I'm excited to share that we are embarking on a new scientific adventure with @BennyChefetz, Evyatar Ben Mordechay, and Moshe Shenker. We’re grateful to BSF @usisraelbsf for their support and excited to deepen the collaboration between @UCSF and @HebrewU through this research.

Most experiments fail, and negative results rarely get published. This means LLMs are unaware of the outcomes of most experiments.

Happy Passover

"Give me the strength to be as confident as Reviewer 2 when he rejects a paper outside his expertise."

Journals: "We need you to work for us for free, but only under our conditions" oh and please send the reviewed manuscript back in less than two weeks, we have a business to run

Today, the Trump administration repealed the endangerment finding: the ruling that served as the basis for limits on tailpipe emissions and power plant rules. Without it, we’ll be less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change — all so the fossil fuel industry can make even more money.

The way to accelerate science is to SLOW it down. Fewer papers please! We’re drowning in meaningless text. One GREAT paper per lab per decade is more than enough. q.e.d 👇

"The purpose of TSCA is to protect people and the environment from harmful chemicals. The proposed changes to this law are alarming: they remove public health guardrails, undermine EPA’s ability to protect people from harmful chemicals, and will lead to more death and disease."

And then he said: "How are we going to fix the reproducibility crisis in science if we only publish novel findings?"

Happy Hanukkah!

At EPA’s D4 meeting today: - Most reviewers industry-affiliated - Most EPA scientists in sync with industry - EU, UK, Canada: “D4 very persistent and very bioaccumulatative” - EPA: “maybe persistent but not bioaccumulative” Corporate capture case study youtube.com/watch?v=eTZ9rjVd…

So proud of our @UCSF_ObGynRS early-career investigators presenting their critical environmental health research @ the #NIEHS_EHSCC Annual Meeting hosted by @ukcares1. Read more prheucsf.blog/2025/10/28/ucs…

Reviewer 2 is about to lose his job to AI

Never forget. What terrorism did. Never forget. Those who perished. Those who ran towards danger to help.

I’m looking for a motivated PhD student to join productive team and interesting project. See 👇🏻@DimiAbrams

🐀 🔬 This study is the first to link maternal exposure to environmentally relevant carbamazepine concentrations with growth delay in mammalian embryos. 👇 pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.102… Prof. @BennyChefetz @HebrewU

One thing that our education system has screwed up is not teaching students the value of personal responsibility. Low conscientiousness leads to high neuroticism and depression. As Carl Jung so brilliantly put it, "Modern man doesn't see God because he doesn't look low enough."

This explains everything

Journals can’t find peer reviewers. Preprints aren’t taken seriously. Garbage papers slip through peer review. Meantime, AI is slowly taking over. Nature describes the current situation. I highly recommend reading the article. 📍 The summary ( my comments): 1. We are facing a SIGNIFICANT overload on reviewers. Fatigue is epidemic. Few scientists have time for much peer review. As a result, manuscript turnaround times are chaos. They’re unpredictable and painfully slow. 2. Grant and facility proposals demand massive peer review too. They push the system even further. 3. Review quality is decreasing. Rigor is inconsistent. Technical aspects are poorly assessed. 4. Gatekeeping and bias are very real (we all know how manuscripts are rejected due to competition & jealousy). It causes a growing dissatisfaction among scientists. 5. Paid reviewing does NOT automatically improve the acceptance rate. Trials show mixed results. For example, acceptance rates barely increased from 48% to 53% for Critical Care Medicine. The quality of PR remained the same. But for Biology Open, the PR process has become much faster. In either case, paid reviews are very hard to scale business-wise. 6. Distributed Peer Review is becoming more popular. Some funding agencies now require applicants to review peers’ proposals. But to to eliminate bias in it? I don’t know. ❗ There’re no simple solutions. As a careful observer, I think that the complex picture is evolving along the following trajectory: AI-assisted peer view (AI pre-screening, AI PR-assistant, AI audition of peer reviews) Community reviewing Some form of compensation Involvement of wider community in PR lists (not only most recognized scientists) What’s your view on it?

The New York Times was recently forced to issue a correction on a story about starvation in Gaza, which had prominently featured a misleading photo of a mother and her emaciated child. @Coldxman: “I’m not saying there isn’t hunger or food insecurity or humanitarian disaster in Gaza… What I’m saying is that the pipeline that’s feeding you information about the humanitarian disaster in Gaza is fundamentally broken, biased, untrustworthy, and weaponized against Israel.”