Writing is thinking. On the value of human-generated scientific writing in the age of large-language models. Editorial in Nature Reviews Bioengineering. I couldn't agree more. The reason that I write those mini reviews is that it forces me to think in a structured manner.
The future of reviews writing in the AI era. That's from Nature Reviews Chemistry.
Relatedly: James Gleick on the parrot in the machine.
How the brain wakes up from sleep — and produces that morning feeling.
A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition.
Image generators are designed to mimic their training data, so where does their apparent creativity come from? A recent study suggests that it’s an inevitable by-product of their architecture.
How smell guides our inner world.
Millions of tonnes of nanoplastics are polluting the ocean. These plastic particles smaller than a human hair can pass through cell walls and enter the food web.
By mathematically proving how individual molecules create the complex motion of fluids, three mathematicians have illuminated why time can’t flow in reverse.
Patricia Lockwood on the collected prose of Sylvia Plath.
Yuja Wang in the Financial Times.
Is mathematics mostly chaos or mostly order?
The surprising power of placebos demonstrates how the mind influences both the experience of ill health and the evolution of illness.
The optimistic brain: scans reveal thought patterns shared by positive thinkers. I tend to be skeptical of these kinds of findings.
How to avoid nuclear war in an era of AI and misinformation.
Two books look closely at both the limitations and the possibilities of the art of literary translation.
How you breathe is like a fingerprint that can identify you. Your inhalation and exhalation pattern is not only unique to you, it can be a marker of your physical and mental state, a recent study suggests.
Is this fascism?
Viet Thanh Nguyen on the struggle for Los Angeles, the “migrant invasion” that wasn’t and the real meaning of America”s second-biggest city.