One of the authors, Hector Zenil, indicating a simulation of AI agents interacting and trying to influence one another, with the various metrics associated with each agent in the arena displayed. CREDIT: OIA

Perfect AI alignment with human values is mathematically impossible, according to a study. The authors propose an alternative strategy of “managed misalignment,” in which competing AI agents with different cognitive styles check one another. In PNAS Nexus: https://ow.ly/AZSR50YKFaK

Frequently Asked Questions About Our Innovative New EdTech Collaboration “With a free Skynet Edu account, students can gain the career-readiness needed to navigate an exciting future in which they will be hunted by a remorseless, ...

My institution relentlessly going whole hog on AI has the one benefit of inspiring colleagues to be completely hilarious-
www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/fre...

The countdown is on! A group of generous donors has pledged to match all AIA Giving Day gifts dollar for dollar, up to $50,000, but only through tomorrow, Tuesday, April 21.

Don’t miss your chance to make twice the impact—give today at buff.ly/s6G2mR3

screenshot of "Trait coevolution and causal inference using generalized dynamic phylogenetic models" in Methods in Ecology and Evolution

So proud of my beloved @err-ring.bsky.social 's latest work. Erik & co overcome the limits of Pagel's 'discrete' method by developing a novel class of generalized dynamic phylogenetic models. doi.org/10.1111/2041...

Years ago I asked how he figured this out:

'By thinking really hard.'

Photo of several puzzle piece with various hand-drawn designs on them. I Love Libraries logo. Text over photo reads: "Find Your Joy and Return to It Often: Why Libraries Matter More than Ever. Sam Helmick, 2025-2026 ALA President" ALA150 American Library Association

"So this week, I encourage you to engage with your library in person or online. Wander the stacks. Attend a program. Ask for a recommendation. Let yourself be surprised." - ALA President Sam Helmick

Read Sam's full piece: https://bit.ly/4cQ4Qvf

📸 Tomahawk (WI) Public Library

#NationalLibraryWeek

700-year-old mummy from Bolivia contains earliest confirmed evidence of strep throat bacteria in the Americas A DNA analysis of pathogens from a pre-Hispanic mummy revealed that the bacterium that causes scarlet fever and strep throat was present in the Americas prior to European colonization.

Scientists have confirmed that group A strep can be identified in ancient remains. They found pathogen DNA in a prehispanic mummy from Bolivia — raising the question: Where did strep (and diseases like scarlet fever) originate? 🧪🏺

I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.

The Cultural Evolution Society is delighted to announce that Mason Youngblood (he/they) @masonyoungblood.bsky.social, Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Stony Brook University, is the recipient of the 2026 CES New Investigator Award.

Congratulations Mason on this well-deserved award!!

'I had no-one to talk to': The 92yo trying to save his dying language Peter is the last living speaker of the First Nations language Thiinma. When he met linguist Rosie, they used music to help keep his knowledge alive, and formed a beautiful friendship along the way.

www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04...

Just in case you don’t believe me. This is a thing I’m always upset about when it comes to public scholarship, which is a topic I care so deeply about. www.patreon.com/posts/900009...

Spring has sprung at our HRAF offices in New Haven, Connecticut🌷🌷🌷

Why do some societies frown upon public displays of affection while others disapprove more of queue-jumping? New research publshed in #JRSocInterface reveals that cultural differences in #SocialNorms follow predictable patterns doi.org/10.1098/rsif... | #Biomathematics #PredictiveModelling

1. In this paper, we included this word cloud of the top 200 words in the volume Man the Hunter. A reader wondered how could the top 200 words in a book with the title "Man the Hunter" include "woman" but not "man"? Doh!
🧪 #rstats #BioAnth #AcademicSky 🧵

I’m looking for an automated way to read others’s scientific data without giving credit or acknowledgement, and also claim full credit for insights from it. And I want it to have a fitting name

OAI: say no more

The Neanderthal Infant Whose Bones Were Already Older Than Its Teeth A nearly complete skeleton from northern Israel suggests that Neanderthal babies followed a fundamentally different developmental strategy from modern humans.

A Neanderthal infant’s bones and teeth don’t agree on its age. The gap between them reveals something fundamental about how Neanderthals developed. New research in Current Biology. #Neanderthal #Paleoanthropology #HumanEvolution www.anthropology.net/p/the-neande...

They're weak and getting weaker for sure but forgive me for not joining in the chorus saying this regime is cooked because another apocalyptic cut to federal funding for my sector just dropped and the kidnappings in my state have not slowed down (though it seems to have done so elsewhere)

We've published some exciting archives-related articles this year and would like to accept more submissions like these, but we need your help!

Please share this call for volunteers to serve on the editorial board with your #archives colleagues

Sperm whales’ communication closely parallels human language, study finds Analysis shows whales’ coda vocalizations are ‘highly complex’ and remarkably similar to our own

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

HRAF President, Carol Ember, is offering two types of workshops this spring. Free to join! Learn how to sign up:

hraf.yale.edu/cross-cultur...

My photo shows a profile view of a small horse figurine with head to the left, displayed against a dark background. Sculpted from mammoth ivory, the surface is a mottled greyish-earthy-brown colour with a shiny patina. It was once likely pale white in colour. It measures 2.5 cm height, 4.8 cm width, and 0.7 cm depth. The head is gracefully lowered with a long and elegant curving neck, and a convex curved back. The four legs are incomplete. The top of the tail remains. The eyes, nostrils, and mouth are carved as indents. The ‘Vogelherd Horse’ was excavated in 1931, together with a number of other ivory animal figurines from the Vogelherd Cave, Swabian Jura, Germany. It is the oldest known sculpture of a horse. On display at the Museum of Ancient Cultures, at Hohentübingen Castle, Tübingen, Germany.

Something ancient and wonderful for the weekend!

A tiny horse figurine carved from mammoth ivory about 40,000 years ago!

Imagine the #IceAge artist at work, sitting by the warmth of a fire, creating what is the world’s oldest known figure of a horse!

📷 by me

#Archaeology

Native Americans were gambling with dice 6,000 years earlier than anyone else, study says Archaeological record suggests hunter gatherers were playing games of chance at the end of the last ice age

🏺 Interesting objects but I don't see that it's possible to argue specifically for these to be for gaming/gambling, rather than something like divination, with yes/no responses. That would make as much sense c. 12 Ka as gaming.
www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

www.scientificamerican.com/article/two-...

all these universities kept axing medieval history departments as if they thought tyrants beefing with the Pope was going to stop being relevant

Native Americans Were Making Dice and Gaming Thousands of Years Before Anyone Else New research shows that Native Americans were making dice for gaming thousands of years before anyone else in the world.

Native Americans were rolling dice and playing games of chance thousands of years before anyone else. New research shows that hunter-gatherers in North America crafted bone dice as far back as 12,800 years ago, way before similar games appeared in Europe or Asia.

The Ancient Dice Discovery That Puts Native Americans at the Very Dawn of Probabilistic Thinking Bone dice recovered from Ice Age deposits in the American West have rewritten the origins of gambling, and of something far bigger.

"For more than a century, historians placed the birth of dice and games of chance firmly in the Near East. A new study has dismantled that assumption entirely, tracing the practice to hunter-gatherers on the western Great Plains some 12,000 years ago." indiandefencereview.com/the-ancient-...

Dogs were widely distributed across western Eurasia during the Palaeolithic - Nature Analysis of nuclear and mitochondrial genomes from archaeological canid remains found across Europe and Anatolia shows that a genetically homogeneous dog population was already widely distributed acro...

"This finding suggests that dogs were exchanged among genetically and culturally distinct western Eurasian Late Palaeolithic human populations, namely the Magdalenian, Epigravettian and Anatolian hunter-gatherers."

So seems "I'm going to go see a man about a dog" goes back at least 15 centuries.

Cinnabar, a vibrant, mineralized form of mercury sulfide, was often used to coat lacquerware in ancient China. Image credit: Veke.eu/Shutterstock

China’s past #cinnabar use left a #mercury signature written in human #bone. In PNAS Journal Club: https://ow.ly/hvK950YFKpU

#HanDynasty #TangDynasty #TraditionalChineseMedicine #China #archaeology

The Protein Gap Bone chemistry from 12,000 Europeans traces a 10,000-year pattern of unequal access to meat—and finds women consistently on the losing end

New research applies an economics-based inequality metric to isotope data from 12,281 European skeletons—finding persistent male dominance in high-protein consumption across 10,000 years of prehistory and history. #Bioarchaeology #StableIsotopes #FoodInequality www.anthropology.net/p/the-protei...

No. Educators do not NEED to incorporate AI into their classrooms. I would like to see you be transparent about any financial incentives you or the union receive from AI companies. #edtech #education