Well gang, it's happened: OpenAI has built a platform filled exclusively with fake, AI content. I've been playing with it for a few days, and I think it's safe to say we're basically kissing reality goodbye. Here's the story: www.npr.org/2025/10/03/n... And some thoughts 🧵

I know people are submitting AI-generated papers and some are AI-assisted, but… There were 26,646 new submissions to arXiv in September 2025.

EXCLUSIVE: In her first interview all year, Susan Monarez, CDC director for only 29 days, tells me why Trump/RFK fired her and where this is all headed. The CDC director is an “inherently political position, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be politically compromised”, she tells @nature.com.

'You'll never need to work again': Criminals offer reporter money to hack BBC. Brilliant and chilling piece by @joetidy.bsky.social - who is not, I can confirm, now living on a beach in the Bahamas! www.bbc.com/news/article...

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."

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪 Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students. I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:

HHMI adopts Plan U journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

This investigation is WILD. Props to @joelving.bsky.social!

A professor of physics in Iraq was permanently dismissed last week after a government investigation found he orchestrated a massive fraudulent publishing scheme involving hundreds of thousands of dollars paid into his bank account by unwitting researchers. An exclusive from @joelving.bsky.social.

“… not all large-scale research into mRNA vaccines in the United States is being dismantled … even as the US Department of Health and Human Services pulls back, the country’s military continues to bankroll parts of the same research.” By Elie Dolgin | @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Exclusive: The US Department of Defense is continuing to bankroll projects to develop vaccines against deadly pathogens go.nature.com/46AcHbZ

Yesterday's presser is perhaps the most glaring example of the discrepancy between the Trump admin's words (gold standard science! rigor! reproducibility!) and their actions (citing a couple correlative studies to make massive policy changes). Placebo RCTs for thee, observational study for me.

Exclusive: Journal bans drug safety database papers as they flood the literature FAERS is one of several publicly available datasets being exploited by paper mills, pumping hundreds of often meaningless and sometimes misleading papers into the scientific literature, @katetravis.bsky.social reports.

I'm on @nature.com's podcast talking to @nickpetrichowe.bsky.social about the role that journalists can play in combating research misconduct. Honored to appear alongside @jamesheathers.bsky.social, @abalkina.bsky.social, @richvn.bsky.social and many others: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I was surprised to see that a firm claims to have essentially solved the issue of detecting when there‘s LLM-generated text in content. But researchers at Pangram Labs say they have, claiming false-positive rates of 1 in 10,000. www.nature.com/articles/d41... @nature.com | @miryamnaddaf.bsky.social

AI tool detects LLM-generated text in research papers and peer reviews: Authors and peer reviewers are failing to disclose the use of LLMs despite journal policies limiting their use. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Inspired by Fred Rogers, @nature.com asked readers to help us 'find the helpers' amid the crisis in American science. What emerged were inspiring stories of researchers, legal experts, data hounds and government scientists who are fighting the dismantling of the US research enterprise. 🧪🧵1/6

Today @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

From filing lawsuits to tracking canceled grants to writing op-eds, here are some scientists pushing back against the Trump administration's cuts to science. Story in @nature.com by @dangaristo.bsky.social @maxkozlov.bsky.social @heidiledford.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪

An investigation has identified more than 1,500 research articles produced by a network of Ukrainian companies that could be one of Europe’s largest paper mills go.nature.com/3VxA1SD

Here's something a bit different. We've been reporting from Edinburgh to try to get to the bottom of a mystery in London. Princes Street is the Scottish capital's most famous shopping street — and it's gaining the *exact same* tatty gift shops as London. www.londoncentric.media/p/edinburgh-...

woah this is genuinely, utterly WILD Ant queens of one species produce males of another species, so she can then mate with them and produce hybrid workers! This is so gloriously weird I can't quite compute it 🤯🧪🐜 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I use this word a lot but it feels increasingly like we have moved beyond ‘enshittification’ as a kind of side effect of increasing profits to just outright ‘enscamification’

SO MANY CONGRATS to @maxkozlov.bsky.social for winning @sciencewriting.bsky.social's Clark-Payne award for young science writers! Max's reporting on the impacts of the Trump administration "gives readers straight answers at a confusing time," one judge said. casw.org/news/max-koz...

Very embarrassing to print this like it means anything www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Researchers argue over whether ‘novel’ AI-generated works use others’ ideas without credit go.nature.com/3VaNpvQ

Researchers argue over whether ‘novel’ AI-generated works use others’ ideas without credit. By Ananya | @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Such an important essay on the anti-vaccine playbook — and how not to fall for it www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

My new @science.org editorial on the role of scientists in defending democracy is out today. As authoritarianism takes hold in the US, we must fight for the democratic principles that enable a free society and scientists have a key role. I hope you'll join us. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Enter the holoject. Not a subject, not merely an object. An image of subjectivity, analogous to a hologram of a physical object.Whatever it is, it might be something else.A holoject appears to be a tragicomic figure, but in fact it is and can be neither. thesilverlining3.substack.com/p/the-death-...

An important piece on #AI generated #preprints and why it's important to consider their impact on scientific ecosystem. Some other important considerations related to this that are not covered in the article 👇 🧵1/14 #AI4Science #AI4Research #ScAISci #SciSci

Will be hard to explain in the future that the US government went antivax, causing a lot of avoidable suffering and death, not in response to any negative incident with vaccines, but to the biggest, fastest, most successful, most impressive vaccine rollout in history.

"“How quantum mechanics and gravity fit together is one of the most important outstanding problems in physics" - Kathryn Zurek. Researchers are now planning ways to test the true nature of gravity in the laboratory. by @castelvecchi.bsky.social | @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Preprint servers are strugging with an influx of AI content. "How do you do quality assurance while keeping things relatively light touch so the system doesn’t collapse on itself?" by Traci Watson | @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Preprint servers are strugging with an influx of AI content. "How do you do quality assurance while keeping things relatively light touch so the system doesn’t collapse on itself?" by Traci Watson | @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Oops! The Times has had to issue an embarrassing correction over supposedly "sluggish" EV sales 😳 ❌ It said EV sales to private buyers fell 10.8% this yr ✅They actually GREW…by 62% Yet Times articles still claim a "big fall", "collapse" & "slide" in private EV sales 🤔 1/7

Trump's new executive order "looks like an explicit attempt to destroy peer review for federal science grants,” a physicist in Texas tells @dangaristo.bsky.social. 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

ALPHA CENTAURI PLANET CANDIDATE DIRECTLY IMAGED BY JWST #kermitflail 🧪🔭

It’s only problematic through a capitalist lens -- to people who mistake community for a growth metric rather than a space for actual conversation.

this is a great piece about an important topic, and this is, i think, one of the more important takeaways small coordinated networks of people in scientific gatekeeping positions can have a disproportionately high degree of responsibility for some problematic aspect of science

We're going to need journalists to stop talking about synthetic text extruding machines as if they have *thoughts* or *stances* that they are *trying* to *communicate*. ChatGPT can't *admit* anything, nor *self-report*. Gah. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chat...

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... 🤖🧪

A detail just slipped in towards the end, that the woman leading one of these companies (Cathy Tie) is He Jiankui's ex-wife... 🤔

part of why "you need to adopt LLMs or become unemployable" is not very convincing is that almost nobody I actually know, i.e. the people most likely to be hiring or referring me in future, actually hold this opinion

An illuminating comment on this FT piece is in the comments: "once you include cyber crime, which doubles the number of current crimes compared with those shown in the graph above, the fall in overall crime between 1982, when the survey started, and now isn't anywhere near as dramatic as shown."

A rubber duck has made it to our cover! Why? It’s the latest tool to help solve a formidable challenge - design an adhesive that remain effective in wet environments. @nature.com 🧪 Further details here (spoiler - inspiration comes from biology) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It's tempting to conclude that systematically-produced fraudulent science is not cited or used and that they mostly end up in backwater journals, but I'd venture that such articles are just as likely to wind up highly-cited as legitimate scientific articles and can appear in any caliber of venue.

Animals feeding on Marburg virus-carrying bats caught on film www.nature.com/articles/d44...

We've been waiting for this report from NSF for many months — results of a survey on sexual harassment at US Antarctic stations. The numbers aren't good, but at least this problem is out in the open & starting to be tackled. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Can authors afford APCs for #openaccess publishing if NIH caps its payments for them? Institutional read-and-publish deals offer an APC-free alternative, but NIH also wants to lower the indirect cost rate to 15%, which could squeeze money for such deals. @science.org www.science.org/content/arti...