Developing news

Posted by the Node, on 18 January 2023

After a short break, our first ‘Developing news’ post of 2023 focusses on disruption in science.

How good is ChatGPT?

One of the main talking point on Twitter in December was ChatGPT, a chatbot from OpenAI that interacts with the user in a conversational tone. The success of ChatGPT has prompted worries of how the technology could affect student assessment and even write scientific papers!

Comparing scientific abstracts generated by ChatGPT to original abstracts using an artificial intelligence output detector, plagiarism detector, and blinded human reviewers
Catherine A. Gao, Frederick M. Howard, Nikolay S. Markov, Emma C. Dyer, Siddhi Ramesh, Yuan Luo, Alexander T. Pearson

Abstracts written by ChatGPT fool scientists – comment

U.S. universities are starting to overhaul classrooms in response to the new AI chatbot ChatGPT, prompting a potentially huge shift in teaching. Some professors are redesigning their courses, even choosing handwritten assignments over typed ones. https://t.co/5B6eEPyBS1
— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 16, 2023

Publishing with ChatGPT

A conversation with ChatGPT on the role of computational systems biology in stem cell research

First article with ChatGPT as coauthor 🤨. Next article: Word, M., Excel, M., and GPT, C. (2023). 'Does Adding Software as Authors Result in More Citations? An Ongoing Experiment' pic.twitter.com/M8IfabC1Tu
— Johan Farkas / jfarkas@mastodon.online (@farkasjohan) January 14, 2023

Just for fun?

Checkmate, biologists pic.twitter.com/4d1zWODUoz
— Michael Baym (@baym) January 16, 2023

Innovation in science

A new paper analysing the frequency of major new directions (or disruption) of science over time prompted discussions on i) whether this is true, ii) the causes and iii) whether we should be worried. We have picked out some examples of the chat below and recommend that you click the links for the full discussion.

New Nature paper provides evidence that science has become less innovative since the 1950s. The authors suggest reversing the trend by:
1. reading widely,
2. focusing less on quantity of papers, & more on research quality,
3. taking year-long sabbaticals.https://t.co/oYV5JCXRl8 pic.twitter.com/viN2IJ0cSn
— Itai Yanai (@ItaiYanai) January 4, 2023

This is a thought provoking article, If it is not the quality of published work than what is causing it! 🧐😶🙄🤔thread below 👇🏻 Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time | Nature https://t.co/RIwG1VuiMu
— Shuchi Agrawal Singh (@ShuchiChromaBio) January 5, 2023

No OnE nO kNoWs WhY

– Bureaucrats killing science
– incentives to be productive and not creative
– selection of toxic and/or mediocre individuals for permanent positions
– research councils throwing away tons of ideas
– environment leading to high rates of depression and anxiety pic.twitter.com/G0L3WwBUq6
— José Cerca (@IslandGenomics) January 5, 2023

My humble opinion, is that this is the result of half-century of peer review… pic.twitter.com/ANz8L5yXVG
— Mathieu Ferron (@Mathieu_Ferron) January 6, 2023

Piping hot morning coffee take: if there really is a decline in "disruptive" science, could it be linked to our easy, finger-tip access to *all* the literature? Maybe out-of-the-box thinking is correlated with naivety and ingnorance?
— Maxim Greenberg (@maxvcg) January 12, 2023

preLights in #devbio

Want Erk-cellent representation of Erk signalling dynamics? Wilcockson and authors explore an improved biosensor that faithfully reports Erk activity without being impacted by Cdk1

Like Meta, but better. METALoci: a new tool to identify 3D regulatory regions in the genome, sex-determination edition.

“Worry” your way out: Driscoll and colleagues characterize a bleb-based mode of cell migration featuring repetitive agitation of the extracellular matrix.

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Tags: developing news
Categories: Discussion, Highlights, News

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