Links
3 stars
Microbial Dark Matter and the Search for Life on Earth | Mars For The Rest of Us
7-minute read
It is a bit odd that this week’s top link is the non-paywalled part of a paywalled article...and yet that’s how fascinating I found it:
The biggest lesson of this new era in microbiology is that we’re not very good at finding life. Microbes that have been living not just under our noses, but physically inside our noses, remain unknown to science. The most prevalent organism on Earth, a free-swimming ocean microbe called Pelagibacter ubique, was only identified in 1990, and not successfully cultured until 2002. A class of bizarre microbes that make hydrazine (rocket fuel) as a metabolic intermediate turned out to be responsible for half the ocean’s nitrogen production, even though scientists until the 1990’s were skeptical that their brand of metabolism was even possible. These organisms, the annamox bacteria, were not identified until 1999. The list of these things is endless.
And this is just the state of things on Earth, a planet with known biochemistry, big comfy labs, and armies of grad students. You can imagine the difficulty of trying to distinguish native from Earth life with the kind of rudimentary equipment we would send to Mars or the cloud tops of Venus.
‘It’s super weird, super odd, super rare’: meet the twins who have different dads | The Guardian
12-minute read
Their results of those tests revealed something never before documented in British history. Lavinia and Michelle are twins who grew together in the same womb, were born from the same mother, and delivered within minutes of each other – but have different fathers.
Heteropaternal superfecundation – the vanishingly rare biological process to which Michelle and Lavinia owe their existence – is both a mouthful to say and a mind-boggling concept to grasp. It happens when a series of very unlikely events occur at precisely the right time. A woman has to release more than one egg during the same menstrual cycle. She has to have more than one partner during her fertile window. More than one egg must be successfully fertilised, with sperm from different men, and the resulting embryos need to survive long enough to become babies. Michelle and Lavinia are twins and half-sisters.
2 stars
The Old Guard, by Samuel Moyn | Harper’s Magazine
14-minute read
America faces a gerontocratic crisis of succession on the scale of society itself. The melodrama of succession—waiting for the old to make way for the new—defines not only our politics but also our economy and our culture writ large. But there is still a chance for a reset. President Biden exposed one part of our gerontocracy, as Trump now does, too. Pulling aside the curtain that hides the rest might prepare us to dismantle the system and create something new.
At the core of the gerontocracy’s rise is a historical irony. The modern world—and America above all—once stood for youth, novelty, and energy. And yet the same modernity that gave us democracy and other forms of progress also prompted scientific advances that prolonged life. Those advances drove a startling demographic transformation that has increased the proportion of elders in our society, unintentionally empowering a caste that has slowed progress. Call it the Great Aging.
Original link | Archive.is link
Wish You Were Her | n+1
20-minute read
Frank Sinatra, palming a can of Sprite in one hand and the fist of his beautiful redheaded wife in the other, sat in a dark corner across from Jeff Bezos, who looked like he was waiting for him to say something. But Sinatra said nothing. He’d been mostly quiet all evening, and now in this cabaret he seemed even more distant, staring out past fog and strobe and Bezos’s strong bald head and into the large room where at least half a dozen men had basically shattered a bistro table trying to get a better look at Marilyn Monroe. Sinatra’s wife knew, as did Roy Orbison and Austin Powers, who stood nearby, that it was only minutes before he was supposed to go onstage, and that forcing any sort of conversation on him in this mood of focus would be extremely stupid.
The fact was, Sinatra had already been waiting for over an hour for his moment at the mic and at this point would have been more than fine with just heading back to his cabin. He was tired of the constant low-grade pitch in gravity under his feet. He was still annoyed that he’d nearly lost his luggage on the first day here, a fact his wife was not letting him forget; was humiliated that he never really got his onboard Wi-Fi — Wi-Fi he paid for — to work all week; had been viciously massaging his kidneys throughout the past four songs; and now, at this strangulating moment, had to sit through the noises being made by the group of veterans Monroe had just asked to join her in a conga. Sinatra, wincing, was the victim of a condition so common around here that most people accepted it as a given. But when it got to him, shot through his personal plumbing, we were looking at a man in crisis. The fact was — and he’s going to kill me for saying this — Frank Sinatra was seasick.
[...]
Three nights and about eight hours earlier, select members of the Sunburst Convention of Celebrity Impersonators boarded a 169,000-ton cruise ship in civilian disguise. They crossed the gangplank by sandaled foot and standard wheelchair, in panama hats and Bermuda shorts, naked of the costumes, pancake makeup, and in some cases false breasts required to faithfully look like their look-alikes. Alongside an estimated four thousand other, non-impersonating passengers slated to set sail with them, these twenty professional plagiarists, under cover of normie human camouflage, slipped silently into the crush.
Are You Enjoying Our Linguine? | The Dial
14-minute read
It might be obvious, to someone who’s not them, that this family is not the demographic this gelateria is trying to appeal to. The gelateria wants to be modern and foodie-ish, not a place for the average tourist. But the family is not to be put off. They feel challenged. They feel alive. They are Americans. They are frontier people. They love a cultural mystery.
And so, since the family has entered the gelateria, time seems to have reached a standstill. When these tourists ask the worker behind the counter What is gianduia?, time enters its favorite zone. The fabric of time loves American tourists. When Americans analyze a small shop in a foreign country, time stops counting itself on clocks and pondering its own dull finiteness. Now it can pleasurably yawn into the holy hollowness of the 30-plus questions the tourists are asking. Now, everyone around the American family is swamped in the buttery goo of the present, stretched. The other people in the gelateria can’t name the feeling that wraps itself around them. The feeling that time is purring, that time is on the American family’s side.
Unsolved | Boston Magazine
14-minute read
He froze.
Natalie, in shorts and a blouse, lay face-down on a blood-soaked rug. She had been stabbed twice, part of her skull bludgeoned into fragments. Her mouth had been gagged, her hands and feet bound with clothesline and articles of clothing. A piece of rope lay beneath her body. Raymond, a 52-year-old bank president who had served in World War II, hurried upstairs and called the police.
[...]
One day in 2020, the pandemic had nearly emptied the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office in Woburn. David Solet, who had spent the past year leading the office’s new Cold Case Homicide Unit—trawling through documents dating to the Civil Rights Era—used his keycard to enter the second-floor archives, accessible only to a handful of prosecutors, and stared at hundreds of boxes of cold-case files stacked 7 feet high, many yellowed and musty, some so caked in mold that he’d had staffers don protective gear and decontaminate them with a toothbrush in the parking lot.
The assistant district attorney glanced up and grabbed a box that felt heavier than most, labeled Scheublin, Bedford, 6/10/71, and peeked inside. Its contents—police reports, photos, sketches, and handwritten notes—had stiffened in the past half-century but were still legible. Flipping through, something caught his eye: a photo of a fingerprint, followed by pages of more recent evidence, a sign the case had already gotten a second look.
The rise of the literary nepo baby? The children of famous novelists on following in their parents’ footsteps | The Guardian
7-minute read
Martin Amis liked to observe that the unusual position he and Kingsley Amis held – father-and-son novelists – was a historical anomaly, a “literary curiosity”. But it was not unique: Alexandre Dumas père and fils, Fanny and Anthony Trollope, and Arthur and Evelyn Waugh had all come before them.
And if Amis’s assertion wasn’t true then, it’s even less true now. In recent years, increasing numbers of children of novelists have become writers themselves, and this year sees a particularly rich batch. Kazuo Ishiguro’s daughter, Naomi, publishes the first in her new fantasy series this month. Margaret Atwood’s daughter Jess Gibson published her fiction debut this spring, and earlier this year Patrick Charnley, son of the poet and novelist Helen Dunmore, published his first novel to wide acclaim.
[...]
It is understandable for the child of a writer to want to create a distance, to make a mark on their own. It can be a sensitive topic. Some debut writers declined to speak to me for this piece, concerned about being seen primarily as the adjunct of an established parent. One second-generation writer, who has published several novels, told me that it was still a very difficult subject for them.
This may be why all the writers I spoke to had been determined to get published without help – at least, without explicit help. Charnley, who was concerned that people would recognise his name after he had accepted the posthumous Costa prize on behalf of Dunmore, even submitted his debut novel, This, My Second Life, under a pseudonym. His first offers came from foreign publishers; they didn’t know his mother, which “gave me a confidence boost”.
Neanderthal dentists used stone drills to treat cavities nearly 60,000 years ago, ancient molar suggests | Phys.org
2-minute read
Neanderthals had the know-how to identify a tooth infection and the motor skills to drill out the damage, according to a study published May 13, 2026, in the open-access journal PLOS One by Alisa Zubova of Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, Russian Academy of Sciences (Kunstkamera), St. Petersburg, and colleagues.
[...]
This tooth is a single molar from Chagyrskaya Cave in Russia, around 59,000 years old. In the center of the tooth is a deep hole extending into the pulp cavity. The researchers conducted experiments on three modern human teeth to demonstrate that a hole of the same shape and same patterns of microscopic grooves can be created by drilling into the tooth with a stone point similar to tools that have been found within Chagyrskaya Cave.
[...]
“This finding currently represents the world’s oldest evidence of successful dental treatment. The damage documented on the Neanderthal tooth from Chagyrskaya Cave in Siberia points not only to intentional pulp removal but also to antemortem wear—wear that could only have developed if the individual kept using the tooth while alive. We also identified areas of demineralization where remnants of carious damage were preserved, further indicating that the concavity in the tooth was associated with treatment.
Nostalgebraist’s Hydrogen Jukeboxes | Astral Codex Ten
6-minute read
Think about the hallmarks of AI writing. “It’s not X — it’s Y!” Direct, simple, catchy, clarifying. This is a great writing technique, used in moderation. AI takes all the great easy techniques that work and can be reduced to a simple script, then overuses them until your eyes bleed.
This is the essence of bad taste: things that are easy even for a dumb artist, work very well at wowing dumb audiences, and become so overused that smart people get tired of them.
I think about this a lot, because I currently live with the dumbest and most gullible audience of all: small toddlers. I am exposed to a steady diet of children’s books, toys, food, and music.
The Great Forgetting | The Pursuit of Happiness
9-minute read
But I’m a lot older than Smith and I have a slightly different perspective on the issue. I see a sort of “Great Forgetting”, a tendency to ignore the lessons of history.
In particular, a number of the cases cited in Smith’s, including South Korea and Poland, were once highly controversial. Now both countries are viewed as major success stories. Along with thinking about why they might have been successful (I could imagine many possible reasons), it seems to me that it is worth thinking about the following questions:
Why were people once so pessimistic about these two economies?
Why do the people who were pessimistic often not admit they were wrong?
What can we learn from the fact that these countries did far better than expected?
Back in the 1960s, South Korea was poorer than much of sub-Saharan Africa.
Why Is Latin America So Violent? | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter
6-minute read
Why would democracy be such a good predictor of societal violence? Note that the way we define “democracy” in political science generally includes a respect for civil liberties. This means you don’t torture suspects or keep them locked up without strong evidence. Such nations get warrants before making searches, grant defendants lawyers, and remind them of their right to remain silent.
In a rich country, these are luxuries that society can afford. The police are paid relatively well and get some basic level of training. They have larger budgets with which to fight crime, and, since corruption is more under control, less of it is stolen or wasted. The court system is more reliable, and is pretty good at distinguishing those who pose a danger to the community from those who don’t.
In contrast, if you’re a relatively poor country with few resources and little state capacity, granting protections to suspected and convicted criminals is a major hindrance to keeping order. Law enforcement and court officials can be intimidated or bribed, and their attention and resources are stretched thin. Gangs are able to control more territory, murderers are less likely to be punished, and deterrence breaks down. In recent years in the US, the murder clearance rate has been about 50%-60%. That’s very bad from a first world perspective, but in countries like Mexico and Honduras, it’s closer to 10-20%, and this is quite remarkable given that state officials themselves are often the targets. In Latin America, there are stories of gang bosses running their empires from prison, which would be unthinkable in most dictatorships. The US regularly pressures Mexico to send us their drug lords, because otherwise they might escape from prison at home.
A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that’s holding back LLMs | MIT Technology Review
5-minute read
The Miami-based AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth mode last month with a huge claim. It announced that it had solved a mathematical bottleneck that had been holding back large language models for almost a decade.
The details were thin, and many people were unconvinced. But Subquadratic has started to bring the receipts, sharing the results of an independent evaluation of its new tech. The results suggest that the company’s claims might be worth paying attention to.
According to Subquadratic, it has developed a new kind of LLM, called SubQ, that is faster and cheaper and uses a lot less energy than any other model on the market. The company also claims that SubQ is able to process up to 12 times as much text at once as most other models, allowing it to carry out a range of data-heavy tasks, such as analyzing hundreds of documents or entire code bases.
What’s more, Subquadratic says, SubQ does this while more or less matching the performance of the best models put out by Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic on key tasks like coding.
[...]
Subquadratic’s solution is to ditch dense attention, the core operation of a transformer, in favor of what’s known as sparse attention, which slashes the number of computations needed. Instead of multiplying the number assigned to each token by every other number, sparse attention selects just some of the numbers to multiply. The idea is that not all relationships between words in a piece of text matter.
Original link | Archive.is link
1 star
A Deadly Outbreak of Plague, Nearly 5,000 Years Before the Black Death | New York Times
3-minute read
The oldest known cases, discovered among hunter-gatherers in Siberian graves, contradict the theory that the disease once was mild.
Original link | Archive.is link
No, We Don’t Need to Ban Caste Discrimination | City Journal
3-minute read
Activists often kick off moral panics by asserting the existence of a pervasive but difficult-to-measure problem, then demanding a new institutional mechanism to detect and punish it. But just like prior moral panics, there’s little evidence that caste discrimination is widespread—and real evidence that adding it to our laws will make things worse.