Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation and why creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming AI, is a bad idea.
34 min · 7,804 words
Surprisingly Complex Waves Reveal the Brain's Inner Workings
Unexpected patterns traveling across the human brain may be reorganizing its activity in real time.
9 min · 2,113 words
Functional ultrasound imaging from scratch
Functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) is a brain imaging modality that is just starting to be demonstrated in human studies. I’m sure many will be familiar with structural ultrasound imaging, which forms static images using ultrasound, as in a sonogram1. Functional ultrasound instead captures movies of brain tissue very rapidly, tracking subtle changes caused by the blood flow that follows neural activity.
11 min · 2,451 words
What is the biggest unsolved problem in science? what 84 AI models think
We put "What is the biggest unsolved problem in science?" to 84 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) at the same time. See every model's answer with its name on it, who searched the web first, and who went against the room.
19 min · 4,300 words
Historians often blame drought, famine, and invaders for the Late Bronze Age collapse—but that can’t explain why the empires never came back. Patrick Fitzsimmons argues for a deeper structural story.
14 min · 3,253 words
How Delhi Cut Electricity Loss from 50 to 5 PercentHere’s How Delhi Achieved Its Epic Power-Grid Fix
IEEE Spectrum's Mini Shaji Thomas recounts how Delhi slashed electricity losses from about 50% to 5%—the privatization, metering, and grid-operations reforms that turned candlelit kitchens into reliable power.
15 min · 3,457 words
Standard deviation or standard error? What each one measures, and which one belongs in your paper
Selçuk Korkmaz clarifies SD vs SE with interactive figures: use SD to describe sample spread, and report estimates with confidence intervals rather than bare standard errors.
16 min · 3,717 words
Burning Man Death Rates: A Short Lesson in Statistics
Summary: Three people died at Burning Man in 2026. This was about a quarter of what the crude national rate would predict (~12 deaths). Calculating the age-standardized death rate, we’d expect to see an average of 4.9 deaths. At this rate, seeing 3 deaths is not abnormal. However, Burning Man’s near zero death rate over its existence is abnormal, and likely due to selection bias of healthier attendees and other confounding demographic factors.
6 min · 1,389 words
A short note on the lunar terminator paradox: why the day/night boundary on the Moon looks sharper (or stranger) than everyday intuition about lighting predicts.
2 min · 529 words
Why All Philosophers Ought To Be Radical Naturalists
My last blog posts calling for a scientific turn in philosophy and the abandonment of aprioristic philosophy largely resulted in three responses.
7 min · 1,549 words
Gravity Seems Holographic. What Does That Mean for Reality?
Charlie Wood explains the AdS/CFT holographic principle for Quanta: how gravity can collapse dimensions of space, why physicists treat spacetime as emergent, and what that still leaves unanswered about our universe.
13 min · 2,997 words
John D. Cook explains dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbits: why satellites there stay in perpetual sunlight, and what that means for powering orbital compute servers.
1 min · 257 words
Lab on a Contact Lens Can Measure Stress Through Serotonin
IEEE Spectrum covers a smart contact lens that aims to measure serotonin as a stress biomarker, part of a broader push toward continuous body-chemistry sensing.
4 min · 960 words
Why is the human body so crap except for the liver?
Dynomight asks why the liver regenerates so well while most human tissues heal poorly, surveying biology, evolution, and regenerative medicine.
20 min · 4,636 words
arXiv receives multiyear investment to support independent nonprofit launch
arXiv announces $17.2M in multiyear philanthropic commitments from the Simons Foundation International, XTX Markets, and the Siegel Family Endowment as it launches as an independent nonprofit.
4 min · 825 words
The science of Monkey Island: can grog actually dissolve a metal mug that fast?
Journal of Geek Studies tests the Monkey Island gag: whether acidic grog could dissolve a metal mug, with chemistry, history, and experiment notes.
16 min · 3,665 words
Biology Might Not Be Quantum, but Its Math Is Quantumlike
Elise Cutts for Quanta Magazine explores how biological systems may not rely on quantum physics, yet often obey quantumlike mathematics—interference, contextuality, and what that means for modeling life.
11 min · 2,523 words
How Zambia Approved an HIV Drug in 12 Days
How Zambia’s medicines regulator authorized an HIV drug in 12 days—and what that says about the access gap when medicines sit where the disease is not.
16 min · 3,572 words
Rainmaker Raises $100M Series B to Scale Low-Cost Water Production and Weather Modification
Rainmaker Technology announced a $100 million Series B to expand atmospheric research and scale drone-based cloud seeding for freshwater production. The company says its radar and validation systems have linked operations to more than 145 million verified gallons of freshwater.
1 min · 263 words
Arrow heads at Obi-Rakhmat (Uzbekistan) 80 ka ago?
A PLOS ONE study examines stone points from Obi-Rakhmat Cave and asks whether they indicate early projectile / arrow technology around 80,000 years ago in Central Asia.
66 min · 15,269 words