Steven Phelps

@alfonslopeztena It's as though he didn't think this through.

If Trump leaves Iran with its near-bomb grade nuclear fuel buried and the Strait of Hormuz under Iran's control, he will have failed to address the problem that triggered his attack and created a vast new one for energy markets. It would define his legacy nytimes.com/2026/07/26/us/…

a ball with the LRB this morning “One of the odder moments in the long history of the (seven deadly) sins came in the late 2oth century, when they began to be redefined as virtues: pride as self-esteem, anger as-sertiveness, greed entrepreneurship, lust a healthy libido…. 1/n

Genetic trade-offs in fertility and longevity explain the maintenance of disease-associated alleles in humans | Nature Ecology & Evolution nature.com/articles/s4155…

Two open conjectures solved in one week + the OpenAI model escaping its test container to hack HuggingFace feels like another “yup, we’re on an exponential” type moment.

While FIFA has captured everyone’s attention, something consequential happened in academia this week, especially for international students in PhD programs. DHS issued a final rule changing how long F-1 students may remain in the United States. A thread on what it means and what students and universities can do. 🧵

Pyongyang on the Potomac

The Spanish Civil War isn't a perfect analogy for modern American politics, but it has lots of eerie parallels. noahpinion.blog/p/americas-pol…

War in the Middle East takes an ugly turn as US forces target an Iranian water desalination facility, destroying it almost entirely and leaving close to 10,000 people without drinking water. With roads and bridges destroyed, getting water to the affected rural communities will be extremely difficult but efforts are already underway.

Why do human societies adopt rigid moral rules? Rigid rules can protect cooperation when motives are opaque. Flexible rules allow justified exceptions but also make it easier for cheaters to hide behind plausible excuses. People often have legitimate reasons for failing to cooperate, yet those reasons are typically opaque to observers, allowing opportunists to disguise selfishness as justified hardship. This creates a trade-off between maximizing welfare and protecting cooperation from those who would exploit excuses to justify selfishness. Flexibility maximizes welfare when trust is secure, whereas rigidity preserves cooperation when trust is fragile. This account explains why rigid rules are common when others are perceived as unreliable. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

@vagheesh Thank you Vagheesh!

@evolbrain The paper that won the nobel prize was an incredible paper for the tightness of its writing. Every line had some form of scientific insight without a line wasted and helped shape how I wrote my PhD paper! science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Science friends! This fall I'm teaching a class on "Scientists as Writers" and looking for model papers. What is a scientific paper you love for the quality of its writing? Maybe something you have used as a model in your own work? What do you love about it?

A vast Indigenous American genome map exposes lost migrations, ancient ancestry and more than a million new variants phys.org/news/2026-04-v…

What matters most for childhood brain organization? We analyzed 649 variables. The answer: Socioeconomics (SES); with brain patterns pointing at sleep & stress as drivers. Even brain-IQ associations were better explained by SES confounding. In Science: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Important new Nature paper (Alexander Tyshkovskiy, Vadim Gladyshev lab): universal transcriptomic clocks of aging and mortality across mice, rats, macaques and humans, from more than 11,000 transcriptomes. The aging field has long wanted robust multi-species transcriptomic clocks, this seems to fit the bill. I also liked that their chromatin-modification module clock tracks DNA methylation clocks most closely which hints at a transcriptome-epigenome link. nature.com/articles/s4158…

@vsbuffalo There is a natural life cycle of these technologies. Maps begin as tools for description, because they offer new views & bc the leading edge of tech is generally too pricey for well powered interventions. Over time they direct new interventions & response measures. So cheer up!

“measurement technologies generate their own research programs. Once you can measure something at single-cell, spatial, genome-wide resolution, the field reorganizes around producing and indexing that measurement… ‘we mapped it’ gets published as though mapping were explaining.”

Mechanisms and control of a novel vocalization: the singing mouse song is a whistle that depends on air sac inflation By @evolbrain et alii royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/2…

@vsbuffalo @chrisalbon I was held up at gunpoint once as an undergrad and it really shook me. Was afraid to walk alone at night for months.

@chrisalbon I’m okay, thanks. Could have been way worse, but definitely most rattled I’ve ever been

@Infidel41402769 @TheFigen_ @grok Low voice and caress? Sounds like they found a way to evoke oxytocin to me.

@TheFigen_ Is this true @grok and what evolutionary survival value could lie behind this phenomenon?

Back in 2003, a German film crew filming in the Gobi Desert captured an incredibly moving moment: after a tough two-day birth, a mother camel rejected her newborn. A nomadic family then performed the ancient Hoos singing ritual passed down for generations. Once the song ended, the camel shed tears and finally accepted her baby. This powerful scene became one of the most memorable parts of the Oscar-nominated documentary The Story of the Weeping Camel.

I sent ChatGPT an audio file of a series of FART sound effects and asked what it thinks of "my music" and this is what it said

I feel so sorry for @StevenErlanger! Pretty sure he didn't write that headline 😅