Tootfinder

Antibiotic “megacluster” discovery provides new strategy to fight superbugs
It’s “an exciting advance in efforts to restock the antibiotic arsenal.”
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/06/antibiotic-megacluster-discovery-p…

Antibiotic "megacluster" discovery provides new strategy to fight superbugs
It's "an exciting advance in efforts to restock the antibiotic arsenal."

London-based Perceptic, which says its end-to-end AI platform for drug development is being used by top pharmaceuticals, raised a $12M seed led by Accel (Jeremy Kahn/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/05/2…

Exclusive: Perceptic, a startup automating drug discovery end-to-end for Big Pharma, emerges from stealth with $12 million in seed funding
Accel is leading the seed funding round for Perceptic, which emerges from stealth today.

Usable Security and Privacy Experts on Mastodon: Let's Fill This List!
Starting in the Fediverse and looking for researchers, practitioners, and institutions in the field of Usable Security and Privacy? I compiled a list on @… as a starting point.

Syria saw an opportunity when the war with Iran cut off access to one of the world’s most important shipping routes.
With multiple Mediterranean ports and borders with Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, the country offers a desperately needed alternative to the blocked Strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway that, before the war, was used to transport a hefty share of the global oil supply.
Iraq and Gulf states including the United Arab Emirates have already begun to transport oil an…

Blocked Strait of Hormuz Leads to New Opportunities for Syria
The latest war in the Middle East has created new economic opportunities for Syria thanks to its geography.

Happy CI!
I pulled the trigger and cut over completely, we are no longer building with GitHub Actions at all.
Clean build with 45-74 warnings depending on platform, no asan/ubsan reports on the (admittedly limited) test suite, no static analysis errors, and 210 static analysis warnings - which while not ideal, is much better than the several thousand we had at the start.
This means there is now a window in which pull requests don't have CI checks (since we only run the …

#DDA ist Kooperationspartner von #eBird Deutschland. Das Cornell Lab of Ornithology und der DDA haben eine Kooperation zum Start des deutschen eBird-Regionalportals vereinbart. Dieses ist ab sofort unter ebird.org/region/DE erreichbar.

When you think big tech/ai heads won't make you more angry, you learn they go after rare books, scan them and destroy original copy...
And this is considered "fair use" of course 🤦
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/07/23/ai-vendors-ar…

AI vendors are destroying rare books to feed the chatbot
Every AI vendor trains their chatbots on the Common Crawl, a copy of the whole public internet. But that’s just the starting point. AI vendors are desperate for more data — in the hope of making th…

A starter pack of questions to help think about "discovery" and "knowledge":
1. When was X discovered?
2. Once it was discovered, who knew X?
3. 1000 years later, who knew/knows/will know X?
4. Is X true?
5. Which groups of people would say it's true vs. false?
When X is "a² b² = c² in a right triangle" we think there are nice clean answers to these questions. But when X is "COVID-19 transmits via small airborne aerosols and a mask is needed to reduce the risk of infection" things get more interesting, particularly the answer to question 1. Does something count as "discovered" if many/most people would say it's false?
People love to answer this question by appeal to "scientific consensus" but the scientific consensus on aerosol transmission is still shaky if you consider certain big institutions, and even if it's mostly settled now, there was definitely a period between "experts on transmission know it" and "there's a scientific consensus." So which counts as discovery? What if knowledge is held secret, like many military technologies? What about historical facts that become censored?

If I stared disapprovingly into the camera of the unmarked street view car, does that count as denial of consent?

Last year, we covered how Anthropic was buying physical books,
scanning them,
and destroying them to feed their Claude chatbot.
Judge William Alsup ruled this fair use.
In particular, he said mulching the books was perfectly fine because making them digital was
“exceedingly transformative”: [Order on Fair Use, 2025, PDF]
The print original was destroyed.
One replaced the other.
And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, s…

AI vendors are destroying rare books to feed the chatbot
Every AI vendor trains their chatbots on the Common Crawl, a copy of the whole public internet. But that’s just the starting point. AI vendors are desperate for more data — in the hope of making th…