Nicola Jones

 Read my Q&A with UBC forest ecologist and fire researcher Lori Daniels in Yale E360  https://e360.yale.edu/features/lori-daniels-interview

When I heard the news that an interstellar object had been spotted hurtling into our Solar System, my thoughts were: 1) Okay. Surely that's not a rare thing, is it? 2) Uh... is it an alien? Turns out that while there probably ARE a tonne of objects winging their way through our Solar System from 'elsewhere', it is rare indeed to spot them: this is only the third interstellar object we've ever seen (hence the name, 3I/ATLAS, with ATLAS being the telescope project that spotted it). And no, it's not an alien spacecraft, although there was a moment of speculation about instellar object number one, back in 2017, that the weird cigar-shaped strangely-accelerating object was alien. It wasn't. It was great fun to chat with the people involved with the find. Check my story at Nature :  https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02141-5 PS - perhaps one day there will be something out there, somewhere, that notices Voyager 1 or 2 passing by, and yes indeed we will be the...

Here's a fun piece: I had a chat with some scientists who have used teams of virtual AI 'agents' to help them formulate new experimental ideas, critique their papers, and run lab meetings to think through different aspects of their work.  All felt that the adoption of LLMs into idea generation and experimental design is as inevitable as the adoption of Internet searches into science. But they differed in whether they felt the results would be dramatic or always beneficial. Chatbots might make things more efficient and help guide graduate students, for example, but they might also undercut learning, or take away the "fun part" of science, such as coming up with new ideas.   My story for Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02028-5