“Cosmic strings appear to be a generic prediction of our (admittedly fuzzy) understanding of the early Universe. We may not know exactly what went down all those billions of years ago, but we’re fairly certain that it involved phase transitions and that those phase transitions should support the existence of topological defects like cosmic strings.”

“When [Ron] DeSantis says that the people of Martha’s Vineyard are ‘virtue signaling,’ it’s in part an accusation of hypocrisy. But more broadly, it’s a wholesale attack on the very idea of virtue.”

“[I]t was common for deepfake audio to result in vocal tracts with the same relative diameter and consistency as a drinking straw, in contrast to human vocal tracts, which are much wider and more variable in shape.”

“So when Hild is called hægtes, she is being labelled uncanny, powerful, fearsome, and dangerous — but also perhaps necessary to a group’s survival, even admirable, and most definitely to be paid attention to — not for her femininity but for her otherworldly power.”

“The fact that Tebo 1 apparently didn’t face serious infection suggests that whoever performed the amputation understood how to keep the wound, the surgical tools, and their hands clean and understood that they needed to do so (which puts 31,000-year-old hunter-gatherers ahead of European and American surgeons just a century ago).”

“I’ve never felt so conflicted using an emerging technology as DALL·E 2, which feels like borderline magic in what it’s capable of conjuring, but raises so many ethical questions, it’s hard to keep track of them all.”

“The panic over Quiet Quitting is that bosses realize that they have used almost every mechanism to control and incentivize workers other than actually incentivizing them.”

“[A]dding soft tissue pads into the models substantially reduced the overall stress and strain on the pedal bones across all five species, similar to the cushioning pads of today’s elephants and rhinoceroses.”

“The majority of long Covid patients — more than 75 percent, according to some estimates — were never hospitalized for their original infection. For these people, uncovering the reasons for their enduring illness is less straightforward, though scientists have several leads.”

“[Betelgeuse’s] trademark pulsation has also stopped—hopefully temporarily—perhaps because the interior convection cells ‘are sloshing around like an imbalanced washing machine tub’ as the photosphere begins the slow process of rebuilding itself.”

“In the overall logic that I am describing, rivals would seek to conserve whatever fighting forces they have, either to protect their own personal interests during an unpredictable time, or to make a play for Moscow.”

“Doing this only excuses the messaging that we have been seeing everywhere we look … that crypto is an ‘investment’, or the future of money, or the democratized version of finance that will finally give the average person a fair shake.”

“[T]he cases may arise from a co-infection of two different viruses—one of which could be an adenovirus and the other a hitchhiking virus—in children who also happen to have a specific genetic predisposition to hepatitis.”

“Real questions are almost never settled in terms of right or wrong but rather how best to balance the competing equities of various solutions. Sarcasm is too lazy to engage in such important discussion.”

“[T]he ancient wolf genomes clustered together in time. That is, a given wolf was most likely to be closely related to other wolves alive at around the same time, no matter where those wolves lived on the planet.”