Botanist/Plant taxonomist @KewScience. Identifying/curating MSB herbarium collections.

Kew, London
Joined November 2015
Just deployed a major evolution of the Biologist's Toolkit: The Botanical Taxonomy Workbench. 🌿🔬 I’ve unified my experimental prototypes into a single, integrated interface. Try it here: 🔗 taxonomy-workbench-293694911…
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Perhaps underappreciated...
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Opus 5.5 passes the musical Turing test.
Claude Opus 5.5’s Oboe Concerto in C minor. 60% of respondents identified it as being human-written -- higher than pieces by Handel (58%) and Vivaldi (43%).
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Suddenly, AI has solved 90 of the 500 most important open problems in mathematics Highest ranked problems: #2 Riemann Hypothesis — PARTIAL #4 Hodge Conjecture — PARTIAL #5 Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture — PARTIAL #10 Extended Riemann hypothesis for Dedekind zeta functions — PARTIAL #12 Generalized Riemann Hypothesis for Dirichlet L-functions — PARTIAL #15 Tate Conjecture for Algebraic Cycles — PARTIAL #22 Hilbert's Tenth Problem over the Rationals — FULL CLAIM #24 Grothendiecks Generalized Hodge Conjecture — PARTIAL #28 Matrix-Multiplication Exponent Equals Two — PARTIAL #29 Unique Games Conjecture — FULL CLAIM #31 Anderson Model Extended States in Dimension at Least Three — FULL CLAIM #37 Prove the Penrose inequality or present a counterexample — FULL CLAIM #38 Higher-dimensional Euclidean Kakeya conjecture — PARTIAL #39 Modularity of Elliptic Curves over Number Fields (End_K(E)=Z) — PARTIAL #40 Hilbert's Sixteenth Problem, Second Part — PARTIAL #46 Fourier restriction conjecture — PARTIAL #47 The Fontaine-Mazur Conjecture on Geometric Galois Representations — PARTIAL #48 Nonexistence of Landau–Siegel zeros for quadratic Dirichlet L-functions — FULL CLAIM #52 The Baum-Connes Conjecture for the K-Theory of Reduced Group C*-Algebras — FULL CLAIM #62 Permanent versus Determinant over C — PARTIAL #69 Finiteness of the Tate-Shafarevich Group for Elliptic Curves — PARTIAL #72 Termination of Flips Conjecture in the Minimal Model Program — PARTIAL #77 Chowla conjecture on correlations of the Liouville function — PARTIAL #78 Abundance Conjecture for the minimal model program — FULL CLAIM #80 Hadwiger Conjecture — FULL CLAIM #83 Zilber-Pink Conjecture on Unlikely Intersections — PARTIAL #87 Bose-Einstein Condensation in Interacting Continuous Bose Gases — FULL CLAIM #92 Entanglement Area Law for 2D Gapped Quantum Systems — FULL CLAIM #94 Grothendieck Standard Conjecture of Hodge Type — PARTIAL #95 Kannan-Lovasz-Simonovits conjecture on isoperimetry of log-concave measures — PARTIAL #99 Grothendiecks Section Conjecture in Anabelian Geometry — PARTIAL #112 The Haldane Conjecture on Spectral Gaps of Antiferromagnetic Quantum Spin Chains — PARTIAL #114 Iitaka conjecture C_{n,m} on subadditivity of Kodaira dimension — FULL CLAIM #119 The Borel Conjecture on Topological Rigidity of Aspherical Manifolds — FULL CLAIM #124 Aspherical Manifolds Admit No Metric of Positive Scalar Curvature — FULL CLAIM #130 Polynomial Bound for Limit Cycles of Planar Polynomial Vector Fields — PARTIAL #136 Erdős problem 3: divergent harmonic series and long arithmetic progressions — FULL CLAIM #139 Cannon's conjecture — FULL CLAIM #145 Residual Finiteness of Hyperbolic Groups — FULL CLAIM #153 Congruent Number Problem — PARTIAL #161 BPL = L (Derandomizing Bounded-Error Logspace) — FULL CLAIM #163 NP versus the Existential Theory of the Reals — PARTIAL #169 The Free Group Factor Isomorphism Problem — FULL CLAIM #172 Conformal Invariance of the Critical Random-Cluster Model with q <= 4 — FULL CLAIM #179 Arnold Conjecture on Hamiltonian Fixed Points — FULL CLAIM #181 Polyakov Conjecture: Absence of a Phase Transition for Planar O(n) Models with n >= 3 — FULL CLAIM #183 Smooth anisotropic Calderón uniqueness from full boundary data — FULL CLAIM #193 Nonvanishing conjecture for projective log canonical pairs — FULL CLAIM #195 Parity conjecture for elliptic curves — PARTIAL #198 Long-Range Order in the Quantum Heisenberg Ferromagnet — FULL CLAIM #203 Bochner-Riesz conjecture — PARTIAL #205 Local Smoothing Conjecture for Wave Equations — PARTIAL #206 Kaplansky's Zero-Divisor Conjecture for Torsion-Free Groups — FULL CLAIM #210 Artin's primitive root conjecture — PARTIAL #211 Hilbert-Smith Conjecture — FULL CLAIM #213 Falconer distance set conjecture — FULL CLAIM #222 Virasoro Conjecture for Gromov–Witten Invariants — PARTIAL #224 Wall's Poincare Duality Group Conjecture — FULL CLAIM #225 K(pi,1) conjecture for Artin groups — FULL CLAIM #234 Unconditional 2−epsilon Inapproximability of Minimum Vertex Cover — FULL CLAIM #235 Chromatic Number of the Plane (Hadwiger--Nelson Problem) — PARTIAL #237 Global Existence of Classical Solutions to the Relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell System — PARTIAL #239 Universal Optimality of the Hexagonal Lattice in Dimension Two — FULL CLAIM #246 De Giorgi Conjecture for the Allen-Cahn Equation in Dimensions 4 to 8 — FULL CLAIM #254 Exact satisfiability threshold for random k-SAT for small k (k = 3) — PARTIAL #256 Polynomial-Time Decidability of Semidefinite Programming Feasibility — PARTIAL #260 RL versus L — FULL CLAIM #261 Kadison Similarity Problem for C*-Algebras — FULL CLAIM #267 Sidorenko Conjecture on Bipartite Homomorphism Densities — FULL CLAIM #268 Shafarevich Holomorphic-Convexity Conjecture — FULL CLAIM #270 Kuznetsov Rationality Conjecture for Cubic Fourfolds — FULL CLAIM #271 All groups are good: the four-dimensional disc-embedding conjecture — FULL CLAIM #278 Planar homogeneous Mumford–Shah local-structure conjecture — PARTIAL #284 Nearby Lagrangian Conjecture — FULL CLAIM #285 Cartan-Hadamard isoperimetric conjecture — FULL CLAIM #289 Sharp Upper Bound in Yau's Conjecture on Nodal Sets of Laplace Eigenfunctions — FULL CLAIM #290 Kaplansky's Idempotent Conjecture — FULL CLAIM #291 Calderón uniqueness for bounded measurable real isotropic conductivities — FULL CLAIM #292 Global Attractor Conjecture for Complex-Balanced Mass-Action Systems — FULL CLAIM #295 Zariski Multiplicity Conjecture for Hypersurface Singularities — FULL CLAIM #297 Amenability of Thompson's Group F — FULL CLAIM #298 Griffiths Positivity Conjecture for Ample Vector Bundles — FULL CLAIM #300 The Singer Conjecture on Vanishing of L2-Cohomology of Aspherical Manifolds — PARTIAL #305 Birkhoff Conjecture (Near-Boundary Continuous Invariant Foliation) — FULL CLAIM #306 Secret key from all entangled states — FULL CLAIM #311 Mahler Conjecture on the Volume Product of a Convex Body — FULL CLAIM #321 Finiteness of Finitely Presented Periodic Groups — FULL CLAIM #328 Sinai's Positive Metric Entropy Conjecture for the Chirikov Standard Map — FULL CLAIM #334 Unrestricted Linear-Circuit Lower Bound for the Discrete Fourier Transform — FULL CLAIM #343 Koebe circle-domain uniformization conjecture — FULL CLAIM #351 Kobayashi Conjecture: Hyperbolic Compact Kähler Manifolds Have Ample Canonical Bundle — FULL CLAIM #356 Bott Conjecture: nonnegatively curved simply connected manifolds are rationally elliptic — PARTIAL #357 Strong Hyperplane Conjecture for Isotropic Constants — FULL CLAIM #358 CAT(0) Models for All Word-Hyperbolic Groups — FULL CLAIM #359 Hopf Conjecture: no metric of positive sectional curvature on S^2 x S^2 — PARTIAL #361 Alperins Weight Conjecture for Modular Representations of Finite Groups — FULL CLAIM #364 Log-Brunn-Minkowski Inequality for Symmetric Convex Bodies — FULL CLAIM #366 Hyperkähler SYZ (Lagrangian Fibration) Conjecture — FULL CLAIM #368 Benjamini-Schramm conjecture p_c<p_u for non-amenable Cayley graphs — FULL CLAIM #369 Dixmier unitarisability problem for discrete groups — FULL CLAIM #374 Fujita Freeness Conjecture — FULL CLAIM #375 Nagata Conjecture on Plane Curve Linear Systems — FULL CLAIM #378 Toms–Winter: Strict Comparison Implies Z-Stability — FULL CLAIM #379 Margulis–Platonov normal-subgroup conjecture — FULL CLAIM #388 Shelah's Categoricity Conjecture for L_omega1,omega — PARTIAL #392 Measure-zero singular set of stationary integral varifolds — FULL CLAIM #401 Serres Positivity Conjecture for Intersection Multiplicities over Regular Local Rings — FULL CLAIM #403 Rokhlin problem on multiple mixing — FULL CLAIM #419 Lück's Determinant Conjecture for Discrete Groups — FULL CLAIM #420 Absolute continuity of Bernoulli convolutions outside reciprocal Pisot parameters — FULL CLAIM #421 GNRS Conjecture — PARTIAL #424 Irrationality of Catalan's Constant — FULL CLAIM #425 Separable Quotient Problem for Banach Spaces — FULL CLAIM #430 Long-Time Existence of the Calabi Flow on Compact Kaehler Manifolds — FULL CLAIM #432 Combinatorial Invariance of Kazhdan-Lusztig Polynomials — FULL CLAIM #434 Realizable Limit Shapes in Two-Dimensional First-Passage Percolation — PARTIAL #438 Zariski Cancellation Problem (characteristic zero, dimension ≥ 3) — FULL CLAIM #440 Stein's Conjecture on the Hilbert Transform along Lipschitz Vector Fields — FULL CLAIM #448 Smooth Realization of Finite-Entropy Ergodic Transformations — FULL CLAIM #450 Deligne–Drinfeld Freeness Conjecture for grt_1 — FULL CLAIM #453 Shub entropy conjecture — FULL CLAIM #456 Maximal Number of Mutually Unbiased Bases in Composite Dimensions — PARTIAL #458 LeBrun-Salamon Conjecture: positive quaternion-Kahler manifolds are symmetric spaces — FULL CLAIM #461 Kaplansky's Direct Finiteness Conjecture — FULL CLAIM #465 David–Semmes Riesz-transform problem in intermediate dimensions — FULL CLAIM #467 Small Cohen-Macaulay Conjecture — FULL CLAIM #468 Ergodicity of Irrational Triangular Billiards — FULL CLAIM #472 CAT(0) Conjecture for All Artin Groups — FULL CLAIM #475 Katok entropy rigidity conjecture — FULL CLAIM #476 Polynomial-Time Solvability of Condon's Simple Stochastic Games — PARTIAL #480 Furstenberg No-Bigeodesics (Planar FPP, Standard Minimum Moment) — FULL CLAIM #483 Gaboriau's Fixed Price Problem for Countable Groups — FULL CLAIM #484 Persistence Conjecture for Weakly Reversible Mass-Action Systems — FULL CLAIM #486 Campana-Peternell Conjecture — PARTIAL #497 Maximum Number of k-sets and Complexity of k-levels — PARTIAL
We’re releasing a broad range of new mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model. We’ve been consulting with the independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Advanced Study, and we have drawn on their advice and public recommendations to inform how we release these results. github.com/openai/math
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Translating foreign-language species keys right on the page in BHL with Chrome and Gemini. Game changer!
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🚨 NEW FLORA VOLUME PUBLISHED: Flora Malesiana, Series I, Vol. 25, Part 1 & 2: Fabaceae (Leguminosae) subfam. Papilionoideae (Faboideae) by F. Adema et al. is hot off the press! 🚨 Free online! Link on FM families page floramalesiana.org/new/famil… @nparksbuzz #SBGScience #SEAsia
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Daniel Cahen retweeted
How it feels talking to anyone outside of twitter
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Daniel Cahen retweeted
In 34 out of 37 countries polled by Gallup, more adults express positive feelings about AI than do negative ones. In 25 of those countries, majorities of adults who are aware of AI say it will improve their daily lives, rather than negatively affect them. semafor.com/article/09/23/20…
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Biggest productivity boost lately: feeding database extracts to our enterprise LLM to flag anomalies—unexpected localities, taxonomic revisions, or shifted species concepts since the last ID. It consistently surfaces records worth revisiting.
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Seen in Mark Watson's 2026 Linnaean Society President's Lecture
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Daniel Cahen retweeted
i gave astra a robot, a paint brush, and a camera then asked it to paint the golden gate bridge in real life! it figured out how to control the robot, and progressively got better throughout its attempts. the timelapse is sick
This is GPT-6 Astra. Anything you can do on a computer, Astra can do for you. Fast.
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Daniel Cahen retweeted
We’re sharing a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, one of the deepest problems at the frontier of mathematics. The proof was produced by a group of agents, using an OpenAI next-generation model significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra. The problem concerns whether the description of smooth three-dimensional fluid motion modeled by the Navier-Stokes equations can break down. It has remained unresolved for roughly 90 years.
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Obituary - Jonathan Mitchley Dr M the singing botanist - University of Reading reading.ac.uk/news/2026/Univ…
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We've been getting a lot of questions lately about how the Internet Archive digitizes books. The short answer: page by page, by hand. You may remember our viral 2021 video of Eliza Zhang scanning a book. That's still how we do it. Meet Eliza, and learn how we scan books: blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/…
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Tropical Plant Families Identification Handbook has a new 2026 printing - some tweaks to families and updates of species numbers (and a few errors corrected). E.g., Icacinaceae are no longer ‘Unplaced’ and Boraginaceae changed to reflect family debates. #botany
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In my last two posts, I emphasized the enormous gains in material wealth and life expectancy that humanity has experienced over the past couple of centuries. But those improvements are nothing compared with the monumental gains in what I call moral autonomy and self-determination. Two centuries ago, in 1826, the vast majority of people were far less free and far less able to shape their own futures or their communities’ futures. Let me start with labor. One striking feature of economic history is that, for most of the human past, much labor has not been free but coerced through violence, ranging from the worst forms of chattel slavery to serfdom, peonage, and feudal tenancy. In 1826, for example, around 30% of workers worldwide were subject to some form of violent coercion and to legal limits on the work they may do (this is different from, and more restrictive than, economic limits, such as being a landless laborer with little choice of employer). If you are born in 1826, you stand a strong chance of being born to an enslaved mother in the Americas or to a serf in Russia. Today, the ILO computes that fewer than 1% of workers are coerced in this way. Let me continue with gender. If you are a woman in 1826, your freedom to choose a husband, an education, an occupation, how many children to have, and to own property is severely limited nearly everywhere. If you are an enslaved or coerced woman, you face a very high chance of sexual assault during your lifetime. Free women suffer these attacks too, with next to no recourse. Let me move to religion and ideology. If you belong to the “wrong” religion, denomination, or ideology, or if you simply love someone you “should not love,” you risk severe punishment. Even in the U.S., Massachusetts still has an established church and will keep it until 1833 (the First Amendment applied only to the federal government until Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947)). In the U.K., we are three years away from the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 and forty-five years away from the abolition of religious tests at Oxford and Cambridge. In education and culture, 88% of people are illiterate, and fewer than 2% hold the equivalent of a high school degree. For most, the great works of art and literature play no part in daily life, beyond perhaps a religious image or text seen in the local temple. Finally, almost nobody outside a small elite participates in political life. In 1826, only the U.S. can be called a democracy, and that stretches the word. With very few exceptions, only white adult men can vote, and even among them, several states, such as Virginia, restrict the franchise to about 50% of white adult males. Some Swiss cantons (but not all!) do better, and Norway, then in union with Sweden, has a relatively broad franchise for men. The United Kingdom (before the 1832 reform), France, and the Netherlands have very restricted franchises. And that is pretty much it. Nothing resembling democracy or the rule of law exists in all of Asia and Africa, most of the Americas, and the rest of Europe. In nearly all the world, you could be arrested at the whim of your ruler, and there was little you could do about it. I do not want to paint too rosy a picture of 2026. Workers are still coerced. Gender inequalities remain large. In many parts of the world, you still cannot think what you want to think or choose your own romantic life. Democracy has badly backslid over the last two decades. And I am increasingly forced to remind people that due process is the twin sister of liberty. But if I ask you, behind a veil of ignorance, whether you want to live in 1826 or 2026 (that is, you do not know whether you will be born a king or an enslaved woman, only that the probabilities match the proportions in the global population), you would be crazy to pick 1826. Your life will be short. You will probably be very poor. You will be illiterate, told what to do for a living, who to pray to, and whom to marry, and no one will give a penny for your input into the running of your community. And, you can be arrested at will. And this absence of moral autonomy and self-determination is worth ten, one hundred, or even one thousand times more than all the extra income that modern economic growth has given you. My post on life spans: xitter.cf/JesusFerna7026/status/… My post on prosperity: xitter.cf/JesusFerna7026/status/…
In 2028, the median person on Earth will live on more than $10 a day for the first time in history (figures adjusted for inflation and for differences in purchasing power across countries). In the last decade alone, the share of people above this threshold has risen from 41.3% in 2016 (3.11 billion) to 48.7% in 2026 (4.03 billion). Think about that for a second: we have pushed nearly 900 million people over this threshold in ten years, around 90 million people a year (slightly above the population of Turkey). At the very bottom, we have also seen progress, though slower. In 2016, 12.6% of the world lived below $3 a day (947 million people). In 2026, the figure fell to 10.0% (826 million). This fall is harder to achieve because the poorest countries also have fast population growth. As fertility falls there, and I think it is already falling, we will cut poverty much faster. You are probably thinking that $10 a day is not a demanding threshold. True. But in 1990, yesterday in historical terms, only 1.42 billion people lived above it. And this is not just China: 2.6 billion people have crossed the $10 line. On the other hand, in 1990, 2.20 billion people lived below $3 a day. I checked these figures today because I start teaching Global Economic History at Penn this Wednesday, and I wanted to update the numbers I use. As Joel Mokyr instructs us: “The responsibility of economic historians is to remind the world what things were like before 1800. Growth was imperceptibly slow, and the vast bulk of the population was so poor that a harvest failure would kill millions. Almost half the babies born died before reaching age 5, and those who made it to adulthood were often stunted, ill and illiterate.” (“What Today's Economic Gloomsayers Are Missing,” 2014.) This will be my first lesson to the students on Wednesday: we live in times of historically unprecedented prosperity, and, by and large, things are getting much better every year.
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Daniel Cahen retweeted
There's a chaired, full professor at UChicago who has put out *200* papers in 2026 alone. And at least one has been submitted to a journal (so potentially many more). They don't all cite each other though -- rookie mistake.
I saw someone post a dozen+ AI slop papers purporting to solve niche open problems. This is antisocial behaviour and worse than if the problems stayed open. 0 people understand the solution, and there is no readable writeup. Also, incentive for either is removed.
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New Flora volume alert 🚨 Flora of Thailand Leguminosae vol 4, part 3.4 treating Tribe Desmodieae. #botany #beans #Thailand
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Daniel Cahen retweeted
When you're considering what drought tolerant plants to grow next year, you might want to consider growing bananas. A banana plant measuring 11ft high grown by Cathy Neville in her garden has 24 small bananas Read more - bbc.in/4xvXDYN Photo: Cathy Neville
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Daniel Cahen retweeted
Who will make progress on Riemann first? - Anthropic's staff mathematician; Harvard undergrad; valedictorian; Erdos 2 in undergrad; Morgan prize; Princeton PhD; Society of Fellows; big time problem solver - a guy going for a jog asking it to "take a real stab at it"
8 days ago, while jogging, I asked Claude to solve the Riemann Hypothesis It didn’t. 1.5 days later, it proved >= 67% of the zeros are on the line (prev: 41.6%) Still not sure what that means, but some analytic number theorists seem excited anthropic.com/research/riema…
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