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Showing posts from April, 2026

We are missing our target of 1.5C warming: what now?

Andy Reisinger talks us through what will happen to the global temperature, what that means for the planet, and how we can crank the thermometer back down again... An interview in Knowable Magazine .

Science ramps up AI papers and foundation models

The annual Stanford Human Centred AI Index report is out! This massive report is a fantastic "state of the union" type report on where we're at with AI, tracking progress and major events from the past year. My story in Nature tracks how science papers are increasingly mentioning AI (up 26% from last year), the new foundation models announced for science, and some skepticism about the utility of 'agents' for performing end-to-end science. Read it at Nature .

Score: 50/50 for science

A massive 7-year project aiming to examine the repeatability of social science has come to a close. The project, called SCORE, found (as previous studies have found before) that only half of the tested papers could be replicated successfully when new researchers tackled the same question with new data. It's a glass half-empty / half-full situation... the authors say this is just a sign of scientists being human and making concessional honest mistakes, being messy in failing to report exactly what they did and how they did it, and the strange-but-true fact that doing something slightly differently can legitimately yield entirely different results.  The team also tested whether people or machines could predict if a paper would replicate (by checking anything from the reputation of the authors to the sample size and the statistical power of the finding). People scored 76-78% at their best; computers failed miserably. But newer AI-based systems are doing far better. Read my news story ...