Weekly Recap (March 6, 2026)

Biology essays, fast bio bounty, PDF accessibility in Quarto, Claude Skills for R, sex lives of neanderthals and humans, Ginkgo cloud lab, Applied Machine Learning Conference, AI in Science

Vicki Boykis: Antidote. (speaking of Vicki, she’s a keynote speaker at the AMLC…)

Conference registration for the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference is now open! The conference will take place on April 17–18 here in Charlottesville, Virginia — now just 6 weeks away. We’re offering Full Conference, Friday Only, and Saturday Only tickets at employer-paid, personal, and student price tiers. Early Bird pricing is available until March 20.

Niko McCarty: 30 great essays about biology. I’ve admired Niko’s writing for years, as you can probably tell from all the links to Asimov Press and Niko’s own blog I’ve linked to here over the years.

Niko is also giving out a $10,000 fast biology bounty. TL;DR: $10,000 in prizes for ideas on how to speed up wet-lab experiments. Prizes will be given for ideas that are highly original and technically tractable. A few paragraphs will suffice.

Isabella Velásquez: Claude Skills for R Users.

PDF Accessibility with LaTeX and Typst with Quarto 1.9.

What Your DNA Reveals About the Sex Life of Neanderthals (gift link). Another great story by Carl Zimmer at NYT covering the Science paper showing that interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans was sex-biased, with Neanderthal men mating more often with modern human women than the reverse. The word “preference” was used several times to refer to modern human womens’ “preference” for Neanderthal men.

Simon Willison: Agentic Engineering Patterns.

Andrew Gelman: The 80% power lie.

Ruxandra Teslo and Asimov Press: AI Won’t Automatically Accelerate Clinical Trials. A response to Dario Amodei’s recent interview with Dwarkesh Patel.

WTF Happened in 2025? A collection of datapoints in or around 2025 which we may look back as a historical inflection point. Open source & curated in realtime by Latent Space.

Ginkgo Bioworks launches Cloud Lab: https://cloud.ginkgo.bio/. Protocols that run in a fully autonomous lab. Currently 3 protocols are available, more on the way.

Science Policy Forum: The science and practice of proportionality in AI risk evaluations.

Private money cannot replace public funding of science.

Sara Altman & Simon Couch: 2026-02-27 AI Newsletter: LLM code review in a Google Docs-style interface, local models vs cloud models.

Screenshot from reviewer, LLM code review as if a member of the tidyverse team were there with you to workshop your code for reproducibility, readability, and resilience.

Adam Kucharski: There’s a realistic possibility you’ll read this.

Science News: How will we know if AI is smart enough to do science?

A Decade of Docker Containers. For the past decade, Docker has provided a robust solution for building, shipping, and sharing applications. But behind its simple “build and run” workflow lie years of complex technical challenges.

Alexander Kustov: Academics Need to Wake Up on AI. There are lots of nits I can pick with this one, but overall some good points throughout that are difficult to disagree with.

R Weekly 2025-W10: tidymodels, tidyplots, ggvariant.

rOpenSci: Software Review in the Era of AI: What We Are Testing at rOpenSci.

New papers & preprints:

• Genome modelling and design across all domains of life with Evo 2

• DECODE: deep learning-based common deconvolution framework for various omics data

• LLM-assisted systematic review of LLMs in clinical medicine

• LRSomatic: a highly scalable and robust [Nextflow] pipeline for somatic variant calling in long-read sequencing data

• Empowering biological knowledgebases: advances in human-in-the-loop AI-driven literature curation

• How do authors want to use AI for review?

• Pangenome-guided sequence assembly via binary optimization

• Artificial Intelligence agents for biological research: a survey

• Charting single-cell lineages with synthetic and natural barcodes

• bioRxiv: the preprint server for biology

• SummArIzeR: Simplifying cross-database enrichment result clustering and annotation via large language models

• Using semantic search to find publicly available gene-expression datasets

• Interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans was strongly sex biased

• Torsional flexibility of the thoracic spine is superior to that of the lumbar spine in cats: Implications for the falling cat problem

Figure 2(a) from the paper above: A representative frame sequence illustrating sequential rotation of the anterior and posterior trunk without counterrotation during air-righting. In this sequence, a cat rotates to the right. (1) The dorsal sides of both the anterior and posterior trunk are initially oriented downwards. (2) Upon release, the anterior trunk becomes oriented laterally, while the posterior trunk remains oriented downwards.