“The apes were particularly fond of figs, which contained some of the highest levels of alcohol the team recorded” www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

“Having previously resisted calls to kick Musk out of the Royal Society, its president Adrian Smith has now written to fellows to say its governing council will discuss the matter at a meeting on 1 October” www.researchprofessional.com/0/rr/news/uk...

Let me make this clear: If you are white and just stand by and watch your fellow white person doing this and you say nothing, it's as if you did it yourself.

“An old white woman got on the train and immediately pointed at me and told me to correct how I was sitting. I refused, so she went to the conductor and complained. The conductor called the police and stopped the train.”

As CNN offers daylong saturation coverage of the podcaster’s funeral, I went back and checked to see how CNN covered Melissa Hortman’s memorial on 6/28, where Walz spoke and Biden/Harris attended. It got about four minutes during the hours it was happening—less than Jeff Bezos’s wedding that day.

Abstract submission now open for the next Cultural Evolution Society conference in Rabat, Morocco next May @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social @ces2026.bsky.social

They abandoned the whole free speech thing as soon as people started saying things that genuinely offended them. It wasn’t that they were so tolerant that they accepted nazi talk as a necessary evil to protect speech writ large, they just liked saying and hearing slurs bsky.app/profile/jame...

I'm grateful to all the health care systems and insurance companies that are providing COVID vaccines according to science rather than conspiracy theories

Glad Science collected this data (though the results are entirely unsurprising). GenAI cannot accurately summarize scientific papers, sacrificing accuracy for simplicity. And shame on publishers who are pushing genAI summaries on readers. Great way to accelerate an epistemic apocalypse.

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits." www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

The Trump administration has attacked diversity programs, historical discussions of slavery, civil rights and more as he pressures civic institutions to de-emphasize race. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of The 1619 Project, discusses what led to this movement. nyti.ms/4msq3x8

I have to keep this deliberately vague, but this is a total disaster for academic research. And imposing it so suddenly is just cruel. I’ve got friends scrambling to get back to the US before midnight tonight. Do you know how hard that is to do on 36 hours of notice?

No way, he doesn’t even look like exactly like a comically corrupt government official in a Dick Tracy comic who gets caught with a bag of money with a dollar sign on it

The plan for NSF is to demote its director to an advisory role to what a former senior figure compared to a Soviet political commissar. Also, greatly reduce the role of rotators from academic departments to consolidate administration power. This is a disaster for science and innovation.

turns out it's pretty hard to put an hour's worth of charlie kirk together and hold up the "he was not a white christian nationalist, actually" charade

a few thoughts (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/o...

Giving a bully your lunch money is only a temporary downpayment for future bullying. We ALL need to step up for the first amendment. By-the-way, for the record, this ex-Disney employee finds Jimmy Kimmel very talented and funny. mh

this is a good book to counter the crap out there: www.amazon.com/Open-Play-Ca...

As usual with this issue, Harris is calling for a compromise that already exists. Every sporting body has standards for how long athletes must be on hormones before they can compete as women. The problem isn’t that we’re ignoring ‘reasonable concerns,’ the problem is that republicans are lying.

Five Questions for Agustín Fuentes www.sapiens.org/biology/five...

This is the way you lay it out!! Krieger N, Bassett MT. Structural and Scientific Racism, Science, and Health — Evidence versus Ideology. [Perspective]. New Engl J Med 2025; 393(12):1145-1148 www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

I love that there is a primate art symposium at today's meetings of the American Society of Primatologists to honor Michelle Bezanson and celebrate the primatologists and conservationists who integrate art into their work. ⚱️🐒🌍

lol in case folks haven't noticed, every political and economic attack in this country is perfected on minorities FIRST and then scaled. 🤷🏿‍♀️

Adaptations to water stress and pastoralism in the Turkana of northwest Kenya | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

In July, EPA announced it would dismantle the Office of Research & Development. Now, staff have been ordered to immediately halt *all* work on research papers. (Surely entirely coincidental to easing way for slaughterhouses to pollute our water? subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eene...)

This is the way you lay it out!! Krieger N, Bassett MT. Structural and Scientific Racism, Science, and Health — Evidence versus Ideology. [Perspective]. New Engl J Med 2025; 393(12):1145-1148 www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

I've been saying this for yearsf: LLM-GENERATED SAMPLES ARE JUST FALSIFIED DATA. It's similar to just lying about what people said, or taking your own best guesses. HEY FELLOW SOCIAL SCIENTISTS: STOP TRYING TO FIND WAYS TO AVOID ACTUALLY TALKING TO THE PEOPLE YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE STUDYING

Why bother actually studying humans to understand them when you can just make up data based on fake samples and forget trying to understand real humans at all?

jesus fucking christ why

I absolutely reject a world where the dead remain among us in the form of AI clones that could multiply across all connected media. Not only do I find it indecent, but what about mourning? It's so important to be able to grieve. We've all been there. This is pure sci-fi dystopia. 👎

“We still have to live under that, that fear of losing our identity, losing our culture, our religion,” Peltier says about his continued commitment to Indigenous rights. “The struggle still goes on for me. I’m not going to give up.”

A good piece for today.

Correcting myself since I didn't read carefully enough in my haste; this doesn't go into effect immediately, it goes into effect in 29 hours, at 12:01 AM on Sunday morning.

It's Friday night. We're a bookstore who gives recommendations. You're a reader who is going to finish a book at some point. Tell us what you're reading now & we'll recommend what to read next!

History rhymes a bit too well sometimes.

"Media outlets, colleges, publishers, and ordinary organizations in Trump’s crosshairs can and should openly defy him." nymag.com/intelligence...

Nature reviews the "fascinating" Sex is a Spectrum by @anthrofuentes.bsky.social social 🎉

"The conclusion of this experiment is that ChatGPT Plus did not meet SciPak’s standards."

Tl;dr = No. www.science.org/content/blog...

Conservatives have been bragging all week that they got the Trump administration to pull NIH funding from 17 studies using fetal tissue. What the 'pro-life' movement won't tell you is that one of those studies was seeking to cure brain cancer in children. jessica.substack.com/p/nih-brain-...

Researchers, teachers, and students: Explore the open-source data of the Green Book and use the Community Map to connect local history to the national history of surviving and traveling during Jim Crow. Start now: greenbookproject.org.ohio-state.edu #GreenBookProject #CommunityMap #EconSky

Mind the gap. #Archaeologists are excited about #dinosaurs as much as everybody else - but we don't dig them. Not literally. That's where our colleagues in #palaeontology come in - there's a good sixty-four million years of evolutionary history between the Flintstones and their pets. 🏺🦕

“Wouldn’t life be easier if organisms just kept copying themselves to reproduce?” yes, but so much less interesting. "Sex is a spectrum" @princetonupress.bsky.social is one of the five of the best science picks! capsule review @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A "Trouble with Tribbles" reboot? really? Bad.

Austerity measures all over the place but the university has $50 million for… whatever this is

I gave my heart and soul to that place. Built entire sections for journalists pushed out of their home countries. When the writer I hired, Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi Arabia, they paraded me around as a symbol for press freedom. I put MY LIFE on the line to defend journalism and WaPo.

Rich people, especially rich people in the media & entertainment industries right this moment: The point of having fuck you money is saying “fuck you” when it counts.

The Third Reich had an agency called the Reichskulturkammer, "Reich Culture Chamber". All singers, writers, musicians, journalists, and actors had to apply for membership and were ideologically vetted. Expulsion or failure to gain admission resulted in an occupational ban. Jews were not admitted.

After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like.

I’m reposting Barack Obama 😭