Paper Roundup December 2025: computing billiards, an impossible atmosphere, and Roman constructions

Papers on big questions at the frontiers of science, curated by hand each month

More than words: prosody in the brain

The brain's dedicated hardware for handling the melody of speech overlaps with regions involved in language processing and recognizing facial expressions.

There's no gene for being human

Barbara Molz found supposedly extinct ancient gene variants in hundreds of modern humans. They don't seem to do much.

What do space sugars tell us about the origin of life?

The mystery of life's origin is not a missing magic ingredient, it's a missing process.

Paper Roundup November 2025: Mars lightning, language processing, and autism microbiome

This month's curated list of interesting new papers

Tessellation revelation

From my archives: the story of how mathematicians discovered "soft cells" that fill space without corners

The individual isn't what it used to be

Tim Waring thinks human evolution is shifting from genetic and individual to cultural and collective

Women have no genetic blueprint

Neither do men, but women *really* don't

Paper Roundup October 2025: dark matter, emergence, and dinosaur mummies

Papers on big questions at the frontiers of science, curated by hand each month

Does biology play dice?

Some thoughts on nature, nurture, and chance in development

Political (neural) networking

Eddie Lee mapped the political landscape underpinning the increasingly polarized US Senate using the same physics that sparked the AI boom

True fictions

The storytelling instinct conjures illusions of consensus in science