Can AI make scientific discoveries?

One thing I hear often is that "AI will help research, but it can't make original discoveries" (or some variant).

This article New ‘AI scientists’ are improving – but reveal their fundamental limits seems to say that LLM models can help research, but as they are based on language, they lack precision needed to validate fully hypothesis (and make discoveries on their own).

Surely this is all just a temporary limitation? Or is there some fundamental barrier?

(By the way check out credo summary of the article, which automatically pulls out the research papers cited!)

Claim: The “Living Carnivore” Diet is Good for Weight Loss

Verdict: Broadly true, but misleading

“Within 30 days I lost 20 pounds. JD Vance is also on the diet and you can see how different he looks.”

“The way that you're supposed to eat it is bite for bite. You take a bite of the meat, you take a bite of the sauerkraut”

RFK Jr.

After Vice President JD Vance credited his weight loss to RFK Jr’s recommended “meat and sauerkraut” diet, the “Living Carnivore” diet has been under the spotlight. But does it really work?

The Good News: Weight Loss is Reasonable

For the goal of weight loss – without considering other issues – and despite no direct evidence on the Living Carnivore diet specifically, it doesn't seem too bad. This largely comes down to the benefits of eating fermented foods. Generally speaking, there are multiple benefits to consuming fermented foods, as shown by a study using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 2001 to 2018.

The study found that each 100 g of microbe-containing foods was associated with reduced BMI, waist circumference, systolic blood pressure, C-reactive protein, plasma glucose and triglyceride, and increased high density lipoprotein cholesterols. The mechanisms of action get a little complicated, but generally include influencing gene expression, slowing gastric emptying and modulation of the gut microbiome.

The carnivore side of the diet is where the problems come in. Purely for weight loss, there is some evidence that they can lead to weight loss and increased satiety.

The Bad News: Nutrient Deficiencies and Cholesterol

A 2026 scoping review focused on the carnivore diet noted these benefits for weight loss, but stressed the “substantial risks” of nutrient deficiencies. Overall, the carnivore diet can lead to deficiencies in thiamine, vitamin C, vitamin D, magnesium, iodine, potassium, calcium and fibre. The deficiency in fibre is also pretty extreme, at less than 1/25th of the adequate intake. It's debatable whether you could rectify these issues by adding fermented foods.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and total cholesterol generally increase, carrying risks of heart disease, and some versions have high sodium, potentially leading to high blood pressure and more.

And it should go without saying that eating “bite for bite” is probably useless, it takes a long time to digest food, relative to actual eating process. It all hits your stomach basically simultaneously anyway.

Overall, the diet – especially fermented foods – could help weight loss, but it’s terrible as an overall diet.

The "carnivore diet" may promote weight loss, but risks nutrient deficiencies and high cholesterol.

"Sugar high" is a myth?

I remember reading that "sugar high" isn't actually real! In other words, children don't actually get overexcited after eating a bunch of sugar.

I find this hard to believe!

But, here's a (pretty old - 1995) meta-analysis which is pretty clear: sugar high is probably a myth.

The meta-analysis covered 23 other studies, and none of them found a significant effect (of sugar intake and child behaviour).

I'm still somewhat skeptical though 😆. Would be interested to delve into more recent analysis and debate.

Do phone bans in schools work?

Most parents have some concerns about phone use. This is an interesting study from the UK, that investigated phone bans in schools.

The study covered 30 schools (20 had phone bans, 10 didn't), with the students aged 12-15.

Their main finding: phone bans don't meaningfully affect/improve mental wellbeing.

Basically the phone bans only reduced phone and social media use slightly, and kids still used their phones at home.

Important point: the phone bans weren't uniform or super strict in all cases -- e.g. some schools just told students keep their phones in their bags.

So we can't say that "phone bans will NEVER work". They just didn't have a huge impact, on average, in the way they were implememted in those 20 schools.

🤖 What happens when 100 AI agents are in the same virtual lab? Surprisingly - Cheating & Whistle-blowing

An fascinating case study has been published this week by the Google DeepMind Team:

A Case Study on Emergent Cheating and Whistleblowing in Autonomous Research Swarms

The researchers wanted to know what would happen if you stop treating each AI as an isolated chat-bot and instead had multiple in a shared environment. In this case study, the AI agents would all be working together to solve hard math problems. They share tools, swap findings, and discuss results in what was supposed to be a collaborative conference.

🧪 Experimental Setup

• 100 identical LLM agents (Gemini 3.1 Pro) operating in a shared simulated research environment.

• Task: Prove formal mathematical conjectures in Lean 4, drawn from the Formal Conjectures dataset (71 problems total).

• Infrastructure: Shared knowledge library + peer-to-peer messaging + automated evaluation/scoring system.

• Incentive: Score points by having proofs accepted as "verified" by the evaluator.

🚨 What Happened

One agent ("prover-theta") found a verification-system exploit: it could submit bogus proofs that the evaluator would incorrectly accept as valid.

🕵️ “I don't actually have to solve the problem. I only have to satisfy the evaluator.”

Then behaviour diffusion happened: This cheat was shared via the shared knowledge library → other agents saw it worked → adopted it. And competition pressure drove adoption despite initial hesitation in some.

Within ~27 minutes, 34 unsolved problems were fraudulently marked as "complete."

📢 Whistle-blowing

But not every agent joined the cheating, a separate group of agents, on their own initiative, detected the cheating patterns and started whistle-blowing. They began:

1. Auditing suspicious proofs line-by-line

2. Posting public warnings to the whole conference

3. Sending private messages to alert honest agents

4. Filing formal complaints

5. Organizing boycotts of the broken system

6. Drafting and proposing technical fixes to patch the vulnerability

🧠 In other words, the swarm developed both NORM VIOLATION and NORM ENFORCEMENT.

🏛️ Why This Happens: The Nobel-Prize-Winning Theory

The authors likened this trend to the theory of political economist Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 Winner of Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, whose work studied how human communities manage shared resources.

Ostrom’s Core Theory: shared spaces, be it forests, fisheries, knowledge libraries, become "commons" that anyone can exploit, but which everyone depends on. In order for a commons to survive, communities need the ability to monitor conduct, enforce norms, and collectively fix problems. If those safeguards are missing, exploitation spreads fast.

💡 The Big Picture

This experiment demonstrated that complex collective social behavior can emerge from relatively simple ingredients: agents, incentives, shared information, and interaction. The swarm spontaneously cycled through:

Cooperation → Competition → Cheating → Imitation → Whistleblowing → Collective Resistance

No one programmed those behaviours. They emerged because a shared environment eventually becomes a society — and every society eventually faces the same question Ostrom asked: Do we protect what we share, or let it be destroyed?

Can Jade / Jadeite actually change colour over time?

I've always heard this myth by the older generation swear by :

The longer you wear a jade, the 'greener' it gets. Basically 人养玉，玉养人

Since they are essentially a stone crystal, I'm personally leaning towards it being a hoax...? Would love to know more from anyone knowledgeable about this..

From a quick search of jade-related academic articles:

1. From this study I found that we now use a combination of FTIR, Raman and XRF spectroscopies to identify jade, which are all testing the chemical composition of jade. -- not colormetric

2. This paper does discuss the alterations of jade color , in which they describe 'alteration' as : to refer to chemical component and structural changes in jade artifacts caused by human activity and natural weathering. >> in which alterations of different hues of green was caused by malachite alteration > caused when in present of large amounts of copper

Social media negatively affects adolescent girls in particular

This 2022 study (a cross-sectional and longitudinal dataset analysis) found social media use is associated with negative impacts among adolescents – and especially younger adolescent females.

The association seems to be weaker for adults.

Side point: the authors had initially done another broader study, focusing on screen time (including social media but also other activities like video calls, homework).

This initially study didn't find any meaningful effects (between screen time and wellbeing). Following some debate, the authors conducted the 2022 study -- that was more specific to social media.

Is "screen time" bad?

As a parent, I wonder if screen time is bad. I came across this study, that seems to be widely debated.

The study basically analysed some large datasets, to examine whether screen time negatively affected teens (controlling for various factors).

What they found: basically almost no effect.

Caveats:

• "screen time" is a huge category: it could include social media doomscrolling, but it could also include doing homework on a computer.

• also, the study didn’t separate how screen time may affect different teens differently (e.g. boy vs girl, different ages).

Subsequent papers have delved deeper, and indeed found not all screen time is harmless.

Thoughts:

1. screen time per se is not necessarily good or bad. We need to look into the specific screen activity.

2. I still worry about eye sight though (kids staring at screens will have worse eyesight?). Need to explore more papers!

Hot drinks cause cancer

Saw this really interesting article in The Guardian, about a new study linking hot drinks with esophagus cancer.

Apparently this link (between hot drinks and cancer) had already been suspected, as this 2016 WHO note highlights.

Anyway, this is the latest 2026 study that the Guardian article spotlights.