It's great that this article linked to the original journal article. Nice that it's open access, too! So good to see that it's becoming more common. The academic publishing business is just so… well, in a word, fucked.

Archaeological evidence suggests ancient human societies in South America revered foxes to such an extent that they were buried next to them.

Scientists were surprised to find a fox buried in a human grave dating back 1,500 years in Patagonia, Argentina.

They think the most likely explanation is that the fox was a highly valued companion or pet.

DNA analysis shows the animal dined with prehistoric hunter gatherers and was part of the inner circle of the camp.

Higgs, 94, who was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 2013 for his work in 1964 showing how the boson helped bind the universe together by giving particles their mass, died at home in Edinburgh on Monday.

After a series of experiments which began in earnest in 2008, his theory was proven by physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Switzerland in 2012; the Nobel prize was shared with François Englert, a Belgian theoretical physicist whose work in 1964 also contributed directly to the discovery.

Relevant quote:

After the pilot period, Garcia and the team issued a survey to the clinicians, asking them to report on their experience. They reported that the AI-generated drafts lightened the cognitive load of responding to patient messages and improved their feelings of work exhaustion despite objective findings that the drafts did not save the clinicians’ time. That’s still a win, Garcia said, as this tool is likely to have even broader applicability and impact as it evolves.

Link to paper in JAMA (currently open access)

This is about exactly how I remember it, although the lanthanides and actinides got shortchanged.

Abstract

Growing concern surrounds the impact of social media platforms on public discourse and their influence on social dynamic, especially in the context of toxicity. Here, to better understand these phenomena, we use a comparative approach to isolate human behavioural patterns across multiple social media platforms. In particular, we analyse conversations in different online communities, focusing on identifying consistent patterns of toxic content. Drawing from an extensive dataset that spans eight platforms over 34 years—from Usenet to contemporary social media—our findings show consistent conversation patterns and user behaviour, irrespective of the platform, topic or time. Notably, although long conversations consistently exhibit higher toxicity, toxic language does not invariably discourage people from participating in a conversation, and toxicity does not necessarily escalate as discussions evolve. Our analysis suggests that debates and contrasting sentiments among users significantly contribute to more intense and hostile discussions. Moreover, the persistence of these patterns across three decades, despite changes in platforms and societal norms, underscores the pivotal role of human behaviour in shaping online discourse.

This article discusses a new study on the link between gut bacteria and diet, particularly the ability to digest cellulose, a major component of plants.

Key Points:

• Humans have gut bacteria that can break down cellulose, but the amount varies depending on diet.
• Rural populations and hunter-gatherers have more of these bacteria compared to urban dwellers.
• The decline is likely due to modern, processed diets low in fiber.
• Some cellulose-digesting bacteria may have come from our primate ancestors, while others were acquired from domesticated herbivores like cows.
• These bacteria, though digesting cellulose for themselves, may provide benefits to human health through byproducts and immune system interaction.

The study identified:

• Four distinct groups of cellulose-digesting bacteria in humans.
• A historical decline in these bacteria with dietary changes.
• Potential benefits to gut health from these bacteria, even if they contribute minimally to direct food processing.

It’s March 14th! An excellent day to eat pie and do maths. I might brush up on my geometry and try the NASA Pi Day Challenge.

Unfortunately not the best headline. No, quantum supremacy has not been proven, exactly. What this is is another kind of candidate problem, but one that's universal, in the sense that a classical algorithm for it could be used to solve all other BQP problems (so BQP=P). That would include Shor's algorithm, and would make Q-day figuratively yesterday, so let's hope this is an actual example.

Weirdly enough, they kind of skip that detail in the body of the article. Maybe they're planning to do one of their deep dives on it. Still, this is big news.

Infrastructure studies represent a domain that remains significantly uncharted among degrowth scholars. This is paradoxical considering that infrastructures constitute a fundamental prerequisite for the equitable distribution of many aspects of human well-being that degrowth proponents emphasize. Nonetheless, the substantial resource and energy consumption associated with infrastructures cannot be overlooked. The internet offers an instructive case study in this sense, at its best it forges human connections and is productive of considerable societal value. The resource implications of the often-overlooked internet physical layer of data-centres and submarine cables needs to be acknowledged. Furthermore, the ways in which assumptions of perpetual growth are built into this global infrastructure via the logic layer of internet protocols and other governing mechanisms such as finance and network design need to be examined if we are to determine the extent to which such infrastructures are inherently growth dependent.