this opener by krugman is how every musk story should be framed open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

A Derbyshire Police spokesperson said: "A criminal investigation has been launched into an allegation of perverting the course of justice after the alleged use of AI systems by an officer to create evidential material in a number of cases. www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/derby-n...

Phase contrast microscopes were invented in the 1930s by the Dutch physicist Frits Zernike, and developed and manufactured by physicist and entrepreneur Caroline “Lili” Bleeker. Zernike won the Nobel Prize for this in 1953 ...

My latest www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The rate of freezing in pure water can be exponentially sensitive to various parameters. “In one set of experiments, researchers found nucleation rates varied over six orders of magnitude, even in experiments that tried to reproduce similar conditions.” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

An associate editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience has resigned. He asked the editorial office to turn off the AI assistant, and was told it was "not possible". 😵 Read the whole thread!

An excellent thoughtful and clear review of the state of AI. yalereview.org/article/mela...

Between now and October (our 20th anniversary issue), we're running a subscription drive and dedicating all new revenue toward improving pay for our staff, writers, artists, and contractors. Details on how to subscribe can be found here: clarkesworldmagazine.com/subscribe/

I saw the movie “Backrooms” [not having seen the web series] and though the ideas and visuals were interesting at first, overall it felt very thin. Maybe the original form was a better fit, with an open-ended accretion of lore rather than expectations of a self-contained plot.

TIL that meteorologists use “shower” and “rain” as technical terms related to the type of cloud from which the precipitation falls. www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

Starts With A Bang podcast #130 – the initial mass function of stars Give the Universe a massive enough cold cloud of gas, and it'll give you a spectrum of stars of all different masses. But that spectrum isn't universal, and we finally understand why. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #astro

Shame on the American Diabetes Association- ejecting scientists from the meeting for distributing copies of an editorial critical of NIH funding cuts. Kudos to these scientists for standing up for science and resisting censorship 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 Now to go check the IDweek code of conduct page…

I thought “The Audacity” was pretty enjoyable. A little bit hit and miss, but messy in a way that I found satisfying by the end.

This terrific article by Siobhan Roberts could help elevate the public discussion of AI in mathematics. The interview about the Leiden Declaration is especially helpful. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/s...

Colin and Rowena play a game where a quizmaster asks Colin to fill in one COLUMN of a 3×3 grid with three 1s or -1s whose product is -1, then asks Rowena to do the same for one ROW with three numbers whose product is 1. If they agree for the square in common, they win one point.

“… paint damage, floor damage, damage to a kitchen doorframe, bent poles in dishwasher racks, water damage and scratches on wooden credenzas … decorative items and books moved from shelves to drawers … ” Airbnb hosts need to add a new clause to their agreements: no robots.

www.quantamagazine.org/key-chemistr... A fascinating article in Quanta on work to find the ground state of a key molecule in nitrogen fixation via an ingenious classical computation — despite this problem often being cited as a potential benchmark for quantum computers.

How can we generalise the fact that the angles at the vertices of a triangle add up to 180°, to apply to tetrahedra and higher-dimensional n-simplexes? Here’s a result discovered by Benoît Bertrand and Lucía López de Medrano that I learned from Omar Antolín.

With some help from @gro-tsen.bsky.social, Paul Schwahn and I have proved a conjecture connecting the Standard Model to octonions. I'm talking about it on Sunday at 14:30 UTC. I think you can watch it on on Zoom here : aubg-satellite-workshop.netlify.app It probably won't be recorded. (1/n)

An equilateral triangle inside a regular hexagon. What’s the angle? #geometrypuzzle

“The sum-product conjecture is false for real numbers” THOMAS F. BLOOM, WILL SAWIN, CARL SCHILDKRAUT, AND DMITRII ZHELEZOV A human proof that exploits the same kind of “tower of fields” that was used in the AI-generated counterexample to the unit-distance conjecture!

www.thepushupchallenge.com.au/fundraisers/... I’m in training for the push up challenge starting 3rd June. Currently, I can do 35 in a row. From experience I know that by the end of the challenge I’ll double that. I’ll need to. The biggest day will be 229 push ups. All for a great cause.

Most likely, no human typed the word “permission” here. Rather, they misspelled “persimmon” in such a way that autocorrect considered “permission” the closest valid word. Pure spellchecking that *flagged* the typo would have alerted the user, who would have made the right choice.

Proteins get modified on all sorts of ways - and it’s time we figured out the landscape of how that affects drugs binding to them, too:

I have just read the second butchering I've seen in two days of the story of Max Planck's quantum hypothesis. So I've posted this extract from the initial draft of my forthcoming book in the vain hope that it might avert a few such butcherings in future homunculusmusic.wordpress.com/2026/05/26/p...

“If consciousness can survive brain death, then materialism dies.” “If … the brain works in a permissive way, then consciousness is … received like a song by a radio.” What next, Nature? “If Big Foot has been captured on camera and we really have found the ruins of Atlantis ... ”?

Every summer I repost this article on how to spot drowning. Please read it and pass on. In the last few years I’ve had SIX messages from people who saved a kid’s life after clicking on the link from my feed. slate.com/technology/2...

Trying to brush up on my field theory to understand the counterexamples to the Erdős unit distance problem has made my inner dialogue sound like … “totally real!” “totally imaginary!” “totally ramified!”

OpenAI's claim that this is a central conjecture in discrete geometry is not an exaggeration. This will I think be looked back on as the first time that AI solved a major mathematics problem (defined as a problem that all experts in some subfield had thought about). openai.com/index/model-...

New dataset published: this is the audio + transcripts of AI-generated podcasts using NotebookLM to analyse how it "translated" source documents from different times and cultures. My favourites are the 20 podcasts generated from an empty PDF. The paper about it is in press. doi.org/10.18710/RNT...

If you use LLMs to do your data analysis, or if you listen to people who do, you should read this kucharski.substack.com/p/real-signa...

Once a minute Brian Moore asks 13 AI systems to generate animated images of clocks with second hands. As he says, they really suck at it. clocks.brianmoore.com

Nomination for Pulitzer in best snarf omg snarf opening paragraph www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/b...

A square and two rectangles. The area of Yellow rectangle is A. What is the area of purple rectangle?

A square and an isosceles triangle (blue color). What is the red angle?

TIL that Leon Theremin — inventor of the electronic instrument played without touch by the capacitance your hands create at different distances — also invented the first “passive” listening device, with no internal power supply, relying on energy beamed from an external source.

What’s the expected number of times you need to throw a fair d-sided die to get a run of N consecutive 1s? Call this E(N). If we define p(k) as the probability of getting a run of length N-1 after k throws, we have Σ p(k) = 1 Σ p(k) k = E(N-1) To get a run of length N …

“The Cancer Killers” chronicles the decades-long struggle of two tenacious researchers who developed a method for the targeted delivery of cancer drugs wrapped in fragments of bacterial cell walls, as they face the daunting business/investment side of bringing their invention to patients.

Tickets still on sale for my Pint of Science talk about James Webb this coming Monday in Parramatta!

Breaking: Google AI summary of leaked Australian budget papers confirms that $2B will be allocated to phasing out all bicycle gears that rotate in the wrong direction by 2035.

Dear Benjamin Franklin I have travelled back in time from 2026 to tell you that we’re still not certain exactly how lighting works. There are relativistic electrons and gamma rays involved, maybe positrons, and (possibly extragalactic) cosmic rays.

Wow, they actually *retracted* this so-called meta-analysis about ChatGPT effects on learning performance, though it got massive metrics and social media attention before that. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🔭 A cautionary tale for undergrads (and above!) using AI for #astro plots: our BSc student wanted to make a "quick" HR diagram showcasing M-dwarfs & thought some chatbot could make one and... well... ...extra credits are now offered to students who can correctly find all errors on cursedHR.png 🫠 🧪

Equilateral triangle and a rectangle. What is the ratio of yellow area and blue area?

This was a hard story to report. Newborns who don’t get a vitamin K shot are 81 times more likely to develop a condition where they bleed uncontrollably. But more and more families are declining the shot. And babies are dying. www.propublica.org/article/more...

I solved all errors by telling the machine “do not make errors”

Breaking: Rubio, Araghchi announce negotiations to divide up parallel worlds between those in which US, Iranian conditions are met to each party’s complete satisfaction.

Two squares and a rectangle. The blue square area is 4. What is the area of the rectangle?

A reminder to my fellow West Australians that, whatever your age, you can get a FREE flu vaccine in May and June. I got mine today. Most pharmacists are participating, but you’ll probably need to book an appointment online.