Links for Winter 2026
Enhancing your new year's eve potluck
New Year’s Eve potluck idea: a 15th-century recipe to make a giant egg.
Why are some regions of the US covered with a checkerboard pattern visible from satellite images?
In the recent TV show Plur1bus, a virus causes humanity to merge into a single hive-minded consciousness, and people have been debating how implausible that is. As a microbiologist, the closest real thing I can think of is bacteriophage Pf, a virus that causes populations of bacteria to assemble into one big iridescent liquid crystal.
More cool videos in the paper’s supplements.
Some evidence that preventing children from moving and fidgeting around impairs creativity. I wish we had larger studies about this. Actually, I wish we had larger studies before subjecting hundreds of millions of children to this treatment every year.
There are two very different types of life: prokaryotes (small and streamlined, e.g. bacteria) and eukaryotes (big and complicated, e.g. humans). We know that eukaryotes evolved from prokaryotes, chiefly by swallowing other prokaryotes and turning them into organelles (like mitochondria). But it took multiple large-scale innovations to make modern eukaryotes, and the intermediate states are all extinct – so we don’t know which innovation enabled which other innovations.
A new study uses gene-level molecular clocks to figure out the timing of various important gene duplication events, and concludes that the mitochondria endosymbiosis happened pretty late in the process: the cell already had a nucleus, a cytoskeleton, and the ability to transport stuff in intracellular vesicles when it acquired mitochondria. This challenges the conventional wisdom that the mitochondria was the starting point of everything else (see here).
Have you noticed that heroin ain’t as good as it used to be? Well, that could be because the CIA has been covertly spraying poppy fields in Afghanistan with seeds of plants engineered to lower their opioid content.
Exotic creature of the season: the salp, a barrel-shaped tunicate that’s almost entirely transparent. It feeds on phytoplankton, but will occasionally run into random objects (like entire fish), ingest them and carry them along for everyone to see.
How can we design AI tools that feel less like calculators, and more like musical instruments?
A surprising number of biology breakthroughs come from Carlsberg, the Danish beer company. This raises a lot of questions about how and why this was possible, and apparently Asimov Press is willing to send someone to Denmark to investigate. If that sounds like a mission for you, apply at the link.
It is sometimes claimed that masturbation is ok because “everyone does it”. Well, this is incorrect – anthropologists in 2010 found at least two cultures, the Aka foragers and Ngandu farmers from central Africa, whose languages don’t even have a word for masturbation. “[We] were surprised that they were not aware of these practices, did not have terms for them and how difficult it was to explain both sexual practices. They laughed as we tried to explain and describe the sexual activities. […] They found it unusual and said it may happen far away in Congo, but they did not know it.”
David Friedman’s tactics to reveal the truth, the anarcho-capitalist’s way.
Wholesale wikipedias
List of people who have lived in airports
Black Neon Tetra # Credit Card Fraud
Collision between a car and a submarine
Different than iridescent crystals, but also creepy: the merging of cells into a singular multinucleate blob by virus like RSV. Respiratory Syncytial Virus is named for forming “syncytium”, a multinucleated mass of cytoplasm resulting from multiple cells fusing together.