The linked Popular Mechanics article cites this Smithsonian article.

The Smithsonian article cites this National Geographic article and this Science Advances article (among others).

The National Geographic article is paywalled.

The Science Advances research article seems to be the original source—here’s the abstract:

The nature of human dispersals out of Africa has remained elusive because of the poor resolution of paleoecological data in direct association with remains of the earliest non-African people. Here, we report hominin and non-hominin mammalian tracks from an ancient lake deposit in the Arabian Peninsula, dated within the last interglacial. The findings, it is argued, likely represent the oldest securely dated evidence for Homo sapiens in Arabia. The paleoecological evidence indicates a well-watered semi-arid grassland setting during human movements into the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia. We conclude that visitation to the lake was transient, likely serving as a place to drink and to forage, and that late Pleistocene human and mammalian migrations and landscape use patterns in Arabia were inexorably linked.

It’s like the Sokal affair in reverse.

For the new study, she and 16 graduate and undergraduate students gathered nearly 20,000 photographs of raccoons across the contiguous U.S. from the community science platform iNaturalist. The team found that raccoons in urban environments had a snout that was 3.5 percent shorter than that of their rural cousins.

Or maybe people in cities take more photos of “cuter” animals?

I don’t know—Ibn al-Wardi was writing while the Black Death was ongoing, to an audience that had just experienced it first-hand. Even if he was adapting the narrative to literary conventions, it doesn’t seem like he could have distorted the events much without getting called out for it.

The paper and the phys.org article are a year old (which is maybe why it doesn’t seem so unexpected)—any guess why Popular Mechanics is only reporting on it now?

With the state of their habitat, who can blame them?

So they culture different brain tissues and blood vessels separately and then glue them together manually. Are the resulting blood vessels fully functional, such that they could keep the organoid alive indefinitely?

40% of young adults who drank in the past year

Yeah—it looks like it’s a trend among drinkers, so it says nothing about the overall drinking rate.

The only time orcas see humans is when we’re flailing practically helplessly in the water—they’re probably trying to save us from extinction.

My theory is that the inhabitants of K2-18b are deliberately flooding their atmosphere with dimethyl sulfide to make it unappealing to humans.

Of course hermaphroditic worms are one thing, and humans traits are another

Yeah, I have to keep reminding myself of that.

…after the predator instantly becomes enamored with the adorable baby quokka, and calls her own kids over to play.

Further images reveal how massive galaxies surrounded by dark matter, the invisible substance said to pervade the universe, warp space and magnify more distant galaxies behind them.

So Euclid’s images violate Euclid’s parallel postulate.

Avoiding nuclear war long enough to destroy the world with our normal economic activity.

Is your Kindle e-ink?

The general issue with e-ink-based readers and scrolling is that e-ink is designed to be mostly static, with sporadic (preferably partial-page) refreshes; but scrolling needs to have a very high refresh rate that updates the whole page simultaneously if it’s going to be usable.

So instead of a simulation, maybe we’re living inside of some other type of thing we’re hard-wired to be unable to even think of—and maybe “simulation” is the idea we’re hard-wired to replace it with.

Seems like they could have avoided this by having the Sandy Hook families join the bid with an arbitrarily high dollar amount—which they’d immediately get back as creditors.

Obligatory Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

My understanding of quantum algorithms is that they set up parallel computations in such a way that incorrect solutions cancel out and correct ones reinforce each other. They indicate the existence of multiple universes to the same extent that the double slit experiment does.

All information was passed down orally by people specially-trained to serve as “oral repositories”—in various cultures they were called bards, makars, aoidos, and various other terms. Important information was often set in verse to aid memorization.

There was a transitional period when writing and printing were used, and an even briefer period when these were supplemented by encyclopedias on CD-ROM before the birth of Wikipedia.