An idea for a masters-level class or journal club alternative: “Where are they now?” but for big splash papers published in the 2000s. Take a few papers published around 20 years ago, then follow what happened subsequently.
Why the discussion surrounding mirror life echoes past scientific "shocks," and how adaptive governance, not outright bans, can foster responsible innovation.
A new era is starting at GigaScience, today being the last day for the Hong Kong team including Nicole Nogoy, Chris Hunter, Peter Li, Mary Ann Tuli, Bastien Molcrette and Ken Cho. Joining them, and as outgoing Editor in Chief, I thought I would give my thoughts and perspectives on the last 15 years at the Open Science publishing coalface. It wasn’t meant to end this way, but I’m still very grateful for the journey.
As we enter Peer Review Week 2025, we would like to propose the use of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principles for scientific peer review , using these to make the process more scalable, efficient and also better equipped for the increasing use of AI in publishing. Today marks the start of Peer Review Week 2025 (PRW 2025), an annual event celebrating the vital role peer review plays in ensuring the
AI in academia, $1B NSF cut, AI+biosecurity, bacterial DNA from mammoth bones, understanding LLMs and their math, bioacoustics for conservation, Synthetic Eden, lots of R/AI updates, CRISPR horses...
GigaScience Press is again helping CitizenScience.Asia mobilise Citizen Scientists Across Asia for a groundbreaking biodiversity initiative from October 3 to 12 2025.
Quoting from Olivia Guest et al. (2025) "Against the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia."
In Google's new paper, "An AI system to help scientists write expert-level empirical software" an AI supposedly "invents" new methods in bioinformatics and infectious disease modeling & forecasting.
Reposted from the original at https://blog.stephenturner.us/p/development-environment-portable-reproducible. You upgrade your old Intel Macbook Pro for a new M4 MBP. You’re setting up a new cloud VM on AWS after migrating away from GCP. You get an account on your institution’s new HPC. You have everything just so in your development environment, and now you have to remember how to set everything up again.
Reposted from the original at https://blog.stephenturner.us/p/codex-positron. Last month I wrote about agentic coding in Positron using Positron assistant, which uses the Claude API on the back end.Positron Assistant: GitHub Copilot and Claude-Powered Agentic Coding in R Stephen Turner·Jul 16Read full story Yesterday OpenAI announced a series of updates to Codex, the biggest being an IDE extension to allow you to use Codex in VS
Reposted from the original at https://blog.stephenturner.us/p/positron-assistant-copilot-chat-agent I have a little hobby project I’m working on and I wanted to use the opportunity to fully make the switch to Positron from RStudio. I used Positron here and there when it first came out, but now that it’s out of beta and has a more complete feature set (like remote SSH sessions!) I have everything I need to switch and not look back.