Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

What’s the biggest single crystal you’ve grown? David Boyce and students at Queenswood School have grown a 3kg crystal of copper sulfate. Now he shares his tips for how you can do it too.

Via Chemistry World on Bluesky.

#Chemistry https://www.chemistryworld.com/culture/how-to-grow-an-enormous-single-crystal/4022946.article

Do you have a vision for a Workshop but don’t have the time to arrange the logistics or raise the funding? Submit your idea to us in our annual call for topics. We'll provide all necessary support for successful applications. Find out more at https://biologists.com/workshops/propose-new-workshop/

The war waged by the tech authoritarian oligarchy against the media has reached a new level:

#Palantir is suing us. Us, the Republik Magazin.

A small Swiss media company, funded by readers, founded in 2018 and free of advertising. I am not aware of any other media company globally that Palantir is currently targeting so aggressively.

What is this about? Together with my wonderful colleagues at the WAV research collective Jenny Steiner, Lorenz Naegeli, Marguerite Meyer, and Balz Oertli, we published a two-part series on Palantir's activities in Switzerland on December 8 and 9.

Using an extensive corpus of documents – which we obtained thanks to the Freedom of Information Act – we were able to trace a sales campaign over a period of seven years. Palantir tried to get in with many federal authorities – and was rejected everywhere.

And we also found out that the Swiss Army Staff evaluated the products and came to the conclusion that the army should refrain from using Palantir products.

Among other risks, they feared that data would be passed on to the US authorities.

Palantir is not just any company. ICE uses its products to hunt down migrants in the US. The Israeli army IDF uses the software in its Gaza offensive. The British health authority NHS has made itself dependent on the products for data analysis during the pandemic. And CEO #AlexKarp displays inhuman and aggressive rhetoric towards Europe, while the company itself advertises the “optimization of the kill chain.”

These are all facts, repeatedly verified and published by renowned media outlets. Our research relating to Switzerland and Zurich is based on this.

In addition to analyzing documents, we also spoke to various sources – including Palantir executives here in Zurich. The quotes used were presented to them and approved. Of course, we always adhered to the high standards of journalistic work. We conducted a thorough fact check before publication.

But the company doesn't want us to write the truth.

After the US company owned by right-wing tech billionaire #PeterThiel dedicated an absurd blog post to us, claiming some misinformation (such as that they had not participated in official tenders with the federal administration, a point we never claimed. On the contrary: we spoke from the outset of attempts to establish contact, sales talks, informal meetings, business as usual), after the Global Director of Privacy & Civil Liberties (PCL) Engineering and contact person for Swiss media Courtney Bowman launched personal attacks against us in LinkedIn comments between Christmas and New Year (“partisan fear-mongering”), Palantir's Swiss lawyers demanded a counterstatement on December 29.

We rejected this demand in its entirety.

In January, they demanded the same thing again. We rejected it again.

And now we see each other in court.

But why all this?

Our research on the Swiss army report caused a huge international media response. The Guardian and the Austrian newspaper Der Standard reported on the Swiss army's rejection. Numerous financial portals and stock market magazines picked up our news (which could have consequences for the overvalued stock market company Palantir).

And Chaos Computer Club spokesperson Constanze Kurz presented our research to a huge audience at the renowned IT conference Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg at the end of December.

All of this is making Palantir nervous.

We have now submitted a comprehensive defense brief. We can substantiate all of our findings with several documents and publicly available media reports.

We trust in the rule of law and freedom of the press in this country.

In keeping with yesterday's event “Zurich, little Big Tech City” at the Gessneralle, where we first announced this news exclusively to the audience on site:

World politics will soon be negotiated in Zurich: freedom of the press, the facts about ICE, Trump, Israel, Karp, tech authoritarianism.

The truth.

All this at the Zurich Commercial Court.

We will not be intimidated. And we will keep you informed.

I recently posted a pre-print about reasoning and large-language models....

trying to get that piece on a pre-print server itself was a bit of a journey which illustrates concerns I've had for the last 18 months or so: namely that AI will kill publishing reform.

here a blog post about it:

#academic #openScience
https://write.as/ulrikehahn/is-ai-killing-scientific-reform

Marimar Martinez was the first US citizen shot by CBP/ICE.

Agent Charles Exum shot her five times. She miraculously survived.

DHS accused her of being a domestic terrorist.

She went to court to get the body cam footage released.

It shows Agent Charles Exum driving with his gun drawn.

Saying “do something b*tch”.

Ramming her car.

Shooting her.

Hours after the shooting, Greg Bovino emailed the agent and offered to delay his retirement in light of his excellent service.

The email said “you have much left to do”.

Other agents praised the shooting.

Said they should celebrate.

Exum bragged… “5 shots, 7 holes”

Ms Martinez showed incredible courage by fighting to ensure this footage was released to the public.

Everyone should watch it. Make sure the world sees this.

She’s standing up for Silverio Gonzalez.

For Keith Porter.

For Renee Nicole Good.

For Alex Pretti.

For everyone murdered by this regime.

She’s exposing ICE/CBP for who & what they are.

Thank you Marimar.
#uspol #ice #abolishice #cbp #immigration #fascism #marimarmartinez

dplyr 1.2.0 is out now and we are SO excited!

- `filter_out()` for dropping rows

- `recode_values()`, `replace_values()`, and `replace_when()` that join `case_when()` as a complete family of recoding/replacing tools

These are huge quality of life wins for #rstats!

https://tidyverse.org/blog/2026/02/dplyr-1-2-0/

What's the most common complaint I've heard about Linux?

Not the installation process.
Not finding a distro.
Not getting programs to work.
Not troubleshooting.
Not hardware compatibility.

The most common complaint about Linux I've seen is this:
For a normal computer user, asking for help is just about impossible.

They ask a simple question and:
People respond "Did you Google it?"
People complain that the question wasn't asked "correctly".
People respond "RTFM"
People get mad??? at them for making an easy mistake.

We can't expect normal people to know to, or even know how to deal with any of that stuff.

Search engines these days are awful, manuals are hard to read for most people (especially stuff like ArchWiki), and normal people make mistakes we think are easily avoidable.

The solution to making Linux more popular is not ruthless promotion. The solution is to actually help the people who are trying to use it.

#Linux

"Getting over ANOVA: Estimation graphics for multi-group comparisons", Lu et al. 2026 (Claridge-Chang's lab)
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.26.701654v1

"Data analysis in experimental science mainly relies on null-hypothesis significance testing, despite its well-known limitations. A powerful alternative is estimation statistics, which focuses on effect-size quantification. However, current estimation tools struggle with the complex, multi-group comparisons common in biological research. Here we introduce DABEST 2.0, an estimation framework for complex experimental designs, including shared-control, repeated-measures, two-way factorial experiments, and meta-analysis of replicates."

Grateful to Adam Claridge-Chang for leading and pushing on this. There's institutional-wide need for change in the biological sciences when it comes to statistical handling of data. And quite the memorable acronym, #DABEST ...

#statistics #biology #ANOVA #DABEST

AI deepfakes affect people even if they know the videos are fake: nice media coverage here of https://phys.org/news/2026-01-people-swayed-ai-generated-videos.html one of our recent studies. 1/2
1/2

My book, Accessibility For Everyone, is now free and online as a website.

https://accessibilityforeveryone.site

The book was first published by A Book Apart in 2017 but it holds up! It covers web accessibility for designers, developers, content folks, and really everyone who works in tech.

ArXiv "now requires first-time posters to be endorsed by an established arXiv author in their own field. People who have previously posted in the same disciplinary section of arXiv do not need an endorsement. The move is an attempt to clamp down on a rising tide of fraudulent submissions, says University of Amsterdam astronomer Ralph Wijers, chair of the arXiv editorial council. A large fraction, he says, are generated with artificial intelligence (AI)."

https://www.science.org/content/article/arxiv-preprint-server-clamps-down-ai-slop

#AIslop

Our new pre‑print is out!

scReady – an automated and accessible pipeline for single‑cell RNA‑Seq preprocessing: Empowering novice bioinformaticians

https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/11-43

@haessar.bsky.social @fionan-a.bsky.social @yiyicheng

#scRNAseq #bioinformatics

Built an oncology trial duration forecaster. The honest finding? R² dropped from 0.84 to 0.04 under proper validation. Validation strategy > model selection.
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🔗 stevenponce.netlify.app/projects/standalone_visualizations/sa_2026-01-19.html
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#rstats | #shiny | #pharma | #clinicaltrials | #machinelearning