Silicon Valley has gone wild for Moltbook, the social network for AI agents. What can scientists learn from studying it? Great @nature.com story from Mohana Basu 🧪🤖 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

1/4 RIP Micius 🛰️ The world's first quantum satellite crashed into the Pacific last week (to the west of Ecuador) after an almost 10-year mission Also known as Mozi (& QUESS) it was famously the first to teleport a photon to space (or at least its quantum state) 🧪⚛️ www.nature.com/articles/nat...

OpenAI is among those investing a whopping $252 million into a start up called Merge Labs. They want to use ultrasound -- rather than electrode implants -- to read out and interact with the brain. What are its chances of success? My @nature.com story here: www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪

We're back with a new vid! First protein, now exercise. How much do you need to reap the health benefits? The good news is, probably not as much as you think... 🧪

"Another remarkable case is a 106-year-old woman who took up swimming at age 70 & won her first competition three decades later. Longevity runs in the family: she has two younger sisters over 100 & a 110-year-old aunt." Great story from @marilenharo.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪

Auschwitz was at the end of a process. We must remember that it did not start from gas chambers. This hatred gradually developed: from ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder. Auschwitz took time.

I quizzed @cern.bsky.social's new director general on what that $1bn donation will mean for their long-campaigned for future machine, and whether physicists should pursue cheaper, more varied experimental strategies instead ⚛️🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

How big can something be and still be quantum? We're far off Schrödinger's dead-and-alive cat but physicists have put a cluster of 7,000 atoms into a superposition of distant paths - the chunkiest cat state yet, with philosophical and practical ramifications 🧪⚛️ www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Great @nature.com story from @nicolakimjones.bsky.social 🧪 "How central 'being a man' was to someone’s sense of self wasn’t particularly predictive of which group they landed in. "'Manly' men are not necessarily toxic," says Hill Cone. "There is positive masculinity." www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I stopped putting protein powder in my breakfast after making this video (with producer & extra extraordinaire @nickpetrichowe.bsky.social) It's based on this great story by @marilenharo.bsky.social from the end of last year🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41... Do you need more protein? Watch & learn!

Happy Friday folks! Recently you may have seen demos of glitzy humanoid robots doing impressive stuff. But demos don't say a lot. I wanted to know if these bots are finally becoming useful 🤖🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

In a recent study, LLMs undergoing "therapy" came out with tales of bewildering "childhoods" of pre-training and "fears" of failing their creators, with traits that in people could point to mental health concerns. Should their mimicking of human traumas worry us? 🧪🤖 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Great new feature out on the ways that researchers are trying to stop dormant cancer cells from reemerging years later 🧪https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-04149-3

This is interesting ... I don't receive @cern.bsky.social 's press releases anymore, perhaps because I reported on many physicists' opposition to this project

Wow. CERN has secured a promise of $1 billion (!) towards its planned Future Circular Collider from private donors (such as the Breakthrough Prize Foundation & Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fund) - the first such donation for CERN, which has until now been taxpayer funded home.cern/news/press-r... 🧪⚛️

This was such awful news to report on yesterday. My thoughts are with Nuno Loureiro's family, friends, colleagues and the whole fusion community, of which he seemed to have been a beating heart. What a tragedy www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪⚛️

What's the best science gift you ever got? 🔭🔬 We asked @nature.com readers for their faves. They include the geneticist inspired by slicing up cow eyeballs she was given as a child, and the former head of the Canadian Space Agency who got a telescope for Christmas in time for the Apollo 8 mission

I somehow missed when my own story came out... 🤦 but here's one that I've been trying to write a version of for a while. Amidst the flood of claims from quantum labs right now, a few initiatives are trying to find transparent ways to chart progress. More here 👇 www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪⚛️

Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek's founder, is one of Nature's 10 - those who took a prominent role in shaping science this year 🧪🤖 DeepSeek makes frontier models for very cheap. I profiled him & the firm here (as well as you can profile a man who doesn't speak to the media) www.nature.com/articles/d41...

36 years ago today, 14 women, most of whom were studying engineering, were killed by an anti-feminist gun man at École Polytechnique in Montreal. I was a young graduate student studying physics at the time and I will never forget. #MontrealMassacre #NeverForget 🧪 👩‍🔬 ⚛️ 🎢 #AcademicSky 🇨🇦

I write a lot about AI and in AI policy circles I kept hearing one thing -- China is the country talking loudest about wanting to regulate the technology at a global level. Here's my explainer on what that could look like 🧪🤖 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Rather than just scaling, is it time to bring the neural networks behind LLMs together with old school rule-based 'symbolic' AI? Lots of opportunities and challenges in this great story by @nicolakimjones.bsky.social 🧪🤖 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

In a gear change from my last few stories...by acting as a "mechanical fuse" this simple little slipknot, added to surgical thread, can radically improve how surgeons perform sutures & lead to better outcomes A lovely intersection of mechanics, geometry and medicine 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

This announcement brimmed with hype but at its heart are interesting qs - what if models could learn from high-end scientific (rather than everyday) data? And are there specific science Qs that AI can help? Done well, AI for science yields amazing stuff (see AlphaFold). But done badly brings risks

DeepMind has long been seen as the scientists' AI firm: focusing on ethics, publishing prolifically & tackling problems researchers want solved. But since the advent of LLMs, the pace of AI has changed and commercial imperatives abound. Can DeepMind stay on top? www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪🤖

This millimetre-size robot from @ethz.ch can be steered around the body in real time using magnetic fields. Once it arrives at a blockage or tumour, it delivers its cargo of drug and dissolves. So far only in pigs and sheep; human trials are next. My story here: www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪

There was a lot of hubbub last month about this tiny, one-author model that beats some big LLMs on a prominent benchmark supposed to test intelligence (ARC-AGI). Right now it mainly does sudokus, but could this technique eventually helps AI go beyond LLMs? www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪🤖

This is pretty cool. How do you train an LLM? Yes but reeeeally how? This 200+ page (!) blog from @hf.co shows how to train a model from start to finish, bugs, warts & all. Loads of interesting details I hadn't thought about huggingface.co/spaces/Huggi...

Another day, another claim of quantum advantage -- this time, with hints of (someday) doing something useful 🧪⚛️ www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Where do the world famous LLM sceptic @garymarcus.bsky.social & his bud Laurence Fishburne (AKA Morpheus) like to hang out? The Royal Society of course! 🧪🤖 Here's my write up from @unisouthampton.bsky.social's Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Turing Test event www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Next week @jameszou.bsky.social & colleagues will host a conference where all the papers are written by AI agents & reviewed by them too. What do you reckon? A good chance to put AIs through their paces? Or a way to divert AI slop from elsewhere? 🧪🤖 My story here: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Not common to see a 7-byline story in the wild, but that's what the situation calls for when the government shuts down and every science agency needs to be checked in on for RIFs, grant terminations, and general dysfunction. Our update on what the chaos means for science here:

I'm pretty sceptical about 'AI scheming', as it's so easy to anthropomorphise & experiments often involve telling the AI to do the bad thing they end up doing. To understand what's behind the hype, read this smart & sober overview [email protected] 🧪🤖 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Over at @naturepodcast.bsky.social we also made a super short vid on this year's physics Nobel Prize. Quantum phenomena at the macroscopic scale in two minutes... go! With me, and Ben Thompson & camera work by the fab @emzywb.bsky.social 🧪⚛️ www.youtube.com/shorts/krita...

John Martinis’ wife didn’t wake him in the middle of the night (California time) to tell him he had won a Nobel. “I got up a little bit before 6. Then I opened my computer and saw John and Michel’s and my pictures." Story by @lizziegibney.bsky.social and me www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Have you heard loads about "AI agents", but have little idea what they are, what they can do for researchers and whether to believe the hype? Then this is for you! 🧪🤖https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03246-7

Nature's news team is now recruiting for our paid US intern position for January to June 2026. It's a great opportunity to come join our team & publish important stories 🧪 Apply by 16 Oct springernature.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/SpringerNatu...

I was going to post a rant about the perils of quantum computing hype, following the claim by #HSBC & #IBM that they have improved bond market predictions using a QC, but instead I will just link to Scott Aaronson's blog which says it all scottaaronson.blog?p=9170 🧪⚛️ cc @bullshitquantum.bsky.social

Also read @helenpearson.bsky.social & @heidiledford.bsky.social's excellent story unpicking the origins of Trump's paracetamol/autism claims www.nature.com/articles/d41... This quote sums it up: "We do not think that taking acetaminophen is in any way contributing to actually causing autism"

Remember DeepSeek's R1 model that crashed the US stock market in Jan? DeepSeek has said it did not boost the model by training on OpenAI outputs. This and much more (eg $$ to train & technical details) revealed in the firm's peer reviewed paper out in Nature today 🧪🤖 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

ICYMI, this week I wrote about GPT-5 and the effort to stop LLMs from hallucinating, as well as saying they've done tasks they haven't. With web search to verify facts, finding citations is getting a lot better. But as soon as it's off, things can still go very wonky🧪🤖 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

OpenAI's new open-weight #AI model looks to be a powerful reasoner. It's small enough to use locally and they've done loads to make it available. But has it entered the game too late to become the go-to for researchers? Do ping me if you're trying it out! www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🤖🧪

Hey quantum fans. Here's a slightly different #quantum survey from my mind-boggling one on interpretations, but seems important! This group hopes to understand how to help quantum scientists to stay in the field & thrive. If you have time, you can fill it out here👇 www.diviq.org/survey 🧪⚛️

This year quantum physics turns 100, so @nature.com decided to conduct the biggest ever survey of what lies behind it. Do physicists really believe in multiple universes? Can influences happen instantaneously? Is the Copenhagen interpretation all it's cut out to be? ⚛️🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The Thirty Meter Telescope — long planned to be built in Hawaii but now with its US funding on the chopping block — could be given a new lease of life in Spain, following a government bid to host at the telescope on La Palma. Will the TMT board accept? 🧪🔭 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

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Moonshot AI has now published its technical report about Kimi K2 github.com/MoonshotAI/K... The 32-page doc says the model trained on NVIDIA H800 GPUs, including post-training reinforcement learning on agentic examples My story from last week is here: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Meet Kimi K2 from Beijing-based Moonlight AI. Good at coding, writing & multi-tool tasks, reports say it's the best open model available. It looks like #DeepSeek wasn't an anomaly. Sources said to expect more cutting-edge & free models from Chinese firms soon 🤖🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

For this week's @naturepodcast.bsky.social we chatted about a news story on researchers putting hidden prompts into preprints to try to game peer review, and turned it into a 90-sec vid. Take a look here: www.youtube.com/shorts/WvamK... 🧪🤖 With @nickpetrichowe.bsky.social & @danjfox.bsky.social