Kara Swisher, Ads, and Wellness A journalist with big podcasts swerves out of her lane, crashes into a grift or two

When @karaswisher.bsky.social promotes health misinformation while attacking it, we have a problem.

www.the-geyser.com/kara-swisher...

Thanks! Sent you an email

*finding

Enjoyed the talk (just watched video). Have you published on the zombie funding? And how common is the fluoxetine treatment in clinical practice?

A lot of Orbán's American fans are saying that this election proved he was never an authoritarian in the first place.

This is completely wrong — and, in fact, betrays a complete misunderstanding of both Hungarian politics and modern authoritarianism.

Here's why.

Did quantum sensors help find a U.S. pilot shot down in Iran? Experts doubt it The heart’s faint magnetic signals can’t be detected at large distances, researchers say

Scepticism about the hype that ‘ghost murmur’ quantum sensors can spot heartbeats from miles away.
www.science.org/content/arti...

Another fake disease AI thought was real was "Kyloren syndrome." It showed up in Google's AI Overview.

It was from a hoax paper that @neuroskeptic.bsky.social wrote to expose a predatory journal.

See "The garbage'll do", July 2017, in my hoax anthology, Stinging the Predators:

bit.ly/StingPred

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real Bixonimania doesn’t exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional illness?

🚨 For nearly two years - and even now, depending on the day and model - AI models could tell you all about bixonimania, a totally made-up disease in a paper funded by “the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation". My @nature.com story on AI's fallibility in medicine www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real Bixonimania doesn’t exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional illness?

Many of the claims made regarding the enhanced efficiency of AI tools are misleading; this one isn't. Large language models (LLMs) are *very* efficient at spreading false information.
#ArtificialIntelligence #LLMs 🧪
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The science of Artemis II YouTube video by nature video

I am biased but this is the greatest and possibly only Artemis II video you need 🌝 www.youtube.com/shorts/Tc2vN...

Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done? Tens of thousands of publications from 2025 might include invalid references generated by AI, a Nature analysis suggests.

My colleague & I teamed up w/ Grounded AI to look for fake/hallucinated references. Our analysis suggests that at least tens of thousands of publications from 2025 likely contain such references. More detz at @nature.com, w/ input from @gcabanac.cpesr.fr, @mhmdhsini.bsky.social & @kowb.bsky.social.

Until you change the incentive structure of academia you will continue to see people fear losing their status and use AI as a way to fast-track productivity bc academia doesn't currently value the meaningful production of knowledge, only the performance of producing it.

This is the inevitable consequence of there being far too many scientists and journals whose only goal is to publish as many papers as possible. Before these papers would have been junk, now they're AI generated junk.

Yeah it’s annoying that such a stupid word has become the term of art in the field.

Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done? Tens of thousands of publications from 2025 might include invalid references generated by AI, a Nature analysis suggests.

Tens of thousands of papers published in 2025 contain fake/hallucinated citations, an analysis by Nature and Grounded AI suggests
By @miryamnaddaf.bsky.social and Beth Quill | @nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done? Tens of thousands of publications from 2025 might include invalid references generated by AI, a Nature analysis suggests.

The question about fake references should NOT be “What can be done?”

We KNOW what can be done: human peer reviewers and editors check the damn references individually, by hand.

The question should be, “Why are so many publishers NOT doing those basic checks?”

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done? Tens of thousands of publications from 2025 might include invalid references generated by AI, a Nature analysis suggests.

Tens of thousands of papers published in 2025 contain fake/hallucinated citations, an analysis by Nature and Grounded AI suggests
By @miryamnaddaf.bsky.social and Beth Quill | @nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I‘d still love a package subscription to the magazines I like rather than subscribing to each individually tho

Eye drops made from pig semen deliver cancer treatment to mice Minuscule particles with the ability to cross hard-to-penetrate barriers can be loaded with drug treatments to target intractable diseases.

An unlikely duo — pig semen and eye drops — can halt tumour growth in mice. Could the drops replace needles to treat kids with retinal cancer someday? 👁️🐷
Thanks to Chunxia Zhao at Adelaide University and David Greening @bakerresearchau.bsky.social for chatting with me! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Interesting counter argument to the ‘break the link’ proposals for electricity and gas prices.

hmm, if the error has a major impact on the paper then why doesn’t it also impact on the work that’s built on the paper?

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social

We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked

What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective

We call it the digital sphinx

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

For several months, people have been wondering why Reform hasn't declared any crypto donations, despite Nigel Farage saying they'd received some

Now @theobserveruk.bsky.social can reveal why...

This is a granular and informed piece that will teach you about things you don’t know and probably didn’t want to know but which you (we) should know. It also makes some important ancillary points about how homogenized and blindered AI “critique” has become.

Purchasing power in 2026 is $155B for US and $146B for China. Cross over point in 2028 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00618-5

The crossover point between US & China investment in R&D may come sooner.

Last year, the White House proposed $5B+ in cuts to NSF, $18B+ in cuts to NIH, and billions more in cuts to NASA, DOE, EPA, NOAA, ...

Hard to stay ahead when support falls behind.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

NEW: This new report, from BBC, is the best takedown of the insanity of Trump you will see anywhere.

Calm, coherent and repeating only Trump’s own words. Devastating.

Brilliant work once again from Roz Atkins.

(🎥 BBC News)

This is utter garbage. I believe in net zero. We need to get there. But renewables are not competitive. That's why they are subsidised. Fossil fuel markets are highly competitive. It shouldn't be hard to hold these two thoughts at the same time.

You might have formed the impression that Paul Johnson, former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, knows what he's talking about. The media treats him like the voice of God. But here he is - and not for the first time - talking out of his hat. Let's break it down in a short thread. 🧵

In search of Banksy, Reuters found the artist took on a new identity Anonymity has become part of a lucrative brand for the artist Banksy, but records we unearthed prove his true identity and show the new name he used to travel to Ukraine.

I'd normally be annoyed at Reuters for doing a fake out where they focus on Rob from Massive Attack, before explaining that Banksy is actually the guy the Daily Mail named years ago, but it's so well written and richly reported I didn't care www.reuters.com/investigates...

This is a pretty interesting unsolved mystery. How did a 2021 social media post linked to a state propaganda campaign know accurate details about SARS-CoV-2 origins that only came to light later? And if the details we know about were right, could the other fairly shocking details also be true?

What are the Returns to R&D? A Thought Experiment by Jones and Summers

I think it's just that a perspective based (narrowly?) on jobs created and economic spillovers is going to give a lower return rate than a perspective based on the idea that R&D will in the long term create new technologies driving societal growth. (cf www.newthingsunderthesun.com/pub/ijugr2h6... )