Ben Hall

Delighted to see our latest work out! It’s well understood that our environment can induce mutations in cells. What’s remarkable here is that we observe a shift in the selective landscape as a result of treatment that can be decoupled from the creation of new mutations.

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Scattered thoughts on how doing math feels these days dynomight.net/math/

King’s Cross

Hadn't realised that as many as 1 in 3 full timers work mainly from home. Once again, this isn't the labour market or economy as imagined by most politicians. cepr.org/voxeu/column...

🧪⚛️ Our paper is finally published in Phys Rev Research! doi.org/10.1103/cnfz... Can cells make decisions using equilibrium physical principles, without resorting to irreversible, energy-consuming signaling cascades? We say yes, with the help of self-assembling membrane proteins! 🧵(1/7)

Maybe the BBC should get someone who actually knows what he is talking about then.

'Rather than proposing a solution, the report sets out a series of trade-offs embedded within the system and calls for a conversation to identify “what balance policymakers, institutions and the public wish to strike” between them.'

This anecdote is telling. It's all very well telling students to use AI like a personal tutor. But these tools (out of the box, anyway) are designed & trained to constantly try to do more for you than you ask. Not exactly a quality you need in a tutor. openquestionsblog.substack.com/p/ai-is-kill...

Very good essay. You can read it in 5 minutes. I wrote some of my own thoughts on this over the weekend. What Counts as Impact? doi.org/10.59350/006...

I was, dear reader, sorely disappointed to discover that this is something about bioinformatics.

"Empirical conclusions depend not only on data but also on analytic decisions" Apparently we know this from... wait for it... many analyst studies. Pro tip: If you don't open a book or talk to a statistician, you can experience the joy of discovery every day 🤯

New post: "Drowning in slop" Large parts of the state are being increasingly overwhelmed with complaints, appeals, objections.... written by AI. It's gumming up every process. Britain is particularly vulnerable. How bad has it got and what can we do about it? samf.substack.com/p/drowning-i...

We really need to make Meng's Big Data Paradox central to teaching, don't we? Researchers don't know this stuff bc they have never been exposed to it. But it is fundamental. (Link to paper PDF statistics.fas.harvard.edu/sites/g/file...)

In other words, a 10 percent contraction in one of Britain’s most successful exports. If it were steel or fish or other infinitely less profitable sectors, people would be having a meltdown.

Software engineering could and should be done with the same care as any other type of engineering. This is a post in honor of Margaret Hamilton (and also a subtweet of all vibe-coders everywhere).

Good thread on today's dump by OpenAI of 722(!) preprints on unsolved math problems. Slightly alleviated my sense of existential despair about being a scientist. Slightly.

In that case OAI kinda got burned. I think a lot of ways in which they and others handled that badly. But what to do now? They're sitting on a big pile of pretty major results. What do you even do with that? Mathematicians are mad at you for the whole NS fiasco but your job is not be a proof-machine

So what do you do if you're a lab that has a model that can solve problems at that level? For a start you pump the gas on it a bit, to see how far it can go. Focus hard on a few of the very famous problems. Famous problems get attention, and, as the famous AI adage goes, attention is all you need

So a few folks asking why OAI is releasing this at all. And I think that's probably worth a thread in its own right

IMO, the issue is not the monetary contribution, it's that an awful lot of people conflate fun activities that you do in your spare time as also being the same thing in terms of work, as in - not *real* work Games are enjoyable activities you do on the evenings and weekends with your mates

This is the funniest thing I've seen today, possibly ever

A cri de cœur from a emeritus professor of biochemistry at Yale. inpreparation.substack.com/p/opinion-re...

Had a UKRI funded grant proposal rejected at the "AI triage stage". "This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review." 🧪 #academicsky

I've been trying to respond with a personal email to every request for a PhD or Master thesis placement in my group. But with the flood of AI generated applications that's now coming in every day, this has become impossible.

SCOOP: Top researchers at Columbia, Stanford, and others thought they were elected to elite scientific societies alongside Nobel laureates. The catch? The organizations are a sham. I spent the last month diving deep into a massive academic scam spanning continents, for @nature.com

Can’t work out what the government or the BBC is actually recommending in terms of stocking up food. Article talks about a balanced diet, government site is even vaguer. Hard to follow advice when it doesn’t say even say if we’re talking hours or days www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I have blamed The agents That hacked Your website And which You probably Reasonably thought I controlled Forgive me I am rich And unaccustomed To taking responsibility

New piece on the Last Ditch bar shenanigans and how it's remarkable that some people are still misattributing COVID-19 risk. gidmk.substack.com/p/the-last-d...

Nice example of how AI predictions are limited by the training set. AlphaFold has not learned the rules of protein folding, it's just great at predicting structures based on what it has already seen. Added constraints (e.g. alignment revealing conservation patterns) can help make a good prediction.

Nikole Hannah-Jones w/ a sobering follow-up on her decision yrs ago to enroll her daughter in a poor, majority-Black public school rather than a wealthier, whiter private school. You leave heartbroken for the kids being failed by this grossly unequal system. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/m...

My son told me a joke. Two cats have a swimming race. They're called "one two three" and "un deux trois". Which one wins? "One two three" because un deux trois quatre cinque.

Am I too online? I ask myself as someone’s feedback includes a query about the phrase “hacker mindset” in a new application

Free newsletter: The idea that we're nearing the creation of AI systems that we can't control and that pose an existential threat to humanity is a lie and a distraction from the tangible harms and problems caused by LLMs and AI labs' near-unlimited resources. www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-alread...

On the train opposite someone with a very cool PLOS Biology laptop sticker. Feel slightly silly with my Ivysaur sticker. Won’t make me take it off though.

I did a somewhat deep dive into the recent OpenAI and Anthropic "hacks" for an upcoming interview. IMO, the AI companies are better off running with the "rogue AI" story because the real story is actually pretty embarrassing. Like making your Wi-Fi password "wifi" embarrassing. 🧵

AI can now detect, automate, and chain together exploits faster than any human hacker can. That is significant. Which means that the system vulnerabilities once considered not so low hanging fruit are actually very low hanging.

Sir Demis Hassabis: 'the arts is really where my whole family, I guess my genetics is'. While his formal training is in the sciences, 'I think of myself as being led creatively, intuitively, and emotionally, actually....that's also what's helped me in my science'.

🚨🚨🚨 Seems like another Mathematician comes forward with concerns about OpenAI stealing unpublished math research and then publishing it as AI solve under big publicity. Andreas Thom and Gábor Kun worked on Gromov’s soficity conjecture. (See his thread with alt-text) mstdn.science/@andreasthom...