I recently gave a 30-minute talk at the Librarian Futures Virtual Summit, and for the topic of "AI-powered search," I decided to play devil's advocate.

In Archie Carr’s encyclopedic “Handbook of Turtles: The Turtles of the United States, Canada, and Baja California”, first published in 1952, he quotes favorably and at length the observations of “Mrs. Knowlton” on the behavior of wood turtles (Clemmys insculpta) and box turtles (Terrapene carolina). The source given in the references is: Knowlton, Josphine Gibson.

Or how I’m slowly coming to my senses.

Adam Mastroianni’s blog Experimental History is consistently fascinating. In a recent article on whether conversations end when people want them to, he makes this point, very much in passing: This is a brilliant insight, and it explains so much about what’s wrong with journal articles. When you’re balancing all six requirements, how are you ever going to write something that people are going to actually enjoy reading?

Natalia Calderón, DR © Grabado Xalapa, Veracruz. 2023 Parte de la colección “Gráfica” Sitio de la autora Esta es una reproducción digital, con fines de divulgación, de una obra original proporcionada por su autor o propietario. Todos los derechos están reservados por la artista.

This week’s recap highlights Variant-EFFECTS for rewriting regulatory DNA to dissect and reprogram gene expression, zero-shot evaluation revealing the limitations of single-cell foundation models, EcoWeaver for large-scale prediction of gene functional associations from coevolutionary signals, and how assemblies of long-read metagenomes suffer from diverse errors.

There’s a moment—somewhere in the quiet space between hypothesis and imagination—when science fiction stops feeling like fiction at all. I remember it clearly. We were outlining the premise of On the Wings of a Pig , building the scaffolding of a story that spanned lightyears and lifetimes.

by Sofia Baroncini, Constanze Buyken, Judit Garzón Rodríguez, Ian Kisil Marino, Sarah Oberbichler, Cindarella Petz The 2025 Digital Humanities Conference, held this year in Lisbon under the theme “Building Access and Accessibility: Open Science to All Citizens”, brought together a global community of researchers, developers, and practitioners to reflect on the role of openness, inclusivity, and ethics in digital scholarship.

Continuing the practice, this note represents, revises, and reflects on that which reappears every year, events and memories that should be recalled and reconsidered. I had planned another piece on contemporary Japan, but that can wait.

A Revista Argumentos acabou de lançar um dossiê sobre Michel Foucault, cujo tema é “Vidas Infames e Insubmissas“, com diversos artigos incríveis.

We’re once more looking to grow our editorial team at JOSS! Since our launch in May 2016, our existing editorial team has handled over 5000 submissions (over 3000 published at the time of writing, almost 500 under review) and the demand from the community continues to be strong. JOSS now consistently publishes 40-45 papers per month, and this is gradually increasing.