I’m beyond thrilled to share that our work on using deep learning to compute excited states of molecules is out today in @ScienceMagazine! This is the first time that deep learning has accurately solved some of the hardest problems in quantum physics. science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/…

A selection of photos showing Buran at the launch pad in Baikonur, arranged in sequence.

Remarkable Magnum Opus from @VamsiMootha & the Mitocarta Tree of Life consortium consisting of 9 back to back research papers (+2 perspectives) just released in Cell and Cell family journals: - Characterization of mito proteomes from 6 diverse species, from Giardia to Leishmania to Arabidopsis - Optimized methods for mito enrichment, DIA mass spec, protein correlation profiling, microscopy validation, and cryoEM analysis of native complexes - Comparative analysis reveals dozens of proteins shared among pathogens but lost in human hosts = “pan-parasite” drug targets - Data used to re-train ML predictor of subcellular localization => predicted mitoproteomes across hundreds of eukaryotes - Giardia solute carrier discovered with functional validation - Dynamic rewiring of Acanthamoeba mito proteome from aerobic to anaerobic energy production characterized And tons more… The papers are instant landmarks and raise even more questions than they answer, paving the way for many future investigations of this fascinating organelle #mitochondria cell.com/consortium/mitocart…

An interesting perspective (as one would expect) from Kevin Buzzard. xenaproject.wordpress.com/20…

The Economist published an article yesterday calling for regulations to protect against mirror life. They propose restrictions on buying mirror chemicals, including extremely normal stuff like L-Glucose or D-amino acids. What is going on, guys? Where did this come from? I think the concerns about AI designing pandemics are overblown, but at least designing viruses is a real thing that we actually know how to do. 1. To be clear: we do not have any idea today how to make an autonomous cell from scratch, mirror or not. Making a mirror cell from scratch is much, much harder than making a non-mirror cell from scratch. I am a believer in strong AI acceleration but there is a lot of hard science and manufacturing that is missing here. People have ideas about how to do it, but they have ideas in the same way we have ideas about quantum computing: we will have lots of hints that it's around the corner before you see in on a shelf at walmart! Call me when we create an autonomous non-mirror cell in the lab from scratch, and then we can chat about sensible regulations. 2. Even if they existed, mirror bacteria wouldn't be able to escape the lab: they couldn't eat anything. Good luck being a left handed organism in a world where all the food is right handed. I know, a malicious person with access to mirror life could in principle give the mirror organism a way to digest non-mirror food, and then it could wreak havoc. But the converse is also possible: if a mirror bacterium were on the loose we could just give the normal non-mirror bacteria enzymes that would allow them to eat the mirror bacteria, and drive competition. This fact is generally ignored. 3. Finally, mirror life doomers pretend we have no defense against mirror life. This is also just nonsense. We have plenty of defenses. They are called mirror antibiotics. Mirror antibiotics would work against mirror life the exact same way non-mirror antibiotics work against non-mirror life. And there are way more options for mirror antibiotics than there are for non-mirror antibiotics, because we don’t have to worry about accidentally killing the human in the process! We actually even already have a ton of mirror antibiotics, since they are usually byproducts of antibiotic manufacturing. Fosfomycin, for example, is extremely simple, easy to manufacture in bulk, and industrial quantities of mirror fosfomycin are already produced today as a byproduct of fosfomycin synthesis. D amino acid analogs, like D-cycloserine, would also be very effective. If we can figure out how to make mirror life we can definitely figure out a bunch of universal mirror antibiotics to kill it. Spare a thought for the poor scientists studying chiral biochemistry. Their requests to the models are all about to be denied as potentially dual risk. Meanwhile, want help finding a supplier for a toxin with nanogram LD-50? Sure, Claude will help you with that. I agree mirror life escaping the lab would be bad and it deserves consideration, but can we stop pretending that it is a huge danger right around the corner that deserves front page regulatory attention, and instead focus on real shit like AI cyberattacks and the fact that the poles are still literally melting?

The year is 2027. You join the Zoom call for your job interview. He begins: "you are walking through the desert and find a tortoise on its back..."

Introducing 💫 Gumbel Straight Flow 💫: Distilling Autoregressive Models into One-step Flow Maps 🚀 Can autoregressive (language) models be used as teachers for flow map parallel samplers?

1/ 🚨 Just out in @NatureNeuro! 🧠 We profiled >6,000 features of brain dynamics across humans + monkeys, mice, fish and worms 🧑🐒🐒🐁🐟🪱 to find a shared neural endpoint of anaesthesia: spatiotemporal isolation of local activity 🧵 🔗 doi.org/10.1038/s41593-026-0…

Still some frontiers left for those outside the big LLM companies.

POV: You’re about to read the worst op-ed ever

Excited to share our EMNLP oral paper! We find that RL teaches model to traverse parametric knowledge more effectively, thus accessing knowledge previously inaccessible in instruction-tuned models. With @niloofar_mire, @RylanSchaeffer and Manasa Kaniselvan 🧵

growing corn for ethanol is actually completely bananagrams crazy

OK upon reading further (always click the link first...) they are basically doing what we already do with screwworms (but need to do more of)