Nicola Jones

When an improv performer and a bunch of biologists decide to kill time at conferences by counting jokes, this is what you get: seriously funny science. Read my story in Nature .

AI is being used everywhere these days -- including by the military in the current attack on Iran, along with ongoing conflict in the Ukraine and Gaza. The US Department of War is now insisting that any contractual procurement of AI for the military call for "any lawful use" of AI, without constraints. That has kicked up a fuss with their old supplier, Anthropic, and possible new suppliers including OpenAI, xAI and Google.  The concerns revolve around mass domestic surveillance and the possibility of future fully-autonomous lethal weapons -- such as drones programmed to identify and kill enemy combatants without human intervention. Many say the latter is currently illegal under international law (though that's disputable).  Plenty of efforts are ongoing to try to come up with international agreement, but it's hard -- not least because it's tricky to define what "fully-autonomous lethal weapons" even are. Experts are meeting this week in Geneva to talk ab...

Neutrinos -- the ghostly particles that flood our Universe -- are supposed to weigh nothing. But physicists know they do, in fact, weigh something. How much? And which one is heaviest, and which lightest? Now they're zeroing in on answers. See my article in Knowable magazine.  https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/physical-world/2026/physicists-make-progress-weighty-problem-neutrino-mass

Fluorescent proteins, taken from jellyfish, are a standard workhorse of biology. They let us light up proteins and check on the conditions inside of cells. Now, quantum physicists have shown that they can harness the quantum properties of electrons in these proteins, turning them into exquisitely sensitive sensors of magnetic fields. This also means we can turn them off and on remotely, making them useful for new imaging and therapeutic techniques. Read all about it here! https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00662-1