Paper Roundup December 2025: computing billiards, an impossible atmosphere, and Roman constructions
Papers on big questions at the frontiers of science, curated by hand each month
Latest
More than words: prosody in the brain
The brain's dedicated hardware for handling the melody of speech overlaps with regions involved in language processing and recognizing facial expressions.
There's no gene for being human
Barbara Molz found supposedly extinct ancient gene variants in hundreds of modern humans. They don't seem to do much.
What do space sugars tell us about the origin of life?
The mystery of life's origin is not a missing magic ingredient, it's a missing process.
Paper Roundup November 2025: Mars lightning, language processing, and autism microbiome
This month's curated list of interesting new papers
Tessellation revelation
From my archives: the story of how mathematicians discovered "soft cells" that fill space without corners
The individual isn't what it used to be
Tim Waring thinks human evolution is shifting from genetic and individual to cultural and collective
Women have no genetic blueprint
Neither do men, but women *really* don't
Paper Roundup October 2025: dark matter, emergence, and dinosaur mummies
Papers on big questions at the frontiers of science, curated by hand each month
Does biology play dice?
Some thoughts on nature, nurture, and chance in development
Political (neural) networking
Eddie Lee mapped the political landscape underpinning the increasingly polarized US Senate using the same physics that sparked the AI boom
True fictions
The storytelling instinct conjures illusions of consensus in science
Paper Roundup
Paper Roundup September 2025: Mars life, exploding black holes, quantum computing
Papers tackling the biggest questions in science, curated by hand each month.
There is no time telescope
The Mars that may have hosted life long ago is our neighbor in space only.
Satire
The Loeb Scale for science PR disasters
The Loeb Scale measures the severity of science PR disasters from typos to fraud
Q&A
Hydra are a cosmos in a cuvette
To see order emerge from chaos, Anaïs Bailles shreds up immortal animals and watches them re-grow
Paper Roundup
Paper Roundup August 2025: Alpha Centauri Ab, Worm Circuits, AI Chess
Every month, I publish a curated list of scholarship on "big questions" in science — the stuff you'd find sitting on the desk of an old timey natural philosopher whisked to the present.
Complexity
Why does complexity science like ants so much?
Ants are basically the unofficial mascot of complexity science. Why?
Astrobiology
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
Paper Roundup
Paper Roundup July 2025: 3I/ATLAS "fanfiction," arsenic life retraction, K2-18b
Every month, I publish a curated list of scholarship on "big questions" in science — the stuff you'd find sitting on the desk of an old timey natural philosopher whisked to the present.
Announcements
I'm trying something new here.
Reviewer, too is a new newsletter synthesizing the frontiers of complexity, astrobiology, and origins of life research — and an attempt at bridging journalism and scholarship. I hope you'll join me!