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Ben Hall

@hallben.bsky.social
2.8K followers 3.5K following 1.1K posts

Professor in computational cancer biology at UCL interested in disease, mutations, and aging. Funded by CRUK, MRC and Royal Society. Personal account for science, code, music, photography! “Tired is the new awake”

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Reposted by Ben Hall
John Stott @jpsastro.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Had a UKRI funded grant proposal rejected at the "AI triage stage". "This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review." 🧪 #academicsky
I am writing to let you know that, unfortunately, your application was not successful.

Review process

As part of the initial triage of the 179 proposals submitted to this call, each was assessed using an AI-based review. Every proposal was read independently by several different AI models against the same seven criteria used to shape this call (including cyber security relevance, research quality and novelty, importance of the problem addressed, feasibility of the project plan, likely outputs and impact, value for money, and responsible research practice), with each model asked to give a score and a written justification with supporting quotations from the text. To guard against any one model's idiosyncrasies, we also ran a second, independent process in which different AI models debated the merits and weaknesses of each proposal before reaching a judgement, again against the same criteria. Scores from both processes were combined to produce an overall ranking. 

This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review.  Projects selected for funding were drawn from those that progressed to the full human review stage. We recognise that AI-assisted assessment is a new and evolving part of the review process, and we are continuing to evaluate how well it aligns with the judgements of human reviewers on this call. We will soon produce a document detailing our method, so that others can build upon it and improve it.

Feedback on your application

Your application was not selected to progress beyond the AI triage stage.  To provide transparency on the outcome of this assessment, we are sharing below the scores (out of 5) from each of the two AI review processes described above, together with the mean score across the two processes.
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Wolfgang Huber @wkhuber.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I've been trying to respond with a personal email to every request for a PhD or Master thesis placement in my group. But with the flood of AI generated applications that's now coming in every day, this has become impossible.
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Max Kozlov @maxkozlov.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
SCOOP: Top researchers at Columbia, Stanford, and others thought they were elected to elite scientific societies alongside Nobel laureates. The catch? The organizations are a sham. I spent the last month diving deep into a massive academic scam spanning continents, for @nature.com
nature.com
Exclusive: Sham scientific societies are misleading star researchers
A Nature investigation reveals a network of organizations that have been building their ranks through deceptive practices.
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Ben Hall @hallben.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Can’t work out what the government or the BBC is actually recommending in terms of stocking up food. Article talks about a balanced diet, government site is even vaguer. Hard to follow advice when it doesn’t say even say if we’re talking hours or days www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
What food items should you stock up on in case of an emergency?
Extreme weather may be changing the way we need to shop, with the UK government urging people to stock up on canned goods.
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LeithMotive @leithmotive.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
It is my very strong opinion that scientists should be strongly discouraged from jokey or quirky names. You want to avoid an emergent situation where a nasty child cancer is called Sonic Hedgehog medulloblastoma, for example.
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Katie Martin @katie0martin.ft.com · 25/09/2026
I have blamed The agents That hacked Your website And which You probably Reasonably thought I controlled Forgive me I am rich And unaccustomed To taking responsibility
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Health Nerd @gidmk.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
New piece on the Last Ditch bar shenanigans and how it's remarkable that some people are still misattributing COVID-19 risk. gidmk.substack.com/p/the-last-d...
gidmk.substack.com
The Last Ditch Mask Fight: What Are The Risks of COVID-19 in 2026?
A discussion that we’re still somehow having
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Michalis Averof @michalis-averof.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Nice example of how AI predictions are limited by the training set. AlphaFold has not learned the rules of protein folding, it's just great at predicting structures based on what it has already seen. Added constraints (e.g. alignment revealing conservation patterns) can help make a good prediction.
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Den of Scholes @denofscholes.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
BBC News - Warrington is 'almost a city' says Andy Burnham - but is it? - BBC News www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... Interesting up to the point where the white boomer aged male complained about cycle lanes. Another Facebook radical.
bbc.co.uk
Warrington is 'almost a city' says Andy Burnham - but is it?
What do people in Warrington think of the prime minister recently saying their town was "almost a city"?
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Hakeem Jefferson @hakeemjefferson.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Nikole Hannah-Jones w/ a sobering follow-up on her decision yrs ago to enroll her daughter in a poor, majority-Black public school rather than a wealthier, whiter private school. You leave heartbroken for the kids being failed by this grossly unequal system. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/m...
nytimes.com
In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? (Gift Article)
A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.
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Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
My son told me a joke. Two cats have a swimming race. They're called "one two three" and "un deux trois". Which one wins? "One two three" because un deux trois quatre cinque.
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Ben Hall @hallben.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Am I too online? I ask myself as someone’s feedback includes a query about the phrase “hacker mindset” in a new application
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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 14/09/2026
Free newsletter: The idea that we're nearing the creation of AI systems that we can't control and that pose an existential threat to humanity is a lie and a distraction from the tangible harms and problems caused by LLMs and AI labs' near-unlimited resources. www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-alread...
wheresyoured.at
https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-already-in-dangerous-hands/
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter, and you can subscribe on the following links: $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month. In return you get a weekly newsletter…
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Ben Hall @hallben.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
On the train opposite someone with a very cool PLOS Biology laptop sticker. Feel slightly silly with my Ivysaur sticker. Won’t make me take it off though.
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Jess Miers 🦝 @jmiers230.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
I did a somewhat deep dive into the recent OpenAI and Anthropic "hacks" for an upcoming interview. IMO, the AI companies are better off running with the "rogue AI" story because the real story is actually pretty embarrassing. Like making your Wi-Fi password "wifi" embarrassing. 🧵
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Jess Miers 🦝 @jmiers230.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
AI can now detect, automate, and chain together exploits faster than any human hacker can. That is significant. Which means that the system vulnerabilities once considered not so low hanging fruit are actually very low hanging.
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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Sir Demis Hassabis: 'the arts is really where my whole family, I guess my genetics is'. While his formal training is in the sciences, 'I think of myself as being led creatively, intuitively, and emotionally, actually....that's also what's helped me in my science'.
thersa.org
Demis Hassabis: Will AI Change How We Create?
Sir Demis Hassabis is this year's recipient of the Albert Medal. Watch Demis's reflections on AI and what makes the Royal Society of Arts distinctive.
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LeithMotive @leithmotive.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
The theft is one thing, but the inability of Openai to defend themselves by showing the working is a bigger issue. Doesn't meet the basic threshold for research publications.
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Philipp Markolin @philippmarkolin.eurosky.social · 10/09/2026
🚨🚨🚨 Seems like another Mathematician comes forward with concerns about OpenAI stealing unpublished math research and then publishing it as AI solve under big publicity. Andreas Thom and Gábor Kun worked on Gromov’s soficity conjecture. (See his thread with alt-text) mstdn.science/@andreasthom...
1/3 I want to record a number of points that I realized after reading up on the controversy. In fact it recalls an exchange I had with OpenAI after its non-sofic-group announcement. It exposes a serious, unanswered question about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished mathematics.

I wrote in an email to Mark Sellke and Sebastien Bubeck shortly after the surprising finding of a non-sofic group using the methods of Kun and myself:
“Another point is that I and a colleague in Dresden were discussing the expander matching problem and various extensions of the work with Gabor Kun actively over the last months with ChatGPT, so that we are of course curious if that was part of the training data or accessible to the reasoning process. There is a certain (frankly unacceptable) lack of transparency here; and I fear it will damage the communal process of math more than the new AI-generated results will benefit the subject.”

Mark Sellke’s complete answer was: “Regarding your conversations with ChatGPT: that did not happen.”

I had explicitly asked about two different things: (1) whether our conversations entered training data, and (2) whether they were accessible to the solving process. The categorical answer now looks as though it addressed only direct access under (2). No such qualification, explanation, or evidence was given. I take this as dishonesty to say the least.
OpenAI now says in the Buckmaster-Alpöge case that no specific user data was accessed, but adds that it “cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.”
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John Oxley @joxley.jmoxley.co.uk · 11/09/2026
🚨 NEW BLOGPOST 🚨 The last week has seen multiple incidents of masked mobs trying to subvert the power of the state. Their actions have been illegal and unpleasant. But the treatment has been weak. The police haven't dealt with it, and neither has govt. open.substack.com/pub/joxleywr...
open.substack.com
Stop the Louts
The tools exist. The will, so far, doesn't.
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Ben Hall @hallben.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Delighted to see our latest work out! It’s well understood that our environment can induce mutations in cells. What’s remarkable here is that we observe a shift in the selective landscape as a result of treatment that can be decoupled from the creation of new mutations.
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Ben Hall @hallben.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Delighted to see our latest work out! It’s well understood that our environment can induce mutations in cells. What’s remarkable here is that we observe a shift in the selective landscape as a result of treatment that can be decoupled from the creation of new mutations.
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Wellcome Sanger Institute @sangerinstitute.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Cancer treatments give a growth advantage to cells with particular genetic changes in healthy tissue. New research provides insights into chemotherapy side effects and drug resistance 💊 Read more ⤵️ www.sanger.ac.uk/news_item/chemothe…
sanger.ac.uk
Chemotherapy alters ‘Darwinian battleground’ in our bodies
Researchers uncover the genetic effects of cancer treatments in normal tissue, providing insights into side effects and drug resistance.
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
It contributes to the impression of dodginess that most of the time it's "LLMs are totally inscrutable, we can't tell anything about the relationship between training data and output, we can't explain any decisions" and then when it becomes inconvenient they're "nope, definitely didn't happen"
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Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
New post: "When government works" The vaccine rollout is often cited as a rare example of the state working. For the first time the person who led it, Emily Lawson, talks about how she did it + what the lessons are for govt in normal times. (£/free trial) samf.substack.com/p/when-gover...
samf.substack.com
When government works
The story of the vaccine rollout
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<Joaquin | Barroso> @joaquinbarroso.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
VMD not for Bio, but for CompChem This a guest post by Yamil Hernández, first year PhD student on loan from Puebla, who is working with us in photosynthesis related projects for his thesis. VMD (Visual Molecular Dynamics) is a free widely known visualizer developed by the Theoretical and…
joaquinbarroso.com
VMD not for Bio, but for CompChem
This a guest post by Yamil Hernández, first year PhD student on loan from Puebla, who is working with us in photosynthesis related projects for his thesis. VMD (Visual Molecular Dynamics) is a free widely known visualizer developed by the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group from the University of Illinois. It is primarily used to analyze and visualize molecular dynamics (MD) results, as well as to prepare biological systems for further simulations.
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Prof Christina Pagel @chrischirp.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
skullduggery and high mathematics.... the original statement by the mathematician who seems like a nice and honourable man - worth reading! cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/st...
cims.nyu.edu
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Prof Christina Pagel @chrischirp.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
and more things keep dropping. It does seem as if OpenAI have solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium problem which is pretty amazing but doubts remain over how they got there... openai.com/index/navier...
openai.com
On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
We’re sharing an AI-generated solution to the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, including a writeup and a formal proof in Lean.
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Sarah O'Connor @sarahoconnorft.ft.com · 08/09/2026
There's a lot of focus right now on employers’ plans for AI. But if you're worried about your job being automated, the more proximate threat could be that colleague of yours with a Claude subscription and a manic glint in their eye. www.ft.com/content/ed21...
ft.com
AI is ushering in an era of mass toe-treading at work
Boundaries between different occupations are blurring at the cost of a collaborative company culture
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John Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch.ft.com · 08/09/2026
2) England is a rare exception. During the 2010s many other countries (including the other 3 UK nations) changed tack, experimenting with ideas like transferrable skills instead of focusing on tried-and-tested disciplines and methods. It looks like those experiments have failed.
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John Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch.ft.com · 08/09/2026
Two extraordinary charts from today’s PISA test results: 1) School test scores continue to collapse internationally, underscoring how this is no longer a Covid effect but sustained decline. Those falls in reading and maths are equivalent to about two years of lost schooling.
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Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
New PISA data out England is now top ten in all three areas (reading, maths, science) and the second highest performing country outside of east Asia (after Estonia). This is a huge public policy success.
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Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
This was the point I emphasised about Palantir when I wrote about tech soverignty - their model is to make bits of the state dependent on them and them jack up the price. samf.substack.com/p/sovereignt...
samf.substack.com
Sovereignty for sale
Tech monopolies and the future of the nation state
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Jim Pickard @pickardje.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
it’s weirdly fortuitous that the FT Magazine just happened to run a brilliant deep dive into James Orr yesterday morning, hours before the scandal broke: www.ft.com/content/c2d0...
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Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
University of Cambridge reviews after death of Prof Jason Arday Part 1, led by Nazir Afzal OBE, will examine the University’s support of Professor Arday Part 2, a broader review of institutional processes and practice related to his appointment and time at Cambridge www.cam.ac.uk/news/univers...
cam.ac.uk
University of Cambridge launches independent review following the death of Professor Jason Arday
The University of Cambridge is launching an independent review following the death of Professor Jason Arday. It will examine the University’s decision-making, policies and organisational processes, wi...
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In Medias Malone @professormusgrave.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
The thing about LLMs is that they unleash coding ideas for which the bottleneck was capital and expertise, which is to say largely unprofitable or non profitable ones
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Claus Wilke @clauswilke.com · 03/09/2026
The reason Claude did well at binder design is because the prompt hardcoded that it should use ESMFold2 for scoring, and apparently ESMFold2 is really good. It's also only a few months old so not widely used yet. AI in biology keeps disappointing. blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/anthropic-...
blog.genesmindsmachines.com
Anthropic has not solved the peptide-binder design problem, but maybe bi[o]hub has
The protein design field is getting pushed forward by human experts in protein design, who would have thought
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Nature @nature.com · 03/09/2026
Top artificial-intelligence models failed to predict the biological consequences of rewriting a virus's entire DNA code. go.nature.com/4rbHdmN
go.nature.com
Mutating every DNA letter of a genome shows surprising effects — and the limits of AI
Top artificial-intelligence models failed to predict the biological consequences of rewriting a virus's entire DNA code.
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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
This is very interesting. Impressive experimental work, and shows the current limitations of predictive AI even for this highly studied phage. I see that the failures of prediction due to poor structural information for the protein in question are particularly acute for so-called Protein H... 1/2
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Michel Nivard @michelnivard.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
🚨& 🧵 Our new Nature paper is out! Across 46 cohorts and up to 1.14M people per Big Five trait, we do GWAS and ask how robust, generalizable and consequential the genetic signals underlying personality really are. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
How can we model the biological mesoscale? Nice to see this tricky question being addressed in an interdisciplinary way. A key question for me is: how much of the *biological* information-processing is being done at this scale? www.cell.com/biophysj/abs...
cell.com
Meso-Soup: A community approach to building a computational description of the biological mesoscale
Physics-based models of biomolecular systems that explicitly represent biomolecular structure and mechanics, such as atomistic molecular dynamics simulations, are well established because experimental...
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Adrian Woolfson @adrianwoolfson.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
joehorsman.substack.com/p/claude-def...
joehorsman.substack.com
Claude Definitely Didn't Solve Protein Design. That's Kind of the Point.
If you just read the headlines, apparently Claude can design proteins now.
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Jennifer Ouellette @jenlucpiquant.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
'We'll find way to save Jodrell Bank,' Burnham says www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
Andy Burnham says "We'll find a way to save Jodrell Bank"
Burnham said "there is no way that we can see its demise, and it won't happen under my Government".
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John Oxley @joxley.jmoxley.co.uk · 31/08/2026
Using this as an excuse to post the Odyssey thought that came into my head. The way Telemachus mopes around his mother so much - calling that Homer's simp son.
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Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
The overreaction to this Hugging Face thing is driving me nuts. Come flay me for being wrong but... 1/x
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Tom Roberts @tpgroberts.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Fundamentally, this is just a story of bad software design. The fact that agentic AI tools do not have stronger controls against the tool attempting a potential solution that is, in fact, a crime is ultimately on OpenAI and Anthropic for failing to correctly design their harness.
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Nick Anstead @nickanstead.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
I’m calling it now… we need a less brooding Bond reboot and more of this…
static.klipy.com
Roger Moore James Bond Smirk
Alt: Roger Moore James Bond Smirk
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Aylwyn Scally @aylwyn-scally.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
This is a thoughtful piece by @ent3c.bsky.social, articulating a view of hereditarianism that I think is shared by many in anthropology, psychology & elsewhere. It's also one that I, as a geneticist working on human evolution, fundamentally disagree with. ericturkheimer.substack.com/p/the-cofnas...
ericturkheimer.substack.com
The Cofnas Manifesto
The social consequences of hereditarianism
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Jeremy Goldkorn @goldkorn.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
I went back to China after a decade away—I'd previously lived there for 20 years. Some notes:
chinafile.com
App Life in China
“It’s really tough doing anything in China right now,” my friend told me. He’s a serial entrepreneur in Shanghai with a locked-in grin. We were waiting for our food in a Taiwanese restaurant in a lovi...
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