Naomi Wolf could I suppose have googled it - but prefers to shout "I'm an idiot look at me!" to her many equally stupid followers.

Lovely piece by @chrischirp.bsky.social about the moonshot, collaboration and humanity open.substack.com/pub/christin...

now THAT’S how a major publication should write a lede www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

There is no excuse for downplaying or eliding the insanity of Trump’s morning post. It is the most unhinged public comment by a president in US history and should be reported and remarked upon as such.

This is why the 25th Amendment exists. This is the purpose of having the 25th Amendment. To not use this power to remove the president is not a passive act, a mere option: it is a positive decision to misuse the constitution.

I do love a good bit of vaulting.

This is an actual post. This is not funny. This is beyond desperate. This is a deeply unwell man who doesn’t belong anywhere near the levers of power. Every member of his cabinet and Congress is complicit in not demanding his removal now.

This is excellent. I choose not to use AI for my writing, but Naomi's piece reminds me that I'm in no position then to make uninformed judgements about its potential.

Inaccurate election bar charts are nothing new. But when we challenged a Reform spokesman on the numbers didn’t apologise or plead mathematical incompetence; he openly admitted that the misleading bar chart was a deliberate tactic. Read about it here:

Having read a lot of these interviews for my book on Bohr, I found this fascinating. I think Heilbron is right to speak of "ridiculously detailed questions". Kuhn will whip out a 40-year-old paper and start going through it, and folks like Heisenberg won't really remember it at all.

Can this be real? Seriously?

and then shapes its output accordingly (cheating, becoming erratic); there is no more reason to think it feels desperation than to think that it sees blue or tastes berries. WHAT AM I MISSING I FEEL LIKE I AM TAKING CRAZY PILLS that anyone sees more going on here? 8/8

you, a naive fool: i do believe there are some things the nytimes won’t both sides the nytimes:

If we're on the verge of superintelligent AGI, why, when I miss out a space typing "All the best" at the end of a message, does the software decide I meant to write "All Thebes" like I'm Sophocles or something?

These are really something. As someone who's not a big fan of human spaceflight, I am happy to say that it does make a difference to know that some people actually saw these sights.

Artemis II is a thing of beauty open.substack.com/pub/iandunt/...

Sorry but reading Samantha Harvey's "Orbital" is now mandatory.

I daresay LLMs could be used for passable subediting of text, and almost certainly already are, thereby depriving humans of the training that was essential to me in learning how to get sentences grammatical, clear, concise, & elegant. (Yeah right, so what happened, but that's another story I guess.)

Researchers have sought evidence for the bold conjecture that there are two types of liquid water since the 90s – and now an international team claims to have found it. @philipcball.bsky.social www.chemistryworld.com/news/scienti...

Really annoying that viruses figured out the value of long noncoding RNAs too. www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

If there is a finer land than Wales, I've yet to find it.

Cambrian spring.

This is wonderful from @drmatthewsweet.bsky.social. Weird intersectionality? I recorded a Radio 1 session here, as did Gary Lachman with Blondie, & then Gary got into the occult and reviewed my book on Paracelsus for the Independent. www.theguardian.com/books/2006/f... www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

This seems a good day to remember how it all began: www.iconbooks.com/ib-title/how...

As we rightly celebrate the successful Artemis launch and, I trust, the success of the whole mission, should we at the same time perhaps be more angry at this sort of thing? (I don't mean the story, but the sentiments therein.) www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This might be a good time to recommend Orbital by Samantha Harvey. For all kinds of reasons. www.penguin.co.uk/books/454068...

Right. I do not use AI to write (or knowingly for anything else). I have no interest in doing so. This afternoon's writing was hard, and joyous, and emotional. (Look, I'm working on my second novel, so.) I can't imagine wanting to ditch all that for frictionless slop.

Cambrian ochres.

Oh, we're still doing "helium-3 is the key to nuclear fusion"? (And now, apparently, quantum computers!) Seriously? Why don't you tell us that the Apollo missions gave us Velcro and Tang for good measure? www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

I share your lack of excitement Philip. And let us not forget Art 11 of the 1979 Moon Agreement about the Moon being ‘common heritage’ of humankind against extractivist practices in outer space something I discussed here (paper coming out soon in edited vol): www.college-de-france.fr/en/agenda/sy...

Friends who aren't in science often assume I'll be excited by stuff like this. But as this piece intimates, it's precisely because I am in science that I'm not.

Chemists use atomic radius as a measure of the size of an atom, typically defined as half the distance between the nuclei of two adjacent atoms. However, in reality atoms don’t have fixed boundaries, @philipcball.bsky.social reports. www.chemistryworld.com/news/the-que...

Y'all know about this already, right? And all the comments are correct. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ssi...

If the impending launch of Artemis II has you think "whats this whole Moon mullarkey about anyway", could I recommend my book on the topic. "The Moon: A History for the Future"? I think its pretty good and I am reliably assured that others do to. www.google.co.uk/books/editio...

If people want a short overview or two: by Andrew makingsciencepublic.com/2021/11/05/s... or by me makingsciencepublic.com/2022/04/29/u...

"For many outcomes, things still look much worse for adolescent girls". Talk of a male ‘crisis’ is uncomfortable when girls and women face entrenched inequalities. The message I heard was: we need to understand challenges faced by *all* young people. 7/7 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Are boys in ‘crisis’ — and is the manosphere playing a part? My new @nature.com feature digs into data on boys & young men incl. education, health & attitudes — and asks whether talk of a ‘crisis’ risks sidelining women & girls. 1/7 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Most FW-libertarians refute compatibilism - the view that free will is compatible with determinism. We have recently argued that compatibilism is moot because the universe is not, in fact, deterministic, so we don't have to entertain that premise link.springer.com/article/10.1...

So glad to see this being talked about - and indeed, given a name.

Jeanne Barret was badass, and deserves a biopic. www.rmg.co.uk/stories/mari...

This is a very interesting book. I'll be posting a (rather different) review soon.

"DNA codes for RNA codes for proteins codes for phenotype." I just don't understand it - how do you get the VC for a biotech startup when you've only read the Ladybird Book of Biology? But judging from Trump's science advisers, this is the future of biology. www.techradar.com/pro/every-li...

What is equity for women's education around the world look like? Or how far have we got in the UK? Some reflections on a couple of recent @royalsociety.org conferences occamstypewriter.org/athenedonald...

Even simple liquids can crack. Kind of weird. journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

Not much space left for spontaneous physical collapse to be a viable option in quantum mechanics. journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

Sunday evening gothic rock. www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcuQ...

Yes - though I suspect the thinking here, to the extent that there is any at all, is that AI will do all the biology.

Spot the signs of an AI-based scam. I'm curious about how it works though - I'm guessing that if authors say "Ooh yes please", at some stage they are asked for a fee. I guess we're going to get ever more of this stuff.

Despite being the most familiar liquid, water breaks many of the rules that govern the liquid state – a conundrum we have long theorised about. Now, researchers in Stockholm have evidence to help us understand the weirdness of water. @philipcball.bsky.social www.chemistryworld.com/news/scienti...

Happy #NoKings Day www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkyF...