City animals act in the same brazen ways around the world

Daniel T. Blumstein, Peter Mikula, and Piotr Tryjanowski in The Conversation:

The urban monkeys in New Delhi are so bold they’ll steal the lunch right off your plate. If you’ve spent time in New York, you’ve probably seen squirrels try to do the same. Sydney’s white ibises got the nickname “bin chickens” for stealing trash and sandwiches.

This brazen behavior isn’t normal for most species in the countryside, yet it shows up in urban wildlife, and not just in these cities.

Studies show that animals living in urban environments around the world exhibit common sets of behaviors. At the same time, these urban animals are losing traits they would need in the wild. This process of urban animals’ behavior becoming more similar is known as “behavioral homogenization,” and it accompanies the loss of species diversity with urbanization.

We study animals in urban settings to understand how humans can help wildlife thrive in an urbanizing world. In a new study, we explore the causes and the long-term consequences of these behavior changes for urban wildlife.

More here.

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CAR T-cell therapy takes woman from bedridden to ‘perfectly fine’

Michael Le Page at New Scientist:

A woman who had three different autoimmune conditions has not required treatments for almost a year after her immune cells were genetically modified and used to kill off the rogue cells attacking her body. “She was deathly sick and bedridden at the time we met her, and we treated her, and seven days later, she got out of bed,” says Fabian Müller at the University Hospital of Erlangen in Germany. Within months she appeared to be fully recovered. “I just saw her yesterday. She’s perfectly fine,” says Müller, speaking 11 months after the treatment.

This woman is one of a growing number of people with autoimmune conditions who have been successfully treated this way, and the first to have three different ones treated simultaneously. “The really crazy thing is that you have three autoimmune diseases, and all three of them, by chance, you can tackle with one treatment,” says Müller.

More here.

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Internet “brain rot” has escaped our phones to take over … well, everything

Willy Staley in the New York Times:

Maybe a decade ago, it still felt as if there were a wild expanse within your phone, a portal to a vast and sometimes terrifying alternate dimension. If the sensation resembled anything in the real world, it was vertigo: There was a bottomless pit in the palm of your hand. And since the mass isolation of the pandemic, that feeling has been replaced by a growing sense of claustrophobia. You can leave it in the other room if you want, but your phone still closes in on you. Even if you spend very little time online, there’s little you can do outside the logic of the internet. It is a force that warps our reality, a cosmic background noise that is everywhere and nowhere — something inhuman that’s subtly reshaping our language, our politics, even our minds.

More here.

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The Audacity Is a Sharp Satire for Tech’s Fear and Self-Loathing Era

Judy Berman in The Time Magazine:

In a scene from AMC’s new tech-industry drama The Audacity, two old friends reunite around a crackling campfire. “Men like you and me, we gotta duck when sh-t f-cks the fan,” Randall Park’s Gabe tells his pal turned business partner, Duncan (Billy Magnussen). “Get an island, get some guns, and go long on guillotines.” Gabe is already putting that plan into action. Once a hedonist partying with the proceeds of a website called GambleSluts.com, he’s now living as a paranoiac quasi-hermit on a luxurious private island. As Duncan sadly notes, Gabe has stationed armed guards where models in bikinis used to gyrate. Welcome to the Silicon Valley psyche ca. 2026.

This siege mentality defines The Audacity. Premiering April 12, the series joins a voluminous canon of tech satires (Silicon Valley), thrillers (Westworld), sagas (Halt and Catch Fire), philosophical treatises (Devs), and compilations of all of the above (Black Mirror); the more this sector dominates our lives, the larger it looms in the minds of our storytellers.
More here.

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One Human Faced 100 Hungry Mosquitoes to Model Where They Bite

David Hu in The Scientist:

“Four minutes is too long.”

That’s the note undergraduate Chris Zuo sent me along with photos of countless mosquito bites on his bare skin. This full-body massacre wasn’t the result of a camping trip gone awry. He’d spent that limited amount of time in a room with 100 hungry mosquitoes while wearing nothing but a mesh suit we thought would have protected him.

Thus began our three-year journey trying to understand the behavior of a deceivingly simple insect, the mosquito.1 It may sound like a professor’s sadistic plan, but, really, we did everything by the book. Our university’s institutional review board approved our procedures, making sure Chris was safe and not coerced in any way. The mosquitoes were disease-free and native to our home state of Georgia. And this session resulted in the first and last bites anyone received during the study.

Besides my role as torturer of students, I am an author and professor at Georgia Tech with over 20 years of experience studying the movement of animals.

More here.

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Friday Poem

Enter Book


The book you held in your hands
now lies on the nightstand by your bed,
in its heart
the lines you sketched
under the sentences you read more than once, bewildered,
before you put the book down
and started pacing aimlessly between the rooms.

You let it drown you for a full week,
took it everywhere you went;
read it alone in bed,
and stretched out on the sofa while the family’s voices
drifted toward you from the other room. 

Whenever you’d lift your head,
you found yourself
face-to-face with the world,
glancing at the sky outside your window;
ready, at last, to converse with the hills. 

Every book grants you the language
you need to make contact
with something you had no idea even existed:
a tree’s pores, a fox’s nose,
sadness on a face, a nation’s suffering. 

Look how beautiful you look as you read.
Look how peaceful you look
as you let an entire continent colonize you;
as you lay the book down on the nightstand,
as if returning to the world
something that belongs to it—

as you stand, dazzled by the hills
as though the book, too,
has returned to the world
something that belongs to it.

By Dalia Taha
Translation from Arabic By Sara Elkamel

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Thursday, April 9, 2026

The writing secrets of Stephen King

Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian:

When Caroline Bicks first met Stephen King she was worried. As a teenager she had scared herself silly with his books – Carrie and The Shining were the two that crept under her skin and refused to budge – but now she found herself in the odd position of being Stephen E King professor at the University of Maine. The chair had been named in honour of the English department’s most famous alumnus, and Dr Bicks was a Harvard-trained Shakespeare specialist. What, beyond a name, would they really have in common?

At the time of her appointment, Bicks’s employers had told her not to initiate contact with the famous author in any way. But four years into the job she got a phone call from “Steve” who turned out to be a teddy bear: “I couldn’t believe it. The man responsible for terrifying generations of readers – including me – was so … nice.” Not quite a meet-cute, but promising.

This book is Bicks’s account of what happened when King gave her permission to spend a year in his archive, poring over the drafts of five of his most popular novels, including Pet Sematary, The Shining and Carrie. Bicks’s particular aim is to spot what she calls King’s “biblio‑magic” in action. She wants to identify how he chooses and places words with the intention of producing material effects on the reader’s body. How, exactly, does he make hearts beat faster, stomachs lurch and palms prickle with sweat?

More here.

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Laws of Nature and Chances: What Breathes Fire into the Equations

Craig Callender at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

This book’s subtitle is based on a question the physicist Stephen Hawking once asked: “What breathes fire into the equations…?” If understood as asking what makes some propositions laws of nature, Barry Loewer’s book provides an answer: the activity of science. Not God, powers, dispositions, essences, capacities, or primitives. Loewer instead develops a sophisticated “Humean” answer that grounds the origin of nomological modality in scientific practice.

Thirty years ago, Loewer defended a theory of laws of nature inspired by David Lewis (1996). Since then, he has become a champion of all things Humean in the metaphysics of science—from laws to chances to counterfactuals to explanation—and he has helped shape the field as we know it today. Bouncing off Lewis’s rich project, Loewer is, like Lewis, an example of a (these days, rare) systematic philosopher. At the core of his system is, well, the system, the “best system” theory of laws. According to this theory, which traces its origins to J.S. Mill and Frank Ramsey, the laws of nature are the result of the most powerful and compact summary of the fundamental facts of the world. This long-awaited book is a kind of best system manifesto, which motivates and advances the theory based on his three decades of reflection upon it.

more here.

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Ultralightweight sonar plus AI lets tiny drones navigate like bats

Nitin Sanket at The Conversation:

To help small aerial robots navigate in the dark and other low-visibility environments, my colleagues and I developed an ultrasound-based perception system inspired by bat echolocation.

Current robots rely heavily on cameras or light detection and ranging, known as lidar, or both. But these sensors fail in visually challenging conditions, such as smoke, fog, dust, snow or complete darkness.

I’m a scientific engineer who develops bio-inspired microrobots. To solve this challenge, my research team looked at nature’s experts at navigating in poor visibility: bats. They thrive in dark, damp and dusty caves and can detect obstacles as thin as a human hair using echolocation while weighing as little as two paper clips. They emit sound waves and listen to weak echoes reflected from objects.

However, enabling this sensing on aerial robots is extremely challenging because propellers generate a lot of noise. It is a bit like trying to listen to your friend while a jet engine is taking off next to you.

More here.

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On Ben Lerner’s Transcription

Maggie Millner at n+1:

Transcription is his first book written as an elegy, a mode that comes with a thornier-than-usual crop of formal mandates. What kind of verbal machine is an elegy supposed to be, let alone one for intellectual giants like Waldrop or Kluge? To honor the departed mentors in true mimetic fashion, the ideal book should both describe and ventriloquize them, incorporating these writers’ love of slippage and fragmentation, their aversion to cliché and self-seriousness, their taste for the marginal and off-kilter over the exhaustive and august. It should constellate their favorite metaphors and métiers: dreams, angels, ghosts, “apothegms.” It should resist hyperbole. It should purloin language and motifs from their own books and letters, enacting the alchemy of artistic influence. It should alert us to the limits of memory and bend our sense of linear time. It should also, preferably, and wherever possible, approximate the conditions of death itself.

Implausibly, Transcription pulls off all this and more. It is a lovely, desponding, idiosyncratic novel, anchored in a series of dialogues about artmaking, technology, and literal and figurative parenthood.

more here.

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‘Stay Alive,’ about daily life in Nazi Berlin, shows how easy it is to just go along

John Powers at NPR:

It’s been 80 years since Adolf Hitler shot himself in his bunker, yet our fascination with the Nazi era seems eternal. By now I’ve read and seen so many different things that I’m always surprised when somebody offers a new angle on what the Nazis wrought.

Ian Buruma does this in Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945, a new book about living in a country where you have no control over what happens. Inspired by the experience of his Dutch father, Leo, who was forced to do factory work in Berlin, Buruma uses diaries, memoirs and some personal interviews — most of the witnesses are dead, of course — to explore how it felt to be in Berlin during World War II. He weaves together a chronicle that carries Berliners from the triumphant days when Germany steamrolled Poland and daily life felt almost “normal” (unless you were Jewish, of course) through the end of the war when bombs pulverized the city, and Soviet soldiers arrived to rape and pillage.

More here.

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The Push for Artificial Inheritance

Ashley Smart in Undark Magazine:

Last June, at a conference and retreat center not far from downtown Berkeley, California, around 100 people gathered to mull a new, techno-centric future of human reproduction. There was the physics professor moonlighting as a biotech company executive. There was the secret author of a widely read newsletter with a reputation for controversial takes on race and intelligence. There was the fertility specialist with a practice in nearby San Ramon. There was, by way of video feed, the Harvard professor whose foundational work in genetics had arguably helped lay the groundwork for a meeting like this to happen in the first place.

And there was an unmistakable interest in genetically modifying human embryos — to spare them from disease, yes, but also to engineer smarter, stronger, more resilient human beings.

More here.

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This May Be the Most Important Medical Story of the Decade

Jeff Coller in The New York Times:

When KJ Muldoon was born in the summer of 2024, his parents were told he had a disease so rare, it strikes about one in 1.3 million newborns. His condition, a severe deficiency of an enzyme known as CPS1, left his tiny body unable to properly break down protein, flooding his blood with toxins that could cause brain damage or death. A liver transplant could correct the problem, but KJ was too young and too fragile to undergo one. With each passing day, the risk of irreversible neurological damage grew. What happened next may become the most important medical story of the decade. In just six months, a team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine designed a personalized therapy that could correct the single misspelled letter in KJ’s DNA using a gene editing technology known as CRISPR. To get the therapy inside KJ’s cells, doctors relied on the same kind of mRNA technology that powered the Covid-19 vaccines. He received his first dose at 6 months old. One year later, KJ is walking, talking and thriving at home with his family.

…A key question is how the F.D.A. would enforce manufacturing standards for individualized treatments. If the standards are too onerous for each customized treatment, then the platform won’t be able to scale up. Even with the right regulatory framework, there would still need to be a commercial infrastructure to use it. No pharmaceutical company is going to build a manufacturing line for a disease that affects 12 people. Someone has to build the bridge between a one-off academic breakthrough and a repeatable clinical service, and right now there is little funding for that.

More here.

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Thursday Poem

A Postcard from Tehran

Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles, Miles and miles— Robert Browning

bed-bruised I opened eyes on pellucid puddles
after the last night’s rain, the lissom branches
of juniper swayed rather edited by the wind
picking like a pen on a page makes me jot down
over a cup of tea, a well-earned security strip
by the news that a friend in Tehran had died,

we shared Hafiz, set to collaborate on an exegesis
on Rumi, talked in Farsi on the phone, our lingual
consanguinity, an elongated cadence on the tongue,
like moosiqi, other guttural Arabic sounds softened,

last summer, he sent me a postcard from Isfahan
peach blossoms in umbrous orchids, the clouds
returning like aerial strikes, as if skies missed
them over there under shapeless rubble, like
stanzas abandoned in despair, smoked eyes
a parental congregation of school girls|
bombed, moist but unyielding, and the world
disputes what if a false flag!

crepuscular hues around mountains ringed by
a halation halo, people stick to their tasks, burials
break the monotony, on viridescent slopes
a few sheep grazing, come home.

Prof, Dr. Rizwan 
Institute of English Studies
Punjab University
Lahore Pakistan

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Wednesday, April 8, 2026

Gray took over the modern world but color may be returning

Frank Jacobs at Big Think:

No, you haven’t suddenly gone colorblind. This map is in color. In fact, it is a map of color — specifically, of each U.S. state’s favorite house paint color. It’s just that those favorites look like a swatch book for a funeral parlor — like fifty shades of gray.

Well, gray-ish. From Hawaii to Maine, from Alaska to Florida, the most popular shade for your home’s exterior is some variation of gray, off-white, beige, or greige — a hue so existentially undecided that it can’t commit to being either gray or beige, and so ends up neither, and both.

But how can this be? America is anything but monochrome. It contains multitudes of cultures, climates, and landscapes, and people who disagree, loudly and publicly, about nearly everything. So why, when Americans need a tin of house paint, do they so often reach for the neutral shelf? Why does the average house in this great and varied nation look like it’s been dipped in a vat of Resigned Indifference®?

The answer is a phenomenon dubbed “the grayening”: a gradual but relentless draining of pigment, not just from exteriors but also from interiors and from the stuff of everyday life, like cars and phones.

More here.

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How Grains and Grasses Fed (and Still Feed) Humankind

David George Haskell at Literary Hub:

As I walk through the broomsedge in June, dozens of grasshoppers clatter away with every footstep. Bees and wasps wing past, leafhoppers spring, and beetles scurry for cover. This productivity is why so many birds depend on grasslands for their breeding or wintering. Grasslands, especially those in humid areas with good soil, provision their local food webs as richly as do forests.

Grasses also build soil. Their leaves send about two thirds of all the food they make to the underworld. There, roots tunnel many meters down. As they grow, they break up clay and rock, exude sugars and other molecules, and interweave their cells with fungi. When the roots die, they add spongy organic matter to the soil. This soil‑building process is so productive that it lifts the ground. When a degraded grassland returns to health, the ground heaves up, as if inhaling with relief.

More here.

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