What does the most complete endocast of Homo naledi tell us about the brain and behavior of this most unexpected, recently extinct human species? #FossilFriday link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Donald Trump’s corruption is driving up your costs. Here’s the receipt—and you’re stuck with the bill.

Fifty years since a simple equation described the chaos of biology 🧪🌐 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Yeah that tracks

You are not going to be able to escape the "I love inflation" clip if you live anywhere near a competitive district or Senate seat. www.nbcnews.com/politics/don...

What could possibly go wrong. I mean, c’mon mannnn

I'm not much of a whale fossil guy, but this is a super cool paper/discovery

“The known cases of police stalking are almost certainly a vast underreporting of the overall abuse, because they largely include only cases in which the behavior was so egregious that it led to police officers being fired, arrested, or both.”

Some really crazy cases in here - cop looked up ex-girlfriend and family in Flock 100+ times - cop stalked wife giving "test" as reason - cop searched one plate 395 times in 10 months; was later fired Cops keep getting arrested for using Flock to stalk people www.404media.co/cops-keep-ge...

Now published: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Science Friday has a very exciting guest host this week! Say hello to Jane Lindholm from But Why on @vermontpublic.org 👋

Happy #PrideMonth! To celebrate, I'm starting a thread of readings on queerness in animals/evolution, and keep adding throughout the month. I'll include a mix of writing for popular audiences as well as some scientific articles and book recommendations! 🧪 🏳️‍🌈 (1/n) Nature has ALWAYS been queer! 🌈

NEW When #Neanderthal remains were discovered in Shanidar Cave, Iraqi Kurdistan, the fragile and crushed condition of the bones prevented detailed analysis. A year of conservation work helps explore the complex mortuary practices observed at the site. 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy... 🏺 #Archaeology

New post is live! 40 years of race science arguments about brain size & the racial IQ gap, nobody bothered to write down the math or do anything beyond gawk at correlations. I did, walking through the data & formalizing it with the Lande equation. It fares worse than you could even imagine.

Testing the Energetics of Gestation and Growth Hypothesis for Human Secondary Altriciality onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

It Takes Two to Tango: A Pluralist Account for Building Comprehensive Explanations in Human Evolution - Menéndez - American Anthropologist - Wiley Online Library anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

and here is a terrific summary that lays clear why everyone should oppose this-- it will kill science in the United States elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of...

After a Wisconsin town did this, the mayor said: “The fact that they didn’t take the cameras down shows that we are the product. They were never really selling to us in the first place. They're selling to much bigger agencies the ability to spy on a ton of people.” (via boltsmag.org/verona-wisco...)

We released a trove of disclosure records that detail the finances of more than 1,600 Trump appointees, including former lobbyists, industry executives and at least a dozen officials who declined to identify former clients.

Google is transforming Search from a list of links into an AI-powered experience filled with conversational answers, autonomous agents, and interactive interfaces — a shift that could further reduce traffic to publishers across the web.

this would be an excellent time for donald trump to *not* have installed the host of a youtube show called "erection connection!" as the person charge of infectious disease policy for the united states of america. www.statnews.com/2026/05/17/e...

First real post on the new blog! If you follow human genetics, you've likely of "missing heritability". If you look at twins to estimate heritability, you get values much larger than what molecular genomic methods produce. IQ, for example, goes from 50-80% heritability to 10-15%. Which is right?

"Hallucination" implies conscious experience that chatbots lack. We need another term for the specific kind of error where they make things up out of whole cloth. It's not lying because they don't know anything.

AI companies are writing their own constitutions. Meanwhile, a shared vocabulary for contesting algorithmic power has been traveling across red and blue states, from legislatures to civil society. New from me in @science.org: "A Civic Grammar for AI Rights" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵

New newsletter: my comments from a panel on the weaponization of Title VI. buttondown.com/KateClancy/a...

Check out this cool video about a collab between my recent PhD student Swapna Subramanian and a local farmer www.instagram.com/reels/DXwrUo... She took local yeast from his farm & evolved them for better consistent cider production. The product is on sale at Longview CiderHouse in New Britain CT.

People have got to wake up to how bad the situation in US science is right now

Rasmus Winther and I just published “Troubling Populations: Where races go, populations must follow” in Current Anthropology (doi.org/10.1086/741015. Please contact me if you don’t have access).1/16

The responses to the Surovell et al paper attempting to redate the Monte Verde site in Chile - some of the earliest generally accepted evidence for people in the Americas - are now out, including responses from the site excavator. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Hmmmm, who do I trust more to look out for women, Smith College or a Trump appointee currently being sued for covering up years of sexual abuse?

Con artists posing as ICE agents and immigration officers are using WhatsApp and fake court hearings to bilk vulnerable people out of their savings with empty promises to fix immigration problems. As mass deportations continue, scam complaints soar.

Screaming to the abyss: #ColossalBio did not resurrect the dire wolf and they're probably just going to make an antelope with methemoglobinemia to give it a bluish color. Their #DeExtinction #DisInformation campaign is just a pyramid scheme because #ExtinctionIsForever 🧪

The desk got a little out of control this semester…

We're in peak spring bird migration! Here's my guide to making the most of this incredible spectacle, for @sciam.bsky.social 🧪🪶🦉

Excited to see this manuscript from Charles Roseman and Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther out in CA. I'm one of the respondents, but the whole set is an interesting perspective: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10....

Here’s my piece on the “now-completed demolition” of the Voting Rights Act in @thenation.com The VRA is the most important piece of legislation in American history. It more than anything is what ended American-style apartheid. And now Republicans have killed it.

After facing pressure from AAUP Penn and other organizations, a federal judge has delayed the order for the University of Pennsylvania to comply with the Trump administration and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's subpoena to hand over a list of Jewish faculty and students. Read more ⬇️

The gaslighting will continue until the polls improve.

I will forever be grateful to the non-profit hospice that helped us care for my mother in law during her final 18 months. This should not be a profit-seeking industry.

Half of all Americans die in hospice care. Easy money and a lack of regulation transformed a crusade to provide death with dignity into an industry rife with fraud and exploitation. (Published 2022 with @newyorker.com)

We are proud to publish this thoughtful & nuanced article by Aylward et al. on the Genetics Society's changing relationship with eugenics over the past 100 years. 'Eugenics and the Genetics Society' by Alex Aylward, Daniel J. Fairbanks, Maria Kiladi & Gregory Radick www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Lots of interesting stuff to wade through in this paper. Is it odd that my first reaction was, "wow...imagine how complex aDNA from sub-Saharan Africa at ~80-120ka is likely to be..."? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"In the first major case in which the Court granted emergency relief as a means of shaping nationwide policy, it turns out that the justice who led the charge was the one who was doing quite a bit more than calling balls and strikes." Me on Saturday's @nytimes.com scoop in today's "One First":

Just a thought: How about we stop shaming the poor for buying things that may not be essential, and start shaming the rich for making a profit off things that are essential?

John is absolutely right to see the “infinite patience” for Khan’s failed EdTech creative destruction & the closure of Hampshire as linked. EdTech has always been dependent on using grades as the foundation for A/B testing, behavioral modification (which they pretend is learning), & tokenization.

I wrote about Dianna Russini, the constant pressure female reporters face to prove they aren't sleeping with sources (plus the pressure we do get from sources to get involved with them), and why all of this is so uncomfortable to talk about. Gift link: