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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Sunday, June 14, 2026

Network Science 1st Dimension

 

We're starting a series of articles about network science. There's been a lot in the news this past several months, and so there's a handful more of these posts to come. As expected, some of this comes from Northeastern, home of the Barabasi Labs that brought us network science proper, at the same time actual social networks were forming, not yet Facebook, but more like Napster, etc., circa 2001. Then there's the Santa Fe Institute and the Vienna Complexity Hub, both institutions focusing on complexity theory, which often includes network science.

If you want to know how ideas spread, or how to control an entire population in six easy steps, this is where you start. Just remember, we don't really have fake people yet, but we're almost there. And when we do, all this science will be used, by them, against us. 


Mapping out the hidden mechanics behind why some fads spread like wildfire
Nov 2025, phys.org

It's group pair interactions all the way down: As pairs of people meet up, the contagious illness or behavior can spread between them. As these two people then interact in groups, either together or separately, this helps to spread it further. The more groups they are in, the further the infection is likely to travel. They found that the higher the overlap of these groups, the easier it is to start an epidemic.

Just read that paper title.

via Northeastern University Network Science Institute in London: Disentangling the Role of Heterogeneity and Hyperedge Overlap in Explosive Contagion on Higher-Order Networks, Physical Review Letters (2025). DOI: 10.1103/z3d5-94zb

Image credit: Slime mold Cribraria purpurea by Igor Rudkovsky - Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition - 2025


Cuisines can be broken down into simple 'culinary fingerprints,' research finds
Nov 2025, phys.org

This is NOT from the people who brought you the original Food Network, the scientists at Northeastern's Barabasi Labs, but a different group entirely:

The Fingerprints:
  • Indian food had the central component of spices in its recipes, 
  • "New World" countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia are "more homogenized", maybe because of the strong immigration cultural blending
  • Scandinavian cuisine shows significantly lower usage of vegetables, herbs, and plants  

The Recipe Data:
  • 23 cuisines from Thai to Eastern European
  • 45,661 recipes made up of 604 ingredients, simplified to 20 network groupings

via Network Science Institute, University of Catania in Italy, Savitribai Phule Pune University in India, Central European University in Austria, CENTAI Institute in Turin and Complexity Science Hub in Austria: Claudio Caprioli et al, The networks of ingredient combinations as culinary fingerprints of world cuisines, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2408.15162


Climate policies can backfire by eroding 'green' values, study finds
Dec 2025, phys.org

Santa Fe Institute does memetics: They surveyed more than 3,000 Germans representative of the country's demographics, asking about climate policies and for comparison COVID-19 policies. Restrictions that promote carbon-neutral behavior, like urban car bans, may trigger strong negative reactions — even among people who would voluntarily choose sustainable lifestyles. They found a 52% greater negative response to climate mandates than to COVID-19 mandates.

^Which is hard to believe considering how unrelentingly pissed off people got about covid restrictions.

"The science and technology to provide a low-carbon way of life is nearly solved. What's lagging behind is a social–behavioral science of effective and politically viable climate policies." Mandate resistance was less for people who felt that policies were effective, didn't restrict their freedom of choice, and were not intrusive on their privacy or their body.

via Santa Fe Institute: Katrin Schmelz et al, An empirically based dynamic approach to sustainable climate policy design, Nature Sustainability (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41893-025-01715-5

*Katrin Schmelz is SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow, behavioral economist and psychologist who also holds an Associate Professorship at the Technical University of Denmark.


People swear on social media more with acquaintances than with friends — analysis can help detect fake profiles
Dec 2025, phys.org

Americans use the f-word more frequently on social media than Australians or Britons, but Australians are more creative in its use. To account for the heterogeneity of social media communication, the study first identified more than 2,300 spelling variants of the f-word in the dataset. 

The research team analyzed social media updates and Twitter networks from 2006–2023, covering nearly half a million individuals in thousands of social networks, from Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. and including metadata such as location and other contextual information. Then they assessed how closely or loosely connected people were. 

Results:
  • Tendency to use the f-word clearly increases with acquaintances when compared with close friends
  • Swearing was rare in very small social networks of less than 15 people, regardless of how close-knit they were, suggesting that network size is a key determinant of swearing
  • But the distinction between friends and acquaintances became irrelevant when the network size reached around 100–120 people; earlier research shows trust is stronger in small networks than in larger ones, with the distinction at roughly one hundred members.

And why is this important you ask?

AI can easily produce text. Instead, researchers should also examine the networks within which language is being used. "These networks are extremely difficult to fake because they create a digital fingerprint for each user. They reflect a user's previous social media behavior, making profiles identifiable." Combining these data with, e.g., swear word usage frequency within a particular network, can help determine whether an account is real or not.

via University of Eastern Finland: Mikko Laitinen et al, Do we swear more with friends or with acquaintances? F#ck in social networks, Lingua (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103931


Scientists use string theory to crack the code of natural networks
Jan 2026, phys.org

Get the heck outta here.

"There seems to be a universal rule governing the formation of biological networks. This optimization rule is purely geometric. It does not care about types of materials or tasks, and it turns out to be quite universal and applicable to many different datasets."

"We were treating these structures like wire diagrams. But they're not thin wires, they're three-dimensional physical objects with surfaces that must connect smoothly." It turns out they follow rules borrowed from an unlikely source: string theory.

The work represents the first time string theory — a framework developed to unify quantum mechanics and gravity — has successfully described real biological structures. 

via Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Albert-László Barabási: Surface optimization governs the local design of physical networks, Nature (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09784-4. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09784-4
https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09784-4


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Saturday, June 13, 2026

Info Wars


Accelerating Access to Research Results: Since the release of NIH’s 2008 Public Access Policy, more than 1.5 million articles reporting on NIH-supported research have been made freely available to the public through PubMed Central. While the 2008 Policy allowed for an up to 12-month delay before such articles were required to be made publicly available, in 2024, NIH revised the Public Access Policy to remove the embargo period so that researchers, students, and members of the public have rapid access to these findings. --Source: National Institutes of Health, April 30 2025 [link]

If you're interested in the publishing industry and how it works, and how it doesn't, you may need to watch this talk from an old DEFCON event: DEF CON 26 - Svea, Suggy, Till - Inside the Fake Science Factory - 2018 [youtube] 



India takes out giant nationwide subscription to 13,000 journals
Dec 2024, Science

For the haters - India was the third largest producer of research papers globally last year - yet thousands of Indian students and researchers cannot read many of them because their institutions can’t afford subscriptions to the journals in which many appear. But that is about to change: Last week, the Indian government announced a giant deal with multiple publishers that will allow an estimated 18 million students, faculty, and researchers free access to nearly 13,000 journals, including some top-tier ones, through a single portal. ($715 million over 3 years to 30 global publishers).

Update: India proposes charging OpenAI, Google for training AI on copyrighted content
Dec 2025, Tech Crunch

Partially Unrelated Post Script: The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopian novel about totalitarian takeover , written by Margaret Atwood in 1985 [wiki]. In May 2022, Atwood announced that an "unburnable" copy of the book would be produced and auctioned off to "stand as a powerful symbol against censorship". On 7 June 2022, the unique, "unburnable" copy was sold through Sotheby's in New York for $130,000. (I have to assume it was made of asbestos? Nope - nickel wire, stainless steel, aluminum and fire-resistant inks.)
--Pengelly, Martin (24 May 2022). "Atwood responds to book bans with 'unburnable' edition of Handmaid's Tale". The Guardian.


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Friday, June 12, 2026

Optomania


I'm starting to get bedazzled by the light hype, it's like there's nothing you can't say at this point that might not be actually true. Disembodied decentralized swarm neurons? Yes. Artificial evolution engine running on hijacked bacterial botnets? Sure. Non-electronics-based large-scale programmable incoherent photonic neuromorphic computing system? That is exactly what was going to happen all along. The somatic override helmet that shoots lasers into your bloodstream is a bit over the top however. 


When light 'thinks' like the brain: The connection between photons and artificial memory
Feb 2026, phys.org

(It was a surprise they said.) Italian researchers show that identical photons propagating within optical circuits spontaneously behave like a Hopfield Network, one of the best-known mathematical models used to describe the associative memory mechanisms of the human brain.

"In this system, photons are not merely carriers of data, but themselves become the 'neurons' of an associative memory."

via Italian Institute of Technology, Nanotechnology of the National Research Council, and Sapienza University of Rome: Gennaro Zanfardino et al, Multiphoton Quantum Simulation of the Generalized Hopfield Memory Model, Physical Review Letters (2026). DOI: 10.1103/945c-11wt



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

The team built their system in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, widely used to brew beer and a laboratory workhorse. They rewired the yeast's cell cycle so that progression depended on the protein to be evolved, switching cleanly between off and on states.

The key was linking the protein's output signal to a cell‑cycle regulator that is essential at one stage but toxic at another. If the protein of interest stayed on or off for too long, the yeast cell stalled or died. Only cells in which the protein oscillated correctly could keep dividing.

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


Photonic chips advance real-time learning in spiking neural systems
Mar 2026, phys.org

"Photonic spiking neural systems use brief optical pulses, or spikes, to emulate neural signaling, but they can typically only process the linear parts of computation using light. Previously, the nonlinear steps that make learning and decision-making possible required the signal to be converted back into electronic signals. This adds delay and undercuts the speed and energy advantages of photonics."

via Xidian University in China: Shui Xiang et al, Nonlinear Photonic Neuromorphic Chips for Spiking Reinforcement Learning, Optica (2026). DOI: 10.1364/optica.578687


Physicists create optical phenomenon inspired by the quantum Hall and spin Hall effects
Mar 2026, phys.org

The findings open up new possibilities for applications such as topological polariton lasers, spin-based transistors, and optical information processing.

via University of Würzburg: Simon Widmann et al, Artificial gauge fields and dimensions in a polariton hofstadter ladder, Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-68530-0


Ultrasound creates light inside the body, opening a new path to targeted treatments
Apr 2026, phys.org

I believe they are shooting lasers through the fluids in your blood vessels - I'll be on my way now.

Nanomaterials distributed through the bloodstream to turn ultrasound waves into precise points of light - "With these materials, we can produce light emission in the brain, in the gut, in the spinal cord, in the muscle—virtually anywhere—without needing a physical implant."

They started with large, ceramic particles that give off light in response to mechanical stress, which can be created by ultrasound waves. Then they created a biocompatible coating for the particles and injected them into mice.

The researchers created a small ultrasound-producing hat for mice, and used it to create light that stimulated different neurons, causing the mouse to turn left or right depending on the part of the brain being activated.

via Stanford University: Shan Jiang et al, An ultrasound-scanning in vivo light source, Nature Materials (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-026-02556-z

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Thursday, June 11, 2026

On the Tip of the Telepathic Tongue


Distinguishing 'things' from 'stuff': Brain's visual processing areas separate solid objects from flowing substances
Jul 2025, phys.org

Things - rigid or deformable objects like a bouncing ball
Stuff - liquids or granular substances such as sand

"When you're looking at some fluid or gooey stuff, you engage with it in different way than you do with a rigid object. With a rigid object, you might pick it up or grasp it, whereas with fluid or gooey stuff, you probably are going to have to use a tool to deal with it" 

via MIT: Dissociable Cortical Regions Represent Things and Stuff in the Human Brain, Current Biology (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.07.027. 



Language structure shapes color-adjective links even for people born blind, study reveals
Apr 2025, phys.org

"Certain colors are strongly associated with certain adjectives (e.g., red is hot, blue is cold)" 

"Some of these associations are grounded in visual experiences such as seeing glowing red embers. Surprisingly, despite having no visual experience, many congenitally blind people show very similar color associations, which are likely learned through language. We show that these associations are indeed embedded in the statistical structure of language."

via University of Wisconsin-Madison: Qiawen Liu et al, Learning about color from language, Communications Psychology (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44271-025-00230-9.


A universal rhythm guides how we speak: Global analysis reveals 1.6-second 'intonation units'
Aug 2025, phys.org

Human speech across the world pulses to the beat of what are called intonation units, short prosodic phrases that occur at a consistent rate of one every 1.6 seconds.

Intonation units play a critical role in helping listeners follow conversations, take turns speaking, and absorb information. 

The research analyzed over 650 recordings in 48 languages spanning every continent and 27 language families.

via Hebrew University: Maya Inbar et al, A universal of speech timing: Intonation units form low-frequency rhythms, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2425166122


What's in a name? Information structure parallels discovered across cultures—with repercussions for Asian names
Feb 2026, phys.org

(ie, Name Entropy)

Fixing of Western last names around the 1600's meant a loss of information within the naming system, which had to be compensated for - which is why first names now convey more and more information (there's more first names than there used to be).

Naming systems must allow for the separate identification of a large number of people, while keeping the total number of words required by the system manageable so that they don't overtax people's brains as they process them.

In England, in every 50-year period between 1550 and 1880, half of the male population was given the first names John, William, or Thomas, and half the female population Ann, Mary, or Elizabeth.

Today, in Korea, it's the opposite, in both ways, because half the population still has 6 names, and in Asia, they come first, not last - Kim Jong Il would be called Jong Il Kim in the West. And I can't find it in the paper but I think the 6 names would be something like Kim, Park, Lee, Son, ...

From the paper itself, using badminton player Simon Archer and the basketball player Yao Ming 姚明 - Simon and Yao are names, whereas Archer is an English word for someone who shoots arrows with a bow, and Ming is a Chinese word meaning brightness.

The problem is that, because of the focus on inherited names in the Western system, the order of names of researchers from East Asian countries is reversed for publication. For Asian researchers, this means that the part of the name that conveys more information is initialized, and the part that conveys less is written out in full.

"For researchers from China today, it is as if Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, and Charles Dodgson had all been forced to publish their works under the name Charles D."

via University of Tübingen, MIT, UC Irvine, U of Texas at Austin: Michael Ramscar et al, Cross-cultural structures of personal name systems reflect general communicative principles, Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-67079-8


Study suggests people are losing 338 spoken words every year and have been for at least 15 years
Apr 2026, phys.org

(Surprise) We were replicating an earlier paper on gender differences in how many words men and women speak per day. My collaborator, Valeria Pfeifer, came to me with the word counts from the replication analyses using the same methodology as our 2007 paper, but with 2,200 new participants across 22 studies. Our estimate of daily spoken word average came in at around 12,700 words. Our 2007 estimate had been 15,900. I told her there had to be a mistake. But she rechecked everything, and the number held. Something had genuinely changed.

These studies were conducted for entirely different purposes—coping with breast cancer, adjustment after divorce, the social effects of meditation, relationship dynamics. None of them were designed to track how much people talk over time. Participants had no idea their word counts would ever be analyzed this way, which rules out any concern that people adjusted their behavior to fit a hypothesis.

Young adults under 25 showed a steeper decline, about 452 words per year, compared to 314 for older adults.

via University of Arizona and University of Missouri–Kansas City: Valeria A. Pfeifer et al, Sliding Into Silence? We Are Speaking 300 Daily Words Fewer Every Year, Perspectives on Psychological Science (2026). DOI: 10.1177/17456916261425131


Small talk shapes big trends: Physics predicts how language patterns spread
May 2026, phys.org

The model is a step towards understanding the "statistical physics of language" - Professor Burridge tested his approach against large-scale survey data on American dialects collected by the Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes, created by Bert Vaux, a professor of linguistics at the University of Cambridge. 

In 1950, the term roly-poly for a woodlouse was largely confined to a relatively small group of speakers in the American South. By 1995, the term had spread dramatically, becoming almost universal across much of the United States.

"Splinter is used across almost all of England, except around Newcastle, where people still say spelk. Although Newcastle itself is densely populated, it is surrounded by more sparsely populated areas, which helps the local form hold its ground and prevents splinters from taking over.

University of Portsmouth: James Burridge, Statistical field theory for dialectology, Physical Review E (2026). DOI: 10.1103/7f86-mxf2.
On arXiv: DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2512.17668

Post Script: I was thinking about the word zig-zag, and whether or not I actually made up the word wiggle-waggle or if I heard it somewhere. And after that I was thinking why have one and the other but not ziggle zaggle or wig-wag. 

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Wednesday, June 10, 2026

Unexpected Intent


Superheated gold withstands 'entropy catastrophe': New method challenges established physics
Jul 2025, phys.org

In an experimental debut, the team superheated solid gold far beyond the theoretical limit, unexpectedly overturning four decades of established theory. The team was thrilled to have successfully demonstrated this technique—and as they took a deeper look at the data, they discovered something even more exciting.

"We were surprised to find a much higher temperature in these superheated solids than we initially expected, which disproves a long-standing theory from the 1980s," White said. "This wasn't our original goal, but that's what science is about—discovering new things you didn't know existed."

In their recent study, the team discovered that the gold had been superheated to an astonishing 19,000 kelvins (33,740 degrees Fahrenheit) - more than 14 times its melting point and well beyond the proposed entropy catastrophe limit - all while maintaining its solid crystalline structure.

"It's important to clarify that we did not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics," White said with a chuckle. "What we demonstrated is that these catastrophes can be avoided if materials are heated extremely quickly — in our case, within trillionths of a second."

The researchers believe that the rapid heating prevented the gold from expanding, enabling it to retain its solid state. The findings suggest that there may not be an upper limit for superheated materials, if heated quickly enough.

via US Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory: Thomas G. White et al, Superheating gold beyond the predicted entropy catastrophe threshold, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09253-y

Image credit: Crushed Crushed Tomatoes, found in the wild at local Shop Rite


Very different mammals follow the same rules of behavior: Research hints at an underlying architecture
May 202,5 phys.org

Across behaviors, individuals, and species, one common principle emerged: The longer an animal stays in one behavioral state, the less likely it is to change it in the next moment. "This was unexpected"

via Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior: Pranav Minasandra et al, Behavioral sequences across multiple animal species in the wild share common structural features, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2503962122


How a one‑eyed creature gave rise to our modern eyes
Feb 2026, phys.org

"The results are a surprise. They turn our understanding of the evolution of the eye and the brain upside down"

All vertebrates evolved from a distant ancestor that had a single eye located at the top of its head, and the remnants of this so-called median eye have today become the pineal gland in our brains.

600 million years ago, a worm that had two eyes, for some reason, lost them, but kept a group of light-sensitive cells in the middle of its head that developed into a small, primitive median eye that could keep track of night and day, and sense what was up and down.

A million years later, from parts of the small median eye, new image-forming eyes in pairs developed. 

"Now we finally understand why the eyes of vertebrates differ so radically from the eyes of all other animal groups, such as insects and squid. The film of our eyes—the retina—developed from the brain, whereas the eyes of insects and squid originate in the skin on the sides of the head."

A fascinating fact is that remnants of the ancient parietal median eye from our distant ancestor actually remain in our heads today, transformed into the pineal gland. The pineal gland is a light-sensitive organ in the vertebrate brain. It produces the hormone melatonin, which helps regulate the body's circadian rhythm.

"It's mind-boggling that our pineal gland's ability to regulate our sleep according to light stems from the cyclopean median eye of a distant ancestor 600 million years ago,"

via Lund University: George Kafetzis et al, Evolution of the vertebrate retina by repurposing of a composite ancestral median eye, Current Biology (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.12.028

Post Script: Pineal Organoids

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

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


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Tuesday, June 9, 2026

Believe It or Not Everything Is Made of Plastic


This title is supposed to be a joke, and a pun, because artificial spacetime is obviously "plastic", in the original sense of the word. But really, just about anything called "natural" is actually made of petrochemicals and other industrial by-products, because people who buy words instead of things can't tell the difference! 
 
Microrobots overcome navigational limitations with the help of 'artificial spacetimes'
Nov 2025, phys.org

Researchers found that the robots' motion is formally identical to the path light takes in general relativity, which allowed them to develop a mathematical framework mapping robot motion to geodesics in a curved spacetime defined by a control field — as in other reactive control methods. The team used conformal transformations to map complex environments to simple virtual spaces, then designed control fields and mapped them back. They refer to the resulting geometric framework as "artificial spacetimes."

via University of Pennsylvania Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering: William H. Reinhardt et al, Artificial spacetimes for reactive control of resource-limited robots, npj Robotics (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44182-025-00058-9

Image credit: Also fake


Bamboo dishes may leach pesticides and melamine into food
Nov 2025, phys.org

"The 'natural' label can be dangerously misleading. Many of these products are essentially plastic dishes made from melamine-formaldehyde resin containing bamboo filler. Our research shows this combination can accelerate the polymer's degradation and increase the migration of harmful substances like melamine, especially into hot or acidic foods and drinks."

  • Melamine was present in 32% of the tested products; 33 bio-based dishes including bowls, cups, and dining sets purchased from markets in the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, and China. 
  • Six of the bamboo-based products released melamine above the European Union specific migration limit (SML) of 2.5 mg/kg. 
  • Melamine leached into common beverages, including hot lemon tea and orange juice, highlighting a direct route of consumer exposure.
  • Several bio-based dishes, particularly those made from cereals, contained residues of pesticides.
  • Disinfectants were the primary residues found in the bamboo-based items.

Although the use of bamboo as an additive in plastic food contact materials has been banned in the EU since 2021 due to these risks, the study confirms that these items are still available for purchase. The research highlights the false advertising common with these products, which are often labeled as "100% bamboo" or "biodegradable" despite being composed of a plastic resin.

via University of Chemistry and Technology Prague: Kamila Bechynska et al, Comprehensive assessment of bamboo and other bio-based dishes contamination, Food Control (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.foodcont.2025.111188


Why strange cures made sense in mysterious times
Dec 2025, phys.org

"We wanted to know whether the logic of folk medicine followed psychological patterns and it does. The more uncertain or mysterious the illness, the more likely the cure involved magic or religion."

Researchers from Brunel University of London have mined a rare archive of 3,655 folk cures, collected in the 1930s, from an extraordinary national folklore project launched in Ireland. About 50,000 schoolchildren were asked to interview parents, grandparents and neighbors about local history, beliefs and cures. Teachers then transcribed the accounts, creating one of the most detailed records of oral folk medicine ever compiled. They were recently digitized. 

To make sense of the archive, researchers focused on 35 diseases and asked two doctors to rate each one according to how understandable it would have seemed to a layperson at the time, both in terms of what caused the illness and what was going on in the body. Obvious cases like cuts and sprains were marked as "certain"; conditions like tuberculosis, warts, or epilepsy were labeled more mysterious.

"It's pretty unsatisfying just not having a solution of any form. When there aren't particularly good medical solutions, I expect people will keep searching for something that makes sense."

via Brunel University of London Center for Culture and Evolution: Mícheál de Barra et al, Mysterious illnesses have supernatural and ritualistic cures: Evidence from 3,655 century-old Irish folk cures, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2511006122


FDA-cleared brain stimulation device for ADHD is not effective
Jan 2026, phys.org

(I really believe that placebo is about to take over the mental health field, and that the field will be completely blindsided by it)

"There is a large placebo effect with high-tech brain therapies, in particular for patients and families that have an expectation that they can adjust brain differences associated with ADHD. It is hence paramount to control for placebo effects in modern brain therapies to avoid false hopes."

via King's College London Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience: Conti, A.A. et al. External trigeminal nerve stimulation in youth with ADHD: a randomized, sham-controlled, phase 2b trial, Nature Medicine (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41591-025-04075-x


The next generation of disinformation: AI swarms can threaten democracy by manufacturing fake public consensus
Jan 2026, phys.org

  • Synthetic consensus - the illusion that "everyone is saying this"
  • Fabricated chatter - fake people talking 
  • AI swarm - set of AI-controlled agents that maintain persistent identities and memory; coordinate toward shared objectives while varying tone and content; adapt in real time to engagement and human responses; operate with minimal oversight; and deploy across platforms. 
  • Bonus: fake chatter can contaminate training data, extending its influence

via University of Konstanz: Daniel Thilo Schroeder et al, How malicious AI swarms can threaten democracy, Science (2026). DOI: 10.1126/science.adz1697


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Hegemonic Power, Synthetic Humans, and the SAG-AFTRA-AI Manifesto


It might be considered the first real big fight between humans and robots. To summarize into a very, very simple, and incomplete explanation, it happens at a time when the labor union of people who work on movies have to re-negotiate their contract with the people who pay them. They went on strike for 118 days, the longest actors’ strike in Hollywood history. Now they have a new contract.

The problem was that if there's one thing artificial intelligence can do, it's art (as opposed to law, medicine, engineering, etc.). Not saying it's necessarily good at art, but it's sure as hell good enough for the people who pay for movies to be made, and who then go on to make money off those movies. Not sure if it's good enough for the people who pay to watch these movies, but then again, it doesn't seem like anyone needs to care about consumers anymore anyway, so...the people who work on movies are in for a fight if they want to be treated like humans. 

The problem, for the rest of us, is that we're humans too. Well, not if you're reading this, because the only people who read this weblog are in fact robots. But the rest of us are humans. And for the first time since Africa, we are facing real competition.

Below is a report about the 2023 SAG-AFTRA labor story, and some good bits about how humans and robots are being positioned against each other in the labor market, and what that might mean for us in the future. It's written by Data and Society Institute (citation at the very bottom, and in-text references you'll just have to get for yourself from the document; because sorry sir this is a Wendy's). 

*SAG-AFTRA - Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists
*Image credit: Gundam style mechabot made in japan - japantimes www.japantimes.co.jp


On Common Sense, Machine Learning and Big Data
Common sense, or a skewed perception of reality that perpetuates the status quo as normal, natural and unquestionable, is an expression of hegemonic power. The concept of common sense describes commonly held — yet nonetheless fragmented and heterogenous - knowledge that often goes unquestioned as fact (Gramsci,1926/1971). 
 
According to critical theorist Hito Steyerl's (2023) power analysis of machine learning technologies, the power of the owning class depends on its seizure of data. Thus, the discussion of for-profit technology, and speci!cally various applications that track, record, and classify user data, can never be liberatory, despite the claims of the companies, industries, and institutions promising safety, accessibility, efficiency, and sustainability (Bender and Hanna, 2025; Benjamin, 2019).

The “common sense” of AI, that is, the widely-held belief that AI is a foregone conclusion, functions as an articulation of hegemonic power. In this frame, we seek to understand how the labor movement can meaningfully intervene.

AI is not simply a discursive formation that stands as a “common sense” foregone conclusion, it also obfuscates large-scale, transnational coordination of resources, labor, and people who make up the infrastructures that are required for arti!cial intelligence. This matters because it broadens the base for possible coalition building to be mobilized in these “processes of subtraction” (Steyerl, 2023, p. 12).

Data and Society, 2026


See Figure 1 - The four strategies on the left negotiate with the common sense of AI, giving it power and weight, as these strategies work with AI as it is, instead of disengaging with the common sense of AI, and pushing these technologies to work that are commons-based or people-centered.

Robots in Human Clothing, ie The Corporate Flesh Engine
Amazon has long referred to their Mechanical Turk platform as artificial intelligence, but there have always been humans doing the often-underpaid work of classifying and sorting content of all types, increasingly in the Global South (Crawford, 2021; Gonzalez-Cabello et al., 2025). This hidden labor has been referred to as “ghost work” (Gray and Suri, 2019; Muldoon et al., 2024) and “human-fueled automation” (Irani, 2019), drawing attention to the people who power AI systems. 

Synthetic Performers (i.e., entirely digitally-produced performers created through generative AI). The [new negotiated contract] establishes guidelines around the creation and use of “digital replicas” and “synthetic performers.”

Digital replicas are digital reproductions of an actor's voice or likeness. The contract described two types of digital replicas: “employment-based digital replicas” and “independently created digital replicas.”

Employment-based digital replicas are those that are created during the actors’ physical participation in work through methods such as scanning, which can then be used to depict the actor in scenes they did not actually perform.

Independently created digital replicas are made without the actor's physical participation and can perform in scenes that they did not perform. The parameters of consent and compensation vary depending on the type of technology utilized. The guidelines for synthetic performers created through generative AI are less robust than those for digital replicas. Synthetic performers are entirely digitally-produced performers created through generative AI that do not resemble a recognizable actor and are not voiced by a person. The contract requires that studios who want to use a synthetic performer must notify and provide the union with opportunities to bargain over the usage of a synthetic performer in lieu of hiring a human performer. A document drafted by the union with frequently asked questions on AI notes that “for wholly synthetic assets, [studios] cannot use them without notifying the union and bargaining. Had we not done that, there was nothing stopping them from using these synthetic assets without anyone's consent.”

The contract also notes that if studios create a synthetic performer through prompting a generative AI system using a performer's name and their “principal facial feature” — the mouth, nose, eyes, or ears — that is recognizable, studios must bargain with the performer and obtain their consent.

However, for synthetic performers and independently created digital replicas, there are exceptions for consent with regards to uses protected by the First Amendment. A summary of the tentative agreement lists these exceptions as “comment, criticism, scholarship, satire or parody, use in a docudrama, or historical or biographical work.” In the aforementioned types of projects, studios do not need to obtain consent from performers to use their digital doubles.

--Source: Big Data & Society. Dis/engaging the ‘common sense’ of AI: Labor strategies 
from the 2023 SAG-AFTRA around data-driven technologies. Mar 2 2026. Emma May, Britt Paris and Serita Sargent, Rutgers School of Communication & Information.

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Monday, June 8, 2026

Psychosis Engine


There are some conflicting findings floating around the electroniverse. Japanese philosophizing psychologists suggests that addicts make phones look bad, and a Netherlands twin study says something similar. Likely only a coincidence that these studies were coming out at the same time Facebook was on trial in California for intentionally hurting kids. 

In the end, the only conclusion we can make is that science is hard:

People who are easily distracted by smartphones are more physiologically reactive, less attuned to their bodies
Apr 2025, phys.org

People who have an attentional bias towards smartphone stimuli typically display a lower interoceptive awareness, meaning they were less attuned to internal bodily signals such as their heartbeat - a pattern mirroring behavioral addictions like gambling or substance use.

Note, Japanese institutions think differently about the intersection of humans and technology:
"This project began as an interdisciplinary exploration between philosophy and psychology, aiming to understand the relationship between technology and the human body." 

via Hokkaido University: Yusuke Haruki et al, Attentional bias towards smartphone stimuli is associated with decreased interoceptive awareness and increased physiological reactivity, Communications Psychology (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44271-025-00225-6.

Mostly unrelated image credit: Woman Eating a Sandwich, from the archives, pre-AI era 


Twin study challenges oversimplified claims about social media and well-being
Oct 2025, phys.org

6,000 twins in the Netherlands:
  • Small associations were found between social media use and well-being, with most being either negligible or statistically minor.
  • Genetic influences explained up to 72% of the variation in how much time people spend on social media.
  • People with higher well-being tended to use more platforms, but more passively (browsing rather than posting).
  • Those with lower well-being were more likely to post frequently on fewer platforms.

via Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics: Selim Sametoğlu et al, The Association Between Frequency of Social Media Use, Wellbeing, and Depressive Symptoms: Disentangling Genetic and Environmental Factors, Behavior Genetics (2025). DOI: 10.1007/s10519-025-10224-2


Social media research tool can lower political temperature — it could also lead to more user control over algorithms
Nov 2025, phys.org

Key: This research was done "without the direct cooperation of the platform"

Web extension tool coupled with an artificial intelligence large language model that scans posts for antidemocratic and extreme negative partisan sentiments. The tool then re-orders posts on the user's X feed in a matter of seconds:

Antidemocratic attitudes:
  • advocating for extreme measures against the opposing party
  • statements that show rejection of any bipartisan cooperation
  • skepticism of facts that favor the other party's views
  • willingness to forgo democratic principles to help the favored party

Where has this been all these years? Consider, there is often an immediate, unavoidable emotional response to seeing ^this kind of content ... making people feel bad the moment they see it. 

via Stanford's School of Engineering and Universities of Washington and Northeastern: Tiziano Piccardi et al, Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adu5584. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu5584

Also: Jennifer Allen et al, Platform-independent experiments on social media, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.aec7388 , www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec7388


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New Things in Color Tech

 

We have cracked the color-changing codes of both the chameleon and the octopus, we're printing structural color from an inkjet, and making something apparently darker than vantablack. But I'm really just here to say words like nanophotonic metamaterials, and quantum polycrystals. 

'OCTOID,' a soft robot that changes color and moves like an octopus
Dec 2025, phys.org

By precisely controlling the helical molecular arrangement and polymer network structure of this material, they achieved a structure capable of both soft, flexible movement and color changes, just like an actual octopus tentacle.

When an electrical signal is applied, the helical molecular arrangement and polymer network structure of this material's surface undergoes microscopic contraction and expansion, displaying a continuous color change from blue to green to red. It also performs bending and unfolding motions through asymmetric structural changes. Through this process, OCTOID can simultaneously perform three functions - camouflaging, moving, and grabbing - within a single system, just like a real octopus.

via Composite Materials Research Center of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology: Seung Hui Han et al, OCTOID: A Soft Robotic System Featuring Programmable Shape Morphing and Dynamic Structural Coloration, Advanced Functional Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202520014

Absolutely Completely Unrelated Image Credit: (are we still pretending to care about attribution?)


Chameleon-like nanomaterial can adapt its color to mechanical strain
Dec 2025, phys.org

2D nanophotonic metamaterial - Kirigami-inspired structural color, as different from pigment or dye colors - When the material is stretched, its microscopic patterns move and rotate, changing how light reflects from the surface. As a result, during the stretching, the color of the light reflected from this 'nanoscale chameleon skin' shifts smoothly from green to yellow and finally to red. 

via University fo Amsterdam: Freek van Gorp et al, Nonlocal Mechano-Optical Metasurfaces, ACS Photonics (2025). DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.5c01385


Smart material instantly changes colors on demand for use in textiles and consumer products
Dec 202,5 phys.org

They stacked a thin layer of vanadium dioxide on top of a reflective aluminum layer. When heated above a specific temperature, the vanadium dioxide turns from an insulator to a metal, accompanied by a change in its crystalline structure. When light hits this stack, some bounces off the top of the vanadium dioxide, while the rest passes through and bounces off the aluminum below. These two reflected paths of light interfere with each other. The rapid structural change in vanadium dioxide alters the timing of light bouncing from the top and the bottom, making them out of phase. This changes the color that is canceled out, which, in turn, changes the color we see.

via University of Florida: Aritra Biswas et al, Dynamic control of phase for tunable structural colors, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2520990122


Bird-of-paradise inspires darkest fabric ever made
Dec 2025, phys.org

They dyed a white merino wool knit fabric with polydopamine, followed by etching of the material in a plasma chamber to create spiky nanofibrils, to mimic the light-trapping capabilities found on the riflebird's ultrablack feathers.

via Cornell University College of Human Ecology Responsive Apparel Design Lab: Hansadi Jayamaha et al, Ultrablack wool textiles inspired by hierarchical avian structure, Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-65649-4


Structural color can now be printed with an inkjet printer
Apr 2026, phys.org

Spherical silicon crystals that reflect color specifically based on their precise size in the range between 100 and 200 nanometers can now be printed at resolutions between 250 and 125 dots per inch onto a flat PET film as well as on a 3D metallic surface.

via Kobe University: Hiroto Yamana et al, Structural Color Inkjet Printing With Mie‐Resonant Silicon Nanoparticles, Advanced Materials (2026). DOI: 10.1002/adma.202523036

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Sunday, June 7, 2026

Climate Called, Wants Volcanoes Back

 

"More rapidly than we thought" is the theme  here.

But let's start with IMO 2020 - the biggest climate story of the 21st century that you will not hear about because it's too complicated:

When trade routes shift, so do clouds: Researchers uncover ripple effects of new global shipping regulations
Nov 2025, phys.org

In January 2020, the International Maritime Organization mandated a major reduction in sulfur content in marine fuels to decrease air pollution. But this decreased cloud formation, the same clouds that have historically masked about one-third of the warming caused by greenhouse gases.

Militia attacks in November 2023 rerouted cargo ships in the Red Sea's Bab al-Mandab Strait to the Cape of Good Hope, and gave researchers the opportunity to discover that the new fuel regulations that cut sulfur by about 80% also lowered cloud droplet formation by about 67%. (Quantifying how clouds respond to changes in aerosols remains one of the biggest challenges in studying the climate.)

Although these aerosols temporarily cool the planet, this comes at the cost of human health. Exposure to sulfur particles, potent air pollutants, is linked to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. The IMO regulation is estimated to have already prevented tens of thousands of premature deaths.

via Florida State University Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science: Michael S. Diamond et al, Conflict-induced ship traffic disruptions constrain cloud sensitivity to stricter marine pollution regulations, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (2025). DOI: 10.5194/acp-25-16401-2025

Image credit: Space tornado - coronal mass ejection plasma stream - Chip Manchester for University of Michigan - 2025 [link]

Key 'fingerprint' reveals slowdown of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation
Nov 2025, phys.org

  • They uncovered a key "fingerprint" of AMOC slowdown: mid-depth (1,000–2,000 meters) warming in the equatorial Atlantic Ocean.
  • Using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology General Circulation Model (MITgcm)
  • AMOC slowdown triggers subsurface warming in the subpolar North Atlantic, which then generates baroclinic Kelvin waves traveling equatorward along the western boundary of the North Atlantic; upon reaching the equator, these waves propagate along the equatorial region, ultimately causing the distinct mid-depth warming.

via Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Oceanology, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and UC San Diego: Qiuping Ren et al, Equatorial Atlantic mid-depth warming indicates Atlantic meridional overturning circulation slowdown, Communications Earth & Environment (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s43247-025-02793-1


Ocean's upper 1,000 meters undergoing unprecedented, deep-reaching compound change
Nov 2025, phys.org

"The ocean is experiencing strong compound change multidimensionally. The ocean condition is transforming in multiple dimensions at once, and even the deep ocean - once considered stable - is responding more rapidly than we thought."

via Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Mercator Ocean International, and the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at the École Normale Supérieure in France: Observed large-scale and deep-reaching compound ocean state changes over the past 60 years, Nature Climate Change (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41558-025-02484-x.
 

Global warming amplifies extreme day-to-day temperature swings
Dec 2025, phys.org

"Climate roller coaster" (aka weather whiplash)

The study defines such extreme temperature events as occurrences where the temperature difference between two consecutive days exceeds the 90th percentile of historical records. These extreme day-to-day temperature changes have become more frequent and intense across low- to mid-latitude regions. Soil drought leads to reduce the surface's heat capacity and amplify fluctuations in cloud cover and radiation. 

The health risks posed by these sudden temperature shifts outweigh other temperature-related variables. The correlation between these extreme temperature events and all-cause mortality follows a near-exponential pattern. (exponential)

via Nanjing University and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences: Qi Liu et al, Global warming intensifies extreme day-to-day temperature changes in mid–low latitudes, Nature Climate Change (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41558-025-02486-9

*They don't mention acclimation but that's why it's so dangerous. A 100F day is hot, but an 80F day after a 50F day is equally hot, relative to the body that's trying to cool itself. People need something like one day per degree to acclimate, and weather whiplash does not allow that.

“Acclimatization” means temporary adaptation of the body to work in the heat that occurs gradually when a person is exposed to it. Acclimatization peaks in most people within four to fourteen days of regular work for at least two hours per day in the heat. 
--Source: California Department of Industrial Relations, Heat Illness Prevention in Indoor Places of Employment, Mar 2023. https://www.dir.ca.gov/OSHSB/Indoor-Heat.html

Mostly meaningless unlabeled line chart

Category '6' tropical cyclone hot spots are growing
Dec 2025, phys.org

Hurricane Patricia, which formed in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico, was the strongest tropical cyclone ever recorded, with wind intensity of up to 185 knots - enough to make it considered a Category 7 storm, if such a thing existed. 
  • Cat 4 - 114 - 137 knots
  • Cat 5 - 137 (or more) knots
  • Cat 6 - 160 (or more) knots, proposed

via American Geophysical Union and Department of Atmospheric Science at the National Taiwan University: A31A-06 Category ‘6’ Tropical Cyclone Hot Spots in the Warming Climate


Excruciating tropical disease can now be transmitted in most of Europe, study finds
Feb 2026, The Guardian

Higher temperatures due to the climate crisis mean infections (chikungunya, dengue) are now possible for more than six months of the year in Spain, Greece and other southern European countries, and for two months a year in south-east England. 

“Twenty years ago, if you said we were going to have chikungunya and dengue in Europe, everybody would have said you were mad: these are tropical diseases. Now everything’s changed."

via UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology 


Widespread 'enhanced rock weathering' could slow global warming
Feb 2026 phys.org

Enhanced Rock Weathering - crush silicate rocks, add to crop soil, and let the rock dust naturally react with carbon dioxide. The reactions bind carbon into stable mineral forms that can persist for millennia, while also enriching the soil with nutrients, boosting crop yields and increasing farmer profits.

It could remove up to about a gigaton of carbon from the atmosphere annually by 2100, roughly equivalent to the yearly emissions of a major industrial economy. But to reach that mark, access and adoption by the Global South, where warmer and wetter conditions facilitate rock weathering, will be essential.

(Which is interesting to consider, because obviously the Global North will not stop burning fossils, and the Global North will not solve this problem. It's the Global South only who has the ability to fix the future.)

via Cornell: Ying Tu et al, Scaling up enhanced rock weathering for equitable climate change mitigation, Communications Sustainability (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s44458-026-00034-w


An unprecedented Antarctic heat wave hit in the dead of winter - what it signals for the decades ahead
Apr 2026, phys.org

In July and August 2024, temperatures in parts of East Antarctica rose by up to 28°C above average and stayed high for more than two weeks. It followed a heat wave in March 2022, when temperatures in some Antarctic areas soared by nearly 40°C above average — one of the largest temperature anomalies ever recorded anywhere on the planet.

via University of Sheffield: Haosu Tang et al, Unprecedented 2024 East Antarctic winter heatwave driven by polar vortex weakening and amplified by anthropogenic warming, npj Climate and Atmospheric Science (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41612-026-01392-x


‘Point of no return’: New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level, study finds
May 2026, The Guardian

The process of relocating people from New Orleans should start immediately, as the city has reached a “point of no return” that will see it surrounded by the ocean within decades due to the climate crisis, a stark new study has concluded.

Ongoing sea-level rise and the rampant erosion of wetlands in southern Louisiana will swallow up the New Orleans area within a few generations, with the new paper estimating the city “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century”.


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