Nicola Jones

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 .

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 

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

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! 

 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