Weekly Recap (February 27, 2026)

and : A Visual Guide to DNA Sequencing.

Nature: How AI slop is causing a crisis in computer science. Submission stats from arXiv are here: https://arxiv.org/stats/monthly_submissions. This seems truly unsustainable.

Fifty-four seconds. That's how long it took Raphael Wimmer to write up an experiment that he did not actually perform, using a new artificial-intelligence tool called Prism, released by OpenAI last month. "Writing a paper has never been easier. Clogging the scientific publishing pipeline has never been easier" …

PaperQA3: a frontier multimodal deep research agent for science.

PaperQA3 introduces the highest-performance multimodal capabilities available for deep research agents today… Edison Literature and Kosmos can now read figures and tables from over 150M research papers and patents, and will read, parse, and consider hundreds of figures and tables before responding… Additionally, we've updated the underlying algorithm of our literature agent (which is open source) to improve its ability to answer more complex questions. The result of these improvements show Edison Literature as one of the strongest deep research agents across benchmarks, beating out current-day frontier deep research agents.

Lior Pachter: The Quickening (or, vibe-porting edgeR from R to Python). See also the paper, Differential analysis of genomics count data with edge*.

: The least understood driver of AI progress. An opinionated guide to "algorithmic progress" and why it matters

Nature: AI is threatening science jobs. Which ones are most at risk? "Data-analysis and modelling positions are already becoming obsolete, but hands-on experimentalists can breathe easy for now."

Anthropic blog: Statement from Dario Amodei on Anthropic's discussions with the Department of War. This is what a spine looks like.

It's 10 PM and an AI Just Did My Students' Homework. UVA professor of commerce writes about this new Einstein app1 that is riling up everyone on the socials. I appreciate his insights on the opportunity that tools like this provide, rather than seeing them purely as some existential threat to higher ed. On one hand it's kind of shocking that Cheating-as-a-Service is a successful business model these days. On the other, this looks like a matter of degree, not kind. Chrome already has built-in autobrowse that'll take all your canvas quizzes for you. You can do similar things with Perpexity's Comet browser or OpenAI's Atlas browser. We have to come to grips with and acknowledge that if students want to cheat themselves out of an education, they will. I think at some point you have to appeal to students' desire to learn, and if that doesn't work, to their desire to get a job when they graduate. Years ago I taught a graduate biological data science course, graded as CR/NC instead of AF. I told everyone on day 1 they'll get a CR regardless of whether they came to class, did the homework, whatever. But, as an employer / hiring manager, I've never once looked at a GPA or transcript. Ever. I'll know within minutes if you've AI'd your way through courses and don't actually know anything. Presumably you want a job when you're done here and you'll never land one if you've cheated yourself out of learning.

: Five Things: Feb 22, 2026: Biology uplift, DOE robo-labs, Web 4.0, Seedance 2.0, Arc Institute paper.

: How worried should we be about AI biorisk? The barriers to bioattacks are hard to identify — and it's even harder to know whether AI is reducing them.

UK AI Security Institute: Boundary Point Jailbreaking: A new way to break the strongest AI defences.

Lucas Harrington: Wealthy Individuals Funding Science is Good for Everyone.

, METR blog: Five lessons from having helped run an AI-Biology RCT.

Nature: Biotech investor set to lead NSF. If confirmed, Jim O'Neill would be the first non-scientist or non-engineer to lead NSF.

The Last Temptation of Claude. By outsourcing to an AI tasks that require thinking and deliberation (hitting the Gemini button to draft an email before you've decided what you think, using Claude to summarize the paper instead of reading it), you erode the very skill you'd need to recognize you're doing it.

R Weekly 2026-W09 Git commits, Pick a License, and How to choose the best LLM using R and vitals.

rOpenSci News Digest, Feb 2026: Champions program, policy updates for GenAI, new packages, software review,

Joe Rickert / R Works: January 2026 Top 40 New CRAN Packages: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Methods, Data, Dynamical Systems, Ecology, Economics, Epidemiology, Finance, Genetics, Genomics, High Performance Computing, Mathematics, Machine Learning, Medical Application, Networks, Statistics, Time Series, Utilities, and Visualization.

NYT: More Than Half of Teens Use Chatbots for Schoolwork. A new study from the Pew Research Center finds teenagers think chatbot-assisted cheating has become "a regular feature of student life."

New papers & preprints:

• Genomic approaches to accelerate American chestnut restoration

• Five ways to spot when a paper is a fraud

• Agentic AI and the rise of in silico team science in biomedical research

• Portello: Making global assembly more effective for rare-disease whole genome sequencing

• Best practices for moving from correlation to causation in ecological research

• ChatGPT Health performance in a structured test of triage recommendations

• Ten common misconceptions about Galaxy (and why they are wrong!)

• Rapid directed evolution guided by protein language models and epistatic interactions

• AIxBio: Opportunities to Strengthen Health Security

• Nallo: a Nextflow pipeline for comprehensive human long-read genome analysis

• Differential analysis of genomics count data with edge*

• Systematic reviews in minutes to hours using artificial intelligence

• Genetic underpinnings of chills from art and music

• A multiplex, prime editing framework for identifying drug resistance variants at scale

• Driving forward the restoration of an American icon

• An agentic system for rare disease diagnosis with traceable reasoning

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