Scienza

This kind of story still gives me the heebie-jeebies

Too many years ago, I was a die-hard bicyclist who pedaled everywhere. That habit died here in Minnesota, where we’re buried in snow for 6 months of the year, and half the remaining time is non-stop prairie winds. Some people do manage it, though, and I was thinking maybe I should start up again in […]

Pharyngula · EN

IEEE Xplore Digital Library Adds AI Assistant

IEEE recently released the IEEE Xplore AI Research Suite , built on the full text of millions of peer-reviewed publications in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library . The library offers full-text access to IEEE standards , journals, magazines, conference proceedings, and more. Researchers who use the AI suite to search the digital library receive answers grounded in verified scientific results, ensuring a high level of accuracy and trust. The suite is available as an optional subscription upgrade to all IEEE Xplore Digital Library institutional subscribers. Powered by a proprietary AI system optimiz

IEEE Spectrum · EN

I Used AI to Fake a Scientific Paper. Here’s What Happened

Science has a spam problem. And the spam filter is getting clogged up. According to all reports, academic publishing is drowning in what has come to be called AI slop: low-quality, mass-produced content generated with AI. By 2025, an estimated 57 percent of all published academic articles exhibited detectable evidence of large language model (LLM) influence, a massive jump from 12 percent in 2023. What’s more, over 12 percent of Nature Communications reviews were found to be completely AI-generated in 2025. Given that for every 40 papers showing statistical evidence of AI usage in 2025, only o

IEEE Spectrum · EN

Your Robot’s Safety Functions Already Work. What If the Input Lies?

This article is brought to you by VicOne . A mobile robot slows for someone in a hallway. A collaborative arm eases its movement as a worker approaches. A humanoid pauses to let a person pass. Each response depends on information about the robot or its surroundings: a distance reading, a position estimate, or a stop signal. But what happens when one of those inputs is wrong, and the robot still responds exactly as designed? The mobile robot reads the hallway as clear while someone is still there. The arm estimates that the worker is farther away. The humanoid does not receive a stop signal as

IEEE Spectrum · EN

How Beta Technologies Is Clearing the Runway for Electric Flight

In the cockpit of Beta Technologies’ Alia CX300, pilot Chris Caputo steers onto Runway 33 at Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport in Vermont. Cleared for takeoff, he releases the brakes and nudges the throttle forward. At the back of the aircraft, the five-blade pusher propeller snaps awake, and the Alia bolts forward. There’s no shriek of a turbofan spooling up, no shudder of a piston engine, and no wait for thrust. Just the low hum of an electric motor and a shove of instant acceleration. Within a few seconds, we’re at 85 knots (almost 160 kilometers per hour), and Caputo rotates t

IEEE Spectrum · EN

Systems Thinking Is Vital in the Age of AI

Modern engineering projects increasingly combine human judgment with machine capability. An engineer can define a problem, then ask an artificial intelligence tool to search relevant research and technical standards, generate design options, test them in simulation, and compare the results. The engineer can then bring the results to specialists who understand the parts AI cannot judge on its own, such as whether a design can be built safely, whether it makes sense in a particular setting, or how it might affect its users. The final decision about whether and how to move forward remains a human

IEEE Spectrum · EN

Consumer Appetite for Personal AI Goes Mainstream

This article is brought to you by Qualcomm Technologies . For many consumers, much of the promise and appeal of AI is personal. Consumers are looking past generic tools and want to know how these technologies will help them in their daily lives. These trends coincide with the advent of new classes of wearable devices that, in addition to being able to leverage powerful frontier models, feature built-in intelligence that understand the context of a user. Where are they? What are they seeing and hearing? What are their habits, their preferences, their schedules? It’s an astonishing pivot, from p

IEEE Spectrum · EN

When Electric Cars Were for Women

At the turn of the last century, the automobile industry was still new and evolving rapidly. In 1898, there were about 50 carmakers in the United States. A decade later, that number had increased fivefold. In 1901, the companies produced 7,000 vehicles. By 1910, production had reached 181,000. For several decades, electric cars vied with those powered by steam and internal combustion, and nobody was sure which technology would come out on top. Steam had the legacy of locomotive technology behind it but came with a risk of fire. Steam-powered vehicles could also become exceedingly hot, dependin

IEEE Spectrum · EN

Guarding the Gates of Knowledge

A recent scroll through social media got me thinking about trust. About half my feed was filled with AI slop that astute users would call out as being machine-generated, often to the embarrassment of the rube who unknowingly spread it and sometimes to the delight of the poster who shared it deliberately because they found it amusing or useful for sowing confusion. Remember the good old days of GPT-3 when we could ask the chatbot anything and it would almost instantly and very confidently spit back a plausible but false answer? That’s when the word “hallucination” as applied to AI answers enter

IEEE Spectrum · EN

Arguments in Favor of AI Fair Use

I made some notes on the nature of the training of LLMs, and about whether we as a society should consider the material used to train them as a fair use of that material. I believe it would be best … Continue reading →

Kevin Kelly Technium · EN

Robot Basketball

Earlier this year I made a bet with Craig Mod. He felt sure that robots would soon be able to play basketball better than humans. It’s a reasonable prediction based on the fast advancements in robots running sprints, kicking balls, … Continue reading →

Kevin Kelly Technium · EN

Weekly Links, 10/02/2026

Not a normal debate. The debate about whether AI is a “normal technology” has been spun into overdrive with AI-generated musicals defending each side. (AI-musical is becoming a thing.) A Normal Debate?

Kevin Kelly Technium · EN

Swarm Intelligence

Here is a possible world 50 years in the future, one I think is more likely than the scenario most people expect, which is one huge AI in the sky. Fifty years from now most AI is invisible. There is … Continue reading →

Kevin Kelly Technium · EN

Most Improbable Agent of You

It is commonly said that AI today is the worst it will ever be. This is true. AI today is probably the most centralized it will ever be as well. Currently the most reliable way we know how to make … Continue reading →

Kevin Kelly Technium · EN

Weekly Links, 10/23/2026

The internet archive’s Wayback Machine library is a planetary treasure. It preserves the archive of the web. Don’t let publishers take it down. Why the Internet Needs a Memory PDOOM is a great music video slopcore with a very SILO … Continue reading →

Kevin Kelly Technium · EN

A Proposal for Universal National Service

Every young person between the ages of 18 and 21 should provide 2 years of mandatory national service. Accepted service goes beyond military service and includes civilian service like teaching, or construction, or emergency response. Everyone serves. There are no … Continue reading →

Kevin Kelly Technium · EN

Weekly Links, 10/30/2026

We now have a genuine world model in Google’s Genie4. Real time generation, volumetric, 3D navigation, language prompts. Awesome! Genie 4: A new generation of world simulation

Kevin Kelly Technium · EN

As a journal editor, I’ve started using Claude to help find reviewers

I’m an editor at Am Nat; before that I was an editor at Oikos. An increasingly challenging part of an editor’s job is finding reviewers. Traditional methods all have drawbacks: For many mss, the topic’s sufficiently far outside my wheelhouse … Continue reading →

Dynamic Ecology · EN

This Friday linkfest is built with next-gen adherence to our industry-leading ethical principles

This week: Wildlife Photographer of the Year, what makes for good exploratory research, perfect AI alignment achieved, “the world has put up a lot more resistance than I thought to be standardized and quantified,” Fast Slow Fourier Transform, the hedgehog … Continue reading →

Dynamic Ecology · EN

“[T]hrowing people into the deep end is a great way to find out if they can swim, but a poor way to teach them to swim”: Bethann Garramon Merkle and Stephen Heard on teaching scientific writing

Note from Jeremy: Welcome to our latest interview post! Today’s interview is with Bethann Garramon Merkle and Stephen Heard. It’s about their new book on teaching and mentoring writers in the sciences, though as usual with our interviews it ranges … Continue reading →

Dynamic Ecology · EN

Ecology is now ready for “Big Code” and the errors it hides

Two years ago (almost to the day!), our own Brian McGill asked if ecology is ready for “Big Code” and the errors it hides. That is, increasing numbers of ecology papers are based on hundreds or thousands of lines of … Continue reading →

Dynamic Ecology · EN

Dynamic Ecology, an experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern blogging industry, makes this Friday linkfest

This week: RIP Jeff Houlahan, one academic’s AI workflow, a new review of my book, and more. Sad news: ecologist Jeff Houlahan passed away suddenly on Oct. 14. He was 67. I never met Jeff in person, but he was … Continue reading →

Dynamic Ecology · EN

No true Scotsman, doing ANOVA by hand, the hippopotamus major, and AI

Here is author and former financial analyst Dan Davies, being snarky about people in financial analysis–possibly including him!–who used to claim that you shouldn’t download financial data from Bloomberg because you didn’t really understand any data you hadn’t typed into … Continue reading →

Dynamic Ecology · EN

Do you want me to compile data on last year’s N. American ecology faculty job market? Take the poll!

I ask because I’m not sure I can be bothered. It’s not a ton of work to ID a bunch of new TT ecology hires and compile various bits of public information about them. But it’s not a trivial amount … Continue reading →

Dynamic Ecology · EN