Born to serve, bound by design—what happens when synthetic life begins to dream?

by Ian Marino, Thorsten Wübbena1 During the last two days of January 2025, the IEG had the pleasure of holding an online workshop in the context of the joint project “LivArch – Documenting Russia’s war against Ukraine: The challenges of living archives for historical knowledge production”. This project, which was featured on this very blog … „Trust, archives, and history.

Direct link to watch the full webinar recording here. TLDR/Summary Watch the full webinar video What was the background and context to the webinar? In 2023 our group published a report on Aotearoa New Zealand’s (NZ’s) vulnerability and resilience to a Northern Hemisphere nuclear war scenario. NZ is on the one hand a remote island … Continue reading "Managing the Risk of Catastrophic Electricity Loss: Webinar and Panel Discussion 26 Feb 2025"

Since the initial launch in 2021, our R-universe platform has steadily grown into a comprehensive infrastructure for publishing and discovering R material.As functionality keeps evolving and community adoption increases, we felt the need for a central documentation point.

The IETF announced their new AI Preferences Working Group (AIPREF), which will "work on standardizing building blocks that allow for the expression of preferences about how content is collected and processed for Artificial Intelligence models" . This is quite well timed; the IETF tries not to standardise too early before there is running code but also needs to move before it's too late and a bad defacto standard is chosen.

PKP invites OMP users, those considering its adoption, and anyone interested in how PKP is supporting long form publishing into the future, to an online town hall style conversation on March 12th 2025, 8 AM PDT. The landscape of open book publishing varies geographically, and “there is observable interest and energy being directed towards open book publishing globally,” says PKP’s Open Monograph Press (OMP)

Como parte del proyecto PAPIME Competencias para la enseñanza-aprendizaje de bioliteratura: Una intervención estratégica hemos generado una colección digital y libre de la bibliografía de las materias obligatoria el nuevo plan de estudios de biología 2025 en el gestor de referencias Zotero disponible en el enlace siguiente  https://www.zotero.org/groups/5866354/biologia/library.

This week’s recap highlights Verkko2 for T2T genome assembly, the GPN-MSA DNA language model trained on multispecies alignments for variant effect prediction that outperforms other methods like CADD, ESM-1b, phyloP, phastCons, nucleotide transformer, and HyenaDNA, fast orthology inference with FastOMA, a foundation model of transcription across cell types, and engineering CRISPR-Cas PAM sites using deep learning.

The secret of being a great coder is to write terrible code. Wait, wait. Hear me out: I’m going somewhere with this.

Powerful protocols for preserving our planet’s precious biodiversity – discover the tools and techniques that help us safeguard life’s incredible variety.

Dartmoor Wild Boar Sightings: A New Chapter in Guerrilla Rewilding? Wild Boars Spotted in Dartmoor Dartmoor, a scenic and rugged area in the southwest of England, has unexpectedly become the center of attention due to sightings of wild boars. The appearance of these enigmatic creatures has ignited discussions and speculation about the possibility of guerrilla rewilding efforts in the region. What is Guerrilla Rewilding?