Simone Cuff

Given how hard it is to find reviewers there is a very real danger of this.

Just saw ChatGPT and its AI LLM ilk called stochastic parrots and it is just the most fabulously satisfying, accurate metaphor.

When you are being formal: LLM. When you are saying what you think: SP.

Transparent peer review to be extended to all of Nature’s research papers From today, all new submissions to Nature that are published will be accompanied by referees’ reports and author responses — to illuminate the process of producing rigorous science.

Pleased to see this extending further across the publishing ecosystem.

#ResearchIntegrity

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

To celebrate this (urp 🤢) exciting new journal series, we made a mini game!

Can YOU guess which journals are Discover, MDPI, or both? No cheating! There's even the challenge mode "APC Ladder."

Share your high score with the hashtag #ResearchIntegrity

pagoba.shinyapps.io/publi_guess/

FUN!! 🤮 6/n

Tech giant creates a green space only to be horrified that they are accidentally creating a valuable ecosystem rather than a token piece of bio-art.

📌

A female Western Gull was recorded riding 150km in a garbage truck from San Francisco to a compost facility in Central CA, probably to forage. TWICE. An innovator, an icon, a genius.

This is one of my favorite @waterbirdsociety.bsky.social papers I've ever handled as managing editor #ornithology

Here's our piece on the £86bn R&D budget

The govt calls it a “bumper funding package” worth more than £22.5bn a year by 2029–30

In reality it's a real-terms freeze, accounting for inflation, using OBR forecasts

But probably as good as the research sector could hope for

Dogs pollute water with pesticides even weeks after flea treatment When dogs given spot treatments for fleas go swimming, they release levels of pesticides dangerous to aquatic life for at least a month after the treatment

Our latest research shows spot-on flea treatments on dogs are released into water when dogs swim even 28 days after treatment - in contrast to the label which suggests dogs can safely swim 48 h after treatment.
www.newscientist.com/article/2482...

See also statistics and critical thinking.

But mainly because this not only has an excellent point, but because it is a damn good read.

🚨 We're recruiting! The Journal of Medical Microbiology is seeking two Editors for our Molecular and Microbial Epidemiology section. Help shape the future of microbiology research.
📅 Apply by 20 June 2025
🔗 microb.io/News

We have officially moved in.

Our Pop-Up Science Shop will be open to the public from 7th July until 3rd August 3025.

Find us in the St David's shopping centre in Cardiff near John Lewis, Zara and Apple.

Learn about the microbial world in, on and around us.

Including the black death.

An institute focussed on economic outcomes recommends economic outcomes as a metric of higher education.

This comes back to asking what universities are for. If they are for churning out finance graduates & CEOs then this makes sense. If they are as centres of learning then it is a false metric.

Yes, but the skeletons it was found in were geographically distant from one another as well, suggesting wide distribution by 1000 years ago rather than a newly emergent disease.

The nature of status-seeking in society (and by some elements in science especially) normally makes me despair. LLMs enabling that without effort even more so. This blog post suggests a refreshingly subversive take on both.

Mass mortality of Black-legged Kittiwakes, Norway, 2023: more than 15,000 birds dead, population reduction of 50%. genotype EA-2022-BB
👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Are you based in the U.S. 🇺🇸 or Canada 🇨🇦 and thinking of doing research in Europe?

ERC grants offer up to €4.5 million to support groundbreaking, investigator-driven frontier research in all fields.

Watch the dedicated info session for researchers in your region👉 youtu.be/92QYink1Lik

#ChooseEurope

Exciting job opportunities!

Two postdoc positions are available in the Fodor Lab at
@dunnschool.bsky.social to study influenza virus transcription, genome replication, nuclear export and assembly.

More info: my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

📌

But close reading is not just for academics, and it deserves a bigger audience. Not because it’s virtuous. Not because it makes us better people. (I know some great close readers who are real assholes.) But because it’s a thrilling way to think with others, to claw back some of the time taken from us daily by tech oligarchs (I have looked at Twitter impulsively several times while writing this pointedly long, difficult sentence), and relearn some of our capacity, atrophied into passivity by algorithms, for aesthetics, a term that arose in modernity to name a storehouse of values in dialectical opposition to those of capitalism: above all, treating texts as ends in themselves rather than as means to productive ends—treating them, that is, as art.

Close reading is for everyone: defector.com/close-readin...

AI Is Eating Data Center Power Demand—and It’s Only Getting Worse A new analysis of AI hardware being produced and how it is being used attempts to estimate the vast amount of electricity being consumed by AI.

"According to his research, worldwide AI energy demand is now set to surpass demand from bitcoin mining by the end of this year"

New paper from Alex DeVries on what proportion of total data centre demand is for machine learning applications

The 10am Tuesday method and the 1am Saturday method may not always be the same method.

I've just learned that adding "-ai" to your Google search will get rid of those annoying, often inaccurate AI summaries which otherwise appear at the top.

The info was gifted to me and now I gift it to you. 😊.

Now, if only I could get rid of SEO...

Would love to, but the letter states the undersigned study politics. I'm sure a lot of well informed academics from other disciplines would also like to put their support behind the letter.

A mockup of a guide to coding called "Coding with GPT" with a picture of a dog-possibly emu hybrid animal on the front. Credit to @DanielW_Kiwi is in the right hand lower corner.

Pathways to Work: Reforming Benefits and Support to Get Britain Working Green Paper This consultation seeks views on the approaches government should consider around reform of the health and disability benefits system and employment support.

"This consultation seeks views on the approaches government should consider around reform of the #health and #disability benefits system and employment support." Respond by 30th June - online form here forms.office.com/pages/respon....
www.gov.uk/government/c...
#Disability #DisabilitySky #NEISVoid

The problem with most machine-based random number generators is that they’re not TRULY random, so if you need genuine randomness it is sometimes necessary to link your code to an external random process like a physical noise source or the current rate of US tariffs on a given country.

This paper👇 is now retracted (with the authors' agreement): thanks again to the authors for putting this on the table, and hoping the "reviewer" feels ashamed... #researchintegrity

doi.org/10.1016/j.ij...

Really enjoying meeting like minds at #FAIRS (Fostering Accountability for the Integrity of Science). #ResearchIntegrity