Paul McAuley

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems... SIMON: What? SHAPIRO: ...Or saying... SIMON: You imagine that? SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over. SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level. SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this. SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

70 - 75s have to pay for it too (unless immunocompromised or living in a care home).

Getting my jab today, but thanks to Wes Streeting, I have to pay for it (£90)… Many other 65-69s and immunocompromised ppl will not be able to afford it.

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

A shaggy parasol mushroom growing amongst nettles.

A trio of Coprinus species of mushroom growing in leaf litter.

Unidentified mushroom growing in leaf litter.

Mushroom, possibly Agaricus vaporarius, amongst grass and leaf litter.

The season when vast underground empires extend fruiting bodies into the upper world.

View across slopes of trees taking on autumn colours towards the brow of Beacon Hill, Buckinghamshire.

So I went for a walk today

This image released by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) on Oct. 1, 2025 shows a view of the Tianwen-2 probe alongside Earth, captured by the probe during its deep-space journey. The newly released image, acquired by a monitoring camera mounted on the probe's robotic arm, showcases China's five-starred red flag and the white return capsule against the backdrop of a distant, blue Earth. (Some slight image processing by me.)

China's Tianwen-2 is on its way to Kamoʻoalewa, an asteroid that currently doubles as a "quasi-moon" of Earth. The spacecraft will collect samples & bring them back home.

On its outward trajectory, Tianwen-2 looked back and got this lovely view of our planet. 🧪🔭

english.news.cn/20251001/ef3...

This is the novel everyone will be talking about. It’s wonderful. And a beautiful blogpost from @catamaroon.bsky.social to mark its release today. 📚💚📚

Researchers have found a way to get close-up images of nearby #stars and #exoplanets within 25 years. These new probes would be tiny disks with optical sensors, accelerated into space by lasers, travelling at 0.2 times the speed of light. spectrum.ieee.org/high-speed-i...

Rapid amyloid-β clearance and cognitive recovery through multivalent modulation of blood–brain barrier transport - Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy - Rapid amyloid-β clearance and cognitive recovery through multivalent modulation of blood–brain barrier transport

🧠 Alzheimer’s reversed in mice

A new study found that injecting nanoparticles can 'remind' the blood–brain barrier to function properly again, restoring normal brain activity in mice. Human trials could follow within years.

🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#SciComm #Alzheimers 🧪

Amazing: Comet ATLAS formed some 8 billion years ago. It made about 3 dozen circuits around our galaxy. It entered our our solar system & just passed 30 million kilometers from Mars...

...where ESA's ExoMars orbiter captured these images of the interstellar comet! 🧪🔭

www.esa.int/Science_Expl...

THE FLESH KING by me!

THE ESSENTIAL HORROR OF JOE R. LANSDALE

SHADOW TICKET by Thomas Pynchon

My new book, THE FLESH KING is out today and available everywhere your get your books. But I’d feel like an ass if I didn’t mention new books by two of my favorite writers: THE ESSENTIAL HORROR OF JOE R. LANSDALE and SHADOW TICKET by Thomas Pynchon. Why not go nuts and get all three?

An erupting volcano. A black spatter cone with a gap in the front has lava fountaining out, hundreds of feet into the air, smacking against the cone, and flowing along a snaking lava river toward the camera. A plume of gas rises into the air with mostly cloudy sky in the background.

Just found this image of the 2021 Fagradalsfjall eruption in Iceland that I've never shared before. Being in the presence of this volcano and feeling the intense heat of the Earth on my skin was genuinely the best experience of my life and its not even close. #photography

Is this a plan to make solar power contribute to global warming?

Wiley set to earn $44m from AI rights deals, confirms “no opt-out" for authors The US publisher is the latest to capitalise on deals to give tech firms access to its authors’ content to train their Large Language Models (LLMs).

Everybody makes money out of academic authors except the authors...News.

Wiley is the latest academic publisher to reach a multi-million deal to allow access to its content to AI developers, with no opt out, let alone payment, for the authors who created that content.

OMG

Pleased to discover this one back in print, & at a very reasonable price point, too.

"[L]ike its predecessors, a near-faultless technical performance...[plus] 2 new items to the Beauman repertoire: relative structural simplicity and profound emotional resonance."

Restored Hogarth murals at London hospital open to public for first time St Bartholomew’s hopes 18th-century satirist’s two large-scale paintings will become a must-see for art fans They had remained almost unseen for 300 years, but now two of William Hogarth’s masterpiece murals are available to the public for the first time. The North Wing at St Bartholomew’s hospital in London, which contains The Pool of Bethesda and The Good Samaritan – two large-scale murals by the British painter – has opened after a £9.5m restoration project. Continue reading...

Restored Hogarth murals at London hospital open to public for first time

YouTube video by Sky TV The Last Panthers | Opening Credits with new music from David Bowie

10 years ago today (yikes): the first taste of "Blackstar," in a trailer for The Last Panthers (and a great fake-out by DB, making everyone assume the song would be another "Heat"): www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6J4...

How researchers restored a thriving habitat for Atlantic puffins in Maine Atlantic puffins face an increasingly precarious foothold due in part to a loss of habitat and to troubles tied to warming ocean waters and climate change. But an effort off the coast of Maine…

Puffins return to Maine after half a century of absence. Eastern Egg Rock now hosts the only puffin colony in the United States, restored through decades of painstaking work after the birds were hunted out a century ago. buff.ly/RB0Ibz0
#ShareGoodNewsToo

Randolph Scott, Virtuous Loner of the West Lonesomeness, nobility, and anti-machismo: the ‘Ranown’ westerns are an underappreciated treasure of American cinema.

“Freedom is meant to be used for others. In each story, when confronted with injustice that isn’t his problem, the hero -makes it- his problem.

— @hannahgracelong.bsky.social for @thebulwark.com on the wonderful Ranown Westerns

www.thebulwark.com/p/randolph-s...

With John Ryan, Anthony Cronin, Patrick Kavanagh & Tom Joyce (Bloomsday, Sandymount, 1954)

Today is Brian O’Nolan’s (aka Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen et al) birthday.

Tawny owl

Six weeks ago, I picked up a year-old tawny owl with a broken leg off the main road near our home and dropped him off at our nearest vet.

After a few days, I received one of the most bizarre phone calls I’ve ever had, asking “So when are you coming to pick up your owl?” 🧵

@unlikelyworlds.bsky.social

as a girl with a PhD in natural language processing and machine learning it's actually offensive to me when you say "we don't know how LLMs work so they might be conscious"

I didn't spend 10 years in mines of academia to be told ignorance is morally equal knowledge.

We know exactly how LLMs work.

It's the best thing Sam's written. I would say that, it just happens to be true...
:-)

Trees in autumn colours reflected in the dark water of Viaduct Pond under a cloudless blue sky.

Hampstead Heath: 08:02

Shrimp on a Bubble coral
#gili #giliislands #lombok #diving #scuba #giliair #pets #ocean #sealife #marinelife #shrimp #padi #bubble #coral

It would take around 1.1 million acres of solar panels to (clean) power the world. That's less than a quarter of the number of acres devoted globally to golf courses. You can see where this is going, right...?

Watch today is a Soviet-made handwound “medical watch” from 1989 by Slava. The scales help you determine the patient’s heart rate. You must wait until the seconds hand reaches 0 or 30, then count 15 patient pulses. Where the seconds hand is on the scale at that moment is the heart rate.