For anyone else trying to follow this research, the article is describing the paper by Moody et al. from a year and a half ago.

strung together two comments Trump made more than 54 minutes apart

Isn’t that about the normal interval it takes for him to progress from one coherent thought to the next?

@[email protected] 14,000,000,000 years

Who picked the name “Vultr” for a hosting provider?

For perspective, this author’s previous article was Do Childhood Vaccines Cause Tornadoes? It hasn’t been ruled out.

He seems obsessed with making the rather pedantic point that researchers should never state that anything is impossible based on absence of evidence.

The linked Popular Mechanics article cites this Smithsonian article.

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

The National Geographic article is paywalled.

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

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

Yeah, but these are cops we’re talking about—they’re conditioned to escalate at the first sign of noncompliance.

Can you really picture a cop physically intervening, being pushed aside, and saying “ok, never mind”?

It’s like the Sokal affair in reverse.

It’s almost as if Democratic voters are selecting their candidates based on some other criterion entirely.

One of Kemp’s central arguments—that some early societies were relatively democratic, and that hierarchical rule is not humanity’s default setting—closely echoes the theory advanced by David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. That book, published in 2021, generated heated debate about the origins of inequality and the reliability of the archaeological record, and it was ultimately admired more for the force of its argument than for its account of the earliest societies.

Is that really the consensus opinion on Dawn of Everything?

Even regular laws should have a trial period, and only get confirmed after demonstrating that they have the intended effect.

They’re seeing gamma rays from suspected dark matter collisions—that’s actually more substantially accurate than I was expecting.

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

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

Saag paneer.

How will we pay each other for our thoughts?

I ate the last one yesterday.

Did you really expect me to resist?

Global Thermonuclear War.

We queried the TriNetX Global Research Network for adults ≥ 18 years with an insomnia diagnosis (ICD-10 F51.0). The exposed cohort required ≥ 1 melatonin prescription and ≥ 365 exposure-days; controls had no melatonin exposure.

I interpret that to mean that both the study and control cohorts had insomnia diagnoses, but the cohorts weren’t randomized and no other variables were controlled for.

So 58% of districts are at or above median income, but only 24% of districts have more drivers than riders?

Could it be that both variables are closely correlated, and the latter is just sampling closer to the tail end of the distribution?

Beijing is actively cooperating with the international community. The Chinese authorities have confirmed their readiness to engage with all relevant parties to maintain the credibility of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT).

I assume this is a response to Trump’s decision to re-institute testing?