Sunday, June 21, 2026

The Semantic Philanthropist


Maybe there's just a hell of a lot of new words blasting out of the science cannon these days, this seems like a lot.

100 years of menus show how food can be used as a diplomatic tool to make and break political alliances
Nov 2025, phys.org

Gastronationalism - using food to create specific psychological effects and convey symbolic messages, to facilitate diplomatic negotiations, cultural exchange, and political messaging

via Basque Culinary Center: Power for dinner. Culinary diplomacy and geopolitical aspects in Portuguese diplomatic tables (1910-2023), Frontiers in Political Science (2025). DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2025.1669350


Sugars, ‘Gum,’ Stardust Found in NASA's Asteroid Bennu Samples
Dec 2025, NASA

Space Gum - polymer-like material rich in nitrogen and oxygen and never seen before in space rocks; could have helped set the stage on Earth for the ingredients of life to emerge; the same kinds of chemical groups that occur in polyurethane on Earth, making this material from Bennu something akin to a ‘space plastic.’

via NASA and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx: Furukawa, Y., Sunami, S., Takano, Y. et al. Bio-essential sugars in samples from asteroid Bennu. Nat. Geosci. 19, 19–24 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-025-01838-6


Pleasant-sounding words are easier to remember, pseudoword experiment shows
Dec 2025, phys.org

Artificial Pseudowords - non-words with no meaning (e.g., clisious, smanious, drikious); used in a scientific study about whether words have aesthetic qualities or not

via University of Vienna: Theresa Matzinger et al, Phonemic composition influences words' aesthetic appeal and memorability, PLOS One (2025). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0336597


The hexatic phase: Ultra-thin 2D materials in a state between solid and liquid observed for the first time
Dec 2025, phys.org

Hexatic Phase - When a material becomes so thin that it is practically two-dimensional, the rules of melting change dramatically. Between the solid and liquid phases, a new, exotic intermediate phase of matter can arise, known as the "hexatic phase." Ultra-thin, two-dimensional materials enabled researchers to directly observe atomic-scale melting processes. Surprisingly, the observations contradict previous predictions.

via University of Vienna: Thuy An Bui et al, Hexatic phase in covalent two-dimensional silver iodide, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adv7915.


Urban birds' beak shape rapidly changed during COVID-19 lockdowns, suggesting human-driven transformations
Dec 2025, phys.org

Anthropause - The period of global slowdown caused by COVID-19 lockdowns; it gave scientists a rare chance to see how animals physically changed when human activity suddenly decreased. (This isn't exactly new but I'm making sure you have it on your list)

via UCLA: Eleanor S. Diamant et al, Rapid morphological change in an urban bird due to COVID-19 restrictions, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2520996122


Feral AI gossip with the potential to spread damage and shame will become more frequent, researchers warn
Dec 2025, phys.org

Feral AI Gossip AKA Bot-to-Bot Gossip - After publishing an article about how emotionally manipulative chatbots can be, the New York Times reporter Kevin Roose found out chatbots were describing his writing as sensational and accusing him of poor journalistic ethics and being unscrupulous. Other AI bots have falsely detailed people's involvement in bribery, embezzlement, and sexual harassment. These gossipy AI-generated outputs cause real-world harms - reputational damage, shame, and social unrest. It's particularly dangerous, because it operates unconstrained by the social norms that moderate human gossip. (In the actual article, they define "feral" as being unconstrained by the communicative norms and evaluative standards of human-to-human gossip.)

via University of Exeter: Joel Krueger et al, AI gossip, Ethics and Information Technology (2025). DOI: 10.1007/s10676-025-09871-0 [personal note these authors use the word bullshit a little to informally for an academic paper, "these bullshit generators" 


First breathing 'lung-on-chip' developed using genetically identical cells
Dec 2025, phys.org

Lung on a Chip - Shit is moving fast; not only is it a lung on a chip, it's a breathing lung on a chip.

via The Francis Crick Institute: Chak Hon Luk et al, Autologous human iPSC-derived Alveolus-on-Chip reveals early pathological events of M. tuberculosis infection, Science Advances (2026). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aea9874.


How a miniature womb on a chip can help women struggling to conceive
Jan 2026, phys.org

Womb on a Chip - you heard it boys; AKA "endometrioids" (via "organ-oids"), human uterine cells embedded into layers of a special gel, then placed in a microfluidic chip that circulates nutrients and mimics the complex environment of the human uterus

via Chinese Academy of Sciences: Qian Li et al, A 3D in vitro model for studying human implantation and implantation failure, Cell (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2025.10.026


How AI is distorting online research, from polls to public policy
Feb 2026, phys.org

Paradata - typing speed, keystrokes and copy–paste behavior; can be analyzed as response patterns and behavioral patterns to identify non-human poll-response aka poll fraud, and which compromises much scientific data, like for example where some researchers hire Mechanical Turkers to complete a survey, but because Mechanical Turk was bought by Amazon, and they don't give a shit about either their products or their users, they let it go to shit and be overtaken by robots, Moldovan-bankrolled robots, or whatever. Bottom line is we can't tell the difference anymore and "all the data is contaminated"

via IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca and University of Cambridge: Folco Panizza et al, How to deal with the survey-taking AI agents that threaten to upend social science, Nature (2026). DOI: 10.1038/d41586-026-00386-2


Space mining without heavy machines? Microbes harvest metals from meteorites aboard space station
Feb 2026, phys.org

Biomining - Microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi can harvest crucial minerals from rocks and could provide a sustainable alternative to transporting much-needed resources from Earth; an experiment conducted aboard the International Space Station found "biomining" fungi particularly adept at extracting palladium from a meteorite in microgravity

via Cornell and University of Edinburgh: Rosa Santomartino et al, Microbial biomining from asteroidal material onboard the international space station, npj Microgravity (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41526-026-00567-3


Increase of AI bots on the Internet sparks arms race
Feb 2026, Ars Technica

GEO - generative engine optimization (the new SEO)


Light-guided 'optovolution' evolves proteins that switch states on schedule
Mar 2026, phys.org

Optovolution - uses light to guide the evolution of proteins with dynamic, multi‑state, and computational functions - making yes-or-no decisions based on specific rules

via EPFL Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne Laboratory of the Physics of Biological Systems: Light-directed evolution of dynamic, multi-state, and computational protein functionalities., Cell (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2026.02.002


Forest soil on doormats rebalances urban homes' indoor microbiome, study suggests
Mar 2026, phys.org

FaRMI Farm-home Resembling Microbiota Index - previously associated with lower asthma risk, and bacterial diversity increased, and the proportion of human-associated bacteria decreased.

via University of Eastern Finland: Martin Täubel et al, Environmental microbiota transfer from forest soil into urban homes: a proof-of-principle study, Microbiome (2026). DOI: 10.1186/s40168-026-02352-6


Lab-grown pineal gland organoids produce melatonin, offering a new sleep model
Apr 2026, phys.org

Assembloid - two or more types of organoids linked together, via the new Pineal organoids you see floating around these days

via Yale University: Ferdi Ridvan Kiral et al, Generation of human pineal gland organoids with melatonin production for disease modeling, Cell Stem Cell (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.stem.2025.12.004


Post Script:
What do we call fingerprints for robots? Like "these words have 'robot' written all over them"?
The telltale words that could identify generative AI text
Jan 2026, Ars Technica

Researchers were inspired by the way we can measure excess deaths from COVID, in this case measuring excess words that shouldn't be there. Here's a few from the list:
  • delves
  • showcasing 
  • underscores
(They don't mention it here, but I heard "nestled" is found in prpoperty listings.)

The rest are overwhelmingly “style words” like verbs, adjectives, and adverbs:
  • across
  • additionally
  • comprehensive
  • crucial
  • enhancing
  • exhibited
  • insights
  • notably
  • particularly
  • within

via University of Tubingen and Northwestern University; preprint: Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary. Dmitry Kobak. [Submitted on 11 Jun 2024 (v1), last revised 3 Jul 2025 (this version, v5)] https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2406.07016

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Saturday, June 20, 2026

Pedagogy Meet Robogogy and Data as Labor


Seen above, a humanoid ponders its existence, instead of studying for its algebra exam. 

New theory explores how workers interact with technology in the modern workplace
Sep 2025, phys.org

This is about a new theory of workplace communication; the traditional version is called Social Exchange Theory, and it says we engage with people who are rewarding, and avoid people who are costly. Your co-worker might know a lot about a certain subject, but they talk your ear off.

The new theory is called Socio-Technical Exchange, and it says we develop "machine heuristics" - "When they felt expertise was important, people often preferred a human coworker, finding coworkers more efficient and knowledgeable. However, with simple or embarrassing questions, a machine was deemed a superior collaborator."

via University of Kansas: Cameron Piercy et al, Socio-Technical Exchange with Machines: Worker Experiences with Complex Work Technologies, Human-Machine Communication (2025). DOI: 10.30658/hmc.10.3

Image credit: hahahaha


Robots learn how to move by watching themselves
Feb 2025, phys.org

"Kinematic Self-Awareness"

"We humans are intuitively aware of our body; we can imagine ourselves in the future and visualize the consequences of our actions well before we perform those actions in reality. Ultimately, we would like to imbue robots with a similar ability to imagine themselves, because once you can imagine yourself in the future, there is no limit to what you can do."

via Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science: Yuhang Hu et al, Teaching robots to build simulations of themselves, Nature Machine Intelligence (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s42256-025-01006-w


Teaching AI models the broad strokes to sketch more like humans do
Jun 2025, phys.org

Their method, called "SketchAgent," uses a multimodal language model—AI systems that train on text and images to develop a "sketching language" in which a sketch is translated into a numbered sequence of strokes on a grid. The system was given an example of how things like a house would be drawn, with each stroke labeled according to what it represented — such as the seventh stroke being a rectangle labeled as a "front door" — to help the model generalize to new concepts.

via MIT CSAIL Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: Yael Vinker et al, SketchAgent: Language-Driven Sequential Sketch Generation, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2411.17673


Study argues online clicks and scrolls are 'thin labor' powering AI
Feb 2026, phys.org

Every time a user solves a reCAPTCHA or browses a social media feed, they provide the training data necessary for AI systems to function. Currently, tech giants extract this value without offering users any bargaining power or fair terms of engagement.

"We must decide if we are merely horses leaving digital manure behind or if we are the essential workers who build the intelligence of the future"

They advocate for the use of data unions, data strikes, and enhanced portability rights to give users a way to negotiate with massive platforms. By treating data as labor, the authors provide a framework for the public to exert collective power against the extractive practices of surveillance capitalism.

"Data strikes and data unions give the public a powerful tool to talk back to technology companies. When we act together to withhold or redirect our data, we transform from passive sources of information into a collective force that can reshape the digital economy to serve everyone, not just a few billionaires."

via Simon Fraser University and Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business: Tae Wan Kim et al, Are We Horses? Rethinking Data as Labor, Philosophy & Technology (2026). DOI: 10.1007/s13347-026-01033-4

Like for example:
Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training data
Apr 2026, Reuters


Post Script of Martin Luther King Jr Quote About Greeley Meatpackers:
"As machines replace men, we must again question whether the depth of our social thinking matches the growth of technological creativity. We cannot create machines which revolutionize industry unless we simultaneously create ideas commensurate with social and economic reorganization, which harness the power of such machines for the benefit of man...the new age will not be an era of hope but of fear and emptiness unless we master this problem. Its solution will require forthright creative social planning from the shop level up to the highest levels of government."  
--Dr. King to the United Packinghouse Workers Union of America on May 21st 1962, and in response to Thousands of workers strike at one of the largest meatpacking plants in the US, Mar 16 2026, AP News [link] 

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Friday, June 19, 2026

Surveilling the Pseudonymous


Is your bank keeping your secrets? New study says 'It's complicated'
Oct 2025, phys.org

The researchers analyzed privacy policies from more than 2,000 of the nation's largest banks and found a maze of contradictory, confusing, and overlapping disclosures about how customer information is collected, used, and shared. Nearly half of the banks examined published multiple privacy policies - often with inconsistent statements that make it hard for consumers to know what really happens to their data.

"In many cases, banks claimed they don't share customer data with outside parties in a federally required U.S. Consumer Privacy Notice, yet disclosed such sharing elsewhere or deployed marketing tracking cookies without acknowledgment"

FYI - The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act is a federal law requiring financial institutions to tell customers in a concise two-page notice how they share personal information and safeguard it.

via University of Michigan: Lu Xian et al, Layered, Overlapping, and Inconsistent: A Large-Scale Analysis of the Multiple Privacy Policies and Controls of U.S. Banks, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2507.05415



Facebook to stop targeting ads at UK woman after legal fight
Mar 2025, BBC News

Public Service Announcement - this woman does not live in the United States, so don't get any ideas; this is based on GDPR which is a UK thing.

Facebook has agreed to stop targeting adverts at an individual user using personal data after she filed a lawsuit against its parent company, tech giant Meta. ... a "gateway" for other people wanting to stop the social media company from serving them adverts based on their demographics and interests.

"I knew that this kind of predatory, invasive advertising is actually something that we all have a legal right to object to."

It was when she found out she was pregnant in 2017 that she realised the extent to which Facebook was targeting adverts at her. She said the adverts she got "suddenly started changing within weeks to lots of baby photos and other things - ads about babies and pregnancy and motherhood". "I just found it unnerving - this was before I'd even told people in my private life, and yet Facebook had already determined that I was pregnant," she continued.

(This goes back to stories about Target from way earlier, 2011 even.)

Ms O'Carroll said that Meta had agreed to stop using her personal data for direct marketing purposes. She said that she did not want to stop using Facebook, saying that it is "filled with all of those connections and family and friends, and entire chapters of my life".


Facebook and Instagram have a subscription service in most of Europe, where users can pay monthly so that they don't get ads on the platform.


How AI could end online anonymity
Mar 2026, phys.org

First, the AI reads through a user's post history on either Reddit or Hacker News, examining unstructured text. This is raw, unorganized information like comments, jokes, education, and subtle writing quirks. It then turned this micro-data into a mathematical representation of the person's profile to find candidate matches across millions of other profiles on the open web or on separate sites like LinkedIn.

They successfully linked accounts with up to 67% accuracy at 90% precision, costing only $1 to $4 in computing power per account successfully linked.

"Pseudonymity does not provide meaningful protection online. Users who post under persistent usernames should assume that adversaries can link their accounts to real identities or to each other, and that the probability rises with each piece of micro-data they post."

via ETH Zurich: Simon Lermen et al, Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs, arXiv (2026). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2602.16800


Your car's tire sensors could be used to track you
Feb 2026, phys.org 

From the article itself: Although not providing the exact location of the tire or the car, researchers have discovered that most TPMS sensors transmit a unique identifier in clear text that never changes during the lifetime of the tire. ... malicious actors could easily scale their efforts to track several thousands of cars, given that we observed at least 20k cars during our measurements. Our results show that TPMS transmissions can be used to systematically infer potentially sensitive information such as the presence, type, weight, or driving pattern of the driver.

via IMDEA Networks Institute: Can't Hide Your Stride: Inferring Car Movement Patterns from Passive TPMS Measurements [pdf]

Further Reading, because we already knew about this back in 2007:
  • I. Rouf, R. Miller, H. Mustafa, T. Taylor, S. Oh, W. Xu, M. Gruteser, W. Trappe, I. Seskar, Security and privacy vulnerabilities of in-car wireless networks: A tire pressure monitoring system case study, in: 19th USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Association, Washington, DC, USA, 2010, pp. 323–338.
  • S. Velupillai, L. Guvenc, Tire pressure monitoring [applications of control], IEEE Control systems magazine 27 (6) (2007) 22–25.
  • FCC, OET List Exhibits Report ID: MRXFG2R4MA (2011). 

Public Service Announcement: Can you spot the difference between these two urls?



^Anytime you see "%20" in a url, it's probably a mistake; it's what happens when you paste a truncated url (where either you or your smart-auto-assistant put a line break in the middle because it was too long) and then you go and paste that url, with the line breaks, into the search bar; anywhere there's a line break, the computer puts %20's instead. Take them out and it still works. 


Post Script on Anti Surveillance:
Graffiti framework lets people personalize online social spaces while staying connected with others
Oct 2025, phys.org

It's an app called Graffiti (I hate all these names being such generic terms that could be referring to something else; like why would you call your company Company, or your restaurant Breakfast?) - the app makes building personalized social applications easier, while allowing users to migrate between multiple applications without losing their friends or data. ... the purpose is to lower the barrier to creating personalized social applications and to enable those personalized applications to interoperate without requiring permission from developers.

The open, interoperable nature of Graffiti means no one entity has the power to set a moderation policy for the entire platform.

"The system lets each person pick their own moderators, avoiding the one-sized-fits-all approach to moderation taken by the major social platforms"

To avoid context collapse (your Tindr profile showing up on LinkedIn), the researchers designed Graffiti so all content is organized into distinct channels. Channels are flexible and can represent a variety of contexts, such as people, applications, locations, etc.

via MIT CSAIL Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: Theia Henderson et al, Graffiti: Enabling an Ecosystem of Personalized and Interoperable Social Applications, Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (2025). DOI: 10.1145/3746059.3747627

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Thursday, June 18, 2026

Straight Bernays


"What is truly vicious is not propaganda, but a monopoly of it."
-Edward Bernays, 1952

I'm not sure why people hate Edward Bernays so much. Especially Americans. In America, the economy itself relies on people being brainwashed into spending their money on stuff they don't need. "Disposable income" it's called, and it's the basis for the consumer economy that apparently gives America its edge. Without "engineering the consent" of an entire population, we wouldn't have teflon or wall-to-wall carpet. And we wouldn't all be living the American dream of freedom from tyranny, you know, protection against authoritarian overreach like warrantless wiretapping, or more terrible things like being kidnapped off the street into an unmarked van. We wouldn't all have access to free health care, or cars and cheap gas so we can dissolve the social fabric by driving away from our friends and families, towards better economic opportunities that distort the value of our labor, and exploit our social capital leaving us alone, depressed and financially insecure. I thought we like all those things, yet we don't like Bernays. I thought we like surveillance advertising; it's cute to think that someone cares so much about you they're logging your location every 5 seconds throughout the day and plotting it against all the other people you're co-located with so they can sell you lipstick to make you look better, because I'm sorry to have to say this but you don't look that great right now, and could use some help, and we're here to help. Edward Barnays is here to help. Why are you resisting?

"People must want cleanliness before they want soap."
-Also Edward Bernays

(AKA "People must forget how to use a frying pan before they want teflon")

Finally, I'm paraphrasing here, on how to change people's minds:
People hold no allegiance to beliefs. They hold allegiance to other people, authorities who espouse those beliefs. These are two different things. To change one's beliefs, therefore, one must either discredit the authority or create new authorities. Discrediting the beliefs does not work.

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026

Network Science 4th Dimension


Last installment of the network science series. Forget the AI takeover, we're already mindless automatons (but don't tell the free will enthusiasts).

A physics explanation shows why US elections keep ending 50:50—and why more spending won't change that
Apr 2026, phys.org

A spending threshold in US House races of roughly 1.8 million USD per campaign limits outcomes. Below it, social dynamics shape outcomes. Above it — on both sides — elections systematically trend toward a draw, no matter how much either party ultimately spends, while driving polarization higher. ... When both parties spend over 1.8 million USD, social influence becomes negligible and the election very often ends in a close race.

Further, on incumbents: The researchers put a number on this structural advantage. Even if the incumbent spends nothing, a challenger must invest roughly 140,000 USD just to neutralize the baseline incumbency effect. When the incumbent spends around 900,000 USD, the challenger still faces a disadvantage equivalent to about 20% of total campaign cost, purely as a consequence of the system's phase structure, not the incumbent's individual qualities.

via Complexity Science Hub Vienna: Jan Korbel et al, Empirical Validation of the Polarization Transition in a Double-Random Field Model of Elections, Physical Review Letters (2026). DOI: 10.1103/9gjj-1df6. 

On arXiv: DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2510.00612

Image credit: A fungus Talaromyces purpureogenus known for its red, diffused pigment
Wim van Egmond - Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition - 2025


From public kissing to talking during movies, a simple formula predicts moral norms across cultures
Apr 2026, phys.org

"An implication of our simple formula is that norms for one behavior can inform us about norms for a very different behavior. For example, the more okay it is to kiss in the street (a behavior that elicits concerns about purity), expect it to be less okay to beat children (which instead elicits concerns about harm)."

Moral Flavors Model = TC(B) + MF(B) x MT(S) 
  • TC - total concern that behavior B is seen to elicit
  • MF - moral flavor either individualizing type (harm, fairness) or binding type (purity, authority, loyalty)
  • MT - moral taste measures emphasis of individualizing concerns over binding concerns

via Institute for Future Studies in Sweden: Kimmo Eriksson et al, Same flavours, different taste buds: a theory for predicting social norms for specific behaviours across cultures, Journal of the Royal Society Interface (2026). DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2025.1122.

Post Script - List of Morally Contentious Behaviors
  • claiming government benefits to which you are not entitled
  • avoiding a fare on public transport
  • stealing property
  • cheating on taxes
  • accepting a bribe 
  • homosexuality
  • prostitution
  • abortion
  • divorce
  • sex before marriage
  • suicide
  • euthanasia
  • for a man to beat his wife
  • parents beating children
  • violence against other people
  • terrorism as a political, ideological or religious mean
  • having casual sex
  • political violence
  • the death penalty
--World Values Survey Wave 7 data (2017–2021) for 42 societies; Minkov M, Kaasa A. 2022 Do dimensions of culture exist objectively? A validation of the revised Minkov-Hofstede model of culture with World Values Survey items and scores for 102 countries. J. Int. Manag. 28, 100971. doi:10.1016/j.intman.2022.100971


How deceptive content reached millions of voters during the 2020 US elections
Apr 2026, phys.org

(Note that Facebook was directly involved in this research, so assume you are being intentionally deceived by this data, at least to some extent, and in an attempt to make Facebook look better than they are)

They focused on 49 deceptive networks that targeted adult Facebook and Instagram users in the US during the 2020 election, both disincentivized networks of users who engaged in inaccurate political discourse and financially motivated networks disseminating content that is largely dismissed as spam or clickbait. 13 out of the 49 identified were "coordinated inauthentic behavior networks", and the remaining 36 networks were found to be financially motivated (by advertising). They were organized by characteristics like where they originated, how many accounts they ran, and what they posted about, as well as by activity and reach.

The networks were measured to have reached about 40 million users, or 15% of the overall network, and were highly concentrated - only 3 of the 49 networks accounted for over 70% of all the users reached. One of which was an account called "Rally Forge' created in the US. (It's really fucking frustrating, in this case for example, to try and get the list of the ** other 2 ** networks, but we can't because it's behind a paywall; a paywall that we already paid for with our tax dollars. And yet we then turn around and give it all away for free to the same companies so they can gobble it up into their too fat, too slow, and too stupid artificial intelligence engines.)

So anyway, here's the important part:
Networks reached most of their audience not directly, but because ordinary users — people unaffiliated with the networks — reshared their content. The network with the highest reach, for example, reached about 1.3 million users directly, but 13 million indirectly through reshares by ordinary users. (That's 10 times more people, for the mathematically challenged among us) ... They suggest that interventions that only target deceptive networks might be insufficient, as regular users are also contributing to the dissemination of misleading content.

So, if you are one of these impact layer people who get hit first, and none of us could really know if that's us because the inauthentic group networks are hidden by design, then by simply using the platform, ie sharing articles with your friends, you are doing up to ten times the work of the company, the group, trying to advertise or influence - we are literally working for them, for free, by taking the attention of our friends and giving it to them, so we are exploiting our own social network for their benefit, likely lessening our own social capital for their increasing financial capital 

One last thing:
Interestingly, the researchers observed that financially motivated networks, which some previous studies dismissed or considered less impactful in the context of elections, produced a substantial amount of political content. Moreover, the content they disseminated often reached far more users than the posts shared across politically motivated networks. (In other words, election financing things like Citizens United, where anyone, anywhere, using otherwise hidden money, also called dark money, can purchase otherwise democratic election campaigns and the candidates they support.)

via Stanford University, Meta, University of Pennsylvania: Ruth E. Appel et al, How deceptive online networks reached millions in the US 2020 elections, Nature Human Behaviour (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02435-2.


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Tuesday, June 16, 2026

Network Science 3rd Dimension


Continuing the network science installment, this group of articles reveals some of the more nefarious considerations, and even applications, of the scientific method in the employ of manipulating human activity at a large scale. 

Sharper brains switch to a 'not what you know, but who you know' mindset online and on social media, study shows
May 2026, phys.org

It's pretty fascinating - The irony of how social media platforms literally need you to be less social in order to engage with more content, almost like it's content vs people - almost like it's financial capital vs social capital, and we are being influenced to give up the social capital for sure. The more of your social capital I can take from you, the less you will be able to avoid my taking your financial capital. It's how I drink your milkshake, as they say. 

It seems the problem is that in the end, we the users of social media applications somehow end up with less of both. 

"When you follow someone on LinkedIn, join a Facebook group, or become a member of an online community, you might assume you will learn more about the content they share. Paradoxically, our study suggests the opposite happens, as individuals channel their mental energy away from knowledge gathering to mapping the social landscape, noting people's individual connections and the wider network.

"Interestingly, this shift was exhibited more among people with greater working memory capacity, so the sharper you are cognitively the more likely you are to tune that content out."

The research involved around 1,000 adults aged between 18 and 77 across five experiments. In each study, participants engaged with simulated social media environments, such as joining groups, following pages, or becoming friends with others. Their exposure to content, as well as their memory for both content ("who knows what") and social connections ("who knows who"), was then assessed.

"This pattern reflects a cognitive trade-off. Rather than encoding information itself, individuals increasingly track who possesses the information. It indicates that people engage with and use the social network like an external hard drive for the brain." 

"The strength of this switch also appears to be determined by working memory capacity. Individuals with higher working memory capacity showed a more than 50% reduction in content recall, but a dramatic increase (over 150%) in accuracy in tracking social connections after forming connections to others. 

University of Bristol, University at Buffalo, State University of New York: Esther Kang et al, Tracking connections, not content: How working memory shapes content and social learning in online networks, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2026.104925

Image credit: Slime mold Arcyria major releasing spores by Henri Koskinen - Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition - 2025


The 'private solution trap': Why richer countries may favor adaptation over public solutions, and who pays
Mar 2026, phys.org

The Private Solution Trap - Participants given higher budgets (representing wealthier nations) consistently contributed more to private solutions (like flood mitigation) than those given lower budgets, while they also contributed proportionally less to public solutions (reducing greenhouse gases). Inequality within groups therefore dramatically increased over the course of the game.

"The data clearly shows this is a problem that exists above culture."
 
via University of Nottingham: Eugene Malthouse et al, The private solution trap in collective action problems across 34 nations, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2504632123


Scientists call out health-harming corporations driving rise in chronic disease
Mar 2026, phys.org

This is straight memetics, and how ideas spread, or don't spread, and how to modulate that spread:

Globally, five commercial products are key factors in 31% of all deaths each year:
8m - Fossil fuels
7m - Tobacco 
2m - Ultra-processed foods
2m - Chemicals used in commerce and pesticides
2m - Alcohol

"Clinicians, the public, the media and policymakers need to understand that these health-harming industries all apply the same set of tactics used by 'Big Tobacco' to create uncertainty about the harms of their products, delay regulation and therefore continue to profit from their sale"

via University of Sydney and the Center to End Corporate Harm at UC San Francisco: Corporations as Vectors of Noncommunicable Disease—Using Internal Industry Documents to Identify Preventive Strategies, New England Journal of Medicine (2026). DOI: 10.1056/NEJMms2507028


Can you trust a finding? A new project maps which studies replicate
Mar 2026, phys.org

News about the news: Findings from the Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) program - a collaborative effort involving 865 researchers - have been published in Nature as a collection of three papers alongside a release of five additional preprints. The SCORE program offers new empirical evidence on the reproducibility, robustness, and replicability of research across the social and behavioral sciences, and the predictability of replicability.

The SCORE team sampled claims from 3,900 papers published from 2009 to 2018 in 62 journals spanning criminology, economics, education, finance, health, management, marketing, organizational behavior, psychology, political science, public administration, and sociology. These claims were subjected to a variety of methods of credibility assessment.

[This writeup also reports findings from 5 more articles that are still pre-prints]

Transparency - Data was available for only 24% of a sample of 600 assessed papers. For the 143 papers that were subjected to reproduction tests, 74% successfully reproduced at least approximately and 54% precisely. Reproducibility was highest for papers where both original data and code were shared, and lowest when reanalysis required reconstructing the original dataset from public sources.

Uncertainty - For each of 100 papers, at least five independent analysts tested the same question with the same data, applying their own decisions about how to best analyze the data. ... 74% of analyses were reported to arrive at the same conclusion as in the original investigation; 24% to no effects/inconclusive result, and 2% to the opposite effect as in the original investigation.

More - Human assessments are reasonably accurate at predicting replication outcomes, but of the automated methods of eliciting predictions from machines about the replicability of findings (Synthetic Markets, MACROSCORE, and A+), none were consistently effective. 

General Findings - For reproducibility specifically, there were substantial differences in data availability that were associated with higher reproducibility rates in Economics and Political Science compared with other fields.

led by Pennsylvania State University, TwoSix Technologies, and the University of Southern California: Visit the website for an overview of the SCORE program, via Nature. https://www.cos.io/score

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Monday, June 15, 2026

Network Science 2nd Dimension


Continuing the network science installment, this time with Hyper Fleck Information Space. 

Mate choice: How social trends influence mate diversity
Feb 2026, phys.org

If everyone performed "mate copying" behavior, then diversity would decline. This is what happens instead:

Conformity: Here, the majority follows the trend. The model shows that this can paradoxically lead to the fixation of traits that have a lower biological quality. A rarer, actually fitter type then has little chance of asserting itself against the established social trend.

Anti-conformity: If individuals deliberately copy the minority, diversity in the population remains stable.

This new model makes it possible to identify the "critical copying probability." This threshold value marks the point at which social information overrides natural selection. If around 40% of the population follows the example of other individuals when choosing a mate, a biologically inferior type can suddenly dominate the group.

The study emphasizes that evolution is not determined by genes alone. It is also shaped by the way information flows and is processed within a community. 

via University of Würzburg: Srishti Patil et al, Phenotypic polymorphism via mate copying, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2510849123

Image credit: Slime mold Arcyria denudata by Frederic Labaune - Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition - 2025


Personal change thresholds may explain why popular policies fail to spread
Mar 2026, phys.org

Some people will try a new idea the moment they hear about it. Others wait until everyone else is doing it. In survey experiments, participants repeatedly chose between options such as energy policies or messaging apps while seeing different levels of social support for each one. Based on these choices, the team estimated each participant's personal threshold for change. "This approach lets us infer individual tipping points."

Using extensive simulations on real social networks, they compared different strategies for "seeding" change. They found that strategies combining two types of information — social network structure and individual thresholds for change — consistently outperformed approaches based on only one of these factors.

In scenarios where individuals with high thresholds were less responsive to targeting, the most effective strategy was to target those individuals connected to many others who were already close to adopting the change.

In settings where targeting is costly, as in online influencer marketing, the best results came from more sophisticated algorithms that took both network structure and individual thresholds into account.

"By identifying who needs just a little nudge and how influence spreads through social networks, interventions can be designed to have a much larger impact."

via University of Zurich: Radu Tănase et al, Integrating behavioural experimental findings into dynamical models to inform social change interventions, Nature Human Behaviour (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02417-4


Bell-bottoms today, miniskirts tomorrow: Math reveals fashion's 20-year cycle
Mar 2026, phys.org

The 20-year-rule in fashion; it's true and it's here: 
Analyzing roughly 37,000 images of women's clothing spanning from 1869 to 2025, taken from the historical sewing patterns of the Commercial Pattern Archive at the University of Rhode Island, and identifying datapoints (literal points on the pictures) of eyes, neckline, waistline, hemline, feet to measure the fashion trends. 

It's one of the most comprehensive quantitative datasets of fashion ever assembled.

Also - "The system intrinsically wants to oscillate" ... and in this case, that oscillation is between the tension between wanting to stand out while still fitting in; once a style becomes too common, designers move away from it—but not so far that the clothes become unwearable.

But not anymore, apparently - One of the clearest patterns involves hemline length; skirt lengths have repeatedly shortened and lengthened; but starting in the 1980s, the data show a wider range of skirt lengths appearing at the same time, suggesting that fashion trends are becoming more fragmented, and rather than one dominant trend, niches emerge, reflecting more diversity in fashion.

via Northwestern: Emma Zajdela, "Back in Fashion: Modeling the Cyclical Dynamics of Trends," of the session "Statistical Physics of Networks and Complex Society Systems" at the American Physical Society Global Physics Summit in Denver, March 17 2026


A new way to detect breakthroughs in science: Large-scale analysis reveals 'disruptive' innovations in research history
Mar 2026, phys.org

Hyper Fleck Infospace - Using a machine-learning technique known as neural embedding, the researchers built a map of approximately 55 million scientific papers and patents. Each paper is represented by two points—one reflecting the research it built upon, another reflecting the research it inspired. When a paper is truly disruptive, these two points are far apart, meaning it redirected future research away from what came before it. Unlike other disruption indexes, it is sensitive to broader contexts and can better identify "simultaneous discoveries."

(This below is from the paper proper)

"Bibliometric Data Artifacts"

Here, we introduce an embedding-based measure that captures the extent to which a scientific work redirects the research trajectory. 

Our approach embeds each paper in a high-dimensional space reflecting its direct and indirect connections to prior and subsequent work. Just like neural language models that represent tokens and sentences as vectors, we imagine each paper as a vector that captures its intellectual “position.” We then train two distinct vectors for each paper in the same embedding space: one representing its past, or “antecedents,” context—the configuration of prior work it draws upon—and another representing its future, or “descendants,” context—the body of work it gives rise to. When a contribution substantially reshapes the trajectory connecting past to future, or initiates a new stream of research, these two contexts diverge; the distance between them therefore captures the extent to which subsequent work departs from the prior knowledge.

...As a reference point, we use the disruption index (“CD index”) (15, 16), a widely used indicator that uses the topology of local citation network. The disruption index captures how subsequent work diverges from earlier foundations, focusing on whether later papers cite the predecessors of a focal contribution through direct citation links.

...Using a dataset of more than 55 million scientific papers from the Web of Science (WoS) and the American Physical Society (APS), we show that our measure—“Embedding Disruptiveness Measure” (EDM)—provides a continuous, high-resolution view of how scientific contributions reconfigure the relationship between inherited knowledge and emerging directions. 

...If the embedding model is trained such that the proximity between the vectors indicates higher connections between their papers, and if disruptive papers tend to eclipse the future knowledge from the past, making future knowledge less rely on the past, we expect that a paper’s past and future vectors diverge as the paper’s disruptiveness increases. Thus, by quantifying the distance between these two vectors—representing the past and future context of each paper—we can estimate their disruptiveness. 

Simultaneous disruption - To understand why some of the landmark papers have such low D scores, resulting in a bimodal distribution of D, we examine the top 10 papers with the largest difference between the disruption index score D and the EDM score (delta). We found that all 10 papers are related to the notable examples of simultaneous disruption.

via State University of New York Binghamton University and Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, Luddy School of Informatics, Indiana University: Uncovering simultaneous breakthroughs with a robust measure of disruptiveness, Science Advances (2026). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adx3420


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