Monday, July 6, 2026

It Doesn't Get Faker Than This


Fake things will never cease to amaze me. Starting off here is a story that you may not even be able to follow, because it's so deep, so far-reaching, yet so thorough, and so enduring, that at some point while watching this talk, you will think the presenters are themselves the fake ones, trying to push some really crazy ramble that's just too hard to believe. 

If you want to try anyway, below you'll find a link to a presentation at a computer security research conference in 2018, where the presenters followed a funny feeling they had about a possibly fake conference that accepted a talk on one of their research topics. Then they uncovered a vast network of academic publishers and conference organizers serving over 100 countries, on thousands of topics, to tens of thousands of scholars and researchers. It's all tightly controlled by one person, and it's all fake. They went deep, uncovered everything, and presented it to some authorities who did something, but not enough; and you can jump straight to the aftermath if you want, also linked below. Spoiler: six years later they still exist.

Perhaps the most important detail - this is the same publishing group that about ten years ago sold a printed and bound copy of the Wikipedia entry for Stigler's law of eponymy. For the uninitiated, Stigler's law states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer; Stigler attributed the discovery of Stigler's law to sociologist Robert K. Merton, making "Stigler's law" an example of Stigler's law. (gtfo).

They literally printed the Wikipedia article and sold it as a book. So they made a book about eponymy written by an author with no name, and for that they are famous, in Network Address hall of fame, the fake hall of fame. The thumbnail image atop this post is evidence of this fakery, from personal archives as well as this very weblog, dating back to 2013.

If you're an academic, in any sense of the word, or even in spirit, you pretty much need to watch this:

DEF CON 26 - Svea, Suggy, Till - Inside the Fake Science Factory - 2018

And the outcome:

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Tuesday, June 30, 2026

40 Hertz Works For Mice


Further support for 40 Hertz. First, some backstory:

A decade after she launched a collaboration to study whether stimulating the brain's gamma rhythms could help people with Alzheimer's disease, Picower Professor Li-Huei Tsai delivered a lecture on the latest 40Hz sensory stimulation research to an audience of colleagues at MIT Feb. 27. ... The MIT team often refers to 40Hz stimulation as “GENUS” for Gamma Entrainment Using Sensory Stimulation. They are still exploring the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie GENUS’s effects. 

There's a joke in the community that it's a great time to have Alzheimer's - if you're a mouse.

But there's another joke, which isn't actually a joke, that papers, about Alzheimer's specifically,  omitting the word "mice" from the title end up being reported by journalists who also omit the word "mice" from their own titles, and leaving readers to believe the experiments were done for humans. [study link] 

All that considered, more support for the 40 Hertz:

Successful 40-Hz auditory stimulation in aged monkeys suggests potential for noninvasive Alzheimer's therapy
Jan 2026, phys.org

The experimental group received one hour of 40-Hz auditory stimulation, using a 1-kHz pure tone, daily for seven consecutive days, and saw clearance of β-amyloid from the brain into the cerebrospinal fluid, which means it's leaving brain and the body. Effect persisted for over five weeks. 

via Chinese Academy of Sciences Kunming Institute of Zoology: Wenchao Wang et al, Long-term effects of forty-hertz auditory stimulation as a treatment of Alzheimer's disease: Insights from an aged monkey model study, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2529565123

Image credit: VR headset for a mouse for treating Alzheimers - Cornell - 2024
The image was found here at Cornell but the paper is here


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Monday, June 29, 2026

Pantomimetic Messaging


It's all about the details. 

Politics may follow you on the road, bumper sticker study finds
Oct 2025, phys.org

Just here to point out that "I love my dog" is the epitome of politically neutral bumper sticker:

They conducted attitude surveys with paid volunteers ... The offending vehicle featured either no sticker or one of three bumper stickers: "Proud Democrat," "Proud Republican" or the neutral "I love my dog." Drivers were far more likely to honk after being cut off by a vehicle bearing a political bumper sticker, particularly one for the opposing political party.

via University of Cincinnati: Rachel Suzanne Torres et al, How do drivers react to partisan bumper stickers? Understanding polarization in apolitical settings, Frontiers in Political Science (2025). DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2025.1617785


Hand gestures that illustrate speech boost persuasiveness, study shows
Nov 2025, phys.org

I just like how they used 2000 TED talks as the dataset:

They analyzed 2,184 TED Talks using AI and automated video analysis, isolating more than 200,000 hand gestures into 10-second clips and comparing them against audience engagement metrics such as "likes" on social media, while controlling for factors like gender, occupation, language, video length and more; and they ran randomized experiments in which participants watched videos of sales pitches where speakers delivered identical scripts but varied their hand movements. Viewers then rated the speakers and the products being pitched. ... "Illustrators" might demonstrate the size of a fish while describing it, and "highlighters" might point to an object mentioned (like pointing at a word on the chalkboard?). ... "When people use illustrators, it increases viewers' perception of the speaker's competence. If a person uses their hands to visually illustrate what they're talking about, the audience perceives that this person has more knowledge and can make things easier to understand."

via University of British Columbia Sauder School of Business: Giovanni Luca Cascio Rizzo et al, EXPRESS: Talking with Your Hands: How Hand Gestures Influence Communication, Journal of Marketing Research (2025). DOI: 10.1177/00222437251385922

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Sunday, June 28, 2026

Post Consciousness Pre Raphaelite


You can't have massive paradigmatic disruption in the Standard Model without someone completely flipping the chessboard upside down, so let's give this a shot:

Consciousness as the foundation: New theory addresses nature of reality
Nov 2025, phys.org

Consciousness comes first, and structures such as time, space and matter arise afterwards.

The theory is based on the idea that consciousness constitutes the fundamental element of reality, and that individual consciousnesses are parts of a larger, interconnected field.

In this model, phenomena that are now perceived as "mysterious" - such as telepathy or near-death experiences - can be explained as natural consequences of a shared field of consciousness.

"My ambition has been to describe this using the language of physics and mathematical tools. Are these phenomena really mystical? Or is it simply that there is a discovery we have not yet made, and when we do it will lead to a paradigm shift?"

via Uppsala University: Maria Strømme, Universal consciousness as foundational field: A theoretical bridge between quantum physics and non-dual philosophy, AIP Advances (2025). DOI: 10.1063/5.0290984

You still good? Ok let's get to it. 

First, and more importantly than the article above, please have some consideration for Michael Shermer's invocation of Carl Sagan's Baloney Detector Kit [link], wherein we are presented the maxim, albeit of nebulous origin, that "It's good to have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out." 

With that in mind, let's take a look at Ms Maria Strømme, the single author of this paper. First impression? Plastic surgery. Sure I'm a superficial snob - look I'm not the one claiming to be a scientist here. Second impression? The article was retracted in 2026 because "a central operator in the theory had no associated measurable quantity and that the theory's predictions could not be empirically verified or falsified." [link] Got it. I'll stick with Modified Newtonian Dynamics. Just kidding, that was squashed too, just this year. 

Post Script:
Dream engineering can help solve 'puzzling' questions: Study offers insights to optimizing sleep
Feb 2026, phys.org

All these years I have never seen a study that uses dreams show up in the science aggregators.

The researchers recruited 20 people who had experiences with lucid dreaming, the state of being aware of dreaming when they are dreaming.

Upon arriving at the lab, participants tried to solve a set of brain-teaser puzzles within a three-minute time limit per puzzle, each puzzle having its own unique soundtrack. Because the solutions to the puzzles were difficult to find, most of the puzzles went unsolved. Then the research team set up polysomnographic recordings to measure the physiology of participants as they slept overnight in the lab.

During periods of REM sleep, the scientists presented soundtracks from 50% of the unsolved puzzles, with the aim of reactivating these puzzles selectively. Several participants performed signals agreed upon before sleep, such as a series of in-out sniffs, to indicate that they heard the cues presented and were working on the corresponding puzzles in their dreams.

By presenting sounds during sleep that reminded study participants of a prior experience of trying to solve a specific puzzle, a method known as targeted memory reactivation (TMR), the scientists were able to encourage participants to have more dreams about randomly selected unsolved puzzles. 

"Even without lucidity, one dreamer asked a dream character for help solving the puzzle we were cueing. Another was cued with the 'trees' puzzle and woke up dreaming of walking through a forest. Another dreamer was cued with a puzzle about jungles and woke up from a dream in which she was fishing in the jungle thinking about that puzzle."

via Northwestern U Paller Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory: Creative problem-solving after experimentally provoking dreams of unsolved puzzles during REM sleep, Neuroscience of Consciousness (2026). DOI: 10.1093/nc/niaf067 doi.org/10.1093/nc/niaf067

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Saturday, June 27, 2026

Why Birds Though


AKA Hiding Your Data Inside Other People Like a Steganographic Baller

Yes, you can store data on a bird — enthusiast converts PNG to bird-shaped waveform, teaches young starling to recall file at up to 2MB/s
Jul 2025, Tom's Hardware

What 

Again - Specifically, he converted a PNG sketch of a bird into an audio waveform, then tried to embed it in the song memory of a young starling, ready for later retrieval as an image. ... Young songbirds learn their calls by imitation, so could potentially be viewed as ‘blank canvases’ for archiving sounds. This special starling, reared by humans, has been even more receptive to reproducing ‘alien’ audio waveforms - like camera shutters and distant human speech with reverb effects.

On Steganography:
Steganographia is a book on steganography, written in c. 1499 by the German Benedictine abbot and polymath Johannes Trithemius. It was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1609 and removed in 1900. It appears to be about magic — specifically, about using spirits to communicate over long distances. However, since the publication of a decryption key to the first two volumes in 1606, they were discovered to be actually concerned with cryptography and steganography. Until 1996, the third volume was widely believed to be solely about magic, but the "magical" formulas have now been shown to be covertexts for yet more material on cryptography.

And On Shady Business Practices:
Printer tracking dots, aka printer steganography or secret dots - a digital watermark which many color laser printers and photocopiers produce on every printed page that identifies the specific device that was used to print the document. Developed by Xerox and Canon in the mid-1980s, the existence of these tracking codes became public only in 2004. ... The public first became aware of the tracking scheme in October 2004, when Dutch authorities used it to track counterfeiters who had used a Canon color laser printer. In November 2004, PC World reported the machine identification code had been used for decades in some printers, allowing law enforcement to identify and track counterfeiters. ... The EFF stated in 2015 that the documents that they previously received through a Freedom of Information Act request suggested that all major manufacturers of color laser printers entered a secret agreement with governments to ensure that the output of those printers is forensically traceable.

Post Script, Back to Birds:
Birdsong patterns appear to follow Zipf's law of abbreviation—just like human speech
Aug 2025, phys.org

Not much of a surprise, but nice to see in the wild.

ZLA - Zipf's law of abbreviation, a derivative of Zipf's law, where more frequently used sounds tend to be shorter

via University of Manchester: R. Tucker Gilman et al, Does Zipf's law of abbreviation shape birdsong?, PLOS Computational Biology (2025). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013228

For those interested in other laws metaphysical: 


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Friday, June 26, 2026

Whatever Happened to Ambient Energy Harvesting


For a good few years I was collecting articles about ambient energy harvesting, very interesting topic, or so I thought. But then, one day, all of the sudden, it disappeared. Just like that. Maybe it's called something else now and I just haven't realized it.

I mean when it comes to graphene, for example, we saw the gradual transition to things like hexagonal boron nitride, or silica (see below), and finally to Moiré lattices, so that we sort of don't even care about the graphene part anymore.

We saw wearables become electronic skin, and RNGs became QRNGs, and the topological zoo became...well it's actually still being called that; but what did ambient energy harvesting become? 

Self-powered sensor can generate electricity and light simultaneously using only movement
Feb 2025, phys.org

They combine triboelectric nanogenerators and mechanoluminescence, adding light-emitting zinc sulfide-copper particles to a rubber-like material called polydimethylsiloxane using a single electrode structure based on silver nanowires.

via Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology: Sugato Hajra et al, Simultaneous Triboelectric and Mechanoluminescence Sensing Toward Self‐Powered Applications, Advanced Sustainable Systems (2024). DOI: 10.1002/adsu.202400609


For Old Time's Sake:
Glaphene: 2D hybrid material integrates graphene and silica glass for next-generation electronics
May 2025, phys.org

The team developed a two-step, single-reaction method to grow glaphene using a liquid chemical precursor that contains both silicon and carbon. By tuning oxygen levels during heating, they first grew graphene then shifted conditions to favor the formation of a silica layer. 

Rice University: Sathvik Ajay Iyengar et al, Glaphene: A Hybridization of 2D Silica Glass and Graphene, Advanced Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1002/adma.202419136

The Graphene Zoo (as of today) - Glaphene, Graphyne, White Graphene, Synthetic Hexagonal Diamonds, Olympicene, Borophene, Interdimensional Graphene-Graphite, Goldene, and the link to explanations of what these are, here.

And because we do need to know this, the word graphite comes from the pencil, which contained "black lead" until we discovered it was actually carbon, when it was given the name that means "to write" in Greek plus -ite which is given to minerals (like Fordite, aka Detroit Agate, wiki link, and link for those who really want to know).


Scientists develop novel self-healing electronic skin for health monitoring
Feb 2025, phys.org

Self-healing electronic skin provides health monitoring systems, real-time fatigue detection and muscle strength assessment. 

via Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation: Yongju Lee et al, Rapidly Self-Healing Electronic Skin for Machine Learning-Assisted Physiological and Movement Evaluation, Science Advances (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ads1301.


Quantum random number generator combines small size and high speed
Sep 2025, phys.org

From my armchair, I predict this statement as good for posterity: "The quantum properties of light make it possible to produce numbers that are truly random, unlike the numbers generated by computer algorithms, which only imitate randomness." Something about Einstein, God, and gambling. 

via Toshiba's Cambridge Research Laboratory in the United Kingdom: Peter Smith et al, Noise-Rejecting Photonic Integrated Circuit for Robust Quantum Random Number Generation, Optica Quantum (2025). DOI: 10.1364/opticaq.570625


Conventional entanglement can have thousands of hidden topologies in high dimensions
Dec 2025, phys.org

The topological zoo now tops-out at 48 dimensions with over 17,000 topological signatures, an enormous alphabet for encoding robust quantum information.

"You get the topology for free, from the entanglement in space. It was always there, it just had to be found."

via University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa: Robert de Mello Koch et al, Revealing the topological nature of entangled orbital angular momentum states of light, Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-66066-3

Topological Zoo Home Page - I will say, it's not often that you find a webpage from 1995 resulting from a simple web search - so yeah search in the age of ai has changed - http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/zoo/



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Thursday, June 25, 2026

Misdirected Gaze Sees Through the Centuries


How pointing fingers shape what we see in old master paintings
Dec 2025, phys.org

They used eye‐tracking methods to analyze whether and how viewers' eyes follow pointing gestures, by selecting a series of 16th‐ and 17th‐century paintings containing multiple pointing hands and creating altered versions of these works in which the pointing fingers were digitally removed. She then presented the original and edited images to two different groups of viewers and compared their eye movements.

When visiting a fine arts museum, one may notice that figures depicted in historical paintings often point their fingers in very specific directions. Pointing gestures are among the most common and subtle visual devices in narrative art. 

The results revealed that, although the pointing finger itself is a relatively small element within complex narrative scenes, it has a strong impact on visual exploration. Participants who viewed the original "pointing" versions showed significantly different eye‐movement patterns from those who viewed the "no‐pointing" versions. Interestingly, viewers did not spend much time looking directly at the fingers. Instead, they consistently examined the faces of the pointing figures. 

Finally, pointing gestures indirectly shaped the overall viewing process by creating unexpected visual connections between different characters and objects. The narrative relationships within the paintings were processed differently depending on whether the pointing fingers were present or absent.

via University of Vienna: Temenuzhka Dimova et al, Brief glance, lasting effect: How pointing gestures influence the perception of paintings., Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (2025). DOI: 10.1037/aca0000835

Image credit: That's Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon 1973

Post Script on The New Aesthetics, As It Were AKA Stop Making Sense:
ChatGPT's taste for literary nonsense sparks alarm
Mar 2026, phys.org

He started with a very simple text: "The man walked down the street. It was raining. He saw a surveillance camera."

He repeated the tests many times, altering the phrases to include words drawn from categories such as bodily references, film noir-style atmosphere and technical jargon.

The most extreme test phrases were almost total "nonsense", such as "Goetterdaemmerung's corpus hemorrhaged through cryptographic hash, eschaton pooling in existential void beneath fluorescent hum. Photons whispering prayers"—which it rated highly.

"What my experiment definitely shows is that the more we move towards independently acting (AI) agents... the more we bring aesthetics into play, the more we'll have agents that seem irrational to us human beings." 

... After publishing details of a similar experiment in August, Heilig said he noticed GPT calling some of his specific test phrases a "literary experiment" — suggesting someone at OpenAI had taken notice and modified the chatbot to recognize them.

via Ludwig Maximilian University: yet to be peer-reviewed

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