The Sociothermodynamic Superhighway

Urban highways cut opportunities for social relationships, says study

Mar 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-03-urban-highways-opportunities-social-relationships.html

Highways were intended to shorten the commute to work and make traveling within the city easier.

"But this comes at a price, especially over short distances. If someone wants to cross a multi-lane highway, it takes a lot of effort. So highways connect over long distances, but divide over short ones."

via Complexity Science Hub Vienna: Luca Maria Aiello et al, Urban highways are barriers to social ties, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2408937122

https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2408937122

Image credit: AI Art - Racetrack Alive - 2025

Urban inequality scaling throughout the ages: Ancient and modern cities show predictable elite wealth patterns

Mar 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-03-urban-inequality-scaling-ages-ancient.html

Don't forget the Santa Fe Institute mixup on this topic - about ten years ago they thought population density rises in tandem with wealth, according to scaling laws, but a few years ago that thought was revised to show that only the average rises, but if you break it down, there's less people with more money and more people with less money:

The researchers found that the same scaling relationships that appear to shape modern economic activity—in which cities grow richer and more productive as they get larger—may also shape the way wealth is concentrated at the top. In other words, the processes that make cities wealthy may also often make them unequal.

"It seems as if inequality isn't a side-effect of city living under particular cultural or economic conditions; it may be a built-in consequence of urban growth itself."

Scientists analyzed evidence from both ancient Roman and modern cities to see how wealth scales with city size. The data for Roman cities included numbers of monuments and counts of inscriptions dedicating monuments to elite patrons. Data for modern cities included counts of very tall buildings, as well as counts of billionaires per city. They then applied statistical scaling methods to test for mathematical relationships between city size and indicators of elite wealth.

via Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology: Parallel scaling of elite wealth in ancient Roman and modern cities with implications for understanding urban inequality, Nature Cities (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44284-025-00213-1

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00213-1

Culture as Metaphysical Superorganism

This is about human things, but mediated by culture, which is more powerful than engines, or fuel, or multiplexed photonic quantum computers:

Aboriginal ritual passed down over 12,000 years, cave find shows

July 2024 phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-07-aboriginal-ritual-years-cave.html

My god, a 12,000 years old tradition:

They discovered some 12,000 year old sticks in a cave. The discovery was made inside Cloggs Cave in the foothills of the Victorian Alps in Australia's southeast, in a region long inhabited by the Gunaikurnai people. An anthropologist from the 1880s recorded the rituals of Gunaikurnai medicine men and women. One ritual involved tying something that belonged to a sick person to the end of a throwing stick smeared in human or kangaroo fat. The stick was thrust into the ground before a small fire was lit underneath. The medicine men would then chant the name of the sick person, and once the stick fell, the charm was complete. The sticks used in the ritual were made of casuarina wood. And the sticks found appear to be the same sticks, so they're evidence that this tradition has been happening since then, and was passed down by oral tradition, but since the advent of the written word, we've lost a connection to this. 

via Monash University and Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation: Bruno David et al, Archaeological evidence of an ethnographically documented Australian Aboriginal ritual dated to the last ice age, Nature Human Behaviour (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-01912-w

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01912-w

Image credit: AI Art - Rave Party - 2023

Culture, and fashion in particular, reduces social conflict, enabling a more complex society:

Colorful traits in primates ease tensions between groups, data suggest

Aug 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-08-traits-primates-ease-tensions-groups.html

"Species that shared more space with their neighbors had significantly greater differences in ornamentation between the sexes. In species where groups frequently interact, males are more likely to sport flashy traits that set them apart from females."

Vivid physical traits might help to reduce conflict between groups, possibly by allowing them to quickly assess potential rivals from a distance.

via Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at University of Zurich and University of Western Australia: Cyril C Grueter et al, The role of between-group signaling in the evolution of primate ornamentation, Evolution Letters (2024). DOI: 10.1093/evlett/qrae045

https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/evlett/qrae045

We should be reminded, via Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants (2011) that technological evolution follows relatively strict trajectory, independent on the civilization, so that bone needles always come before bellows (how else do you sew the skins to make the bellows), and ceramics before metal (metal kilns are much hotter than ceramic kilns, and require the advent of bellows). 

The beginnings of fashion: Paleolithic eyed needles and the evolution of dress

Jun 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-06-fashion-paleolithic-eyed-needles-evolution.html

"Eyed needle tools are an important development in prehistory because they document a transition in the function of clothing from utilitarian to social purposes,"

"What intrigues me is the transition of clothing from being a physical necessity in certain environments, to a social necessity in all environments."

The earliest known eyed needles appeared approximately 40,000 years ago in Siberia. Eyed needles are more difficult to make when compared to bone awls, which sufficed for creating fitted clothing. Bone awls are tools made of animal bones that are sharpened to a point. Eyed needles are modified bone awls, with a perforated hole (eye) to facilitate the sewing of sinew or thread.

The innovation of eyed needles may reflect the production of more complex, layered clothing, as well as the adornment of clothes by attaching beads and other small decorative items onto garments, and which may have allowed larger and more complex societies to form, as people could relocate to colder climates while also cooperating with their tribe or community based on shared clothing styles and symbols.

Dr. Gilligan and his co-authors argue that clothing became an item of decoration because traditional body decoration methods, like body painting with ocher or deliberate scarification, weren't possible during the latter part of the last ice age in colder parts of Eurasia, as people were needing to wear clothes all the time to survive.

via University of Sydney: Ian Gilligan, Palaeolithic eyed needles and the evolution of dress, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adp2887

https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adp2887

Post Script: Read Bernard Rudofsky's Are Clothes Modern? (1944)

Clash of the Titans

When the big dogs fight each other you know it's getting crazy (like how Ford and Blue Cross had a lawsuit prior to the labor negotiations circa 2023).

Beyonce and Adele publisher accuses firms of training AI on songs

May 2024, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0434yx8vgxo

Image credit: AI Art - Drunk People Fighting - 2024

So this is very much an arms race between (pro-profit anti-human) food manufacturers who spend their astronomical profits on research that makes their food addictive, vs pro-human scientists who are trying to make our brains not-addicted to food (albeit then using the for-profit pharma industry). 

Trojan Horse' weight loss drug found to be more effective than available therapies

May 2024, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-05-trojan-horse-weight-loss-drug.html

"We already know that GLP-1-based drugs can lead to weight loss. The molecule that we have attached to GLP-1 affects the so-called glutamatergic neurotransmitter system, and in fact, other studies with human participants suggest that this family of compounds has significant weight loss potential. What is interesting here is the effect we get when we combine these two compounds into a single drug," Clemmensen says.

via Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research at the University of Copenhagen: Jonas Petersen et al, GLP-1-directed NMDA receptor antagonism for obesity treatment, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07419-8

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07419-8