China’s Regulators Take Aim at “AI Boyfriends” spectrum.ieee.org/china-ai-c…

"Free Trade Flip-Flopping, How Countries Flip-Flop from Protection to Free Trade and Back" : researchgate.net/publication…

People are asking how AI companies will discover the next breakthrough drug. I think they're asking the wrong question. Generating molecules is a commodity. The limiting factor is no longer the ability to create hypotheses. It's the ability to test them in the real world.

n 1933, a right-wing group called the Woman Patriot Corporation branded Albert Einstein a 'radical' because of his pacifist and democratic socialist views and tried to get him banned from the USA. Luckily they were unsuccessful.

This from Murray Gell-Mann is hilarious: “I have to mention something that happened while Art Rosenfeld and I were writing the article. A man came in who said he worked for the government and showed us a badge - he was obviously from the CIA - and he said, ‘Are you Murray Gell-Mann?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘I'd like to talk with you - alone.’ Well, Art Rosenfeld was upset; he went down to the library to work on our article while I was interviewed by this government person who wanted to talk with me alone. And he said, ‘You were recently in Russia?’ I said, ‘Yes’. He said, and he was reading from a piece of paper but he obviously didn't understand what was on the piece of paper, he was some low-level person that didn't know what he was saying, he was just reading from this telegram that he'd got. And he said, ‘You were there and we heard that recently the…’ ...how did this work... ‘recently a prize was awarded, a Stalin prize or Lenin prize, or something of that kind, was awarded for prediction of catalysis of fusion reactions by muons and… and that the work was experimentally confirmed. Now you've visited a lot of Soviet laboratories. Will you tell us in which laboratory this confirmation was carried out?’ And I said, ‘Oh yes, I think I know what you're talking about.’ In the meantime I had wrenched the paper away from him, I wasn't supposed to look at this piece of paper, it was classified or something, but I had–since he was stumbling over it so much—I had wrenched the paper away and read it and then I understood what he was asking, because he didn't understand enough to ask the question intelligibly. I said ‘Oh, I see, you mean this award of a prize for predicting muon catalysis, and the announcement that somewhere in some laboratory this had been confirmed. Well the laboratory was not in the Soviet Union. It was confirmed at Berkeley, at the radiation lab, by the man you just threw out of the room–and his collaborators.’ He didn't see the humor.” piped.video/watch?si=_srm8--…

President Milei of Argentina has said his country will take matters into their own hands to secure the Falklands from Britain at his UN speech today. Is that a military threat…

🇺🇸‼️ A network of Russian agents supplying Russian software to the Secret Service has been uncovered in the US, - NYP. The CEO of an American technology company, Lee Reiber, has been charged with concealing Russian control over a company that received a US Secret Service contract to supply software. American helped Russian citizens conceal their ownership of Oxygen Forensics so it could receive US government contracts. Prosecutors allege that 55-year-old Reiber conspired with 52-year-old Russian citizen Oleg Davydov to conceal the company's Russian ties and promote its software to US government agencies. If convicted, both men face up to 20 years in prison.

As someone who did this kind of genome mining work during my PhD, some thoughts on this Anthropic announcement: First, the very simplified version of what they did is that they noticed two genes (one known, one new) sitting next to a weird repeating piece of DNA. More specifically, they described an unusual reverse transcriptase (RT) associated with a repetitive DNA array and an unknown accessory protein. This kind of process was used to understand CRISPR back in 2002 and was key to the gene editing tools we use today. To put this into context, though, people have been finding RTs associated with CRISPR arrays since 2008, and this general kind of genome-neighborhood mining has been used to discover new biological systems for decades. The basic genome-mining strategy is well established, and there are now mature tools and published pipelines for doing much of this. There are papers that discover and experimentally validate dozens of new systems using this approach in a single study. Doing it in bacteriophage genomes is also nothing new (eg CasPhi). Finding a weird cluster of genes and repeats is often the easy part. The hard part, and where the real discoveries come from, is figuring out what the system actually does. Eg for the bridge-RNA discovery in 2024 from @arcinstitute or the discovery of CasPhi in 2020 from @DoudnaJennifer they figured out the pieces of the system and the rules for what makes it work so it can be used. Anthropic does not yet know what this does. They’ve shown that the repeat array produces RNAs, but not what those RNAs do, what the RT does with them, or whether the system has any of the programmable properties that make the CRISPR comparison justified. I’m genuinely rooting for all of the frontier labs to seriously get into biological discovery, and I’m excited about what comes out of it. But announcing these very early, incremental findings with the framing of a major discovery doesn’t help. I’d much rather they set the bar high now, so that when an AI actually discovers a fundamentally new biological mechanism, everyone appreciates how big a deal it is.

👇 L’affaire Thélyson Orélien, un séisme pour le monde de l’édition? ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle…

I’m a scientist. I need to say this because the AI hype is getting ridiculous. AI can design a molecule in seconds. That doesn’t mean it discovered a drug. It discovered something we scientists have never been short of: Something to test. Someone still has to make it. Run the experiment. Measure whether it works. Check whether it’s toxic. And ultimately prove it works in the real world. AI hype tells us: “Prediction is discovery.” “Simulation is experimentation.” “Generating a molecule is developing a drug.” It isn’t. AI is making ideas incredibly cheap. But every new idea creates something AI cannot generate: Evidence. And the more hypotheses AI produces, the more experiments we’re going to need. That’s the irony nobody seems to be talking about. AI may not make laboratories obsolete. It may make them more valuable than ever. You can speedrun the thinking. You can’t speedrun reality.

🚨 Après un cancer du sein, faut-il vraiment interdire prises de sang, perfusions ou prise de tension sur le bras opéré ? Cette consigne reste encore très largement donnée aux patientes. 👉 Pourtant, les données scientifiques ne montrent pas d’augmentation du risque de lymphœdème avec les prises de sang, injections ou mesures de pression artérielle sur le bras homolatéral. 👉 Les facteurs de risque démontrés sont surtout l’importance de la chirurgie axillaire, l’irradiation ganglionnaire, l’IMC et les complications infectieuses. 👉 En pratique : privilégier l’autre bras lorsqu’il est facilement accessible, mais pas d’interdiction absolue du bras opéré lorsque la situation clinique le justifie, notamment après curage axillaire et en l’absence de lymphœdème. Une vieille habitude médicale qui persiste malgré l’évolution des preuves et des recommandations. À diffuser : beaucoup de patientes vivent encore avec cette contrainte… probablement inutilement. (Bulletin du Cancer - Septembre 2026)

Un autre outil. Même conclusion. Peut-être aussi les mêmes biais inhérents à la méthode. lucide.ai/roman-rentree-litt…

«J’ai eu peur pour ma sécurité»: la fille de Bernard Drainville insultée en faisant du porte-à-porte journaldequebec.com/2026/09/…

La caricature de Côté lesoleil.com/opinions/carica…

Près de la moitié des travailleurs canadiens en détresse financière, selon un sondage tvanouvelles.ca/2026/09/22/p…

NEW: 🇫🇮 Finland has carried out its first blast tests on civil defence shelters in more than 30 years, with tests conducted around Rovaniemi in northern Finland to assess how Finnish shelters perform against threats associated with modern warfare. The Finnish Ministry of the Interior and the Finnish Defence Forces organised the tests, which were observed by civil defence experts from Finland, Ukraine and several other European countries. Similar blast tests were last conducted in Finland in 1992. The Finnish government says the purpose is not simply to test existing shelters, but to develop Finland’s civil defence system, learn from Ukraine’s experience of modern warfare and strengthen international cooperation on civilian protection. An eight-member Ukrainian delegation from ministries responsible for civil defence shelters and the State Emergency Service of Ukraine also took part. The wider three-day event focused on lessons from Russia’s war against Ukraine, the need for civil defence shelters in modern Europe and what makes an effective shelter system. Finland and Ukraine are also working together through the Civil Protection Shelter Coalition for Ukraine, established in 2025, with Finland supporting Ukraine’s development of its own shelter network while also drawing lessons from Ukraine’s experience. The tests were carried out around Rovaniemi, in Finland’s far north and roughly 100 km from the Russian border.

Ojo: ¿Espejismo en PISA? 😮 El informe reportaba algo inédito: los estudiantes de alto nivel socieconómico (Q4) caían MÁS que el resto. “[A] new phenomenon of affluent students who struggle”. Problema: quizás NO era cierto. Un trabajo publicado hoy explica que el bajón se debe a un *cambio de métodos* en PISA. La definición de nivel socioeconómico es distinta en 2022 y 2025. Y aquí está la clave: si se usa una definición igual en las dos oleadas, los niños del Q4 ya no caen más. El "fenómeno" desaparece por completo. En esencia, el cambio movería niños entre viejos y nuevos Q1-Q4. Antes pesaba más el capital cultura y ahora las posesiones. Ejemplo: tener libros en casa vs. tener piscina. Asumo que lo primer predice mejores notas. Es plausible esto: el cambio llevó niños del viejo Q4 —y buenas notas— al Q1-Q3, y por eso veríamos un bajón artificial del Q4. Lo explican con detalle @LuciaCobreros, @lucas_gortazar @ecorreig y colegas en un paper de @innovamat.

So the Thirty Meter Telescope project has rejected the offer of 1 billion (!) Euros to build it on La Palma without giving any explanation: iac.es/en/outreach/news/iac-… and see also lavozcanaria.com/en/la-palma… and alohastatedaily.com/2026/09/… and diariodeavisos.elespanol.com… - is the TMT toast now?