Digital Note Taking Obsidian 1.9 released with a magnificent new feature: Bases Dear Scholar, Obsidian is my software of choice when it comes to organising academic information. I have used this tool for many years and accumulated hundreds of thousands of words in notes. This week, the team behind Obsidian released a new version, 1.9, that features a very long-awaited update called Bases. I spent many hours experimenting with it and discovering new ways to organise my information and navigate...

ChatGPT-5 Update for Academics Dear Scholar, The big topic in AI news this week has been the release of ChatGPT-5 just a few days ago. I spent my weekend testing out different scenarios and writing an in-depth review of what has changed and how that influences your academic career. For those who have purchased my Effortless AI course, I have also recorded two new videos about the details and implications of this major release. Subjectively speaking, GPT-5 is just a better, more intuitive...

Agentic AI finds new research ideas Dear Scholar, A new type of AI has been released this week: AI Agents. Instead of answering a query in one step, like a generative AI, an agent has a goal, and it will plan, search, and review results to achieve it (see diagram below). This involves many iterations and can easily take 15 minutes. The SciSpace AI agent does this for academics and searches academic papers, rather than the internet, as the ChatGPT agent does. You can imagine that this opens...