How can citizen science reduce psychological distance to science? Insights from three projects in contested environmental contexts

Citizen science (CS) is a participatory mode of knowledge production, enabling non-scientific actors to contribute to and sometimes contest scientific agendas and interpretations, making it a way to bridge science and society. This paper examines how that potential unfolds by analysing the individual perspectives of citizen scientists through the lens of Psychological Distance to Science (PSYDISC). Drawing on three case studies of contested environmental CS, we identify which contextual aspects of CS shape citizen scientists' experiences of social, spatial, temporal, or hypothetical distance to relevant science, and how these experiences may relate to trust. Our findings underscore the role of science communication as both a channel for dissemination, and as a constitutive element of participatory research; crucial for reducing psychological distance and enabling socially robust knowledge production, especially in contested, policy-relevant science settings.

François Chollet on Twitter / X

GPT-6 Astra represents a step-function change in model capability for interactive reasoning problems. It scores 66% on ARC-AGI-3 using our standard harness, and nearly 100% with a continuous conversation harness and custom compaction, at a cost of roughly $360 per game.In fact,…— François Chollet (@fchollet) September 3, 2026

GPT-6 Astra: A new generation of intelligence

Introducing GPT-6 Astra, our most intelligent and aligned model yet, with state-of-the-art capabilities across computer use, coding, cybersecurity, and science.

François Chollet on Twitter / X

GPT-6 Astra represents a step-function change in model capability for interactive reasoning problems. It scores 66% on ARC-AGI-3 using our standard harness, and nearly 100% with a continuous conversation harness and custom compaction, at a cost of roughly $360 per game.In fact,…— François Chollet (@fchollet) September 3, 2026

ARC-AGI-3

ARC-AGI-3 is the first interactive reasoning benchmark for AI agents—play as humans and build agents that learn in novel environments.

Elon Musk Unmasked in Alex Gibney Documentary: “Insane a Person This Chaotic Has So Much Power”

He is the richest man on earth. An explosive new film from the Oscar-winning director suggests he may also be the most dangerous.

Musk (2026) | Documentary, Biography, History

3h 52m

Citing Less Critically: LLMs Reshape the Rhetoric and Reach of Scientific Citation

Scientific citations carry rhetorical intent. Scholars may cite prior work positively (supporting), negatively (contrasting), or neutrally (mentioning). As large language models (LLMs) increasingly assist scientific writing, whether they reproduce citations with the same rhetorical intent as humans remains unclear. We introduce a masked-citation task to compare human and LLM-generated citation behavior. For each citation context, an LLM generates a replacement citation sentence, producing a counterfactual corpus directly comparable to human citation. We analyze what, whom, and how models cite, using an LLM-as-a-judge to classify citation intent and a 20-million-edge coauthorship network to measure social distance between cited authors. Across six popular LLMs and 1,746 top NLP conference papers (63k+ contexts, 132k+ citations), three patterns emerge: (1) Compared with human citation, LLMs cite significantly less critically; (2) LLMs over-cite popular and older papers, a tendency amplified for contrasting citations where human writing more often draws on recent, niche work; (3) Whereas humans often cite within their close social network, especially for supporting citations, LLMs tend to draw on more socially distant authors. Together, these differences are double-edged: LLM citation reaches beyond a scholar's close collaborators while being less critical and amplifying visibility bias, reshaping the rhetoric and reach of scientific citation.

alice.mosphere.at/bluesky-heatmap

A repository on Tangled

fray — Bluesky thread factions

fray — Bluesky thread factions

samantha.wiki/fray

A repository on Tangled

Shawn Gude on Twitter / X

.@BernieSanders: "An essential story about one of America’s greatest champions for workers." Sara Nelson (@FlyingWithSara): "This book couldn’t be more timely.” @GraceBlakeley: "Masterful." Preorder American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs today!…— Shawn Gude (@shawngude) August 31, 2026

American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs

Before Bernie Sanders, before Zohran Mamdani, America’s favorite socialist was Eugene Debs.In 1912, some 1,200 Socialists held elected office across the United States. Wisconsin had a Socialist congressman in Washington, and ministers in Oklahoma preached the gospel of “Christian socialism” at revival-style gatherings come summertime. The leader of this vibrant movement? One Eugene V. Debs—part working-class agitator, part radical prophet, a man who made it feel like being an American and a socialist was the most natural thing in the world. Even opponents would describe Debs as Christlike. Born in Indiana in 1855, he’d dropped out of school at fourteen to work on the railroad. Elected to the state legislature in his twenties, he’d seemed a rising star in the Democratic Party: an optimistic moderate who urged respectability and compromise. But this was the Gilded Age: an era of corporate tycoons and outrageous sums of money in politics, of grueling hours and few rights for workers (if any). And when, in 1894, the president sent in thousands of troops to break a nationwide railroad strike Debs helped organize, Debs was radicalized. He emerged from a six-month prison sentence as a crusader, a stirring orator who would soon see all forms of unaccountable power—rich over poor, men over women, white over Black, colonizer over colonized—as poisonous to human freedom. Cofounding the Socialist Party of America, Debs would run for president five times and spend the rest of his life convincing ordinary workers that, together, they could create a political movement strong enough to transform the world. It wouldn’t be easy. He would suffer from chronic illness, lose friends and enrage allies, risk his marriage to a woman he loved, and receive a decade-long prison sentence for opposing World War I. And yet, countless Americans—not just in his lifetime, but in ours—would heed Debs’s righteous call for human solidarity. When Debs ran for president in 1920 from behind bars, he received almost a million votes. A rousing, poignant, intimately human tale of struggle against the odds, American Socialist is a stunning portrait of one man’s radicalization—and of the country he radicalized in turn. It’s a story that speaks powerfully to our own Gilded Age, when the very wealthy again rule America’s political and economic life and millions are looking for an alternative.

First impressions: Delta - Cameron's writing

A look at Zed's new agent development tool.

Introducing Delta

From the Zed Blog: A multiplayer environment for coding with agents, from the creators of Zed.

Skyreader Vision - Skyreader Dev Log

What Skyreader and the reading app ecosystem can become with your support

Semble — Make sense of the web, together

A place for mapping the web, connecting ideas, and building shared knowledge.

AT Intents proposal

I work on Skyreader and have recently been trying to improve the cross-app sharing experience (e.g. “send this article to semble/margin/etc”). The problem I’m running into is each app integration requires a bespoke implementation and the “save to” UX starts to get cluttered as the number of integrations increases. What would be nice is if the atproto ecosystem had a standard and generic way for cross-app sharing that was usage aware so you could filter by apps you actually used. So I’ve put tog...

disnetdev.com/at-intents

A repository on Tangled

The Syllabus on Twitter / X

In the 1970s, radical economists left the university to work as activists. From the Union for Radical Political Economics to economic affairs bulletins, our book of the week investigates how the New Left changed economics.By Tiago Mata on @CambridgeUPhttps://t.co/aQQi9nqd0C pic.twitter.com/FM1A9nK5vN— The Syllabus (@syllabus_tweets) September 1, 2026

Radical expectations: how the New Left changed economics

In the 1970s radical economists campaigned to reform their discipline and their universities. They became journalists and activists, moving beyond academia, to forge new models of public engagement and collaborative knowledge in economic life. Radical Expectations tells the story of how these economists set out to make economics more democratic. It traces their campaign to bring protest movements to the campuses, triggering the emergence of an alternative understanding of expertise directed at validating and empowering the perspectives and voices of women, Black Americans, labor activists, and the urban poor. It shows how a radical identity formed and how radicals helped reform disciplinary institutions. Furthermore, it argues that the radical economics' legacy was the development of a language and models of expert-lay collaboration that empowers direct action in economic affairs. The book is about the community of radical economists who championed the promise of change and what came of it

What stories should we tell about scientific progress now?

In search of the mysterious fruits of basic science