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Briefing chat: What Galileo’s scribbled margin notes reveal about his scientific journey Hear the biggest stories from the world of science | 6 March 2026

This week on the Nature Briefing Podcast, we discuss what Galileo’s scribbled margin notes reveal about his scientific journey.

go.nature.com/47skGJq

Tweet Claude Code wiped our production database with a Terraform command. It took down the DataTalksClub course platform and 2.5 years of submissions: homework, projects, and leaderboards. Automated snapshots were gone too. In the newsletter, I wrote the full timeline + what I changed so this doesn't happen again. If you use Terraform (or let agents touch infra), this is a good story for you to read.

Back in my day you needed a senior engineer for this sort of thing

Kleiner Service: Gratis-Auszug aus meinem KinderUni Band "Wolken, Wind und Wetter". Auch für viele Erwachsene lesenswert!
👉 www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/kind...

A promotional graphic for the EU-Canada Digital Trade Agreement featuring the circular flags of the European Union and Canada side-by-side. The text "EU-CANADA DIGITAL TRADE AGREEMENT" is displayed in white capital letters over a scenic background of a turquoise mountain lake, likely Lake Louise in Canada, with snow-capped peaks reflected in the water.

We've launched negotiations with Canada for a Digital Trade Agreement.

This will make it easier and safer to do [EU-CA] business online and across borders and provide stronger protections for consumers↓

link.europa.eu/pTTf6h

Okay this is wild.
An AI tool just installed another AI tool on 4k developer machines without asking.

Someone put a prompt injection in a GitHub issue title.
Cline's AI triage bot read it and executed npm install from a malicious repo.

From aging to fetal health and clean energy to pharmaceuticals, the Acceleration Consortium awards over $2 million to projects that accelerate scientific discovery in a wide range of fields. Read more: acceleration.utoronto.ca/news/from-ag...

GitHub - Pavelevich/llm-checker: Advanced CLI tool that scans your hardware and tells you exactly which LLM or sLLM models you can run locally, with full Ollama integration. Advanced CLI tool that scans your hardware and tells you exactly which LLM or sLLM models you can run locally, with full Ollama integration. - Pavelevich/llm-checker

Intelligent Ollama Model Selector

AI-powered CLI that analyzes your hardware and recommends optimal LLM models.
Deterministic scoring across 200+ dynamic models (35+ curated fallback) with hardware-calibrated memory estimation

github.com/Pavelevich/l...

Yesterday they reverse engineered Apple’s neural engine: github.com/maderix/ANE

And today people are running the amazing Qwen3.5 accelerated on an m1, this is insane:

we've basically moved entirely to this internally at work

everything is a web page, you can generate single-html stuff in seconds and post it. UX demos, dashboards, three.js stuff, games, birthday cards...

Announcing npmx: a fast, modern browser for the npm registry Today we're releasing the alpha of npmx.dev – a fast, modern browser for the npm registry, built in the open by a growing community.

npmx is now in alpha: this is our story, as told by our team and friends

State of WASI support for CPython: March 2026 It's been a while since I posted about WASI support in CPython! 😅 Up until now, most of the work I have been doing around WASI has been making its maintenance easier for me and other core developers. ...

Wrote a blog post to give a status update on WASI support for CPython as PEP 816 got accepted!

snarky.ca/state-of-was...

"A mobile robotic process chemist", just published in @digital-discovery.rsc.org pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a... Video shows 3 back-to-back autonomous reaction cycles (make product, analyse product (HPLC-MS), isolate solid product, clean reactor, check reactor is clean, loop) over 20 h. Reactor = 1 L

84% of the time, “ChatGPT Health” killed a customer using their paid service as advertised

Vertical farms are another of those solarpunk technologies that have the potential to radically change the world for the better. but only viable with power too cheap to meter.

Final version @nature.com of our paper describing unconventional multicellular development in a choanoflagellate inhabiting an extreme environment. A ton of new data since the first @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint (which we've kept updating).

A brief 🧵 (carried over from the old place)

Coupled Cluster con MōLe: Molecular Orbital Learning for Neural Wavefunctions Density functional theory (DFT) is the most widely used method for calculating molecular properties; however, its accuracy is often insufficient for quantitative predictions. Coupled-cluster (CC) theo...

Coupled cluster is the gold standard of quantum chemistry, but its steep scaling limits its routine use.

We introduce the MōLe model, the first equivariant neural architecture that directly predicts CC excitation amplitudes from Hartree-Fock molecular orbitals.

📃 arxiv.org/abs/2602.20232

[1/7]

Our work on MōLE, our AI approach to learn the coupled cluster wave function to accelerate quantum chemsitry is out now! #ai4science #compchemsky #chemsky #ai @thematterlab.bsky.social

Claude the Instructor

✍🏻 How I got Claude to teach me dbt: rmoff.net/2026/02/20/c...

(and here's the hand-coded, human-authored result: rmoff.net/2026/02/19/t...)

As an AI-enthusiastic developer, I DON'T WANT YOUR CHATBOT. I want a remote-hosted MCP server with OAuth so *my* agent can do real work without me becoming the clicker-of-the-buttons for the AI.

Don't just slap an anthropomorphised mascot into your product as its own "agent" and declare victory.

New in Claude Code: Remote Control.

Kick off a task in your terminal and pick it up from your phone while you take a walk or join a meeting.

Claude keeps running on your machine, and you can control the session from the Claude app or http://claude.ai/code

thinking about how many more people are using the CLI, are using tmux, are interested in API access to services, are building their own little tools and dashboards and integrations. kind of a failure on the part of programming that it took AI to make this stuff accessible to people.

How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week One engineer used AI to rebuild Next.js on Vite in a week. vinext builds up to 4x faster, produces 57% smaller bundles, and deploys to Cloudflare Workers with a single command.

There is no moat any more.

blog.cloudflare.com/vinext/

Writing about Agentic Engineering Patterns I’ve started a new project to collect and document Agentic Engineering Patterns—coding practices and patterns to help get the best results out of this new era of coding agent development …

I've published the first two chapters of a new guide to Agentic Engineering Patterns - coding practices and patterns to help get the best results out of coding agents like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/23/agentic-engineering-patterns/

I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point.

I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion

People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it

This is Claude Sonnet 4.6: our most capable Sonnet model yet.

It’s a full upgrade across coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, knowledge work, and design.

It also features a 1M token context window in beta.

A critical assessment of bonding descriptors for predicting materials properties Most machine learning models for materials science rely on descriptors based on materials compositions and structures, even though the chemical bond has been proven to be a valuable concept for predic...

In a new preprint, we systematically demonstrate that quantum‑chemical bonding descriptors improve machine‑learning models and yield more accurate, interpretable predictions of bonding‑related material properties, including thermal conductivity.
arxiv.org/abs/2602.12109

#compchem

Unitree robots working at the unitree factory. The robots are building themselves now.

As someone deep into MCP (hello, I am one of the Core Maintainers of the protocol), what Kelsey alludes to here is 🎯

MCP completely removes the need to care about underlying API shape. Intent is what matters in a universal adapter. Behind the scenes you can use SOAP/XML for all we care.

Associate Director, Computational Chemistry at Takeda Pharmaceutical Learn more about applying for Associate Director, Computational Chemistry at Takeda Pharmaceutical

Takeda (Boston, MA) looking for Associate Director, Computational Chemistry, (PhD, 7+ yrs exp): jobs.takeda.com/job/boston/a... #chemjobs #compchem

(position pretty old, Nov 2025 posting)

📅 #ICYMI – Mar 5, AC director Alán Aspuru-Guzik + scientific leadership team members Christine Allen + Milica Radisic are speaking at U of T Entrepreneurship Week about how AI is shaping our world.

Register now: uoft.me/uteweek2026-... #UofTEntWeek #UofTStartup