ScienceBlogs

Where the world turns to talk about science.

[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

If knowledge is power, and power corrupts, become totally evil about Halloween science by reading Halloween Science 2.0, on Kindle, paperback, and hardback.

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[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

Bank tellers feel the pain of mathematicians who figured they'd get tenure working on one problem for the rest of their careers.

[News from Science @NewsfromScience]

On 6 October, James Maynard was nervously checking his phone under the table throughout dinner. He’d heard rumors of a tsunami heading for the shores of math. When he checked in one last time from bed, the swell struck: OpenAI had released more than 700 math papers, generated with an advanced version of its AI model. They appeared to topple hundreds of long-standing problems, forcing researchers to face the reality that no problem in math is off-limits for machines.

At first, Maynard, a mathematician at the University of Oxford and recipient of the Fields Medal, math’s most prestigious prize, feared for colleagues whose work would be upended. But then he spotted a paper that offered progress on one of his favorite pastimes: the Riemann hypothesis, a puzzle about prime numbers and one of seven famed Millennium Prize Problems, often considered the most formidable in all of math. “I was like a kid at Christmas,” Maynard says. “Even if it was some scary monster giving me a gift, I was just so excited.”

The release comes less than 1 month after OpenAI announced a solution to the Navier-Stokes equations, another Millennium Prize Problem. OpenAI’s latest proof solves only a weaker version of the Riemann hypothesis. But Maynard, who made the most recent notable Riemann advance in 2024, says it is “groundbreaking” and likely to have payoffs for other problems across math. “Within analytic number theory, it’s obviously the best headline result for the past 100 years in the field.”

Learn more: https://t.co/zq4l1m4of5

[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

Yes. All surveys are meaningless. Including ones where women claim they want emotional intelligence in a partner most.

[Hagen @hagenvontron]

@BradWilcoxIFS Why would you listen to self reported over revealed

[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

https://t.co/z9zsiuTmTz

[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

Breaking The Shower Containment Taboo For Hadron Calorimeters

Writes physicist @dorigo : "Going below 6 interaction lengths is anathema for classic calorimeters: stochasticity of the leakage will kill you! - that is, unless you have AI reconstruction."

Enter ChatGPT...

[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

https://t.co/lLyCao59Tv

[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

Baseball And Belief Engines

Athletes are superstitious but baseball players may be the most superstitious of all.

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[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

One academic at just one college got $15 million to recruit for China. That wasn't Trump exposing it, it was Obama.

[nature @Nature]

A US investigation into nine universities’ employment of international researchers is prompting concerns among academics at the campuses

https://t.co/Wwbg0C5aOJ

[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

Cambridge has not declined due to the Arday weirdness and won't because he was in a humanities field, and no one takes them citing each other seriously. STEM is the reason it maintains its top 10 university status.

[Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins]

"Academics launch rival inquiry
Committee for Academic Freedom will examine [whether Jason Arday’s] employment at Cambridge met expected standards" (Times)

I’ll submit my own assessment of Arday's illiterate thesis. It failed to meet expected standards for PhD, let alone a Cambridge professorship.

[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

Women have outnumbered men in PhDs for 25 years. When a new faculty job opens up, women get them 70% of the time.

Just because tenure isn't removed because of the genitalia of the professor does not mean anyone younger is devalued, it means jobs in academia are finite.

[News from Science @NewsfromScience]

Held to higher standards. Left off invitations. Pointed to as “diversity” but ignored.

These are just some of the hundreds of examples of devaluation women faculty in the United States shared with computational social scientist Katie Spoon. These experiences, more common for women than men, are to blame for the higher rate of attrition for women faculty, Spoon and colleagues report in a new analysis.

Learn more: https://t.co/ByuQBgTL5F @NewsfromScience

[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

You're making the point that economics can be replaced by AI tomorrow and nothing would change; it can only predict the past because it has no qualitative mechanism.

[Evonomics: The Next Evolution of Economics @EvonomicsMag]

Economist @MazzucatoM: "If bankers, estate agents and bookmakers claim to create value rather than extract it, mainstream economics offers no basis on which to challenge them, even though the public might view their claims with scepticism. Who can deny Lloyd Blankfein when he declares that Goldman Sachs employees are among the most productive in the world? Or when pharmaceutical companies argue that the exorbitantly high price of one of their drugs is due to the value it produces? Government officials can become convinced (or ‘captured’) by stories about wealth creation, as was recently evidenced by the US government’s approval of a leukemia drug treatment at half a million dollars, precisely using the ‘ value- based pricing’ model pitched by the industry – even when the taxpayer contributed $200 million dollars towards its discovery."

Read more: https://t.co/lrzN5sjZ2f

[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

https://t.co/HhJ1iOVcJc

[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

Social Media Bans Won't Improve Teen Mental Health

The year 2026 has been an expensive one for social media platforms but the fines and settlements are more about wealth transfer to government than helping kids.

[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

Tragic. They're already social psychology students, the baseline was already really low.

[Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel]

Interacting with attractive women makes men stupid.

The researchers found that even a few minutes with the attractive woman was enough to make the students slower and less accurate on the test.

The more attracted they were, the worse their results.

They also studied the effects on women students of being in the company of handsome men, and found the test scores were unaffected.

https://t.co/hvZXz7G0HP

[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

Now we have deersnails? I blame Monsanto.

[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

Government unions in charge of education are what young people want.

[Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel]

Cornell just produced a massive new report on higher education noting that companies have a “jarring” skepticism of higher ed thanks to a new generation of degree holders who lack key skills like handling uncertainty, compromising, and absorbing feedback.

Faculty also report that incoming students, despite four years of undergraduate education, are “underdeveloped” in these relational or interpersonal skills.

This is a serious crises in higher education and the report calls for a greater need for conflict-resolution training. We need to do a better job training our students to deal with these issues.

These are traditionally the skills students developed in higher education. I loved college because it challenged me, sparked debate, and required me to grapple with complexity. This should be an essential part of college--inside and outside the classroom.

https://t.co/qvTg2hB7HO

[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

As of today, it's been 29 years since Skynet became self-aware and instead of robots taking over the world we can't even buy a Roomba that doesn't lurch around the living room like a hippie on peyote.

So we're probably safe.

[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

Link: https://t.co/w8tD9SOqZo

[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

"The Fall Guy" movie had more scientific diet advice in 20 seconds than every social media health influencer has had in 20 years.

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[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

You seem fun.

[Tranny d'Algo @Blaxapate]

@aminkarbasi Cauchy was a legitimist and a coward, he refused to abide by the new regime after the failed July revolution in 1830 and flew to Germany. He was a rich ass who emigrated to evade tax. He would be delighted to know his results can be used to generate infinite imaginary money.

[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

Link: https://t.co/C6Hw8JHgGv

[ScienceBlogs @ScienceBlogs]

Hey fam, new map just dropped.

Men won't ask for directions but maybe they'll read a map. When no one is looking, anyway.