The tasty fats in cat poo coffee

This was a surprisingly fascinating thing to research and write.

The wildly-expensive and exotic brew of civet coffee is made from beans that have been eaten, digested and excreted by civet cats across Asia. It's a strange and possible dangerous practice. These researchers are helping to work out what makes the coffee taste distinctive, while hoping to protect the welfare of the civet cats.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03467-w

Fun fact: civet coffee isn’t the only delicacy that utilizes animal excretions. Thai Black Ivory coffee uses beans eaten and pooped by elephants; Peruvian coati coffee has passed through a coatis, a local relative of the racoon; some favour coffee beans that have been excreted by bats, and some Chinese teas are enhanced with insect droppings. Honey comes from bee excretions, and Argan oil from the pits of olive-like fruits consumed by goats in Morocco.

---

The AI Paper Proofers

Chatbots and large language models are being used to fact-check scientific work, but how effective are they? And is this a good idea?

My article for the Foundational Questions Institute. https://qspace.fqxi.org/articles/280/the-ai-paper-proofers 

AI in media, education and science

I will be speaking at this upcoming panel event in celebration of the anniversary of UBC's school of journalism: https://jwam.ubc.ca/events/event/ai-in-our-world-shaping-media-education-and-science/

Oct 9

6-8:30pm

UBC downtown, Robson Square Theatre

Biodiversity Research Centre open house

I have been working to coach a set of amazing researchers to give fascinating public talks at this upcoming event, Sept 17 at the University of British Columbia: https://biodiversity.ubc.ca/events/biodiversity-research-centre-symposium-and-open-house

Highlights will include:

- how understanding the social lives of viruses gives us new tools to fight them

- how animals have shifted to be more nocturnal in the face of scary humans

- how bringing biodiversity to agriculture can help solve the global food crisis 

- why sturgeon are eating themselves to death 

- how gut bacteria might help save polar bears from climate stress 

- what heat stress does to plants, and the global limit we shouldn't cross 

- the kingdom of life you never knew about

- and... the sex lives of guppies 

See you there! 

Putting 'good fire' back on the land

 Read my Q&A with UBC forest ecologist and fire researcher Lori Daniels in Yale E360 

https://e360.yale.edu/features/lori-daniels-interview

Interstellar!

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 alien visitors... strange thought. It looks like Voyager is going about 1/4 the speed of this sucker.

PPS here's a great animation of our planetary orbits and 3I's trajectory. I asked: no, there is no chance it will hit Mars.

https://bsky.app/profile/tony873004.bsky.social 

 

Scientists work with virtual AI teams

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

Is ChatGPT making you stupid?

Okay, no, I can't answer this question; no one can, yet. But I got the chance to look at a fun new brain scan study of students writing essays with ChatGPT, Google, or the old fashioned way, using 'just their brains'. 

Unsurprisingly, students who wrote essays with a chatbot didn't show as much brain 'connectivity' (widespread talk from one region of the brain to another). In other words, their brains were less engaged. No shocker there. But there are some more subtle findings that are interesting. PS - anyone seen a study of how calculators change our brains? How about typewriters? YouTube? Cat videos? 

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02005-y 

Lightning lights up the North

Is the globe getting more lightning? And if so, what will that mean for local ecology and global climate?

"In August 2019, something bizarre happened in the Far North: A massive thunderstorm produced more than a thousand flashes of lightning, including a record-breaking bolt that hit just 32 miles from the North Pole, the closest strike ever recorded. “It was a crazy summer,” says Rick Thoman, a climatologist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

It’s common knowledge that thunderstorms and lightning are more likely when it’s hot than when it’s cold; they are more prevalent in the tropics than in the Arctic. So, scientists wondered: Was the Arctic becoming more electric in our warming world? ..."

 https://e360.yale.edu/features/arctic-lightning-climate-change

The Medical Evidence Project

The aptly-named Centre for Scientific Integrity (CSI) -- the non-profit set up to oversee Retraction Watch -- has launched a new project aimed specifically at rooting out the bad science that's skewing medical guidelines.

These guys are expert science sleuths, so here's hoping they can make a difference

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01739-z

This story is an exclusive: I was chatting to Ivan Oransky for a different story and he mentioned this was coming up, and offered it exclusively to Nature.

How to untangle red tape

I had the opportunity to edit this great Q&A with a political scientist about bureaucracies, how they work, why and when they become corrupt, and how to reform them -- with patience, not a chainsaw.

https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/society/2025/how-to-make-bureaucracies-better

Roundtable: Reporting on Reports

I am quoted in this nice piece looking at how journalists do their work, in particular how we deal with massive reports:

https://www.theopennotebook.com/2025/04/29/roundtable-reporting-on-reports-how-journalists-harness-hundred-page-documents/