Cannibalism in Neolithic Iberia occurred at different times and reflected different human behaviours.

The team expected a single regional episode of cannibalism. Then the radiocarbon dates arrived, and the question shifted from what one cause could explain it to why it happened again and again, and in such different forms.

Multiphase human cannibalism in Neolithic southern Iberia: Chronological and taphonomic evidence from Malalmuerzo, Carigüela, and Majolicas Caves

The bottom line is this: AI safety absolutely requires constitutional democracy.

A perfectly safe AI in the hands of an authoritarian state is not safe at all. The case for treating legal and constitutional repair, from emergency powers to surveillance law, as AI safety work.

AI and Political Freedom: The Risk to Democracy and How to Respond

I didn’t write this about the world, I wrote it about myself.

Depression-era slogans that haunted a meatpacking neighborhood, and years of outreach work on cold northern streets, taught one lesson above all: empathy. Today it is treated as weakness.

Rooming House

The evidence was overwhelming; an upward lightning discharge from the top of the storm had hit the ER-2.

Months after a campaign hunting gamma-ray flashes, a researcher spotted pulses too fast to come from inside a cloud. A camera that usually showed only black at night turned out to hold the first record of such a strike.

Detection and Analysis of an Upward Jet-Like Electrical Discharge Intercepting a High-Altitude Research Aircraft

Human amoebas good and bad are part and parcel of life and death.

A mycologist's late-career detour, begun out of curiosity about whether single cells can be said to learn. It leads to vampire amoebas that turn red draining algae, amoebas that hunt worms in packs, and the rare brain-eating species that may be spreading as the climate warms. It also leads inward, to the hundreds of billions of amoeboid white blood cells crawling through all of us — and to the cancer cells that move the same way.

A Is for Amoeba: The Story of Life in a Single Cell

People Don’t Want to Argue with AI, and That Makes Them More Persuaded by It

When people believe they are talking to an AI rather than a person, they push back less and change their minds more. The persuasive edge comes from the listener, not the machine.

From People to Prompts

In disability fiction, distance lends us not only drama, but intimacy.

Today's screens are full of minds that think and perceive differently, which makes this the right moment to look back at how twentieth-century American writers drew readers toward cognitive disability. Their tools were narration, vision and time, and a kind of intimacy that does not depend on getting inside a character's head. One of the most-read novellas in American schools shows how repetition itself becomes the foundation of the story.

Engaging Minds: Cognitive Disability and American Storytelling, 1899–1953

A very powerful woman's story

Filming a year aboard a Doctors Without Borders ship, an anthropologist witnessed a militia seize women and children at sea. The film follows one family through what came next, and traces the European money behind the kidnapping.

Rescue