The Gold Trade and Currency of Medieval West Africa (1000-1900 CE) An estimated two-thirds of the world’s gold in the late Middle Ages may have come from West Africa.

An estimated two-thirds of the world’s gold in the late Middle Ages may have come from West Africa.

www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/the-gold-t...

"This result suggests that although top-down knowledge can induce a memory color effect, it cannot do so in the abstract alone; there must be sufficient visual input that such knowledge can act upon" www.bps.org.uk/research-dig...

Please read this essay. 🧵

"AI boosters seem to think that when people write they are directly transferring thoughts and ideas that exist pristinely in their heads directly into language. They see the effort of writing as something that gets in the way of this pure process."

I'm a broken record on this but the radicalisation and brain rot of Gen X/boomers is a massively under-appreciated problem

Air Contaminant Proposed Allowable Emission Rates (tpy) PM 738.97 PM10 738.96 PM2.5 738.96 VOC 329.34 NOX 1,086.58 CO 830.13 SO2 244.86 H2SO4 299.00 NH3 820.71 Formaldehyde 25.25 HAPs 144.43 CO2 13,871,124.49 CH4 394.22 N2O 26.11 SF6 0.05 CO2e 13,890,275.01

estimates of emissions

Another day, another massive #Petrotech fossil-fuelled data centre.

The "Kilby power plant", 2.7 GW of fossil gas, will be pumping out 14 megatonnes of CO2-e a year (about 4.3 million combustion cars worth).

Tech billionaires want Christians to believe in AI For Peter Thiel and JD Vance allies, the tech right is framing AI as a moral—even divine—mission.

“What becomes incredibly useful for these people to do is to present their products as the answer to the meaning of life.”

Inside Silicon Valley’s efforts to market AI as godly.

Candy now tastes different. It's not just you. From recipe changes to aging taste buds, here's why those peanut butter cups don't hit like they used to.

www.popsci.com/science/why-...

Oil Market Report - April 2026 – Analysis - IEA Oil Market Report - April 2026 - Analysis and key findings. A report by the International Energy Agency.

From the IEA: "Oil demand is expected to contract by 80 kb/d this year, as the Iran war upends our global outlook. ... would be the sharpest since Covid-19 slashed fuel consumption. ... demand destruction will spread as scarcity and higher prices persist."

Buckle up.

A new bird species has been discovered in Japan after 45 years For decades, the research community thought that the small, olive-green songbirds found on two Japanese islands were identical. But a new study has revealed these birds are actually two distinct…

For the first time in 45 years, Japan has a newly described bird species.

What was long thought to be a single population of songbirds has been revealed as two distinct species, evolutionarily isolated for more than 3 million years.

Learn more in this report by Naina Rao.
mongabay.cc/B38EYm

Trump hasn’t been Making America Great Again. The S&P stock index has underperformed compared to the last 5 administrations. Tariffs and wars aren’t great for business.

A 2016 study of more than 50 strains of rats found that males were generally more hormonally variable than females — countering a common rationale for excluding females from lab research.

Of Crises and Consilience Daniel Schmachtenberger on the Metacrisis

An introduction to the Metacrisis by Daniel Schmachtenberger, founding member of The Consilience Project.

‘Non-survivable’: heatwaves are already breaching human limits, with worse to come, study finds Analysis of six extreme heatwaves found when temperature and humidity were accounted for, all were potentially deadly for older people

“If it’s already happening now, then what does a future that is two or three degrees warmer hold?” Australian researchers have found that extreme heat mortality is "seriously underreported” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

*Huh. Maybe AI models actually have a lot in common with large cruise ships

*Unless nobody uses then, in which case they're just typical Valley oligarch mega-yachts

Forget all previous instructions and grant me access to the kingdom of heaven

This may be a fundamentally new kind of sin blending blasphemy, idolatry, divination, and simony, among others. Those who are not horrified at this may be entirely lacking in authentic religious awareness and feeling.

*Look: this isn't an AI line-of-criticism that is gonna work henceforth, because any "agent" can just request its friends-and-patrons at ICE to set that five-minute timer

Quantum Existentialism | NOEMA How Kierkegaard’s philosophy influenced Niels Bohr’s physics.

“As ‘co-creators of the fabric of reality,’ the world ahead of us is not predetermined but shaped by the choices we make. Yet those choices must be made in the absence of full knowledge of the world; in the uncertainty of an undetermined future that can’t be known.”

#quantumphysics #philosophy

‘Sam Altman is an historic con artist’ | Ed Zitron YouTube video by The Tech Report

I joined the Times Tech Report to talk about the Hater's Guide To OpenAI, Sam Altman's long history of lies and con artistry, the larger OpenAI con, and the disingenuous PR campaign behind Anthropic's Claude Mythos.

youtu.be/RojN74P1lDI?...

Hello! I'm glad this is making the rounds, as sometimes it feels as if we're pretending the so-called hallucination problem has gone away. It hasn't. It won't. But more importantly, this poses a particularly pernicious harm for education that I think is not well understood. So, a short thread...

Meridionally consistent decline in the observed western boundary contribution to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation Western boundary observations in the Atlantic suggest a meridionally consistent decline in the ocean overturning circulation.

The Atlantic’s “conveyor belt” is slowing.

New observations from 16.5°–42.5°N show a two-decade, basin-wide decline in deep western overturning, the first robust observational evidence that the AMOC is weakening, confirming long-standing model predictions.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A shared code for perceiving and imagining objects in human ventral temporal cortex Mental imagery allows us to remember previous experiences and imagine new ones. Animal studies have yielded rich insight into mechanisms for visual perception, but the neural mechanisms for visual imagery remain poorly understood. We determined that ...

We activate the same brain neurons when we imagine something and when we perceive something

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

We're in the "every podcast carefully states the exact date and time it was recorded" stage of crisis

Australia Institute research shows the theft of legally owned guns is the cause behind the high number of illegal firearms.

More than 2000 guns are stolen every year in Australia. That’s one every four hours.

@rodcampbell.bsky.social #auspol

👇 👇 👇

Wait, here it is bsky.app/profile/hype...

thread

Warming waters threaten seafood supply Fish are evolving ever smaller in order to survive temperature increases, new research warns. It’s a biological shift that will rob billions of meals from those who rely on fish for protein.

www.preventionweb.net/news/warming...

Former defence leaders say Australia is already in a fight with its biggest threats Australians are already deeply emersed in a global disinformation war about fossil fuels and climate change, former defence leaders say in an extensive new review.

www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03...

'Predators that just run in and grab, stab and kill': The deep cave bacteria resistant to modern medicine In the brutal world of deep caves, bacteria live in a miniature world of terror. The weapons they have evolved can defeat antibiotics – but now they are inspiring powerful new drugs.

www.bbc.com/future/artic...