Severe Covid leads to persistent viral reactivation, with >10 different viruses noted in the first 40 days after hospital admission. Long Covid was specifically associated with reactivation of latent Anelloviridae virus @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Virus reactivation in acute and long COVID-19 - Nature

Chronic reactivation of distinct herpesviruses and anelloviruses occur during acute and long COVID-19, and track with disease severity, inflammation and outcomes, revealing immune signatures with prog...

nature.com

Iván Szelényi (1938-2026), a towering figure in sociology, one of the finest global intellectuals Hungary and Eastern Europe has ever produced, has died. Rest in peace and solidarity. 1/6

Social robots that use expressive gestures increase human engagement but reduce trust if they make errors during conversations, according to new human-robot interaction research. Learn more in #ScienceRobotics: https://scim.ag/4hzZ3gg

Multilevel dynamics of the brain, hormones, mind, and behavior in social human-robot interaction

Expressive design boosts engagement, yet robot errors trigger an oxytocin-linked shift from trust to vigilance.

scim.ag

The “near collapse of civic friendship is a catastrophic threat to public life,” Robert P. George writes. “Restoring it depends on our capacity to practice civil discourse, which in turn requires us to acknowledge our fallibility.”

The Two Great Threats to Truth

Moral relativism and fanaticism may seem to have nothing in common, but they lead to the same result.

bit.ly

PNAS Nexus Editor-in-Chief Yannis C. Yortsos shares his perspective on the dynamic and interconnected nature of modern research. Watch now⬇️https://ow.ly/tlCC50Zv34r

PNAS Nexus Editor-in-Chief Yannis C. Yortsos on the modern research landscape

Shaping PNAS Nexus: Editor-in-Chief Yannis C. YortsosPNAS Nexus Editor-in-Chief Yannis C. Yortsos discusses the transformative concept of convergence in the ...

ow.ly

Everyone's comparing Nolan's Odyssey to Homer, but I think there's much more richness The ancient Greeks adapted the Odyssey into ART While these images might appear static to us, I want to walk through how an ancient Greek saw art: AS DYNAMIC STORYTELLING like our films 1/13

I'm not saying that anyone ever sat down and said, "Parents with sick children will pay whatever we charge for a thermometer at 2AM." They didn't have to: this is the kind of thing an automated system can do without any human intervention: www.ftc.gov/system/files... 15/

This Roman ring, wishing good life to Senicianus, was found in Silchester. It’s now on display in The Vyne. Its fame derives from the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler consulting Tolkien on it in the ‘20s. Tolkien was inspired by the idea of a lost cursed ring & the rest is literary history. 🕰️C4thAD

The AAUP explicitly endorsing political candidates is foolish and, one would think, inconsistent with what such an organization should be doing. www.aaup.org/news/aaup-an...

AAUP Announces First-Ever National Political Endorsement

The AAUP is proud to endorse Dr. Abdul El-Sayed for US Senate in the Michigan Democratic primary.

aaup.org

Individual-Level Mortality Predictions: Statistical Models vs. Machine Learning Study examined whether ML could improve individual-level lifespan predictions. www.demogr.mpg.de/go/ML-SM-LS Monica Alexander | Ugofilippo Basellini | Emilio Zagheni | Demography - the flagship journal of PAA

“The method was fine when it flattered the cause and fatally flawed when it didn’t.”

Opinion | When Bad Research Feels Good

My work advanced social-justice causes I believed in. There was just one problem.

chronicle.com

Sometimes, when you are doing research, you become so obsessed with hidden reasons for things that you miss the manifest reasons.

Seeing Behind and On the Surface

YouTube video by For the Love of Science

youtube.com

The satirical art group responsible for about a dozen public pieces mocking President Trump in the nation’s capital over the past 20 months has now landed in New York. https://wapo.st/4x8LOHS

New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Nearly a decade after starting the project, the first major results from our comparative connectomics work is online! Comparing the head direction circuits of the central complex in bees, ants and flies, recapitulating >300million years of evolution.

Jason Arday appears to be a plagiarist, a liar, and a charlatan. The real question is why Cambridge University doesn’t investigate and take commensurate action. Maybe they know and gave him tenure anyway?

Exclusive: News outlet killed story on plagiarism allegations after Cambridge prof hired law firm

Jason Arday In September 2025, Times Higher Education had a bombshell story in the works: A star sociology professor at the University of Cambridge had allegedly plagiarized parts of his Ph.D. thes…

retractionwatch.com

Vaibhav Krishna, Hirokazu Shirado, Feng Fu, Nicholas A. Christakis: Modeling Duelling Contagions of True and False Information in the Face of Inherent Individual biases https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24360 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.24360 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.24360

“He told me when he got home, he said, ‘Dad, I wasn’t going to let go of that kid because I knew if I let go of him he was going to drown and I wasn’t going to let that happen,’ and it brought a tear to my eye when he said that,” his father recalled. “It was pretty amazing.”

Exclusive | Heroic teen lifeguard who saved boy from pounding California surf rescued others that day, family reveals

The father of the Santa Cruz lifeguard who saved a little boy facing monster waves speaks out.

nypost.com

The themes explored in Terminator become more and more provocative.

The Washington Post@washingtonpost.com · last wk.

The FCC issued a ban on the import of humanoid robots, expanding a Trump effort to keep out cutting-edge Chinese technology. The ban follows a determination by the administration that allowing the robots into the U.S. presents a national security risk.

Schools in at least three states will be equipped with drones this year that can zoom through halls, smash windows and pepper-spray active shooters if teachers report a threat. The drones are capable of reaching a shooter within 15 seconds.

Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters

The plastic, nonlethal aircraft, which can smash windows and ram attackers, will be at the ready in a handful of schools in Florida, Georgia and Colorado.

washingtonpost.com

The homeowner I interviewed in this piece has now sued the feds for entering his private property without a warrant www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bOg...

Federal Agents Raided His Home—Live on Ring

YouTube video by Institute for Justice

youtube.com

Catherine Rampell@crampell.bsky.social · 8mo ago

“It was violent. There’s blood all over the house. It’s insane,” the homeowner, who is a U.S. citizen, told me. “It’s complete lawlessness. How does the government have impunity to jump into my home without a warrant?” www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-is-w...

On the front page of the Skeptic magazine website 🤟 www.skeptic.com

We have done many field experiments documenting the policy relevance of social contagion and I wholly agree that “diffusion should be part of behavioural policy making.” This paper is a valuable exploration of mechanisms involved.

koenfucius@koenfucius.bsky.social · last wk.

Behavioural policy relies on social transmission—but how do different social learning mechanisms perform? Paper by @gaveltri.bsky.social & @acerbialberto.com examines four canonical social learning rules, and argues diffusion should be part of behavioural policy making: buff.ly/cbyAnuD

“No finer, greater gift in the world than that…. when man and woman possess their home, two minds, two hearts that work as one. Despair to their enemies, a joy to all their friends. Their own best claim to glory.”

1/3 In the weekend @wsj.com, I review two books related to evolution, one that argues (with nuance) for its relevance to how we think about the regulation of behavior (eg laws), the other offers a bold hypothesis for how human design might improve what evolution has delivered...

Jawdropping data visualization www.wsj.com/health/healt...

Ebola outbreak in the DRC: 2973 confirmed cases (+68) incl. 1309 deaths (+40) The outbreak has now touched 48 health zones across 5 provinces insp.cd/sitrep-n070-...

Long-lost love story by Alan Turing rediscovered in archive www.popsci.com/science/alan...

Long-lost love story by Alan Turing rediscovered in archive

'Pryce's Buoy' is an unfinished romance tale between two men.

popsci.com

#CDC reports that the confirmed #measles count in 2026 has hit 2,318, exceeding the 2025 total. It's the highest annual total — & the year's far from over — in 35 years. To keep measles under control, about 95% of kids need to be vaccinated. Few parts of the country are hitting that target.

Sensing your body (‘Interoception’) is everywhere in theories of mental health. But when we tested how well hundreds of people sensed their heart and lungs, the link to symptoms was almost nowhere to be found. 💣 🚨New @natmentalhealth.nature.com paper 🚨🎉 asks why 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Yale is hiring in developmental psychology (open rank )! We're especially interested in complementing and broadening our area, including via somewhat less traditionally central such as cross-cultural and comparative approaches. Feel free to reach out with questions!