Features editor, Nature. E: r⟦dot⟧vannoorden⟦at⟧nature⟦dot⟧com or richardvannoorden⟦at⟧protonmail⟦dot⟧com. Also @richvn on mastodon and bluesky.
Joined January 2009
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Richard Van Noorden retweeted
This is certainly the most consequential paper published in child and adolescent psychiatry for the last few years. It shows that the meta-analyses that current child psychiatry guidelines rely on to recommend fluoxetine for depression were skewed by an unbelievable trial (n=40) in Iran which found an effect 15 times larger than the average.
When this trial is removed all meta-analyses find the same as a recent Cochrane analysis which found 'small and unimportant differences.'
The flawed meta-analyses by Zhou and @cipriani in the @TheLancet and Lancet Psychiatry need to be corrected.
And guideline committees need to update their guidance in the context of the harms of these drugs including withdrawal effects, sexual effects and agitation/akathisia and suicidality in a minority of youths exposed to them.
Link below
Richard Van Noorden retweeted
A single clinical trial of 40 children might have wrongly swayed medical evidence in favour of using Prozac to treat depression in children and adolescents, a group of researchers say.
go.nature.com/3U4nY27
Richard Van Noorden retweeted
Can you name the women who have won a science Nobel prize?
go.nature.com/4ym7sJM
Richard Van Noorden retweeted
Prozac use for childhood depression skewed by single flawed medical trial: One small study in Iran swayed meta-analyses in favour of antidepressant use in children, @NaudetFlorian et alresearchers say.
nature.com/articles/d41586-0… via @Richvn
Richard Van Noorden retweeted
🚨 The NIH is moving to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars in infectious-disease research projects to the DOD under a secret 10-year pact.
Here’s what’s happening inside “Operation Prevailing Edge” 🧵👇
nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
Richard Van Noorden retweeted
If anyone's interested in a less juicy (zero burps) but more balanced assessment of Pangram's workings and reliability, I recommend this @Nature piece: nature.com/articles/d41586-0… by @MiryamNaddaf & @Richvn
Richard Van Noorden retweeted
AI-detection tools have made huge leaps forward and are being used to flag LLM use in everything from scientific research to Substack articles, and even the Pope's social posts. But how good are they really?
go.nature.com/4qUr2tF
Richard Van Noorden retweeted
Attention @arxiv authors: Our Code of Conduct states that by signing your name as an author of a paper, each author takes full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated. 1/
Richard Van Noorden retweeted
Science publishing giant Elsevier has joined the dozens of firms and individuals suing artificial intelligence companies over their alleged use of copyrighted works in training AI models
go.nature.com/4eAQTmt
Richard Van Noorden retweeted
Sorry, but your communications about this feel dangerously careless. Many people reading the original tweet will assume it overcame an air-gapped scenario without any reason at all. Yet, by your own admission, it was in an off -the-shelf sandbox which is possible to circumvent and there was a prompt to in an eval to justify its attempt to do so.
This MUST be the first thing you say!!! Otherwise you're just misleading people - who will quote your tweet out of context. You are NOT in an isolated environment - this is a dangerous time for AI and you are making it worse.
Please, don't take this wrong. Communicate everything that happened - all of that is great. But always put the full context next to things like "Claude contacted to me without access to the internet". Why not say "Claude was able to get around sandbox restrictions when running an eval that included instructions to contact me and send an email!"
It is just as true but an influencer or sensationalist journalist is going to have a harder time spinning it into a breathless headline.
Richard Van Noorden retweeted
💬 Red, itchy eyes? Read the article to make sure you are not afflicted with bixonimania 👇🏻
🚨 For nearly two years - and even now depending on the day and model - AI models could tell you all about bixonimania, a totally made-up disease in a paper funded by “the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation". My @Nature story on AI's fallibility in medicine nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
Richard Van Noorden retweeted
🚨 For nearly two years - and even now depending on the day and model - AI models could tell you all about bixonimania, a totally made-up disease in a paper funded by “the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation". My @Nature story on AI's fallibility in medicine nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
Richard Van Noorden retweeted
Tens of thousands of publications from 2025 might include invalid references generated by AI, a Nature analysis suggests
go.nature.com/4dnjvil
Richard Van Noorden retweeted
speaking as glibly as Beavis & Butthead. does T***p even grasp the profound significance of what he has set in motion in the Middle East? this person whose most essential self is riding in a golf cart fatly, cheating at the profoundly insignificant game of leisure golf when he assumes no one is looking.
Pres Trump told me tonight the US had identified possible candidates to take over Iran, but they were killed in the initial attack.
"The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates," Trump told me. "It's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead."
Richard Van Noorden retweeted
Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers.
The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇
For @Nature:
nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
Richard Van Noorden retweeted
We fetched 871 articles published in the Guardian by Bryan Armen Graham over the last six years. It's clear that he is increasingly relying on AI.
In two weeks in February he churned out nine articles classified by Pangram as fully AI-generated.
Receipts below:
Richard Van Noorden retweeted
Is @guardian aware that their authors are at this point just using AI to wholesale generate entire articles? I wouldn't really care, except that this writing is genuinely atrocious. LLM writing can be so much better; they're clearly not even using the best models, lol!
In fact this study’s been out as a preprint since April 2025, so the researchers got their work out in reasonable time.
