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Claude-shaped scienceWorking on Claude-shaped problems with BootLoops, a toolkit for exact calculations in quantitative science
Harvard physicist Matthew Schwartz’s Anthropic guest post on BootLoops: an open-source harness that steers LLMs toward checkable, quantitative “Claude-shaped” problems across physics, ecology, genetics, and more—with human experts supplying scientific taste.
5 min · 1,244 words
Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodoFrontier models can now produce novel historical knowledge, but in a really weird way
Historian Benjamin Breen walks through how Opus 5.5 surfaced a previously unnoticed 1615 Dutch East India Company log mentioning dodos—and what AI archival sleuthing can and cannot yet do.
3 min · 631 words
Surprisingly Complex Waves Reveal the Brain's Inner Workings
Unexpected patterns traveling across the human brain may be reorganizing its activity in real time.
9 min · 2,113 words
Functional ultrasound imaging from scratch
Functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) is a brain imaging modality that is just starting to be demonstrated in human studies. I’m sure many will be familiar with structural ultrasound imaging, which forms static images using ultrasound, as in a sonogram1. Functional ultrasound instead captures movies of brain tissue very rapidly, tracking subtle changes caused by the blood flow that follows neural activity.
11 min · 2,451 words
Can New Technologies Finally Replace Animal Testing?
Brandon Keim reports for IEEE Spectrum on new approach methodologies such as organ-on-a-chip devices, stem-cell-derived tissues, organoids and AI models that aim to replace animal testing in drug development, how researchers are proving they work, and the regulatory and cultural shifts needed for wider adoption.
13 min · 3,009 words
Maya Rosen argues in Works in Progress that the US resurgence of dengue and locally acquired malaria is avoidable, because engineered self-limiting and Wolbachia mosquitoes already work in field trials but spent some fifteen years bouncing between the USDA, FDA, and EPA, and she calls for a faster approval path.
10 min · 2,335 words
What is the biggest unsolved problem in science? what 84 AI models think
We put "What is the biggest unsolved problem in science?" to 84 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) at the same time. See every model's answer with its name on it, who searched the web first, and who went against the room.
19 min · 4,300 words
Historians often blame drought, famine, and invaders for the Late Bronze Age collapse—but that can’t explain why the empires never came back. Patrick Fitzsimmons argues for a deeper structural story.
14 min · 3,253 words
How Delhi Cut Electricity Loss from 50 to 5 PercentHere’s How Delhi Achieved Its Epic Power-Grid Fix
IEEE Spectrum's Mini Shaji Thomas recounts how Delhi slashed electricity losses from about 50% to 5%—the privatization, metering, and grid-operations reforms that turned candlelit kitchens into reliable power.
15 min · 3,457 words
Standard deviation or standard error? What each one measures, and which one belongs in your paper
Selçuk Korkmaz clarifies SD vs SE with interactive figures: use SD to describe sample spread, and report estimates with confidence intervals rather than bare standard errors.
16 min · 3,717 words
What's Earth's dominant species by mass?
Signore Galilei works through biomass estimates to find which single species weighs the most: humans outweigh ants, cattle top the animals ahead of humans and Antarctic krill, sugar cane leads crops, and boreal trees such as black spruce and Dahurian larch hold billions of tonnes, far more carbon than all animals combined.
4 min · 935 words
In Ukraine, distributed renewables foil Russia's assaults
Paul Hockenos reports from Mykolaiv and elsewhere on how small off-grid solar fields, batteries, and other distributed renewables keep water and power flowing in Ukraine despite Russian strikes on centralized plants, and why the larger grid will still need protected transmission.
6 min · 1,355 words
What's the Future for Pure Math Research in the Age of AI?
Stephen Wolfram surveys AI’s growing role in pure mathematics—headline ‘solved’ problems, what automation does and doesn’t replace, and how human mathematical taste and research programs may evolve.
31 min · 7,084 words
Burning Man Death Rates: A Short Lesson in Statistics
Summary: Three people died at Burning Man in 2026. This was about a quarter of what the crude national rate would predict (~12 deaths). Calculating the age-standardized death rate, we’d expect to see an average of 4.9 deaths. At this rate, seeing 3 deaths is not abnormal. However, Burning Man’s near zero death rate over its existence is abnormal, and likely due to selection bias of healthier attendees and other confounding demographic factors.
6 min · 1,389 words
A short note on the lunar terminator paradox: why the day/night boundary on the Moon looks sharper (or stranger) than everyday intuition about lighting predicts.
2 min · 529 words
Chemist and science communicator Michelle Wong (Lab Muffin Beauty Science) explains why AI-generated science content is error-prone and lists practical tells for spotting it, from chatbot formatting and voice to hyperprolific output and inhuman errors.
6 min · 1,331 words
Why All Philosophers Ought To Be Radical Naturalists
My last blog posts calling for a scientific turn in philosophy and the abandonment of aprioristic philosophy largely resulted in three responses.
7 min · 1,549 words
Gravity Seems Holographic. What Does That Mean for Reality?
Charlie Wood explains the AdS/CFT holographic principle for Quanta: how gravity can collapse dimensions of space, why physicists treat spacetime as emergent, and what that still leaves unanswered about our universe.
13 min · 2,997 words
John D. Cook explains dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbits: why satellites there stay in perpetual sunlight, and what that means for powering orbital compute servers.
1 min · 257 words
The next frontier in worm research is to be able to visualise (map) the locations of worms, in-situ, and if possible, at the paddock scale.
6 min · 1,389 words