Great article from @iansample.bsky.social. Starts with info on the significant harms to oral health from smoking and moves on to give nuanced assessment of the more limited evidence on vaping. If all coverage was like this then a majority of Brits would not think that vaping was as bad as smoking.
26.09.2025 08:59 — 👍 5 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0
Fact-checking Trump’s autism announcement
The Guardian's Science Weekly podcast is great, it's up there with More or Less for the best media science output.
This latest on paracetamol, vaccines & #autism is superb. Madeleine Finlay, Ian Sample @iansample.bsky.social , & their production crew 👏👏👏
open.spotify.com/episode/5LRh...
26.09.2025 06:53 — 👍 12 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 1
Fraud, AI slop and huge profits: is science publishing broken?
Podcast Episode · Science Weekly · 02/10/2025 · 18m
Thanks @iansample.bsky.social at @theguardian.com podcast for chatting #ScientificPublishing.
This pod follows from The Strain on Scientific Publishing & reports of publisher profit margins rivalling Google etc...
Paper: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Pod: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/s...
02.10.2025 10:54 — 👍 23 🔁 11 💬 1 📌 3
If you'd like to read more on this, see @iansample.bsky.social 's article.
Article: www.theguardian.com/science/2025...
Paper: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
02.10.2025 11:00 — 👍 5 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
I have stacks of questions about how the model’s working: how is the grammar intact, why are certain words repeated, are any lowest probability? But I like it.
AI threatens to reduce human experience by steering our choices to popular ones. This is feeble, silly pushback. Or token subversion?
🤖🧠🧪
11.09.2025 12:45 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Using least probable tokens, the answer was a hoot:
“A great city emerges through kaleidoscope sandwiches of perpetual thunder. It integrates gelatinous traffic systems of whispering algorithms. It preserves holographic fountains of magnetic jam and encourages staircases of wandering moons.”
🤖🧠🧪
11.09.2025 12:33 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
The question I posed was: What features make a great city? The normal (most probable, single token) response highlighted the richness of a city’s culture, the diversity of its people and the strength of its public spaces.
Fair enough.
But a bit dull.
11.09.2025 12:32 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
I asked ChatGPT to emulate Least Probable Token Selection across single, double and triplet tokens. Instead of building sentences from the most probable next token(s), it chooses them from the long tail of lowest probabilities.
The results are fun.
🤖🧠🧪
11.09.2025 12:31 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Accordion staircases of wandering moons
AI chatbots churn out answers by repeatedly predicting the next token, be that a word, subword or character. Building sentences from highly probable next tokens isn’t a bad way to extract consensus from language.
But it's boring.
So I had a word.
🤖🧠🧪
11.09.2025 12:30 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
In case you missed it at the time - this is dark stuff.
08.09.2025 09:10 — 👍 9 🔁 8 💬 1 📌 0
Epilepsy, ecstasy and the nature of reality
Podcast Episode · Where The Wild Thoughts Are · 08/09/2025 · 35m
Dostoevsky, bliss and the absence of prediction error between expectation and experience. Fascinating stuff from @jomarchant.bsky.social and Fabienne Picard at University Hospital Geneva 🧪
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/w...
08.09.2025 07:15 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
The deadly toll on journalists in the Gaza war
With foreign media barred, Palestinians have reported alone, facing the ‘most deliberate effort to kill and silence’ them ever
The Guardian has today printed the names, and where possible, images, of all the media workers killed in Gaza, as part of an international day of action involving more than 150 media organisations.
www.theguardian.com/global-devel...
01.09.2025 09:28 — 👍 1921 🔁 1084 💬 11 📌 15
Where the Wild Thoughts Are
Huge congrats to @jomarchant.bsky.social on her new science podcast! 🧪
In the first three eps, the NYT bestselling author delves into plant cognition and potential hints of life elsewhere, and hears that there may be no laws of physics🤘
jomarchant.com/wildthoughts
youtube.com/playlist?lis...
01.09.2025 09:33 — 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
This made us laugh… and cry. If you felt it too, here’s one way to help two agencies in the bunker 👇
01.08.2025 15:12 — 👍 58 🔁 19 💬 0 📌 2
The Guardian :: Senior Science Investigative Reporter
We’re hiring for a major role in the US, an investigative journalist to cover what’s happening with science in the US and beyond. This is extremely important territory for us. 🧪
workforus.theguardian.com/jobs/795 The Guardian :: Senior Science Investigative Reporter
26.07.2025 06:02 — 👍 102 🔁 103 💬 4 📌 3
Scientific publishing needs urgent reform to retain trust in research process | Letters
Letters: Readers respond to an article on how too many low-quality papers and journals are being churned out
A few letters came in on my piece about the state of scientific publishing. One line that leaps out: “The academic publishing market systematically diverts public research funds into shareholder profits.” 🧪
www.theguardian.com/science/2025...
21.07.2025 14:45 — 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Trump officials cut billions in Harvard funds after university defies demands
15.04.2025 07:05 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Science journalist and NYT bestselling author of Cure, Decoding the Heavens and The Human Cosmos www.jomarchant.com
Professor a NYU; Chief AI Scientist at Meta.
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You can't start a fire worryin' about your little world falling apart
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Guardian interviewer/features writer, with a thing for prison and miscarriages of justice (well not a thing for them as such, a thing for writing about them). Proud Mancunian/Salfordian. City fan of some vintage
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