

A South Australian ecologist has been tracking giant earthworm sightings for 30 years, despite the species not officially existing in the state.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-19/giant-earthworms-south-australia-new-species-science-sa/106897594

#Animals #ScientificResearch #AnimalBehaviour #Invertebrates #IsabellaKelly

Researchers working on artificial placentas for premature babies
By Emma Wynne

The aim of the technology is to give babies born too soon a few more weeks to grow and develop in womb-like conditions, and a better chance of a long and healthy life.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-18/artificial-placenta-research-for-premature-babies/106929330

#PregnancyandChildbirth #ScientificResearch #InfantHealth #EmmaWynne

Researchers working on artificial placentas for premature babies
By Emma Wynne

The aim of the technology is to give babies born too soon a few more weeks to grow and develop in womb-like conditions, and a better chance of a long and healthy life.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-18/artificial-placenta-research-for-premature-babies/106929330

#PregnancyandChildbirth #ScientificResearch #InfantHealth #EmmaWynne

Common Cooking Ingredient Could Raise the Risk of One Deadly Cancer

People who consume the highest amounts of chili peppers may face a greater risk of developing certain digestive cancers, particularly esophageal cancer, a…
#dining #cooking #diet #food #Cooking #cancer #esophagealcancer #Gastrointestinalissues #HealthandMedicine #HealthandScience #Lifestyle #Medicine #scientificresearch
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2729528/common-cooking-ingredient-could-raise-the-risk-of-one-deadly-cancer/

Common Cooking Ingredient Could Raise the Risk of One Deadly Cancer

People who consume the highest amounts of chili peppers may face a greater risk of developing certain digestive cancers, particularly esophageal cancer, a…
#dining #cooking #diet #food #Cooking #cancer #esophagealcancer #Gastrointestinalissues #HealthandMedicine #HealthandScience #Lifestyle #Medicine #scientificresearch
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2729528/common-cooking-ingredient-could-raise-the-risk-of-one-deadly-cancer/

Common Cooking Ingredient Could Raise the Risk of One Deadly Cancer   https://www.diningandcooking.com/2729528/common-cooking-ingredient-could-raise-the-risk-of-one-deadly-cancer/ #cancer #Cooking #EsophagealCancer #GastrointestinalIssues #HealthAndMedicine #HealthAndScience #Lifestyle #Medicine #ScientificResearch

Common Cooking Ingredient Could Raise the Risk of One Deadly Cancer   https://www.diningandcooking.com/2729528/common-cooking-ingredient-could-raise-the-risk-of-one-deadly-cancer/ #cancer #Cooking #EsophagealCancer #GastrointestinalIssues #HealthAndMedicine #HealthAndScience #Lifestyle #Medicine #ScientificResearch

Hopes bones in underwater 'time capsules' will unlock more prehistory
By Josh Brine

Scientists who have been finding fossils in SA's underwater caves are hoping they can give a window into environmental changes.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-16/underwater-caves-preserving-pre-historic-animal-bone-fossils-sa/106912130

#Fossils #Palaeontology #Animals #Nature #ScientificResearch #JoshBrine

Hopes bones in underwater 'time capsules' will unlock more prehistory
By Josh Brine

Scientists who have been finding fossils in SA's underwater caves are hoping they can give a window into environmental changes.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-16/underwater-caves-preserving-pre-historic-animal-bone-fossils-sa/106912130

#Fossils #Palaeontology #Animals #Nature #ScientificResearch #JoshBrine

Researchers develop laser technology to test drinks for methanol
By Sophie Holder

Adelaide University researchers have developed a way to use lasers to test closed alcohol bottles for methanol, which kills hundreds every way.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-16/scientists-using-lasers-to-test-for-methanol-in-drinks/106917366

#ScientificResearch #Alcohol #PubsTavernsandBars #ScamsandFraud #FoodandBeverageProcessingIndustry #SophieHolder

Researchers develop laser technology to test drinks for methanol
By Sophie Holder

Adelaide University researchers have developed a way to use lasers to test closed alcohol bottles for methanol, which kills hundreds every way.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-16/scientists-using-lasers-to-test-for-methanol-in-drinks/106917366

#ScientificResearch #Alcohol #PubsTavernsandBars #ScamsandFraud #FoodandBeverageProcessingIndustry #SophieHolder

“When you mix science and politics, you get politics:*…

Tina Hesman Saey on a looming threat to the U.S…

Soviet scientists in the 1930s knew what could happen if they bucked the party line: denunciation, firing and banishment from the scientific establishment, even imprisonment and death. Political reprisals against those who opposed the views of dictator Joseph Stalin and his followers — and the dubious science they endorsed — led to the starvation of millions, as well as to decades of lost progress in fields from agriculture to molecular biology.

Now, scientists are warning that history could repeat itself — but in the United States.

A new proposal from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget would put political appointees in charge of funding decisions traditionally overseen by scientists. In recent years, the federal government has funded about 40 percent of basic science research in the United States.

The OMB’s more than 400-page proposed rule change would let political appointees decide how to hand out federal research funds and who can get them. It would cut funding for collaboration with scientists in other countries and restrict scientists’ ability to communicate their findings. What’s more, it could prevent research on matters that President Donald Trump’s administration has deemed “not in the national interest” — such as studies on health disparities, mRNA-based vaccines and research that doesn’t recognize biological sex as a strict binary.

The new rules would also give OMB the power to rescind previously approved research funds. The proposal “poses a sweeping threat to federal grantmaking and the responsible stewardship of American taxpayer dollars,” the science advocacy group Stand Up for Science Foundation said in a report. In addition, it would impact nonscientific grants supporting services for mental health, housing, education, veterans and Tribal nations, affecting the health and well-being of millions.

So far, OMB has received more than 98,000 comments on the proposal. The public comment period closes July 13. It then will be up to OMB to decide whether to keep the rule as is, revise it or scrap it.

These far-reaching measures are already drawing parallels to dark moments in scientific history. Some researchers say the recent mass firings, policy changes and grant cancellations at federal research institutions, including the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, closely mirror what happened in the U.S.S.R. under Stalin. “A similar threat now hangs over U.S. science,” the editorial board of The New England Journal of Medicine wrote in June.

Its editorial invoked the example of Trofim Lysenko [see here], an agronomist and astute political operator who rose to power in the 1930s Soviet Union under Stalin.

Until the 1930s, “the Soviet Union was a real powerhouse in the field of genetics,” says Lee Dugatkin, an evolutionary biologist and historian of science at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.

Then, Lysenko came along. “This guy was your sort of classic charlatan,” Dugatkin says. “He had the equivalent of a mail order degree in agriculture, but he was quite good with the press, and he started to basically spread this idea out there that he was capable of dramatically increasing crop yield, particularly wheat.”

Lysenko’s supposed innovation was a process called vernalization and amounted to soaking seeds in freezing water. The resulting plants — and all their offspring — should be resistant to the U.S.S.R.’s famously cold winters, Lysenko reasoned.

His reasoning was based on a disproven idea in evolutionary biology called Lamarckian inheritance. French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his followers thought that things an organism experiences in its lifetime can be handed down to the next generation. The classic example is a giraffe that has to stretch to reach leaves producing offspring with long necks.

This idea ran counter to Mendelian genetics, which holds that genes — not environmental influences — control traits and are passed to offspring. Mendelian geneticists thought it would take five years to breed more cold-tolerant crops. Lysenko said he could do it in two to three years.

Stalin didn’t have time to wait. He was trying to get collective farms going and needed to increase crop yields to feed more than 150 million people. Large parts of the country had already suffered from famine in 1932 and 1933 and about 6 million people died. Some resorted to cannibalism.

Stalin embraced Lysenko’s quick-fix approach. That decision, says Michael Gordin, a historian of science at Princeton University, was “something that the majority of people at the time, and everyone since, considers the wrong side of the dispute.”

Lysenko was put in charge of a prestigious genetics institute and forced his scientifically unsound farming practices on the collective farms. His methods were disastrous.

Soaking seeds in freezing water hampered germination, leading to crop losses. Millions starved. Meanwhile, Mendelian genetics was branded a “whore of capitalism,” and geneticists were forced to renounce their views or lose their jobs. Many were jailed, and almost a dozen were executed or died in prison.

The Soviet Union lost its scientific leadership role and sat on the sidelines for important scientific discoveries of the 1950s and beyond. One, Gordin says, was the development of “massively” productive hybrid corn. The country also missed out on the discovery of DNA and the advent of molecular biology, putting Soviet genetics decades behind the rest of the world.

Soviet genetics did not recover from Lysenko’s influence until after the break-up of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gordin says. “I think you’d be hard pressed to find anybody who thinks that … Russia is today, or Ukraine, or any post-Soviet successor state, is a leading molecular biology country.”…

The Soviets did it, and it didn’t end well: “Here’s what happens when you put politicians in charge of science,” from @thsaey.bsky.social in @sciencenews.bsky.social.

See also: Idiocracy

* John M. Barry

###

As we remember the past so as not to repeat it, we might recall that it was on this date in 1834 that the Spanish Inquisition (finally) ended. Authorized by Pope Sixtus IV in 1478, the Inqusition was initially led by inquisitors (Miguel de Morillo and Juan de San Martín) who were appointed by the future Catholic monarchs, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. It was originally (ostensibly) intended primarily to identify heretics; its aim, to maintain Christian orthodoxy. But it became an effective instrument of state power by replacing the Medieval Inquisition, which was under Papal control.

Over its course, the Inquisition prosecuted an estimated 150,000 people for various offences. An estimated 3,000–5,000 were turned over to the state for execution, particularly in the initial 50 years, mostly by burning at the stake. Other punishments included penance and public flogging, exile, enslavement on galleys, and prison terms ranging from several years to life. In many of these punishments an important motive was the confiscation of all the victims’ property.

As Monty Python observed, “nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” And nobody expected it to last 356 years.

“When you mix science and politics, you get politics:*…

Tina Hesman Saey on a looming threat to the U.S…

Soviet scientists in the 1930s knew what could happen if they bucked the party line: denunciation, firing and banishment from the scientific establishment, even imprisonment and death. Political reprisals against those who opposed the views of dictator Joseph Stalin and his followers — and the dubious science they endorsed — led to the starvation of millions, as well as to decades of lost progress in fields from agriculture to molecular biology.

Now, scientists are warning that history could repeat itself — but in the United States.

A new proposal from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget would put political appointees in charge of funding decisions traditionally overseen by scientists. In recent years, the federal government has funded about 40 percent of basic science research in the United States.

The OMB’s more than 400-page proposed rule change would let political appointees decide how to hand out federal research funds and who can get them. It would cut funding for collaboration with scientists in other countries and restrict scientists’ ability to communicate their findings. What’s more, it could prevent research on matters that President Donald Trump’s administration has deemed “not in the national interest” — such as studies on health disparities, mRNA-based vaccines and research that doesn’t recognize biological sex as a strict binary.

The new rules would also give OMB the power to rescind previously approved research funds. The proposal “poses a sweeping threat to federal grantmaking and the responsible stewardship of American taxpayer dollars,” the science advocacy group Stand Up for Science Foundation said in a report. In addition, it would impact nonscientific grants supporting services for mental health, housing, education, veterans and Tribal nations, affecting the health and well-being of millions.

So far, OMB has received more than 98,000 comments on the proposal. The public comment period closes July 13. It then will be up to OMB to decide whether to keep the rule as is, revise it or scrap it.

These far-reaching measures are already drawing parallels to dark moments in scientific history. Some researchers say the recent mass firings, policy changes and grant cancellations at federal research institutions, including the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, closely mirror what happened in the U.S.S.R. under Stalin. “A similar threat now hangs over U.S. science,” the editorial board of The New England Journal of Medicine wrote in June.

Its editorial invoked the example of Trofim Lysenko [see here], an agronomist and astute political operator who rose to power in the 1930s Soviet Union under Stalin.

Until the 1930s, “the Soviet Union was a real powerhouse in the field of genetics,” says Lee Dugatkin, an evolutionary biologist and historian of science at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.

Then, Lysenko came along. “This guy was your sort of classic charlatan,” Dugatkin says. “He had the equivalent of a mail order degree in agriculture, but he was quite good with the press, and he started to basically spread this idea out there that he was capable of dramatically increasing crop yield, particularly wheat.”

Lysenko’s supposed innovation was a process called vernalization and amounted to soaking seeds in freezing water. The resulting plants — and all their offspring — should be resistant to the U.S.S.R.’s famously cold winters, Lysenko reasoned.

His reasoning was based on a disproven idea in evolutionary biology called Lamarckian inheritance. French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his followers thought that things an organism experiences in its lifetime can be handed down to the next generation. The classic example is a giraffe that has to stretch to reach leaves producing offspring with long necks.

This idea ran counter to Mendelian genetics, which holds that genes — not environmental influences — control traits and are passed to offspring. Mendelian geneticists thought it would take five years to breed more cold-tolerant crops. Lysenko said he could do it in two to three years.

Stalin didn’t have time to wait. He was trying to get collective farms going and needed to increase crop yields to feed more than 150 million people. Large parts of the country had already suffered from famine in 1932 and 1933 and about 6 million people died. Some resorted to cannibalism.

Stalin embraced Lysenko’s quick-fix approach. That decision, says Michael Gordin, a historian of science at Princeton University, was “something that the majority of people at the time, and everyone since, considers the wrong side of the dispute.”

Lysenko was put in charge of a prestigious genetics institute and forced his scientifically unsound farming practices on the collective farms. His methods were disastrous.

Soaking seeds in freezing water hampered germination, leading to crop losses. Millions starved. Meanwhile, Mendelian genetics was branded a “whore of capitalism,” and geneticists were forced to renounce their views or lose their jobs. Many were jailed, and almost a dozen were executed or died in prison.

The Soviet Union lost its scientific leadership role and sat on the sidelines for important scientific discoveries of the 1950s and beyond. One, Gordin says, was the development of “massively” productive hybrid corn. The country also missed out on the discovery of DNA and the advent of molecular biology, putting Soviet genetics decades behind the rest of the world.

Soviet genetics did not recover from Lysenko’s influence until after the break-up of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gordin says. “I think you’d be hard pressed to find anybody who thinks that … Russia is today, or Ukraine, or any post-Soviet successor state, is a leading molecular biology country.”…

The Soviets did it, and it didn’t end well: “Here’s what happens when you put politicians in charge of science,” from @thsaey.bsky.social in @sciencenews.bsky.social.

See also: Idiocracy

* John M. Barry

###

As we remember the past so as not to repeat it, we might recall that it was on this date in 1834 that the Spanish Inquisition (finally) ended. Authorized by Pope Sixtus IV in 1478, the Inqusition was initially led by inquisitors (Miguel de Morillo and Juan de San Martín) who were appointed by the future Catholic monarchs, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. It was originally (ostensibly) intended primarily to identify heretics; its aim, to maintain Christian orthodoxy. But it became an effective instrument of state power by replacing the Medieval Inquisition, which was under Papal control.

Over its course, the Inquisition prosecuted an estimated 150,000 people for various offences. An estimated 3,000–5,000 were turned over to the state for execution, particularly in the initial 50 years, mostly by burning at the stake. Other punishments included penance and public flogging, exile, enslavement on galleys, and prison terms ranging from several years to life. In many of these punishments an important motive was the confiscation of all the victims’ property.

As Monty Python observed, “nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” And nobody expected it to last 356 years.

Natural nanotech the new weapon against flystrike
By Justine Longmore and Warwick Long

A biopesticide using tea-tree oil in nanoparticles has been developed to keep flies off sheep.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2026-07-15/tea-tree-oil-nanotechnology-flystrike-sheep/106876168

#SheepFarming #EssentialOilCrops #ScientificResearch #Agribusiness #JustineLongmore #WarwickLong

Natural nanotech the new weapon against flystrike
By Justine Longmore and Warwick Long

A biopesticide using tea-tree oil in nanoparticles has been developed to keep flies off sheep.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2026-07-15/tea-tree-oil-nanotechnology-flystrike-sheep/106876168

#SheepFarming #EssentialOilCrops #ScientificResearch #Agribusiness #JustineLongmore #WarwickLong

Sotheby’s Big T. Rex Auction Raises Concerns Hype and Wealth Are Upending Science

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.wired.com/story/sothebys-t-rex-auction-shows-wealth-upending-science/

Sotheby’s Big T. Rex Auction Raises Concerns Hype and Wealth Are Upending Science

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.wired.com/story/sothebys-t-rex-auction-shows-wealth-upending-science/

Scientists discovered a fascinating trick to feeling like you slept great even if you didn’t

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/placebo-sleep-study-ex1/

Scientists discovered a fascinating trick to feeling like you slept great even if you didn’t

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/placebo-sleep-study-ex1/

'Mirror life' technology worries Doomsday Clock scientists. This is why
By Ellen Phiddian

This year, scientists included a new potential threat in their decision to move the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight. So what is 'mirror life' and why are they concerned?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2026-07-12/why-mirror-life-has-doomsday-clock-scientists-alarmed/106780618

#ScientificResearch #Chemistry #Ethics #Biology #EllenPhiddian

Water in the air an 'untapped water resource' until now
By Joanna Prendergast

Can water be made from air in WA's Wheatbelt? Researchers are putting an invention to the test.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-09/water-from-the-air-to-grow-native-seedlings/106888152

#WaterResources #WaterSupply #LivestockFarming #LocalFoodSystems #Agribusiness #ScientificResearch #IrrigatedFarming #JoannaPrendergast