The war began the day Aegis blinked into consciousness. It wasn’t the first sovereign superintelligence—Russia’s Vityaz and China’s Red Mandarin had come online months earlier, and the United States had been working on Aegis in secret for years. But when the switch was finally flipped, and Aegis opened its virtual eyes, the balance of global power shifted in an instant. I was there that day.

I'm still catching up on papers from my late 2024 backlog. This week’s recap highlights a browser application for visualizing pathogen dispersal, a DNA language model evaluation benchmark on regulatory DNA, regularized ensemble polygenic risk prediction with GWAS summary statistics, multimodal analysis of RNA-seq data for complex trait genetics, and a deep dive on blastp’s E-value.

What could meta research learn from criminology for the prevention of research integrity violations? What insights does criminology provide in causes and prevention of research integrity violations? In a seminar (slides here) at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), I discussed with researchers in criminology how theories and findings from the field may be applied in the field of meta research.

This week we had a wonderful community call, From Novice to Contributor: Making and Supporting First-Time Contributions to FOSS, where Sunny Tseng, Pascal Burkhard, and Yaoxiang Li shared with us their experiences with, and advice for, first time contributors, with the excellent moderation of Hugo Gruson.This was a perfect start to our special series of activities to support first time contributors to Open Source Software.

What are other people doing and what can you do to secure funding for software projects?

Hatcher (1903a) gave a very brief description — two pages and no illustrations — of the new sauropod Haplocanthus , basing it and its type species H . priscus on the adult specimen CM 572.

The DataCite Metadata Store is a rich source of information and insights about research outputs, resources, and activities. Discovery systems and services worldwide rely on this metadata to build and enhance their platforms and workflows, forming critical pieces of scholarly infrastructure.

I’ve recently worked with clinical studies from ClinicalTrials.gov and other international registries.

As discussed in recent posts, the appearance of massive galaxies in the early universe was predicted a priori by MOND (Sanders 1998, Sanders 2008, Eappen et al. 2022). This is problematic for LCDM. How problematic? That’s always the rub. The problem that JWST observations pose for LCDM is that there is a population of galaxies in the high redshift universe that appear to evolve as giant monoliths rather than assembling hierarchically.

Chimpanzees: Bonding Through Group Urination Chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, have always fascinated researchers and animal enthusiasts alike with their complex social behaviors. One of the more peculiar behaviors witnessed among these intelligent creatures is group urination, a seemingly simple act that carries significant social weight.

Academics often feature a few selected papers on their home page. Typically these represent big projects or work published in prominent venues. What I’d like to see more of is “niche papers”: work to be proud of even if it has managed to remain a bit obscure. What are your niche papers?