To be clear, no country should have its head in the sand about AI. But ‘embrace’ here, from OpenAI, means one thing - ‘uncritically adopt our tech, become permanently dependent on our power and infrastructure, and pay us handsomely for the privilege’

One of the biggest questions in biology is how complex cells evolved about 2 billion years ago. Here's my new story on how scientists are solving the mystery of eukaryotes like us. Gift link: nyti.ms/4qMbo22

Hot eukaryogenesis news (is there any other kind?) - hydrogen production and aerobic respiration may have been present in the Asgard-eukaryotic ancestor - paper in @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Since this is so, so obviously a total contrast to the way it reports Trump, and the comparison is so inevitable, I think we have to read this as a blatant provocation. Which means, Jeez, this is where we are now.

It is good news, but the fact that a headline like this is even possible is very grim news indeed.

*Very* interested to see this, for all sorts of reasons. www.cell.com/cell-systems...

I explain in @thenewworldmag.bsky.social why Obama was right (or at the very least, eminently sensible) about aliens, while much of the media was extremely silly about it. www.thenewworld.co.uk/philip-ball-...

Physicists often must switch between two frameworks: quantum for small stuff, classical for big. Can the idea of decoherence be the bridge?

I'm very happy to see this nice discussion. The cytosol and crowding are a big deal in cell biology, but it's still not uncommon to see cells treated as though they were a bag of dilute, well-mixed molecules...

Sending this around again as the US awakes, since it seems to have created a fair amount of discussion.

In the genre of critical reviews of The Selfish Gene, the most underrated may be Stent’s. Much attention goes to Lewontin’s Nature review and to Midgley’s long critique (which wasn't, in fact, a traditional book review, but a reply to J. L. Mackie). Dawkins later responded in the same journal.

I just read Gunther Stent’s 1977 review of The Selfish Gene (in the Hastings Center Report), and oh boy. A 🧵 Some samples: Dawkins’ “perverse” definition of the gene “denatures the meaningful and well-established central concept of genetics into a fuzzy and heuristically useless notion.” /1

Our February editorial celebrates 100 years of Fermi-Dirac statistics. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Divination. I see my visual history of divination is now up on the Yale website. Forthcoming this year, Oct 2026. Enjoyed the challenge, once again, of exploring global traditions. Complex and rich. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

I'm grateful for the opportunity to sit down with @davideagleman.bsky.social to spread optimism about the next steps in brain research & their impact on understanding brain and mental disorders. For a bolus of that excitement, start at 32:50, where David nails a summary of it (in 3.5 minutes).

I had a great chat with Evan at the wonderful The Giant's Shoulder about How Life Works. youtu.be/9SseGx0R0fY

The story here is not about Obama talking about aliens. It's about the media hyperventilating and writing dumb headlines about Obama saying entirely reasonable things about aliens. Thanks to conspiracy theories in this arena, we have culturally lost the plot.

I love the anecdote about Feynman and Bob Crease. I suspect that had more to do with Bob knowing the history and philosophy of physics, and Feynman being averse to the complications that both disciplines introduce to the "beauty".

I could be wrong but I think this might be the first experimental demonstration of the purported advantages in charging a quantum battery as opposed to a classical one. Not clear how practically valuable it'll be, but nice to see proof of principle. journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

The death toll from Musk’s budget cuts will surpass that of every war in the last few decades combined. He knowingly triggered famines and collapsed health systems, yet he faces no consequences. We need to stop calling it cost-cutting and start calling it what it is: mass murder

These cuts to physics research will be a disaster for UK scientists – and for our standing in the world www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Nick is right that if they feel they don't know, why are they doing what they're doing? I suspect it might be because they do actually know: No, the models are absolutely not conscious FFS. But it's edgy to say otherwise.

This piece is getting attention, and rightly. All the more reason that the occasional wayward element not be used as reason for Edgelords to dismiss the rest. Genetic algorithms are not "systems theory mixed with race science". They are... www.thenerve.news/p/epstein-bi...

This isn't something distant or far away. Super-agent & close Epstein ally, John Brockman had huge influence. His 'rockstar' writers, scientists and academics dominated our book pages & broadsheets. We need nothing less than a total revisionist history of the last 20 years. 2/

Here, @philipcball.bsky.social sums up the whole ugly Epstein mess and why it matters (along multiple dimensions). Reading it was therapeutic.

Donald Trump v the BBC: it should be easy to know side you’re on. We should rally to the cause of public service broadcasting before it’s too late app.prospectmagazine.co.uk/story/72423/...

Just added this to my WordPress site, so it's free to read. homunculusmusic.wordpress.com/2026/02/14/e...

The problem with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was not that it invoked a mysterious "wavefunction collapse" (whoever told you that?!) but possibly just that Bohr & co didn't apply it carefully to the "quantum-classical transition". www.quantamagazine.org/are-the-myst...

‪I roll my eyes at most people talking about the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, but Wojciech Zurek is the real deal. He's been working on it for decades, making steady progress. This is a good quick intro to where he's at now. Of course it's no substitute for reading Zurek's papers!

Jesus, this hits hard.

It's so wild people this dumb are in charge of so much

If you want a colourful weekend read, here's the extract from my book Alchemy: An Illustrated History published in @chemistryworld.com www.chemistryworld.com/culture/cruc...

Resolving the "measurement problem" in quantum mechanics would be a huge deal. Doing it without any exotic assumptions or additions to standard QM would be amazing. Now, I'm not reckless enough to say that is what has been achieved here, but... www.quantamagazine.org/are-the-myst...

civil society and right groups orgs that often keep a tab on and organise campaigns against these evil corporations are overstretched and underfunded. this internal memo from Meta is insidious and sickening

Does Consciousness Require a Subject? The Self, Agency & AI Limitations www.mindbodysolution.org/kevin-mitche... - really enjoyed this chat with Tevin Naidu! 😊 cc @cdj.bsky.social @anilseth.bsky.social

I don't expect there to be exactly a huge clamour of agreement here, but it feels to me that the work I talk about here may have supplied the basic framework for understanding "the measurement problem" in quantum mechanics - and with no added magic!

Qualia essays go where curiosity leads. This week, follow @philipcball.bsky.social down the rabbit hole into the subatomic realm, where he examines entanglement's role as the bridge between the quantum and classical worlds. www.quantamagazine.org/are-the-myst...

“If a single animal can have several different genomes at once, which one is the blueprint? This may not even be the right question to ask...” Intriguing jumping-off point for a superb piece on why our favourite metaphors fail to capture biology; @elisecutts.bsky.social in @pioneerwork.bsky.social 🧪

The scriptwriters have been really poor in this series. Time they gave us some believable characters instead of just cartoon villains. That blanket scene - come on, no one does that in real life!

I couldn't be more delighted to be among this stellar line-up. Looking forward to hearing what the others have to say about this. There will be a series of papers too in a forthcoming special issue of Phil Trans B.

Hoorah for @jomarchant.bsky.social launching her new book In Search of Now (which looks fabulous) last night in Kensington. Lovely to see my friends and colleagues including @wanderinggaia.bsky.social @helenpearson.bsky.social @castelvecchi.bsky.social @mpshanahan.bsky.social, Marnie Chesterton...

I've reviewed Adrian Woolfson's new book On the Future of Species, for @thelancet.com. The book is a curious mixture - it says good things about what the genome does & does not constrain or control, but then seems to spin a fantastical vision of synthetic genomics. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

The essay is finally up! Here's a link: pioneerworks.org/broadcast/ge...

There we have it, US media. He has revoked the ruling. He has not revoked the scientific finding that led to the ruling. Those are not the sort of thing one can revoke. This is not hard. If you're keen not to be actively complicit, use words properly.

Why are all the US media using words like "revoke" and repeal"? They mean nothing in this context. Why not "refuse to accept", "deny", or "lie about"?

You can't... repeal... a scientific finding. At that point it's just called lying about it.

How can one a 'revoke' a scientific finding? www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/12/n...

This is the key point - it's not about Moderna's flu vaccine, it's about sending a signal to the rest of the industry that vaccine development isn't viable in the US. It's all part of the larger anti-vaccine agenda.

“At the hearings, Pam Bondi had a choice to make: she could deliver the answers that Epstein’s victims and the American public deserved, or she could give the performance that Trump would enjoy. “Bondi chose Trump over Epstein’s victims. No wonder she couldn’t look them in the eyes.”