Last year RFK Jr closed the NIH lab where they were doing stuff like this. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

A phase 1 clinical trial of base editing to treat beta-thalassaemia looks promising. Wow, this genome-editing technique is moving fast! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This looks impressive: a technique for simultaneously deducing gene expression, chromatin accessibility and conformation, and histone modification at the single-cell level: basically the 3D epigenome and transcriptome. Question is: can we make sense of all that? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In 15 mins I'm taking part in a panel discussion at the American Geophysical Union's Astrobiology meeting (AbSciCon) in Chicago on "Scientific Authority in the Search for [Extraterrestrial] Life". I'm online, but the rest of the panel is live. I think it'll be fun.

All good technologies can be misused, but the rate of misadoption (is that a thing?) of AI is breathtaking. Go ahead and use it to educate yourself or inspire you to new ideas. Do not cut and paste from it into things you claim to have written! Just don't ever do that!

“It feels like being the world's biggest party-pooper, but you can’t go out there & say you created a direwolf when you haven’t. That you genuinely believe you recreated an extinct species based on 20 gene edits.” @toriherridge.bsky.social debunks the de-extinction grift, with @rowhoop.bsky.social.🧪

One for fans of exotica: how making an oscillator with an effective negative mass can enable quantum noise cancellation in precision optomechanical measurements like gravitational-wave detection. physics.aps.org/articles/v19...

𝗦𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 I've shared book suggestions on the brain, conceptual foundations of biology, and much more. Check out the collection from past years. (interface not perfect at this point). sparkling-trifle-93b8c9.netlify.app

How do you define a species? The question has been controversial since the days of Darwin. Recent advances in genomics have both clarified and complicated the picture. www.quantamagazine.org/how-ecotypes...

Result! That was the funniest moment of the episode.

Here is our story on the huge OpenAI maths result www.newscientist.com/article/2527...

A great read, and there's much I agree with. And some that I very much do not. Stay tuned.

This is a failure of journalism, on a really basic level, but it is also a failure of political leadership. It was going to fall simply in the basis of what the previous govt did. But Starmer somehow conspired to actively spread the impression it was rising.

Why science needs to talk about failure. My latest column for @thenewworldmag.bsky.social www.thenewworld.co.uk/philip-ball-...

Yes indeed, this reflects my perception: to much of the media it's all about "what people feel", not what politicians will do.

This is so full of mind-expanding thoughts. e.g. "For me, Gödel’s theorems do not show that mathematics is limited, but rather that mathematics is much wider and more powerful than Hilbert’s finitistic view." www.quantamagazine.org/what-do-gode...

The mathematician Alexander Grothendieck is revered in the world of math; outside of it, he’s known for his unusual life, if he’s known at all. But what were his actual mathematical contributions? www.quantamagazine.org/how-alexande...

Topology is the bedrock of modern math. But it doesn’t gel with algebra. A pair of mathematicians have proposed a new framework that eases topology’s limitations. Their work rewrites our understanding of how numbers behave. www.quantamagazine.org/two-research...

Partly because, as Thony says, there is no "scientific method".

In all its history, Google did one good thing: created a transformational, empowering search engine. Then it did a lot of bad things. Now it is destroying the one good thing. techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/g...

Woah, neat!

Including the little-known phylogenetic association of flies and rice.

Oh, but it's complicated! nautil.us/why-nature-p...

Oh god, are tech people really still talking about a Turing test moment? Are they really so out of touch? www.thenewworld.co.uk/philip-ball-...

Well call me naive if you will, but I'm considerably reassured by this.

Interesting. I mean, don't we all love it when you ask someone for directions and they say "Thanks for asking, that's such a great question. Now let's think about this..."

Please help spread the news far and wide! We have a new, full-time, permanent Lecturer in Global History of Science job @stsucl.bsky.social Don't be fooled by the application of deadline of only 9 June 2026. This is an open search #histsci #skystorians www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Oh god, so depressing. I love her writing. lithub.com/nobel-laurea...

The chemist in me is a bit horrified to discover that physicists are happy to write silicon nitride as SiNi.

Here we go again. Colossal hype incoming. “To be clear—Colossal isn’t close to recreating the moa. Scientists would need to study DNA from moa bones & insert thousands of changes into the genome of an existing bird, something that’s still technically difficult—with or without an artificial egg.”👇🧪

Well this was something of a rabbit hole, but one that I think was very helpful (to me at least) in clarifying what folks mean when they speak about illusionism, i.e. *not* "consciousness is an illusion".

The piece I'm working on right now reminds me that few things make me more angry about molecular biological nomenclature than "BRCA1" - as if to say this is a gene for breast cancer. Same with "oncogenes" generally. This is an epic fail that we're kind of stuck with.

It's that little laugh when he says it. Everything about Musk is in that little laugh.

"The incompleteness theorems teach us that when it comes to our attempt to master the conceptual order, whether it be in mathematics or, for that matter, in any other domain, we will always fail." But each time, better.

Nailed it.

"I am pleased to inform you that your manuscript entitled "The enabling molecular mechanisms of biological agency" has been approved for publication in the upcoming theme issue of Philosophical Transactions B". 😁

"a PRS is not an internal predisposition waiting to be realized; it is a risk estimate derived from a model constructed from population-level DNA associations without clearly defined biological mechanisms."

Turns out that wishing for UK politics to be boring and competent for a while was wishing for too much.

Your periodic reminder that just because a company got a ton of VC funds, it doesn't mean their idea is not stupid. arstechnica.com/science/2026...

Daughter has headed off to be tested for GCSE chemistry on fullerenes and nanotubes, and god I feel old. www.nature.com/articles/354...

Why I live here.

Jesus, these responses. I am not a paid academic, but I know I must check every one of the references I cite when I write academic papers (or books for that matter). As Dr Waters says, this is basic good practice.

Goodness, this special issue looks interesting.

I have two Gen Z'ers. They have different thoughts to me, as kids should. But they don't have a different way of framing reality & truth. Once again: worry more about the boomers and elders blindly going down their conspiracy rabbit holes. The kids are alright. (Also, I agree w/David's responses)

More (less?) than not a stretch. Classicists will find it hilarious that people are freaking out about this.

It's very nice.

This phishing spam to authors is reaching new heights of poesy. So moving.

Not really surprising that the "free speech on campus" activists don't care that much now that higher education and academic research in the US are actually being dismantled.

Not just straws - it's clandestine soup-eating from now on, lads. And no kale. Sorry, I don't make the rules. www.mediaite.com/media/tv/con...

Such a great Tom Gauld. But there's a serious point here too. Of course, there's no reason sales should reflect worth or quality. But the real issue is about what manner of cultural work a book is doing...