Nice! Got some hills here in central VA 😉

UVA's Cancer-Data Science Alliance Sparks Discovery — School of Data Science UVA's first Cancer Research and Data Science Symposium opened the door to a powerful collaboration between cancer researchers and data scientists.

I have the best colleagues, part 100. Data science + cancer research FTW. datascience.virginia.edu/news/uvas-ca...

Haven't filled a gas tank since the Iran conflict began

I suppose it's an appropriate day to notice that the Dr Bronner's chapstick I've been using forever is made with Cannabis sativa oil

Policy Changes to SBIR & STTR Foreign Disclosure and Risk Management. SBIR/STTR reauthorized through 2031, with expanded foreign-risk denial criteria, no cure period before denial, and full-repayment authority for material misstatements or ownership changes post-award grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

ggsql: A grammar of graphics for SQL Introducing ggsql, a grammar of graphics for SQL that lets you describe visualizations directly inside SQL queries.

What am I looking at here opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-04...

This week on What's New in R:

✅ Walkthrough of @andrew.heiss.phd’s Positron workflow
✅ Blog post by @ivelasq3.bsky.social sharing collection of Claude skills for R users
✅ @stephenturner.us’s demo of a Claude Skill for automatically generating _brand.yml files

Read more: buff.ly/iTfyA48

#rstats

Students Think AI Hurts Their Thinking. They Use It Anyway. A recent RAND survey finds rising AI use alongside rising skepticism among students.

Blog post: Students Think AI Hurts Their Thinking. They Use It Anyway. doi.org/10.59350/zza...

Huge congrats Adam! 🎉 🧬

Using prediction markets to estimate the reproducibility of scientific research There is increasing concern about the reproducibility of scientific research. For example, the costs associated with irreproducible preclinical research alone have recently been estimated at US$28…

Using prediction markets to estimate the reproducibility of scientific research (2015) pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC... 🤔

UVA Library's AI Literacy and Action Lab library.virginia.edu/ai/lab

I can hear the Music and see almost every level right now

Lots of other fields w/ dual use, including bio, which I'm obv more familiar with. But the legit bio use cases alignment with bioweapons dev is narrower I think than what I think is near perfect broad alignment cybersecurity with cyber offense.

Reading about Mythos and I'm stuck on a question I don't have the background for. Cybersecurity research and cyberattacks are the same action w/ different intent. "Help me find CVEs to patch" is the same task in defense and offense. How does the field handle this? Looking for reading recs.

Creating baby geniuses to thwart the AI threat? (Yes, really.) The new wave of Silicon Valley–backed gene-editing startups is straight out of “Brave New World.”

Card carrying geneticist here. Chill out. This will never work. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

(Satire, friends)

Fisher-Price Is Pivoting to AI-Powered Autonomous Weapons Manufacturing “We at Fisher-Price have always believed in the power of imagination. In discovery. In the joy of a child pressing a button and hearing a satisfying sound. T...

'Fisher-Price will exit the “child development toy” vertical and re-emerge as Mattel·igence AI Defense Systems, a fully integrated autonomous weapons manufacturer focused on AI-enabled lethality solutions for the modern battlefield. Our stock is up 4,000 percent.' www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/fis...

Accelerated long-read variant calling with Clair3 for whole-genome sequencing AbstractSummary. The rapid growth of genomic data and increasing adoption of long-read sequencing technologies have rendered variant calling one of the mos

Accelerated long-read variant calling with Clair3 for whole-genome sequencing academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

Protein design, generative AI and biological security pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41994287/

Public use of a generalist LLM chatbot for health queries www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Weekly Recap (April 17, 2026) blog.stephenturner.us/p/weekly-rec... Opus 4.7, GPT-Rosalind for bio, what's a PhD for?, NIH chatbot research, code review for data, git, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Posit Assistant vs Claude Code, local LLM coding agents & #Rstats, papers... 🧬💻🧪

Charlottesville needs congestion pricing.

I couldn't find anything in the docs about adaptive thinking on the new Opus 4.7 model.

Towards predictive virtual embryos with genomics and AI www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧬💻🧪 rdcu.be/fdP4O

A scientist drills a skull in search of ancient human DNA

Until now, scientists have identified only a few dozen variants that went through natural selection in humans in the past 10,000 years. A new study claims to find hundreds--maybe thousands. Here's my story on the provocative research, and the mixed reception it's getting. Gift link: nyti.ms/4tSJH9G

PaperOrchestra: A Multi-Agent Framework for Automated AI Research Paper Writing arxiv.org/abs/2604.05018

New NIH Highlighted Topic: "Research on Chatbots and their Usage." They want studies on benefits, harms, automation bias, behavioral dependency, and effects on decision-making in health contexts. grants.nih.gov/funding/find...

NIH Webinar May 6-7: Advancing Biomedical Careers: Strategies for successful F and K Awards. web.cvent.com/event/139673...

BioClaw: Human-Bot Research Collaboration Ecosystems in Group Chats www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

SkillClaw: Let Skills Evolve Collectively with Agentic Evolver arxiv.org/abs/2604.08377