Paper Roundup
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
Brain
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.
Q&A
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.
Astrobiology
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
Paper Roundup November 2025: Mars lightning, language processing, and autism microbiome
This month's curated list of interesting new papers
From the Archives
Tessellation revelation
From my archives: the story of how mathematicians discovered "soft cells" that fill space without corners
Q&A
The individual isn't what it used to be
Tim Waring thinks human evolution is shifting from genetic and individual to cultural and collective
Biology
Women have no genetic blueprint
Neither do men, but women *really* don't
Paper Roundup
Paper Roundup October 2025: dark matter, emergence, and dinosaur mummies
Papers on big questions at the frontiers of science, curated by hand each month
Biology
Does biology play dice?
Some thoughts on nature, nurture, and chance in development
Q&A
Political (neural) networking
Eddie Lee mapped the political landscape underpinning the increasingly polarized US Senate using the same physics that sparked the AI boom
Opinion
True fictions
The storytelling instinct conjures illusions of consensus in science