Reminder: Publication schedule will remain random until we have over 20 members. We are almost there!
If you spent the summer avoiding global warming…
Google published predictions of the structure of 350,000 proteins produced by its AlphaFold AI system. Deducing protein structure is a very hard problem and requires magnificent amount of work by grad students, so this is a remarkable achievement.
Note that I said “predictions”. We don’t know how many of these structures are accurate. And many proteins probably do not have a stable structure at all.
So people remain skeptical of the ultimate significance of this work.
Whether proteins are like little molecular machines or not is a subject of some debate among people trying to find the best way to think about the living world.
Bronze Age empires collapsed because of disease
The collapse of the Egyptian Old Kingdom and Near Eastern Akkadian State in the 3rd millennium BCE may be linked to demographic decline due to Y. pestis (a different strain of the bug responsible for bubonic plague) and S. enterica (Salmonella).
This discovery made use of ancient DNA found in 68 human teeth from the Hagios Charalambos cave in Crete.
Read the full paper.
Human vocal anatomy is the result of loss of complexity
We tend to think evolutionary adaptation results from increasing complexity. Not so in general, and possibly not so for the human adaptation for speech!
Check out the full paper in Science.
Two wins for behavioral science
Yes, count us as forever skeptical when it comes to these topics. But these are nonetheless impressive.
Prebunking means inoculating people against misinformation by suplying them with critical thinking skills in advance. Now a team of scientists worked with YouTube to inoculate millions — and it seems to be working! Stay tuned to see this used more and more (with unintended consequences, for sure).
Megastudy (n=32,059) tested techniques for reducing anti-democratic attitudes. Top three: intergroup contact (not that again!); addressing mistrust in media; creating shared intergroup identity.
Final Treats
For when you have some free time.
Read a New Yorker book review about the cultural construction of emotions.
Deep Learning Alone Isn’t Getting Us to Human-Like AI as Gary Marcus keeps reminding us.
The book What Is Cognitive Psychology by Michael R. W. Dawson is open access.