Reminder: If researchers find Cohen's d = 6, no they didn't.

trustworthy.scientific.claims/posts/if-res...

Ancient DNA reveals that natural selection has upregulated the immune system over the last 10,000 years www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...

The area of genomics of named historical individuals is developing rapidly but feels like the Wild West.

We need standards and ethical frameworks:
- Who are the stakeholders (descendants/victims/countries etc)
- Who gives consent
- Destructive sampling
- TV show "publication"
- Data access

Convergent natural selection at both ends of Eurasia during parallel radical lifestyle shifts in the last ten millennia www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...

Endometriosis lesions are oligoclonal structures derived from the normal endometrium www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02...

We just published a brief preprint on aDNA from two Medieval Ottonic emperors. 🧬👑

We confirm via IBD segments that remains attributed to Otto "the Great" and "Saint" Heinrich are third-degree relatives. As historically attested - suggesting that they are authentic. ✅️

doi.org/10.64898/202...
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It is so painfully obvious that a more sensible world would be treating the development of AI with much more care than what we see from the current state of affairs.

I really wish that AI labs were not racing as fast as they can to train models that are much smarter than humans and unleash them on the world.

I wish that they hadn't already released models which generate images and audio that are hard to distinguish from real footage or the work of artists.

It is very clear that we could stop AI development right now and it would still transform a substantial portion of white collar work, often unrecognizably, over the next 5-10 years as people figure out how to make the technology work in various industries, even given current models' limitations.

I welcome Iceland to the EU if only so we might see Hlöllabátar in Europe. The continent needs Hlöllabátar.

Lasting Lower Rhine–Meuse forager ancestry shaped Bell Beaker expansion - Nature A distinctive population with high hunter-gatherer ancestry persisted 3,000 years later than in most European regions, contributing to later Lower Rhine–Meuse Bell Beaker users.

Proud that after five years of careful analysis and discussion our paper "Lasting Lower Rhine-Meuse forager ancestry shaped Bell Beaker expansion" has now been published.

This paper in Management Science has been cited more than 6,000 times. Wall Street execs, top govt officials, and even a former U.S. Vice President have all referenced it. It’s fatally flawed, and the scholarly community refuses to do anything about it.
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/01/22/a...

At the same time, posts from those two are likely responsible for a non-trivial proportion of the mania around genetic enhancement in Silicon Valley.

Blogging has consequences...

Fun that this study is substantially motivated by the 2013 "Lizardman's constant" post on Slate Star Codex. Like seeing those polygenic score benchmarking studies citing Gwern (as they should).

I think Trump's contribution to this decision is fairly small. EU membership has long been debated in Iceland and the two coalition parties pushing for a vote have basically been pro-EU since before Trump's first term. The upcoming referendum was agreed upon before Trump's second term began.

'They saw them on their dishes when eating': The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans Only recently described by science, the mysterious mushrooms are found in different parts of the world, but they give people the same exact visions.

With most psychedelic drugs, you never know what you're going to get. But this mysterious mushroom from China - without fail - causes users to hallucinate tiny people: crawling up walls, popping out from under furniture and marching under doors. www.bbc.com/future/artic...

Brenna Henn Wanted to Improve Genetic Medicine. Then Her N.I.H. Grant Was Cut. Brenna Henn had a long-term grant to study the genetic diversity of Africans and people of African descent. Then her N.I.H. funding was cut.

Brenna Henn Wanted to Improve Genetic Medicine. Then Her N.I.H. Grant Was Cut.

Paleogenomic insight into the collapse, recovery, and management of American bison www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12...

This smells distinctly like collider bias and/or selection bias and/or regression to the mean... You simply can't select teen prodigies, and world class athletes rom databases, and go run regressions without serious consideration of the selection process!

News & Publications Eugenie Reich & Gregg Shapiro Announce $15 Million NIH Grant Fraud Settlement (December 2025) Complaint Settlement Agreement Scientific Fraud in the 21st Century (Video Lecture) Sandia Nationa…

The U.S. Department of Justice has reached a $15 million NIH grant fraud settlement with Dana-Farber Cancer Center. This resolves a False Claims Act qui tam complaint that I filed on behalf of @sholtodavid.bsky.social in April 2024, with Gregg Shapiro as my co-counsel.

Sperm from donor with cancer-causing gene was used to conceive almost 200 children Some children have already died and only a minority who inherit the mutation will escape cancer in their lifetimes.

Sperm banks should be much more strictly regulated. (particularly, only accepting donations from registered donors). The banks don't seem to make the slightest effort to avoid these cases.

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Homo sapiens-specific evolution unveiled by ancient southern African genomes - Nature The genomes of 28 ancient southern African individuals dated to between 10,200 and 150 years before present offer insights into the evolution of Homo sapiens.

Our new ancient DNA paper has just been published!
We present 28 new genomes from southern Africa - several of them high-coverage whole genomes.
Exciting to be moving towards population-level representation of ancient southern African genetic diversity!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Bayesian inference of population structure using identity-by-descent-based stochastic block models www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11....

This Kallmann diagnosis seems deeply implausible. For one thing he (famously!) was able to grow facial hair. And there's no indication that this intensely documented person had severely impaired smell, a distinctive feature of Kallmann. In fact, a little Googling specifically indicates the opposite:

I learn from my students of the Icelandic Saga map: hours of fun! sagamap.hi.is/is/

Revisiting the Evolution of Lactase Persistence: Insights from South Asian Genomes www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11....

A tutorial on how not to over-interpret STRUCTURE and ADMIXTURE bar plots - Nature Communications Clustering methods such as STRUCTURE and ADMIXTURE are widely used in population genetic studies to investigate ancestry. Here, the authors provide a tutorial on how to interpret results of these anal...

Apropos of nothing in particular, I think it's useful to signal-boost this old paper on "how not to over-interpret ADMIXTURE bar plots". www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ciliates Euplotes YouTube video by Microvisum

Can't believe I'd never heard of Euplotes before today: single-celled organisms who scurry around on little "legs"! Around 50 μm long, so ~1000x smaller than a tardigrade. This one has a kind of horseshoe crab habitus, flattened and with a "carapace". Incredible.

youtu.be/uJF30emkWt8?...

The big tech companies are reversing the intellectual and political gains of the Enlightenment and returning us to a New Dark Ages of ignorance, rage and superstition - it's the most important story of our time
jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-o...