Flotsam of interest for me:
- reporting on a single data point exciting cosmologists (and beyond!), namely one unusual flash recorded in 2023 or 2024 by the LZ detector thru its 10 tonnes liquid xenon basin, which looks like what a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP!) would produce. This would be a fist in experimentally supporting the dark matter theory. But without reproducibility, ’tis hard to jump to a conclusion. In correlation, a news article on the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, with two World Views, one on Roman herself as “mother of Hubble”. Promising advances on far, far away celestial bodies thanks to the infrared abilities of said telescope. And again to cosmology.
- a news feature on “the Einstein test”, checking whether language models trained only on pre-1905 data could rediscover relativity. This is a clever way to separate creativity from regurgitation, if the historical training corpus can indeed be kept clean. And faster than training monkeys to type…
- an article combining climate and econometric modelling to assess how human-induced climate change has shifted, and will shift, the burden of childhood malaria in Africa. The attribution relies on counterfactual climate simulations, which makes me wonder about the propagation of uncertainty.
- an article linking US mortgage records from around the Second World War to race and immigration status. It shows that New Deal programmes disproportionately excluded Black borrowers, a nice (if sad) record-linkage exercise.
- a privacy feature on how UK Biobank was shut down after a data leak and is now imposing new safety measures. It raises the recurrent tension between protecting participants’ privacy and keeping data open to researchers, which connects once more with the membership-inference paper I discussed earlier.
- an editorial praising the World Bank for publishing and verifying the raw data and code behind its reports. Other agencies should indeed follow suit!
- a news item on the massive experience of mutating every DNA letter in a viral genome, whose effects the top AI models failed to predict (fail or pass the survival test!). A welcome reality check on AI in biology.
- two militant comments on the economy, one by Joseph Stiglitz et al. calling for an IPCC-like International Panel on Inequality, and one on a call for measuring growth through all forms of capital, rather than GDP alone. And a great poster (reminding me of Indian movie posters) on the side!
- an editorial on the comforting aspect of the Ig Nobel prizes, no matter how silly they sound.
- a book review of The Winding Trail &tc. on the Principia Mathematica and Newton’s disdain for hypotheses (with his famous “hypotheses non fingo” that clashes with the modern scientific approach!), along with his habit of feuding over priority. What is amazing with Newton’s meteor trajectory is he only seriously engage into mathematics during his final undergraduate term at Cambridge, one year before the Great Plague and his revolutionary breakthroughs!
