Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

In a study published on Thursday in the journal Science, a team of researchers report that men with a lot of Neanderthal ancestry and women with a lot of modern human ancestry had a strong preference to mate with each other. Maybe modern human women found something especially attractive about men with a lot of Neanderthal DNA, or vice versa. Or maybe the two groups were equally attracted to each other.

However it played out, the preference was intense. “You need a strikingly strong phenomenon to get us there,” said Alexander Platt, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of the new study.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Afra Wang at Asterisk:

Made in Ethiopia is a documentary about factories, specifically Chinese factories. It deserves attention from anyone thinking seriously about US reindustrialization and from anyone trying to understand how China touches the world.

I watched it this past May in San Francisco. Afterward, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Its story felt uncannily familiar: The grammar of modernization in Ethiopia echoed that of the China I grew up in. It pressed on the part of my writer’s brain that keeps circling words like “labor” and “reindustrialization” — the currents moving through the intellectual world I’m part of.

The film follows Eastern Industrial Park, a garment manufacturing complex in rural Ethiopia built in the wake of the Belt and Road Initiative. The ambitions were considerable: expanding factory operations, promising the local government 30,000 new jobs, and carrying the weight of China’s development narrative abroad. Director Xinyan Yu structures the story around three women: Motto, an ambitious Chinese factory manager navigating impossible quotas; Beti, an Ethiopian worker learning the rhythms of the factory floor; and Workinesh, a local farmer whose land vanished beneath industrial expansion. Through them, the documentary poses quiet, hard questions about what industrialization means, what progress costs, and how China — as a manufacturing power — shapes the experience of modernization in African nations.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Bailey Trela at Commonweal:

The best works by the Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck leave you convinced they might vanish from one moment to the next, just as a dream seems to grow sharper right before it ends. For all their winking tints and sinuous linework, the dominant mood is one of bittersweet calm, reminding us that fugacity, when it recurs often enough, eventually achieves a sort of permanence. Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through April 5, is a fittingly relaxed introduction to the artist, revealing Schjerfbeck’s discreet mastery, one cleverly understated canvas at a time.

Born in the summer of 1862 to Olga Johanna Printz and Svante Schjerfbeck, an office manager for the local railway, Schjerfbeck would spend much of her life at a remove from the Finnish metropole of Helsinki. Standard biographical treatments suggest that this isolation exacerbated Schjerfbeck’s depressive tendencies, and that together these help explain the painful sense of solitude that often imbues her canvases. In fact, though it would be wrong to downplay the role of physical and mental debility in Schjerfbeck’s life and career, the major note might just as well be struck by her sustained industry and series of deep and artistically nourishing friendships.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Eva Amsen in Undark:

Genetics is rarely as simple as introductory biology classes make it seem. Only some biological traits, such as blood groups or dry ear wax, are linked to a single gene and passed on in the predictable way that Gregor Mendel demonstrated with pea plants in the mid-19th century. Instead, many traits are a complex effect of multiple genes in combination with other factors. For example, even though some people are genetically predisposed to be at a higher risk of heart disease, their health outcome also depends on their lifestyle and health care access. But if it’s already difficult to predict whether someone will develop heart disease based on genetics alone, imagine how much more nebulous it gets when genetic test results are linked to social or behavioral outcomes.

In “What We Inherit: How New Technologies and Old Myths Are Shaping Our Genetic Future,” Sam Trejo and Daphne O. Martschenko outline the complex relationship between genetics and societal issues. The title refers both to genetic inheritance and to two persistent genetic myths that have been passed on through generations. One is the destiny myth, which assumes that genetics alone can fully explain differences between people. The other is the race myth, or the belief that there is a genetic basis for the way that society has categorized people into races.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Warren Cornwall in Science:

NEAR MANAUS, BRAZIL—The lilting song of the musician wren once commonly heralded sunrise in the central Amazon jungle. But in October 2025 it was a rare wonder when the flutelike melody cut through the dawn gloom. “Did you hear that?” whispered Stefano Avilla, an ornithologist and Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM) Ph.D. student. “Good ear,” said Jared Wolfe, a Michigan Technological University wildlife ecologist. “This bird is in rapid decline. You don’t hear it very often.” Here in the Brazilian Amazon and in other tropical forests across the Americas, birds are vanishing from surprising places—expanses of forest untouched by fires, chainsaws, or bulldozers. These aren’t migratory species in decline because of habitat loss on distant continents; many spend their entire lives in a single patch of trees.

These enigmatic declines have received little publicity. But they are setting off alarm bells among scientists who monitor birds in places as far flung as Panama, Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil. “It’s a big story,” says Bette Loiselle, a University of Florida (UF) ornithologist who has spent more than 2 decades studying birds in Ecuador’s Yasuní Biosphere Reserve, a part of the Amazon harboring some of the world’s richest biodiversity. In the seemingly healthy forest there, she’s watched sightings of once-familiar birds such as the wedge-billed woodcreeper, blue-crowned manakin, and white-throated toucan dwindle. “It’s someplace that you think, ‘This should not be happening.’”

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

The Physics of Angels

I suspect the world remembers everything—
time and word and bones flung together
and me in it, suspecting. If we can believe
in photons—entities that possess movement
but not mass, and if the spirit, too
is made of light—then who am I to say
I haven’t lived before—or you,
and thus this tenderness?
Who am I to doubt that grace
is elemental, like fire—or that souls
have no need of us, finally?

by Trish Crapo
from Walk Through Paradise Backward
Slate Roof Publishing, 2004

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Taran Dugal at The New Yorker:

Though “Godlike” is inseparable from the downtown scene in which it is set, the word “punk” fails to make an appearance in the book. In fact, save for an isolated reference to Andy Warhol, most of the prominent cultural figures of that era go unmentioned. The novel concerns itself, instead, with the fictitious poets Paul Vaughn and R. T. Wode, the former a twenty-seven-year-old member of the East Village literati, the latter his teen-age male lover. For a hundred and forty pages—which, we are told at the outset, comprise the journals of the now fifty-three-year-old Vaughn, housed in a psychiatric unit on the Upper East Side—Hell charts their relationship in vaulting prose that jumps with audacious velocity from the sacred (“This I love, to be borne by love. The only person to tell it to is Jesus. My head is a church”) to the pornographic (“What does the tiny spurt from Cupid’s penis taste like? Like displaced space”).

Vaughn and Wode have sex in back alleys, decrepit apartments, motels, and hotels. They take LSD in gelatine form and write frenetic poetry and have even more sex. They drink to excess in storied haunts of seventies New York (at one point, Vaughn recalls how Wode “stood on a tabletop in the noisy little dark back room of Max’s Kansas City and pissed into a champagne glass”) and spend “the greatest amount of their time together reading and writing and sometimes talking” in Wode’s apartment.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Wen Gao at The Common Reader:

A few months ago, I was babysitting two kids, one eight and the other five years old. We were in the middle of a board game when the numbers six and seven happened to come up together. Suddenly, as if they had been struck by something. They giggled hysterically, chanting “Six-seven!” with their hands up and down. I was so confused.

Once I finally tucked the kids into bed, I found that I could not get over it, and I asked ChatGPT. It said that six and seven are merely two natural numbers whose meaning depends on context. When I typed “67” into Google, the entire screen began to shake up and down, mimicking the kids’ arm motions. Apparently, Google’s software engineers are in on the joke. I sank into the rabbit hole of YouTube. My homepage was instantly flooded with Gen Alpha¹ prank videos. Some of them were quite dismissive,  grounded in religious belief, or even cult-related. None of them did anything to quiet my curiosity. Finally, I found a New York Times article. It traced the whole phenomenon back to a song called “Doot Doot (6 7)” by the rapper Skrilla. Basically, as I understood it, the article discussed that Gen Alpha is using absurd memes to reclaim their own space and identity where they are constantly surrounded and monitored by the digital environment.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Alex Wilkins in New Scientist:

A clump of human brain cells can play the classic computer game Doom. While its performance is not up to par with humans, experts say it brings biological computers a step closer to useful real-world applications, like controlling robot arms.

In 2021, the Australian company Cortical Labs used its neuron-powered computer chips to play Pong. The chips consisted of clumps of more than 800,000 living brain cells grown on top of microelectrode arrays that can both send and receive electrical signals. Researchers had to carefully train the chips to control the paddles on either side of the screen.

Now, Cortical Labs has developed an interface that makes it easier to program these chips using the popular programming language Python. An independent developer, Sean Cole, then used Python to teach the chips to play Doom, which he did in around a week.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Gerald Epstein in the Boston Review:

Without Donald Trump, the crypto industry would have met a very different fate. In the years before his second presidential campaign kicked off, crypto markets were undergoing a series of downturns that, if not necessarily spelling cryptocurrency’s death knell, were threatening to dramatically weaken the standing of an asset class that had minted a new generation of economic elites, relegating it to the status of a niche object for the likes of tech hobbyists, online gamblers, and drug dealers. 2022 in particular was such a bad time for crypto that commentators started to refer to it as a “crypto winter.” The value of Bitcoin—the cryptocurrency that, back in 2009, gave birth to the crypto revolution in the first place—had skyrocketed in the few preceding years, but in November 2022 it fell precipitously, taking down many crypto initiates with it. Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, at its peak the third-largest crypto exchange in the world, collapsed, and Bankman-Fried and his friends were arrested. Apart from the most enthusiastic keepers of the faith, few were predicting a turnaround anytime soon.

But by the fall of 2025, crypto was booming again.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Gordon Hughes at Artforum:

THERE IS, IT SEEMS TO ME, a right wrong way and a wrong right way to see Carol Bove’s folded steel sculptures. Take, for example, her 2018 Cutting Corners. I know it’s wrong, clearly and demonstrably, to view this object as anything but hard steel, yet one sees it wrongly: as soft, thick folds of draping fabric transforming into crumpled cardboard or rubber tubing supporting a glossy black plastic cylinder, culminating in a series of six-by-six-inch steel boxes at the end of its three tangled tubes. Adding to the illusion of soft pliability is the distinct sense that the tubes are filling with air, as if internal pressure were pushing them outward from within, even as, paradoxically, they appear to be deflating at the same time. Much like those indefatigable tube men manically dancing up and down outside of used-car lots, extending and collapsing with each new breath, Cutting Corners appears impossibly suspended between two opposing movements of pressure: pushing out from within, buckling under from above.

As one rotates around the sculpture, the illusory softness of the tubes suddenly hardens, reverting if not to steel exactly then to something steel-y, as if the industrial materiality of Cutting Corners maintains its sense of illusion by imitating something very similar to, without actually being, steel. As the material appears to shift from soft to hard, the outward and downward movements of the tubes no longer suggest the gentle pressure of filling and escaping air, but imply a decidedly more violent bending and crushing of metal, as if the tubes had been pushed out of shape against their will.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Dear March-Come in

Dear March—Come in—
How glad I am—
I hoped for you before—
Put down your Hat—
You must have walked—
How out of Breath you are—
Dear March, how are you, and the Rest—
Did you leave Nature well—
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me—
I have so much to tell—

I got your Letter, and the Birds—
The Maples never knew that you were coming—
I declare – how Red their Faces grew—
But March, forgive me—
And all those Hills you left for me to Hue—
There was no Purple suitable—
You took it all with you—

Who knocks? That April—
Lock the Door—
I will not be pursued—
He stayed away a Year to call
When I am occupied—
But trifles look so trivial
As soon as you have come

That blame is just as dear as Praise
And Praise as mere as Blame—

by Emily Dickinson
1830-1886

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Sally O’Reilly at Cabinet Magazine:

I find these publications compelling by their very existence and, for the most part, unreadable. Their content slides off my mind. Gray literature’s high and narrow window onto specialist processes is anathema to traditional general-interest non-fiction publishing, which delivers information like a tap dispenses safely managed water—filtered, chlorinated, and piped into your very own quarters. Gray literature is a sploshing bucket of someone else’s water, murky with unfamiliar vocabulary, its means of application not always entirely obvious. Each publication is an invitation to speculate on a sector’s operations, to marvel at the specificity of other people’s knowledge and the focus of their working lives. My paltry library gestures toward the infinite complicatedness of human activity and the vast, disorganized array of murky buckets out of which the materiality of our lives somehow continues to emerge.

I have recently acquired some items that confuse the already untidy category of grayness. While seeking out books on theatrical quick-change (more on that another time), I came across the Webster’s Timeline History series and, out of curiosity, bought the three cheapest of the second-hand editions available: Wallpaper, 1768–2007; Secrecy, 393 BC–2007; and Bristol, 1000–1893.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Jamieson Webster in The Paris Review:

In her 1977 novel Angst, Hélène Cixous names the quarter hour of Great Suffering—“straight away,” “never again”—when the mother lays the child on the tiles and does not return. Angst divides us: either to remain in unending anguish, or to move to the anguish of an unendingness. This is the threshold into which the text plunges the reader.

Suddenly what we never knew is known: we are tossed out to the no place that no one ever leaves. To the unending … This is exactly what I feared, the worst. Towards which corridors were sweeping me at growing speed, and I couldn’t slow down, and I didn’t dare wake up, I was so afraid to find that what it was going to say would be forever true.

We come to a woman who has lived this angst to the final hour. There was no relief for her, having lived in and through hopelessness and no-hope, a radical expulsion and the solitude of “facing a faceless wall.” Yet from either side of this fault, one can continue loving, there where it perishes again and again—this is the hand Cixous holds out to us. In her postscript, she writes: “So there was a woman who had taken women’s suffering and their fear upon her without giving way to despair; a woman capable of confronting the Law and its pawns, without letting herself be caught by their sleights of hand, their mirror games, their ivory towers.” Because she was able to be present to herself, there may be “another writing.”

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Nicola Jones in Nature:

Crystal jellyfish have an eerie beauty: thanks to a natural protein, they emit a faint green glow. For decades, researchers have used that green fluorescent protein and similar molecules to light up the field of biology, tracking what’s happening inside cells.

Now these ubiquitous tools are getting a glow-up: their quantum properties are being harnessed to make them similar to the fundamental bits of quantum computing. “These fluorescent proteins that everybody uses as a fluorescent label can actually be turned into a qubit,” says Peter Maurer, a quantum engineer at the University of Chicago in Illinois. The idea “sounds very science fiction”, says Maurer. But the physics isn’t new, and the approach has already been shown to work in principle.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Alain de Botton at Big Think:

In most nations and most parts of the world, for most of history, couples were formed not by the individuals themselves, but by the wider society, families, the village, the court. There were, if you like, dynastic marriages. You would get together with somebody because they had a plow and you had an ox and it seemed like a good match, or you were the Duke of Brabant and they were the Princess of Naples and that was seen as a wonderful union. So you got together for reasons that were nothing to do with emotional compatibility. There were a lot of tears, there was sadness, there was loneliness, but it didn’t seem to matter because relationships were seen to be about something else.

There was then a momentous change that occurs towards the end of the 18th century, starting in Britain, France, Germany, parts of Italy, a revolution in feeling that we now know as romanticism. One of the central tenets of romanticism is that each individual should be left to decide on their partner by their own, the movements of their own heart. They should be left to decide for themselves. It’s a beautiful idea, it’s a very liberating idea, it should make a lot of sense. We have been in the romantic age now for 200 years, perhaps shorter, perhaps a little longer time period.

And let’s put it plainly, it’s been a disaster.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.