Need funding for your wildlife research? Discover millions in grants from regional and national programs with deadlines approaching fast.

The intersection of artificial intelligence and biotechnology is, depending on whom you ask, either a harbinger of our demise or the dawn of a biomedical renaissance. AI is being framed as everything from a rogue scientist’s bioweapon lab to the ultimate safeguard against pandemics. But as someone who sat on the National Academies’ study committee on AI and Biosecurity, I can tell you: the truth is neither so dire nor so utopian.

Citations are crucial to academia. For me, they’re the literal way of saying, “I stand on the shoulders of giants.” They allow us to build on existing knowledge, floor by floor, forming an ever-growing tower. As a PhD student, I’ve just begun laying my own bricks in this structure. So when my work got cited for the first time, I was thrilled.

This blog has joined the Fediverse as @index@blog.front-matter.io, thanks to a major beta update of the underlying Ghost blogging platform. Read about Activitypub support in Ghost here.

Mark Wilson reviews Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason, by Katherine Brading and Marius Stan

por Florencia Gutiérrez Pensemos que estamos en 1940 y nos piden tomar una fotografía que sintetice las formas de trabajo vinculadas a la industria azucarera en el norte argentino. El desafío no sólo nos obligaría a mover el lente para descentrar la mirada de los ingenios, espacio laboral eminentemente masculino, sino que implicaría ampliar el foco.

Bursa Fisherman and Stork Reunite: A Remarkable 14-Year Bond In an incredible tale of friendship between humans and nature, a fisherman from Bursa, Turkey, and a stork have reunited for the 14th consecutive year. This heartwarming annual reunion is a testament to the bonds that can form between humans and wildlife, proving that even across different species, friendships can flourish. To read the full news report, click here.

A few weeks ago I gave a lecture entitled ‘The Great Disorientation’. It covered a lot of ground, as our present disorientation is indeed very great. Confused, overloaded, we stumble from update to update, constantly refreshing, all the while reducing our individual and collective capacities to comprehend and respond.

For work I’m reading and taking notes on my blog about cancer biology texts. The following are notes on most chapters of The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Some of these are not actual chapters (e.g., “Leukemia” is not a chapter). I listened (during many episodes getting a kid to sleep in the middle of the night) to this book borrowed from my local library with the Libby app.

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X-ray crystallography is the technique of using the diffraction of x-rays by the electrons in a molecule to determine the positions of all the atoms in that molecule. Quantum theory teaches us that the electrons are to be found in shells around the atomic nuclei.