Nicola Jones

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 .

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 .

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 ...

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