Lead exposure sounds like a modern problem, at least if you define “modern” the way a paleoanthropologist might: a time that started a few thousand years ago with ancient Roman silver smelting and lead pipes. According to a recent study, however, lead is a much more ancient nemesis, one that predates not just the Romans but the existence of our genus Homo. Paleoanthropologist Renaud Joannes-Boyau of Australia’s Southern Cross University and his colleagues found evidence of exposure to dangerous amounts of lead in the teeth of fossil apes and hominins dating back almost 2 million years. And somewhat controversially, they suggest that the toxic element’s pervasiveness may have helped shape our evolutionary history.

Joannes-Boyau and his colleagues took tiny samples of preserved enamel and dentin from the teeth of 51 fossils. In most of those teeth, the paleoanthropologists found evidence that these apes and hominins had been exposed to lead—sometimes in dangerous quantities—fairly often during their early years.

Tooth enamel forms in thin layers, a little like tree rings, during the first six or so years of a person’s life. The teeth in your mouth right now (and of which you are now uncomfortably aware; you’re welcome) are a chemical and physical record of your childhood health—including, perhaps, whether you liked to snack on lead paint chips. Bands of lead-tainted tooth enamel suggest that a person had a lot of lead in their bloodstream during the year that layer of enamel was forming (in this case, “a lot” means an amount measurable in parts per million).

In 71 percent of the hominin teeth that Joannes-Boyau and his colleagues sampled, dark bands of lead in the tooth enamel showed “clear signs of episodic lead exposure” during the crucial early childhood years. Those included teeth from 100,000-year-old members of our own species found in China and 250,000-year-old French Neanderthals. They also included much earlier hominins who lived between 1 and 2 million years ago in South Africa: early members of our genus Homo, along with our relatives Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus. Lead exposure, it turns out, is a very ancient problem.

What if I could scan your friend’s brain while they watched an advertisement, and use that data to predict with startling accuracy what you will buy?

Not what your friend will buy. What you will buy.

Researchers from Shanghai International Studies University say they think they can do it.

In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the scientists say they’ve demonstrated that close friendships create powerful neural synchronization — to the point that brain scans of one person can actually predict the purchasing behavior of their friends.

The research team, led by Jia Jin, conducted two studies with 222 participants to understand how friendship influences consumer behavior at the neural level.

In the first study, 175 participants evaluated products over time while researchers tracked their real-world social networks. Friends rated products far more similarly than non-friends did. And as friendships grew closer, product evaluations became even more aligned. When friendships weakened, the similarity decreased.
The second study put 47 participants into fMRI brain scanners and showed them advertisements. When friends viewed the same ads, their brains synchronized in specific regions linked to object perception, attention, memory, social judgment, and reward processing.

Their brains were literally firing in sync.

The most interesting findings came when researchers used machine learning to analyze the brain scan data.

A person’s neural activity patterns could predict not only their own purchasing intentions, but also the purchasing intentions of their friends—with greater accuracy than they could predict the behavior of strangers.

Thus, if marketers could scan your brain while you watch an ad, they wouldn’t just learn about you and one friend; they could potentially predict the buying behavior of everyone in your social network.

Of course, friends influence each other’s choices. Your buddy recommends a restaurant, you try it. Your colleague raves about a new gadget, suddenly you’re interested too.

But this research suggests the influence runs much deeper than conscious recommendations–to the point perhaps that friendship shapes the fundamental cognitive processes we use to evaluate choices in the first place.

Also, the research tracked friendships over time. As people became closer friends, their neural patterns became more synchronized. As friendships faded, the synchronization weakened.

That suggests the the neural connection between friends is dynamic, constantly adjusting based on how close the relationship is at any given moment.

The study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

Imagine a future where companies don’t just target you based on your own browsing history.

They target you based on the neural patterns of people in your social network. Or else, they identify “high-value” consumers not by their purchasing power, but by how influential their neural patterns are across their entire friend network.

We’re not there yet. Brain scanning technology isn’t cheap or scalable for mass consumer research.

But the fundamental insight remains:

We like to think of ourselves as independent decision-makers, carefully weighing options and making rational choices based on our unique preferences.

But our purchasing decisions are possibly far more interconnected with your friends’ decisions than we probably realize.

Somewhere, a marketing executive just got very, very excited. Probably his or her friends, too.

In the global race to decarbonize, hydrogen stands out as one of the most promising clean fuels. But despite its potential to power industries and transportation without emitting carbon, producing hydrogen sustainably in a water electrolyzer has been limited by the high cost and scarcity of one critical ingredient: iridium.

Now, a team of researchers at Rice University has developed a new catalyst that dramatically reduces the amount of iridium needed in proton exchange membrane (PEM) water electrolyzers, a key technology for generating green hydrogen from water. Their innovation — an iridium-stabilized ruthenium oxide catalyst that uses just one-sixth as much iridium as conventional systems — maintains industrial-level performance for more than 1,500 hours of continuous operation. The research was recently published in Nature Nanotechnology.

The strongest predictor of whether someone believed in COVID-19-related misinformation and risks related to the vaccine was whether they viewed COVID-19 prevention efforts in terms of symbolic strength and weakness. In other words, this group focused on whether an action would make them appear to fend off or “give in” to untoward influence.

[…]

Our findings highlight the limits of countering misinformation directly, because for some people, literal truth is not the point.

Discovery of almost 100 sauropod footprints over a distance of 220 metres provides new insight into how Jurassic dinosaurs moved through the landscape of what is now Britain

That is, probably, the most important video I have ever seen. A 75 year scientific study that can be backed up with hard data. Successful relationships with family and friends is, by far, the most valuable things that we have.

“We’ve been looking at the brain forever now, and every once in a while, a surprise comes along”

Invidious: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=BEs-LRsJ9uY

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEs-LRsJ9uY

Video description (only the part about the content):

It’s spooky season, so I thought I could talk about the scariest thing imaginable - the absurdity of space, time, and existence.

Trying something a little different for this video. Hope you like it.

LINKS

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-41-B

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/science/science-highlights/mapping-the-cosmic-web/#%3A%7E%3Atext=Filaments

Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot OFFICIAL
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot

TIMESTAMPS 
0:00 - Intro
2:09 - Astrophobia
7:14 - Space in Perspective
9:35 - Terrors of Alien Life
10:17 - Could It Be A Simulation?
11:08 - The Horror of Time
13:46 - The Pale Blue Dot
17:23 - Sponsor - Brilli

Magic mushrooms have been used in traditional ceremonies and for recreational purposes for thousands of years. However, a new study has found that mushrooms evolved the ability to make the same psychoactive substance twice. The discovery has important implications for both our understanding of these mushrooms’ role in nature and their medical potential.

Magic mushrooms produce psilocybin, which your body converts into its active form, psilocin, when you ingest it. Psilocybin rose in popularity in the 1960s and was eventually classed as a Schedule 1 drug in the US in 1970, and as a Class A drug in 1971 in the UK, the designations given to drugs that have high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. This put a stop to research on the medical use of psilocybin for decades.

But recent clinical trials have shown that psilocybin can reduce depression severity, suicidal thoughts and chronic anxiety.

Some not-so-clinical trials have reached the same conclusion. Still, it's a bit unclear where researchers are finding a bottleneck on producing cubensis. Give those fuckers the right environment, and after the fourth flush, you're trying to give them away as soon as they're dry.

This study may provide scientists with additional tools to produce psilocybin to use for medical purposes. Mushrooms tend to grow slowly both in nature and in the laboratory. Psilocybe (magic mushrooms) take about two months to grow from spores to mature mushrooms.

Oof. "May provide" is lousy writing and invites the reader to internalize "but then again, it may not."

Pedantry aside, these scientists need to try growing a vegetable. "Two months is an eternity!" Yeah, compared to bacterium.

And it's a bit involved but not complex with SOPs proven to avoid contamination. Getting there's the hard part. After that, you should have plenty of liquid culture good to go, and from there, it's just a matter of inoculating, breaking and sending to bulk ahead of multiple flushes per cake.

Like, it's way easier than actually doing organic chemistry!

If large amounts of psilocybin are needed for testing in clinical trials or for future medical use, quick and sustainable ways of producing it should be investigated.

Scale. Let's be conservative and presume two flushes per 6L-shoebox cake. Once you've got to liquid culture, you can start filling jars daily to have a constant supply.

Currently, psilocybin is produced using synthetic material because it is faster than extracting the compound from mushrooms and has higher yields.

It's also still produced the old-fashioned way.

This has its drawbacks though. The current synthetic extraction methods that scientists use generate hazardous waste and include key steps that can only be carried out on a small scale.

Because what I want from psychedelic therapy is producing hazardous chemicals as a byproduct. With spent cakes, you can compost them, trash them or just throw them in the yard and hope they react to the next rainstorm.

Enzymes are inherently more sustainable than non-biological catalysts because they generally operate in mild conditions (such as low temperature and neutral pH) and are easier to purify, which reduces energy consumption and waste. Also, enzymes are biodegradable, which helps decrease the environmental impact of industrial processes.

Ya think?

A cup of tea can recharge you after a long, tiring day. Tea might also be just what spent batteries need to rejuvenate. In a new study, researchers have used natural compounds that they extract from tea leaves to regenerate lithium-ion battery electrode materials.

The study, published in the journal Advanced Materials, could be a cheaper, more energy-efficient, and environmentally friendly way to recycle batteries compared with traditional recycling methods.

Definitely a "how'd they even think of that" sort of reasoning line.

But current battery recycling relies on metallurgical techniques. This typically involves chopping up battery materials and heating them to high temperatures, burning energy. The techniques also usually break down the materials into individual elements. So metallurgical methods don’t make economic sense for lithium iron phosphate cathodes, which don’t contain valuable elements.

Researchers in China found a way to directly regenerate the entire lithium iron phosphate cathode. They did that using tea compounds called polyphenols, which are antioxidants famous for their health benefits. Polyphenols are rich in hydroxyl groups. These groups donate electrons to the oxidized, degraded iron and converts it back to its original form. The interplay between the electron donors and the lithium salt also restores the crystal lattice of the lithium compound.

"St. Andrew's fine teas and battery rejuvenation, serving you since 1706."

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcOLyqfA5k8
• Invidious: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=TcOLyqfA5k8

BTW I get 3 different titles, depending on where I look the video up:

1. I never understood why spacetime needs a minus sign…until now!
2. How Einstein’s Professor actually unlocked relativity
3. The Idea Einstein thought was stupid

Video description:

Why does the spacetime interval have a minus sign?

The books I mentioned in this video:

Relativity visualised by Lewis Epstein

Spacetime Physics by Edwin Taylor

A study in Current Biology reports that some “gifted word learner” dogs can learn category words that refer to how toys are used (such as tugging versus fetching) and extend those labels to new objects that serve the same function. In tests, these dogs chose the correct toy by function even when it looked different, a pattern reminiscent of how human infants group objects by purpose during early language learning.

Study: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)01079-6

Other articles:

• https://nautil.us/some-dogs-can-learn-new-linguistic-tricks-1238106/
• https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dogs-with-large-vocabularies-can-understand-category-words-not-just-names/

Once a century, a very special day comes along. That day is today — 9/16/25.

Pi Day (3/14) often comes with sweet treats; Square Root Day (4/4/16 or 5/5/25, for example) has a certain numerical rhyme. But the particular string of numbers in today's date may be especially delightful to the brains of mathematicians and the casual nerds among us. Linda Gordon draws cartoons for the website that her husband Ron Gordon made to celebrate mathematically themed days.

First, "all three of the entries in that date are perfect squares — and what I mean by that is 9 is equal to 3^2^, 16 is equal to 4^2^, and 25 is equal to 5^2^," says Colin Adams, a mathematician at Williams College who was first tipped off about today's special qualities during a meeting with his former student, Jake Malarkey.

Even more interesting?

(Fun bonus: It turns out the full year, 2025, is also a perfect square: 45 times 45.)

Technology is changing healthcare in ways we couldn’t imagine a decade ago. AI is helping doctors analyze scans faster, predict patient risks, and even suggest treatment options based on data. At the same time, wearable devices and health apps let patients track their own heart rate, sleep, and activity levels in real time.

But it’s not all simple. How much should we rely on AI? Can it really understand the nuances of human health, or will it always need a doctor’s judgment to make sense of the data?

I’m curious—how do you see AI shaping the future of healthcare? Will it make care smarter and more accessible, or are there risks we need to watch closely?