Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by VivienM

🎃nisillos @onisillos.bsky.social · 19h

I suspect that I'm going to be repeating "these books are medicinal" a lot.

NightMar on Hicks Street, Part 4: The Rabbit’s Revenge @histoftech.bsky.social · 23h

doomscroll break

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Deborah Blum @deborahb.bsky.social · 18h

This.

Laura Helmuth @laurahelmuth.bsky.social · 18h

Six of the nine Nobel Prize winners this year work in the U.S.
Three of the six were born outside the U.S., which is the pattern most years. No country has benefited more from welcoming immigrants from around the world.
www.nobelprize.org

The official website of the Nobel Prize - NobelPrize.org

The Nobel Prize rewards science, humanism and peace efforts. This is one of the central concepts in the will of Alfred Nobel, and it also permeates the outreach activities that have been developed for...

www.nobelprize.org

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Laura Helmuth @laurahelmuth.bsky.social · 17h

This is how it's done: put the truth right there in the headline and sub headline.

Scientific American @sciam.bsky.social · 17h

The U.S. Supreme Court will determine whether Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy, an ineffective and often harmful practice targeting LGBTQ+ youth, violates a therapist’s right to free speech

Supreme Court Weighs Ban on Scientifically Discredited ‘Conversion Therapy’

The U.S. Supreme Court will determine whether Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy, an ineffective and often harmful practice targeting LGBTQ+ youth, violates a therapist’s right to free speech

www.scientificamerican.com

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Rock Lab @rocklabtb.bsky.social · 20h

Ditto. Thanks for this Sarah. www.statnews.com/2025/10/06/g...

The NIH ordered me to stop my ‘dangerous’ gain-of-function research. It isn’t dangerous at all

Safe gain-of-function research is necessary to identify new treatments for diseases like for tuberculosis — but the NIH has imposed unfounded stops.

www.statnews.com

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The Associated Press @apnews.com · 20h

BREAKING: The Nobel Prize in chemistry is awarded for work in the development of metal–organic frameworks to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi.

Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi share Nobel Prize in chemistry

Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi have won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing metal–organic frameworks.

bit.ly

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VivienM @vivienm.bsky.social · 1d

And here is an openly accessible link. rdcu.be/eJVUr

Choose your human genome reference wisely

Nature Methods - Scientists can choose between multiple human genome references, and a pangenome reference is coming. Deciding what to use when is not quite straightforward.

rdcu.be

VivienM @vivienm.bsky.social · 1d

Here is the link:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Choose your human genome reference wisely - Nature Methods

Scientists can choose between multiple human genome references, and a pangenome reference is coming. Deciding what to use when is not quite straightforward.

www.nature.com

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VivienM @vivienm.bsky.social · 1d

... “Philosophically, the ‘reference’ is evolving from a single, static genome to a more dynamic, population-inclusive framework,” says Shuhua Xu, who heads the population omics group at Fudan University. The coming framework is the pangenome — a reference that represents many genomes....

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VivienM @vivienm.bsky.social · 1d

My latest story: ...“The idea of a single reference genome is outdated,” says NIH researcher Adam Phillippy, who directs the Center for Genomics and Data Science Research, part of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health....

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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 1d

2012 Nobel laureate John Gurdon has died. His work was central to both the development of animal cloning and the possibility of reprogramming cells to a different state. A giant of cell and developmental biology.
www.magd.cam.ac.uk/news/profess...

Professor Sir John Gurdon FRS (1933-2025) | Magdalene College

Magdalene College is deeply saddened to announce the death of Professor Sir John Gurdon FRS, who served as Master of the College from 1995 to 2002.

www.magd.cam.ac.uk

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James Briscoe @jamesbriscoe.bsky.social · 1d

Very sad news, John Gurdon has died.

A developmental biologist's developmental biologist, Nobel prize winner

His work is the foundation of much of today's dev & stem cell bio.

An inspiration to many, including me. Always asking questions & wanting the answers

www.magd.cam.ac.uk/news/profess...

Professor Sir John Gurdon FRS (1933-2025) | Magdalene College

Magdalene College is deeply saddened to announce the death of Professor Sir John Gurdon FRS, who served as Master of the College from 1995 to 2002.

www.magd.cam.ac.uk

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MwahahahahahadScientist @mads100tist.bsky.social · 1d

His work precedes Star Wars by 15 years, so this is even more true (RIP John Gurdon)🧪

Caroline Beck @frogsquisher.bsky.social · 1d

Since the collective noun for frogs is an army, he can also be credited with generating the first clone army. 🐸🧪✊

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Reuters @reuters.com · 1d

Uncharted legal territory if Trump starts shutdown firings, experts say reut.rs/4mUgFm6

Uncharted legal territory if Trump starts shutdown firings, experts say

President Donald Trump has repeatedly tested the boundaries of executive power since his return to office and is exploring uncharted legal territory with threats to carry out mass firings during the federal government shutdown, legal experts and lawmakers said.

reut.rs

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Oded Rechavi @odedrechavi.bsky.social · 1d

Fwd: Fwd: “I hope this email finds you well”

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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 1d

Oh joy, this is wonderful. And a great choice for the recipients. I had a great chat with Michel at the Helgoland quantum centenary: he's such a modest guy.

Nature @nature.com · 1d

BREAKING: The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis "for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit"

Stay tuned for more.

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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 2d

On the other hand, accuracy alone may be *underestimating* this ability in visual settings

It is essential to go beyond accuracy in evaluating such capabilities!

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.02125

Blog post: aiguide.substack.com/p/do-ai-reas...

🧵 10/10

Do AI Reasoning Models Abstract and Reason Like Humans?

Going beyond simple accuracy for evaluating abstraction abilities

aiguide.substack.com

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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 2d

Conclusions: Evaluations like those of the ARC Prize, using accuracy alone, may be *overestimating* abstract reasoning ability of these models in textual setting.

🧵 9/10

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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 2d

Do AI reasoning models abstract and reason like humans?

New paper on this from my group:

arxiv.org/abs/2510.02125

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Do AI Models Perform Human-like Abstract Reasoning Across Modalities?

OpenAI's o3-preview reasoning model exceeded human accuracy on the ARC-AGI benchmark, but does that mean state-of-the-art models recognize and reason with the abstractions that the task creators inten...

arxiv.org

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Margaret Harris @drmlharris.bsky.social · 2d

Ahead of tomorrow’s #NobelPrize announcement, I went on a deep dive in search of the most obscure physics Nobel Prizes in history. That means it's time for a thread on...🧵

PHYSICS NOBEL PRIZES YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF – PART 1

(1/n)

A photo of the Matterhorn rising above an Alpine landscape. The colours are a little washed out, but do not appear artificially tinted

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Prof Gavin Yamey @gavinyamey.bsky.social · 2d

Also, the "experts of ACIP" is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard in my professional life; almost all are utter kooks, extreme anti-vaxx activists, or vaccine skeptics with no expertise at all in vaccines, infectious disease epidemiology or immunology (www.science.org/content/arti...)

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Adrian Liston @labliston.bsky.social · 2d

A small primer on the #NobelPrize awarded to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi today. This prize was for combining two separate fields of immunology research - genetic research on IPEX and immunology research of regulatory T cells (#Tregs), with enormous impact on biology/medicine

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Mallory Harris, PhD @malar0ne.bsky.social · 3d

IMO this hasn't gotten enough attention: a recent memo at NIH announces that peer review will be devalued in determining which grants get funded, granting more power to political appointees to make decisions based on the admin's whims over scientific merit

kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

Changes at NIH Give Political Appointees Greater Power To Fund or Block Research - KFF Health News

The National Institutes of Health’s long-held standard of peer review for grantmaking has been subverted by President Donald Trump and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, who gave unprecedented power to po...

kffhealthnews.org

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Ben R Lee, PhD @benrlee.com · 5d

🚨 Please repost widely!🚨

I am recruiting a PhD student to join my lab next fall to work on forest and climate change ecology projects in southern Appalachia! Come join me in one of the most beautiful, biodiverse, and understudied parts of North America. Details below and happy to answer questions

An ad for a PhD position to start fall 2026 working with me at ETSU. For more info, please email at LeeBR1@etsu.edu.

A close-up picture of dimpled trout lilies active in early spring, still largely surrounded by the previous year's senesced tree leaves.

A beautiful vista of the Blue Ridge Mountains from on top of Carver's Gap on the border between North Carolina and Tennessee.

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Signal @signal.org · 5d

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

signal.org

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Alexis Verger 🧬🧫🧪 @alexis-verger.cpesr.fr · 2d

😍☺️ With Mary E. Brunkow, 2025 #nobelprize in Physiology or Medicine, I'll be able to update my trading cards of female science nobel prize winners #womeninscience #womeninSTEM

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