“We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those left behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.” — Tom Stoppard.

New PNAS paper with the impressive Daniel King, @gagliardilaura.bsky.social and other wonderful co-authors -- www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Opportunity Alert for Faculty in Nigeria Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Faculty Fellows at the University of Chicago: uchicago.infoready4.com#competitionD...

In the century leading up to 1975, nearly 6000 freighters went down in the Great Lakes. The Edmund Fitzgerald was the last. The last. In 50 years, not a single commercial freighter has been lost in the Great Lakes. Why? It's NOAA. Of course it's NOAA.

Happy "Lights All Askew" Day to all who celebrate! (Headline in the New York Times from Nov. 10, 1919, brings Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity -- along with its alleged incomprehensibility -- to the public.) 🪐🔭🧠📰 #physics #science #histsci #lightsallaskew

Dropbox informed me today that, at least, "Emojis in filenames are finally here! 🥳" -- what a time to be alive ...

Moon Duchin is the coolest!! www.nytimes.com/2025/11/03/s...

Learn about Globus Compute next week: www.globus.org/events/compu...

AI can accelerate scientific discovery, but only if we get the scientist–AI interaction right. The dream of “autonomous AI scientists” is tempting: machines that generate hypotheses, run experiments, and write papers. But science isn’t just automation. cichicago.substack.com/p/the-mirage... 🧵

A terrific AFP fact check uses reverse image searches to expose how a White House video took scenes from Florida, Texas, South Carolina and Nebraska and lied that they showed "Chicago is in chaos." factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com....

I guess one king is ok

Congratulations to Saman

Fascinating paper by Zhen Zhang & James Evans: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05591  Analyzing 2M papers published immediately following the training of five prominent open LLMs, we show that ... the most perplexing are disproportionately represented among the most celebrated ... and also the most discounted.

Class is off to a good start. We had to cap enrollments at 50 but 60+ there in practice. I am posting slides at agents4science.github.io. Lecture 1 gives big picture on how reasoning models linked to resources form scientific discovery platforms #agents agents4science.github.io/Assets/Lectu... .

BEST BIG CITY IN THE US 9 YEARS IN A ROW. While critics try to paint Chicago as something to fear, the rest of the world knows the truth — this is the best big city in America.

Body-camera video appears to contradict the government’s claim that Marimar Martinez, 30, drove toward officers before one of them opened fire at her late Saturday morning in Brighton Park, her attorney claimed. trib.al/9Sxu9IN

"The Globus Striped GridFTP Framework and Server", published in 2005, received the SC 2025 "Test of Time" award. This technology underpins the Globus service used by 100,000s worldwide to transfer and share data. Thanks to SC TOT committee; congrats to all! sc25.supercomputing.org/2025/10/last...

1. Take this seriously. Here is how you do it. Take a screenshot of the #HatchAct violation, whether it's on LinkedIn or other social media or on the actual US Government website. When you file your complaint, provide your personal contact information. If you're a furloughed fed, you're off-duty.

History repeats.

We're excited to share that Jiwen Fan, Faculty Co-Director of the AI for Climate (AICE) research initiative, has been named an American Geophysical Union Fellow! This program recognizes scientists making major contributions to our understanding of the planet Learn more 🔗 in reply ⬇️

Paul Alivisatos [president UChicago] writes that the university "has a great calling to organize itself to promote excellence in how to think with machines." Humans have been thinking "with machines" (e.g., books) for millennia. Will more powerful machines enable more powerful thoughts?

I donate to them, and I think everyone who can should. donate.wikimedia.org

Start of the fall quarter here at UChicago and thus of my new "AI Agents for Science" course, which reached capacity almost as soon as enrollment opened. agents4science.github.io. It's going to be fun! #agents

Chicago now powers EVERY city-owned building – from airports to police stations – with renewable energy. That includes O’Hare airport. ⚡🌞 #CleanEnergy

NEW: Nature trained AI to predict which NIH grants from 2014 would have been cut if the Trump admin had its way back then — and what science would have been lost to history. "The results show the damage that cuts in funding can do to research, and the unpredictable nature of the research process."

🚀 We’re thrilled to announce the upcoming AI & Scientific Discovery online seminar! We have an amazing lineup of speakers. This series will dive into how AI is accelerating research, enabling breakthroughs, and shaping the future of research across disciplines. ai-scientific-discovery.github.io

🔥 Today we announce the Meta OMol25 Electronic Structures Dataset - 500 TB of molecular data in collaboration with the AI at Meta team. Access Details: github.com/facebookrese...

It was a pleasure to meet him at Argonne some 40 years ago. I asked him what he thought of the NCAR CCM, which we were working with at the time. “Too many IF statements” he replied 😃

Luckily, Sinclair has a helpful database of all their stations, so you can see if they're operating in your area and respond accordingly. sbgi.net/tv-stations/

“Of all the women incarcerated worldwide, one in four is imprisoned in the United States.”

These are precedented times and the precedent is a loud ass warning www.nytimes.com/1939/02/04/a...

I’m gonna be crass and say, preorder *my* book! Kiese Laymon calls it “the most politically audacious book I’ve read in decades” and Moiya McTier calls it “deft weave of quantum physics and cultural wisdom” 😻 #BookSky www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/746817...

📣 NEW -- In The Economist, discussing the privacy perils of AI agents and what AI companies and operating systems need to do--NOW--to protect Signal and much else! www.economist.com/by-invitatio...

Clarence Darrow Bridge, Jackson Park, Chicago. Built in 1880 by Burnham and Root.

During the day yesterday in California, >75%of all electricity was produced by renewable #energy, including solar. After the sun went down, half of all electricity STILL came from renewables, including wind batteries, hydro, geothermal, etc.

Amir Jina, Faculty Co-Director, DSI's AI for Climate Initiative, & Paul Winters, Assoc Dean and Professor at University of Notre Dame - Keough School of Global Affairs explore how AI can expand access to accurate, tailored weather forecasts in a new article for @us.theconversation.com 🔗⬇️

Before I was born, a great uncle died of whooping cough and a cousin was handicapped by Rubella. I hope that this will not be our future.

Cite each other. Cite your friends. Cite your friends' friends. Cite each others' students. Cite the paper you like at that conference last year. Cite the person you met who's going up for tenure next year. Our bibliographies should push the limits of every journal's page limits.

I’ve said it before but reading all the medieval history books I’ve been reading lately has been so comforting. Makes you realize that there have always been mad and incompetent kings and they almost always die in ignominy and everyone piles shit on them for centuries after they’re gone.

..."Thanks to cutting-edge tools and high-powered computing systems, new forecasting models are now delivering faster and more accurate predictions than ever before." Read the blog: www.globus.org/blog/new-for...

Just received a text asking me to take a "Public Safety & Crime Survey", and it seems pretty clear that some local politician is trying to figure out whether to support or oppose deployment of armed forces to Chicago. Let them know what you think ilresearch.info/7RFF

🚀 Join us for ParslFest 2025! Meet researchers, developers, and cyberinfrastructure experts to share experiences and explore the latest in Parsl and Globus Compute. 📅 Aug 28–29 | 🏙️ Chicago & 🌐 Virtual (free) 🔗 Register now: parsl-project.org/parslfest/pa...

Please join tomorrow’s Globus-hosted webinar at 3 p.m. CDT. Hear from Tony Weaver, a staff member at Franklin and Marshall, on how they are using Globus Flows (with Globus Compute) to streamline the research process at their college. Learn more and register here: bit.ly/3UD42A8

Oldie but goodie from the bird app (credit Ben Orlin) x.com/benorlin/sta...

1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said." It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy. I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.

Congrats to postdoc Maxime Gonthier!🎉 His work “A scheduler to foster data locality for GPU and out-of-core task-based linear algebra applications” has been accepted for publication at the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing.

Academia is basically a collection of people who got lucky early on and mistook it for genius. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...