"A landmark study drawing on ancient DNA from nearly 16,000 West Eurasians found that directional genetic selection is not only widespread but accelerating." Stephen Jay Gould famously argued there had been no biological change in humans for 40,000 years. David Reich's latest research is making that consensus increasingly hard to sustain, write @JonEntine & Patrick Whittle.

Eppur si muove... brain motion within the skull is driven by abdominal muscle contractions that activate a hydraulic-like vascular connection between the nervous system and the abdominal cavity... nature.com/articles/s41593-0…

Hypothalamic clock governs circadian pain by Wei, Lou, Li et al. Pain runs like clockwork. A brain clock circuit rhythmically tunes how neuropathic pain feels. science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…

The Iliad and the Odyssey are foundational literary works that are also about men doing manly things and feeling manly feelings — they’re about pride and duty, they’re about friendship and loyalty, they’re about fear of death and bravery in the face of it, they’re about striving and longing. These are stories that have taught men to be men for a thousand years, that celebrate the highest versions of masculinity, and that is why so many people who are hostile to these values and ideals try to mess with these works of literature, to claim them for other audiences, to “recontextualize” them, to “queer” them and to subvert them. Men barely read today. Boys are alienated and underserved by English instruction and are falling starkly behind in reading. The “literary man,” a common type in hipster Brooklyn as recently as the mid 2010s, is basically extinct. Men are now the most underserved, underrepresented audience in books and publishing, and anyone in publishing who claims to be interested in “equity” or serving neglected audiences should be focused on this disparity. English teachers and the publishing industry should be working to get men and boys reading again and to elevate works that speak to men and boys. And that means preserving and teaching Homer, in translations which preserve the majesty and the masculinity of the original works.

Where, exactly, does learning happen in the brain? Out now @Nature , we identify a synaptic locus of birdsong learning and show that the circuit can be tuned to make birds learn faster, but at a cost.🧵 #neuroscience nature.com/articles/s41586-0… Open link: rdcu.be/fiyrS

Researchers used administrative data from Florida and looked at the effects of teacher experience, advanced degree attainment, and professional development. Effects on student achievement were meager, and often not in the direction you'd hope:

nearly 80% of young faculty in medicine are women. 80%

"The study found that evolution accelerated during the Bronze Age ~ 5,000 years ago... Combinations linked to years of schooling, household income and intelligence test scores in Europe and the Middle East increased over the past 10,000 years" nature.com/articles/d41586-0…

3D single-cell maps of embryos reveal "universal" geometry of blood vessels and nerves. More here: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…

RT @robkhenderson: Giving everyone a universal basic income will not reveal most people’s inner Mozarts or Emily Brontës. At bottom, this…

Boston biotech has been running the same playbook for years and everyone in the ecosystem knows it. Early-stage companies are built less on validated biology and more on signaling: a splashy Nature or Science paper, a thin patent scaffold, and the reputational gravity of well-networked academic founders. That combination is often enough to unlock large funding rounds. The problem is that high-impact publication has become a proxy for truth. It isn’t. It’s a selection mechanism for novelty and narrative. The result is predictable: – groupthink gets reinforced – weak or irreproducible findings persist for years – dissent is disincentivized – hype substitutes for validation In many cases, the goal is not to rigorously test whether an idea is correct, it’s to create enough mystique that it feels important. That perception alone can carry a company surprisingly far. So it’s not surprising to see the same voices recycled across boards and advisory roles—people who helped build and legitimize this model in the first place.

Sociology has been slow to adopt emerging standards of scientific rigor, in large part because of its strong political skew and embrace of activism over accuracy. stevestewartwilliams.com/p/t…

Orbitofrontal cortex drives predictive filtering of sensory responses | Nature Neuroscience nature.com/articles/s41593-0…

A beast of a paper from @byl015 @UCSDNeuro, dissecting the role of PFC interneurons (PV, SOM, VIP) controlling cocaine seeking. Normally, the PFC inhibits VTA DA neurons via a local GABA interneuron. Classic inhibitory role of the PFC over subcortical regions. Here, they show that chronic cocaine increases the activity of paravalbumin (PV) neurons in the PFC and their connectivity with the PFC pyramidal-VTA pathway, which basically removes the brake on the DA VTA neurons, leading to cocaine seeking. Only parvalbumin (PV) interneurons track and promote cocaine seeking. It's unclear what SOM and VIP do. It's a really incredible paper that demonstrates how powerful PFC interneurons are. Perhaps I'm biased because about 15 years ago we identified CRF interneurons in the PFC as being similarly recruited during withdrawal-induced craving for alcohol. I don't think that CRF colocalizes with PV neurons (probably more with VIP/SOM), so it's intriguing; perhaps it's a drug specificity (cocaine/alcohol), or model (limited vs extended access), or reinforcement specific (positive/negative). Now, the million-dollar question is if you get these mice to the point of dependence, would the VP interneurons still be the ones that matter, or would you see involvement of the SOM, VIP, CRF?

What actually happened is that over the last ten or fifteen years, appeals to consensus were used in support of so many obvious falsehoods that consensus ceased to be a good heuristic for the best available science, and started to be a good heuristic for somebody lying to you.

“Modern man is in a terrible predicament. He is helplessly enamored with the beauty of what the old world built, yet despises the beliefs that inspired them to build it.” —Jeremey Wayne Tate

Major academic publishers' revenue and what they pay authors and reviewers: Revenue: Elsevier: $3.9 billion Springer Nature: $2 billion Wolters Kluwer: $1.6 billion Wiley: $1.8 billion Taylor & Francis: $800 million Sage: $500 million They pay: Authors: $0 Reviewers: $0