Hacker News with Generative AI: Research

Average person will be 40% poorer if world warms by 4C, new research shows (theguardian.com)
Economic models have systematically underestimated how global heating will affect people’s wealth, according to a new study that finds 4C warming will make the average person 40% poorer – an almost four-fold increase on some estimates.
Climate Change, Economics, Research, Global Warming
11 points by nickcotter 20 hours ago | 2 comments
Average person will be 40% poorer if world warms by 4C, new research shows (theguardian.com)
Economic models have systematically underestimated how global heating will affect people’s wealth, according to a new study that finds 4C warming will make the average person 40% poorer – an almost four-fold increase on some estimates.
Climate Change, Economics, Global Warming, Research, Poverty
10 points by speckx 1 day ago | 1 comments
Top US Scientists "SOS" Letter to the Government (nytimes.com)
Researchers at academic institutions nationwide say that U.S. science is being dismantled.
Science, Government, Research, Academia, United States
6 points by hydrolox 1 day ago | 1 comments
DeepMind slows down research releases in battle to keep competitive edge (ft.com)
Artificial Intelligence, Research, Business, Competition
5 points by StanAngeloff 2 days ago | 1 comments
The US Assault on Science: National Academies Letter (nytimes.com)
Some 1,900 leading researchers accused the Trump administration in an open letter on Monday of conducting a “wholesale assault on U.S. science” that could set back research by decades and that threatens the health and safety of Americans.
Science, Politics, Research, United States
95 points by pmags 2 days ago | 42 comments
New blood test checks for Alzheimer's and assesses progression, study (theguardian.com)
Researchers have developed a blood test for patients with thinking and memory problems to check if they have Alzheimer’s and to see how far it has progressed.
Alzheimer's, Medicine, Health, Science, Research
10 points by pseudolus 2 days ago | 0 comments
Glutamate Unlocks Brain Cell Channels to Enable Thinking and Learning (neurosciencenews.com)
In an effort to understand how brain cells exchange chemical messages, scientists say they have successfully used a highly specialized microscope to capture more precise details of how one of the most common signaling molecules, glutamate, opens a channel and allows a flood of charged particles to enter.
Neuroscience, Brain, Learning, Research, Biology
6 points by westurner 2 days ago | 2 comments
AI agents: Less capability, more reliability, please (sergey.fyi)
Artificial Intelligence, Reliability, Research
418 points by serjester 2 days ago | 253 comments
Bell Labs Holmdel Complex (wikipedia.org)
The Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, in Holmdel Township, Monmouth County, New Jersey, United States, functioned for 44 years as a research and development facility, initially for the Bell System and later Bell Labs.[3] The centerpiece of the campus is an Eero Saarinen–designed structure that served as the home to over 6,000 engineers and researchers.[4] This modernist building, dubbed "The Biggest Mirror Ever" by Architectural Forum due to its mirror box exterior, was the site of a Nobel Prize discovery, the
History, Architecture, Research, New Jersey
30 points by lordleft 3 days ago | 7 comments
Circuit Tracing: Revealing Computational Graphs in Language Models (Anthropic) (transformer-circuits.pub)
We introduce a method to uncover mechanisms underlying behaviors of language models. We produce graph descriptions of the model’s computation on prompts of interest by tracing individual computational steps in a “replacement model”. This replacement model substitutes a more interpretable component (here, a “cross-layer transcoder”) for parts of the underlying model (here, the multi-layer perceptrons) that it is trained to approximate.
Artificial Intelligence, Language Models, Machine Learning, Computer Science, Research
171 points by ydnyshhh 3 days ago | 27 comments
Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits (2020) (vox.com)
An emergency situation that turned out to be mostly a false alarm led a lot of schools in Los Angeles to install air filters, and something strange happened: Test scores went up. By a lot. And the gains were sustained in the subsequent year rather than fading away.
Education, Air Quality, Public Health, Research, Los Angeles
306 points by tangjurine 3 days ago | 141 comments
Xiaofeng Wang (researchgate.net)
Research, Academia, People
48 points by rolph 3 days ago | 14 comments
AI Experts Say We're on the Wrong Path to Achieving Human-Like AI (gizmodo.com)
According to a panel of hundreds of artificial intelligence researchers, the field is currently pursuing artificial general intelligence the wrong way.
Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, Research, Science, Technology
9 points by rntn 3 days ago | 0 comments
What Anthropic Researchers Found After Reading Claude's 'Mind' Surprised Them (singularityhub.com)
Despite popular analogies to thinking and reasoning, we have a very limited understanding of what goes on in an AI’s “mind.”
Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, Research, Language Models
6 points by Brajeshwar 3 days ago | 0 comments
Population stratification led to a decade of false genetic findings (theinfinitesimal.substack.com)
How population stratification led to a decade of sensationally false genetic findings
Genetics, Science, Research, Bias, Human Biology
32 points by SubiculumCode 4 days ago | 0 comments
Oil and gas money shapes research, creates 'echo chamber' in higher education (floodlightnews.org)
Louisiana’s flagship university is looking to partner more closely with petrochemical industries in the state
Higher Education, Research, Louisiana
45 points by rntn 4 days ago | 7 comments
Publishers trial paying peer reviewers – what did they find? (nature.com)
Trials suggest that offering payment can increase the chance of a researcher agreeing to review, and in some cases speed up the process.
Publishing, Research, Peer Review, Incentives
25 points by xqcgrek2 4 days ago | 24 comments
Researchers bring prehistoric algae back to life (phys.org)
Fully active again even after around 7,000 years without light and oxygen in the Baltic Sea sediment: the diatom Skeletonema marinoi.
Science, Biology, Algae, Research, Ancient Life
9 points by geox 5 days ago | 0 comments
US scientists lost $3B in NIH grants since Trump took office (arstechnica.com)
Since Trump took office on January 20, research funding from the National Institutes of Health has plummeted by more than $3 billion compared with the pace of funding in 2024, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.
Science, Government, Funding, Politics, Research
9 points by pmags 5 days ago | 0 comments
Is AI the new research scientist? Not so, according to a human-led study (warrington.ufl.edu)
In a comprehensive study examining the capabilities of artificial intelligence in academic research, University of Florida researchers have found that while AI can be a valuable assistant, it falls short of replacing human scientists in many critical areas.
Artificial Intelligence, Science, Research, Academia
32 points by gnabgib 5 days ago | 58 comments
The replication crisis may also be a theory crisis (2019) (arstechnica.com)
But methods are only part of the problem, as Michael Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich argue in a paper in Nature Human Behaviour this week. It’s not just that individual puzzle pieces are low in quality; it’s also that there’s not enough effort to fit those pieces into a coherent picture. "Without an overarching theoretical framework,” write Muthukrishna and Henrich, “empirical programs spawn and grow from personal intuitions and culturally biased folk theories."
Science, Research, Theory, Psychology
4 points by Tomte 5 days ago | 0 comments
ChatGPT is shifting rightwards politically (psypost.org)
An examination of a large number of ChatGPT responses found that the model consistently exhibits values aligned with the libertarian-left segment of the political spectrum. However, newer versions of ChatGPT show a noticeable shift toward the political right. The paper was published in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications.
Generative AI, Politics, Research
9 points by giuliomagnifico 5 days ago | 0 comments
Healthy Diets Linked to Holistic Healthy Aging in Long-Term Harvard Study (thecrimson.com)
Researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that certain dietary patterns — such as avoiding processed foods and eating a balance of animal and plant-based foods — promote healthy aging after 30 years, according to a long-term study published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine.
Health, Nutrition, Science, Aging, Research
9 points by mikhael 5 days ago | 0 comments
The Hole Story: How Woodpeckers Make Homes for the Rest of the Forest (allaboutbirds.org)
Woodpecker nest holes are valuable pieces of real estate that may be used by hundreds of other species over many years. Researchers are using the concept of "nest webs" to understand how this valuable resource passes from one owner to the next.
Wildlife, Ecology, Research, Birds
4 points by hn_acker 5 days ago | 0 comments
That Hit Song You Love Was a Total Fluke (hbr.org)
When Princeton sociology professor Matthew Salganik was a doctoral student at Columbia, he got interested in blockbusters — specifically, he got curious about the role of social influence in determining the success of music, art, and books.
Music, Social Influence, Sociology, Research
16 points by gradus_ad 5 days ago | 4 comments
Learning Theory from First Principles [pdf] (di.ens.fr)
Machine Learning, Computer Science, Theory, Research
206 points by Anon84 6 days ago | 25 comments
Much of the administration's agenda for research is in Proj. 2025's 900+page doc (nature.com)
Indiscriminate firings. Terminated grants. Cancelled programmes. The barrage of actions by US President Donald Trump has shocked the country’s research community over the past two months. Yet, much of it was planned out years in advance and laid out publicly.
Politics, Research, United States
18 points by rntn 6 days ago | 4 comments
Plants can take up CWD-causing prions from soil in lab. What happens if eaten? (cidrap.umn.edu)
When Christopher Johnson, PhD, set out to study whether lab mice fed prion-contaminated plants developed neurodegenerative disease, he expected the plants to take up only small prion clusters, but they absorbed large clusters characteristic of prion diseases in deer and other animals.
Science, Biology, Prions, Disease, Research
6 points by bookofjoe 6 days ago | 0 comments
Circuit Tracing: Revealing Computational Graphs in Language Models (transformer-circuits.pub)
We introduce a method to uncover mechanisms underlying behaviors of language models. We produce graph descriptions of the model’s computation on prompts of interest by tracing individual computational steps in a “replacement model”. This replacement model substitutes a more interpretable component (here, a “cross-layer transcoder”) for parts of the underlying model (here, the multi-layer perceptrons) that it is trained to approximate.
Generative AI, Machine Learning, Language Models, Interpretability, Research
8 points by mfiguiere 6 days ago | 0 comments
People say they prefer stories written by humans over AI, study says otherwise (theconversation.com)
People say they prefer a short story written by a human over one composed by artificial intelligence, yet most still invest the same amount of time and money reading both stories regardless of whether it is labeled as AI-generated.
Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction, Storytelling, Research, Consumer Behavior
23 points by PaulHoule 6 days ago | 37 comments