# Reviewer, too | Elise Cutts > A science newsletter about the systems, instincts, and incentives that shape what's discovered, what's believed, and what happens Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### About URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/about/ Last updated: 2026-08-03T14:52:35.000Z ***Reviewer, too*** is a newsletter about science. It covers the systems, instincts, and incentives that shape what's discovered, what's believed, and what happens when research hits the real world for hundreds of readers who care about science and truth as forces for good. [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) The newsletter is written by me, science journalist [Elise Cutts](http://www.elisecutts.com/?ref=reviewertoo.com). I write about science for outlets like *Quanta*, *New Scientist*, *Scientific American*, and *Science.* My background is in geoscience and biology; I earned my B.S. and M.S. from Caltech and MIT before leaving academia to write. I was a 2022 AAAS Mass Media Fellow at *Voice of America* (r.i.p.), 2026 FRONTIERS Journalist in Residence at the Complexity Science Hub, and 2026 *The Open Notebook* Early-Career Fellow. I aim to do four jobs for subscribers: - **Keep you informed.** The Monday edition leads with a short essay on last week's biggest science x society news, followed by a section called Citation Needed — a curated list of links with commentary that puts fresh research, events, and developing stories in context. - **Spark conversations.** There's a lot that pro-science folks have to talk about right now. I aim to provide a space (and occasionally a bit of kindling) for important — and sometimes uncomfortable — conversations about doing, sharing, and acting on science. - **Report exclusives.** The twice-monthly main newsletter features original reporting and exclusive info: think Q&A interviews, magazine-style features, news scoops, reports from conferences or events, and explorations of data. - **Make things make sense.** Through explainers and essays, I give a sense of how individual events and trends fit into big-picture trends and developments. I offer my own opinions and explore and respond to others' perspectives and analyses, too. The main newsletter posts every-other Thursday and the newsy Monday edition posts weekly. Both go out at 5pm Central European Time. ****Relaunch Timeline** You've come at an exciting time! I'm in the middle of re-launching this newsletter with a sharper focus on the systems, incentives, and instincts that determine when and how science matters. See my coverage areas below. To ease into the new topic and new posting rhythm, I'm staggering the launch dates for the Monday and Thursday post formats: ****Monday Editions:** weekly****,** starting June 29 ****Thursday Editions:** twice-monthly, starting in September **UPDATE: July 30 was too ambitious for the Thursday editions. They'll start up in September, most likely. Sooner if I get more paid subscribers and can cut back on other freelance work!* You can get in touch at [elise@reviewertoo.com](mailto:hello@reviewertoo.com) or via Signal: emc.7243623 Sound good? [Subscribe for free](#/portal/signup/free). [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) ## What does *Reviewer, too* cover? You could say *Reviewer, too* is about science and science communication, but its scope is both narrower and broader than that. Here's a living list of what I cover here, updated regularly: [\[1\]](#f-1) - **Metascience and innovation.** How well is science actually working? How would we know? Where do innovations come from? What has to happen for a discovery to matter? Can there be progress without loss? How quickly is the rate of publication accelerating? Does peer review work? What ever happened to the replication crisis? Are good ideas getting harder to find? Who thrives in science and why? Is interdisciplinary just a buzzword? How do the incentives of science shape research? Are the incentives working? - **Science under threat.** How do anti-science forces work to undermine science and its institutions? Why are so many rich countries slashing science funding? Can the rest of the world really fill the gap if US science collapses? What would proposed policy changes mean for research? [Why is US right obsessed with Pluto](https://www.reviewertoo.com/pluto-planet-populism/)? What's responsible for the collapse of trust in science? Did trust in science actually collapse? How are scientists fighting back? - **Truth and the infosphere.** Who does fact-based journalism reach? What incentives shape science media? How is the collapse of traditional media and fractured information landscape shaping the flow of information? Is clickbait bad? Is TikTok bad? Is reading dead? What does the research say about what actually works in scicomm? Was there ever such a thing as shared fact-based reality? Does science need to be dumbed down for general audiences? [What's the "general audience," anyways](https://www.reviewertoo.com/pop-science-doesnt-reach-a-general-audience/)? - **AI in science.** Is AI slop going to kill preprint servers? What about journals? The scientific paper itself? How are scientists using AI? What kinds of AI models exist, and how are they being used in research? Are ["AI scientist" pipelines](https://www.reviewertoo.com/ai-generated-science-is-now-good-enough/) any good? What does it mean that AI can make significant discoveries in math? Are professors going to replace their grad students with Claude? How does AI adoption shape scientists' careers — and science as a whole? - **Bias, attention, and vibes.** What shapes belief in spite of evidence? How do beliefs shape policy and action? How do algorithmic feeds, AI, social platforms, and the attention economy shape how we see the world? Was shared reality ever a thing? How do cognitive biases shape the perception and acceptance of science? Why do people trust grifters and inject dubious peptides? Why is conspiracist rhetoric so effective? Is it all really just about vibes? [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) ## Why subscribe? Subscribing is the best way to support this project. Free subscribers get: - The Citation Needed link-roundup section of the Monday brief - Unlocked comments section - Free access to new posts for 2 weeks after publication Paying patrons get extra perks: - Access to the **full archive** of posts older than 2 weeks - **A full audio edition** of each post recorded by me in one take — no AI voice! - An invitation to the supporters-only Discord (to be launched upon reaching a critical mass of supporters — we are almost there!). - A substantially higher chance the newsletter continues to exist Paid subscribers keep this project running. I chose to build *Reviewer, too* on Ghost because I didn't feel comfortable asking paid subscribers to support Substack.[\[2\]](#f-2) But that means I'm paying a few hundred dollars a year just to keep the site online. And since I'm a full-time freelancer, every minute I spend on this newsletter is time I'm not spending writing for magazines that actually pay my bills. Monetary support makes a world of difference.[ You can sign up for the tip jar tier to automatically tip me 50 cents per post](#/portal/signup) and get access to the patrons-only Thursday edition. I'm working to provide more perks for paid subscribers. Here are my top priorities: - ~~Audio editions of each post read by me (top priority)~~ *Done!* - A quarterly opinionated hot take post - A community Discord and quarterly journal club [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) ## AI Policy Nothing you read on this site is written by AI, but I do use AI tools to support my work. You can read [my complete AI policy here](https://www.reviewertoo.com/ai-policy). As a preview, here are my four golden rules, which apply to my own work and to work by others published here. **Rule 1: Creative work is human work** *None of my creative work (writing, images, video, etc.) intended for public consumption or the creative work by others published on my own websites may be conceptualized or drafted using generative AI.* **Rule 2: Complement don't replace** *I do not use AI tools to replace anything I would realistically a) do myself or b) pay someone else to do in a world in which these tools did not exist. I use AI as a complement, not a replacement.* **Rule 3: Time is respect** *If I'm not willing to spend my time to communicate with someone else, then I can't expect them to spend their time on whatever I have to say. I therefore do not use AI tools to write emails or otherwise communicate with other people.* **Rule 4: The absurdity exception** *If a system or task disrespects my humanity, it does not necessarily deserve the respect of a human response. I may use generative AI tools to do "creative work" (writing) for absurd tasks, especially if the entity demanding and/or evaluating the task is itself an AI (e.g. hiring systems).* [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) ## Why is this newsletter called *Reviewer, too*? It's a pun on an academic inside joke. Before a research paper is published, it goes through peer-review, a usually anonymous process in which 1-3 other scientists decide whether or not a paper deserves to be published in *Annals of Communications of Transactions in Advances Report Letters* or whatever. The mysterious and ever-grumpy "Reviewer 2" is somehow always to blame for negative peer review comments (even if the actual culprit is Reviewer 1 or 3). The name is also a reference to the R2 or R-squared value that reports how well models predict data. [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) --- [\[1\]](#:~:text=%5B1%5D): Shout-out to the extensive About page of Casey Newton's newsletter [Platformer](https://www.platformer.news/?ref=reviewertoo.com) for inspiring the format of my about section. [\[2\]](#:~:text=%5B2%5D): I'm on Substack at [@elisecutts](https://substack.com/@elisecutts?ref=reviewertoo.com) because that is where other writers hang out and I want to interact with them and their work — and also plug this newsletter. But I didn't want to ask paid subscribers to give Substack a cut, given Substack's choice to platform — [and promote and profit from](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-substack-makes-money-from-hosting-nazi-newsletters?ref=reviewertoo.com) — some truly abhorrent content including neo-nazi newsletters. This was a hard choice, and I do often worry that I'm hurting the newsletter's growth potential by refusing to host it on Substack. Time will tell. ### Weekly Research Roundups URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/paper-roundups/ Last updated: 2026-03-10T17:12:02.000Z How did life begin? Could we create life in the lab? How do genomes code for organisms? Do living things shape their own evolution? What is consciousness? How do we learn, perceive, and act? How intelligent is AI, actually? What is intelligence, even? Are we alone? How does order and complexity emerge from chaos and simplicity? Every week, I publish a curated list of the most fascinating, groundbreaking inflammatory, or otherwise bold new scholarship on "big questions" like this so you can keep tabs on the frontiers of basic science. I like to imagine these are the papers you'd find sitting on the desk of an old timey natural philosopher who'd been whisked to the present. [Subscribe](#/portal/signup/free) My top three picks for each week are free for everyone, but the rest of the roundup is a perk for paid subscribers. I also do a monthly round-up of big science news on my main newsletter that's free for everyone. You can choose to subscribe to roundups only, the main newsletter only, or both — and change your mind at any time from your user portal. Any glaring omissions, bad recommendations, or typos are 100% human fallibility and 0% AI hallucination. [Subscribe](#/portal/signup/free) Fields and topics that tend to come up include: - Astrobiology and the search for life - Artificial life/ALife - Origins of life - Cognitive neuroscience - Artificial intelligence - Language - Sleep - Consciousness - Emergence - Causation - Philosophy of science - Statistical physics and information - Scaling laws and phase transitions - Evolution and persistence - Function and purpose in biology - Agency and free will - Quantum biology - Physical biology and biophysics - Morphogenesis - Deep time and Earth history - Exoplanet astronomy - Solar system exploration - Cosmology The point of curation is to make it easier to find *interesting things*, not to flood you with *all the things*. So I skip most papers, even in relevant fields. **If you're a maximalist, consider becoming a paid subscriber**: paid patrons get the whole roundup instead of just my top 3 picks each week, and [can follow the custom RSS feeds I've set up for astrobiology, exoplanets, and origin of life research](https://www.reviewertoo.com/big-questions-rss-feeds). More feeds are coming soon! [Go to custom RSS feeds](https://www.reviewertoo.com/big-questions-rss-feeds) Recommendations are welcome. Send them to elise@reviewertoo.com with "Paper Roundup Recommendation" in the subject line. [Subscribe](#/portal/signup) ### AI Policy URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/ai-policy/ Last updated: 2026-04-29T08:11:07.000Z This page outlines how I use AI tools in making *Reviewer, too* and my general outlook on the use of AI tools in science journalism. It is updated regularly as I add (or drop) tools from my workflows and change my thinking on AI. ## The golden rules All of my decisions regarding AI use not just on this site, but in my work and life more broadly, are made in the light of the following four rules: **Rule 1: Creative work is human work** *None of my creative work (writing, images, video, etc.) intended for public consumption or the creative work by others published on my own websites may be conceptualized or drafted using generative AI.* **Rule 2: Complement don't replace** *I do not use AI tools to replace anything I would realistically a) do myself or b) pay someone else to do in a world in which these tools did not exist. I use AI as a complement, not a replacement.* **Rule 3: Time is respect** *If I'm not willing to spend my time to communicate with someone else, then I can't expect them to spend their time on whatever I have to say. I therefore do not use AI tools to write emails or otherwise communicate with other people.* **Rule 4: The absurdity exception** *If a system or task disrespects my humanity, it does not necessarily deserve the respect of a human response. I may use generative AI tools to do "creative work" (writing) for absurd tasks, especially if the entity demanding and/or evaluating the task is itself an AI (e.g. hiring systems). Absurd tasks are those whose point is not to produce something high-quality, creative, meaningful, or valuable but rather to satisfy some arbitrary requirement or check a box. This also includes highly repetitive, non-creative tasks like re-formatting a list of citations.* ## How I use AI for *Reviewer, too* What follows is an exhaustive list of how I am currently using AI in the production of content on this website. It is updated whenever I add a new tool to my workflow: **Note-taking** I use [Claude Code](https://code.claude.com/docs/en/overview?ref=reviewertoo.com) to manage an [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/?ref=reviewertoo.com) vault where I keep all of my reporting notes. It keeps the vault tidy, with standardized metadata and templates applied consistently throughout, and keeps my records of meetings with researchers and other sources up-to-date. (These are tasks I tried to do myself for years and just kept failing at; I am not an organized, methodical person). Claude Code also generates draft notes based on voice memos, interview transcripts, and chaotic "raw" notes I write by hand. AI-generated notes are always marked as unreviewed; before using them for anything serious, I fact-check them manually. *Importantly, all of the AI-generated content in my vault is aggressively and consistently labeled as such and kept separate from writing I produce myself.* This ensures that no generative AI content sneaks into my writing, even though I do use the summaries Claude generates as a resource and reference when I'm writing my own notes. I treat Claude's generative content the way I would someone else's writing: I can read it, internalize it, and take inspiration from it, but I cannot directly copy or otherwise plagiarize it. **Voice transcription** I use [Otter.ai](https://otter.ai/home?ref=reviewertoo.com) and OpenAI's free open-source tool [Whisper](https://github.com/openai/whisper?ref=reviewertoo.com) to transcribe voice memos and interviews. Transcripts intended for public consumption are checked and cleaned manually before publication. **Learning** I use Google's Gemini-powered tool [NotebookLM](https://notebooklm.google/?ref=reviewertoo.com) to turn research papers into podcast episodes so I can learn about the niche topics I'm interested in while doing chores and walking. I don't treat this as a replacement for reporting and research — any document that I write about on this site, I have read myself in full. ****Generative Content as a Secondary Source** A trend across my uses of AI for learning and note-taking is that I treat AI generative content as a secondary source that requires verification and cross-checking with a primary source if I'm going to use it for anything important. **Hobby programming** I use Claude Code to generate personal utility programs and scripts for small tasks like scraping data from the web and organizing files on my computer. None of this code is intended for anyone else to use. If it ever gets to that point, or if I ever base reporting on code generated with Claude, I will have a software-savvy person help me make sure it didn't produce nonsense. If I write blog posts based on data I collect using web scrapers coded by Claude, I'll note that and post the scraper and the data to GitHub so anyone can review it if they care to. **Fact-checking** I use Claude as a backup fact-checker on my newsletter posts. I check my own facts, but having an outside sanity check is very helpful for catching errors you become blind to as you write. I know this isn't perfect, but it is better than having no fact-check at all, which is what I would have without AI. **Research** I use Claude Code to help me with research tasks like screening preprints and abstracts for potentially relevant stories, identifying possible experts for stories (esp. when trying to increase source diversity), and filling in the basic biographical details of researchers in the "written-by-Claude" sections of my Obsidian Vault. I'm actively experimenting with ways to shape Claude into a useful research assistant for me. I plan to write more about where AI helps and does not help with my reporting and research in the future in the hopes of helping others get the most out of these tools — an article on using Claude Code to screen 20,000 abstracts from the EGU conference is in the works! **Highly repetitive tasks and absurd nonsense** Look. I am just not going to spend hours re-formatting and cleaning up lists of citations or figuring out how to write a shell script that'll get a text file formatted *juuuussssst* the way I need it for some project. For highly repetitive or programmatic tasks, I just have Claude do it. Ask my tax guy, who I used to torture with poorly-formatted spreadsheets of invoices and expenses every year: this is for the best. For this kind of repetitive stuff, I am more error-prone than an AI (and handling it manually frustrates and stresses me out). ## On the use of AI in creative work As outlined above, **I do not use generative AI to conceptualize or draft creative work**and I hold work by others published on this site to the same standard. Here's what I mean by that: **Conceptualizing**: Prompting a generative AI to brainstorm or come up with ideas for creative projects, outline or plan a creative project (e.g. creating a story outline from notes), etc. The spirit of this rule is to ensure that the ideas featured here sprung from human minds, not from machines. **Drafting:** Prompting an AI to produce the bulk or essential part of a creative work, especially as a starting point. Asking an AI tool to generate an image, text, video, website, or other creative project flat-out is clearly a violation. **However, I do allow limited use of generative AI to support, refine or enhance human-conceptualized, human-drafted creative work**. Examples of appropriate uses: - Using an AI coding agent to quickly make changes to a data visualization, Scrollytelling story, or interactive dashboard - Using an AI proofreading tool to ensure compliance with a style guide or simply check for grammar and spelling - Using generative AI to quickly clean up a long, messy list of links or citations to make it consistent and readable - Using a generative AI tool to fill in a simple background or repetitive texture in a digital painting that the artist otherwise conceptualized and drafted themselves - Using phone camera to take a picture or video — basically all phones use generative AI to make images taken with tiny cameras look reasonable - Using an AI assisted audio editor to clean up messy recordings - Using an AI assisted video editing software to quickly cut and edit a simple formulaic video format like a talking head interview - Using an AI transcription tool to transcribe an interview for your notes - Using an AI translation tool to read a document in a language you don't speak - Using AI to collect, present, or summarize information that might spark ideas (Example: asking an AI to collect and summarize all of your existing notes on frogs would be fine, but asking an AI to brainstorm ideas for stories on frogs would not, since that counts as conceptualization). ## I commit to replacing AI with humans Rule 2 states that I do not use AI to replace anything I wouldn't *realistically* do myself or pay someone else for. What realistic means is relative, though, and it'll change as this newsletter grows. Currently, R2 costs more to run than I earn writing it. So I can only afford to pay a truly pitiful $25 honorarium for one-time contributions of art or writing to the site, and I can't afford to pay for ongoing help from a research assistant, copyeditor, fact-checker, or editorial assistant at all. So I use AI to fill in, doing some tasks that I wouldn't realistically pay a human to do in a world without AI (those tasks just wouldn't get done and the newsletter would be worse, in that alternate world) . But if *R2* grows enough, what is "realistic" will change. **I therefore commit to replacing AI with humans if the site becomes profitable enough for me to pay people**. I'm not yet sure what that will look like, but will update this section accordingly once I get a better feel for how this newsletter fits into the rest of my freelance work and which tasks it'd be most constructive to hire someone for first. I anticipate research assistant help and editorial art (which I don't use AI for, anyways) will be among the first things I hire people for. ## Ok, but isn't AI an ethical nightmare? It certainly has its problems. But frankly, so do most things I do regularly, like eating chicken wings and using a cell phone and wearing clothes manufactured in a faraway sweatshop. Already being bad is no excuse for adding another bad thing to my portfolio, of course. I don't claim to be making the best moral choices, or even ethically or logically consistent ones. However, given the things that matter most to me personally, I'm satisfied with the policy above for the time being. My primary goal with this AI policy is to avoid degrading human creativity and replacing the work of the people AI companies stole from to create LLMs and other generative models (incl. journalists like me), while also making use of AI to bring more value to readers and to persist in this job as the world changes and freelance journalism gets weirder and harder. I also write about AI, and using AI tools is very helpful context for that work. ### Impressum URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/impressum/ Last updated: 2026-06-18T07:46:08.000Z **Elise Cutts** *Freelance Science Journalist* Mariahilferstraße 1 #4 8020 Graz Austria Neue Selbständige (New Self-Employed) USt-ID: ATU81308489 Email: hello@reviewertoo.com **Online Streitbeilegung:** Verbraucher, welche in Österreich oder in einem sonstigen Vertragsstaat der ODR-VO niedergelassen sind, haben die Möglichkeit Probleme bezüglich dem entgeltlichen Kauf von Waren oder Dienstleistungen im Rahmen einer Online-Streitbeilegung (nach OS, AStG) zu lösen. Die Europäische Kommission stellt eine Plattform hierfür bereit: https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr **Urheberrecht:** Die Inhalte dieser Webseite unterliegen, soweit dies rechtlich möglich ist, diversen Schutzrechten (z.B dem Urheberrecht). Jegliche Verwendung/Verbreitung von bereitgestelltem Material, welche urheberrechtlich untersagt ist, bedarf schriftlicher Zustimmung des Webseitenbetreibers. **Haftungsausschluss:** Trotz sorgfältiger inhaltlicher Kontrolle übernimmt der Webseitenbetreiber dieser Webseite keine Haftung für die Inhalte externer Links. Für den Inhalt der verlinkten Seiten sind ausschließlich deren Betreiber verantwortlich. Sollten Sie dennoch auf ausgehende Links aufmerksam werden, welche auf eine Webseite mit rechtswidriger Tätigkeit/Information verweisen, ersuchen wir um dementsprechenden Hinweis, um diese nach § 17 Abs. 2 ECG umgehend zu entfernen. Die Urheberrechte Dritter werden vom Betreiber dieser Webseite mit größter Sorgfalt beachtet. Sollten Sie trotzdem auf eine Urheberrechtsverletzung aufmerksam werden, bitten wir um einen entsprechenden Hinweis. Bei Bekanntwerden derartiger Rechtsverletzungen werden wir den betroffenen Inhalt umgehend entfernen. Rechtstext von Quelle: fairesRecht.at in Kooperation mit [Immobilienverkauf Österreich](https://immobilienverkauf-oesterreich.at/?ref=reviewertoo.com) ### Files URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/files/ Last updated: 2026-07-07T10:02:32.000Z A home for linked files referenced elsewhere, mostly data. [Annual research spending spreadsheetAnnual research spending spreadsheet.csv2 KBdownload-circle](https://www.reviewertoo.com/content/files/2026/07/Annual-research-spending-spreadsheet.csv "Download") ## Posts ### Five takeaways from the MIT report on AI in higher ed URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/2026-08-31-mit-ai-report/ Last updated: 2026-09-01T10:27:04.000Z "This report is a call to action." That's a rather dramatic opening line for a report prepared for university administrators. But I think it's a fair one. In January, university leadership at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a leading US technical university, assembled a committee of students, faculty and staff from across the institute to get a handle on AI. The committee was tasked with assessing AI use at MIT, identifying "innovations in teaching and student assessment," and coming up with an institute-wide AI policy. Months later, the MIT Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training has no AI policy — there can be no one-size-fits-all policy, they say. Instead, they have something more like [a manifesto on the purpose of the university in the AI age](https://aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/?ref=reviewertoo.com). I have the feeling the MIT report on AI will end up being an important document for understanding how universities ultimately rise to the challenges of the AI age — or don't. *(Conflict of interest declaration: I'm an MIT alumna)*. It's a tight, well-written text and very much worth a read. But if you're short on time, I've pulled out five takeaways: Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. ## AI is a big deal; universities need to respond fast and accept that they're going to make mistakes Generative AI was widely adopted a little less than four years ago, when OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022\. In that short time, the technology has become a pervasive element of life and society at every scale from the family WhatsApp chat to the global economy. In the report's words: "AI is progressing across almost every domain and on a timescale too compressed for society to properly observe and analyze its impacts and then gradually adapt." ***This is not a paywall!** [**Subscribe for free*](#portal/signup) *to keep reading.* _This post is for subscribers only._ ### "It's honestly a miracle that we're still around" — the Xylom's Alex Ip on indie newsroom realities URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/2026-08-24-alex-ip-xylom-indie-newsroom-realities/ Last updated: 2026-08-24T15:00:57.000Z Preview · Audio edition "It's honestly a miracle that we're still around" — The Xylom's Alex Ip on indie newsroom realities 0:00 /0:00 1× You're hearing a short preview. Paying members get the full audio edition of this article. [Upgrade to listen](#/portal/account/plans) [It's been a tumultuous summer for science media](https://www.reviewertoo.com/6-7-2026-2-weeks-4-science-magazines-shutdown-sold/). *Scientific American* and a major German science magazine were sold, *Research Professional News* is being shut down, *BioGraphic* lost its main funder, and *National Geographic* laid off dozens of staff. This quote from science journalist [Michael Greshko](https://www.michaelgreshko.com/about?ref=reviewertoo.com) sums it up well: “Ask any working science journalist about the state of the discipline, and they’ll tell you the mood is grim ... with alarming frequency, legacy and digital-first publications alike are showing that they can’t provide these journalists with stability. So who will?” Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. Except that quote is three years old. It's from a 2023 post for *Nieman Lab* in which Greshko predicted (or maybe *hoped for*) [a "Defector moment" for science media](https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/science-journalism-has-its-defector-moment/?ref=reviewertoo.com) — the rise of independent newsrooms in the mold of sites like Defector and 404 Media. Things have been grim for a while, but there's still not really a *Defector* for science. Independent science media — newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, you name it — is still largely the domain of science communicators, not science journalists. The relative dearth ofindie science newsrooms makes [the *Xylom*](https://www.thexylom.com/?ref=reviewertoo.com) stand out. Founded in 2018 by [Alex Ip](https://www.alexip718.com/?ref=reviewertoo.com), it's an award-winning nonprofit independent newsroom dedicated to global health and environmental disparities. So, given the the ongoing turmoil in legacy science media, I invited Alex to open up about the realities of running a small independent newsroom. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/08/image-2.png) Alex Ip 葉清霖 is a multimedia science journalist from Hong Kong and founder of the **Xylom*. **Image:** Alex Ip [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) The *Xylom* is both a success story and a cautionary tale. Alex says it claws by on about $9,000 per month for its 3 full-time staff and network of freelancers — math that only works out because all three staffers live in low cost-of-living countries on wages that’d be below the poverty line in the US. The *Xylom's* rates for contributors start at $250 for reported stories. I think I speak for everyone in science journalism when I say that is not what we imagine when we fantasize about a sustainable model for our profession. But despite substantial challenges with everything from funding to the US immigration system, the *Xylom* has hung on for 8 years now even as bigger, better-funded media enterprises have come and go. One reason for this, Alex says, is that the *Xylom* staff knows what’s worth spending their shoestring budget on. Great journalism doesn’t require fancy office space or business-class tickets. It requires dedicated people with important stories to tell (and money to pay them). The following conversation has been edited for length and readability. ***This is not a paywall!** [**Subscribe for free*](#portal/signup) *to keep reading.* _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Some things are beyond words (and pictures, and video) URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/some-things-are-beyond-words-and-pictures-and-video/ Last updated: 2026-08-18T18:16:45.000Z Last week on Wednesday, I cowered in a tiny patch of shade behind the crumbling wall of a graveyard outside the tiny Spanish hamlet of Fuentetoba and waited for the sun to go out. I was there for the sky, for the eclipse. But in the hours before it began, I was glued to my phone: panning around Google Maps, consulting a shade map to be sure the sun wasn't going to set on us before totality, looking up when to expect animals to start acting funny, and panic-Googling everything I could about eye safety and the ISO 12312-2 Standard for solar viewers after I looked at the Sun through eclipse glasses for the first time and felt like I'd done something verboten. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. Once the moon started to nibble on the sun (and that is it what it looked like at first), my phone went in my pocket and didn't come back out. My eyes were on the sky, on the dry fields and hills around me, and on the dozen or so locals who'd pulled up next to the graveyard to enjoy the eclipse from their lawn chairs over snacks and glasses of wine. I wasn't sure what to expect, but it was cool. Fun. Interesting. Exciting. I was having a good time. I was a bit nervous, too. Everyone I know who'd seen one had told me that a total solar eclipse is something otherworldly and indescribable — and that I *absolutely* had to get as close as possible to "the line" of points where totality lasts longest. But up until totality, if I was being honest with myself, my own eclipse experience was closer to "oh neat" than "oh my God." Then the sun went black, and tears flowed. As someone who writes for a living, there's something bitter about admitting that I witnessed something so meaningful to me that I am absolutely incapable of describing in language. But I just can't find the words for that total solar eclipse. I could try. People do try. The best I can do is say that it was overwhelming; I felt like I was watching the apocalypse, but in a good way. Before the eclipse, a friend asked me if I'd take pictures for her. I didn't try, but even if I'd had the right gear for a good shot, a picture wouldn't do much better than words. Nor would a video. I wondered, writing this, if paintings, drawings, or animation might do better. I looked, and while there are some beautiful artistic depictions of eclipses, they're just not the same. A picture is worth a thousand words, but that's no help when no number of words is worth anything at all. What does this have to do with science, or science communication? Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. Both science and communication are about distilling the world into information that can be transferred from one human brain to another. Language, mathematics, art, scientific theories. It's all about compression. But some knowledge can't be compressed. That's why it's such a problem when that one grad student who perfected the black magic of getting the fussy lab equipment to run finally graduates, and why reading about fantastic faraway places is more likely to stoke your desire to see them for yourself than to sate it. For those of us who deal in the creation and distribution of compressed realities, I think it's important to be aware of just how much we have to throw out. When I write long magazine stories, I interview between 5-10 experts on average, typically for an hour each. From each of those interviews, maybe one or two quotes end up in the final draft (though of course, interviews do a lot more to shape stories than just provide quotes). So much gets left out. And a conversation is a compression already. If you're a scientist trying to explain your work to a layperson, remember that they've never been in your lab. They haven't smelled the formaldehyde or peered through the microscope or dusted the chalk from their fingers. The day to day work of research is not a total solar eclipse — nothing is. But there's so much that can't be shared, except by helping others experience it for themselves. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No links or commentary this week. I'm still on vacation, technically. The newsletter will return to its normal style next week. In the meantime, please [fill out my reader feedback survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeDMk19Kj3MLUXlWooW-RS3-9qF6xnWyeIPnZtQGKp%5FrmPHzQ/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=103554711536475789338&ref=reviewertoo.com). There are almost 300 of you, but only 9 have responded so far (thank you)! I'll keep the survey open until next Monday. [Fill out the reader survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeDMk19Kj3MLUXlWooW-RS3-9qF6xnWyeIPnZtQGKp%5FrmPHzQ/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=103554711536475789338&ref=reviewertoo.com) ### How can I make this newsletter better for you? URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/how-can-i-make-this-newsletter-better-for-you/ Last updated: 2026-08-10T15:00:12.000Z Preview · Audio edition How can I make this newsletter better for you? 0:00 /0:00 1× You're hearing a short preview. Paying members get the full audio edition of this article. [Upgrade to listen](#/portal/account/plans) ***TLDR:** *I'm on vacation so there's no normal post this week. R2 about doubled its subscribers since the June relaunch. I'd like to find out who's reading and ask how I can make this newsletter as interesting and useful as possible for you.* [***Please take 5 minutes to fill out my short reader survey**](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeDMk19Kj3MLUXlWooW-RS3-9qF6xnWyeIPnZtQGKp%5FrmPHzQ/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=103554711536475789338&ref=reviewertoo.com)**. Also,* [***get in touch via email**](mailto:elise@reviewertoo.com) *(or just respond to this post if you received it via email) to say hi and let me know what you want from the newsletter. I read and respond to every email from readers!* [Fill out the survey ](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeDMk19Kj3MLUXlWooW-RS3-9qF6xnWyeIPnZtQGKp%5FrmPHzQ/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=103554711536475789338&ref=reviewertoo.com) This week I'm in Madrid, hiding from the Spanish sun in an air-conditioned hotel room as I wait for a coincidence of celestial mechanics to blot out said Spanish sun for a few minutes on Wednesday afternoon: a total solar eclipse. I was originally planning on queuing up a Q&A with Alex Ip of the *Xylom* for this week's vacation-edition post. But then Austria had to go and have its worst heatwave in recorded history last week. It was 30°C in my apartment for several days in a row (like most people in Austria, I do not have AC) and that heat is no joke. If I had a real job, I'd have taken sick leave since I was incapable of doing much more than lying in front of a fan, sleeping, and trying desperately to keep my brain from melting and dribbling out through my ears. So here I am on Monday with no post scheduled — and a timely opportunity to check in with you, reader, and find out what's working and what isn't. [Fill out my reader survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeDMk19Kj3MLUXlWooW-RS3-9qF6xnWyeIPnZtQGKp%5FrmPHzQ/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=103554711536475789338&ref=reviewertoo.com) Why timely? If you've been around for a while, you'll know that [I re-launched the newsletter in June](https://www.reviewertoo.com/i-want-to-do-more-than-write-science-entertainment/) with a new focus on the systems and incentives that shape science and determine how it matters. (Before then it was basically a chaotic personal science blog.) Since the June relaunch, R2's readership has roughly doubled. I want to understand who's reading now and how I can make this newsletter as useful and interesting as possible for you. So if you have a second, please [**fill out this short reader survey**](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeDMk19Kj3MLUXlWooW-RS3-9qF6xnWyeIPnZtQGKp%5FrmPHzQ/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=103554711536475789338&ref=reviewertoo.com) to let me know what's working and what isn't — and how I can make the newsletter a better value for paid subscribers. It'll take about 5 minutes, and I really will read each response. [Fill out my reader survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeDMk19Kj3MLUXlWooW-RS3-9qF6xnWyeIPnZtQGKp%5FrmPHzQ/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=103554711536475789338&ref=reviewertoo.com) If you're not a survey person, you can also just email me by responding directly to this email or shooting a message to [elise@reviewertoo.com.](mailto:elise@reviewertoo.com) I'd love to know: - Who you are and why you're here - What type of content you value most (news, essays, link roundups, etc.) - What topics you're most interested in reading about - What would make R2 a better value for paid subscribers - Whether you'd be interested in things like crowdfunding specific reporting projects, AMA posts or streams, a Discord community, and other experiments I feel like the reboot is working — both for me and for readers. I'm encouraged by the enthusiastic reactions to posts like my essay about how [building trust in science isn't science journalism's job](https://www.reviewertoo.com/27-7-2026-trust-in-science-science-journalism/) and my recent piece on [the missing rung in Germany and Austria's academic career ladder](https://www.reviewertoo.com/2026-08-03-career-limbo-germany-austria-chain-contract/). I'm having fun experimenting with data journalism, like I did in my post about [gender in peer review at *Science*](https://www.reviewertoo.com/is-peer-review-at-science-sexist/). I launched audio editions and they actually don't sound half-bad! And I even got a 1,000-word angry email about my trust in science post, which I take as an encouraging sign that I'm writing about topics people care about. [As dire as things are for science journalism](https://www.reviewertoo.com/6-7-2026-2-weeks-4-science-magazines-shutdown-sold/) right now, it seems like there is an appetite for writing about science that's not [science entertainment](https://www.reviewertoo.com/i-want-to-do-more-than-write-science-entertainment/) — and I'm excited about continuing to experiment and make the newsletter even better. To everyone who's been here since the beginning: thank you for sticking with me through all the changes and experimentation. And to everyone who's new: welcome, I'm so glad you're here! [Fill out my reader survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeDMk19Kj3MLUXlWooW-RS3-9qF6xnWyeIPnZtQGKp%5FrmPHzQ/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=103554711536475789338&ref=reviewertoo.com) --- Running this newsletter costs me several hundred dollars a year and at least 10 hours of work each week. If you want R2 to keep existing, please consider signing up to ****support my work for less than $1 per post.** Supporters receive a warm fuzzy feeling **and* actual perks: the archive of posts older than 2 weeks and audio editions recorded by me — no AI voice! [Support R2 for less than $1 per post ](#/portal/account/plans) ### Academics in Germany and Austria are stuck in job limbo URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/2026-08-03-career-limbo-germany-austria-chain-contract/ Last updated: 2026-09-01T10:32:39.000Z Preview · Audio edition Academics in Germany and Austria are stuck in job limbo 0:00 /0:00 1× You're hearing a short preview. Paying members get the full audio edition of this article. [Upgrade to listen](#/portal/account/plans) [Yvonne Völkl](https://www.tugraz.at/projekte/spanish-letters/home?ref=reviewertoo.com) is a literature and cultural studies researcher at the Graz University of Technology's cluster for Human-Centered Computing. There, she leads a project analyzing novels written via letter in 18th and 19th century Spain. If you're thinking a computing department at a technical university is a weird place for a literature scholar, you're correct — and the reason Yvonne ended up here is revealing. In 2021, Yvonne won a grant from the FWF, Austria's premier research funding agency, for [a timely project on the coronavirus pandemic in fiction](https://www.fwf.ac.at/en/research-radar/10.55776/P34571?ref=reviewertoo.com). Like many researchers, she was on a fixed-term contract. But Yvonne thought winning a competitive grant would make it straightforward to renew her contract at the University of Graz. It didn't. "The project started, and then on the second day of my project, they said: ah, we cannot employ you," she recalled. Yvonne had no idea this could even happen until it happened to her. The notorious paragraph 109 of Austria's university law, nicknamed the chain-contract rule or *Kettenvertragsregelung,* limits how long researchers can work on fixed-term contracts. A 2021 reform sharpened the rule, limiting fixed-term employment at the same university to 8 years — applied retroactively. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. Yvonne says she was eventually able to work with the university HR department to find a work-around solution: she could act quickly to transfer to the project before the new rule took effect, though doing so would require terminating her existing contract early and losing salary during the gap between projects. But even that exception wasn't made for one of the colleagues on Yvonne's project. In the end, the only way to keep the project team intact was to move to a new institution and start new "chains" of contracts. "So this is how my colleagues and I ended up here," says Yvonne. "And one of the colleagues, he couldn't stand this precarity anymore. He looked for a job somewhere else." ***This is not a paywall!** [**Subscribe for free*](#portal/signup) *to keep reading.* _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### It is not science journalism's job to improve trust in science URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/27-7-2026-trust-in-science-science-journalism/ Last updated: 2026-09-01T10:32:51.000Z Preview · Audio edition Audio Edition: It is not science journalism's job to improve trust in science 0:00 /0:00 1× You're hearing a short preview. Paying members get the full audio edition of this article. [Upgrade to listen](#/portal/signup) Imagine attending a gathering of political journalists. It kicks off with a debate about whether the role of political journalism is to improve trust in politics. On one side of the debate are two journalists arguing, no, that is not their job. On the other side is the head of a civic engagement nonprofit's information service and a freelance consultant who writes for political nonprofits. They say: yes, it is the job of "politics writers" to enhance public trust in politics. Absurd, right? But that's the reality in science journalism. In 2018, the US National Association of Science Writers (NASW) really did open its annual conference with [a debate over whether building trust is the job of "the journalist, and more specifically, the science writer."](https://www.nasw.org/article/building-public-trust-science-not-part-science-writer-job-description?ref=reviewertoo.com) Two journalists, argued no, it isn't. Their opponents were the director of the nonprofit American Association for the Advancement of Science's [SciLine](https://www.sciline.org/?ref=reviewertoo.com) service and a consultant who works with nonprofits. The fact that journalists would be put on stage to debate this issue with two public relations professionals is, to me, symptomatic of a schism that science writers need to start taking more seriously than we historically have. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. What you might call the cheerleader-muckraker divide is an enduring tension within science journalism. Dan Vergano, a former senior editor at *Scientific American*, [was talking about this back in 2013](https://lastwordonnothing.com/2013/08/01/conversation-with-dan-vergano-the-science-ghetto/?ref=reviewertoo.com). Compared to beats like politics, crime, or even sports, science journalism is unusually friendly and uncritical. That includes most of my own work for magazines, which I tend to describe as ["science entertainment"](https://www.reviewertoo.com/i-want-to-do-more-than-write-science-entertainment/) in less charitable moments. At its worst, cheerleadery coverage of "gee whiz" science ends up being what science journalist Jackson Ryan calls [press release science journalism](https://nobreakthroughs.com/adrift-in-a-sea-of-similar-science-stories/?ref=reviewertoo.com): uncritical repackaging of press releases from universities. In both the [United States](https://www.nasw.org/?ref=reviewertoo.com) and [United Kingdom](https://www.absw.org.uk/?ref=reviewertoo.com), the largest professional societies for science journalists are also professional societies for people in science PR and education, united under the title "science writer" (Australia, though, [keeps the two separate](https://sjaa.org.au/?ref=reviewertoo.com)). I doubt any American colleague would challenge me in saying that the NASW is the center of gravity of US science journalism. It is also, if you look at the numbers, less science journalism than it is scicomm: less than half of members in the public directory call themselves reporters. As a member, I have access to the private directory, and the point stands with the more complete numbers. In fact, the share of reporters is lower. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. The cheerleader-muckraker tension isn't new. But it is coming to a head now because of an apparent [crisis of trust in science](https://www.nature.com/immersive/d42859-026-00025-w/index.html?ref=reviewertoo.com) — especially since the pandemic. Setting aside any questions about what, exactly, this crisis entails, it's clear that many science journalists today both see trust in science as a problem and think it is our job to help fix it. You see this everywhere in the science writing world these days. Here are just a few examples: ***This is not a paywall!** [**Subscribe for free*](#portal/signup) *to keep reading.* _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Is peer review at Science sexist? URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/is-peer-review-at-science-sexist/ Last updated: 2026-07-20T21:08:53.000Z Last week, [researchers published a dataset of peer review](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aec0494?ref=reviewertoo.com) outcomes for 110,303 scientific papers submitted between 2015 and 2020 to the prestigious journal *Science* and its open-access cousin *Science Advances*. The data tracks each manuscript from submission through editorial review, peer review, and eventual publication or rejection. Getting published in glossy journals like *Science* can make or break a researcher's career, and most existing data on peer review is from less selective journals. So it's notable that the team released an anonymized version of the dataset for everyone to analyze. The initial analysis presented with the dataset found some interesting patterns. One revealing result was the role of editors at elite journals. Because *Science* and *Science Advances* get so many submissions, both journals evaluate papers in two stages: peer review, in which outside experts review the work, and editorial review, in which editors (and boards of experts that advise editors) decide which papers to send for peer review and which ones to accept based on peer review comments. Only 17% of articles submitted to *Science* even made it to traditional peer review. But articles that made it to peer review were accepted over one-third of the time. The team also looked at how topic, prestige, and geography affected acceptance. Papers in Topic 7 (includes viruses, RNA, immune response, and related terms) were accepted 9.6% of the time, but papers in Topic 3 (includes society, politics, gender, and related terms) were accepted just 1.7% of the time. That's a nearly 6-fold difference. Manuscripts with a corresponding author at an institution in the most prestigious quintile had an 11.6% acceptance rate; that rate was just 3.4% for papers in the two least prestigious quintiles. Papers by large teams were accepted at higher rates than those by small teams, and US and Canada-based corresponding authors were more than 3 times as likely to be accepted than those by China-based corresponding authors. There was also small but statistically significant disadvantage in publication outcomes for studies with a woman as corresponding author. Papers with a man as corresponding author were accepted 6.4% of the time, as opposed to 5.3% for papers by their female colleagues (P < 0.001). Some researchers on Bluesky saw the paper as proof of misogyny — not complex systemic factors, but plain old sexism — in the peer review system. "The paper confirms the hostility many of us feel is baked into the editorial & peer review community (sitting behind a veil of anonymity) that prefer to see papers led by women thrown out," read one post by a biophysicist. "New scientific paper by male authors laments continued gender-bias in reviewing of scientific papers led by female authors. Appreciate the solidarity, though I wonder if the reviews were 'easier' for it being a male crew," reads another by an anthropologist. Another post by a cognitive scientist called *Science* sexist. Is it that simple? Are papers really being accepted or rejected *just because they have a woman as corresponding author*? If that's the case, it really, really sucks. Not just because it'd be sexist, but because it'd be very hard to do anything about directly. It's hard to change people's biases. But might there be factors like article topic or author location or institutional prestige that contribute to the gender gap — and which might be easier to address? Since the anonymized data is free to access, I thought it'd be fun to see if I could find out. ***This is not a paywall!** [**Subscribe for free*](#portal/signup) *to keep reading.* _This post is for subscribers only._ ### "The bullets we've dodged have hit someone else" — UK science cuts largely spare physics and astro, hit projects and labs URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/13-7-2026-bullets-dodged-uk-funding-cuts-physics-astro-labs/ Last updated: 2026-07-15T10:45:10.000Z On Thursday last week, the UK's major physics and astronomy funder announced [steep cuts to labs and facilities](https://www.ukri.org/publications/explainer-stfc-prioritisation-outcomes/explainer-stfc-prioritisation-outcomes-2026-to-2030/?ref=reviewertoo.com): 15% overall to multidisciplinary facilities and 8% to national laboratories, with some specific facilities facing budget reductions of up to 40%. However, [feared cuts of up to 30%](https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/news/proposed-budget-cuts-catastrophe-uk-astronomy?ref=reviewertoo.com) to grants for researchers in particle physics, astronomy, and nuclear physics (abbreviated PPAN) were mostly avoided. The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) budget is to remain mostly flat between 2026-2030\. But costs grow year-on-year and are expected to outstrip the budget. To make the math work out, the STFC would have to make cuts. In January, it shared [plans to reduce spending by £162 million](https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-research-councils-2026-1-uk-physics-research-and-science-facilities-face-substantial-cuts/?ref=reviewertoo.com) by 2030\. "One solution could have been for the government to inject more money into the budget — the sums we're talking about are pretty small on the scale of government expenditure," Jim Wild of Lancaster University, a space physicist and president of the Royal Astronomical Society, told me on a video call. For reference, the £162 million the STFC is supposed to save over 4 years corresponds to about 0.012% of the UK's expected £1,368 billion in [public spending ](https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/brief-guides-and-explainers/public-finances/?ref=reviewertoo.com)for the single year of 2025-26. At the time the cuts were announced, it wasn't clear what was going to get the axe. The STFC supports both large research facilities and grants to scientists in particle physics, nuclear physics, and astronomy. At first, it seemed the plan was to cut £38 million from both; a letter from the STFC's executive chair told researchers that funding for PPAN could drop by up to 30% and asked project leaders to work out how their research would be impacted by cuts of up to 60%. The July 9 announcement clarified where the cuts are going to fall. Four-year funding for grants to researchers in particle physics, astronomy, and nuclear physics has mostly been preserved; there'll be a 2.7% reduction relative to last year's level, not the catastrophic 30% cut previously feared. Postdoc grants, specifically, are to be preserved at their 2025-2026 level, budgeting for inflation. "Of course, with these things, the devil is always in the details," said Wild. Sparing one budget line meant striking others; facilities and national labs like the Diamond Light Source, Central Laser Facility, and Boulby Underground Laboratory will take the biggest cuts. Funding for the Particle Physics Department and UK Astronomy Technology Centre, both instrument-building labs, will be cut by 20%. "It's a zero-sum game," Wild said. "The bullets we've dodged have hit someone else." Perhaps ironically, the STFC cuts are happening against a backdrop of "record" spending on research and development in the UK (though once you account for inflation, it's barely more than a real-terms freeze, [according to the Campaign for Science and Engineering](https://www.sciencecampaign.org.uk/analysis-and-publications/detail/rd-in-the-2025-spending-review/?ref=reviewertoo.com)). Last year, [the UK government agreed to spend £86 billion on R&D](https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/spending-review-2025?ref=reviewertoo.com) over the next 4 years. Of this, £58.5 billion is going to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology, which allocated £38.6 billion to UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) — the UK's largest public funder of research and innovation, and the body containing the STFC. However, the new funding isn't necessarily flowing to fundamental science. The new R&D push also came with new priorities. UKRI introduced a "bucket" system dividing its spending into three categories: curiosity-driven research, strategic priorities like AI and quantum tech, and "innovative companies." The idea is to "drive to be more entrepreneurial, to engage more with industry, to realize greater revenue and greater income into our program," UKRI chief executive Ian Chapman [told the BBC](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0ryevpz48ko?ref=reviewertoo.com#:~:text=%22Overall%2C%20we%20will%20drive%20to%20be%20more%20entrepreneurial%2C%20to%20engage%20more%20with%20industry%2C%20to%20realize%20greater%20revenue%20and%20greater%20income%20into%20our%20program%2C%20which%20means%20there%27s%20less%20pressure%20on%20the%20public%20purse%2C%22%20Chapman%20said.). Those are not buzzwords I can imagine most scientists in the UK were very happy to hear. Regarding the STFC cuts, there is still a lot the research community doesn't know. Over the next few months, Wild told me, there'll be talks between the STFC and the [facilities it supports](https://www.ukri.org/councils/stfc/resources-for-researchers-and-businesses/find-an-stfc-supported-facility-or-resource/?ref=reviewertoo.com) to figure out exactly how funding is going to be doled out. For now, preserving grant funding for PPAN researchers is, cautiously, a relief, said Wild. But it's perhaps a rather cold comfort, considering that in 2025-26, the STFC's Astronomy Grants Panel awarded the lowest number of postdocs since 2010 — in the midst of a funding crisis triggered by the 2008 financial crash. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. --- ## Figure 1 *One chart from last week, sometimes by me* Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. ***This is not a paywall!** [**Subscribe for free*](#portal/signup) *to keep reading.* _This post is for subscribers only._ ### In the last 2 weeks, 4 science magazines shut down, sold, or lost funding URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/6-7-2026-2-weeks-4-science-magazines-shutdown-sold/ Last updated: 2026-07-24T09:47:49.000Z On July 1, *Research Professional News* [announced](https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-open-access-2026-7-research-professional-news-to-discontinue-publication-at-end-of-2026/?ref=reviewertoo.com) that it will be winding down operations after 30 years of reporting on science and research policy. That news came right on the heels of a particularly tough week for science journalism. On June 22, conservation and ecology magazine *bioGraphic* [shared](https://45450221.hs-sites.com/the-email-youve-been-waiting-for?ref=reviewertoo.com) that the [struggling](https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/california-academy-sciences-museum-22280835.php?ref=reviewertoo.com) California Academy of Sciences was withdrawing its support; *bioGraphic* had to strike out on its own and is now searching for philanthropic donors. One day later, on June 23, Springer Nature [announced](https://group.springernature.com/gp/group/media/press-releases/divestment-consumer-media/52799204?ref=reviewertoo.com) [that](https://www.reviewertoo.com/29-6-2026-nsf-funding-slash-tech/#:~:text=Scientific%20American%20will%20be%20sold%20in%20a%20%22union%2Dbusting%22%20move.%20Staff%20say%2015%20to%20be%20fired%2C%20salaries%20slashed) it was selling both *Scientific American* and *Spektrum der Wissenschaft*, a major German science magazine. 15 staffers at *Scientific American* were immediately laid off and those invited to stay under the new owners, LabX, were [given offers with salary cuts of up to 30%](https://www.wgaeast.org/wgae-scientific-american-union-statement-on-springer-natures-sale-and-layoffs/?ref=reviewertoo.com) — and, according to one staffer who spoke with me, just 5 sick or personal days and no paid parental leave.[\[1\]](#f-1) This happened just days before the staff's votes to form a union were scheduled to be counted; the National Labor Relations Board went ahead with the vote anyways and staff voted 31:1 to unionize, according to a [statement](https://www.wgaeast.org/scientific-american-union-holds-rally-after-layoffs-and-springer-natures-sale-of-historic-science-publication-demand-recognition-from-new-owners-labx/?ref=reviewertoo.com) from the Writers Guild of America East. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber for as little as €0.50 per post. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Is the NSF slashing research to fund a tech initiative? URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/29-6-2026-nsf-funding-slash-tech/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:46:09.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) You're here at an exciting time. This is my first newsletter after re-launching with an entirely new angle. Read more about [the newsletter's new direction](https://www.reviewertoo.com/about/). Comments and feedback are greatly appreciated right now. So drop a comment below or get in touch at [elise@reviewertoo.com](mailto:elise@reviewertoo.com). And if you're new here, [subscribe for free](#/portal/signup/free) to unlock the full newsletter. *Science* published a [shocking scoop](https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-nsf-slashes-research-programs-support-new-tech-initiative-insiders-say?ref=reviewertoo.com) last week: Insiders at the U.S. National Science Foundation — the major U.S. funder of basic research — told reporter Jeffrey Mervis that the agency is cutting funding for science programs by 20-30% this year. Some fields will be hit harder than others: Mervis' sources said geosciences could be cut by 60% and biology by 75%. Program managers were told to keep quiet about the cuts rather than tell scientists what was happening. The hush-hush budget cuts could explain why so few NSF grants have been awarded this year. Even though the enacted 2026 NSF budget is just 3% less than in 2025, only *one eighth* of the grants awarded in fiscal year 2025 had been awarded by June 15 this year (more than 60% through the fiscal year). That's according to funding watchdog [Grant Witness](https://grant-witness.us/posts/2026-06-19%5Fnsf%5Fworst%5Fyear%5Fin%5Fgenerations/?ref=reviewertoo.com). And 2025 was already a bad year; the last time so few grants were awarded was 1985. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/06/image-2.png) Source: Grant Witness This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### What determines how science is done — and how it matters? URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/whats-discovered-whats-believed-and-what-happens/ Last updated: 2026-06-22T15:14:49.000Z [Subscribe for free ](#/portal/signup/free) After several months on pause, the newsletter is back! *Reviewer, too* is relaunching next week with a whole new format and focus. You can read all about the newsletter's new direction over at [the freshly updated About page.](https://www.reviewertoo.com/about/) To everyone who's still here: thank you for your patience! Here's what you need to know about what's next. [About - Reviewer, too by Elise CuttsA science newsletter about the systems, incentives and instincts that shape what’s discovered, what’s believed, and what happens.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/icon/R-111b7511-5163-494d-9794-4e2f1dca4c7f.png)Reviewer, too | Elise CuttsElise Cutts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/thumbnail/af265421-61dc-4e57-9359-605348cb2671_2010-1-3-d3d93724-bd03-4dc7-9617-73d3d8ee8ef7.jpg)](https://www.reviewertoo.com/about/) [Subscribe for free ](#/portal/signup/free) ## What's changing *Reviewer, too* used to be kind of... chaotic. I'd write about science I thought was interesting with a fuzzy focus on complexity science. Editorially, I was aiming for something vaguely like Sean Carroll's *Mindscape* podcast, which is less about going deep on one specific theme and more about exploring big ideas. That didn't work well for me or for readers, so it's over. **The new newsletter is focused on a new theme: the systems, instincts, and incentives that shape what's discovered, what's believed, and what happens when science hits the real world.** I've broken the scope into five core themes: *metascience and innovation, science under threat, truth and the infosphere, AI in science,* and *bias, attention and vibes.* You can read more on the [About page](https://www.reviewertoo.com/about/). **I aim to do four things for subscribers: keep you informed, spark conversations, make things make sense, and report exclusives.** With those goals in mind, I'm also changing the format of the newsletter. Instead of posting every Thursday, I'm splitting the newsletter into a newsy, quick Monday edition that posts each week and a meatier Thursday edition featuring deep dives, reported essays, Q&As, book reviews, and more that posts twice monthly. **A major goal of this relaunch is to post more original reporting.** I also plan to do more data visualization and start dipping my toes into data journalism — so expect more charts going forward. I want to give this a genuine go, so I'm taking a financial risk winding down my magazine reporting over the next few months (there are still some lingering projects) to have more time to do genuine journalism for the newsletter. **So paid subscriptions make a big difference right now.** You can [support my work for just €0.50 per post](#/portal/account/plans) and get access to the patrons-only post each month. I'm working on better perks for paid supporters like audio editions, a community Discord, and a quarterly controversial hot take post. [Subscribe for free ](#/portal/signup/free) Finally, I've written [an extensive AI policy](https://www.reviewertoo.com/ai-policy/) for the relaunch so you can see how I use AI in my work. TLDR: I don't use it to write or produce art, but I do use it for research, transcription, and other support tasks. ## Relaunch schedule To avoid trying to start too much at once, I'm giving myself a bit of time to work up to the full posting schedule: **Starting next week, you'll get the weekly Monday newsletter.** These are intended as quick reads: a short (\~300-word) essay, analysis, or breakdown of a data visualization followed by Citation Needed, a newsy roundup section of links with a bit of commentary. **Starting next month, you'll get the twice-monthly Thursday editions.** This is the main newsletter: meaty original reporting, essays, Q&As, and more. [Subscribe for free ](#/portal/signup/free) ## Tips, suggestions, and feedback Get in touch by emailing [elise@reviewertoo.com](mailto:elise@reviewertoo.com). I respond to everything that isn't obvious spam or AI garbage. Constructive feedback and tips are greatly appreciated. **I'm always looking for Q&A interview candidates** — researchers, activists, journalists, communicators, educators, policy folks, and anyone else who has something important or interesting to say about science in society. If that's you or someone you know, reach out to suggest them. [Subscribe for free ](#/portal/signup/free) ## ## Why did this happen? For those not in the know, I recently had a bit of a crisis of purpose regarding my work as a science journalist — and, less dramatically, about this newsletter — several months ago. This began back in February, when I wrote about how [the "general audience" of pop science is mostly an audience of educated, wealthy nerds](https://www.reviewertoo.com/pop-science-doesnt-reach-a-general-audience/). That sent me down a rabbit hole of looking into things like literacy stats and magazine vs TikTok audience sizes and — never a good idea — thinking about what it was, exactly, I was doing with my life. Writing physics entertainment for retired engineers is not really how I saw myself and my work. But if I was being honest, that's mostly what I was doing. Then I started a journalism residency (a kind of sabbatical) at the Complexity Science Hub through the European Research Council's FRONTIERS program. The mandatory in-person training included a session in which the trainer basically said flat-out that AI is great at synthesizing research and will replace journalists except for stories requiring in-person reportage. When I asked what the point of my job is, then, the people running this program — a program that supposedly deemed my explanatory reporting important enough to fund — told me that I can find a new purpose as a source of good, journalistic AI training data. That, uh, made me sad. For a few months, I was a mopey blob. The moping was clearly a symptom of uncertainty about my career in the face of AI, but also of a deeper dissonance between what I wanted to do and what I was actually doing. And what *did* I want to do, anyway? Why did I care about science, again? What, exactly, was I hoping to accomplish by spending my life telling people about it? Thankfully, a couple of inspiring talks on metascience and innovation at the Complexity Science Hub — and [a graph of childhood mortality rates from Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past?ref=reviewertoo.com) — helped me find my footing: I care about science because it is our most powerful way of understanding the world, and understanding the world is how humans make life better for each other. Science is why most children now get to grow up instead of half of them dying before puberty. Science is how we free ourselves from vicious cycles, no-win scenarios, and zero-sum games. I realize it's maybe cliché or naive or somehow even right-wing-coded to believe in progress these days. But I believe. I think progress is real and worth striving for, and that if we want a better, fairer future we will have to innovate our way into it. Science matters — and that means the forces at work in how research is done, shared, spread, and acted upon matter too. So that's what I'm going to focus on here at *Reviewer, too* from here on out. [I want to do more than write science entertainment](https://www.reviewertoo.com/i-want-to-do-more-than-write-science-entertainment/). This newsletter is my attempt to do that. I hope it helps. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/06/Youth-mortality-rates-over-last-two-millennia-updated-to-2022.png) [Subscribe for free ](#/portal/signup/free) ### Pluto is MAGA's favorite "planet" for a reason URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/pluto-planet-populism/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:45:39.000Z **Surprise post! I'm in the* [**process of re-working this newsletter*](https://www.reviewertoo.com/i-want-to-do-more-than-write-science-entertainment/) *to be more helpful and impactful and won't be posting regularly until summer. But I just had to say something about the Pluto debacle. So here we are.* **If you're new here and care about science, scicomm, and making knowledge matter in this increasingly unhinged world of ours, consider* [***signing up for the free newsletter**](#/portal/signup/free) *so you won't miss my next post.* **Enjoy the rant. I promise I'm not usually this angry.* ***If you, too, are angry about this, and want to do something with that anger, check out the Planetary Society's** [***Saving NASA Science**](https://connect.planetary.org/68?s%5Fcid=advocacy2026&s%5Fpkgsrc=advocacy2026-unsol&s%5Fsrc=advocacy2026&s%5Fsubsrc=homebar&ref=reviewertoo.com) **campaign**. [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) Yesterday at a [Senate hearing](https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/hearings/a-review-of-the-presidents-fiscal-year-2027-budget-request-for-the-national-aeronautics-and-space-administration?ref=reviewertoo.com) over NASA's 2027 budget, billionaire, [outer-space sports betting trailblazer](https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/inspiration4-leader-places-first-ever-sports-bet-from-space.amp?ref=reviewertoo.com) and current NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said that he is "very much in the camp of 'make Pluto a planet again.'" The internet, predictably, took note. ["NASA Administrator thinks Pluto should be a planet"](https://www.independent.co.uk/bulletin/news/nasa-pluto-planet-jared-isaacman-b2967455.html?ref=reviewertoo.com) (*The Independent*) [NASA chief Jared Isaacman says he's fighting for Pluto: 'I am very much in the camp of 'make Pluto a planet again'](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.space.com/astronomy/pluto/nasa-chief-jared-isaacman-says-hes-fighting-for-pluto-i-am-very-much-in-the-camp-of-make-pluto-a-planet-again&ved=2ahUKEwjgsYb1zJOUAxXM8LsIHWGCMPYQxfQBKAB6BAgIEAE&usg=AOvVaw04WkTfyfR0UXMFxbsRAglI) (*Space.com*) [The head of NASA is now openly campaigning to make Pluto a planet again](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://spacedaily.com/g-the-head-of-nasa-is-now-openly-campaigning-to-make-pluto-a-planet-again/&ved=2ahUKEwiEq%5FrL2JOUAxVjhP0HHeJoH1MQxfQBKAB6BAgMEAE&usg=AOvVaw2ZEcAU0GWdSavVLiBTq3YJ) (*Space Daily*) [NASA Chief Jared Isaacman hints at campaigning to make Pluto a planet again ](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasa-chief-jared-isaacman-hints-at-campaign-to-make-pluto-a-planet-again/?ref=reviewertoo.com)(*Scientific American*) [Quit Whining. Pluto’s Not A Planet — An Astrophysicist Explains](https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamfrank/2026/04/28/quit-whining-plutos-not-a-planet-an-astrophysicist-explains/?ref=reviewertoo.com) (*Forbes*) [MPAPA!](https://www.independent.co.uk/space/pluto-planet-nasa-jared-isaacman-b2966705.htmlhttps://www.independent.co.uk/space/pluto-planet-nasa-jared-isaacman-b2966705.htmlhttps://www.independent.co.uk/space/pluto-planet-nasa-jared-isaacman-b2966705.html?ref=reviewertoo.com) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/04/image-2.png) Some experts say. Source: [**The Independent*](https://www.independent.co.uk/space/pluto-planet-nasa-jared-isaacman-b2966705.html?ref=reviewertoo.com) Let's be clear: the Pluto thing is nothing more than nostalgia-fueled science populism. It might seem silly. It is. We unfortunately live in times in which it is important to take silly things like this seriously. Yes, there are "some experts" — real, serious scientists — who legitimately think demoting Pluto wasn't the right call. No, that does not mean that Isaacman is acting in good faith by bringing up the Pluto thing. As Naomi Klein outlined in her book [*Doppelganger*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/doppelganger-a-trip-into-the-mirror-world-naomi-klein/acc3a7231f775f18?ref=reviewertoo.com), the "Mirror World" of populists and conspiracy theorists draws much of its power by promising to solve twisted doubles of real problems. The gold-gilded White House's [executive order on "Gold Standard Science](https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/restoring-gold-standard-science/?ref=reviewertoo.com)" already deployed this strategy to masterful effect by appropriating the rhetoric of the open science movement to attack science and scientists. But Pluto — wow, what a move. Just fantastic. Whether or not Isaacman planned for the Pluto thing to get so much media attention, he did plan to bring it up at the hearing ("I would have brought it up myself, Senator"). And he sure seemed happy to have a chance to talk about Pluto. "Make Pluto a Planet Again," he said, the corners of his mouth twisting upward as he slowed down to enunciate each syllable. Who can say if it was a knowing grin? A smug smirk? ## Sign up for Reviewer, too | Elise Cutts Science, scicomm, and how to make knowledge matter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. You may have missed it if you, like me, don't live in the Mirror World (though [Sci Fri did notice](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnSpLxrOzYI&ref=reviewertoo.com)), but this is not Isaacman's first flirt with making Pluto a planet again. A few weeks ago, Isaacman and Pluto were even in the news. [Fox News, that is](https://www.foxweather.com/watch/fmc-1z25hmhaegt1i8r8?ref=reviewertoo.com). A cute 10-year-old space enthusiast wrote an enthusiastic letter to NASA begging them to make Pluto a planet again, and an online acquaintance of her mom — a weather blogger and recurring guest on Fox's weather segment — posted the letter to X. [It went viral](https://x.com/tropicalupdate/status/2042216040214434113?ref=reviewertoo.com), and Isaacman responded. > Kaela - We are looking into this. > > — NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman (@NASAAdmin) [April 9, 2026](https://twitter.com/NASAAdmin/status/2042277534927069439?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=reviewertoo.com) "It should be a planet. I mean, more than half of people online think it should be," said Mike of Mike's Weather Page. "I did a little AI summary of the post and it said 95% plus of the 10,000 comments over on X were in favor... it's something about it, it brought back memories." Hm. Oh. Also. Just a few days before that letter went up, Isaacman sat down with the tabloid *Daily Mail* for an interview that was nominally about Artemis II to say "[I fully support President Trump making Pluto Great Again](https://youtu.be/FiM421jmjRM?t=175&ref=reviewertoo.com)... I think we owe it to everyone from Kansas and all their contributions to science and aerospace to rightfully restore that discovery." Who was it that brought up the Pluto thing at the Senate appropriations committee again? Ah yes, Senator Moran from Kansas. What a coincidence. It goes back even further. In May 2025, William Shatner — yes, the man who played Captain Kirk in *Star Trek* — posted on X calling the International Astronomical Union "just a bunch of corrupt nerds on a power trip" and suggesting that Trump re-instate Pluto's planethood by executive order. > So there’s a 10th planet that was found in our solar system? 🤔 I think that we need to change the rules on who gets to name it because the ridiculous astronomers union who not only failed to name Pluto’s moon Vulcan ([https://t.co/q6z3O02PiJ](https://t.co/q6z3O02PiJ?ref=reviewertoo.com)) and then demoted Pluto as a planet… > > — William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) [May 15, 2025](https://twitter.com/WilliamShatner/status/1923030390266265686?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=reviewertoo.com) Elon Musk, then still presiding over the DOGE rampage, concurred. > I’d support that > > — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) [May 16, 2025](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1923222000379609542?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=reviewertoo.com) Interesting. But there's more. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### I want to do more than write science entertainment URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/i-want-to-do-more-than-write-science-entertainment/ Last updated: 2026-06-17T10:31:06.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) ****TLDR: Reviewer, too is changing. I'm shifting my focus to the intersection of science, science communication, and society: How do we know true things about the world, and what has to happen for that knowledge to matter?** Expect more posts on science communication, the information environment, and the systems of science. Science posts aren't going away. But you'll see a shift from fun "big questions"-type stuff to science that either has serious or immediate stakes (think AI and genetics) or which helps us understand how knowledge is made, spread, and used (think metascience and quantitative social sciences). The newsletter will pause for a few months as I re-work the website, nail down the new theme and scope, and write new posts. **If you are a paid subscriber and want a refund, get in touch and we'll work something out.* When I started this newsletter, I thought I would mostly be writing about fun, geeky science — breaking down studies, profiling scientists, writing essays on some fun physics, etc. I was pondering writing a book about complexity science, and I wanted to play around with that idea through my posts. But honestly: I'm having a hard time writing that kind of "fun" science content right now. Over the past months, I've been doing a lot of thinking about science journalism, science, and the increasingly overwhelming state of the information environment and the world. I've been thinking about things like literacy rates in countries like the United States, how people broadly prefer to get their news from social platforms, how short-form video is consuming the world, and how popular science is mostly written for wealthy science enthusiasts — [it isn't actually "popular" at all](https://www.reviewertoo.com/pop-science-doesnt-reach-a-general-audience/). [Pop science doesn’t reach a “general audience”Pop sci readers are wealthy, educated, and left-leaning![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Reviewer, tooElise Cutts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/size/w1200/2026/02/Woman_writing_a_letter-_with_her_maid-_by_Johannes_Vermeer-4-1.jpg)](https://www.reviewertoo.com/pop-science-doesnt-reach-a-general-audience/) I've been thinking about how our lives are the sum total of everything we pay attention to, and we have less attention even than we have time. I've been thinking about clickbait and how you can write the best, most accurate science story ever and it doesn't matter one bit if nobody ever pays attention to it. I've been thinking that maybe we should hold media to a higher standard than simply being *able* to grab attention. I've been thinking a *lot* about attention. And salience. And when and why and how much to trade richness for reach. I've been thinking about how depending who you ask AI is either going to create a shared fact-based reality or destroy our ability to know what's real at all. I've been thinking about whether telling a story about some fun new physics study in a geeky science magazine is informing anyone or making the world better, or if it is really just entertainment for nerds. I've been thinking that maybe entertainment alone isn't enough to justify the creation of a new piece of content — a new pull on someone's attention — anymore. I've been thinking about how science communicators sometimes say the point of science communication is to "share science with the public" as if that isn't a tautology. I've been thinking about how science is a highly insulated, strange culture with its own politics and values, and how easy it is to slip into believing those values are scientifically justified even though *is* does not imply *ought*. I've been thinking about how scientists and science communicators like don't believe the [deficit model of science communication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information%5Fdeficit%5Fmodel?ref=reviewertoo.com#:~:text=In%20studies%20of%20science%20communication,engagement%20by%20the%20scientific%20community.) in theory, but act in practice as if we think convincing everyone that global warming is real will turn make them all vote for the green party and drive electric cars and go vegan. I've been thinking about AI and what it means to create when machines are getting good enough, and [good enough is enough to matter](https://www.reviewertoo.com/ai-generated-science-is-now-good-enough/). [AI-generated science is now “good enough”The “AI Scientist” is mediocre and uninspired. Don’t dismiss it.![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Reviewer, tooElise Cutts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/thumbnail/Albert_Gleizes-_1911-_Portrait_de_Jacques_Nayral-_oil_on_canvas-_161.9_x_114_cm-_Tate_Modern-_London-1-1.jpg)](https://www.reviewertoo.com/ai-generated-science-is-now-good-enough/) I've been thinking a lot about the incentive structures of science and science communication and science journalism and how it probably shouldn't be surprising that people are "losing trust in science." This is all to say I've been thinking a lot about science, its role in society, and how science gets out into the world where it can inform beliefs, drive policy, and actually do something other than just exist. And that's what I am going to write about now. [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) --- ## Reviewer, too is shifting focus to how knowledge is made, spread, and used From here on out, this newsletter is going to be a bit different: instead of writing about fun "big questions" science, I'm going to try to write my way through a question that's been eating at me for months now: **How do we know true things about the world, and what needs to happen for that knowledge to matter?** Put another way, I want to know where knowledge comes from and how it *works* in the world: Where do facts come from (and what is a fact, anyways)? How do facts become beliefs? How do beliefs become actions? And how does finding, believing, and acting on facts happen across scales, from individuals to societies to all 8.3 billion of us? These are questions about science, science communication, and how science touches society, policy, the economy, and individual lives. But they're also about particular research fields and bodies of scientific knowledge that matter in real ways right now, like AI and human genetics. And science offers a useful handle on these questions by helping us understand ourselves, our societies, our information environment, and the systems of science itself. *Reviewer, too* is shifting focus to cover these themes. [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) ## Who is this for? If you care about and believe in science and truth as a force for good, this newsletter is for you. There's a lot that we — researchers, journalists, institutional PR folks, science-minded creators and influencers, activists, and everyone else who deals in knowledge — need to discuss. There are some inconvenient truths to face, like the fact that many of us are probably not reaching the people we say we aim to reach or accomplishing the goals we say we value, and that AI is actually a big deal that we can't just ignore. We need to be getting serious about what it is we're doing here and what we hope to accomplish by doing, sharing, and acting on science. And, given our goals, we need to figure out what actually works. I decided to re-focus the newsletter because I want to spark discussions about all that. Because frankly, I don't see them happening often or publicly within my own field, science journalism — and yet, when I talk to other journalists in private, I get the sense that I'm not the only one who wants to talk about this stuff. Maybe we all just need a place to do it... and maybe also someone willing to post researched but ranty hot takes like "[pop science is for rich nerds](https://www.reviewertoo.com/pop-science-doesnt-reach-a-general-audience/)" on the internet to get people arguing. Let's see. I know that some of you here for the nerdy complexity science and fun "big questions" stuff might be disappointed. But I hope you'll give this new direction a chance — I think you'd be surprised how much complexity science will still play a role in what I write. Knowledge is fundamentally collective, and information spreads on networks. **And if you know someone who you think would care about this kind of thing: please share the newsletter with them!** Aside from signing up to support the site, is truly the best way you can contribute to what I'm doing here. [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) ## What's next This is a big change, and I need a break to re-focus and rework the newsletter. So I'm going to put *R2* on pause for a few months to revise the website, draft new posts, re-orient my research and writing habits and tools, and develop this new direction. I'm also shifting my reporting beat in the background to align better with my new priorities, so there's frankly a lot going right now here at Elise Cutts inc. I plan to start posting again in June or July. There might be an update or post before then, but no regular schedule. I'll send an update once I have a firm re-launch date. If you're a paid yearly subscriber and want a refund, get in touch and we can work something out. But if you're up to keep your subscription running, I'd appreciate your ongoing support during this transition. Thanks for reading so far. Here's to the next thing! ****What I'm working on in the background...** ✅ Writing an AI policy for the site ([**Done!*](https://www.reviewertoo.com/ai-policy/)) ✅ Writing an updated about page ([**Done!*](https://www.reviewertoo.com/about/)) ⬜ Creating an actually good welcome email for new subscribers ✅ Developing a cohesive short pitch for the blog ([**Done!*](https://www.reviewertoo.com/about/#:~:text=Reviewer%2C%20too%20is%20a%20newsletter%20about%20science.%20It%20covers%20the%20systems%2C%20instincts%2C%20and%20incentives%20that%20shape%20what%27s%20discovered%2C%20what%27s%20believed%2C%20and%20what%20happens%20when%20research%20hits%20the%20real%20world%20for%20hundreds%20of%20readers%20who%20care%20about%20science%20and%20truth%20as%20a%20forces%20for%20good.%20%C2%A0)) ✅ Setting up working tools to monitor relevant research + news ⬜ Paid subscriber perks ⬜ Lining up interviews for Q&As after re-launch ⬜ Writing posts [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) ### Who gets the job? Here's how computers could help catch unfair rankings URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/ranking-algorithm-fairness-hyperfair/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:38:27.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) Jobs. University admissions. Grants. We apply for a lot of stuff these days. It used to be that Joe from Human Resources would pull out the dreaded [scales of Anubis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anubis?ref=reviewertoo.com#:~:text=Weigher%20of%20hearts,existence.[42][43]) to weigh your heart against a feather to determine whether your soul should be eaten by a primordial crocodile goddess — er, I mean, rank your application. But more and more, [Joe is letting bots do the ranking for him](https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/03/ai-hiring-human-touch-recruitment/?ref=reviewertoo.com). Maybe this is a good thing: Joe is just a dude, and honestly he's a little racist. Maybe AI can be fairer. Although... AI also consumed the entire internet to come into being, and the internet is also pretty racist. So, how can we tell when an algorithm is fair? And what does being fair even mean? This week's TLDR is a little different. Instead of a study that came out last week, I wanted to highlight this [amazing interactive website](https://vis.csh.ac.at/ranks-of-disparity/?ref=reviewertoo.com) that was made to visually explain a new way to measure the fairness of ranking algorithms. The method, called *hyperFA\*IR*, [was presented](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3715275.3732143?ref=reviewertoo.com) last year at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. It highlights how failing to account for how the pool of remaining applicants changes as you make selections can make some algorithms seem fairer than they really are. [Ranks of DisparityAn interactive explainer and tool to understand ranking fairness, detect bias, and explore equitable outcomes using examples or your own data.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/icon/faviconV2)Ranks of Disparity![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/thumbnail/share-image.png)](https://vis.csh.ac.at/ranks-of-disparity/?ref=reviewertoo.com) This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### About "to" and "around" the Moon URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/about-to-and-around-the-moon-artemis-launch/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:45:24.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) Is it fair to say the Artemis astronauts are going *to* the moon? Amid all the excitement over the launch, this question is what Bluesky has decided to concern itself with. And it has uncovered what is, in my view, a revealing pattern: Scientists and space nerds *mostly* favored saying Artemis II is going "to the Moon." Other folks — including science journalists — preferred alternatives like "around the Moon" and "lunar flyby." Why might that be? (Scientists forget that not everyone is a nerd) Who's right? (Both sides, but one is only *technically* right and that side is *actually* wrong) Isn't this a stupid debate? (No) We'll get to that. But first let's take a look at the arguments for both sides, because Bluesky drama is fun. ## Sign up for Reviewer, too Postcards from the open frontiers of science, by science journalist Elise Cutts Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ## Team "to" the Moon The to vs around debate began when Katie Mack, an astrophysicist and one of the most-followed science accounts on Bluesky, raised the question of "to" vs "around" and declared herself for team "to:" > Can we have a ruling on whether #Artemis II is (a) "a mission to the Moon" or do we have to say (b) "a lunar flyby" just because they're not landing? I say (a) is okay: they're definitely going to the Moon! And past it! They're just not touching down. > > — Katie Mack ([@astrokatie.com](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:62gdkmpwa7xme36getyqnem3?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com)) [April 2, 2026 at 1:00 AM](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:62gdkmpwa7xme36getyqnem3/post/3mihsaxinis2r?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) Pulling together points from the many comments and reposts, here are the key arguments for Team "to:" - They're going to the Moon, they're just not touching down. - If they're not going to the Moon, where are they going? There's no other location you can name that makes sense. > I feel like they're going to the moon, they're just no landing. I've got a flight from Auckland to Vancouver in a couple weeks, where I am changing planes to my further actual destination, doesn't mean I'm not going to Vancouver for this part of the trip regardless of actually being in Vancouver. > > — Dr Sarah Hendrica Bickerton 🏳️‍🌈 ([@sarahhbickerton.bsky.social](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ibuciczjdcfajqygstebv5h5?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com)) [April 2, 2026 at 1:03 AM](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ibuciczjdcfajqygstebv5h5/post/3mihsfpd47c27?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) > definitely A! i mean, if they aren't going to the moon where else are they going?! > > — Prof Christina Pagel ([@chrischirp.bsky.social](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:rw2kfkoa7dvxmip5rm4nay7x?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com)) [April 2, 2026 at 1:03 AM](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:rw2kfkoa7dvxmip5rm4nay7x/post/3mihsftipls2r?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) - Robotic missions to other planets and planetary objects are straightforwardly called missions "to" those worlds, even if no rover or probe touches down: Juno is a mission to Jupiter, Cassini was a mission to Saturn, New Horizons was a mission to Pluto, etc. Why should this be any different for manned missions? > It's a mission to the Moon. Juno is a mission Jupiter and it never landed. I could throw out another 2 to 3 dozen examples. Mission to the Moon, definitely. Very exciting! > > — Alejandro Soto ([@soto.space](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:wova7hnyxu76n7cruepzraod?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com)) [April 2, 2026 at 1:03 AM](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:wova7hnyxu76n7cruepzraod/post/3mihsghwelk2s?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) > While I think NASA officially calls it something like option B, I would say option A is more consistent with historic planetary missions. If a mission orbits a body, it's a mission to that body (Galileo, Cassini, Juno). A flyby literally just flies by (e.g. New Horizons or the Voyagers). > > [\[image or embed\]](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:hv6jq2cogampxha6pjkcxanc/post/3mihtjahhws2w?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) > > — Mark Panning ([@markpanning.seismology.space](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:hv6jq2cogampxha6pjkcxanc?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com)) [April 2, 2026 at 1:23 AM](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:hv6jq2cogampxha6pjkcxanc/post/3mihtjahhws2w?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) - They're going within the Moon's sphere of gravitational influence — the imaginary region around the Moon within which its gravity dominates over the gravity of other bodies like the Earth and Sun — and that's what counts. - The same as above, except using the technical jargon Hill Sphere instead of saying gravitational sphere of influence. - A "mission to the Moon" sounds bigger and more impressive > "A mission around the Moon" sounds both bigger and more accurate to me > > — Randy Tayler ([@randytayler.com](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:hjrhsuuvgohhklfttshceqv2?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com)) [April 2, 2026 at 1:03 AM](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:hjrhsuuvgohhklfttshceqv2/post/3mihsgmsnks2r?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) - Space is hard so we should use the more impressive-sounding term, and us non-astronauts maybe don't even have a right to an opinion on this. [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) > Definitely (a). Because space is hard. They will be travelling 384,400 km, which is: - 920 × the height of the ISS - 1,100 × typical Low Earth Orbit altitude - 1,000 Sydney to Melbourne flights Just because they're not landing doesn't mean they didn't face all the problems of flying to the Moon! > > [\[image or embed\]](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:6etwdejampx6nn2aqkoq3xul/post/3miht7aoqoc2i?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) > > — Sean M. Elliott ([@seanmelliott.bsky.social](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:6etwdejampx6nn2aqkoq3xul?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com)) [April 2, 2026 at 1:17 AM](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:6etwdejampx6nn2aqkoq3xul/post/3miht7aoqoc2i?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) > The only people who are allowed to make this distinction are the remaining guys who landed on the Moon. For the rest of us, they are indeed going to the Moon. #Artemis > > [\[image or embed\]](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ujckarzdbgabawjsukkpyat5/post/3mihtcw2ww22g?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) > > — Martin Hajovsky ([@martinhajovsky.bsky.social](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ujckarzdbgabawjsukkpyat5?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com)) [April 2, 2026 at 1:19 AM](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ujckarzdbgabawjsukkpyat5/post/3mihtcw2ww22g?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) - They're going to see the dark side of the moon and very few astronauts have, so they are going "to the moon." > By the authority vested in me as a space kid, if you are one of the 24 humans who have ever looked at the other side of the moon, you have been to the moon. > > [\[image or embed\]](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:e7gjoonqoh5jasrndbt5ebbn/post/3mihtmsidmc26?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) > > — Jason Darr ([@jasondtx.bsky.social](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:e7gjoonqoh5jasrndbt5ebbn?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com)) [April 2, 2026 at 1:25 AM](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:e7gjoonqoh5jasrndbt5ebbn/post/3mihtmsidmc26?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) - The mission will put the Moon entirely between the astronauts and the Earth, isolating them from radio communications, so it's a "mission to the Moon" > I’ll admit that this is more vibes than logic, but I feel that since the mission will put the Moon entirely between them and Earth, blocking all view and radio communications with Earth, leaving them the only four humans in the whole universe that they can detect, it’s a “mission to the Moon.” > > [\[image or embed\]](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:nrjvetkf4nsosk4vililozku/post/3mihugeuttk2k?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) > > — Emily Lakdawalla 🏳️‍⚧️ Uranus Expert ([@elakdawalla.bsky.social](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:nrjvetkf4nsosk4vililozku?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com)) [April 2, 2026 at 1:39 AM](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:nrjvetkf4nsosk4vililozku/post/3mihugeuttk2k?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) ## Team "around" the Moon In contrast, the opposing side of the great Artemis II preposition debate basically had just one argument: - Saying you're going "to the Moon" is misleading, because people who hear that will think that astronauts are literally landing on the moon. The popular version of this point involves colorful analogies to saying you're going somewhere and then just driving or flying past it: > Someone with children should try “Hey kids! We’re going to the beach!”, and pull that move to see how it goes. > > — Hector Rodriguez ([@rocketcheddar.bsky.social](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:l7ypqrp3cf22mymp5fg4gsgf?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com)) [April 2, 2026 at 1:04 AM](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:l7ypqrp3cf22mymp5fg4gsgf/post/3mihsi473wk2w?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) > If I tell my kid “we’re going to Disneyland!” and then I circle Orlando and come home, they will never forgive me, and I won’t be able to blame them. This is a lunar flyby. > > — Be Jay, Do Crimes. ([@templinjay.bsky.social](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ztsjiqabitcsux3hjfrafjdq?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com)) [April 2, 2026 at 2:14 AM](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ztsjiqabitcsux3hjfrafjdq/post/3mihwemh6wk2d?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) > b) - you don't say you went to Bruger King when you drive by Burger King > > — Fil K ([@nashfil.bsky.social](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:mmqeyv3kcva5pasgl73zbe52?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com)) [April 2, 2026 at 4:10 AM](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:mmqeyv3kcva5pasgl73zbe52/post/3mii4tqfw6k2h?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) > B. I’m not on a “mission to Iceland” if my Airbus 340 flies over it on the way to Europe > > — Shelley ([@dialectics68.bsky.social](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:hpeniqhkuygwvds7zakjg5bz?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com)) [April 2, 2026 at 3:25 PM](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:hpeniqhkuygwvds7zakjg5bz/post/3mijckijimk2s?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) By far the most exhaustive argument against saying "to the Moon" was laid out by freelance science journalist — and fact-checker, that's relevant — Erin Biba. I can't embed Erin's post because it is only visible to logged-in viewers. But here's a screenshot to get you started and a link to [a thread explaining the position for Bluesky folk with accounts](https://bsky.app/profile/erinbiba.bsky.social/post/3mihunt4iuk2g?ref=reviewertoo.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-02-at-19.49.44.png) This, to me is the most important point: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-02-at-19.52.14.png) (There was also some griping about not making Trump's NASA look good. Bad argument, folks!) [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/02/sam-dan-truong--rF4kuvgHhU-unsplash.jpg)](#/portal/signup) Look. You and I both know that if I were a barista, you'd 100% be leaving a tip right now. The social pressure to drop a coin in that jar would just be overwhelming. But you're presumably reading this thing alone on a universe-rectangle, so I can't rely on my mere presence to remind you to be nice. If you made it this far I assume you're enjoying the article. So maybe drop a coin in my digital tip jar. It's just €2 per month (€0.25 per post!) — a cheap and fully automated weekly warm fuzzy feeling for the digital age. [Support my work for €0.25 per post ](#/portal/signup) ## Being technically correct is not a high enough standard for science communication Both sides are right, but only one is technically right. **And technically right is the *worst* kind of right for science communication.** If you are sharing science with a non-technical audience, your job is not only to say things that are true, but to make sure the people listening to you understand what you said. We all understand that facts, presented the wrong way, can be misleading — a good example is how racists cite crime or educational achievement or health or IQ statistics for various minority communities without adding crucial context explaining why the statistics look the way they do. Good communication means accounting not only for the literal meaning of your words, but how those words will be received by others. It means heading off misconceptions before they can arise. And yes, I'm sorry, but "to the Moon" is really misleading for folks who are not space scientists or space enthusiasts who read astronomy blogs. Let's talk about why: This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### AI-generated science is now "good enough" URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/ai-generated-science-is-now-good-enough/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:38:44.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) AI can now write halfway decent research papers about AI. Last week, *Nature* published a study on an "[AI Scientist" that automates research](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10265-5?ref=reviewertoo.com). The tool can come up with the idea for a machine learning study, run the experiments, review its own work, and draft up a paper that human reviewers thought was okay — (almost) without human help. Does this mean that AI will replace scientists tomorrow? No. The AI is a mediocre scientist; its *best* paper was too low quality to be accepted to a normal conference. But it was good enough for workshop with a 70% acceptance rate. And good enough is enough to matter. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### How do social movements win? URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/how-do-social-movements-win-timo-damm/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:39:04.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) How does change happen? It's a question I've been thinking about more and more lately, as it feels like every morning I wake up, open my phone, and discover that the world shifted overnight. You know the drill: new scary bird flu variant, new horrifying election result, new... war. Now there's AI, too, which is either going to save the world or end it or not change much at all except for making most of us poorer depending on who you ask. And in the background, even if many of us are tired of thinking about it, the fossil fuels keep burning and the climate keeps changing. Most of the change that matters in human lives isn't inflicted upon us by the universe. We make it happen ourselves. And one way people create — or resist — change is by organizing in social movements. [Timo Damm](https://timodamm.xyz/?ref=reviewertoo.com) is a PhD student at the Complexity Science Hub and University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna who studies what makes social movements successful. He's also an activist, and he takes a rather unusual approach to research: Timo combines quantitative computer modeling approaches with traditional ethnography. In other words, he embeds with the social movements he studies. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/03/signal-2023-04-09-152354_004-edited-1024x576.jpeg) Timo Damm, pictured here taking notes in the woods, is a PhD student at the Complexity Science Hub and BOKU in Vienna who studies what makes social movements successful ****Image:** Timo Damm Scientists, in my experience, are not an activist bunch. Whether because of institutional norms or the types of personalities drawn to science or both, there is a kind of cultural resistance to politics and organizing and anything that might be viewed as sloganeering or group think among scientists. (Myself included. I'm not proud to admit this, but the word "solidarity" alone is enough to get my hackles up). However, the perfectly objective, detached scientist has always been a myth — and even if there were such a thing as perfect objectivity, science exists in society and is therefore political. And now, I think we're seeing some of the resistance to understanding science in a political context — and to organizing — start to evaporate on the hot rocks of our current political moment. ## Sign up for Reviewer, too Postcards from the open frontiers of science, by science journalist Elise Cutts Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. For Timo, it's obvious that science is political. And when he says he's an activist, he's not talking about just carrying a sign at a protest against research funding cuts. In his spare time, Timo develops security tech and strategy for social justice, climate, and animal rights activists, whistleblowers, and victims of abuse. And the groups he studies are doing a lot more than march. They are radical, and their members at times come into conflict with legal authorities. How they react to crackdowns is part of what Timo studies. How on Earth does a researcher get access to groups like that? And once you're embedded, how do you maintain enough emotional distance to do objective work as a scientist? I sat down with Timo to ask him about all this and more: how he balanced objectivity with personal stakes, science with activism, and the qualitative with the quantitative while working on a[ project about what makes social movements resilient to change](https://csh.ac.at/publication/what-happens-if-you-think-nothing-happens-a-mixed-method-network-analysis-of-group-structure-in-a-social-movement/?ref=reviewertoo.com). It was a truly fascinating chat, and I think you'll enjoy his unusual perspective on what it means to be a scientist when you're studying the systems you live inside of. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. ****Want to support my work? Consider subscribing.** I usually paywall or subscriber-wall Q&As like this, because they take a lot of work to put together. But given the subject of Timo's research (and his work helping people maintain privacy on the web) I just felt it would be icky and weird to make this a subscribers-only post. But if you want to support my work, the best way to do that is to share this story and to subscribe for free to my newsletter. No spam, I promise! [Subscribe for free ](#/portal/signup/free) --- **How did you become interested in studying social movements?** In the beginning, I wasn't really interested in social movements. My interest, for a really long time, has been solving problems to make the world a better place. And with that I don't mean engineering problems. I didn't want to build better cars or something. I'm really interested in solving social problems, or at least trying to solve social problems such as migration or homelessness, poverty, the climate crisis — all of these big social problems. This drew me to studying organization science, and the degree I did was mainly geared towards is international organizations like the UN, the EU, the Red Cross. So we did a lot of scenario planning and simulated responses to disasters where we would have UN or ex-UN officials on site and sort of pretend to solve problems with them. And during that time, I actually grew really disillusioned by the way that public organizations and large bureaucratic organizations solve problems — and more and more confident about the way that small human groups were doing it. **And how did complexity science come in?** In my bachelors and masters I started to work more and more with social movements — and realized that I'm very interested in complex systems, and these movements really are complex systems. So I ended up doing a masters in complex systems. And this is how I combined it: I ended up studying social movements from a complex systems perspective. [Networks are math squares disguised as drawingsThis is why neural networks are linear algebra under the hood![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/icon/R-7.png)Reviewer, tooElise Cutts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/thumbnail/adjacency-matrices-cover.jpg)](https://www.reviewertoo.com/networks-are-math-squares-matrices-linear-algebra/) **What questions do you aim to answer about these small groups of activists in social movements?** I think the one question that everybody that studies social movements is interested in, one way or another, is what determines success, right? Someone who studies business or management is interested in what makes a company efficient or effective, and people who study public administration are interested in what makes a good government. The question of what makes a social movement successful is key to more or less everybody who studies social movements one way or another. And for me, coming from this complex systems perspective, it's really about: how are they successful in a dynamic environment? It connects to collective adaption not just by social movements, but all types of human groups. We're living in a complex political, social environment and problems we're trying to solve change all the time. What's really interesting to me — and the core of my research — is how social movements do this under changing circumstances and in changing environments. Because we know they do it. We just don't know how or why. **What do you mean by a changing environment in the context of a social movement? I hear that and naively think of climate change: as the climate warms up, the environment changes. But I guess what you're talking about is broader.** What you're referring to is not that bad — that is part of the environment. I've done research with groups that are doing climate justice activism and the country they were living in was hit by enormous fires. And then the very environment changed a lot. The whole landscape — an area the size of Austria, roughly — became barren and scarred, and this physical change in the environment changed the way that they could and should do activism. But I'm also referring to the political environment — the way that laws are made, but also beliefs in the society and also how the group is embedded in larger society. Because the sociopolitical environment that a group like Greenpeace finds themselves in is completely different from, for example, militant revolutionaries in South America. ![silhouette of trees during sunset](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1615092296061-e2ccfeb2f3d6?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDZ8fHdpbGRmaXJlfGVufDB8fHx8MTc3NDQ1NTQwNnww&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000) To succeed, movements need to adapt to changing environmental conditions, which could be something as literal as a wildfire or as abstract as a shift in the political winds. ****Image:** [Matt Palmer](https://unsplash.com/@mattpalmer?ref=reviewertoo.com) / [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?utm%5Fsource=ghost&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcampaign=api-credit) [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) **To get back to this idea of successful movements: how is success defined?** This is a very contentious topic, and most people take a very narrow definition. So one of the classic definitions of success or efficiency has been mobilization: how many people or how many resources can you mobilize to do something. If the outcome you're really interested in is a policy — let's say on abortion — then the outcome is very binary. Either the law is there or it is not. And that is not a very good variable to reflect the success of the movement over time and changing peoples' minds and whatever to make the legal change actually happen. But if we can just think very simply in terms of mobilizing money or people, you can really quantify it. It's an easy variable. But already with resources, it gets a bit difficult. Because how do you evaluate resources — and especially human resources? What are they worth? It is hard to tell. And there are plenty of examples in which the environment is such a strong factor and the way that people use resources and the diversity of skills and knowledge of the people involved plays such a big role that a small group is actually much more successful in achieving a desired outcome than a large group. So there have been some shifts from treating mobilization as an outcome, or a binary policy change as an outcome, to trying to develop a more encompassing variable of cultural power. This has been coming out of the US. Because one of the main features of social movements and the very definition from back in the 1960s from [Gene Sharp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene%5FSharp?ref=reviewertoo.com) and [Charles Tilly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles%5FTilly?ref=reviewertoo.com)[\[1\]](#f-1) is that social movements engage in a prolonged conflict over social, culture, and political power with those who currently have the power. So it's only natural to treat power or empowerment of people who are formally not well-represented as a key outcome. **In your own work, you're using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to get at social movements and power. What does this involve, more specifically?** My work is mainly centered around working with individual social movement organizations. I'm working with local groups, people who regularly see each other and organize in-person and that are maximum 70-100 people. This allows for using classic qualitative methods, such as interviews, field work, focus groups, observational research that is really well-suited to develop really in-depth insights. But it is also very limited in scope and limited in control, right? If I observe a group, it is very natural. The ecological validity of the sort of research is extremely high. But I cannot go back and rerun the research with different parameters. I cannot add five people to the group and see how it would have panned out. So I'm trying to pair these really rich, deep insights from immersion in the field and qualitative methods with quantitative modeling. I use the field work to build theory, to build a story of what is happening — and perhaps, if it is possible, to also collect some quantitative data. And then I use agent-based models or other computational models to simulate different scenarios within the realistic baseline developed from field work. [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) **What does it look like in practice when you're embedding yourself with one of these activist groups?** It takes a lot of time beforehand, because one of the most important factors that shapes social movements is the repression against them. Social movements are challenging power, so the people in power often do not want social movements to challenge that power. And therefore social movements are extremely distrustful of people who they perceive to be part of the elites — part of the people who hold power — or just generally outsiders who want information. Because this is exactly what the police is also doing. So it requires long-term involvement and building relationships. For the field work I did for my PhD, the only reason I could work with this group is that I've known some of the people that are active in the group for close to 10 years. In the whole year leading up to the research, I spent a lot of time building relationships and feeling out what people are willing to do in terms of research — whether they're willing to do it at all, what their needs are from a research relationship — before we even had a conversation about whether I can do research and in what capacity. And once that research relationship is set and I've gained the trust of the group, there's usually a phase in which you try to define a research objective together. Because in the past, a lot of ethnographic qualitative research has been done without asking groups for their consent and needs. And this led to exploitative research where predominantly white researchers have gone to predominantly black, indigenous, or otherwise marginalized communities and sort of extracted what they wanted and left — this put strain on the community and only benefited the researcher. So there's a lot of sort of talking and co-defining goals. ![do not cross police barricade tape close-up photography](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/03/photo-1532077795300-c4b487f601f6.jpeg) Social movements may be suspicious of outsiders asking questions, so building trust takes time. ****Image:** [David von Diemar](https://unsplash.com/@davidvondiemar?ref=reviewertoo.com) / [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?utm%5Fsource=ghost&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcampaign=api-credit) [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) Then it actually comes to the research in the field, which usually lasts a couple of months. I will just go and live with the participants, observe and participate in their everyday life to become a member of that community. And every day, I write field notes on what I observed, and write a reflective journal on my position and my feelings to sort of account for this huge bias that I bring in as a researcher that is also participating in the activities. I also have interviews with the people, and at a certain point, I go home, take a break, start looking at that data and reorganizing it. The research relationship for field research doesn't stop there, because I continue discussing and organizing the bits and pieces of my research with participants as the research progresses. Sometimes I've even done research workshops with the participants after articles have been handed in for publication, because there was still a need to interact and clear up certain things. **Can you say which organization you embedded with for your research?** No, that's confidential. **Can you say what general area they work in, then? Was it an environmentalist group, or a social justice group?** They are a group from the climate justice movement who have specialized or mainly worked in blocking fossil fuel infrastructure and advocating for systemic change and indigenous rights as part of that. **How did you learn how to do research in this hands-on, embedded way?** I'm still very much learning. I think field work is a never ending learning process. Qualitative research — interviews, field work, observational work, focus groups — was a big focus of the methodological courses of my bachelor and my masters. But it's a completely different thing if you go into the field and actually do that research and there's no way to prepare you for that. It's like reading books about medicine and knowing, in theory, how surgery works and then actually standing in the room and doing surgery yourself. It's completely different experience. I know that even much more senior qualitative researchers who still go into the field when they're 60, 70 years old, also still make mistakes and tell me: I learn something new every time. [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) **How do you balance your objectives — your duties as a researcher and your activism — when you're in these types of scenarios? Because it sounds like your ultimate goal is to understand how movements can be more effective. That's a kind of activist point of view. Is it possible to balance that against the sort of sober ideal of an objective scientist?** I think, first of all, complete objectivity is never possible. Contrary to what some people from natural sciences might say, you always bring your own assumptions, your own norms, and beliefs about what is true and what is not true to the research — even in things like physics, there are debates and very irrational thoughts might inform what you think is the right position in the debate. So I think it is important that we acknowledge that it is never possible to be completely objective. But it's even harder if you're working on a topic where you are affected by the outcomes of your own research and where you are a part of the system that you are researching. And every social scientist has this fundamental problem. And I think the only way out of this dilemma is acknowledging that this involvement — this lack of objectivity — exists, and reflecting openly on your position. That doesn't mean you can't do rigorous and strategically neutral research. What I mean by this is that you can still have very good methods to determine what is effective. The metric you choose to define that might be influenced by your values, but once you've set an outcome metric that you want to evaluate, you can do pretty objective or neutral research. If I think of my goal of trying to make movements successful, it is because I'm deeply convinced that the outcomes of movements and benefit broader society. That's my personal position not only as a researcher, but also as a member of society that’s shaped by social movements. But in evaluating which strategy makes movements the most effective and which of these strategies might generalize best to society, I think I can take a much more distanced perspective. [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/02/sam-dan-truong--rF4kuvgHhU-unsplash.jpg)](#/portal/signup) Look. You and I both know that if I were a barista, you'd 100% be leaving a tip right now. The social pressure to drop a coin in that jar would just be overwhelming. But you're presumably reading this thing alone on a universe-rectangle, so I can't rely on my mere presence to remind you to be nice. If you made it this far I assume you're enjoying the article. So maybe drop a coin in my digital tip jar. It's just €2 per month (€0.25 per post!) — a cheap and fully automated weekly warm fuzzy feeling for the digital age. [Support my work for €0.25 per post ](#/portal/signup) **So how does the qualitative work you do in the field hook into the work you do when you're back at the research institution, I assume at your laptop, doing quantitative research?** The fieldwork essentially tells a story. And most people have a very limited idea of the story of a collective. There is a lot of research in social sciences that humans have a very good idea of their own social environment and their own perspective — they have a good idea of what they did, maybe even what their friends did, and then same thing with beliefs. But once it goes beyond sort of "n plus one," humans really fail to capture the broader dynamics. So in my research, I asked people about what they did and what their social networks were like during and after two different campaigns, between which a lot of things happened. But I didn't ask them about any specific trajectory of the group from point A to point B. I just get a very clear idea of point A and a very clear idea of point B, and a rough idea of what happened in between. The computational work pulls together the individual stories into a coherent picture. And if I build a computational model, the qualitative work ties in because I can use it to validate the model. If I initialize the model to look like the group at point A and let it run and it comes out looking like the group at point B, and the trajectory matches roughly with the description I got in the field, that's a good sign that the model is producing something we can learn from. And once you have a working model, it gives you a clear overview of the group-level structures and dynamics at every step, which humans cannot do. We can add even more value by letting the model run for longer to discover what happens beyond point B, or by changing parameters — what would have happened if the group was twice as large? What would have happened it if it had twice the resource? Because of actually having done the field work myself I think I have the advantage of having a pretty good intuition of what is reasonable model behavior. **Can you give a more concrete example to help me imagine what one of these models is and what it does?** One good example is that my research in the field was about how activists in the social movement organization experience burnout in response to repression from the police and from the courts. And when I built the first version of the agent-based model with the mechanisms that I saw in the field, I could simulate a scenario in which the group became very resilient and is not burnt out at all — but all individuals burn out, which is extremely counterintuitive and doesn't make a lot of sense, because individuals constitute this group. If all individuals burn out and sort of withdraw and have conflict with each other, then it's very unlikely that the group resilience will be very high. So this was a specific example where I built an early model and another researcher with no experience in the field, or not so much experience with social movements in general, might have said: Wow, I found something really new that no one has ever postulated in scientific work! And I look at it and, for better or worse, think: This cannot be real. My model is wrong. [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) **So it sounds like resilience is one measure of success. What have you found about what makes social movements successful in this way?** I can't get too detailed about the specific way success is defined for this particular group. But I can talk about some of the things that make groups and movements resilient. Resilience means you can absorb a large shock from your environment, like sudden cut of funding, sudden influx of members, sudden dropout, sudden arrests, things like this. And then you can also bounce back so that you receive a shock. You need to adapt to a change in the environment. You don't just absorb it, you also adapt, and you do so successfully to continue operating under the changed circumstances. And one of the biggest factors that is related to resilience is burnout. You can imagine it a bit as a continuum, where people are really resilient, absorptive and adaptive on one end, and they're really burned out and have low capacity to absorb more stress on the other hand, and that's burnout. What I've found is that it is not, as you might think, the direct repression of the police or the courts or any private entities that makes individuals and the movement burn out. Instead, it is more related to the social support that individuals get and that the group gets from within the group and from outside the group. In the practical case that I was working with, the group was confronted with quickly escalating repression in response to one of their campaigns, and most of the people in the group had pretty high social support in the form of financial, practical or emotional support from their families and friends outside of the social movement organization. The group didn't deem it necessary to provide the support internally. But some group members that didn't have this support from the outside were gravely in need. They burned out a lot quicker, and that changed the composition of the whole group to something much more oriented towards just political goals and less towards internal goals of providing care and supporting each other. This then led to a toxic culture, and also more tensions between people — and also less diversity in the group, because a specific group of people burned out, and their knowledge and their skills were missing, and then the whole group became less skilled, less able to reach their political goals. In the end, this led basically everyone to burn out more, even though a lot of people came with a lot of support from their family. This was not really related to the repression itself. It was related to how the group decided to deal with it, which is both a hopeful and a very sad statement, because it puts the agency into the hands of the group. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/03/ICE_Out_of_MN_protest-_January_24-_2026-_Minneapolis_-_13.jpg) The ICE Out movement in Minnesota succeeded despite severe obstacles (including sub-zero temperatures) — an example, Timo thinks, of how support within movements contributes to their resilience. ****Image:** Lorie Shaull, [CC BY 4.0,](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0?ref=reviewertoo.com) via Wikimedia Commons [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) **You're doing this research with a particular kind of social change in mind. But don't you ever worry that what you discover about how to organize effectively will be picked up by people who, let's say, do not want to pursue pro-social goals?** This is what keeps me awake at night. Currently successfully, because I am still doing this research, I tell myself that for all we know this data is already being collected by companies and governments to prevent social unrest, to prevent change where they don't want change. So I think that if governments and other actors who perhaps want to prevent social change are already doing this research, it's even more important that independent scientists who have good connections to social movements to this research, too — and make the insights that probably exist already behind closed doors available to the general public, to sort of even the playing field. **You can't discuss the specific group you worked with, but can you point to a social movement that you feel is a good example of what you've been talking about — of resilience through in-group support?** Yes, a very recent one actually, and one that's still politically relevant: if we look at the ICE Out movement in the Twin Cities in the US, it meets all the classic characteristics of a social movement. It doesn't have formal hierarchies or leadership. People are organized in dense relational networks that are mainly based on previously existing ties of friendship, family, neighborhood, co-workers. And from all that I've read about it, people are extremely supportive because of these pre-existing ties. It's people organizing to protect their neighbors with their neighbors, to protect their family together with their neighbors. And this has been creating a very strong support. For example, a lot of migrants currently cannot go out to work and there are people covering their shifts. There are people who provide free lunches to school children. There are people that shuttle children from migrant parents to school so the parents don't have to leave the house. There are people on every block that have whistles that they can use to alert each other in case ICE enters the city. And it is basically marginalized people being targeted by one of the most powerful law enforcement agencies in the world with violence, intimidation, and a lot of human resources being sent into a city in extremely adverse weather conditions. And somehow, through the support for each other, and through this feeling of unity and solidarity that is generated, people have supported each other through this and essentially enforced that ICE is not in the Twin Cities anymore. So I think this is a recent and politically relevant example of how social support plays a huge role. Because if all of these people had just relied on their individual networks, I don't think it would have worked. **I think that's a good note to end on. Thank you!** [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) --- ### Footnotes [\[1\]](#:~:text=%5B1%5D): For those of you interested in learning more about these scholars, Timo recommends two books: [The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Part 1: Power and Struggle](https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/resource/politics-nonviolent-action-3-volumes/?ref=reviewertoo.com) by Gene Sharp and [Social Movements, 1768-2004](https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781315632063/social-movements-1768-2004-charles-tilly?ref=reviewertoo.com) by Charles Tilly --- ### Thanks for reading It's thanks to readers like you that I can keep this project going. Want to help support independent writing on ambitious, interdisciplinary science? 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[Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) ### You and a frog might have the same taste in music URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/animals-humans-same-sounds-music-beautiful/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:39:25.000Z **TLDRs are short, to-the-point posts about new studies that come out each Tuesday. It's a new format I'm trying out thanks to input from readers.* **If you only want to get the main newsletter posts, you can unsubscribe from TLDRs from your* [**subscriber portal*](https://www.reviewertoo.com/#/portal/account/newsletters)**.* **Have your own suggestions or requests?* [**Fill out my survey*](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSet-JCR8bI8fAvrnGg8y5jtqR%5Fm0-PEai8RtcqfSAD%5FM4j2BA/viewform?usp=dialog&ref=reviewertoo.com)**.* [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) Ah, spring. The flowers are in bloom. The air is full of tree sperm I'm allergic to. And the birds and bugs and frogs are screeching at the tops of their little lungs: "I'm sexy! I'm sexy! Pick me! Pick me!" It truly is the most beautiful time of the year. Jokes aside, spring is undeniably beautiful. It is a loud, colorful, fragrant feast for the senses. We humans find spring so beautiful that we emulate its blossoms and birdsong in our own art, fashion, music, and even perfumes. But we rarely think about whether other animals might appreciate this beauty, too — even though floral fragrance attracts pollinators and birdsong is quite literally a sexy serenade. As is so often the case, science is revealing that humans are less special than we might like to think. New research published last week in *Science* showed that [humans and animals tend to agree on what sounds good ](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea1202https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea1202?ref=reviewertoo.com)— at least when it comes to the sounds animals use to attract each other. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Are the Stardew Valley wiki authors scientists? URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/what-is-science-cataloging-video-game-lore/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:39:46.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) There are people out there who — for reasons I'll never understand — have the unusual combination of patience and truly obsessive energy required to turn the wild wonders of the universe into reams of systematically annotated data. They are the catalogers. You probably know one or two. The catalogers are the obsessive gamers who document every little detail of the farm simulation video game Stardew Valley, down to the last hidden [secret](https://stardewvalleywiki.com/Secrets?ref=reviewertoo.com). They are the rock collectors who buy bigger houses so they can convert a whole floor into a personal museum. They are your hyper-fans, your super-nerds, your mega-geeks. They are the people who somehow maintained the kind of sharp, ceaseless focus necessary to devote entire lifetimes to recording the precise positions of heavenly objects in the millennia before robotic astronomy. To me, it is obvious that science needs catalogers — and that obsessively documenting video game lore or butterflies is, in a way, scientific. Even if done without scientific intent, detailed and systematic datasets are what make a lot of science possible. But cataloging is not the kind of research that tends to get grant money. In fact, granting bodies like the European Research Council have a whole vocabulary built up to disqualify research that sounds too much like cataloging. Any scientist who's ever applied for a grant will know that suggesting a "fishing expedition" — let's just go see what we find and record it — is a good way to get a grant rejected.[\[1\]](#f-1) This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### The asteroid Ryugu contains every letter of the genetic alphabet URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/the-asteroid-ryugu-contains-every-letter-of-the-genetic-alphabet/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:40:05.000Z **TLDRs are short, to-the-point posts about new studies that come out each Tuesday. It's a new format I'm trying out thanks to input from readers.* **If you only want to get the main newsletter posts, you can unsubscribe from TLDRs from your* [**subscriber portal*](https://www.reviewertoo.com/#/portal/account/newsletters)**.* **Have your own suggestions or requests?* [**Fill out my survey*](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSet-JCR8bI8fAvrnGg8y5jtqR%5Fm0-PEai8RtcqfSAD%5FM4j2BA/viewform?usp=dialog&ref=reviewertoo.com)**.* [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) Once again, asteroid samples are in the headlines: this Monday, researchers announced that they'd found [all five letters of the genetic alphabet in rock dust returned from the asteroid Ryugu](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-026-02791-z?ref=reviewertoo.com). Whenever research like this hits headlines, the headlines are invariably... fun. My favorite this time is *India Today*'s "All 5 chemicals that make up life found in a space rock for the first time." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/03/image.png) Lest you think this is a cherrypicked tabloid that nobody reads, India Today is the most widely circulated magazine in the world's biggest democracy. Ah yes, all five chemicals that make up life. All five of them. *New Scientist* (a magazine I write for, because I am indeed stupid enough to throw stones from a glass house) went with an even bolder headline: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/03/image-1.png) Journalists usually don't write their own headlines, just so you know. But I was a bit surprised by this one, considering the article is narrowly focused on RNA and DNA and doesn't mention any of the other "main ingredients of life" that have been found in Ryugu. Reading things like this, you could be forgiven for thinking asteroids are basically ready-made life construction kits. But what should we really make of this new discovery? What does it tell us that we didn't know before — and what does it mean for the origin of life? This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Is your willpower stronger than a proton beam? URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/academic-sacrifice-marginalized-researchers/ Last updated: 2026-03-12T14:00:13.000Z **This post is a guest contribution by an up-and-coming science writer. If you're an aspiring science writer trying to get your first published writing samples ("clips"), feel free to* [**get in touch*](mailto:elise@reviewertoo.com?subject=Aspiring%20Science%20Writer%20Intro&body=Introduce%20yourself%20and%20tell%20me%3A%0A%0A1%29%20where%20you're%20at%20now%2C%20professionally%0A2%29%20what%20your%20professional%20goal%20is%20regarding%20science%20journalism%20or%20scicomm%0A3%29%20how%20you%20hope%20I%20can%20help%0A4%29%20a%20few%20ideas%20for%20posts%20%28think%20stories%2C%20not%20topics%2C%20and%20keep%20this%20short%20%E2%80%94%202-4%20sentences%20per%20idea%29.%0A)**.* **Also get in touch if you'd like to support more young science writers. I'd be very interested in developing a more formal "first clips" program with the right team and/or support.* **You can support R2 — including helping me help more new writers — by signing up to* [**leave a €0.25 tip for each post*](#/portal/signup)**.* [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) I have spent years in the lab perfecting my nitrile glove removal technique. Since starting as a PhD student in microbiology at MIT in 2024, I’ve watched enough safety videos depicting laboratory contamination disasters to ensure that I never, ever touch the outside of my gloves. Even when the only substance I come in contact with is harmless alcohol, I make sure to double-wash my hands and forearms before touching anything else. If someone told me that I would be *guaranteed* the Nobel Prize if I would just ease up on *one* minor safety measure — well, the prize would have to go to someone else. It’s not just me who’s worried about safety. Today, the number of mandatory trainings and other institutional hurdles that fledgling researchers like me have to overcome just to handle a test tube can be frustrating. But for a hypochondriac like myself, these barriers are comforting. So it was quite chilling to read the story of [Anatoli Bugorski](https://allthatsinteresting.com/anatoli-bugorski?ref=reviewertoo.com) for the first time. Bugorski was a PhD student in Soviet Russia working with the U-70 synchrotron, the largest particle accelerator in the Soviet Union. One fateful day in July 1978, he leaned over to check a malfunctioning piece of equipment and was struck in the head by a proton beam. It passed through the back of his head, his brain, and his left middle ear before finally exiting through his left nostril. It’s thought he received 2000-3000 Sieverts of radiation — if you’re like me and have no idea what this number means, Bugorski clarifies by asserting that he saw a flash [“brighter than a thousand suns.”](https://web.archive.org/web/20120425115650/http://www.eco-pravda.ru/page.php?al=bugorsky%5Fcasus) Sounds fun! Bugorski was admitted to a hospital, where the left half of his face swelled up and the skin peeled, revealing that the beam had burned through parts of his face, bone, and brain tissue. Most doctors predicted that he wouldn’t make it, but miraculously, he survived. And more remarkably, after eighteen months of treatment, Bugorski was back in the lab. As harrowing as Bugorski’s tale is, it is unfortunately far from the only story of enormous sacrifice in the name of science. These days, improved safety protocols mean scientists aren’t usually putting their lives on the line for their lab, pacifying nitrile glove enthusiasts like myself. Yet, the sacrifice remains — just in a different flavor. Research culture still demands and glorifies sacrifice in all forms. Especially from marginalized people who already have to overcome systemic adversity before even entering the lab. ## Sign up for Reviewer, too Postcards from the open frontiers of science, by science journalist Elise Cutts Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Today’s scientists are largely treated like cogs in the academic machine, only rewarded when articles are accepted to prestigious journals or when grant funding is awarded. The Trump administration’s attack on higher education, particularly academic research institutions, has only worsened this dynamic. Since taking office in 2025, the administration has halted or completely [terminated research and global health grants](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01295-6?ref=reviewertoo.com), [fired thousands of researchers](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00660-9?ref=reviewertoo.com) and government employees, and threatened or frozen funding to universities in an[ anti-DEI effort to control hiring and admissions](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00881-y?ref=reviewertoo.com). For academia, which already suffers from a lack of diversity and representation, the heightened burden of shrinking research teams and uncertain funding is sure to make the “leaky pipeline” of academic research even leakier. But in the face of these challenges, the solution is not to romanticize resilience. It is to challenge the expectation that scientists survive impossible conditions — we decided we weren’t going to tolerate more accidents like Bugorski’s, and lab safety improved. We shouldn’t tolerate scientific systems built on the sacrifices of marginalized people, either. [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) ## Would you die for science? Bugorski is not the only researcher who literally put their life on the line for science. [Marie Curie](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marie-Curie?ref=reviewertoo.com) discovered two new elements, but later succumbed to a bone marrow disease likely caused by exposure to the very same radioactivity that she helped advance our understanding of. Rosalind Franklin’s undeniable contribution to resolving the helical structure of DNA, famously under-appreciated during her lifetime, exposed her to X-ray radiation that is suspected to have contributed to her death at the young age of 37\. The dangers of radiation were at least moderately known by 1952, the year that Franklin’s student Raymond Gosling took the famous [‘Photograph 51’](https://www.kcl.ac.uk/the-story-behind-photograph-51?ref=reviewertoo.com) that James Watson and Francis Crick used to unravel the structure of DNA. Three decades earlier, the harrowing story of the [‘Radium Girls’](https://www.britannica.com/story/radium-girls-the-women-who-fought-for-their-lives-in-a-killer-workplace?ref=reviewertoo.com), the young women who ingested copious amounts of radium by licking the bristles of brushes dipped in radium paint, had been widely circulated. Franklin may well have known she was risking her life in the lab. > I can’t say that academia has stopped demanding sacrifice. Instead of putting our lives on the line, we’re asked to give up everything that makes life livable. Franklin and Curie are two well-known stories, but there is a long history of neglect in laboratory safety before the widespread [implementation of laboratory safety standards](https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/membership/acs/benefits/discovery-reports/labsafety.pdf?ref=reviewertoo.com). Even as recently as the early 20th century, health risks were regarded as a necessary price to pay to get ahead. August Kekulé, a renowned organic chemist, [once remarked](https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/membership/acs/benefits/discovery-reports/labsafety.pdf?ref=reviewertoo.com): “Who does not ruin his health by his studies, nowadays will not get anywhere in chemistry.” And the labs students trained in were the riskiest. Between 1966 and 1984, [81% of laboratory accidents](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-019-0375-x?ref=reviewertoo.com) occurred in these teaching labs. Doing whatever it took to get ahead in academia, even at the expense of one’s physical safety, was the norm. Eventually, though, we decided that enough was enough. Following countless unacceptable accidents, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration adopted the [Occupational Exposure to Hazardous Chemicals in Laboratories](http://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1910/1910.1450?ref=reviewertoo.com) standard in 1990 to protect laboratory workers. This was followed by the United Nations’ 2003 [Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals](https://www.osha.gov/hazcom/global?ref=reviewertoo.com) to create a standardized system for classifying chemical hazards worldwide. In the US, there are ongoing efforts to enhance laboratory safety across disciplines, and universities around the country have [collaborated](https://cls.ucla.edu/about-us?ref=reviewertoo.com) to develop and implement training courses for students and professionals. After an untold number of injuries and deaths in the lab, we chose not to tolerate this kind of sacrifice anymore. [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) ## We're expected to tolerate the intolerable That being said, I can’t say that academia has stopped demanding sacrifice. Instead of putting our lives on the line, we’re asked to give up everything that makes life livable. If you’re lucky enough to be admitted to a paid graduate program at all, the pay is abysmal. According to data from 2022, [only 2% of the 178 institutions surveyed](https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01392-w?ref=reviewertoo.com) in a crowdsourced dataset guaranteed graduate students a stipend that exceeded the cost of living. If a student wants to supplement these wages with a second job, they’re often prohibited from doing so. And after completing graduate studies, academics are often forced to relocate multiple times for short-term research positions—postdocs— before attaining full-time employment as faculty. In a 2024 survey, [71% of faculty](https://doi.org/10.1128/aem.01483-24?ref=reviewertoo.com) reported not receiving financial support during their postdoc years for these frequent, expensive relocations. Outside of the financial burden, these moves can often be isolating and disorienting, exacerbating the demands of their research positions. As most academics do not attain full-time positions until their mid-30s, academics often have to make the choice of delaying family planning or undertaking milestones like marriage and raising children while making strides in their research. And academic work culture venerates sacrifice; to work at the edge of burnout is to be a good researcher. > Perhaps we shouldn’t measure scientific progress just by what we discover, but also by who gets to stay long enough to make those discoveries. Anecdotally, I see this culture of sacrifice everywhere. My weekly lunch gatherings with colleagues and friends are essentially tea-spilling sessions, trading stories about long hours in the lab. Sometimes, we joke about it lightheartedly, trading selfies of us leaving the lab at ungodly hours. But other times, it is clear that the grueling demands can take an emotional toll. In the popular ‘r/PhD’ subreddit, amidst the [celebratory frog memes](https://www.reddit.com/r/PhD/comments/1os7kuz/why%5Fis%5Fthe%5Ffrog%5Fmeme%5Fassociated%5Fwith%5Fthis%5Fsub/?ref=reviewertoo.com) and research technique questions, hundreds of posts express anxieties over failed experiments, frustration over mounting demands from absent research advisors, and even questions about whether the degree is worth it. One user in the first semester of their program recounted daily anxiety, nausea, and even vomiting, stemming from the pressure of their coursework alone. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/03/p37cbzy0f04g1.jpeg) Frog memes console grad students on r/PhD ****Image:** [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/PhD/comments/1p8wgal/my%5Fturn%5Fto%5Fpost%5Fthe%5Ffrog/?ref=reviewertoo.com) [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) And it’s no surprise that these stories exist. Graduate students juggle coursework with research deadlines, publishing complexities, and advisor demands. It’s like the stress of college times two. Back in 2004, [a study](https://www.emerald.com/ijem/article-abstract/18/7/396/118174/Are-we-doing-enough-for-today-s-graduate-student?redirectedFrom=fulltext&ref=reviewertoo.com) put it plainly, stating that “stress is at the core of the graduate student experience.” Their small study interviewed twelve graduate student participants ranging from ages 28 to 51, and found a central theme of stress, overwhelm, and a demanding workload. One participant even described the PhD life as all-consuming. They asserted that the compounding priorities associated with graduate student life lead to internal conflict, often leading to guilt over which things students choose to prioritize. These pressures can often lead to [burnout](https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-800951-2.00044-3?ref=reviewertoo.com), which is characterized by three dimensions: fatigue resulting from the depletion of emotional resources, cynicism regarding one’s work, and feelings of incompetence. Graduate students [have been reported](https://doi.org/10.1007/s12529-020-09867-8?ref=reviewertoo.com) to exhibit higher levels of burnout and stress compared to both undergraduate students and the general population. For many of us, sacrifice and science go hand in hand. ## Academic sacrifice is asymmetric But burnout doesn’t affect everyone equally, and not every scientist is expected to make the same sacrifices. In 2005, the term [“leaky pipeline”](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09540250500145072?ref=reviewertoo.com) was coined to describe how higher education (particularly in the STEM and medical fields) sees a drop in the percentage of women as one progresses from the undergraduate to professional staff levels. This phenomenon has also, naturally, been[ seen in underrepresented minority (URM) communities](https://search.proquest.com/openview/2be7d6cba88f52834318e3f9855064de/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y&casa%5Ftoken=BjxpU9A1a%5FEAAAAA:ut2WFZ6BJxjusbh5wQwYGbK20d0b%5FMT%5FhdgKKiK9v7xvd4CKS6HsmdYiHJkveBTx--1Pr%5FsgvP0&ref=reviewertoo.com), and is, of course, amplified for those who are both URM and non-male. URM STEM students’ burnout is often compounded by a lack of representation in their programs and limited access to advanced coursework (which can stem from socioeconomic barriers) and mentorship opportunities. As a Nigerian-American woman in a PhD program, I have felt this phenomenon *deeply*. In a Nigerian family, there’s a significant expectation to become a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. And, indeed, there are many in my family, including my own parents. But few African parents encourage their children to pursue academia. My dad certainly didn’t. As a young, bright, mildly rebellious college student (as rebellious as one can be in a Nigerian family), I didn’t understand my dad’s resistance to the idea of my going to graduate school for a PhD rather than an MD. So I pursued PhD programs aggressively, while my other URM friends in STEM majors pursued pre-med tracks. I was thrilled to be admitted to my top choice program, but within the first few weeks, I started to understand my dad’s sentiment. It became abundantly clear that I was going to have to develop thicker skin to make it through my program. For starters, it is rare for me to run into someone who looks like me on a given day. I am grateful for the affinity spaces that my university has, but it was a huge adjustment to be the only Black student in my classes, meetings, and seminars *most days*. I hadn’t realized how much just seeing others that I can relate to was crucial to my feelings of belonging, as I had always felt a sense of BIPOC community and representation from a young age through college. And, if you’re wondering, I’ve attended predominantly white institutions, or PWIs, from pre-K through college. Even when the BIPOC community was in the minority, there was always *someone* in my programs, and just their presence gave me a sense of assurance of my own belonging in STEM. Somewhere in the transition from college to graduate school, that representation dropped dramatically. > Burnout doesn’t affect everyone equally, and not every scientist is expected to make the same sacrifices. And then there’s the [imposter syndrome](https://ctl.stanford.edu/students/imposter-syndrome?ref=reviewertoo.com). Imposter syndrome is the phenomenon of doubting one’s intellectual or professional capabilities. These doubts lead to a fear of being “exposed” as incompetent, as well as questioning whether one belongs in a given professional or academic space. A [2019 study](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-019-05364-1?ref=reviewertoo.com) found that URM students were most likely to exhibit imposter syndrome, with risk factors including a lack of support, negative stereotypes, and racial discrimination. My first semester of graduate school, that feeling *really* set in. I found myself panicking before journal club sessions, worried over whether my understanding of literature would be enough to avoid looking incompetent. I would end up spending way more time than it was worth drafting notes for myself, which ultimately were never actually necessary. Those extra steps that I took to *not* look like an imposter eat away at time that could be better spent getting other work done (of which there is plenty), unwinding with friends, or just *sleeping*. The current political climate has only intensified the sacrifices of URM researchers. The government’s anti-DEI attacks on higher education have been swift and widely felt. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in the [Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard case](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199%5Fhgdj.pdf?ref=reviewertoo.com) that the identity-aware admissions systems at Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill, implemented to increase representation of URMs in universities, were illegal. This controversial ruling was quickly followed by the Trump administration’s [ruthless audits](https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-and-wasteful-government-dei-programs-and-preferencing/?ref=reviewertoo.com) of universities across the country with DEI programs, requiring them to eliminate any and all DEI initiatives. And the Trump administration slashed billions of dollars of research funding to universities with DEI-focused programs. And what’s worse, universities have preemptively shrunk or cut their own DEI-serving offices and initiatives to hold onto their funding. In a recent demonstration of how widespread this erasure of diversity has been, November saw the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference [remove over 200 archived abstracts](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.science.org/content/article/censorship-conference-requires-abstracts-comply-trump-anti-dei-order&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1769317572501593&usg=AOvVaw2parUqCq-YhbFaTlt6isoP) for the incorporation of language perceived as being tied to DEI, like “inclusion” and “accessibility.” The Universities Space Research Association (USRA) justified its actions by claiming them to be a “good faith effort” to comply with the current administration’s policies. I can still feel the sting from an info session I attended this past fall for the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program, one of the most prestigious fellowships for graduate students. During the Q&A portion of the session, a Black student asked whether it would be okay to discuss DEI-centered initiatives as part of their application, and the session leader cautioned her against it. > So what do we do? The answer isn’t to romanticize resilience. There it was. The harmful rhetoric painting equity as the enemy of progress was manifesting in concrete erasures of diversity in higher education. A [2025 review](https://www.emerald.com/edi/article-abstract/44/2/137/1274210/The-anti-DEI-agenda-navigating-the-impact-of-Trump?redirectedFrom=fulltext&ref=reviewertoo.com) of scholars’ perspectives on the federal administration’s DEI rollbacks reveals that an increasing sentiment of hopelessness and despair underlie these new policies. And research institutions, whose URM students, postdocs, and faculty already struggle so much to meet the increasingly weighty demands of academic excellence, must now add another layer to their burnout: fear. Researchers are already expected to endure harm—physical, mental, financial—all for the sake of scientific progress, often with the very institutions benefiting from their work providing inadequate support. For URM students today, this sacrifice is compounded. We must not only navigate the universal pressures of graduate education, but do so while watching the already-fragile support structures around us crumble. We’re expected to tolerate the intolerable in the face of a blatant attack on our right to be in these academic spaces to begin with. So while I am unlikely to burn a hole through my brain working in a lab today, my URM colleagues and I face an uphill battle of fulfilling gruelling demands as researchers while we watch our representation dwindle. [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) ## We need to stop romanticizing resilience So what do we do? The answer isn’t to romanticize resilience. Bugorski's story is striking precisely because he shouldn’t have had to endure it. We shouldn't celebrate survival under impossible conditions—we should question why those conditions exist in the first place. To address the leaky pipeline, institutions must commit to more than performative diversity statements. This means funding mental health resources that acknowledge the impacts of academic stress, not just offering generic services that fail to address the compounded pressures of navigating predominantly white male spaces while managing imposter syndrome. It means creating financial support structures that don't evaporate when politically convenient, recognizing that URM students often lack the safety nets that allow their peers to endure reduced funding. It means building more mentorship programs that connect URM students with faculty who understand their experiences. And perhaps most critically, it means recognizing that diversity isn't a luxury to be cut during "tough times"; rather, it is essential to scientific excellence. The questions we ask, the problems we prioritize, and the solutions we come up with are all shaped by who gets a seat at the table. When I first read about Anatoli Bugorski returning to complete his PhD after a proton beam burned through his skull, I was stunned by his dedication. Now, I'm haunted by a different question: How many brilliant minds have we lost in higher education because they were not as lucky as Bugorski was? Not only those who were not lucky enough to survive horrific laboratory accidents, but also those who did not have the institutional support to endure the financial struggle, burnout, imposter syndrome, and anti-DEI policies of academia? How many researchers have left their fields because the system failed them, and how many more could we lose if we don’t fight back against the attacks on higher education coming from the current administration? Perhaps we shouldn’t measure scientific progress just by what we discover, but also by who gets to stay long enough to make those discoveries. [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) --- ## About the author **Fechi Inyama** is a burgeoning science writer from Ewing, New Jersey. She is currently pursuing a PhD in microbiology and geobiology at MIT, exploring microbial evolution through deep time. She loves writing science stories about evolution, paleontology, and weird microbes. In her free time, she enjoys theater, dance, and trying to win over her roommate’s cat. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/03/finyama_headshot_clear-3-1.png) Fechi Inyama is a burgeoning science writer pursuing a PhD in microbiology and geobiology at MIT. ****Image:** Fechi Inyama --- ### Thanks for reading It's thanks to readers like you that I can keep this project going. Want to help support independent writing on ambitious, interdisciplinary science? 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[Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) ### Stingers and spikes across nature have the same shape. Here's why. URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/stingers-and-spikes-have-a-universal-shape/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:40:39.000Z **TLDRs are short, to-the-point posts about new studies that come out each Tuesday. It's a new format I'm trying out thanks to input from readers.* **If you only want to get the main newsletter posts, you can unsubscribe from TLDRs from your* [**subscriber portal*](https://www.reviewertoo.com/#/portal/account/newsletters)**.* **Have your own suggestions or requests?* [**Fill out my survey*](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSet-JCR8bI8fAvrnGg8y5jtqR%5Fm0-PEai8RtcqfSAD%5FM4j2BA/viewform?usp=dialog&ref=reviewertoo.com)**.* From cacti to bees to narwhals, nature abounds in stabby spikes. Sharp horns and stingers make great weapons, while spines and spikes provide protection. And having spear tips in your mouth comes in pretty handy if you're a meat-eater without hands. Despite their stunning diversity in purpose, shape, and size, stingers and spikes follow a surprising pattern: across the tree of life, they taper to a blunt tip with the same geometry.[\[1\]](#f-1) It's the universal curve of natural stabbing weapons, as it were. And in [research published last week](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2526098123?ref=reviewertoo.com) in the *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, researchers used math and a lot of sacrificial pencil nubs to show where that curve comes from. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/03/pencil_gladiators.gif) The researcher named this thing "pencil-gladiators.gif" and I feel I have nothing to add to that. ****Image:** John Sebastian, Technical University of Denmark This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Networks are math squares disguised as drawings URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/networks-are-math-squares-matrices-linear-algebra/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:45:03.000Z I have a confession to make: I was really, really bad with vectors and matrices in school. It's a long story how I went from loving math as a kid to kind of hating it in college. But a key episode in that saga was when my 9th grade algebra teacher realized the "normal kid" math track my mom had signed me up for meant I wasn't going to hit calculus before graduating unless I skipped a chunk of math mid-year to jump into the "nerdy kid" track. The chunk I skipped was vectors, and I continued to get cold sweats any time I saw the dreaded \[ \] brackets for years. Despite eventually developing a decent intuitive grasp on what matrices and vectors represented, I was hopeless at doing anything with them — to survive college physics, I teamed up with a math major who was equally hopeless at translating physics problems into math, but was an equation-solving machine. Now, as a science journalist liberated from the need to actually *do* math, I can finally *appreciate* it. That includes my old enemy: matrices, the math squares of doom. And today I want to share something amazing about them. Any network — think maps of social connections, routes between cities, links between internet pages, anything really — can be written as a matrix. (So long as it isn't infinite) ![aerial photography of city during night time](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1446776653964-20c1d3a81b06?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDIwfHxuZXR3b3JrfGVufDB8fHx8MTc3MjY5NTYyNnww&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000) We think of the connections between cities as networks of nodes with links, but you could represent the same information with a grid of numbers. ****Image:** [NASA](https://unsplash.com/@nasa?ref=reviewertoo.com) / [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?utm%5Fsource=ghost&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcampaign=api-credit) Translation: a meshwork of nodes connected by edges is really just a grid of numbers in disguise. And if that's not cool enough for you, there's an AI angle. The fact that networks are also math squares is why neural networks are basically linear algebra under the hood. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### A tiny scrap of the genetic molecule RNA can *almost* copy itself. URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/self-replicating-rna-origin-of-life/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:40:53.000Z **TLDRs are short, to-the-point posts about new studies that come out each Tuesday. It's a new format I'm trying out thanks to input from readers.* **If you only want to get the main newsletter posts, you can unsubscribe from TLDRs from your* [**subscriber portal*](https://www.reviewertoo.com/#/portal/account/newsletters)**.* **Have your own suggestions or requests?* [**Fill out my survey*](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSet-JCR8bI8fAvrnGg8y5jtqR%5Fm0-PEai8RtcqfSAD%5FM4j2BA/viewform?usp=dialog&ref=reviewertoo.com)**.* This is a hyper-abridged TLDR because I had a totally different post scheduled to run, but the researchers behind the study ended up having a delay posting their work and I didn't want to break their embargo. And then I had to fly home from a training in Brussels, so I just sat down to write this at 10:50 pm. So I now present for your enjoyment the unproofread residue at the bottom of my brain juice barrel: a quick note on [a cool study about a surprisingly small molecule that can *almost* copy itself](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt2760?ref=reviewertoo.com) and what it could mean for the origins of life. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Complexity is less than the sum of its parts, not more URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/complexity-is-less-than-the-sum-of-its-parts-not-more/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:44:51.000Z **Thanks for reading! If you'd like to support my work, you can do that by* [**becoming a paid subscriber*](#/portal/signup) *or leaving a* [**one-time tip*](#/portal/support)**. You can also help for free by sharing this post or* [**signing up for the free newsletter*](#/portal/signup/free)**.* If you're interested in emergence and complexity, odds are you've come across the phrase "more than the sum of its parts." It's a common way of explaining emergence — a slippery topic that everyone has their own opinions about, but which clearly has to do with lots of little things coming together in a big thing that's meaningfully different from the individual little things. But "more than the sum of its parts" is misleading enough that I'm willing to say it is actually just *wrong*. Complex systems with properties we find interesting, like ant colonies and bird flocks and economies and brains are actually *less than the sum of their parts —* and it is that being "less" that makes them so interesting. Because the things we find interesting are patterns, and patterns are, basically by definition, simplifications that allow us to throw out detail. ## Sign up for Reviewer, too Postcards from the open frontiers of science, by science journalist Elise Cutts Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. So despite its maximalist name, complexity science actually gives reality the Marie Kondo treatment: "Keep only those things that speak to your heart. Then take the plunge and discard all the rest." Except instead of household objects, it's granular detail. And instead of the heart that's spoken to, it's math. ### What do we mean by "more than the sum of its parts?" When we say that something is more than the sum of its parts, we're usually contrasting a difference in *kind* to a difference in *magnitude*. Magnitude just means amount. 5 is more than 4\. Kind is slipperier. It means something like qualitative essence. Blue and red are both colors, so they differ in kind from the 4 and 6, which are numbers. Water and ice are both arrangements of the same molecule, but they different in kind because they are different phases of matter. Something that's more than the sum of its parts differs from its parts in *kind*, not just *magnitude*. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Elon Musk wasn't stupid to buy Twitter URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/elon-wasnt-stupid-to-buy-twitter/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:41:12.000Z **TLDRs are short, to-the-point posts about new studies that come out each Tuesday. It's a new format I'm trying out thanks to input from readers.* **If you only want to get the main newsletter posts, you can unsubscribe from TLDRs from your* [**subscriber portal*](https://www.reviewertoo.com/#/portal/account/newsletters)**.* **Have your own suggestions or requests?* [**Fill out my survey*](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSet-JCR8bI8fAvrnGg8y5jtqR%5Fm0-PEai8RtcqfSAD%5FM4j2BA/viewform?usp=dialog&ref=reviewertoo.com)**.* Do you remember how back when Elon Musk bought Twitter there was this big rush to say how *stupid* the decision was? That it made no business sense? I'm almost nostalgic for that moment: ah, the good old days when we could maybe still believe think Elon was a businessman and not a wannabe horseman of the apocalypse. Buying Twitter wasn't stupid, because it wasn't a business decision. It was a political one. And a study published last week in *Nature* shows exactly what kind of political dividend X is reaping: [the X algorithmic feed drives users to the right](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10098-2?ref=reviewertoo.com#MOESM1). This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### The origin of life wasn't fat-free URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/origin-of-life-lipids/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:44:39.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) Lipids are not exactly the star of the origin of life show. Despite quite literally holding every single cell on Earth together, these fatty molecules (think oils, fats, waxes, etc.) are basically an afterthought in most origin of life hypotheses. If lipids appear in biological origin stories all, it is usually only to provide a vessel that contains and concentrates the real protagonists of prebiotic chemistry: proteins and nucleic acids. Origins research is, broadly, divided into two camps. The information-first camp that generally sees the origin of life as the emergence of a self-replicating RNA molecule is understandably more interested in RNA than fats. In the other camp, metabolism-first thinking that sees life as a self-sustaining chemical network and usually places its origin at deep-sea hydrothermal vents, lipids were a bit of a problem for a while — scientists [had trouble getting lipid vesicles to form in hot salty water](https://communities.springernature.com/posts/protocells-in-deep-sea-hydrothermal-vents-another-piece-of-the-origin-of-life-puzzle?ref=reviewertoo.com). They eventually solved that problem. And besides, there's a solution to prebiotic dilution that doesn't involved lipids at all; [pores in the rock around hydrothermal vents might have filled in for cell membranes](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-021-00830-y?ref=reviewertoo.com) at the origin of life. ## Sign up for Reviewer, too Postcards from the open frontiers of science, by science journalist Elise Cutts Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. If you think I am exaggerating how much of a non-issue lipids are in the origins field, I would refer you to this quote from a recent paper reporting the [discovery of sugars in material returned from the asteroid Bennu](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-025-01838-6?ref=reviewertoo.com): > Given that the fragments of carbonaceous asteroids appear to be widely distributed in the inner solar system, such asteroids or fragments of asteroids (for example, carbonaceous chondrites), would have provided glucose and other bio-essential sugars to broad areas of the inner solar system, together with nucleobases and protein-building amino acids. Thus, **all three crucial building blocks of life** would have reached the prebiotic Earth and other potentially habitable planets. (Emphasis mine) Sugars, nucleobases, and amino acids — the simple molecules that chain together in carbohydrates, nucleic acids like RNA and DNA, and proteins — are *all three* ingredients needed for life, apparently. [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.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/icon/R-4.png)Reviewer, tooElise Cutts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/thumbnail/susanna_truax_1980.62.31-2-1-1-1.jpg)](https://www.reviewertoo.com/bennu-space-sugars/) To be charitable about the three-ingredient recipe for life, it isn't even wrong — so long as you think an isolated self-replicating RNA counts as life, which plenty of scientists do. Hell, I was recently at a whole workshop full of artificial life researchers who were wishy-washy on whether or not self-replicating, evolving snippets of code might be considered alive or not (many called their code snippets "creatures," which I found very cute). Granting creature-hood to self-replicating RNAs, maybe the amino acids in Bennu are even a bit superfluous. With sugar and nucleobases, you'd have *all two* ingredients necessary for life. But you're obviously not getting from that self-replicating RNA to an actual cell without lipids. There's no cutting the fat from origins. That's why, basically the day I read that Bennu sugars paper, I shot off an email to [James Sáenz](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=%5FGhvGycAAAAJ&hl=en&ref=reviewertoo.com). James is a geochemist-turned-synthetic biologist at the Dresden University of Technology who studies lipids — including the role these molecules might have played in the origin of life. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/02/ProfilePic.jpg) James Sáenz is a geochemist-turned-synthetic biologist at the Dresden University of Technology who studies the biophysics of lipids in real life, synthetic life, and proto-life. **Image:** James Sáenz [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) Like basically every interdisciplinary scientist I talk to, James' brain seemed to have had a little short-circuit when I asked him what kind of scientist he is. And like basically every origins scientist I talk to, he was drawn into science by the Big Questions, not by a desire to work in a specific field. As a kid, James was fascinated by evolution. But he chose to study geology in college instead of biology because he didn't think he could keep up with the pre-meds (it was a bit of a "rocks for jocks" situation, he told me). Recalling that Darwin had been a geologist and a close friend of geology pioneer Charles Lyell, James realized Earth science offered its own way to read life's story. And in graduate school, he started working with lipids for the first time; fatty molecules can stick around for eons in sediments, and organic geochemists can analyze their molecular "fossils" to determmine what organisms lived long ago. This is how [researchers are figuring out what ancient ecosystems looked like during dramatic deep-freeze Snowball Earth periods](https://www.science.org/content/article/molecular-fossils-offer-first-glimpse-how-life-survived-snowball-earth?ref=reviewertoo.com), for instance. After graduate school, James was able to take what he'd learned about lipids by studying ancient molecular fossils to study what these molecules do in modern organisms — and how they might have contributed to the origin of life. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/02/2002-07-02-10.56.27.jpeg) James did fieldwork in Namibia to study rocks that formed in the distant past, including during deep-freeze Snowball Earth episodes in which ice may have reached all the way from the pole to the equator. ****Image:** James Sáenz James and his colleagues are showing that lipids do far more than just encapsulate more interesting chemistry. They're not just a stage. They're players. And before the first cells, they might have played entirely different roles than they do in modern cells. It's even possible that lipids controlled the activity of RNA enzymes or ribozymes, like a kind of primitive biochemical switch for the RNA world. I spoke with James about why lipids are so often overlooked in origins of life research and about two fascinating projects that hint at the roles of lipids in early life: one on [lipids as switches for ribozymes](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/boc.202400115?ref=reviewertoo.com), and another on [the tiniest possible set of lipids needed for life](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53975-y?ref=reviewertoo.com) (just two are enough). This interview has been edited for length and clarity. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Tell me how you really feel URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/change-questions-an-checking-in/ Last updated: 2026-02-12T20:44:29.000Z No science this week. Sorry about that — I was planning something on artificial life, but real life ended up getting in the way. So instead, I have a few announcements, a change, and a request for feedback. [Give me feedback!](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSet-JCR8bI8fAvrnGg8y5jtqR%5Fm0-PEai8RtcqfSAD%5FM4j2BA/viewform?usp=dialog&ref=reviewertoo.com) ### The next 4 months will be weird in a good way Starting next week, I'm going to be in Vienna for a 4-month science journalism residency at the Complexity Science Hub. A residency is basically a program that funds a journalist (or artist, or writer, etc.) to take time away from their normal professional life to hang out somewhere interesting and work on projects, learn things, and otherwise develop in ways that wouldn't usually be possible. During this time, I won't be working normally. Instead of pitching and writing science news, I'll be focusing on several projects including: just learning stuff (always good), a short podcast series on novelty, maybe a book proposal if I'm ambitious, and... this newsletter! [\* News \* CSH Welcomes FRONTIERS Journalist Elise Cutts%Elise Cutts is among the seven journalists chosen for the third round of the European Research Council’s science journalism initiative![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/icon/favicon-27.ico)Complexity Science HubComplexity Science Hub![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/thumbnail/portrait-Elise-Cutts-edited.jpg)](https://csh.ac.at/news/csh-welcomes-frontiers-science-journalist-in-residence-elise-cutts/?ref=reviewertoo.com) Change is always an opportunity, and I want to take this opportunity to improve the newsletter. For that, I need your help. [So, here's a survey. ](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSet-JCR8bI8fAvrnGg8y5jtqR%5Fm0-PEai8RtcqfSAD%5FM4j2BA/viewform?usp=dialog&ref=reviewertoo.com) I'd be super grateful if you'd fill it out. It should only take 5 minutes (unless you want to go wild in the "anything else" box), and the more people fill it out the better I can make this place in the future. [Give me feedback!](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSet-JCR8bI8fAvrnGg8y5jtqR%5Fm0-PEai8RtcqfSAD%5FM4j2BA/viewform?usp=dialog&ref=reviewertoo.com) ### Try stuff, keep what works, ditch the rest I'll be honest with you: one reason I want to grow this newsletter is because I'm afraid. I'm afraid of where science journalism is heading. I'm lucky to write for publications that pay well. But an anchor client just cut their rate — I'm now earning $100 less per story for them than I did as a rookie 3 years ago, despite inflation — and one of the best-paying magazines I write for recently told me that they're also cutting rates down. The "competitive" per-word rate of $1/word hasn't budged in literally decades. And science magazines are shutting down because the science philanthropists who fund them are redirecting funds to research because of the Trump administration keeps swinging wrecking balls at science funding. Add generative AI into the mix and... I don't feel like I need to elaborate. That's all to say that building my own audience feels like the only sustainable path forward in the long-term. I know that people still have an appetite for science, even if they might be losing their taste for legacy magazines and traditional science journalism. So instead of only cooking the old menu, I want to try opening up my own little food cart. That's this newsletter. My hope is that it — or whatever it becomes — can grow into something that brings enough people enough value that I can keep on doing this science communication thing. Doing that means being a bit more agile. It took me 6 months to get to about 100 subscribers. I can do better. I want to use the residency to experiment more, keep what works, and ditch the rest instead of clinging to it for months. This process will work better and produce results you, personally, are happier with if you give me feedback. So yeah,[ please fill out that survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSet-JCR8bI8fAvrnGg8y5jtqR%5Fm0-PEai8RtcqfSAD%5FM4j2BA/viewform?ref=reviewertoo.com). [Give me feedback!](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSet-JCR8bI8fAvrnGg8y5jtqR%5Fm0-PEai8RtcqfSAD%5FM4j2BA/viewform?usp=dialog&ref=reviewertoo.com) This brings me to my next point... ### No more paper roundups — at least not in their current form Yeah, paper roundups didn't work the way I wanted them to. At first, when roundups were still monthly, I wanted them to be an "easy" post format to give myself a pseudo-break once a month. That didn't work out. Hilariously, roundups ended up taking me *more* time than other posts. So then I switched them up: they transformed into a way-shorter weekly roundup with a full version just for paid subscribers. The idea was to 1) post more regularly, 2) to eliminate the time-intensive monthly format, and 3) to give people a reason to become paid subscribers. Well, that did not work out at all. Literally nobody upgraded since I made that change! So: it's time to ditch that and move on. For context, my very early subscriber data hinted that paper roundups might be the reason people were reading this newsletter at all. I got most of my new signups from paper roundup posts for a while (that has since really, really changed). So I figured roundups might be the most valuable thing to readers, and hoped that by making them more frequent I could provide the kind of value people would pay for. Clearly I figured wrong. Still, I love human curation and I *love* digging through papers. So I'd love to make paper roundups work — I suspect that if I stuck to a narrower topic, like exoplanet science, they might work better. So if you liked (or didn't like) roundups, [please fill out my survey to let me know and share your ideas](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSet-JCR8bI8fAvrnGg8y5jtqR%5Fm0-PEai8RtcqfSAD%5FM4j2BA/viewform?ref=reviewertoo.com). [Give me feedback! (Are you tired of this button yet?)](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSet-JCR8bI8fAvrnGg8y5jtqR%5Fm0-PEai8RtcqfSAD%5FM4j2BA/viewform?usp=dialog&ref=reviewertoo.com) ### Guest posts from aspiring science writers Finally, one more change you're going to see around here. Occasionally, I'm going to feature guest posts from aspiring science writers. To start science writing, you need "clips" — published work samples. But wait, you might ask: if you need clips to start writing, how do you get clips? Exactly. I'm still very early in my career myself. But I'm reaching a point, I've realized, where I actually can mentor people taking the first steps into this job: getting clips, pitching their first stories, etc. So I'm starting to do that more where I can. And I have this little platform here, so I want to use it to occasionally elevate the voices of aspiring science writers. You can expect the first guest post soon! If you or someone you know is an aspiring science writer who would benefit from a few Zoom calls of mentorship plus a chance to get a published clip here on my humble newsletter, just reach out. If I have bandwidth, I'd love to help. ### Thanks for reading. No really. Seriously, thank you. It's been so fun working on this project, and I do feel like it is starting to get a bit of momentum! People, including writers I respect, share essays from time to time on Bluesky (and [even in their own newsletters](https://www.sequencermag.com/to-be-loved-is-to-be-seen/?ref=reviewertoo.com)!), and folks do keep signing up. Most surprising, I am actually posting every week — which with my tangled yarn ball of a brain feels like a serious accomplishment. I hope that by making some changes, being a bit more experimental and adventurous, and responding tofeedback I can make this place even more worthwhile for you. It's super cheesy, but we all have limited time on this Earth and I'm so genuinely grateful for every one of you that decides to spend a bit of it on my writing. (Also,[ fill out the survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSet-JCR8bI8fAvrnGg8y5jtqR%5Fm0-PEai8RtcqfSAD%5FM4j2BA/viewform?ref=reviewertoo.com)) [Give me feedback!](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSet-JCR8bI8fAvrnGg8y5jtqR%5Fm0-PEai8RtcqfSAD%5FM4j2BA/viewform?usp=dialog&ref=reviewertoo.com) ### Pop science doesn't reach a "general audience" URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/pop-science-doesnt-reach-a-general-audience/ Last updated: 2026-07-20T14:54:57.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) I've spent the last several weeks traveling to research conferences and talking with scientists. And when I mention that I'm a science journalist, there are generally either two reactions: enthusiasm ("I became an astrophysicist because of reading *Scientific American!*") or suspicion ("Aren't you worried over-sensationalized headlines are eroding trust in science?") I'm finding that the suspicious crowd can immediately be brought around with a single sentence: I write for *Quanta*. Scientists love *Quanta*. I get the sense that it's the favorite pop sci publication of the physics-y corners of science — their idea of what pop sci should look like, if science really does have to be "dumbed down" for the public at all. (Many scientists, I get the sense, are caught in a paradoxical catch-22 of believing that their research is so esoteric that no non-scientist could ever understand it and also not understanding that, actually, many non-scientists can't do math, many can barely read, and most couldn't understand their research unless it was greatly simplified.) And I get it. I, too, love *Quanta*. It was one of my favorite science magazines before I started writing for them, and it's one of my favorite science magazines to write for now as a science journalist. They are truly unique in their willingness to tackle complex fundamental science and math, they give journalists the resources and time to really go deep on stories, they're not over-sensationalist, and they take real care to ensure factual accuracy — including hiring dedicated fact-checkers, a rarity these days. ## Sign up for Reviewer, too Postcards from the open frontiers of science, by science journalist Elise Cutts Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. But the thing is, *Quanta* — or Sean Carroll's *Mindscape* podcast, or *New Scientist*, or pick your favorite erudite pop sci medium — is not doing what many scientists seem to think it is doing. Researchers often seem to have this idea that if only all pop science were like the science media they like best, the ignorant masses would be illuminated by the light of reason. Everyone would trust scientists, lose their misconceptions about science and the scientific process, and trust experts while simultaneously embracing scientific uncertainty, supporting a carbon tax, buying an electric car, and getting their kids vaccinated. I'm being a bit facetious here, of course. But I do think it is fair to say that many (not all) scientists who haven't thought much about scicomm do believe that if only pop sci generally looked more like *Quanta*, many of the problems with "trust in science" would be solved. There are so many problems with that idea that I feel I'll have to come back to it in future posts. But for now, let's stick to one issue: Even if it were perfect, pop science couldn't do any of the magical things we might want it to do for trust in science because it is not actually "pop" at all. Popular science has an audience that is overwhelmingly university educated, politically left-leaning, and wealthy. I think most scientists — and science communicators, frankly — have truly no clue who the "general audience" actually is and what communicating with the wide public would look like. [I want to do more than write science entertainmentLet’s talk about science and scicomm in a crazy world![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)Reviewer, too | Elise CuttsElise Cutts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/thumbnail/af265421-61dc-4e57-9359-605348cb2671_2010-1.jpg)](https://www.reviewertoo.com/i-want-to-do-more-than-write-science-entertainment/) I am, in fact, coming back to it in future posts _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Paper Roundup 3.2.2026 URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/roundups/paper-roundup-3-2-2026/ Last updated: 2026-02-03T17:36:10.000Z *Each Tuesday, I send out a human-curated list of research papers that aer interesting, inflammatory, or just plain fun that came out in the past week (or took until last week to pop up in my alerts and RSS feeds). Free subscribers get my top 3 highlights, paid subscribers get the whole list. Sign up to keep tabs on the frontiers of science!* [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) --- 1. [**Noncanonical genetic markers resolve the pre-GOE emergence of aerobic bacteria in Earth’s history**](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2515709123?ref=reviewertoo.com) **by Tianhua Liao *et al.* (*Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, January 20, 2026)** One of life's first, most dramatic terraforming efforts was the complete reworking of Earth's atmosphere: some 2.4-2.1 billion years ago, the sky turned blue. The blue wasn't the point, it was just a side effect of the oxygen pouring into the air, which ate away the rust-red hazes of methane that had previously clouded the sky. Green microbes called cyanobacteria had figured out how to turn sunshine, carbon dioxide, and water into sugar and oxygen — and in doing so, they'd remade the world and set the stage for the evolution of complex life like us, which needs to breathe oxygen to meet its energy demands. But how long did it take after cyanobacteria evolved their oxygen-producing version of photosynthesis before the atmosphere filled with oxygen and the skies turned blue? This study developed a machine learning model to analyze the genomes of over 80,000 different kinds of bacteria to pin down the evolution of air-breathing metabolism to about 2.7 million years ago. That's several hundred million years before the "Great Oxidation Event" that saw Earth's atmospheric oxygen climb from basically nothing to about 10% of modern day levels. As a former geobiologist, I just had to highlight this one — I remember talking about whether or not there was a delay between the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis and the Great Oxidation Event in college! 1. [**A Cambrian soft-bodied biota after the first Phanerozoic mass extinction**](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10030-0?ref=reviewertoo.com) **by Han Zeng *et al.* (*Nature*, January 28, 2026)** More geobiology — sorry, not sorry. Researchers in China unearthed yet another truly jaw-dropping assemblage of Cambrian animal fossils. The newly announced Huayuan biota comprises 153 animal species, among which just under two thirds are entirely new species. Remarkably, most of the fossil animals in this 512 million-year-old treasure trove are soft-bodied creatures. That's rare, because soft body parts — anything that' snot the skeleton, basically — tend to rot away before they can fosilize. But there are even some fossils here whose cell-level tissue is preserved. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/02/image.png) That these are animals does stretch imagination a little bit. I had to chuckle a bit because some of these are labeled as "problematic taxa" in the paper. ****Image:** [Zheng et al 2026 ](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10030-0?ref=reviewertoo.com) 1. [**Geomagnetic Constraints on Millicharged Dark Matter**](https://doi.org/10.1103/8xqd-dbrz?ref=reviewertoo.com) by Ariel Arza *et al.* (*Physical Review Letters*, January 27, 2026) And to round out this week's Earth science-focused highlights: this paper is about using the Earth's magnetic field as a dark matter sensor. Need I say more? I need not. But if you want more, check out this [plain-language summary](https://physics.aps.org/articles/v19/s10?ref=reviewertoo.com) in *Physics*. Last week also saw new papers on **sleep deprivation**, **the structure of the early Universe**, **why hard stuff is rewarding**, and more: _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Maybe don't call exoplanets "Earth-like" until the 2040s URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/stop-calling-exoplanets-earth-like/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:44:22.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) Just this week, researchers announced the discovery of a new planet with some exciting properties: It's almost exactly the same size as the Earth, its year is almost exactly one Earth-year long, and there's a good chance it orbits in the habitable zone. Not only that, its star is not a weird, feisty, atmosphere-shredding M-dwarf like TRAPPIST-1 but a well-tempered orange dwarf that could be our Sun's cousin. Would you say this world is Earth-like? I had to ask myself exactly that question this week when I wrote [this news story](https://www.science.org/content/article/earth-size-planet-spotted-yearlong-orbit?ref=reviewertoo.com) announcing the discovery of exactly that planet. It's real, and it is called HD 137010 b. Look it up, and these are the top Google news results: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/01/image-9.png) Can you tell which one is mine? It is, indeed, the boring one from *Science*. You caught me. I'm even more cautious than the NASA press release. (*Note: we used the same image, but Science's article thumbnails don't seem to be loading properly*) This planet got dubbed a "cold Earth" because it is Earth-sized, orbits a star that's maybe Sun-like if you squint (it is 1000 degrees Celsius cooler) and receives less solar radiation than Mars. And read more widely in the exoplanet world, and you'll see a lot about "super-Earths" and "hot Earths" and "Earth Twins" and "Earth-like planets" around "Sun-like stars." But do we actually know enough about these worlds to justify comparing them to our own? **I'd argue we don't. Earth-like evokes way more than a mass, radius, and position in the habitable zone around a particular kind of star.** I'm guessing that most lay consumers of science communication on exoplanets probably have no clue that the lovely planet pictures that run with these stories are artists' concepts — let alone that we won't even have the needed technology to start characterizing the atmospheres of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of stars like ours until the 2040s. "Earth-like" sounds like air and continents and oceans and maybe life. It does not sound like 2-3 basic physical measurements. It's misleading, and will stay that way for *decades*. I was lucky enough to chat with UC Riverside planetary astrophysicist Stephen Kane about HD 137010 b, and he made this point more clearly than I could: "Clearly by saying 'Earth-like properties around a Sun-like star,' they're trying to draw the analogy to our own planet. However, we don't know any of its properties other than its than its size," he said. And we already know of another planet that's almost exactly the same size as the Earth: Venus. "So if all you know is the size, then you found a Venus. Why not say Venus-like?" This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Paper Roundup 27.1.2026 URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/roundups/paper-roundup-27-1-2026/ Last updated: 2026-01-27T17:49:16.000Z *Each Tuesday, I send out a human-curated list of research papers that aer interesting, inflammatory, or just plain fun that came out in the past week (or took until last week to pop up in my alerts and RSS feeds). Free subscribers get my top 3 highlights, paid subscribers get the whole list. Sign up to keep tabs on the frontiers of science!* [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) --- 1. [**Four camera-type eyes in the earliest vertebrates from the Cambrian Period**](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09966-0?ref=reviewertoo.com) **by Xiangtong Lei *et al.* (*Nature*, January 21, 2026)** The earliest vertebrates had four eyes, not two. That's what a team of Chinese researchers reported last week in *Nature* based on an analysis of two myllokunmingids — the most ancient vertebrates known — from 518 million year-old shales unearthed in Chengjian, China. These shales date to the Cambrian explosion, a period of rapid evolutionary diversification in which the ancestors of modern animal lineages appeared in the fossil lineage for the first time. In some non-mammalian vertebrates, the evolutionary ghosts of these extra eyes persist as light-sensing and endocrine organs in the pineal complex. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/01/image-7.png) The most ancient known vertebrates may have had two pairs of eyes... and looked pretty goofy. ****Image:** Lei et al 2026 I couldn't help but chuckle a bit at this discovery, because it's the second time within a year that scientists have discovered something that props up the world-building of James Cameron's *Avatar* films. Pandora, the alien world of *Avatar*, is a habitable moon of a gas giant in orbit around Alpha Centauri inhabited by four-eyed animals. [Last year, scientists spotted a gas giant orbiting in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri](https://www.reviewertoo.com/a-habitable-world-next-door/). And now we have the four-eyed animals — which mostly lost their extra eyes, as happened on fictional Pandora in the humanoid lineage. Funny. [A habitable world next door?More than you needed to know about the smudge of light that might be a planet in the habitable zone of the nearest Sun-like star![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/icon/R-3.png)Reviewer, tooElise Cutts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/thumbnail/main-image-2-2-1-1-1.jpeg)](https://www.reviewertoo.com/a-habitable-world-next-door/) 1. [**The cerebellar components of the human language network**](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2025.12.030?ref=reviewertoo.com) **by Colton Casto *et al.* (*Neuron*, January 22 2026)** Nestled up against the base your brain is another, smaller brain: the cerebellum. This structure, bizarrely, contains something like 80% of the neurons in the human brain despite accounting for only 10% of the brain's volum. And even more weird, it isn't exactly *necessary*; some rare people are born without entire chunks of the cerebellum — or no cerebellum at all — and they can survive and live *relatively* normal lives. It used to be that researchers thought the cerebellum was basically just involved in motor control. But over the past few decades, they've established that it is involved in a whole lot more — including, as this study demonstrates, language. In a huge dataset of 846 people who sat for 1033 fMRI scans over 26 experiments, the research team pinned down regions in the right half of the cerebellum that respond to language and teased apart what exactly it is they do for language cognition. The team thinks that these regions in the cerebellum might both help predict upcoming language and to integrate incoming words into something like meaning. ![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2a/Gehirn%2C_lateral_-_Lobi_%2B_Stammhirn_%2B_Cerebellum_eng.svg/330px-Gehirn%2C_lateral_-_Lobi_%2B_Stammhirn_%2B_Cerebellum_eng.svg.png) The cerebellum (the pink bit) is weird and we're still figuring out what it does. ****Image:** [Wikimedia Commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebellum?ref=reviewertoo.com#/media/File:Gehirn,%5Flateral%5F-%5FLobi%5F+%5FStammhirn%5F+%5FCerebellum%5Feng.svg) 1. [**Probing quantum mechanics with nanoparticle matter-wave interferometry**](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09966-0?ref=reviewertoo.com) by Sebastian Pedalino *et al.* (*Nature*, January 21, 2026 Quantum particles famously act like both waves and particles, and can exist in states of superposition, which are like clouds of possibility that haven't yet collapsed to a single state or behavior yet. This behavior is usually confined to the smallest scales in space and time — at most, a few hundred atoms. But now, scientists in Vienna have coaxed a whopping 7,000 atoms into quantum superposition in what they (not the media! the scientists!) called the biggest yet "Schrödinger cat state". Together, they have a mass in the range of a protein. This was a highly controlled experiment, but I still wonder if it will mean anything for the quantum biology community, which is often met with a lot of (valid) skepticism over the idea that anything meaningfully quantum could persist at any meaningful scales of space and time within a cell. The headlines for this one have been hilarious. Lots of "Schrödinger's cat got fat" and such. I recommend this story by Elizabeth Gibney in *Nature* if you're looking for a plain-language summary: [Schrödinger’s cat just got bigger: quantum physicists create largest ever ‘superposition’Record-breaking experiment shows that a cluster of thousands of atoms can act like a wave as well as a particle.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/icon/apple-touch-icon-f39cb19454-19.png)NatureElizabeth Gibney![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/thumbnail/d41586-026-00177-9_51965440.jpg)](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00177-9?ref=reviewertoo.com) Last week also saw new papers on **CRISPR-ing mitochondria**, **the oldest ever rock art**, **astronaut brains**, and more: _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Hot rocks are what's cool in rocky exoplanet research URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/hot-rocks-rocky-exoplanets/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:44:01.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) I'm writing this quick note from my hotel room in Groningen, the Netherlands, where I've spent the last week chitchatting with planetary scientists about rocky planets at the 4th Rocky Worlds conference. It's been great. If there is such a thing as "frontier science," rocky exoplanet research is it. This field is almost ridiculously young. The very first rocky exoplanet was confirmed just 15 years ago. And when the conference series started in 2020 — *right* before JWST launched — it was basically all modeling. We were starting to detect rocky planets, but not much more. That all changed with JWST. Observations started rolling in. First there were tentative detections of atmospheres. Now scientists are pushing further, making tentative detections of *molecules* in atmospheres. It's not just the science itself that's young. Most of the Rocky Worlds attendees are PhD students and postdocs, and even the professors are young: PIs are mostly Gen X or elder millennials, and that includes the people leading some of the world's best and biggest groups in exoplanet astronomy. It's rare that you end up seeing so many leading scientists and so few gray hairs at once. ## Sign up for Reviewer, too Postcards from the open frontiers of science, by science journalist Elise Cutts Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Anyways, the field moves fast. And being here was a great way to see the frontier it's moving into right now. And no, it is *not* habitable worlds. We're not even at a point where we can get yes/no answers about habitable-zone rocky planets having atmospheres or not. That might be possible within the next decade, but there are significant challenges to overcome and it isn't on the immediate horizon. Right now, hot rocks are what's cool... or hot? Lava worlds, in particular, are worth keeping your eye on if you want to follow the most exciting new research on rocky worlds over the next few years. Here's why. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/01/PIA20068.jpg) An ***ARTIST'S CONCEPT** of the rocky super-Earth 55 Cancri e, which is expected to be a lava planet based on its blazing-hot surface temperature. ****Image:** NASA/JPL-Caltech This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Paper Roundup 20.1.2026 URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/roundups/paper-roundup-20-1-2026/ Last updated: 2026-01-20T21:52:40.000Z *Each Tuesday, I send out a human-curated list of research papers that aer interesting, inflammatory, or just plain fun. Free subscribers get my top 3 highlights, paid subscribers get the whole list. Sign up to keep tabs on the frontiers of science!* [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) --- 1. [**The unreasonable effectiveness of pattern matching**](https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2601.11432?ref=reviewertoo.com) **by Gary Lupyan and Blaise Agüera y Arcas (arXiv preprint, January 16, 2026)** Large Language Models can correctly "translate" gibberish language generated by replacing most of the words in real English with nonsense words back into English that's pretty dang sensible, and often close to the original. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2026/01/image-5.png) Figure from the preprint showing an original text from an ESPN news piece, a "jabberwockified" gibberish version, and the "translation" back to English by Gemini 2.5 Pro. This isn't just looking up the training data, since the models "translate" novel texts the model had never consumed in its training. The authors take this pattern-matching ability and use it as a way in to explore what AI models *are*, and more deeply what intelligence is — whether you're talking about a machine or a person. *Side note for those interested in artificial life: Blaise Agüera y Arcas has done some very cool work on self-replicating, evolving code snippets, which he discusses in* [*this episode*](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/08/19/286-blaise-aguera-y-arcas-on-the-emergence-of-replication-and-computation/?ref=reviewertoo.com) *of Sean Carroll's Mindscape.* [286 | Blaise Agüera y Arcas on the Emergence of Replication and Computation – Sean Carroll![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/icon/cropped-prepu-270x270.png)Sean CarrollAugust 19, 2024 at 12:25 pm![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/thumbnail/Blaise-Agu-era-y-Arcas_1964_Credit-Steve-Korn-square.jpg)](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/08/19/286-blaise-aguera-y-arcas-on-the-emergence-of-replication-and-computation/?ref=reviewertoo.com) 1. [**De novo emergence of metabolically active protocells**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11013?ref=reviewertoo.com) **by Nayan Chakraborty and Shashi Thutupalli (arXiv preprint, January 16, 2026)** I haven't had the time to look through this one in detail, but the main takeaway sounds pretty spectacular: the two authors claim to have observed a simple starting mix of chemicals spontaneously self-organize into little blobs that maintain themselves by dissipating chemical energy. In other words, they claim to have made something that looks a heck of a lot like a cell — without starting with any complex biological molecules. Spectacular claims require spectacular evidence, and I haven't had the time to look through this preprint or the authors' other work in any detail. I picked this one to highlight in the hopes of hearing from someone who's an expert on artificial life about whether this actually looks significant or not. 1. [**Paleogeography modulates marine extinction risk throughout the Phanerozoic**](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv2627?ref=reviewertoo.com) **by Cooper M. Malanoski et al. (*Science*, January 15, 2026)** Most species go extinct. But what determines who survives? This recent study in *Science* makes the case that geography plays a key role: over the last 540 million years, shallow marine organisms that ranged further along a north-south axis had better survival odds than species that ranged mostly west-east. There's more climate variation with latitude than with longitude, so north-south ranging species had more places to go as ancient climates shifted and their niches collapsed in parts of their range. Perhaps ranging north-south also reflects a kind of intrinsic adaptability that's handy in a climate catastrophe, too. This conclusion squares with how animals are already responding to climate change by moving polewards. Last week also saw new papers on **the brain basis of the bouba-kiki effect**, **subsurface water on Mars**, **black hole Dyson spheres**, and more: _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### A bad month for space whales URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/a-bad-month-for-space-whales/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:42:20.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) Beneath the icy crust of Jupiter's moon Europa lies a ocean of liquid water. This dark alien sea is thought to be between 60 and 150 kilometers deep — up to 10 times deeper than even the deepest ocean trenches on Earth — and contains more liquid water than all of Earth's oceans combined. Compared to Mars — a toxic, dusty, irradiated ball of dry dirt with almost no atmosphere to speak of — and Venus, which somehow manages to be even more hellish, an enormous ocean wrapped up in a protective icy shell sounds pretty hospitable. It's hard not to leap into flights of fancy: forests of weird, bioluminescent Europan kelp swaying on the currents, alien squids, space whales, it's all just too fun to imagine. But there's an element of fact to this fantasy, at least in that astrobiologists genuinely consider Europa and the other icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn to be among most promising places to look for life in our solar system. So it's a bit concerning that two papers came out this past month that complicate hopes for subsurface ocean biospheres on the icy moons we're about to visit and study in the greatest detail — Europa and Saturn's moon Titan. [Europa's ocean could be tectonically and geochemically dead](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-67151-3?ref=reviewertoo.com), which would mean there'd be little energy available for a potential biosphere. And [Titan might not have a liquid water ocean at all](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09818-x?ref=reviewertoo.com). This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Paper Roundup 13.1.2026 URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/roundups/paper-roundup-13-1-2026/ Last updated: 2026-01-13T18:11:28.000Z *Each Tuesday, I send out a human-curated list of research papers that aer interesting, inflammatory, or just plain fun. Free subscribers get my top 3 highlights, paid subscribers get the whole list. Sign up to keep tabs on the frontiers of science!* [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) --- 1. [**Little to no active faulting likely at Europa’s seafloor today**](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-67151-3?ref=reviewertoo.com) **by Paul K. Byrne et al. (*Nature Communications*, January 6 2026)** Bad news for life on Jupiter's icy moon, Europa. The reactions that fuel hydrothermal vents — and life — rely on a continuous supply of fresh rock to Europa's seas. Faulting could do the job, but Byrne et al. report that it's unlikely that much faulting is happening at Europa's seafloor today. 1. [**E. coli chemosensing accuracy is not limited by stochastic molecule arrivals**](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-025-03111-4?ref=reviewertoo.com) **by Henry Mattingly et al. (*Nature Physics*, January 8, 2026)** If you ever feel bad about not having achieved enough in life, just remember: bacteria are bad at moving towards their goals, and they still ended up being the most successful organisms on Earth. (For a newsy summary of this study, check out [Bacteria may not be good at chemotaxis](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-025-03103-4?ref=reviewertoo.com) by Robert G. Endres) 1. [**The anticipation of imminent events is time-scale invariant**](https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2518982123?af=R&ref=reviewertoo.com) **by Matthias Grabenhorst et al. (*PNAS*, January 7, 2026)** How do people predict when something will happen? Matthias Grabenhorst, David Poeppel, and Georgios Michalareas show that we do so in the same way across contexts regardless of whether we're waiting on something that happens once a year or several times per second: we count estimate the probability of events over time. This has important implications for how accurately we can anticipate the future across different time scales. Last week also saw new papers on **same-sex behavior in primates**, **surprise European dinosaurs**, **ancient poison arrows**, and more: _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Paper Roundup December 2025: computing billiards, an impossible atmosphere, and Roman constructions URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/paper-roundup-december-2025/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:42:44.000Z ❗ I'm back from a much-needed holiday break! And I have some news: paper roundups are changing. **From now on, paper roundups will be weekly — and they get their own newsletter!** Instead of one big list of papers with commentary each month, starting later this month I will send out leaner lists of papers without commentary every week. You can choose whether to receive only main newsletter posts, weekly roundups using [your account portal](#/portal). Free subscribers will be able to see my top 3 picks for the week, but *the full list of papers is an exclusive perk for paid supporters.* So if you don't already support R2, now's a great time to change that: to thank you for being with me this far,I'm offering [25% off of a monthly subscription for the next 6 months](https://www.reviewertoo.com/01-07-2026-20-21-37-paperrounduplaunch) to anyone who signs up by the end of January. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### More than words: prosody in the brain URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/more-than-words-prosody-brain/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:42:58.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) It's not what you said, it's how you said it. Prosody — a catch-all for variations in pitch, volume, tempo, and more that give speech its melody — does quite a lot of work in human communication. Prosody conveys our emotions, which can completely change the meaning of a statement in context. The same words, screamed, stated as a matter-of-fact, or delivered dripping in sarcasm, can mean vastly different things. But prosody goes far deeper than adding a layer of emotion over the literal meaning of speech. The way we speak, as opposed to what we say, can change the meaning of an utterance entirely. It can tag particular words as new or important, mark the ends of words or phrases, and even transform statements into questions. In English, ascending pitch acts like an auditory question mark superimposed over the last syllable of a sentence. Other languages do things differently: Hungarian turns simple statements of fact into questions with a sharp rise in pitch on the second-to-last syllable, followed by a drop. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### There's no gene for being human URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/theres-no-gene-for-being-human/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:33:44.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) What makes us human? Personally, I think the answer is language.[\[1\]](#f-1) Maybe you think it's being logical. Maybe you're Spock from *Star Trek* and think it's being *illogical*. But whatever ultimately makes our species special, it's reasonable to think that the difference that made all the difference must be recorded somewhere, somehow in our genome. When scientists first got their hands on complete Neanderthal genomes about a decade ago, they identified several genes that appeared to have received a human-specific "update" sometime after our lineage split ways from that of our Neanderthal cousins. All living humans had the new version, Neanderthals had the old version. This was exciting. Might a one of those gene variants have unlocked human cognition? Scientists seriously wondered if there might be a single gene that could explain what makes us human. Later, as we sequenced more and more human genomes, it turned out that some of those supposedly universal human gene changes aren't actually so universal. While rare, some people do carry the old versions. And they're definitely human. So what's going on with those ancient variants? Did they actually play a deciding role in human evolution? This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### What do space sugars tell us about the origin of life? URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/bennu-space-sugars/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:33:01.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) They're putting sugar in everything these days. Two days ago, researchers announced that they'd found ["bio-essential sugars" in samples returned from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-025-01838-6?ref=reviewertoo.com). Specifically, they identified sickly-sweet glucose and ribose, a carbohydrate ring that links up to form the backbone of RNA — DNA's single-stranded cousin and the prima donna of perhaps the most popular origin of life hypothesis. ## Sign up for Reviewer, too A newsletter about the big questions in science, written by ex-scientist science journalist Elise Cutts Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Previously, researchers had found amino acids and nucleobases — the building blocks of proteins and nucleic acids like DNA and RNA — in samples of Bennu and another asteroid, Ryugu. So the discovery of sugars, which are present at much lower abundances than amino acids and nucleobases, rounds out a prebiotic trifecta. Researchers are often pretty shy about making strong claims about the astrobiological significance of their findings and leave the hype to the press release. But this paper just comes right out and says it: > "These sugars complete the inventory of ingredients crucial to life... this indicates that material with all three components necessary to life could have been dispersed to prebiotic Earth and other inner planets." The discovery of sugars (and weird, sticky polymer rich in nitrogen and oxygen that's being called "space gum) in Bennu is rightfully being celebrated as a major achievement. For starters, the fact that we have this sample at all is incredible. OSIRIS-REx — NASA's most tortured acronym and its very first asteroid sample return mission — flew for several years to reach Bennu. There, it pulled off a soft landing on the asteroid's surprisingly squishy surface, scooped up a half-cup of the universe's most expensive dirt,[\[1\]](#f-1) and then flew home to drop a sample capsule on Earth before jetting off for a new mission. I will never not be proud of our species for doing this kind of crazy thing. Go team human. But. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Paper Roundup November 2025: Mars lightning, language processing, and autism microbiome URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/paper-roundup-november-2025-mars-lightning-language-processing-and-autism-microbiome/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:33:22.000Z *Every month, I publish a curated list of new scholarship on big ideas at the frontiers of science. Inclusion is not endorsement. Think something should be included in next month's*[ *paper roundup*](https://www.reviewertoo.com/paper-roundups/)*? Shoot me an email at* [*elise@reviewertoo.com*](mailto:elise@reviewertoo.com?subject=Paper%20Roundup%20Recommendation)*.* *If you liked this newsletter, why not share it with a friend or post it on Bluesky or wherever else you hang out online? That's the best way to help this project continue!* Don't miss next month's newsletter! [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) --- ## Highlights ### The sound of Mars lightning [**Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars**](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09736-y?ref=reviewertoo.com) **(*Nature*, November 26) by Baptiste Chide, Ralph D. Lorenz, Franck Montmessin, Sylvestre Maurice, Yann Parot, Ricardo Hueso, German Martinez, Alvaro Vicente-Retortillo, Xavier Jacob, Mark Lemmon, Bruno Dubois, Pierre-Yves Meslin, Claire Newman, Tanguy Bertrand, Grégoire Deprez, Daniel Toledo, Agustin Sánchez-Lavega, Agnès Cousin, and Roger C. Wiens** Mars has some truly wild dust devils: its tornado-like columns of spinning dust can be *kilometers* high. And any time you're throwing dust around in dry air, you're wont to build up static electricity. We still don't really know why or how — static is weirdly mysterious — but it happens. And now, thanks to some lucky observations captured by the Perseverance's SuperCam microphone, scientists have strong evidence that this static charge discharges in crackles of "mini lightning" on Mars. [Solving the 250-year-old puzzle of how static electricity worksYou may think you know static electricity, but its true nature has long eluded scientists. We’ve now made a huge leap towards finally figuring it out![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/icon/180x180.50b024f6-4.png)New Scientist#author.fullName}![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/thumbnail/SEI_255865507.jpg)](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2484276-solving-the-250-year-old-puzzle-of-how-static-electricity-works/?ref=reviewertoo.com) That's right: scientists detected Mars lightning by "hearing" it on a rover's microphone. [You can even listen to it](https://youtu.be/cnu0NRsiP8I?t=16&ref=reviewertoo.com). It sounds a bit like someone tapping their microphone. This is one of those cases where I'm a little confused why the paper is getting press now, since the result has been out for a while and was even covered in popular media already. *New Scientist* published a short news story on this work back in May, after the team presented the results at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. I know this because I wanted to write a story about it based on a presentation the team gave at another conference — but by then, this was old news! Side-note: I'm honestly surprised that Perseverance even has a microphone; microphones are not common instruments on spacecraft. So that makes the sound all the more remarkable. And I sincerely hope that we'll start putting more microphones on spacecraft headed for destinations with atmospheres! Having a microphone on Titan or submerged in Europa's ocean would be incredible. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Tessellation revelation URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/tessellation-revelation/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:32:42.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) *This article was* [*originally published*](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mathematicians-discover-a-new-kind-of-shape-thats-all-over-nature/?ref=reviewertoo.com) *in Scientific American on November 19, 2024.* --- How few corners can a shape have and still tile the plane?” mathematician Gábor Domokos asked me over pizza. His deceptively simple question was about the geometry of tilings, also called tessellations—arrangements of shapes, called tiles or cells, that fill a surface with no gaps or overlaps. Humans have a preoccupation with tessellation that dates back at least to ancient Sumer, where tilings featured prominently in architecture and art. But in all the centuries that thinkers have tinkered with tiles, no one seems to have seriously pondered whether there’s some limit to how few vertices—sharp corners where lines meet—the tiles of a tessellation can have. Until Domokos. Chasing tiles with ever fewer corners eventually led him and his small team to discover an entirely new type of shape. It was the summer of 2023 when Domokos and I sat at a wood picnic table at the Black Dog, a cozy spot for pizza and wine just a few blocks from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, where Domokos is a professor. He reached across the table to grab a paper pizza menu and flip it over, revealing a blank underside, and gestured to me to grab a pen. The midsummer sky was taking on shades of orange and indigo as I filled the menu with triangles. Domokos watched expectantly. “You’re allowed to use curves,” he finally said. I started filling the page with circles, which of course can’t fill space on their own. But Domokos lit up. “Oh, that’s interesting!” he said. “Keep going, you can mix shapes. Just try to keep the average number of corners as low as possible.” ## Sign up for Reviewer, too A newsletter about the big questions in science, written by ex-scientist science journalist Elise Cutts Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. I kept going. My page of circles filled with increasingly desperate, squiggly forms. Domokos’s pizza Margherita had long since disappeared, but he wasn’t quite ready to leave. A quick glance at my crude drawing wasn’t enough to determine its average number of corners, let alone the minimum possible. But the right answer must have been something less than the triangle’s three—otherwise, the question would be boring. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### The individual isn't what it used to be URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/cultural-evolution-tim-waring/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:32:23.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) Many of us experience a kind of horror at the thought of losing ourselves. The primary antagonist of *Star Trek: The Next Generation* and *Star Trek: Voyager* is a hive mind called the Borg that assimilates any individual living things or technologies it comes in contact with into its Collective. They're like space ants, complete with a queen — except if ants could turn their prey into fellow ants rather than just eating it. The moral of the Borg arc is essentially that the homogenous collective degrades the whole and that diversity and individuality are worth fighting for. Resistance is not futile. On the other hand, I'd argue there are strains of ascendant politics that clearly reflect some kind of anti-individual longing be subsumed in some grand collective project that goes far beyond the self. Less dramatically, a certain degree of willingness to make personal sacrifices for one's community — and not just blood-relatives — is generally seen as morally good. Loss of self or ego death is a common experience reported by people who take psychedelic drugs; melting into the universe is either terrifying or euphoric or both, depending who you ask. We humans seem to have an ambivalent relationship to the idea of being part of a greater whole: fear and longing all at once. Perhaps that's what you'd expect from a species of individuals on the road to becoming collectives. [Tim Waring](https://umaine.edu/soe/waring/?ref=reviewertoo.com), an ecologist studying anthropology in the economics department at the University of Maine, thinks we are such a species. For several decades he's studied how culture and genetics interact to shape human evolution and has concluded that our species is in the middle of an evolutionary transition in individuality — a shift, like the jump from single cells to multicellular animals, in what counts as a biological individual. And he's eager to move the conversation past sci-fi speculation (sorry, Tim, I couldn't *resist* opening with the Borg) and into the realm of testable theory. ![A man in his 40s or early 50s with pale skin and short gray hair leans against a tree and looks directly into the camera. He's wearing a green shirt, tan pants, a black backpack, and binoculars. The background is a vibrant green rainforest absolutely overflowing with plants.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2025/11/cloud-forest.jpg) Tim Waring is an ecologist at the University of Maine building models of how group-level cultural evolution could be dethroning individual-level genetic evolution in humans. ****Image:** Tim Waring [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) [In a recent paper](https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaf094?ref=reviewertoo.com), Tim and his colleague Zachary Wood outlined a theoretical framework for a human evolutionary transition in individuality that they think could cut a path towards concrete predictions and empirical tests of the hypothesis. Their core insight was to identify two distinct forces that, operating in parallel, could trigger a positive feedback loop that accelerates our species towards a new collective existence in which culture, not genes, is the most important information passed down the generations. These forces are: 1) the degree to which cultural adaptation influences fitness more than genetic adaptation, and 2) the degree to which an individual's fitness is determined by the group she belongs to rather than her own characteristics. Based on this simple framework, Tim and Zach make several predictions about what we could expect from our species if we really are undergoing this kind of dual transition from individuals under Darwinian selection on genes to groups under selection on cultural traits. In the near future, Tim plans to test some of them against real-world data — an important step if this field is going to move from philosophy of biology circles into more empirical ones. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Women have no genetic blueprint URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/women-have-no-genetic-blueprint/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:31:31.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) I'm working on a story for *Broadcast* magazine right now about metaphors of the genome, especially the blueprint. This is something I've been chewing on at least since [talking to Anaïs Bailles about her work on Hydra](https://www.reviewertoo.com/hydra-anais-bailles/), freshwater polyps related to jellyfish that are famous for being basically immortal. If you shred up 50 of the little guys (they have no brains, relax) and pack the shreds into balls of a few hundred random cells, those hodgepodge cell balls will grow into doubly-mythological Hydra-Chimeras that are perfectly viable, if sometimes multi-headed. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2025/11/Bellerophon_riding_Pegasus_and_killing_the_Chimera-_Roman_mosaic-_the_Rolin_Museum_in_Autun-_France-_2nd_to_3rd_century_AD.jpg) The mythological chimera combines the body parts of different animals, usually a lion, goat, and snake (sometimes upgraded to a fire-breathing dragon). She's also female and, in this case at least, a mosaic. ****Source:** [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chimera%5FApulia%5FLouvre%5FK362.jpg?uselang=en&ref=reviewertoo.com#Licensing) If the genome is a blueprint, where is the Hydra-Chimera's blueprint? Any one of its cells could carry the genome of any one of the four dozen or so ill-fated progenitor Hydra. So where's the master plan for its body? You might ask the same question about women. We're not chimeras, but we're something close: mosaics. [Hydra are a cosmos in a cuvetteAnaïs Bailles on astrophysics and immortal animals![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/icon/favicon-15.ico)Reviewer, tooElise Cutts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/thumbnail/Hydra_actin_macro-3-2.png)](https://www.reviewertoo.com/hydra-anais-bailles/) This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Paper Roundup October 2025: dark matter, emergence, and dinosaur mummies URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/paper-roundup-october-2025-dark-matter-emergence-and-dinosaur-mummies/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:31:54.000Z *Every month, I publish a curated list of fascinating, groundbreaking inflammatory, or otherwise bold new scholarship on "big questions" at the frontiers of science. Inclusion is not endorsement. Think something should be included in next month's*[ *paper roundup*](https://www.reviewertoo.com/paper-roundups/)*? Shoot me an email at* [*elise@reviewertoo.com*](mailto:elise@reviewertoo.com?subject=Paper%20Roundup%20Recommendation)*.* *If you liked this newsletter, why not share it with a friend or post it on Bluesky or wherever else you hang out online? That's the best way to help this project continue!* Don't miss next month's newsletter! [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) --- ## Highlights ### Did we just spot a tiny blob of dark matter? **A million-solar-mass object detected at a cosmological distance using gravitational imaging** **(*Nature Astronomy*, October 9) by D. M. Powell, J. P. McKean, S. Vegetti, C. Spingola, S. D. M. White, and C. D. Fassnacht** A tiny twist in an already-twisted image of a distant galaxy might be a little blob of dark matter. The blob is about 1 million times as massive as the sun. If it is a lump of dark matter, that would be small — 100 times smaller than the smallest dark object found before. But it might also be a stealthy dwarf galaxy. If researchers can find more of these little dark blobs, it could help scientists figure out what dark matter actually is. Dark matter is "dark" because it doesn't interact with light. But it does make itself known via another force: gravity. Scientists think it must exist because if it didn't, plenty of things we *can* directly observe wouldn't make sense, especially when it comes to the structure and behavior of galaxies. Gravitational lensing — the way gravity warps light — can also reveal dark matter. When something massive sits between our telescopes and a distant light source, its gravity warps our view. So by measuring the geometry of the warped source, we can infer thins about the mass in-between — even if we can't see it at all. In this study, researchers used radio telescopes from all around the world to scrutinize a smeared-out, gravitationally lensed galaxy. And in that smeared-out light, they found an extra little kink: the gravitational fingerprint of a mysterious dark object about 1 million times the mass of our Sun. That might sound big, but the mystery blob is the smallest dark object observed yet. [Astronomers Find Mystery Dark Object in Distant UniverseUsing a global network of telescopes, astronomers have detected the lowest-mass dark object yet found in the universe. Finding more such objects and understanding their nature could rule out some theories about the nature of dark matter, the mystery substance that makes up about a quarter of the universe. The work is described in two papers published Oct. 9 in Nature Astronomy and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/icon/ucd-favicon5_0.png)UC DavisAndy Fell![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/thumbnail/38887217165_6b70fd0e59_k.jpg)](https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/astronomers-find-mystery-dark-object-distant-universe?ref=reviewertoo.com) This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Does biology play dice? URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/does-biology-play-dice/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:30:51.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) There’s something deeply unsatisfying about randomness. Humans, like other animals, are attuned to cause-and-effect. A lot of the work of being a baby is building a causal model of the world: *If* I drop this fork, *then* what happens? We seem to come pre-loaded with a toolkit for statistical inference. There’s research, for instance by Alison Gopnik, suggesting that children playing with unfamiliar devices are good little scientists: they adjust their expectations about how the device will behave given the results of their “experiments” in roughly the way that Bayes’ Rule, the holy scripture of probabilistic reasoning, would demand.[\[1\]](#f-1) A certain strain of cognitive science — Karl Friston’s [free energy principle](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26435130-300-the-free-energy-principle-can-one-idea-explain-why-everything-exists/?ref=reviewertoo.com) and its many spinoffs — even asserts causal modeling as the one true purpose of the brain (and maybe life itself). Our ability to not just experience but also explain the things that happen to us is what makes our species so good at navigating and exploiting the world. And as humans, this knowledge is not confined to the mire of the animal implicit. We have language. Armed with words, the animal causal modeling instinct takes on new life as the human storytelling instinct. [True fictionsThe storytelling instinct conjures illusions of consensus in science![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/icon/favicon-13.ico)Reviewer, tooElise Cutts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/thumbnail/main-image-4-1.jpeg)](https://www.reviewertoo.com/true-fictions/) Every human culture has its fables and folktales. But *story* in a more general sense — a narrative structure of cause-effect links running from beginning to end — seems so fundamental to human cognition that it’s hard to imagine thinking without it. The driest mathematical proof follows a linear progression from beginning to end, each step enabled by the ones before. Making plans and predictions rests on our ability to concoct mental fictions. And story might even underpin memory. Between 4 and 7 years old, kids get much better at both remembering things and telling stories. And today, researchers published a study of 77 kids in this age group showing that youngsters who could tell more cohesive stories about silent cartoons [were able to recall more factual information about the videos one week later](https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/X62JSRFP9VMT8XKWXJP8/full?target=10.1080/15248372.2025.2571554&ref=reviewertoo.com#abstract). To quote the study authors: > Young children’s memory may be limited in part by their lack of the semantic knowledge necessary to construct narratives, and/or by their impoverished understanding of narrative structure in general. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Political (neural) networking URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/political-physics-eddie-lee/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:29:57.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) The study of complex systems owes a lot to the humble magnet. A magnet’s magic emerges from the collective coordination of countless “spins,” units of intrinsic rotation that make certain atoms, like iron, act like tiny bar magnets. Like their macroscopic counterparts, these spins like to align: put mismatched spins next to each other, and they’ll flip-flop until they point the same way unless random thermal jitters knock them askew. In the 1920s, physicist Ernst Ising captured this push and pull in a simple schema that would go on to become physics' go-to mathematical lasso for wrangling collective phenomena. And decades later, in 1982, condensed matter physicist John Hopfield realized that it might do much more. The way spins influence each other, he realized, looked a lot like how neurons exchange signals. By tweaking the Ising model, Hopfield built a simplified neural network that could “remember” and "recall" patterns. Geoffrey Hinton and others expanded on these ideas to spark the deep learning revolution that ushered in modern AI. Magnets, physics, AI — this all might sound rather far away from the messy, human world of politics. But [Eddie Lee](https://eltrompetero.github.io/index.html?ref=reviewertoo.com), a physicist at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, recently discovered an unexpected connection between voting in the US Senate and the bare-bones neural networks that won Hopfield and Hinton the Nobel Prize in physics last year. Eddie uses statistical physics to study how information flows through life and society. That could mean anything from understanding aggression in monkey troupes to decision-making on the US Supreme Court. And in a [recent preprint](https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02496v1?ref=reviewertoo.com) with co-author Gavin Rees, he turned his physics toolkit on the US Senate to develop a mathematical representation of how individual inclinations manifest in votes. Much to Eddie's surprise, the simple model he devised to capture this straightforward intuition about votes reflecting personal preferences ended up recreating a simple neural network that Hinton used decades ago to unleash the power of deep learning: the restricted Boltzmann machine. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2025/10/IMG_2115.jpeg) Eddie Lee, a physicist at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, uses statistical physics to build simple, illuminating models of how information flows through life and society. ****Image:** Eddie Lee Boltzmann machines were among the first neural networks designed to dream up new data rather than simply remember it — an early form of generative AI. They typically have two layers of nodes: a *visible* layer that takes inputs and gives outputs, and a *hidden* layer that represents patterns internally. By adjusting how strongly different nodes interact with each other, the network can absorb statistical patterns that appear over and over again in their inputs and output similar patterns. Restricted Boltzmann machines are leaner versions that cut down on internal chatter: visible nodes connect only to hidden ones, not to each other. These trim networks played a vital role in the 1990s AI renaissance after Hinton and colleagues showed that stacks of them could be used to "pretrain" deep neural networks and dramatically boost their performance. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### True fictions URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/true-fictions/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:29:29.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) Once upon a time, the universe blew up. I say "blew up" not in the sense of an explosion, but rather click-and-dragging the corner of an image outwards to make it bigger. Right after the Big Bang, the universe was a tiny, compact mote. Practically everything that would eventually be anything was bound up not in familiar matter, but in the energy of exotic fields. But it didn't stay that way for long. In a split of a spilt of a split second — a splinter of time so small that more copies of it fit into a second than seconds fit into all time — the universe stretched out so quickly that even light couldn't keep up. By the end, it had grown by a factor of 1030. That's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000\. 13.8 billion years later, this brief episode of cosmic inflation is still etched into the sky. Were it not for inflation, the universe would be roughly the same everywhere. And like a ball on an infinite, flat plain, it'd have nowhere to "go," no way to do anything other than sit still, forever. But some regions of space are a little denser or a little emptier than others. And when we train radio telescopes on the sky, we see a cosmic quilt of slightly brighter and slightly dimmer patches — tiny fluctuations in the radio afterglow of the Big Bang. Inflation explains the patchwork: quantum fluctuations near the beginning of time that started out tiny got blown up, click-and-drag style, to cosmic scale. Everything else, from stars to intelligences capable of doing cosmology, grew up over the primordial scaffold of disorder created by inflation. Or did it? Yesterday on a cycle across town, I played back an [old episode](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/01/07/episode-28-roger-penrose-on-spacetime-consciousness-and-the-universe/?ref=reviewertoo.com) of Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast in which he interviewed Roger Penrose. I mostly associate Penrose with aperiodic tilings, but he's also a Nobel Prize-winning physicist with plenty of thoughts on cosmology. Carroll, a cosmologist, took the interview as a chance to discuss Penrose's ideas about the beginning and end of the universe. [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) I'd learned cosmic inflation as *the* story of the Big Bang — a solid scientific truth confirmed by observations of the cosmic microwave background. So you can imagine my shock at hearing Carroll and Penrose talk pretty dismissively about inflationary cosmology. Carroll said he'd place a 50/50 bet on inflation being true. Penrose doesn't buy it at all. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Paper Roundup September 2025: Mars life, exploding black holes, quantum computing URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/paper-roundup-september-2025-mars-life-exploding-black-holes-quantum-computing/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:29:08.000Z *Every month, I publish a curated list of the most fascinating, groundbreaking inflammatory, or otherwise bold new scholarship on the "big questions" of science. Inclusion is not endorsement. Think something should be included in next month's*[ *paper roundup*](https://www.reviewertoo.com/paper-roundups/)*? Shoot me an email at* [*elise@reviewertoo.com*](mailto:elise@reviewertoo.com?subject=Paper%20Roundup%20Recommendation)*.* *If you liked this newsletter, why not share it with a friend or post it on Bluesky or wherever else you hang out online? That's the best way to help this project continue!* Don't miss next month's newsletter! [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) --- ## Highlights ### Best evidence yet for ancient life on Mars [**Redox-driven mineral and organic associations in Jezero Crater, Mars**](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09413-0?ref=reviewertoo.com) **(*Nature*, September 10) by Joel A. Hurowitz, M. M. Tice, A. C. Allwood, M. L. Cable, K. P. Hand, A. E. Murphy, K. Uckert, J. F. Bell III, T. Bosak, A. P. Broz, E. Clavé, A. Cousin, S. Davidoff, E. Dehouck, K. A. Farley, S. Gupta, S.-E. Hamran, K. Hickman-Lewis, J. R. Johnson, A. J. Jones, M. W. M. Jones, P. S. Jørgensen, L. C. Kah, H. Kalucha, T. V. Kizovski, D. A. Klevang, Y. Liu, F. M. McCubbin, E. L. Moreland, G. Paar, D. A. Paige, A. C. Pascuzzo, M. S. Rice, M. E. Schmidt, K. L. Siebach, S. Siljeström, J. I. Simon, K. M. Stack, A. Steele, N. J. Tosca, A. H. Treiman, S. J. VanBommel, L. A. Wade, B. P. Weiss, R. C. Wiens, K. H. Williford, R. Barnes, P. A. Barr, A. Bechtold, P. Beck, K. Benzerara, S. Bernard, O. Beyssac, R. Bhartia, A. J. Brown, G. Caravaca, E. L. Cardarelli, E. A. Cloutis, A. G. Fairén, D. T. Flannery, T. Fornaro, T. Fouchet, B. Garczynski, F. Goméz, E. M. Hausrath, C. M. Heirwegh, C. D. K. Herd, J. E. Huggett, J. L. Jørgensen, S. W. Lee, A. Y. Li, J. N. Maki, L. Mandon, N. Mangold, J. A. Manrique, J. Martínez-Frías, J. I. Núñez, L. P. O'Neil, B. J. Orenstein, N. Phelan, C. Quantin-Nataf, P. Russell, M. D. Schulte, E. Scheller, S. Sharma, D. L. Shuster, A. Srivastava, B. V. Wogsland, and Z. U. Wolf** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2025/10/1-PIA26368-Perseverance_Finds_a_Rock_with_Leopard_Spots-2-1-1.png) NASA recently announced that the light colored, dark-rimmed blobs ("leopard spots") and dark speckles ("poppy seeds") in this Martian rock could be a sign of ancient life. ****Source:** [NASA/JPL-Caltech](https://science.nasa.gov/resource/perseverance-finds-a-rock-with-leopard-spots/?ref=reviewertoo.com) This month brought some of the most exciting astrobiology news in a while: NASA's Perseverance rover spotted mineral globules in a rock near Jezero Crater that might be the metabolic leftovers of ancient microbes. So, of course, I'm going to be a bit of a downer about it. While I think it probably is fair to call this the best evidence yet for life on Mars, that does not make it *good* evidence. Contrary to media claims, a similar rock would probably not be widely accepted as evidence for ancient life on our own planet — geochemical evidence alone usually doesn't fly in the "earliest evidence of life on Earth" game. [There is no time telescopeThe Mars that may have hosted life long ago is our neighbor in space only.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/icon/favicon-7.ico)Reviewer, tooElise Cutts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/thumbnail/mariner-1.jpg)](https://www.reviewertoo.com/there-is-no-time-telescope/) This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### There is no time telescope URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/there-is-no-time-telescope/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:43:48.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) The 90s are back: flannel shirts, heroin chic, and NASA scientists getting on TV to talk about signs of life in ancient Mars rocks. On August 7 1996, NASA held a press conference to tell the world that its scientists had probably found evidence for ancient life in a Mars rock. Allan Hills 84001, a potato-sized chunk of 4 billion-year-old Martian stone, had fallen over Antarctica during the last Ice Age as a meteorite after being blasted away from its home planet in an impact event and drifting through space for several million years. Not only was ALH84001 from Mars and one of the oldest rocks ever discovered, it also contained globules of carbonate minerals that suggested a brush with liquid water — and which, on Earth, can form with help from life. Electron microscopy of the carbonates revealed nanoscale structures that recall Earth microbes. Together with organic material and unusual magnetic crystals similar to those made by a handful of terrestrial lifeforms, those "microfossils" were enough evidence to convince a team of NASA researchers that they might have found fossil aliens. Then-President Bill Clinton even met the press on the White House lawn to comment on the groundbreaking discovery. Now, just about 29 years later, [scientists are getting excited about a new Mars rock](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09413-0?ref=reviewertoo.com#MOESM3). This one, unlike ALH84001, is still on Mars — a strip of 3.5 billion-year-old mottled red stone called Cheyava Falls in the Bright Angel formation, which sits on the floor of a river-carved canyon upstream of a lake that was dry when Earth's first continents first rose above the primordial ocean. On September 10, NASA held a press conference to announce that the Perseverance Rover had found unusual mineral speckles in Cheyava Falls that could be the leftovers of ancient microbial activity. ## Sign up for Reviewer, too A newsletter about science that's not afraid to color outside the lines, written by ex-scientist science journalist Elise Cutts Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. The exciting features are nodules of carbonate minerals enriched in iron and sulfur, dubbed "leopard spots" and "poppy seeds." To get just a bit more technical, the iron and sulfur minerals in these nodules are reduced, meaning they've had electrons dumped on them. Plenty of Earth microbes that don't breathe oxygen get their energy by shunting electrons from the organic carbon onto iron and sulfur, which they "breathe." Some iron-breathing microbes also produce carbonate blobs. And there's organic material — probably messy ringed molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which form basically everywhere in space — in the rock, too. So the mineral nodules could conceivably be fossil microbe waste. The agency's interim administrator Sean Duffy — an unqualified Trump appointee and former competitive lumberjack who looks like an AI-generated average of every dude who's ever appeared in a shaving cream commercial — hailed it as "the closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars."[\[1\]](#f-1) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2025/09/1-PIA26368-Perseverance_Finds_a_Rock_with_Leopard_Spots-2-1-1.png) The snapshot from one world that shook another. NASA recently announced that the light colored, dark-rimmed blobs ("leopard spots") and dark speckles ("poppy seeds") in this Martian rock could be a sign of ancient life on the Red Planet. ****Source:** [NASA/JPL-Caltech](https://science.nasa.gov/resource/perseverance-finds-a-rock-with-leopard-spots/?ref=reviewertoo.com) Though I hadn't even been born in 1996, I can't help but feel a bit of déjà vu. As one of the scientists who peer-reviewed the new results pointed out, Cheyava Falls sounds quite a lot like ALH84001\. Both rocks contain similar organic molecules, reduced iron and sulfur, and carbonate nodules. All that's missing are the unusual magnetic crystals and tiny "dubiofossils" — though they could be there, too. Perseverance wouldn't be able to tell. ALH84001, of course, is famous three decades after Bill Clinton's unusual announcement not because it settled the question of life on Mars, but because it did not. After much controversy and follow-up work, astrobiologists have mostly dismissed the ALH84001 biosignature as a false alarm. When I learned about ALH84001 as a geobiology undergrad in the late 2010s, it was taught as a kind of cautionary tale: don't be the scientist who cried alien. > There is no time telescope. There are only old rocks. Perhaps this is why I struggled to get excited about the Cheyava Falls biosignature claim. Eventually, though, I started to worry I'd missed out on something big and texted an astrobiologist friend to ask how hyped I should be about this thing. He sent me a link to a news story he'd been quoted in. The verdict? This was exciting, but by no means conclusive evidence of life — to settle the score, we'd need to bring the rock back to Earth. When I finally pulled up the paper to take a look for myself, my inner dialogue was far more cynical. *Odd minerals in a very old rock. Oh, great. Here we go again.* Practically every discussion of the Cheyava Falls biosignature I've encountered — from the paper itself to the press release and the many news articles and videos it inspired — ends with a similar refrain: to actually know if this rock is evidence of life, we'll need to get a sample back to Earth for analysis.[\[2\]](#f-2) Distance, in other words, is the problem. Mars is far away, accessible only to robotic explorers that, while sophisticated, can't hold a candle to a human scientist with a fancy lab. If only we could analyze this thing in an Earth lab, the thinking goes, we'd know for sure. But is that even true? This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### The Loeb Scale for science PR disasters URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/loeb-scale/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:28:49.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) Sloppy or intentionally misleading science communication is widely recognized as damaging and potentially disastrous. But how disastrous? Clearly, an embarrassing typo in a paper is not of the same magnitude as research fraud. To resolve this ambiguity, this article presents the Loeb Scale, a qualitative logarithmic scale for the magnitude of scientific public relations disasters inspired by the Richter scale for the magnitude of earthquakes. The Loeb Scale is named in honor of [Jacques Loeb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques%5FLoeb?ref=reviewertoo.com), a famous early 20th-century biologist who inspired literary characters and appeared frequently in newspapers and magazines. Any perceived reference to other persons, real or fictional, is purely coincidental. The scale described here should not be confused with the [Loeb Scale for rating interstellar objects](https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2508.09167?ref=reviewertoo.com) recently proposed by sports psychologists Omer Eldadi and Gershon Tenenbaum and the scale's namesake, astrophysicist Avi Loeb. ## Magnitude 1 *Not felt. Recorded only by spellcheck.* Example: Mistaking "effect" for "affect" in the paper abstract ## Magnitude 2 *Felt slightly by some researchers in the epicenter field. No reputational or emotional damage.* Example: This post, hopefully This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Hydra are a cosmos in a cuvette URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/hydra-anais-bailles/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:27:32.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) The early universe was orderly, but formless. With everything the same everywhere, nothing could happen. But quantum fluctuations near the beginning of time infused the neat and tidy early universe with a pinch of disorder — a bit more energy here, a bit less there. And when the universe expanded, those little patches of slightly denser or sparser stuff grew with it. Today, they're smeared across the sky, visible as miniscule fluctuations in the temperature of the Big Bang's radio afterglow. Everything else — the galaxies and stars and planets of the observable universe — grew up from those first seeds of chaos. [Anaïs Bailles](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:s7jrdtojx5iiphvl56qxg2t2?ref=reviewertoo.com), a physicist-turned-biologist at the Max Planck Instituteof Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, sees a mirror of this cosmic origin story in the animal embryo. Beginning from a relatively shapeless, simple state, animals develop into structured, complex forms. This poses a question similar to the one faced by cosmologists: where does all that new complexity come from? Anaïs thinks that her old field, physics, might have answers for her new one. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2025/09/bailles_anais_csbd-2-1.jpg) Anaïs Bailles is a biophysicist at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, where she studies how Hydra reassemble themselves to understand the emergence of complex form in biology. ****Credit:** Anaïs Bailles Biologists tend to look for explanations in either nature or nurture, and the enormous success of genetics has effectively collapsed "nature" down to the genome. Nature is what's "written in our DNA," in the "blueprint of life." But there are limits to this reductive understanding of how organisms come to be, and [the blueprint turns out to be a pretty terrible metaphor for the genome](https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.15908?ref=reviewertoo.com); nowhere in your genes will you find the schematics for an eye. What you will find are instructions for a collection of parts that, embedded in the right environment, will interact with each other to produce more-or-less the same organism, more-or-less every time — but not exactly the same organism, and not every time. If the full story of life is not written in DNA, we must be missing more than several chapters. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Paper Roundup August 2025: Alpha Centauri Ab, Worm Circuits, AI Chess URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/paper-roundup-august-2025-alpha-centauri-ab-worm-circuits-ai-chess/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:46:35.000Z *How did life begin? What is emergence? Are we alone? Every month, I publish a curated list of the most fascinating, groundbreaking, inflammatory, or otherwise bold new scholarship on "big questions" in science. I like to imagine these are the papers you'd find sitting on the desk of an old timey natural philosopher who'd been whisked to the present.* *Send recommendations for next month's roundup to* [*elise@reviewertoo.com*](mailto:elise@reviewertoo.com?subject=Paper%20Roundup%20Recommendation)*. And if this is your kind of weird, why not share it with a friend or post it on* [*Bluesky*](https://bsky.app/intent/compose?text=www.reviewertoo.com%2Fpaper-roundup-july-2025%2F&ref=reviewertoo.com) *or wherever else you hang out online?* Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. --- ## Highlights ### A first picture of a habitable-zone (gas) planet in the closest star system to Earth [**Worlds Next Door: A Candidate Giant Planet Imaged in the Habitable Zone of α Centauri A. I. Observations, Orbital and Physical Properties, and Exozodi Upper Limits**](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adf53f?ref=reviewertoo.com) **(*The Astrophysical Journal Letters*, August 11) by Charles Beichman, Aniket Sanghi, Dimitri Mawet, Pierre Kervella, Kevin Wagner, Billy Quarles, Jack J. Lissauer, Max Sommer, Mark Wyatt, Nicolas Godoy, William O. Balmer, Laurent Pueyo, Jorge Llop-Sayson, Jonathan Aguilar, Rachel Akeson, Ruslan Belikov, Anthony Boccaletti, Elodie Choquet, Edward Fomalont, Thomas Henning, Dean Hines, Renyu Hu, Pierre-Olivier Lagage, Jarron Leisenring, James Mang, Michael Ressler, Eugene Serabyn, Pascal Tremblin, Marie Ygouf, and Mantas Zilinskas** [**Worlds Next Door: A Candidate Giant Planet Imaged in the Habitable Zone of α Cen A. II. Binary Star Modeling, Planet and Exozodi Search, and Sensitivity Analysis**](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adf53e?ref=reviewertoo.com) **(*The Astrophysical Journal Letters*, August 11)by Aniket Sanghi, Charles Beichman, Dimitri Mawet, William O. Balmer, Nicolas Godoy, Laurent Pueyo, Anthony Boccaletti, Max Sommer, Alexis Bidot, Elodie Choquet, Pierre Kervella, Pierre-Olivier Lagage, Jarron Leisenring, Jorge Llop-Sayson, Michael Ressler, Kevin Wagner, Mark Wyatt** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2025/09/e1-Webb_alpha_cen_planet_detail-1-1.jpg) That smudge of light labeled S1 is, maybe, a gas giant planet orbiting in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri Ab, one of the closest stars to Earth. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Aniket Sanghi (Caltech), Chas Beichman (NExScI, NASA/JPL-Caltech), Dimitri Mawet (Caltech), and Joseph DePasquale (STScI) There could be a gas giant in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A, the nearest Sun-like star. And scientists may have just taken a picture of it. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Why does complexity science like ants so much? URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/why-does-complexity-science-like-ants-so-much/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:26:37.000Z [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) Open a book about complexity science, and you'll find ants. Ants crawl over the cover of James Ladyman and Karoline Wiesner's 2020 book W*hat is a Complex System?* Steven Johnson's *Emergence* carries the subtitle "The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" and gives ants their own chapter. The index of Geoffrey West's *Scale* lists entries for ants and ant colonies on 5 pages, scattered from the introduction to the conclusion. Ricard Solé's somewhat technical 2011 book on phase transition devotes two pages to ants. Neil These's less technical, more woo-woo *Notes on Complexity* has even more ants: they appear on pages 43, 34, 35, 30, 31, 24–28, 110, and 110 as examples of everything from complex systems as a whole to feedback loops, local interactions and... materialism? Melanie Mitchell's *Complexity: A Guided Tour* mentions ant colonies on 14 pages. One of complexity's holy texts, Douglas Hofstadter's weird and wonderful *Gödel, Escher, Bach,* expounds on ant bridges, ant colonies, ant castes, ant colony brains, ant intelligence, ant order and chaos, ant teams, and ant communism. Ants even get their own *Ant Fugue* occupying 25 pages. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### A habitable world next door? URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/a-habitable-world-next-door/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:43:29.000Z Telescopes are made to see. It's even in the name. Telescope is a Renaissance neologism that was concocted from the Greek *tele*, far, and *scopos,* watcher, for one of Galileo's inventions.[\[1\]](#f-1) So it's frustrating that exoplanet astronomy has historically involved very little actual seeing. Sight requires contrast, and most exoplanets are far too dim compared to their stars for our telescopes to resolve. Of the 5600 or so exoplanets we know about, less than 100 — all gas giants — have been imaged directly. The rest we know only by the flickering light of their host stars; when a planet transits, or passes between the Earth and a distant star, the star appears to dim. The astronomer of romantic imagination climbs the observatory steps at midnight to peer through his mechanical far-watcher and take in the night sky. The astronomer of modern reality — if she's interested in exoplanets — waits for a space telescope to beam down data that she can turn into graphs. ## Sign up for Reviewer, too Complexity, astrobiology, and the origins of life research synthesized in posts, lists, and journalism-infused reviews written by a PhD-dropout science journalist Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. That's one reason it's so exciting that **astronomers now think they've taken a picture of an exoplanet orbiting the closest Sun-like star to Earth, Alpha Centauri A.** The results were announced on August 5 in a [pair](https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03814?ref=reviewertoo.com) of [preprints](https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03812?ref=reviewertoo.com) on the *arXiv* server, which [were](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adf53f?ref=reviewertoo.com) [published](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adf53e?ref=reviewertoo.com) by the *Astrophysical Journal Letters* on August 11. The planet still needs to be confirmed; for now, it is still just an excitingly planet-like smudge of light. But if it really is there, it orbits in the habitable zone of its star, meaning that water could be liquid on its surface — if it had a surface. The planet is a gas giant, so not exactly a welcoming environment for life as we know it. But if it's anything like the gas giants we know from our solar system, it could host pretty big moons. An entire system of habitable little worlds could be spinning around right next door, within reach of ambitious but technically feasible interstellar mission concepts like Breakthrough Starshot. Behold, perhaps the most exciting smudge you'll ever see: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/2025/08/e1-Webb_alpha_cen_planet_detail-1-1.jpg) That smudge of light labeled S1 is, maybe, a gas giant planet orbiting in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri Ab, one of the closest stars to Earth. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Aniket Sanghi (Caltech), Chas Beichman (NExScI, NASA/JPL-Caltech), Dimitri Mawet (Caltech), and Joseph DePasquale (STScI) How exciting is this news? Exciting, but don't get your hopes up that we'll be popping the alien champagne anytime soon. There's still a lot we don't know about this world, tentatively dubbed Alpha Centauri Ab or Rigil Kentaurus b — including whether it is really there at all. Here's what you need to know about Alpha Centauri Ab, the (maybe) planet next door. This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. [Unlock the archive ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Paper Roundup July 2025: 3I/ATLAS "fanfiction," arsenic life retraction, K2-18b URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/paper-roundup-july-2025/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T12:26:45.000Z *Every month, I collect interesting, fun, rage-inducing, or otherwise noteworthy papers in complexity, astrobiology, and origins. Inclusion is not endorsement.* Weird *suggestions, glaring omissions, and typos are 100% human error and 0% AI hallucination. Think something should be included in next month's newsletter? Shoot me an email at* [*elise@reviewertoo.com*](mailto:elise@reviewertoo.com?subject=Paper%20Roundup%20Recommendation)*.* *If you found this paper roundup helpful, why not share it with a friend or post it on* [*Bluesky*](https://bsky.app/intent/compose?text=www.reviewertoo.com/paper-roundup-july-2025/&ref=reviewertoo.com) *or wherever else you hang out online? That's the best way to help this project continue!* Don't miss next month's newsletter! [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) --- ## Highlights ### Astrobiology: "Comet fanfiction about aliens" [**Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12213?ref=reviewertoo.com) **(July 22, *arXiv* preprint) by Adam Hibberd, Adam Crowl, and Abraham Loeb** For the third time, astronomers have spotted a visitor from beyond the solar system: interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist- turned-alien-hunter who [thinks we should be devoting more energy and funding to searching for intelligent life](https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17790?ref=reviewertoo.com) than exoplanet biosignatures. Loeb has a bad reputation for making sensational claims and behaving unprofessionally with colleagues who disagree with him; he's effectively been ostracized from the astro community at this point. He also has a history [of thinking objects like this might be interstellar alien spacecraft](https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.15213?ref=reviewertoo.com). So the jokes started flying basically as soon as 3I/ATLAS was announced, and only intensified after Loeb did indeed suggest that the interstellar interloper could be a spaceship in comments for [a predictably sensational story](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14871281/Mysterious-interstellar-object-alien-spacecraft.html?ref=reviewertoo.com) in the British tabloid *Daily Mail.* > As of tonight's Arxiv I don't believe my colleague on the 2nd floor has yet published a claim that it's a spaceship. > > — Jonathan McDowell ([@planet4589.bsky.social](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vqtp5dj2o6rqnge56sz2db5a?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com)) [July 3, 2025 at 3:19 AM](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vqtp5dj2o6rqnge56sz2db5a/post/3lszkpgc6ss2s?ref%5Fsrc=embed&ref=reviewertoo.com) ⏳ This post is more than 2 weeks old. To unlock the archive, [support my work](#/portal/signup) by becoming become a paid subscriber. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### I'm trying something new here. URL: https://www.reviewertoo.com/im-trying-something-new-here/ Last updated: 2025-08-07T16:24:32.000Z Hi, welcome to *Reviewer, too*. If you like astrobiology, complexity, or origins of life research, you're in the right place. I'm Elise, a PhD-dropout science journalist who writes about physics and physics-adjacent research for magazines like *Quanta, Scientific American,* and *New Scientist*, and I share your enthusiasm. I'm trying something new here. *R*2 is an attempt to reconcile my scientist past with my journalist present. It's a project in two parts: a regular newsletter and yearly-ish "journalistic review" paper synthesizing research at an open frontier in astrobiology, origins, or complexity. That's the weird bit. More below. I hope you'll consider subscribing to join me on this new endeavor. Signing up is free and unlocks the comments section — more than anything, I hope this thing can grow into a community of people united by a shared interest in some of the most fascinating questions science has yet to answer. [Subscribe](#/portal/signup/free) ## Who are you? I'm Elise, a former ~~bacterial slime enthusiast~~ geobiologist who dropped out of a PhD program at MIT to move to Austria and become a freelance science journalist. Somehow that all worked out fine. These days, I write about science — mostly planetary science, physics, and other fields physicists like to invade — for magazines. My interest in complexity science, astrobiology, and origins arose through an unlikely series of events that started with a *Star Trek* parody musical ([no joke](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdtBArmWHdY&ref=reviewertoo.com)) and ended with me joining an origins of life journal club at Caltech as an undergrad in 2015\. I've been fascinated by the question of how disorganized, simple parts assemble into organized, complex wholes ever since. Besides science, I like languages and birds. You can get in touch with me via email ([elise@reviewertoo.com](mailto:elise@reviewertoo.com)) or on [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/elisecutts.bsky.social?ref=reviewertoo.com). [Elise Cutts (@elisecutts.bsky.social)Science journalist is just a fancy way of saying “professional nerd.” USian in Austria, language geek, collector of fine yellow zigzagged sweaters and etymology fun facts. Yell at me online in EN or DE. www.elisecutts.com![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/icon/apple-touch-icon-3.png)Bluesky Social![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/thumbnail/bafkreigjv2cd756vwdoalenkjn36xpors4rty4ti3dd5tsk6rkc4k5zkpi@jpeg)](https://bsky.app/profile/elisecutts.bsky.social?ref=reviewertoo.com) ## Why should I sign up for your newsletter? Because it'll help you stay on top of complexity, astrobiology, and origins while also digging deeper into topics from those fields that you might not otherwise have spent much time with. It consists of monthly paper roundups and wildcard posts. ### Paper roundup There are just too many damn papers these days. [Paper roundups](https://www.reviewertoo.com/paper-roundups/) are my answer to the ballooning problem of academic paper overload. On the first Friday of each month, I post a curated list of interesting, enraging, or otherwise noteworthy papers from complexity, astrobiology, and origins of life research with some short commentary on a few highlights. I do this all by hand, so any embarrassing omissions, unwarranted inclusions, or typos are 100% human error and 0% AI hallucination. The first one is coming out soon! Recommendations are welcome. Send them to [elise@reviewertoo.com](mailto:elise@reviewertoo.com?subject=Paper%20Roundup%20Recommendation). [Paper RoundupsEvery month, I publish a curated list of new scholarship in complexity, astrobiology, and origins of life research, with short commentary on a handful of highlights. Any glaring omissions, bad recommendations, or typos are 100% human fallibility and 0% AI hallucination. The point of curation is to make it easier![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/icon/favicon-1.ico)Reviewer, tooElise Cutts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/ce/50ce0bca-1919-41ad-957e-8936d28f9214/content/images/thumbnail/american_magpie_1945.8.357-6-1.jpg)](https://www.reviewertoo.com/paper-roundups/) ### Wildcard posts In-between paper roundups, I'll share wildcard posts at least once every two weeks, but often more frequently. This could be anything from a breakdown of a classic paper, a profile of or Q&A with a researcher, a book review, commentary inspired by a news article or podcast episode, an article in the style of a magazine feature or news story, a personal essay, or — around Valentine's day — an attempt at research collaboration matchmaking. The point is variation and experimentation. If some formats are especially popular, I'll do more of them. In the future, I might do series. For instance, I could imagine doing a series of short profiles or Q&As with leading complexity scientists or astrobiologists or a series of essays related to papers from the Foundations of Complexity Science collection. Suggestions for wildcard posts are always welcome! [Subscribe](#/portal/signup/free) ## What are "journalistic reviews?" So far so normal. Here's the weird part: **about once a year, I'll publish a "journalistic review" synthesizing research at an open frontier of astrobiology, origins of life research, or complexity science.** I'm trying to do something new here. Academics write review papers all the time, but they're... well, academic. They're not typically accessible to the uninitiated. They conceal a lot of important context behind academic norms, like just citing papers and leaving it up to the reader to figure out which groups led by which scientists are championing which hypotheses. And most of them read like cardboard tastes. On the other hand, journalists write tons of accessible science content. But as proud as I am of my magazine articles, they exist to inform or entertain first and further scholarship... not at all. So, there's a gap in the science writing landscape: a wide canyon between in-depth magazine features on one side and academic review articles on the other. Journalistic reviews are my answer to that gap. They will be something like 3 parts review paper, 1 part magazine feature. In addition to reviewing academic literature, I'll also incorporate material from interviews to share a bit of the human side of research — and I do this not just to be entertaining, but also useful. Science is done by people, it doesn't just fall out of the sky. So wouldn't it be helpful to be able to know a bit more about the people behind the citations? Wouldn't it be nice, as an early career researcher overwhelmed by literally everything, to know which big-name principle investigators in your subfield have decades-long science beef? Wouldn't it be useful to know more about your colleagues' motivations and worldviews as they relate to their science? Welcome, anonymous lurker! If you're already here, why not sign up to get R2 in your inbox and join the conversation in the comments section? [Subscribe ](#/portal/signup/free) ## This project relies on your support! I was inspired to start this project by [Virginia Trimble](https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/5283/Q-A-Virginia-Trimble-on-50-plus-years-in-astronomy?ref=reviewertoo.com), an astrophysicist and one of the first women to graduate from Caltech. She's known not only for her research, but also for the thorough comprehensive reviews of astrophysics research that she published every year for several decades. Trimble's reviews are well known not only for being thorough and useful, but also hilarious. After learning about Trimble and her reviews, I immediately thought: hey, I'd love to do that job! I'm not in academia anymore, but I'm itching to contribute to scholarship instead of just summarize it. So, what's stopping me from writing reviews? The answer is pretty boring: money. As a science journalist, I get paid when I write for magazines and newspapers. Publishing in academic journals *costs* money — and that's assuming the editors would even consider publishing something by an unaffiliated "independent researcher." Luckily, there's the *arXiv*. I could just slap my reviews up there for all to see and cite. But nobody would be paying me to do that. Well, I'm taking a risk and betting that enough of you nerds out there are interested in complexity science, astrobiology, and origins of life research to support more writing about it. I know that funding a new, weird kind of academic-ish writing you've never seen before is a big ask. That's why *R2* is a twice-monthly newsletter, too, not just a long-term, twice-yearly project. You get something right away. And more than anything, my hope is that we can build a nice little community of people interested in astrobiology, origins, and complexity along the way. ### How to support *R2* I'm just getting started here, so there's a lot you can do. The best way to help ensure this project keeps going is to spread the word and consider becoming a paid patron; ultimately, I'll need your support to keep this going. - Stop lurking and subscribe! It's free. You'll get *R2* straight to your inbox and unlock the comments section. - Become a paid patron for the low low price of 1 cappuccino per month (after Austrian taxes and credit card fees) - Become a founding patron by funding the equivalent of my entire monthly cappuccino habit. - Follow me on Bluesky - Participate in the comments section - Share *R2* with your friends and colleagues - Recommend papers for the monthly paper roundup - Suggest patron benefits ## Sign up for Reviewer, too Complexity, astrobiology, and the origins of life research synthesized in posts, lists, and journalism-infused reviews written by a PhD-dropout science journalist Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. --- Well, here goes nothing. See you in the comments!