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Today in "You must be raking it in with royalties from all those books". 🤨

These stories are often being presented as "cunning AI escapes its test room". I can't see why. It's simply the case that the sandbox was not well isolated by the testing companies. Put the agency and responsibility where it belongs. cyberscoop.com/anthropic-cl...

Anthropic says its AI accidentally hacked three companies during safety testsAnthropic revealed its Claude AI models accidentally breached three real companies during safety testing after a vendor configuration error exposed live systems.cyberscoop.com

Bringing things up to date with my columns for @thenewworldmag.bsky.social. First, this one on Anish Kapoor's latest show in London and his extraordinary Vantablack. www.thenewworld.co.uk/philip-ball-...

Anish Kapoor’s dark matterThe Hayward Gallery’s new exhibition showcases artworks so black that they seem to undermine the very rules by which we perceive the worldwww.thenewworld.co.uk

Shame that right-wing scholars need a leg up from DEI schemes, but there you go.

Hello Betteridge's law.

Hm, I'd like to do a thread on this gnarly item too - will aim to do so soon. It's cool experimental work.

Stephen Hawking claimed that Galileo "was the first person to challenge the received wisdom that the Ancient Greeks, Aristotle in particular, were the ultimate authority." 🙄 Best for @rmathematicus.bsky.social's blood pressure if he doesn't see this... oops...

This is one reason I don't use AI even for "research". I don't think it's inherently evil to be using AI to find stuff (even if I don't feel the need for it), but for quotes, summaries etc it just isn't reliable. Prob generally OK for transcription of interviews, but caveat emptor.

I hope to do a thread on this soon. It's very interesting, though perhaps looks a bit forbidding.

"somewhat warmer", "slowly warming climate"... This will be the typical response of climate denialists to the indisputable reality of this summer. I made this programme a few years ago to try to address precisely this kind of idiocy. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

BBC Radio 4 - The Burning QuestionHow the fight against climate change can move beyond the political left/right agenda.www.bbc.co.uk

"As an author I'd rather hear Reviewer 2's bad attitudes than LLM platitudes". Exactly.

This is a good article about a frankly rather puzzling initiative.

Latest "CEO says a thing". This seems to be how we live now.

If this story is right, Johnson doesn't know what cloning means. www.independent.co.uk/news/science...

Biohacker Bryan Johnson says he’s ‘cloned himself as a baby’ to harvest its organs‘This technology gives us a path to reverse aging,’ says 48-year-old tech entrepreneurwww.independent.co.uk

There's all kinds of DNA on the Turin Shroud, some of it seemingly from the Middle East and India. Whether this tells us anything more about its provenance is not clear. My latest column for @chemistryworld.com www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/dna-...

DNA on the Shroud of Turin reveals plant, animal and human contaminantsPeanuts, chickens and a researcher are among those who have left their mark on the clothwww.chemistryworld.com

The smartness of bees. My latest column for @thenewworldmag.bsky.social www.thenewworld.co.uk/philip-ball-...

Bees are smarter than we ever imaginedExtraordinary new experiments suggest these remarkable insects may think and feel in ways we are only beginning to understandwww.thenewworld.co.uk

Just been sitting right here thinking about that tech bro so desperate to live forever. Just imagine: some of us get to enjoy the privilege of spending time on this astonishing planet, and yet for folks like him it's still not enough.

What Derek says. All of it. Forget all the chin-scratching analyses of the Trump administrations "proposals" & plans - it comes down to this. It's time we simply said it.

Also: bro, you're going to die one day and that's really fine.