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Yes, I wouldn't say humans do it better. automated search could reduce biases from humans. But we need to make sure we don't slide into other biases instead. I think the power of llms to process large amounts of text rapidly is useful and needs to be applied carefully.

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There is a good way to include llms in a research pipeline but trying to automate everything via bootstrapping is not it!

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Beyond biases in the llm models themselves. Naively using llm generated skills or just poorly thought out ones will only make it worse!

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There is an explicit bias to find authors at prestigious universities and senior positions. This will lead to a very clear western, male, white bias in any literature searches with this skill.

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Some of the issues here: The timelines and citation counts are field dependent. This will lead to some fields getting weird answers on what is foundational (whatever that means).

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Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

The problem with offloading finding paper to ai is you will get biased results. 🧪🤖 I don't want to call out k-dense in particular but it's the clearest example of how using tools without reading their prompts Is a bad idea. github.com/K-Dense-AI/c...

Image of a Claude skill from https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/claude-scientific-skills/blob/main/scientific-skills/citation-management/SKILL.md

Further text from https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/claude-scientific-skills/blob/main/scientific-skills/citation-management/SKILL.md

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Nudibranchs use guanine nanocrystals to produce lots of different matte structural colours! This is going straight in my first year lectures. No doubt to be met with blank disinterest. 🧪 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

pnas.org

PNAS

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

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Madeline G. Eppley, PhD @madeline-eppley.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

New paper out in ecology letters! with @andylee.bsky.social @allydefduf.bsky.social We synthesized the active debate on how scientists define sex, including limitations and assumptions. We believe this discussion will lead to more accurate science. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

There is No Consensus on Biological Sex

At this critical moment when misinformation about sex is being applied to policy globally, scientific clarification on the definition of biological sex is valuable. Here, we evaluate the primary appr...

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Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

I don't think they even did that, the connectome is from the FlyWire consortium (flywire.ai) Though I haven't checked maybe some of them were involved in that project as well.

flywire.ai

FlyWire

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Juliet Turner @juliet-turner.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

I always say that it’s good to be in nature (surrounded by flowers and insects)… but to be in Nature (the scientific journal) is not bad either 😊

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Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

I think Aristotle's history of animals (which is amazing btw) has them living for 200-300years so maybe they read that and went with it?

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Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Now with Elsevier's reading assistant I can get hallucinated crap served directly to me while I try to read actual true things what ppl really wrote.

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

Excited for this paper to be out, literal years of hard work by Kozzy. Excitingly, my first last author paper! This work came from joining the Kinds of Intelligence group at Cambridge and being given time by @martahalina.bsky.social to explore and cross disciplines. Hard work but very fun! 🧪 🤖🧠

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Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

youtu.be/lLlwvmu1ZeA?... Possibly my favourite What If? ever. If you haven't read the what if books I highly recommend finding some copies.

youtu.be

What if you had a mole of moles?

YouTube video by xkcd's What If?

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Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

They are sequential hemaphrodites! All born male and when they inherit an anemone they develop into females. Each group has a dominant female, a smaller breeding male and a queue of progressively smaller underdeveloped males helpers. Such a cool system! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_...

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

It is likely then that cooperation in A. percula is driven by direct fitness benefits via inheritance or pay-to-stay type mechanisms! #evolution #gametheory

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Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

Why do anemonefish (A. percula) live in groups where only the dominant pair breed? We tested ~200 groups for genetic relatedness and showed no patterns indicating relatedness was high within groups. 🧬🧪 doi.org/10.1093/behe... @theresarueger.bsky.social #MarineBiology #SocialEvolution

A bright orange clown anemonefish (Amphiprion percula) with white bands and wide black edging. swims near the tentacles of a pale purple sea anemone.

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Theresa Rueger @theresarueger.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

New study in @science.org Science Advances: Clownfish can shrink to survive heatwaves and social conflict! Led by Melissa Versteeg, with Chancey MacDonald, Morgan Bennett-Smith, Pete Buston @newcastleuni.bsky.social @sciencesncl.bsky.social @bostonu.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

science.org

Individual clown anemonefish shrink to survive heat stress and social conflict

Clown anemonefish survive heatwaves by shrinking together with their breeding partner.

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Evolutionary Ecology Group, Cambridge @eegcam.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

After a week of intense population genomics, lots of tired but still smiley faces. Thank you @embo.org for funding another edition of our Population Genomics course in Naples. And thank you to the trainers and participants for making this eight edition another success! #EMBOpopgen

Group photo from the EMBO Population Genomics Course in Naples, 2025

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yes more acc the branch of middle english leading to english. old-english used a partative genitive (i think; I am only a hobby linguist). I think the key point is zero was introduced and naturally replaces "no" or the indication of an absence of stuff, so takes a partative construction.

At least that's my understanding! But I haven't opened a linguistics book in 10 years so could be wrong!

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The branch leading to English used to have a dual class (two things only) so it's not unreasonable language may develop a null class of grammatical number some day.

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Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

Lots of confusion here. It's not about singular/plural. Zero came after English grammar stabilised, we used the partative for no things: I have no marbles. English partative looks like the plural sometimes. So it's confusing ppl.

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How can we rigorously investigate the common-sense capabilities of agentic AI systems? How can we build better models of non-human animal cognition? (Re-)introducing the Animal-AI Environment: A virtual laboratory for comparative cognition and artificial intelligence research!

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Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

I've been thinking about the same thing and came across economics-games.com Not sure how well it works but looks good from small scale testing.

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Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

www.nature.com/articles/d41... 100 year discussion on whether to use the word scientist can now be resolved correctly. By recognising the correct term should be lorer. anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Lore #conlang

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Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

To hijack Weinberg: With or without notebooks, good people can program well and bad people can program badly; but for good people to program badly - that takes notebooks.

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Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

Seems so cool and strange to me that tokenising+transformer of a time series can work. And that the performance generalises so well across the different tasks. 🧪 openreview.net/forum?id=QlT... very good video exposition by first author: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqrC...

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Dylan Burnette @mag2art.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

A cancer cell with three nuclei (cyan) videoed through a microscope. Mitochondria (yellow) and the actin cytoskeleton (red) are also shown. #Science #Biology #CellBiology #microscopy

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Anna Dewar @annadewar.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Our review is out in Nature Reviews Genetics! rdcu.be/d5AY2 We show how phylogeny-based methods can resolve the problem of non-independence in genomic datasets. These methods must be considered an essential part of the comparative genomics toolkit. @lauriebelch.bsky.social @stuwest.bsky.social

rdcu.be

A phylogenetic approach to comparative genomics

Nature Reviews Genetics - Controlling for phylogeny is essential in comparative genomics studies, because species, genomes and genes are not independent data points within statistical tests. The...

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Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Hinton's responses during the banquet interviews are truly S-tier. I'm a bit confused as to why they think ai won't blush though!

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

Now I'm finally on holiday I have time for pointless projects right? I went ahead and calculated the graph for heterozygote dive combinations for the 3 set non transitive dice. The missing link between olive-red and blue-blue is a tie.

Diagram of how all 6 pairs of 2 non transitive dice affect each other.

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Good Sunday recreational maths read on permutation fair dice. 🧮🧪 www.ericharshbarger.org/dice/go_firs...

ericharshbarger.org

Go First Dice

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Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

Great thanks will try to get a copy!

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Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

Hey Javier! Do you have a doi? I did some googling but I couldn't find the full paper. mechanism.ucsd.edu/teaching/mod... doesn't seem to work on my mobile browser.

mechanism.ucsd.edu

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It's an article in a journal (?) called new biology. Seems like a collection of monographs. New Biology volume 18.

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Ah, gotcha. Yeah Def not universal.

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It's a very weird collection of baseless conjecture! I would recommend reading it if nothing else to marvel at the fact this was a persuasive argument at the time. I think it helps highlight how people use scientific language to hide prejudices.

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