Sunday SciKu | Digital Universe

From the quantization of everything (including time?) to Fermi’s Paradox, retrocausality, collective consciousness, and subjective perception, there are plenty of observations that suggest all we see and seem might be a dream within a dream—and that was before Hong Qin at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory was able to create a machine-learning algorithm that can …

Sunday SciKu | Overkill

  For 20+ years, I’ve found the nonsense of the overkill hypothesis maddening. The idea is that humans are such efficient, warlike creatures that we arrive on new continents and murder everything we come across. The Neanderthals in Europe and the Diprotodons in Australia 42,000 years ago. The North American mammoths and mastodons 12,500 years …

Sunday SciKu | Lovely Lemurs

Science folks save their love-related press releases for the week of Valentine’s Day, and this Sunday sciku is no exception. Monogamy is rare in mammals, with only around 4 percent of our animal class exhibiting long-term pair-bonding. Thirty years ago, researchers looked inside the brains of committed voles to see what makes love tick, and …

Sunday SciKu | Pruning

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have been exploring the ways SARS-CoV-2 mutates at the spike protein to evade antibodies. Coronaviruses have an error-checking system that keeps them more stable from mutation than other RNA viruses, but it turns out the proofreader doesn’t notice deletions. So there are certain segments in the spike protein sequence …