Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Matt Kirkcaldie

@matttkk.bsky.social

What a great idea.
www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/artic...

No checkout: School libraries offer support through sensitive books | The Asahi Shimbun: Breaking News, Japan News and Analysis

HANNO, Saitama Prefecture–In a quiet corner in the Hanno High School library here, a bookshelf holds about 100 titles that students can borrow without filling out a form, scanning a barcode or even ta...

www.asahi.com

November 21, 2025 at 9:49 PM

Matt Kirkcaldie

@matttkk.bsky.social

Embarrassing, tone-deaf and unethical; reminds me of another recent failure from @royalsociety.org

Natalia Jagielska @nataliajagielska.bsky.social · 4d

AI slop gracing the cover of Royal Society B. Not only in AI yellow but scientifically nonsensical. Come on. I'm certain human photographs and artworks were ignored to platform ... this.

Royal Society B cover with AI generated image of endocasts.

November 18, 2025 at 1:26 PM

Matt Kirkcaldie

@matttkk.bsky.social

Who better to sing the blazing soul of Horses than @jennpelly.bsky.social?
Nobody, that’s who.
pitchfork.com/reviews/albu...

Patti Smith: Horses

Read Jenn Pelly’s review of the album.

pitchfork.com

November 9, 2025 at 12:26 PM

Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie

Adam Morton

@adammorton.bsky.social

Amid squabbles, bombast and competing interests, what can Cop30 achieve?
- by @fionaharvey.bsky.social

www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Amid squabbles, bombast and competing interests, what can Cop30 achieve?

Climate summit in Brazil needs to find way to stop global heating accelerating amid stark divisions

www.theguardian.com

November 9, 2025 at 8:20 AM

Matt Kirkcaldie

@matttkk.bsky.social

Fascinating piece sifting the historical evidence to reinstate Franklin’s status as a co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, not the less-insightful also-ran portrayed in Watson’s popular history.

Matthew Cobb @matthewcobb.bsky.social · 14d

If you believe either that Franklin discovered the double helix, and / or Watson and Crick stole her data, ask yourself how you know this. Then take a read of this article.

Richard Smyth @rsmythfreelance.bsky.social · 14d

If I see one more stupid Rosalind Franklin take I'm going to lose my mind. Thank god for @matthewcobb.bsky.social and @nccomfort.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

November 8, 2025 at 8:00 AM

Matt Kirkcaldie

@matttkk.bsky.social

Well that's $1.5 million worth of integrity right there

Python Software Foundation @python.org · 26d

as a condition of funding, we were asked to affirm that we wouldn’t undertake any diversity, equity, and inclusion work, whether or not we used the government funds to do so. The PSF simply couldn’t agree to that statement,

October 28, 2025 at 5:46 AM

Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie

Carl T. Bergstrom

@carlbergstrom.com

The dark truth behind FormatMyPaper.com

Beware giving this site your unpublished data

Users noticed the website had fake testimonials and a domain name registered seemingly overnight.

https://ubadah.substack.com/p/beware-giving-this-site-your-unpublished\

October 24, 2025 at 12:11 AM

Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie

Tasmanian Inquirer

@tasinquirer.bsky.social

Unauthorised earthworks and land clearing by a cement company in northern Tasmania has damaged the known habitat of endangered freshwater crayfish and snails, smothering creek beds with silt. #politas

tasmanianinquirer.com.au/news/cement-...

Endangered Tasmanian crayfish habitat damaged by unapproved works

The habitat of an endangered native crayfish in northern Tasmania was damaged by unauthorised earthworks and land clearing by a cement company, according to an order issued by the Environment Protecti...

tasmanianinquirer.com.au

October 19, 2025 at 8:53 PM

Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie

Dr. Ornella Bertrand

@ornellabertrand.bsky.social

New paper out! It was an honor to collaborate with the legend Leah Krubitzer on this review to show that paleontologists and neurobiologists working together can only improve our understanding of brain evolution 🧠
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Full access to the paper: rdcu.be/eK167

The functional adaptations of mammalian brain structures through a behavioural ecology lens - Nature Reviews Biodiversity

Palaeontologists and comparative neurobiologists share a common interest in the evolution of the mammalian brain, but often fail to realize the benefits of this shared interest. This Review draws thes...

www.nature.com

October 15, 2025 at 9:52 AM

Matt Kirkcaldie

@matttkk.bsky.social

Nobody asked me, but I’m dismayed to see echo-chamber / clickbait outrage beginning to dominate Bluesky. For me the point of getting off Twitter was to leave the culture war being algorithmically stoked for profit. This polarisation fractures society and makes it impossible to find common ground.

October 16, 2025 at 1:46 AM

Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie

Mark Rubin

@markrubin.bsky.social

Report on Australian Higher Education finds:

🔹️ Council members have no lived experience of universities

🔹️ Council members have COIs with consultancy firms

🔹️ Council meetings are closed affairs that lack transparency

🔹️ Leaders' exorbitant salaries could not be justified

One submission said leaders’ salaries could not be “justified by the quality of executive decision-making, nor by the scope of executive duties. The core business of a university – teaching and research – is co-ordinated virtually entirely by ordinary non-executive staff”.

September 27, 2025 at 9:28 PM

Matt Kirkcaldie

@matttkk.bsky.social

I know they won the Nobel Prize and all, but I still think the discovery of how spatial awareness is assembled in vertebrate brains is underrated - the most exciting thing in neuroscience in the last 50 years. Literally seeing the brain build a map and use it to navigate, the basis of all behaviour.

Edvard I Moser @edvardmoser.bsky.social · Sep 25

1/5 How does the brain turn the low-dimensional, universal grid cell metric into the rich, diverse codes needed for memory in hippocampal place cells? 🧵
Preprint link 👇

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Functional independence of entorhinal grid cell modules enables remapping in hippocampal place cells

A systems-level understanding of cortical computation requires insight into how neural codes are transformed across distinct brain circuits. In the mammalian cortex, one of the few systems where such ...

www.biorxiv.org

September 25, 2025 at 4:22 AM

Matt Kirkcaldie

@matttkk.bsky.social

Fantastic, essential piece of scientific history, key work from an unheralded pioneer. We’ve only known that the stars are hydrogen and helium for a hundred years.

Elise Cutts @elisecutts.bsky.social · Sep 24

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪

Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students.

I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:

September 25, 2025 at 2:14 AM

Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ

@olivia.science

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

September 6, 2025 at 8:13 AM

Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie

でんか

@k-hermit.com

POKEMON ‎🤍

September 23, 2025 at 1:26 PM

Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie

Raimondo Bruno

@psychopharmres.bsky.social

We’re looking for Australian clinicians working with people who are seeking help with their substance use to share the stories of their wins. Find out more and complete the brief, confidential survey here: bit.ly/3GpQTXP

September 17, 2025 at 11:33 AM

Matt Kirkcaldie

@matttkk.bsky.social

A point which I never see raised is that the cost of the stadium would be borne by all taxpayers, whereas the profits and economic benefits would accrue to businesses catering to the resulting traffic, and the AFL. Seems like a massive expenditure of public money to benefit the private sector.

Nick Feik @nickfeik.bsky.social · Sep 17

For a state already carrying massive debt, and with massive health, education, youth justice problems (et al), this stadium is unbelievably irresponsible. #politas

Nick Feik @nickfeik.bsky.social · Sep 17

"The stadium would 'diminish the economic welfare' of Tasmania (and) would have an 'irrevocable and unacceptable' impact on Hobart's landscape.

"The govt would need to accumulate $1 bil in debt for construction costs, which would rise to $1.8 bil over 10 years"

Govt proceeding anyway. Awesome.

September 17, 2025 at 7:34 AM

Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie

Hourly Cosmos

@hourlycosmos.bsky.social

Mars Valles Marineris from EMM - From Jason Major (jpmajor.bsky.social) - https://flic.kr/p/2pqhbFq

Here's a view of the 4,000-km-long Valles Marineris canyon on Mars made from images captured with the EXI camera on UAE's Hope Mars Mission on May 23, 2023 from about 21,000 km. South on Mars is toward the top here.

September 11, 2025 at 4:00 AM

Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie

Tasmanian Inquirer

@tasinquirer.bsky.social

🐬 Four dolphins died at Huon Aquaculture #salmon farms during first half of 2025. Total number of dolphin deaths over the past two years is now seven, adding to a wildlife toll that includes 108 seals killed on salmon leases since 2018.
#politas #auspol

▶️ tasmanianinquirer.com.au/news/huon-aq...

Huon Aquaculture reported 4 dolphin deaths at salmon farms

Four dolphins died entangled in equipment at Huon Aquaculture salmon farms in the first half of 2025, newly released Tasmanian government data reveals.

tasmanianinquirer.com.au

September 7, 2025 at 11:09 AM

Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie

Society for Developmental Biology

@socdevbio.bsky.social

✨Nervous about development? Don’t be! 🧠 E13.5 🐁 embryo showing nerves (🩵) and endothelial cells (💙) weaving together in the developing pup 🔬 image by Nathan Burns 🧪 #FluorescenceFriday #DevBio #MouseEmbryo

September 5, 2025 at 9:20 PM

Matt Kirkcaldie

@matttkk.bsky.social

I had no idea Brooks Otterlake was here - had been periodically searching the full name for a couple of years now.

B. Otterlake @izzz.bsky.social · Jul 3

Wrote about what's really going on when you talk to an AI assistant

The system prompt defines the character Claude is supposed to play: an intelligent assistant with “depth and wisdom”, possessing its own thoughts and point of view, capable of emotions like interest and enjoyment. It’s told explicitly not to claim that it lacks sentience or subjective experience — rather, to treat the question of its own consciousness as intriguingly unknowable.

How does Claude understand, purely on a language level, what any of this means? How does it know what a friendly, possibly-sentient AI is, or how such an entity is supposed to act? Like any LLM, it draws on what exists in its training data. And since an “intelligent assistant” is something which, until very recently, was only a speculative concept, Claude’s behavior — and the behavior of every AI assistant — is constructed largely from what exists in fiction.

A chatbot’s system prompt is the invisible beginning of every conversation it has with a user. (The final line of Claude’s prompt is “Claude is now being connected with a person.”) When the user types a question or instruction, the text they enter is appended to the end of the system prompt, and the LLM is then made to generate more words — a few sentences or paragraphs that seem appropriate, on some deep-probabilistic level, as a continuation of the existing text — which are presented to the user as a response.

To be totally clear about what’s happening here: the language model is doing next-token prediction on a document whose first several thousand words establish everything that follows as a conversation between a human and a highly advanced artificial mind — a type of mind that doesn’t really exist, but that the model is designed to roleplay. When a person uses Claude or ChatGPT, they’re meant to believe they’re interacting with a helpful AI assistant. What they’re actually doing is collaborating with a language model on writing a work of science fiction about a human talking to an AI.

September 4, 2025 at 7:29 PM

Matt Kirkcaldie

@matttkk.bsky.social

Quelle surprise

Janel Le Belle @janellebelle.bsky.social · Sep 2

I asked an AI app to make a professional headshot for me as a scientist from a recent photo of myself and it made me a MAN because it assumed that a scientist must be male! 😂😂😂 So now I know what I'd look like as a man anyway 👨🏻‍🔬

September 2, 2025 at 5:09 AM

Matt Kirkcaldie

@matttkk.bsky.social

"Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit."
This cannot be said enough.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...