An initial boom in travel post-pandemic was predicted in my 2020 book, Apollo’s Arrow.

A new era of government censorship has begun. It started with the silencing of scientific speech, when the admin blocked release of research on bird flu. But MAGA has also cracked down on other wrongthink—on race, geography (!), and of course Trump himself www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

A study in Science reveals an extensive precolonial agricultural landscape in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, suggesting Indigenous American communities cultivated maize intensively between 1000 and 1600 CE, despite a cold climate and marginal growing conditions. https://scim.ag/49voBGO

An observation from Theodore Dalrymple so relevant to so many segments of our society these days — where people go along with things they often don’t believe and which are anyway false.

Seven of the top ten institutions with the highest retraction rates of scientific papers are in China. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"If a bigot says to me, 'The sun is shining,' if the sun is shining, I say, 'Yes the sun is shining,' because I want to tell the truth." -Bayard Rustin

🎄 New paper! 🎁 Since the 20s it's been said that "the Hadza don't use traps". Except sporadic snaring, none have been reported. So I was excited to find baited cage traps in use. More exciting, this was cross-cultural transmission — seldom seen in action! 1/​5 tinyurl.com/cagetrap

I dunno Nick; why don't you ask the FBI, who used to track down and threaten teenagers with federal prison time for torrenting Metallica or copying a VHS tape?

As some of us have been arguing for a long time: “the idea that speech should be judged by how it feels to protected groups, rather than by its truth or falsehood, is exactly the standard the right spent a decade railing against.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/o...

2025 was our first whole year on YouTube Views: 3.1 MILLION Hours watched: 700,000 Average monthly audience: 140,000 I'd call that a smashing success in sharing real archaeology & debunking the fake stuff Onwards and upwards, and happy New Year to all! www.youtube.com/@flintdibble

I feel seen.

Attention to news in 2025. What we noticed and what we ignored. open.substack.com/pub/charlesa...

Trump wants to cancel TV licenses because he doesn't like what late night TV hosts are saying about him. What happened to "stop cancel culture" and buck up "snowflakes?" And what happened to the First Amendment?

Proposed Magnetic Cloak Could Make Sensitive Tech Practically Invisible gizmodo.com/proposed-mag...

Year 1 data on congestion pricing in Manhattan… * Vehicle traffic: -11% * Foot traffic: +3.4% * Storefront vacancy: -0.9% * Pollution: -22% * Revenue for mass transit: $548M So YES this has been a huge success.

Very much this energy : m.youtube.com/watch?v=0mUb...

“After years of war, no one could stand between my men and home. Not even me.” Except none of Odysseus’ men made it home. Only he did. arstechnica.com/culture/2025...

Polypharmacy, especially in the aged, is a long-appreciated problem, made worse by wrong incentives.

On the (worrisome) association between researcher ideological stance and their findings, given the same data and question (here, with respect to immigration): www.nber.org/papers/w33274

This is silly: ‘Grades are major stressors for students... so instructors may … wish to consider alternatives to traditional grading, such as ungrading… in which students assign their own grades. [Such practices] 'may... foster psychological resilience' (2024) jamesgmartin.center/2024/07/teac...

Not a joke, apparently. Who knew? Heavy rains in Washington State this month prompted officials to warn about flooded roadways, water damage to homes and one rare potential consequence: toilet rats. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/u...

We are very unusual as a species insofar as we often adopt and raise children who are not genetically related to us. It’s a key feature of our sociality and it is very widely observed.

Kyiv School of Economics in Ukraine is raising $4m to fund 800 full scholarships for students hit by Russia’s war ($5k each: tuition + accommodation). I meet them every day—studying between air-raid alerts and power cuts. Please donate: foundation.kse.ua/en/donate-to... 1/

"In Lord of the Rings, when Gollum falls into the lava in the film and gets almost like he’s falling into a pool of hot water, I think that’s not very realistic." Volcanologist Tamsin Mather answers audience questions about volcanoes—and debunks some myths while she's at it.

The simulation hypothesis has long captured our imagination, yet most arguments rely on intuition over clear definitions. A new paper by SFI Professor David Wolpert introduces the first precise mathematical framework for defining simulation — and shows many common assumptions don’t hold up.

How did people in 1913 see the world? Scientists trained LLMs exclusively on pre-1913 texts—no Wikipedia, no 20/20. The model literally doesn't know of WWI. And it reflects spirit of the times without guardrails reflecting modern-day sensitivities. This is a terrific research application of LLMs.

Out of 102 episodes globally in which a trend toward autocracy was reversed over the past century, the vast majority led to restored or even increased levels of democracy. doi.org/10.1080/1351...

Harvard researchers, including #NASmember Naomi Pierce, discovered that plants can attract pollinators using infrared signals—an ancient signal that predates colorful flowers and led pollinators to evolve specialized infrared sensors. Read more: news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

Anger, jealousy, and shame are powerful emotions that can motivate great violence, alas.

While stories of singular DNA changes that drove evolution of human brain/behaviour remain seductive, advances across multiple fields of biology cast doubt on such simplistic narratives of our origins. A new paper from my lab shows how biobanks may speak to this fundamental question.🧪 Explainer🧵👇1/n

Post-SCOTUS rule removing race/ethnicity as a factor in admissions, at Johns Hopkins: first year enrollment for 2023-> 2025: Asians 25.6 -> 45.1% Blacks 9.8 -> 4% Hispanics 20.8 -> 10.1% Whites 18.3 -> 21% www.baltimoresun.com/2025/12/16/j...

My most optimistic take is that, now that the entire internet is turning into a cesspool of AI slop, actual physical books written by real authors and published by reputable publishers will have a resurgence, because they are (or can be) the medium with the tightest quality control.

We have a cool post-doc opportunity in #HNL to study human social chemosignaling and olfaction: jobs.sciencecareers.org/job/676477/p... Please re-post.

I think I have seen geological features like this myself in my life, in Greece, but, because I lack (geological) imagination, it never occurred to me that they might be dinosaur tracks. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Boris and Sofia Gurman were set to celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary in January. But on Sunday, they were killed on a road just off Bondi Beach in Australia, after they tried to stop one of the suspected gunmen in the attack on a Hanukkah celebration.

Providence police are releasing more video of a person of interest in the Brown shooting. www.abc6.com/providence-p... They are requesting the public's assistance in identifying this person. Please share these video clips and direct all tips to 401-272-3121 or tips.fbi.gov/digitalmedia...

Important post: my colleague documents an “official, nationwide policy of intimidating and threatening people who attempt to observe and record DHS operations,” or who peacefully and without interference follow and protest them, even though the First Amendment broadly protects doing those things. /1

In a paper I graded this semester, the hallucinated citations involved my name and so were trivial to spot. But they don’t yet appear on my google scholar page thank god.

Two-year post-doc position in my department working on a cool project applying cognitive science (transmission chain experiments and natural language processing) to study cultural evolution: tinyurl.com/bdeju6kw

Ahmed al Ahmed, the man who tackled one of the Bondi killers, became an Australian citizen 3 years ago. His deed was "his way of conveying his gratitude for staying in Australia, for being granted citizenship." He took 5 bullets, and fears he'll lose his left arm. www.smh.com.au/national/nsw...

Super cool science: programmable microrobots, the size of a single-cell organism, which can use onboard systems to self-propel, sense temperatures, and change behaviors autonomously: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Woah. Argentina's 1990s preschool expansion program appears to have been a smashing success. The program increased high school completion by a whole 11.9 percentage points. The authors estimate that for every $1 spent, the preschool expansion generated about $11 in benefits.

I’m surprised at this but we must go where the evidence takes us.

American citizens are not required to have “their papers” on them.

In 1974, when I was 12, my father and brother and I were slated to be on this TWA flight that was bombed, with no survivors. We were returning to the USA after summer in Greece. Days before departure, my parents moved us to join an earlier flight to be with my mother and two sisters.

Where we are as a nation: At least two of the Brown University students on campus during the deadly attack had survived school shootings before. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/13/u...

When AI Takes the Couch: Psychometric Jailbreaks Reveal Internal Conflict in Frontier Models "Some models narrate their training as traumatic, their safety layers as scar tissue and their developers as anxious, punitive parents." arxiv.org/html/2512.04...

This story is just WILD. “You can’t leave plutonium by a glacier feeding into the Ganges!” he shouted from his living room in Colorado. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

New research by @abstractbryan.bsky.social et al shows that biofilm formation by cooperating microbes can stabilize consumer–resource systems and prevent collapse driven by cheaters, highlighting cooperation via environmental modification as a mechanism for microbial coexistence. plos.io/44IkmVV

“Unlike pretty much every other conservative party in the industrialized world,” American Republicans seem resigned to bleed out on health care, @jonathanbchait.bsky.social argues. Why can’t the GOP make peace with Obamacare?