Isegoria

England is, and has been, close to a meritocracy for many generations

November 3rd, 2026

Gregory Clark, the economic historian behind A Farewell to Alms and The Son Also Rises, has released the final installment of his trilogy on economic development and social mobility, To Have and Have Not:

Unlike its predecessors, To Have and Have Not did not come out through Princeton University Press—nor through any academic book publisher, for that matter. The peer reviewers just aren’t having it. Some won’t even read it.

Clark’s manuscript instead appears online in PDF form, free of charge but with the occasional typo still intact, via Econ Journal Watch, a publication focused on debates within economics.

[…]

The book advances a provocative argument, drawing together several of Clark’s recent academic papers—and several enormous datasets—to claim that social status not only persists strongly within families but does so specifically through genetic inheritance, to a far greater degree than virtually anyone has claimed.

[…]

To Have and Have Not is built on an incredible trove of historical information, including centuries’ worth of English genealogies and marriage records, as well as the population registers of modern Sweden and Denmark. The sheer scale of these data allows Clark to see how social status runs in families—across many links in the tree, both horizontal (from siblings to distant cousins) and vertical (from parents to kids to grandkids)—and to measure status in several ways, including occupational prestige, education, and housing quality.

[…]

To take a typical example, in Clark’s data on Britons born from 1910 to 1996, siblings’ home values correlated at about 0.33. In other words, if someone has an extremely expensive house, three standard deviations above the mean, our best guess would be for their sibling to have a merely nice house, one standard deviation above the mean—closer to the overall average than to the sibling.

[…]

When one moves from siblings all the way to cousins in that same housing-value analysis, the correlation drops only modestly, to 0.21. The general rule he discovers—across many different status measures, and across several centuries notwithstanding massive changes to society and technology—is that these correlations, despite starting out at a modest level, drop by only about one-fifth with each extra degree of relatedness. (Cousins are two steps more distant than siblings in this sense.)

[…]

When variables are measured poorly, or when they fail to capture important details of an underlying concept, the resulting correlations will appear artificially weak.

Thus, our focus shouldn’t linger on the modest correlations among immediate family members. Those aren’t a beautiful testament to the randomness of life and the possibility of change; they’re just misleading. Rather, the very slow decay of the correlations as we move through family trees is where the action is. It reveals a “latent” status that is extremely persistent. Clark finds measurable links in status even among fourth cousins, whose shared ancestors are five generations back.

[…]

Clark’s answer is assortative mating. If people marry others who are similar in their “latent” genetic social status—presumably by matching on a mix of education, intelligence, social graces, work ethic, family connections, and so on—each link in the family tree doesn’t simply add genetic randomness but rather springs from a careful romantic match of like with like. Using a formula that goes back to the pioneering British statistician and geneticist Ronald Fisher, Clark is even able to calculate how strong matching on this latent status must be: to explain the slow decay of social status across degrees of relatedness through genes alone, spouses must be correlated on their genetic status at 0.57. If someone has genetic social status one standard deviation above the mean, he’ll marry someone of status 0.57 standard deviations above it, on average.

[…]

Clark’s own takeaways from his analysis include that “England is, and has been, close to a meritocracy for many generations,” that “much of the 10 percent of national income typically spent on education by high income economies is largely a social waste,” that genetic transmission of status implies “an incentive to select high status immigrants, and reject low status ones,” and that the “relative fecundity of people at the top and the bottom of social abilities” will affect future social outcomes.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Lead in their tooth enamel shows that production had restarted by the middle of the seventh century

November 2nd, 2026

Britain’s medieval lead industry had restarted by the mid-600s:

According to a charter summary attributed to the year 835, a nobleman named Humberht paid the rent on an estate in Derbyshire in lead bars, having to organize its transport all the way to Canterbury.

A new study has found an older record of the Peak District’s medieval lead industry, in the teeth of the people who worked it.

Lead in their tooth enamel shows that production had restarted by the middle of the seventh century and that, by about AD 750, children around the mines at Castleton were growing up in heavily polluted homes.

[…]

Roman and medieval lead waste was re-smelted again and again between the 16th and 19th centuries, which erased many of the traces archaeologists would normally use, according to the University of Nottingham.

“Enamel does not remodel after its initial formation, so these samples provide a closed record of lead concentrations during childhood, between the ages of approximately four and 12 years,” the authors write.

[…]

The researchers sampled 17 people: ten from two Castleton cemeteries, Joule Yard (seventh to eleventh centuries) and Spital Field (twelfth to fifteenth), five from a seventh-century cemetery at Wigber Low, and two from the Iron Age site of Eldon Hole.

Lead in teeth is measured in parts per million (ppm), and according to the study values below 0.5 ppm reflect natural background levels, while anything above 0.6 to 0.7 ppm points to human activity.

“All but one of the medieval individuals had lead concentrations of more than 10ppm,” the authors write, “indicating substantial anthropogenic lead exposure in childhood.” Four of the 15 medieval people had levels above 40 ppm.

Even in the seventh century, the team says, the most exposed children in these Derbyshire mining communities carried as much lead as people in industrial cities of about 1750 to 1850, or more.

At Wigber Low, the pattern seemed to follow rank. A man buried in the seventh century with a sixth-century sword, probably an heirloom, had just 2 ppm, about what people in Iron Age and Roman cemeteries outside lead regions carried.

A young woman from the same cemetery, who died at about 17, had 69.1 ppm. A man in an unfurnished grave, who may have grown up in western Britain, had 29.5 ppm.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

Most of the Russian ships were unregistered and sailed without transponders

November 1st, 2026

As recently as the summer of 2026, hundreds of Russian tankers and dry cargo ships plied the Sea of Azov and the adjacent Black Sea:

Most of the Russian ships were unregistered and sailed without transponders, making them a kind of regional adjunct of Moscow’s “shadow fleet” that ships Russian oil and other goods to the global market in defiance of international sanctions.

The Black Sea shadow fleet has, or had, a more limited remit. It helped supply Russian forces in southern Ukraine—in particular, the Crimean Peninsula, which functions as a kind of unsinkable aircraft carrier for Russian air power.

On July 7, Ukraine’s deep strike drone force finally started hunting the Russian ships—starting with the tankers that represented the bulk of the shadow fleet. By day five of the counter-shipping effort, the Ukrainians had hit and damaged no fewer than 76 tankers and even a few tugboats sent to assist the damaged tankers.

“To be clear, 76 tankers comprise a massive fraction of Russia’s shadow fleet” of unregistered ships, RAND analyst Michael Bohnert explained. “At this rate, in two weeks, there will be next to no Russian tankers in the Black Sea,” Bohnert predicted.

In fact, it took a bit longer for Ukrainian drones to effectively erase Russian shipping from the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. But they did do so—mostly with propeller-driven Fire Point FP-1s and FP-2s. After four weeks, the drones had struck more than 200 Russian ships: the majority of the regional shadow fleet.

The basic, $50,000 FP-1 carries a 130-pound warhead 600 miles under satellite, 5G and mesh radio control. Trading range for firepower, the FP-2 carries a 440-pound warhead out to a distance of around 120 miles.

Upgraded versions of both the FP-1 and FP-2 extended the range of each and also added A.I.-assisted targeting that helped the drones strike ships’ bridges and machinery without also penetrating their hulls and risking environmentally damaging oil spills.

Absent a strong Russian response, the Black Sea countershipping campaign could have ended in a decisive victory for Ukraine. The problem for the Ukrainians is that the Russians also have drones—and, equally importantly, a substantial inventory of cruise and ballistic missiles.

Posted in War | 1 Comment »

Boo!

October 31st, 2026

I’ve written about Halloween and horror quite a bit over the years:

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Hilger is willing to say truths that are often not said

October 30th, 2026

Almost everyone, Alex Tabarrock notes, will find something to hate about The Parent Trap:

Hilger argues that the problems of poverty, pathology and inequality that bedevil the United States are not primarily due to poor schools, discrimination, or low incomes per se. The primary cause is parents: parents who are unable to teach their children the skills that are necessary to succeed in the modern world. Since parents can’t teach the necessary skills, Hilger calls for the state to take their place with a dramatic expansion of not just child care but collective parenting.

I can’t imagine why those parents might be unable to teach their children the skills that are necessary to succeed in the modern world.

No matter what you saw on The Wire, Baltimore spends more than sixteen thousand dollars per student, among the highest in the nation in large school districts and above average for the nation as a whole. Public schools are quite egalitarian in funding with any bias running towards more funding for poorer districts.

Schools, Hilger writes are “actually the smallest and most equalizing part of a much larger skill-building system.” The real problem, says Hilger, are parents.

[…]

In the twentieth century, Asians, Hilger argues, were discriminated against in the United States at least much as Black Americans. But the Asians that came to the United States had high skills while the legacy of slavery meant that Black Americans began with low skills. Asians, therefore, were better able to overcome discrimination.

Yes, those Chinese railroad workers were known for their immense human capital.

Parental investment is surely important but Hilger overstates his case. He writes as if poorer parents have neither the abilities nor the time to teach their children while richer, better educated parents simply invest lots of hours and money imbuing their children with skills.

[…]

The parental investment story also doesn’t fit my experience. I didn’t spend six hours a week helping my kids with their homework. I doubt most parents do. I simply assumed my kids would do their work. I do recall that we signed my kids up for tutoring at Kumon, the Japanese math education center. My kids would complain bitterly when we took them for drill on the weekend. It was mostly filling out rote forms and my kids would hide or bury their drill sheets so we were always behind. Driving my kids to the Kumon center, monitoring them. and forcing them to do the work when they rebelled like longshoreman on work-to-rule was time consuming and it was ruining our weekends. I felt guilty, but after a while, my wife and I gave up. Today one of my sons is a civil engineer and the other is a math and economics major at UVA.

At this point in the book, Tabarrok notes, it was almost inevitable that we were going to get yet another paean to the Perry Preschool Project:

The Perry Preschool project started in the 1960s and had just 123 participants (58 in treatment and 65 in control!). There are more papers about the Perry Preschool project than there were participants. I am jaded.

Aside from the small sample size, the project had imperfect randomization and missing data and most importantly limited external validity. The Perry Preschool project treated a small group of disadvantaged African American children with low-IQs (IQs of 70-85 were part of the selection criteria). The treatment is usually described as “active learning pre-school” but it was more intrusive than that. Every week counselors would go to the homes of the kids to teach the parents (mostly mothers) how to raise their children. The training was important to the program. Indeed, Hilger notes, without sense of irony, that “facilitating greater skill growth in low-income children was so complicated that it required home visitors with advanced postsecondary degrees.” (p. 89). And what were the results?

The results were good! (Heckman et al. 2010, Belfield et al. 2006). But in the popular literature the impression one gets is that the program took a bunch of disadvantaged kids and helped them read and write, making them more middle-class and successful. Some of that happened but the big gains actually happened because the participants, especially the boys, were so socially dangerous and destructive that even a bit of normalization made life substantially better for everyone else. In particular 82% of the treated group of 33 males had been arrested by age 40, including for one murder, 4 rapes, 8 robberies, 11 assaults and 14 burglaries. The control group were worse. In the control group of 39 males there were 2 murders. Indeed the reduction of one murder in the treatment group accounts for a significant benefit of the entire Perry PreSchool project.

Hilger, to his credit, is reasonably clear that what is really needed is an intensive program for disadvantaged African Americans, especially males.

Tabarrok hated much of the book, but “Hilger is willing to say truths that are often not said and for that I would rather applaud than cancel.”

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | No Comments »

There’s no safe place for ammo dumps or command posts

October 29th, 2026

Drone-guided artillery strikes have made Ukraine the graveyard of command posts:

On tomorrow’s battlefield, there’s no safe place for ammo dumps or command posts. Drones will buzz constantly overhead, AI-powered algorithms searching for any sign of life — movement, body heat, wireless signals — that they can target for precision strike. So how can commanders and their staffs survive this new threat, when their very function requires communication?

Ditch that smartphone. Hide in a basement. Turn off every radio you can. Use electronic warfare sensors to scan your own troops for detectable transmissions and shut them off. Offload every function you can to higher headquarters further out of range, transmitting only essential data through an encrypted cloud.

Break up big staffs, like the 200-plus personnel in a divisional Main Command Post, into half a dozen smaller “sub-nodes,” each hiding in a different building or hastily dug bunker, communicating with each other not over Wi-Fi or tactical radio but over ruggedized fiber optic cables a quarter-mile (400 meters) long, unspooled by soldiers through the shelling-shattered windows and rubbled streets.

And every few hours, one of the sub-nodes takes its turn to shut down for a few hours and move a few hundred yards — never too far for those fiber cables — so that, within a day, the entire formation has relocated, slithering undetected across the battlefield like an amoeba.

That’s the prescription from the US Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, helmed by Lt. Gen. Milford Beagle, a South Carolinian who’s served everywhere from Afghanistan and Iraq to South Korea.

Posted in Technology, War | No Comments »

3 lessons from past lab accidents

October 28th, 2026

Alison Young shares 3 lessons from past lab accidents:

Lab workers can be infected without a recognized accident

Initial local media reports said Shipilova broke a test tube before becoming ill, but Russian authorities have since told the WHO that no biosecurity incidents occurred in the laboratory.

Studies of lab-acquired infections have documented for decades that when workers become infected, they often can’t recall having any kind of exposure incident.

As far back as the 1950s, studies found that just 16% of lab worker infections involved recognized accidents.

[…]

Infected workers may not realize their illness came from their lab

Initial Russian media reports, which government authorities dispute, suggested that Shipilova died from pneumonic plague. This lung infection can be lethal if not treated within 24 hours of initial symptoms, which include shortness of breath and coughing.

It remains unknown what killed Shipilova or whether her lab work played a role. Before she died with severe pneumonia, her illness seemed like a typical respiratory infection, Russian health officials told the WHO earlier this month. Tests didn’t detect any microorganisms associated with her work, Russian authorities have said.

[…]

When a tularemia researcher at the prestigious U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases — often referred to as USAMRIID — started feeling ill with a fever, chills, and headache in 2009, she never alerted the lab’s medical team because she assumed she had just caught something from her children, who also were sick.

[…]

That same year University of Chicago plague researcher Malcolm Casadaban died after becoming infected with a weakened form of the Yersinia pestis bacteria he was studying. This particular strain was not known to cause lab infections or fatalities.

[…]

The public rarely learns the details of laboratory accidents

As I report in my book, “Pandora’s Gamble,” there is no universal, mandatory system for reporting lab accidents and lab-associated infections. Not in the U.S. or worldwide.

There also isn’t any comprehensive system to analyze biosafety breaches and share lessons learned so that safety can be improved. This makes it difficult to know how often accidents happen and how often workers become infected.

The 2025 systematic review of published reports during 2000 to 2024 identified 712 laboratory-acquired infections worldwide, including 276 infections and eight deaths involving research facilities. The researchers cautioned that the findings are likely an underestimate because biosafety lapses occur more frequently than are reported.

[…]

For example, after the critical lab waste sterilization plant serving USAMRIID at the Army’s Fort Detrick in Maryland suffered a catastrophic leak in 2018, the government assured the public that no safety threat occurred.

Only through months of digging into the government records behind the official statements was I able to report that a leaking tank had spewed thousands of gallons of unsterilized lab wastewater into an area with an open storm drain that emptied into a public waterway. While no illnesses were connected to the event, community leaders expressed concern about how they’d been kept in the dark about the extent of the incident.

USAMRIID used to publish some statistics about its lab incidents online. But the data was removed in 2022, around the time I was asking officials why more recent data hadn’t been posted. At that time, USAMRIID said the removal was part of a website update. A spokesperson for USAMRIID did not answer questions last week about why the institute hasn’t resumed posting the statistics.

Russia has its own history of concealing laboratory accidents. After dozens were killed by an accidental anthrax release from a Soviet biological weapons facility in Sverdlovsk in 1979, Soviet authorities blamed contaminated meat. It wasn’t until 1992 that the government acknowledged the outbreak was caused by military bioweapons research.

Posted in Policy, Science | No Comments »

A telltale sign of bird flu infection in humans is eye redness

October 27th, 2026

The strain of bird flu that’s ripped through American barns for the last four years has killed two people who caught it from sick animals, but as far as anyone can tell, humans can’t spread it:

The virus has remained a true “bird” flu, tailored to attach to avian cells, not invade human throats and noses, where coughing and sneezing reliably spew droplets.

Under the right conditions, however, that could change. A single mutation could give the bird flu a foothold in people and spark a pandemic that experts fear could be deadlier than COVID-19.

For that to happen, this bird flu would likely need to find an intermediate host — an animal vulnerable to viruses that infect both birds and humans. These animals would be crowded together, each infection raising the odds that a new strain could arise through mutation. Then, for that strain to jump across species, it would have to have access to humans and time to spread among them undetected.

That perfect petri dish exists right now, a ProPublica investigation found. For over two months, an outbreak of bird flu has raged uncontrolled on a Utah farm that raises thousands of mink for fur. Mink have lungs and airways that on a cellular level are remarkably similar to those of people; they have caught and spread other flus and infected some humans with COVID-19.

[…]

Utah agriculture officials learned in mid-August that mink were dying of bird flu on C&T Fenn Farms, about an hour’s drive south from Salt Lake City, according to communications released under the state’s public records law.

Had poultry been infected, the playbook would have been clear: The strain is so virulent that if a single chicken tests positive, the U.S. government requires farmers to kill the whole flock to protect other farms as well as public health. Poultry farmers are reimbursed for the loss.

But there are no federal rules for how to deal with sick mink.

[…]

A telltale sign of bird flu infection in humans is eye redness. It is present in over 90% of cases and is often the sole symptom a person displays.

Last Saturday, a ProPublica reporter tracked down two people who worked at the Utah mink farm. One had a visibly red eye.

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

The idea was to “follow through” on the promise of Head Start

October 26th, 2026

Sold a Story Season 2, Episode 3 looks at Project Follow Through, The Forgotten Experiment:

The idea was to “follow through” on the promise of Head Start.

The study began in 1968. And lasted nearly a decade. It was one of the largest educational experiments in the history of the world. Nearly 60 years later, that’s still the case.

And Project Follow Through ended up providing some answers. Some information that could have influenced the direction of American education.

But it didn’t.

[…]

The government initially focused its data collection on basic academic skills. That worried the developers of some of the other programs. They thought it would give Direct Instruction an unfair advantage.

[…]

In response to complaints, the government added other measures. There were tests that looked beyond basic skills to things like abstract reasoning and problem solving. And there were measures to assess things like self-confidence and attitudes about school and learning.

[…]

The first year of data arrived on their desks. And it did not look good. In fact, it looked so bad that they decided — we can’t let people see this.

[…]

It showed that students in the Follow Through models were not doing better than students in traditional classrooms. Some of them were doing worse. That was bad news for the government because the goal was to find better approaches.

[…]

The government collected data for nearly 10 years. It had test scores and other information about more than 350,000 students in thousands of classrooms all over the country.

[…]

The government’s evaluation showed that Direct Instruction had outperformed all the other models.

It had done especially well compared to the other models when it came to math, reading and spelling skills. Exactly what Direct Instruction was trying to do.

But it had also done well when it came to things like abstract reasoning and problem-solving.

And perhaps the biggest surprise? Direct Instruction performed the best on those measures of self-confidence and how kids felt about school and learning.

[…]

The data showed that Direct Instruction was the only model that had positive results in every category that was measured. In all the other models, the kids did worse — on average — on at least one set of measures.

[…]

According to the government’s evaluation, the models that didn’t succeed — on average — had some schools that did relatively well. The teachers, the coaches, the principals — they made it work.

And the models that did succeed — on average — didn’t succeed everywhere. Even Direct Instruction had schools where things did not go well, where kids did not do better.

And that’s what Ernest House and his group focused on in their critique of the government’s evaluation.

[…]

Project Follow Through had not revealed a program that worked equally well everywhere, every time it was implemented. And for that reason, Ernest House and his group concluded that there was no Project Follow Through winner. There couldn’t be a victor.

[…]

After the critique by Gene Glass and Ernest House, the government did two things.

Number one: It started giving more money to the Follow Through models that had not done well. The rationale was that those models needed more support, more time to prove themselves.

And number two: The Office of Education shifted its focus from highlighting successful Follow Through models to highlighting successful Follow Through schools.

By doing this, it was possible for the government to showcase many of the Follow Through models because most of them had a school somewhere that was doing reasonably well.

[…]

The model that did the best — after nearly a decade with lots of kids in lots of schools in one of the largest education studies of all time — was a highly structured program that relied on carefully sequenced lessons and didn’t expect students to discover things on their own.

It was an answer. But it was not an answer a lot of people wanted to hear.

Posted in Education, Policy | 1 Comment »

The core of the original Project Maven was spotting potential terrorist targets in mind-numbing hours of drone surveillance video

October 25th, 2026

Pentagon planners and military staffs made unprecedented use of artificial intelligence during the 38-day air war against Iran:

“Operation Epic Fury leveraged Palantir’s Maven Smart System in order to conduct strike missions across the entire battle space, 13,000 targets in 38 days,” the Pentagon’s Chief Digital & AI Officer (CDAO), Cameron Stanley, told the SCSP AI+Expo Thursday, adding that troops have shown an “insatiable appetite” for the tech. “[AI tools] allow us to take all of this data, synthesize the data, and make better decisions, faster, on the battlefield.”

MSS is an AI tool suite that evolved from the original Project Maven experiment to a multi-purpose military planning tool built by contractor Palantir. (A separate offshoot of Maven is run by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.)

During Epic Fury, MSS saw unclassified usage surge by 38 percent and classified usage by 89 percent, a Pentagon spokesperson told Breaking Defense, measuring month-to-month. Measured by “tokens,” the individual mathematical operations underlying generative AI, peak daily usage rose 4,425 percent.

At one point, the spokesperson told Breaking Defense, daily usage hit approximately 20 billion tokens. For comparison, in civilian contexts, a single question-and-answer with a chatbot can require several hundred tokens, while an individual power user with a high-level paid account — someone using AI to write code, for instance — can burn up to a quarter-million tokens a day.

[…]

The core of the original Project Maven was spotting potential terrorist targets in mind-numbing hours of drone surveillance video, for instance. But over time, the toolkit has expanded into what contractor Palantir calls “a live, synchronized view of the battlespace” that “enables synchronized mission planning and execution” and features “automated object detection” and “centralized target identification and management.”

The tech analyzes complex combinations of video, satellite imagery, and other highly technical sources of intelligence, according to Palantir and published reports. Maven Smart System can also sift through vast libraries of intelligence reports and draft summaries or potential future courses of action, the Pentagon spokesperson told Breaking Defense.

Posted in Technology, War | 3 Comments »

It’s just carving with a laser

October 24th, 2026

Hundreds of thousands of Americans undergo corrective eye procedures each year, including LASIK, which uses a laser to reshape the cornea and improve how the eye focuses light, but now researchers are investigating a very different approach:

Michael Hill, a professor of chemistry at Occidental College, puts it more bluntly: “LASIK is just a fancy way of doing traditional surgery. It’s still carving tissue — it’s just carving with a laser.”

[…]

Hill and collaborator Brian Wong are studying a technique called electromechanical reshaping (EMR). Rather than physically removing tissue, EMR uses a small electric potential to temporarily alter the chemical environment inside the tissue.

“The whole effect was discovered by accident,” explains Wong, a professor and surgeon at the University of California, Irvine. “I was looking at living tissues as moldable materials and discovered this whole process of chemical modification.”

The approach takes advantage of the chemistry that helps tissues maintain their shape.

The cornea contains large amounts of collagen, a structural protein also found in skin, cartilage, tendons, and other tissues. Within collagen-rich tissue, electrically charged components attract one another and help hold the structure firmly in place.

Because these tissues also contain a large amount of water, applying an electric potential can change their pH. The pH scale measures how acidic or basic something is. Lowering the pH makes the tissue more acidic and temporarily weakens some of the electrical attractions that keep its structure rigid.

During that brief window, the tissue becomes easier to reshape. Once its normal pH returns, those interactions are restored and the tissue can remain in its new form.

Researchers had previously used EMR to reshape cartilage-rich rabbit ears and to modify scars and skin in pigs. The cornea was an especially intriguing target because its precise curvature determines how effectively the eye focuses light.

For the new experiments, the researchers built specialized platinum “contact lenses” designed to act as molds for the desired corneal shape.

They placed the lenses over rabbit eyeballs immersed in a saline solution intended to mimic natural tears. Because platinum conducts electricity, the lens also functioned as an electrode. When a small electric potential was applied, it produced a carefully controlled change in pH inside the cornea.

Within about a minute, the curvature of the cornea shifted to match the shape of the platinum lens.

That is roughly comparable to the amount of time involved in the laser portion of LASIK, but the experimental EMR method required no incision and potentially could use simpler, less expensive equipment.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

It now costs less than $100k to synthesize a pathogen

October 23rd, 2026

Biology is becoming programmable:

Two compounding technological trends are rapidly democratizing dual-use biotechnology: the cost of bioengineering is falling, and AI models are getting better at biology.

Together, they’re lowering the barrier to engineering bioweapons. It now costs <$100k to synthesize a pathogen, AI models are able to outperform experts on benchwork troubleshooting evaluations, and tools like AlphaFold and Evo2 are changing our ability to understand and engineer biology at will.

AI scales offense significantly faster than defense: the physical infrastructure to defend against biological threats does not scale by Moore’s law, but AI lab assistance and the quality of AI biological design tools might.

We are transitioning into a new regime, one where highly-resourced state actors, as well as unsophisticated and under-resourced actors, may be able to synthesize a pathogen far more dangerous than a natural virus.

Our current defenses are inadequate for this paradigm, and engineered bioweapons present a significant threat.

[…]

We break down global biosecurity into a stack of defense layers: Delay, Detect, Withstand, and Combat. We have also included two under-discussed enabling layers: Field-building and Policy & Regulatory.

[…]

Bioweapons are also not a new problem, but we have no effective policy in place to stop them.

For example, the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) was meant to end state bioweapons programs. While its overall effect may have been positive, it has no oversight or enforcement mechanism.

The international unit responsible for supporting the Biological Weapons Convention runs on a $2.2M annual budget with 4 staff. For context, the average U.S. McDonald’s restaurant takes in ~$4M/year.
As they signed the BWC, agreeing not to build bioweapons, the Soviets concurrently expanded their bioweapons program. The Biopreparat program ran for two decades after the treaty, employing tens of thousands of scientists and weaponizing anthrax, plague, and smallpox at industrial scale. They also built stockpiles of vaccines for their own population.

[…]

In a pandemic scenario, costs compound exponentially with the spread of the pathogen. Every day that passes before countermeasure deployment could mean tens of thousands of lives lost. Detection is the layer that gives every other intervention more runway.

The COVID-19 timeline shows the current system’s failure. The first documented cases occurred in Wuhan in early December 2019, but the sequence was not published until January 11th, 2020. When the WHO declared a public health emergency on January 30th, 2020, the virus was already on four continents. Retrospective wastewater analysis later found SARS-CoV-2 in northern Italian samples from December 18th 2019, nine weeks before community transmission was clinically identified at Codogno (La Rosa et al. 2021). This analysis used PCR designed against a published genome, and was therefore able to provide a sensitivity that current metagenomic surveillance for a novel pathogen would not have. However, it is possible that surveillance technology could be developed to achieve something closer to that level of sensitivity, even for novel pathogens.

If there had been wastewater surveillance approaching that level of sensitivity in Wuhan at the time, we could have added ~1 month of time to develop countermeasures and prepare our critical infrastructure for the outbreak, including distributing personal protective equipment (PPE) to critical care workers and ramping up manufacturing capacity.

If the system is unprepared for a pathogen like SARS-CoV-2, it is completely unprepared for an advanced bioweapon.

[…]

Advanced bioweapons enabled by AI could spread with extreme infection rates, often referred to as the “wildfire“ pandemic scenario, or they could spread silently, often referred to as the “stealth” pandemic scenario.

[…]

Pathogens designed to spread asymptomatically with long incubation times will be invisible to the current system, which detects pathogens through clinical surveillance.

The current system is set into motion by some threshold of patients seeking care or clinicians noticing unusual patterns, meaning one or more transmission generations have likely already elapsed. If a patient tests negative for known pathogens, their samples are not sent for metagenomic (agnostic) sequencing by default. In fact, their samples are not sent until a clinician decides to escalate after a prolonged period of ineffective standard treatments, worsening conditions, or unusual deaths, giving bioweapon-class pathogens weeks to spread, especially if designed to do so quietly.

To detect advanced bioweapons, a pathogen-agnostic surveillance system must be built.

Posted in Policy, Science, War | No Comments »

The vertical hand-me-down of culture from previous generations is being replaced by a flood of horizontal transmission

October 22nd, 2026

When Jon Haidt arrived at the University of Virginia in September 1995 for his first academic job, he was assigned to teach Psych 101, a large lecture class:

I found myself inserting quotations from ancient writings, East and West, to show that there is continuity and some degree of universality in humanity’s experience of being human. The ancients knew little worth preserving about physics or chemistry, but they sure were insightful about consciousness, relationships, suffering, and human nature more broadly.

Once I had been granted tenure in 2001 and had the freedom to follow my curiosity, I decided to write a book about ancient wisdom. I would categorize it and analyze it through the lens of modern psychology. Five years later, I published The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.

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As people spend ever less time reading books and ever more time watching very short videos, the vertical hand-me-down of culture from previous generations is being replaced by a flood of horizontal transmission, mostly low quality content that was made recently and will be forgotten momentarily, along with everything else that passes by in an hour of mindless scrolling. As AI begins to create much—and eventually most—of the content we all consume, the loss of connection to the past will accelerate, and people will be increasingly cut off from everything humanity has learned, or felt, or judged to be worth keeping around.

Posted in Education, Policy | 2 Comments »

The human gut microbiome primes fever after vaccination

October 21st, 2026

People differ markedly in their adverse responses to vaccination, but this variation is not well understood:

The gut microbiome has been implicated in adaptive immune responses to vaccination; we hypothesized that interactions between commensal gut microbes and the immune system may influence the risk of adverse inflammatory vaccine reactions.

The µHEAT (Microbial-Human Ecology and Temperature) Study longitudinally tracked 171 healthy young adults receiving severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 mRNA vaccines. Thrice-daily oral temperature records were used to quantify fever, and fecal and serum samples were collected for microbiome and immune profiling. We found that fever had very little effect on the microbiome; by contrast, fever-positive participants displayed chronic low-grade intestinal inflammation and a microbiome characterized by high expression of bacterial flagellins, both pre- and postvaccination. Microbiomes from fever-positive participants induced heightened inflammatory responses in human colonic organoids and exacerbated acute vaccine responses when transplanted into gnotobiotic mice, and this was dependent on sensing of bacterial flagellin through host innate immune receptors. Moreover, microbial flagellin production was modifiable by diet: Dietary additives increased bacterial flagellin production in vitro, and a Western-style diet exacerbated vaccine reactions in mice. Consistent with this, fever was associated with dietary and metabolic markers in humans. Although interventional human studies are needed to establish causality, this suggests that diet modification could be a viable strategy to influence microbiome-dependent vaccine responses.

Posted in Science | 1 Comment »

Oppenheimer and coworkers suggest that Yak X is a different species from present-day wild or domesticated yaks

October 20th, 2026

They’re calling it “Yak X”:

The genetic data are described by Jonas Oppenheimer and a team led by Love Dalén, from bovid bone fragments of Denisova Cave and other nearby sites in the Altai and southern Siberia. Among these faunal collections are small pieces of twenty individuals of an unknown branch of yaks.

Based on comparisons with known yaks and other cattle relatives, Oppenheimer and coworkers suggest that Yak X is a different species from present-day wild or domesticated yaks (Bos mutus and Bos grunniens, respectively). That conclusion is based upon the extent of mitochondrial lineage separation and the lack of evidence of introgression or mixture in the nuclear genomes. None of the bone fragments in the study themselves provide enough anatomical information to assess any differences from living yaks.

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Even though bison and cattle separated from common ancestors more than 2.5 million years ago, interbreeding between these species is possible, with some hybrid sterility of males. Breeders over time have bred bison genes into many breeds of cattle, including the American Beefalo breed.

Almost all herds of living American bison (Bison bison) have some cattle genes, which were introduced into wild bison to varying degrees during the late nineteenth century as bison populations were extirpated in much of the continent. These cattle genes are usually responsible for the light pigmentation that leads to the occasional birth of a “white bison”. Sometimes portrayed as a supernatural sign, the pigmentation really does indicate something new introduced by European influence on this classic North American mammal.

Cattle themselves were domesticated from six or more wild populations that are usually classified as different species by zoologists. Taurine cattle (Bos taurus) are most common in western Eurasia, China, and Mediterranean Africa and the zebu (Bos indicus) in much of South Asia, with varying mixture of zebu into taurine cattle across most of sub-Saharan Africa. Zebu have been mixed with gaur (Bos gaurus), kouprey (Bos sauveli), and gayal (Bos frontalis) in cattle breeds of southeast Asia. In Indonesia, varying mixtures with banteng (Bos javanicus) occur in domesticated breeds. The common ancestry of taurine and zebu cattle is Middle Pleistocene, around 500,000 to 250,000 years ago, with the common ancestor generally identified as the Pleistocene aurochs (Bos primigenius).

All these cattle bred from different wild populations are interfertile. Their male offspring are fertile, making them different from bison-cattle hybrids, where males usually are not fertile. Still, livestock breeders pay a lot of attention to fertility, and hybrids have some fertility depression compared to purebred animals

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There are no real reproductive boundaries; only gradients and local breeds maintained by human selection. For many, the solution to the species problem is that domestication makes them an exception to the rules of speciation. If you’re like me, you likely aren’t happy with an answer that looks like an asterisk.

Yaks diverged from bison during the Early Pleistocene, around 2 million years ago. Yak and North American bison can produce hybrids, sometimes called yakalo. Males are generally infertile, as for bison-cattle hybrids, but breeders have rarely but breeders have crossed them and there have been few studies of hybrids.

Yak populations may have been in contact with Eurasian bison during the Pleistocene but there is no genomic evidence of historic interbreeding between them.

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Altitude tolerance in yaks has been brought into Tibetan cattle breeds, along with disease resistance, coat length, and other traits. Domestic yaks carry introgressed cattle genes, adding up to five percent of their genome in some breeds. That includes a number of selected traits, notably pigmentation.

In terms of classification, yaks, bison, and cattle present a genus problem. All kinds of cattle are classified within Bos, and yaks generally are also. Both Eurasian and North American bison have historically been classified within their own genus, Bison. This classification makes the genus Bos straddle the Bison branch, what systematists call paraphyly. That’s a no-no in modern classification, and researchers have tried to solve it in two different ways. One is to put yaks into their own genus, Poephagus. The other is to lump all the species into Bos, including the bison species, which would then be Bos bison and Bos bonasus. I point out this taxonomic tangle because paraphyly is another classification challenge that bovines share with hominins.