I did not publish this dreck

May 21, 2026 • 8:30 am

A reader sent me this “paper” and asked me if I really wrote it. It is not only garbage, but, in parts, complete gibberish.

I’ll use this space to assert that NO, THIS IS A FAKE.  The “Journal of Evolutionary Genetics and Adaptation” does not exist. Googling it yields no results, and asking Grok yields this:

No, there is no journal titled Journal of Evolutionary Genetics and Adaptation (or any close variant like Journal of Evolutionary Genetics).

Searches across academic databases, journal lists, and publishers turn up zero results for a journal by that exact (or near-exact) name. No ISSN, publisher page, or official record exists for it.

There is an American Journal of Science, mentioned as the place I published this garbage, but it is an earth sciences journal devoted to geology. I’ve never published in it.

Although the content below is opaque, it may be an attempt to say I’ve worked on the developmental genetics of skin color in some bizarre species, which may be a guilt-by association thing with racism. Who knows?

At any rate, I’m making this post only to assert, for the record, that what is below is a complete fabrication. It appears to be the product of an addled mind.

Click on the picture if you want to see some lunacy:

 

Thursday: Hili dialogue

May 21, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, May 21, 2026, and Hummus Day (the third Thursday in May). Didn’t we just have one? Well, it’s good stuff, and I ate a ton of it when I visited Israel in 2023.  Here’s a nice plate from Jerusalem with plenty of tahini in it:

It’s also American Red Cross Founder’s Day, International Chardonnay Day, International Tea Day, National Apéritif Day, and National Strawberries and Cream Day.

While traveling, reader Bill sent me this photo of a handmade metal mallard he saw on sale in a shop.  I wrote, “I WANT IT!”, and he asked if I wanted to buy it through him. Of course I did, and he bought it, wrapped it carefully, and sent it to me. (I reimbursed him.) It now reposes on a cabinet overlooking my office. Isn’t it beautiful? All the feathers are metal, too, forged separately:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 21 Wikipedia page.

Oh, I had a dream last night, and again it was a weird one.  This time I was walking in the middle of two long, long rows of Army tents.  Between the rows of tends were two long rows of picnic tables, all occupied by soldiers. And all the soldiers were eating–tins of mussels!  The tins were flat and had to be opened with a key, like sardines.  But the contents were not just the meat of mussels, but the entire gastropod, shell and all. As I walked down the row of soldiers, all I could hear was the opening of tins and crunching of shells: a real cacophony.  Why I had this dream I had no idea.

Da Nooz:

*I can’t believe this has happened. Trump made a deal with the Internal Revenue Service that he would give up his lawsuit against the IRS but, in return, gain immunity from being investigated and prosecuted FOR ALL TIME for any tax dealings. Further, the government agreed to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to be used to compensate people who, Trump thinks, were wrongly persecuted or investigated (read: January 6 insurrectionists). Oy gewalt! Read and weep (article is archived here):

The Justice Department has granted President Trump, his family and businesses immunity from ongoing inquiries into their taxes, a potentially lucrative arrangement that could shield the president from significant financial liability.

The provision, quietly inserted on Tuesday as a supplement to a remarkable deal that also created a $1.8 billion fund aimed at benefiting Mr. Trump’s allies, protects the president, his relatives and his businesses from pending audits and tax prosecutions.

The one-page document, signed by the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” pending tax claims against Mr. Trump, his family members and businesses.

The provision invited immediate criticism as tax experts raised the possibility that it was illegal.

That the addendum to the deal was posted, without fanfare, on the department’s website belied its bare-knuckled audacity. It revealed the determination of Mr. Trump and his appointees to ram through maximalist measures with minimum outside scrutiny at a moment when they still have uncontested control of government.

The provision was the latest in a series of maneuvers this week that blurred the all-but-vanished boundary between official department business and the private interests of a president intent on using his power to extract financial gain from the federal government for himself and his allies.

A day earlier, Mr. Trump agreed to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the I.R.S. in exchange for the establishment of a fund for people he believes were wronged by federal investigations or prosecutions.

Justice Department officials had in part defended the creation of the fund by pointing to the fact that Mr. Trump and his family members would not be paid by it.

But protection from audit could be quite financially beneficial for Mr. Trump, who has always said that there was no wrongdoing in his tax filings. In 2024, The New York Times reported that a loss in an I.R.S. audit could cost Mr. Trump more than $100 million.

It is unclear if that examination has concluded or if Mr. Trump, his family members or affiliated entities are under other audits. I.R.S. procedures call for the mandatory audit of the president’s tax returns annually.

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal ponders the ethics and efficacy of assassinating leaders like the Ayatollah Khamenei.

Much like the movie Groundhog Day, Washington and Jerusalem—from the think tanks to the command bunkers—are once again grappling with the exact same question they have faced before: Should Khamenei be assassinated? This time, however, it’s Mojtaba, not Ali. Other than that, almost everything is exactly the same.

In the heat of events, the fact that Israel had—for the first time in its history—killed the leader of an enemy state was overshadowed. The country had rehearsed the assassination of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 1992, but ultimately, due to an operational disaster, the mission did not materialize. It also toyed with the targeted killing of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat in 2002. Uri Dan, a confidant of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, recounted asking him if Arafat had died naturally two years later. Sharon replied: “It’s better not to talk about it.” The United States had imposed an absolute veto on an overt assassination.

In 2026, the United States coordinated with Israel on the assassination of the leader of a country with nearly one hundred million residents, hoping to destabilize the regime’s foundations. That hope was partially fulfilled, or partially disappointed, depending on how you look at the glass. On the one hand, the undisputed, top-down control vanished. Iran sank into an internal battle, evident in attacks on the Gulf states that completely defied the political echelon’s position. The replacement son is pale, corrupt and wounded; it is doubtful whether he is leading or merely being dragged.

On the other hand, there is still a command structure; there is still someone to lean on. As long as there is an ayatollah named Khamenei, Iran maintains the facade of a functioning state. President Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Araghchi do allow themselves to deviate slightly from the supreme leader’s rigid line on the nuclear issue—something they would never dare do during his father’s time—but they do not dare deviate much.

So in the war games, here is the dilemma: On one hand, Mojtaba is the last survivor, the only remaining natural heir. If he is assassinated, Iran could sink into leadership chaos that might help the more moderate wing secure an agreement. This is what Israel attempted in the Doha strike last September. It fired advanced missiles at the building housing the more recalcitrant wing of Hamas, the faction that had thwarted a hostage deal.

On the other hand, it’s not as if there are true moderates in Iran. If there is no Khamenei, no Anwar Sadat is waiting in the wings. Without him, there is the danger of securing an agreement that looks good on paper but is not fundamentally different from Barack Obama’s. Mossad Director David Barnea used to tell his American counterparts how, in the previous decade, the administration allayed his fears by arguing, “Who knows what will happen in the long term, in 2026, when the agreement begins to expire.” Well, here we are in 2026—welcome to the long term. Even if a different leadership agrees to freeze the nuclear program for 15 years, 2041 will eventually arrive just the same.

In short, a severe dilemma.

But it’s not clear whether Mojtaba is even alive, as he hasn’t been seen since the airstrike that killed his father on Febraury 28. Or he may be in a coma, or simply staying out of sight. But it would have been possible, if he were sentient, for him to release a video whose location could not be identified. I think he’s out of action, whether dead or comatose. Segal does, however, characterize the dilemma aptly. Even if Mojtaba is dead, there are no “moderates” to replace him.  If they can pretend a dead man is still alive, they can pretend there’s still an Ayatollah calling the shots. Israel would not only have to kill him, but also prove that they did, which is very difficult.

*This tweet by Maarten Boudry called my attention to a new NYT op-ed by Bret Stephens, “Hatred of Israel and the degradation of the West” First the tweet

Excerpts from Stephens, a good palliative to the odious Nicholas Kristof, which he alludes to at the beginning:

[Israel] is not a country of saints. As is true of every other country, the United States not least, plenty of sins past and present can be laid at Israel’s door. They include allegations, by Israelis and others, regarding cases of abuse of prisoners in Israeli jails. Those cases should be thoroughly investigated, just as in the United States the 8,628 allegations of staff-committed sexual misconduct victimizing adult inmates tallied in 2020 alone by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics need to be deeply investigated.

Yet this kind of good-faith criticism of Israeli leaders and policy has for years been giving way to something darker. It’s a hyperbolic and often conspiratorial hatred of the country. It’s a belief that Israelis are perpetually out for the blood of their enemies, even when it comes at the cost of the blood of their friends. It’s the sense that it’s socially acceptable to boycott, assail and sometimes assault Israelis for the supposed sins of their government. It’s a conviction that Israel, alone among the nations, was a mistake to begin with and has no right to exist now.

None of these impulses are justified indictments of Israel. They are indictments of the indicters. More broadly, the fashionable frenzy that is today’s loathing of Israel, coming from the far right but especially from the far and not-so-far left, is a sign of the degradation of the West. Societies that value critical thinking and reasoned moral judgment do not make a fetish of demonizing one small country and its people while imagining that peace, justice and freedom would somehow be achieved if only the country and its people were made to disappear.

I’ve been closely covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for over 25 years. It’s given me something of a front-row seat to this degradation.

This is a declaration of war on Kristof by Stephens, implying that he is making a fetish of Israel-hatred and abandoning critical thinking. Stephens then gives a lot of stories in which unjust accusations were leveled at Israel, and the stories were later corrected by journalists. I’ll quote more than usual here, as this is an important take on accusations like those made by Kristof, but also by many others:

The common thread in these and many other stories is that they all involve strenuous, if ultimately embarrassed, efforts to prove that Israelis deliberately seek to kill the innocent and maim the vulnerable, apparently for no other reason than gratuitous cruelty. This isn’t a matter of reporters’ impartially trying to expose wrongdoing wherever they find it — if that were the case, the errors wouldn’t invariably lean in the same ideological direction. It isn’t speaking truth to power. It’s feeding narratives to the credulous.

Over time this does at least three kinds of damage.

The least of it is damage to Israel, which has been living under the endless drizzle of orchestrated propaganda and media hostility over the course of its 78 years while still managing to transform itself into a military, technological and economic powerhouse — as well as one of the happiest countries in the world.

A more serious form of damage, paradoxically, is to Palestinians. Israelis have become so inured to the tide of tendentious allegations about their supposed perfidy that they can too easily shrug off real scandals, as it is with West Bank settler violence. And the endless parade of anti-Israel stories too often means the Western media pays too little attention to the domestic tyrannies that are Hamas’s rule in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority’s rule in the West Bank.

But the gravest damage is to Western institutions, particularly those entrusted with the dissemination of hard truths.

That goes not only for journalism, but also once-admired organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which in recent decades have turned themselves into factories of anti-Israel invective. “Major human-rights groups’ shift toward overt opposition to Israel has had the unusual effect of sidelining many of Israel’s own activists, who historically are among the sharpest critics of the Israeli government’s behavior in Gaza and the West Bank,” noted Michael Powell last year in The Atlantic.

It’s a similar story with much of academia, in which the anti-Israel furies stirred by the attacks of Oct. 7 were both a symptom of the broader intellectual rot within them and an invitation to the political and legal blowback from which they are still suffering.

. . . this obsession has contributed to the relative neglect of the region’s other fundamental problems, above all the abiding grip of authoritarian politics in places like Cairo and Ankara and totalitarian religious fundamentalism in Gaza and Tehran. When was the last time you heard of an American campus protest against the treatment of Kurds by Turkey (a NATO ally and longtime beneficiary of U.S. security guarantees), or the genocide in Sudan? Why is this year’s arts biennale in Venice being roiled by the inclusion of Israel, but not of China? Why has the recent report detailing the extensive documentation of systematic use of rape and sexual torture by Hamas and its collaborators received little attention?

These aren’t just questions of hypocrisy or double standards. They are evidence of minds that have lost the capacity to think dispassionately and critically. What we should really be worried about isn’t the future of Israel; it’s the fate of the West.

I can’t help but read this as a critique of his colleague Kristof. Of course Stephens will face all kinds of accusations for this piece, but note that he does call out Israel for things that he really thinks are wrong, like the treatment of Palestinians on the West Bank.  But Stephens is right that this kind of mindless and obsessive accusation of Israel hurts Western institutions, which are already assailed by assucations of genocide, apartheid, and the mindless blatherings of protestors like “Globalize the intifada” that we hear regularly.

*Both the Harvard Crimson and the Wall Street Journal report that, completely against my expectations, Harvard has voted to curb grade inflation by capping the number of A grades in each course. Glory be!

From the Crimson:

Harvard faculty voted to impose a roughly 20 percent cap on A grades beginning in fall 2027, approving the College’s most aggressive attempt in decades to reverse grade inflation and reshape academic standards.

Faculty voted 458 to 201 for the first plank of the three-part proposal, which will limit A grades in undergraduate courses to 20 percent of enrollment, with flexibility for up to four additional A’s.

The measure passed with 69.5 percent of votes cast.

Faculty alsoapproved a companion measure to use average percentile rankings, rather than GPA, to determine internal awards and honors. That measure passed 498 to 157, with 76 percent of participating faculty in favor.

But faculty rejected the proposal’s third plank, which would have allowed courses to petition to opt out of the A cap if they were graded on an unsatisfactory, satisfactory, and satisfactory-plus basis. That measure failed 292 to 364.

This is unclear; my inquiries at Harvard have revealed that what was rejected was a plan that would allow courses now graded either “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” to add the grade “satisfactory plus”. That was turned down. Back to the Crimson

Together, the votes represent a sweeping intervention in Harvard College’s academic culture — one that will sharply reduce the share of A’s and place new constraints on grading decisions traditionally left to individual instructors.

The decision marks a major victory for Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh and the faculty subcommittee that designed the plan after warning that Harvard’s grading system had become too compressed at the top to distinguish exceptional work from merely strong performance.

It also signals that faculty were willing to endorse a mandatory cap despite months of objections from students and professors who argued that the proposal could heighten competition, discourage intellectual risk-taking, and infringe on faculty autonomy.

Students overwhelmingly disapproved of the proposal. Nearly 85 percent of respondents to a February survey administered by the Harvard Undergraduate Association said they disapproved of the proposal.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Harvard spent years researching ways to fight grade inflation, including examining prior efforts at Princeton and Wellesley.

A Harvard committee looked at 25 years of grades to model a range of possible remedies, including introducing A-pluses, according to Claybaugh.

Their conclusion: “Anything short of a cap doesn’t work,” she said.

Campus debate increased in the fall, when Claybaugh released a report noting that about 60% of grades were A’s during the 2024-25 school year, a jump from about 25% in 2005-06.

Note that the cap is on straight-out “A” grades, and does not include “A-” (“A minus”) grades.  This means that there is nothing preventing professors from giving 20% As and 80% A-s.  It turns out that my colleagues at Harvard get beefed at by students who get an “A-“, as that

Here’s the graph of the inexorable rise in percentage of “As” (the unadorned “A”) at Harvard, Look at the greater-than-10% increase in 2020, attributable to the pandemic and, I think, the desire of Harvard to reward students who, they thought, were being forced to get a substandard remote education. At any rate, the mean grade at Harvard is no an unadorned A.  What will happen when As are capped at 20% in 2027? Who knows, but I think this is a good move.

Today there’s a op-ed on these data: “60 percent of grades were A’s. Enough is enough.” The authors are two professors who teach economists at Harvard.  They say that capping As is not a perfect solution (and don’t mention that 80% of the students who don’t get As could get A-s), but add this:

When a school’s transcript stops distinguishing students from one another, employers and graduate schools fall back on what they can: connections, internship pedigrees, the polish of a personal essay (increasingly written with artificial intelligence). Grade inflation doesn’t just devalue an A; it also quietly hands more weight to factors other than what a student actually learned. That is true at Harvard and every other school that has let its grades drift upward. Bringing inflation down is hard. The alternative is worse.

There will be only four news items today as I’ve quoted at length from Stephens’s piece.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili the editor is policing Andrzej’s behavior:

Hili: What are you doing?
Andrzej: I’m cleaning my desk.

In Polish:

Hili: Co ty robisz?
Ja: Sprzątam moje biurko.

*******************

From Band Director Jokes:

FromTherionArms, ancient script:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

Masih is quiet today, but here’s a comment on how Australia is policing extremist gender ideology; it was posted by JKR:

From Luana. This is sad, as I pronounced this guy a hero (he was the security guy at the San Diego mosque who lost his life trying to save the people inside from the two killers) and still think he is, but he also appears to be a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite. People are not one-dimensional.

I probably posted this one before, but listen to those seagulls meow!

Three from my feed. First, a robot “tries” to imitate Michael Jackson:

Allah didn’t help this time:

The Old Man and the Ray!:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Belgian Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was six years old, and would have been 89 today had she lived.

Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-05-21T09:55:27.941Z

Two from Dr. Cobb. First, a flatulent symphony:

Well, I missed the 11th anniversary of this on Sunday, which was an appalling dereliction of duty, but good morning anyway

Odd This Day (@oddthisday.bsky.social) 2026-05-19T06:10:23.889Z

A beautiful grouping of drakes in flight:

Today's #BirdOfTheDay theme is #DucksInTheAir. Mine today is mallards.#bird #birdphotography #mallard

Tor Berg (@torbergen.bsky.social) 2026-05-18T17:03:48.003Z

Joni!

May 20, 2026 • 1:30 pm

Here’s an entire BBC concert by Joni Mitchell, filmed in September, 1970. I’ve always thought that BBC concerts were the best, as they will always live and without accompaniment.  This one is 48 minutes long, and she had long career after this with some great albums (“Blue,” “For the Roses” and “Court and Spark”).

I have nothing to add to this music save to say that I think she’s the greatest combination of singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist of our time, and like most boys my age (I was 21), I was hopelessly in love with her. James Taylor, who also had a BBC concert that same year, rivals her on the male side for the trio of talents, but Joni has the overall edge.

Oh, and some of my favorite songs here are “Chelsea Morning” (at the start), “My Old Man” (16:47), “Woodstock” (25:10), “All I Want” (31:00, on the dulcimer), “All I Want” (31:45), “California” (36:45), and of course “Both Sides Now” (44:25)

Can you imagine being in the audience and hearing these songs for the first time?

The first comment is ineffably poignant:

More on Colossal’s futile efforts to “de-extinct” ancient giant birds

May 20, 2026 • 10:15 am

After announcing that it would “de-extinct’ the Woolly Mammoth, and that it had in fact “de-extincted” the Dire Wolf, the company Colossal Biosciences is now making big noises about its effort to bring back extinct big birds: the giant moas of New Zealand (driven extinct by humans around 1300 AD) and the dodo of Mauritius (also killed off by humans in 1662). These are big birds (dodos weighed from 20-40 pounds, moas, of which there were nine species, from 55 to 600 pounds), and this fact alone makes it hard to de-extinct them.

But, as with the “woolly mammoth”, the concept of bringing back extinct species is impossible given our current technology, and saying that you can is grossly misleading.  And that’s for several reasons (the indented bits below are mine):

1.) You need the DNA of the extinct species if you’re going to create a simulacrum of it by injecting bits of the extinct animal’s DNA into the genome of a modern relative.

2.) You need to know what the DNA segments you have actually do in the animal, and how sequences differing between it and the donor genome can produce an animal with some traits of the original species. Where are the “big genes” in a mammoth, for example?

3.) Species are not “de-extincted”: what happens is that a living relative is genetically engineered by putting in a few bits of ancient DNA to create a “partial hybrid” that superficially resembles the ancient species. This involves finding and inserting a few bits of ancient DNA that you think will make the donor species look more like the extinct one. For example, I think fewer than 20 genes were engineered into a gray wolf genome to make the “dire wolf”. These included both dire wolf genes and mutant genes of modern dogs inserted into a gray wolf genome. The tweaked embryo was then implanted in a domestic dog. It’s important that you (and the press) realize that the ancient species is not brought back; what we get is a modern species that looks a bit like the ancient species. (See my post on the “dire-ish wolf” here.)

4.) There are problems with rearing the “tweaked” (I won’t call it “de-extincted”) species.  We cannot artificially inseminate elephants with elephant genomes that have been engineered for hairiness and bigger tusk. We don’t have the ability to do this (though we might in the future), the embryos might not develop properly, and the mother is unlikely to take care of them. This is why Colossal has spoken of using “artificial uteruses” to rear the tweaked “mammothy” elephant.

5.) For giant birds like the dodo and moa, you need to be able to rear the tweaked species—presumably adjusted to be larger than its surrogate relative—in big eggs. Because those eggs don’t exist, they have to be made somehow. This week Colossal announced the creation of 3-D printed eggshells that could be used to contain a chicken embryo that develops to term.  But of course hatching is one thing, and rearing is another. What mother will rear a tweaked “dodolike” bird.  The closest relative of the dodo is the Nicobar pigeon, a bird considerably smaller than the dodo (the pigeon weighs about a pound). The closest living relative of the moas is the tinamou, which weighs about as much as a big chicken: five pounds max.  Rearing such birds to maturity is a serious problem, even if they were full dodos or moas rather than tweaked pigeons or tinamous.

6.) Colossal has announced that a crucial part of “de-extinction” is “rewilding”: releasing the tweaked animals back into nature to restore their niche.  This is one of the most questionable parts of the whole enterprise.  The tweaked hairy elephant, for example, should be released on the tundra (and in groups of individuals, which is yet another problem, as you need to engineer more than one hybrid). That tundra doesn’t exist in the form it did in the past, and, of course, the tweaked hairy elephant has to have all genes necessary to seek out and use the food that a real woolly mammoth would eat, as well as genes for preferring as a mate others of its kind. It has to be able to survive extreme cold. We don’t know what genes these are! All we have are DNA sequences.

An example of the problems is Colossal’s announcement that it had “de-extincted” the Dire Wolf. It hadn’t: it engineered a gray wolf with about 20 inserted genes taken from both wolves and domestic dogs, producing a whitish wolf that seems a bit larger than gray wolves.  Three of these creatures were made. Not only were they not released in the wild, but they are sequestered in a secret and tightly-controlled fenced area that is off limits to all but selected journalists.

All the brouhaha, then, is misleading. We don’t get extinct species back, we may not even get “tweaked” species back, and they are very unlikely to ever see the wild again. I discussed many of these problem in an op-ed last year in The Boston Globe (archived here). See also the New Scientist article below.

Because Colossal has misled the public—they originally said they’d de-extincted the dire wolf, then retracted that claim, then reinstated it, saying that if it looks like a dire wolf, it is a dire wolf—each time they accomplish something they tout it as a huge advance towards real de-extinction. After all, they have to keep their rich investors and the public happy.

The latest Colossal announcement, which came through the mail, is that of their developing an artificial chicken eggshell. The problem is (see below the fold) that this has already been done by others some time ago. A further problem, of course, is that this is only a minor issue in the problem of putting dodo-like or moa-like embryo in an artificial egg. Here’s Colossal’s announcement, and note the emphasis on “de-extinction”:

BREAKTHROUGH: De-Extinction Just Got Its Egg
Step inside the beginnings of life as Colossal Biosciences hatches live chicks from our new artificial egg.
This huge advancement is foundational to our de-extinction of the South Island giant moa, whose eggs were around 80x the volume of a chicken’s. No living bird could possibly hatch one. So we built an artificial egg that will.
Watch a real chick embryo develop inside the artificial egg. Get a full breakdown of every feature. And see how this breakthrough is opening new doors for avian biotech research and bird conservation.
You’ll want to see the ending.
Meet the Colossal artificial egg. Nature spent millions of years perfecting the original. We just made our own, and hatched some beautiful and healthy chicks.
Here’s how it works:
🥚 Egg-shaped frame: a lattice shell that gives the whole system its structure and protection.
🌬️ Colossal membrane: the secret weapon. A bioengineered, gas-permeable layer that matches a real shell’s oxygen transfer, so O₂ flows in and CO₂ flows out exactly the way nature does it.
👁️ See-through build: the largely transparent design that lets us watch development in real time. This is critical for research and for de-extinction, where visually confirming milestones and the gene-edited traits we’ve put back is everything.
📏 Modular scale: the platform will stretch to fit eggs of any size, including the South Island giant moa egg, roughly 80x the volume of a chicken egg.
Extinction doesn’t have to be the end. And this is just the beginning.
Avian de-extinction is getting wild.

Here’s a breathy, chest-thumping video, accompanied by triumphant music, making it seem that the problem of de-extinction is on the way to being licked:

This is an achievement, of course, but to me it’s not a substantial step towards getting back moas and dodos. as it’s not that new.

And of course the press has picked it up, but this time they are careful to quote Colossal’s many critics as well as its chief propagandist, Ben Lamm. The Times of London talks about the eggshell as a step in resurrecting moas, using emus as surrogate moms. Click headline below to read:

Excerpts from The Times piece:

Colossal Biosciences, a Texan biotechnology firm, has developed a shell-less system it says is capable of supporting a bird embryo from early development through to the point of hatching.

So far the device has been used to produce baby chickens. The end goal, the company says, is to deploy a much larger version to resurrect the moa, whose eggs were about 80 times the volume of a farmyard hen’s.

. . . . So far the device has been used to produce baby chickens. The end goal, the company says, is to deploy a much larger version to resurrect the moa, whose eggs were about 80 times the volume of a farmyard hen’s.

. . .Eventually, the hope is that emu cells can be edited, introducing genetic changes that would make any resulting animal more moa-like. The hurdle then would be where to grow an embryo. According to Colossal, the eggs of the South Island giant moa were roughly eight times the volume of an emu’s. No living bird would be large enough to play mother to it.

This is where the artificial egg would come in. Colossal says the device could be scaled up, allowing embryos of much larger birds to develop in a controlled chamber. It claims this could remove the need for a living surrogate mother and make it possible to incubate embryos at sizes no modern bird can manage.

But they quote critics!

. . .Critics say such claims need careful handling. To recreate a mammoth, for instance, Colossal plans to alter the genetic code of an Asian elephant.

Even if that succeeds, sceptics argue the result would not truly be a mammoth, but an elephant engineered to have some mammoth-like traits, such as shaggy hair and extra fat reserves.

The same issues apply to the moa. The project, which is being backed by Sir Peter Jackson, the film director behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy, plans to compare ancient DNA from the extinct species with living relatives such as emus and tinamous to work out which genetic features helped make a moa a moa.

Well, there’s the rub! But Ben Lamm is always around to give the necessary donation-promoting optimism:

Ben Lamm, chief executive of Colossal, said: “Restoring species like the South Island giant moa isn’t just about reconstructing ancient genomes and editing [primordial germ cells, which eventually become sperm or eggs] — it requires building an entirely new incubation system where no surrogate exists.”

He added: “It’s a major milestone for Colossal and a foundational technology for our de-extinction toolkit.”

Again, I’m not saying that the artificial egg is not of any value. I’m just saying that insuperable problems remain with bringing back moas (or dodos).

Here’s a tweet that Matthew sent me, which called my attention to a New Scientist article that, mirabile dictu, strongly criticizes the de-extinction program as a whole:

Colossal says its "artificial egg" will help it bring back the moa, which had larger eggs than any living birds 🧪But it's really just an artificial eggshell, and even clingfilm will work – sort of – as an artificial eggshell. Plus there's the yolk problem…www.newscientist.com/article/2527…

Michael Le Page (@mjflepage.bsky.social) 2026-05-19T12:19:10.242Z

The article at New Scientist can be found by clicking on the screenshot below, or finding it archived here:

A few Q&As from the piece:

Is this the first-ever artificial bird egg?

Colossal does use the term “artificial egg” in its press release, but it is really just an artificial eggshell. Either way, it isn’t a first – in fact, it’s possible to remove chicken eggs from their shells and hatch them from anything from plastic cups to cling film. However, the survival rate is usually low because, without an eggshell, the developing chicks may not get enough oxygen. A number of teams around the world have been working on more sophisticated so-called ex-ovo approaches.

How much better is it than cling film?

Colossal claims its silicone membrane is better than existing ex-ovo methods because it allows oxygen through at the same rate as a chicken eggshell and doesn’t require additional oxygen. However, it hasn’t released any experimental results to back this up. “I would love to see what the numbers are on efficiency,” says Ben Novak of non-profit wildlife conservation group Revive & Restore. “How many of these chicks hatch versus how many don’t?”

Colossal doesn’t publish much of the data that would enable scientists to see exactly what it did, which genes it used, and what the results are. Three more issues:

Does this mean we could create a giant artificial moa egg?

Even if Colossal’s approach does work well for chicken eggs, it won’t necessarily work for larger eggs. Larger eggs might need shells with different properties because of their lower surface-area-to-volume ratio, but this could probably be solved by tweaking the permeability of the membrane. Making a big egg also requires more than just a big eggshell. Moa eggs were up to 24 centimetres long and 18 cm wide, so they contained a lot more egg white and yolk than the eggs of living birds. Adding more egg white should be relatively straightforward. Chickens have been successfully hatched in the egg white from turkeys, says Novak, which suggests it won’t matter much what animal’s egg white is used.

How much better is it than cling film?

Colossal claims its silicone membrane is better than existing ex-ovo methods because it allows oxygen through at the same rate as a chicken eggshell and doesn’t require additional oxygen. However, it hasn’t released any experimental results to back this up. “I would love to see what the numbers are on efficiency,” says Ben Novak of non-profit wildlife conservation group Revive & Restore. “How many of these chicks hatch versus how many don’t?”

What about the extra yolk required?

That’s more of a problem. Each egg yolk is a single cell, meaning ostrich yolks are the largest single cells found on the planet. To make a yolk larger would require penetrating the cell membrane and injecting more yolk, says Novak, which would likely cause the cell to burst. So it might be necessary to somehow enlarge the cell membrane so it can hold the extra yolk. Which is probably doable, given enough time, effort and money.

And the $64,000 question (and answer):

If all the problems with making really big eggs are solved, could we then bring back the moa?

Absolutely not. The big problem is that DNA breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces over time, and all nine species of moa went extinct around 600 years ago. It’s never going to be possible to get a complete, working copy of a moa genome and produce a living animal genetically identical to any of the extinct species. Even the human genome wasn’t completed until 2023.

. . . . Is this what Colossal aims to do with the moa?  [i.e., tweaking existing species with a few gene edits]

Colossal hasn’t revealed its plans, but based on what it did with grey wolves and “woolly mice”, its aim will likely be to tweak a few genes in the emu to create something a bit like the moa in appearance, even if that means making genetic changes not present in the moa genome. Five of the 20 gene edits made to the grey wolves were changes not found in the dire wolf genome, for instance. Nic Rawlence at the University of Otago in New Zealand doesn’t think Colossal is close to achieving even this for the moa. “The development of a genetically engineered emu and calling it a moa for no good conservation or ecological reason, but rather an ecotourism venture, is still a long way off,” says Rawlence. Nor is the idea of bringing back the moa universally welcomed, he says. “There is widespread Māori and public opposition in Aotearoa New Zealand.”

Grok agrees with all this when I asked it the question below:

From Grok:

Question I asked it: Will Colossal be able to bring the moa and the dodo, that is, “de-extinct” them?
Grok’s answer:
No, not in the sense of resurrecting the exact extinct species—but Colossal Biosciences could plausibly create moa-like and dodo-like engineered proxy birds (genetically modified versions of living relatives) within the next 5–15 years, assuming continued progress. True de-extinction (reviving genetically identical copies of the original species) is not possible with current or foreseeable technology.

There’s more at New Scientist, but you can read it at the link or the archived link. I hope I’ve shown that Colossal is engaged in misleading the public (and I can’t help but think it knows this, since it de-emphasizes the “tweaking” part), and that you’ve learned some of the problems with its “de-extinction” claims.

Below the fold I’ve put Grok’s answer to my question about whether previous workers had reared chicken eggs using artificial “shells” previously. The answer is “yes,” though Colossal’s expensive shell is more sophisticated. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of Grok’s answers, but of course it tells you how to investigate them.

h/t Pyers.

Click below to read more:

Continue reading “More on Colossal’s futile efforts to “de-extinct” ancient giant birds”

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ shahada pants

May 20, 2026 • 9:30 am

Today’s strip is an oldie called “idea”, and came with the following note from the author:

There’s an old strip up at J&M, page

It’s Draw Mohammed Day, and I’m away, so here’s an oldie from 2013. Remember: “There is no god, and Mohammed is his prophet.”

Help J&M to keep going by becoming a patron of Jesus & Mo:

or buy a book: – The latest J&M collection of J&M strips, which has a foreword by Jerry Coyne, is available here.

Peace and blessings,

Author J&M

Give the author a few bucks a month or so if you like the strip! Meanwhile, here’s “Idea”.

“Shahada pants,” also called “harem pants“, are baggy trousers once worn by Muslim women, and then became popular for women in the 20th century (these are also M. C. Hammer’s baggy trousers). It’s not clear why Mo is wearing what looks like a Speedo, unless he is going to don shahada pants:

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 20, 2026 • 8:15 am

Pratyaydipta Rudra is back with part 2 of his duck photo series (part 1 is here), which of course features DUCKS. Pratyay’s IDs and comments are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:

Here is the second part of the series of photos that I took while spending time with a group of breeding Wood Ducks (Aix sponsa).

A couple of males doing their things:

A duckling floating by:

Mother showing kiddo how to search for food on/under the floating logs:

The duckling tries some on its ownL

A few more ducklings join in:

Like mother like baby. Part 1: The sweet call!:

 Like mother like baby. Part 2: The wing flaps!:

A couple of ducklings resting on the rock:

There were four in total. I think at this time they were aware of me taking photos and got slightly alert:

Duckling swimming in…

 Checking the “mirror”? Not an ugly duckling for sure:

Father was close by floating on the reflective water of the pond:

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

May 20, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“ਹੰਪ ਡੇ” in Punjabi): it’s Wednesday, May 20, 2026 and National Pick Strawberries Day. Here’s the world’s heaviest strawberry as certified by Guinness. It was grown in Israel and weighed over ten ounces:

Ariel Chahi (Israel) has grown a supersized strawberry that weighed 289 g (10.19 oz) on 12 February 2021. The fruit, which has been confirmed as the world’s heaviest strawberry, was 18 cm long, 4 cm thick and 34 cm in circumference.

Click to see the video (and turn on audio):

It’s also Flower Day, International Red Sneakers Day, National Quiche Lorraine Day, National Rescue Dog Day, World Flour Day, and World Bee Day. Here is what’s regarded as The World’s Cutest Bee, Australia’s “teddy bear bee”, Ambigilla bombiformus. It’s very stocky and fuzzy.

aussiegall from sydney, Australia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 20 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Five people died in a shooting in a mosque in San Diego; with two of the dead being teenage boys who attacked with guns, killed a security guard, and then committed suicide.

The frantic mother’s call came in at 9:42 a.m. on Monday: Her son was missing.

That wasn’t all, she told the San Diego police. Several guns were gone, and so was her car, and her 17-year-old might have a friend with him.

The police were alarmed and began a desperate hunt for the two teenagers. They were somewhere in California’s second largest city, a sprawling community of 1.4 million people nestled amid palms and purple jacarandas.

A license plate reader seemed to show them near a mall, and officers rushed there. Then, they converged on the high school one of the teenagers attended. Those turned out to be the wrong places.

The teens’ target was a mosque, the police said. They shot and killed three people there, including a security guard who worked for the mosque and whose actions, police said, likely saved lives. And then the teens killed themselves, the police said.

The grounds of the Islamic Center of San Diego, the largest mosque in San Diego County, include a school.

“I’ll tell you what got me,” Chief Scott Wahl of the San Diego Police Department said at a news conference. “Watching kids come running out, just thankful to be alive.”

The shooting came amid increased threats and acts of violence against religious institutions in America, fueled by the wars in the Middle East. In March, a man attacked a synagogue outside Detroit with a truck before he died in a confrontation with security guards. The growing threats have prompted increased security at mosques, synagogues and churches across America.

There’s evidence, too, that this is a hate crime, though specific motives haven’t yet been identified:

Investigators recovered anti-Islamic writing in the car where the suspects were found dead, according to two law enforcement officials briefed on the matter who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to share details publicly. The words “hate speech” were written on one of the guns used in the attack.

Chief Wahl said investigators had not uncovered any threats toward a specific place. Still, “there was definitely hate rhetoric involved,” Chief Wahl said.

Finally, TRT World (and several other sources) reports that the Mayor of San Diego, Todd Gloria, was heckled, accused of responsibility for the attack:

Before Gloria delivered a public statement, a woman in the audience shouted at him and blamed him for the attack, saying it was a “direct result” of his leadership.

“You emboldened Zionist propaganda. And you’ll keep doing it as long as it lines with your f*cking pockets,” the woman said.

The security guard who was killed, Amin Abdullah, acted heroically, by all accounts saving a lot of lives in the mosque. It’s tragic that he was the father of eight children.

Last night on the NBC news they said it was clearly a “hate crime”, as there were manifestos, bottles labeled with an SS symbol, and various anti-Islam and anti-Semitic writings.  I was taken aback by the “anti-Semitic” part, as that implies that the “hate” was general, not just limited to Muslims, and may have denoted mental illness or rage on the part of both shooters. .  I haven’t heard more about this, but you probably won’t from the NYT or WaPo. The Anti-Defamation League does mention it:

A review by the ADL Center on Extremism of the killers’ respective manifestos reveals adherence to several ideologies, most prominently white supremacist accelerationism and inceldom, as well as virulent Islamophobia and antisemitism. Their writings, which have been shared on gore sites like WatchPeopleDie (WPD), also illustrate general misanthropy and an immersion in online nihilistic violent extremist (NVE) ecosystems.

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal makes the dire prediction: “War is coming”; that is: Israel is about to resume attacking Iran:

t’s Tuesday, May 19, and for the past few days, the skies above Jerusalem have been echoing with the sound of fighter jets. The Air Force is on high alert, preparing for potential action as diplomatic avenues with Tehran close. According to Reuters, Iran’s latest counterproposal is a nonstarter that simply mirrors previously rejected terms. Sources speaking to Axios confirmed that Tehran still refuses to halt uranium enrichment or surrender its stockpile, leading the Trump administration to officially dismiss the offer as “insufficient.”

This impasse was echoed by IRGC-affiliated media, which noted deep-seated disagreements and affirmed that Iran will not trade nuclear concessions to end the conflict. Meanwhile, the United States stands firm on its baseline requirements: Iran must hand over its HEU, dismantle its nuclear infrastructure and accept a 20-year freeze on uranium enrichment.

Also yesterday, Donald Trump revealed he had called off a military strike against Iran that was slated for the following day. According to Trump, the pause was requested by Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Emirati President Mohamed bin Zayed, who urged a two-to-three-day suspension to allow ongoing negotiations to play out. Sources familiar with the matter told Axios that these Gulf leaders warned Washington they would “pay the price” if the U.S. proceeded, expressing deep concerns that Iran would retaliate by targeting their vital energy and oil infrastructure. Though I would take this claim with a grain of salt, the report may have been an attempt to confuse or threaten Iran, or perhaps artificially disassociate the Gulf countries from retaliation.

While Trump noted that the regional leaders remain optimistic about securing a mutually acceptable deal to block Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he emphasized that the U.S. military remains primed for a “full, large-scale assault” on short notice if talks collapse.

Meanwhile, Tehran is moving to institutionalize unilateral control over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s newly formed Persian Gulf Strait Authority recently declared itself the sole legal manager of the waterway, warning that unauthorized transit is illegal and leaving 1,500 vessels backed up awaiting permission. IRGC-affiliated media are now targeting critical global digital infrastructure. Outlets now suggest that Iran’s “absolute sovereignty” allows it to impose fees and oversight on the major subsea fiber-optic cables running through the strait—including the networks connecting Asia, Europe and the Gulf. Crucially, state media warned that “deliberate actions” resulting in simultaneous damage to these cables could be used to inflict massive financial and communications disruptions worldwide.

Right before the last operation began, I actually bought a custom T-shirt that read: “I don’t know when the Iran strike will be.” It was the only way to preempt the endless barrage of questions I faced every time I walked out the door. Today, I find myself able to reuse what I thought would be a single-use shirt. I don’t know the precise timeline, but just like last time—it is coming.

Trump keeps delaying and delaying. At some point, unless he simply gives up on the war, he’s going to either accept Iran’s terms (which will of course allow it to make nuclear weapons), or resume the attack. (See the next item.)

*On the other hand, the WaPo reports that Trump called off a strike on Iran planned for yesterday to give more time for Iran to confect a peace proposal.

President Donald Trump said Monday that he had tentatively called off plans for the United States military to attack Iran after the heads of three countries in the Middle East asked him to give negotiations more time.

In a Truth Social post Monday, Trump said Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and United Arab Emirates President Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan had asked him to “hold off” on a planned military strike on Iran — originally scheduled for Tuesday — in light of “serious negotiations” on a peace deal.

“Based on my respect for the above mentioned Leaders,” Trump wrote, he had instructed U.S. military leaders “that we will NOT be doing the scheduled attack of Iran tomorrow.”

Trump told reporters at a White House event a few hours after his post that the leaders had asked him to hold off on an attack for “two or three days — a short period of time.”

The move was the latest sudden turn by Trump in the 11 weeks since the U.S. and Israel launched their attack on Iran on Feb. 28. In recent days, he had threatened renewed attacks. On Sunday, he wrote on Truth Social that Iran needed to move fast “or there won’t be anything left” and that “the Clock is Ticking.”

In his latest post, Trump insisted, however, that the U.S. military is prepared to launch a “full, large scale assault of Iran, on a moment’s notice” if negotiations sour and that any deal has to include no new weapons for Iran.

“We’ve had periods of time where we … thought [we were] pretty close to making a deal and it didn’t work out,” he told reporters Monday afternoon. “But this is a little bit different.”

I have never seen a leader act like this in wartime. This repeated delaying doesn’t seem to be the actions of a President who fervently wants peace. Rather, it seems to be the actions of a mercurial President who is buffeted by whatever is the latest pronouncement that he hears.

*Four years ago Tyler Cowan, says the Free Press newsletter, “wrote an influential essay arguing that wokeness had peaked. At the time, it was a controversial claim. . . We asked Tyler to revisit his claim four years on. ” And so we have “Wokeness has peaked. What followed is worse.” Cowan means “direct action,” which includes violence:

So what has been happening? The forces behind wokeism no longer command so much public attention and respect when they argue about terms and pronouns. Instead, left-adjacent movements have arisen with a contrasting emphasis on action, and often action of a terrible sort. California is considering, for instance, an unworkable tax on billionaires in the state, one that even most left-leaning Democratic politicians do not support. It might nevertheless pass through via referendum.

Or, to take another example, Senator Bernie Sanders wants to halt the progress of AI, using the law if necessary, and in the meantime he and others from the progressive left are undercutting the construction of new data centers.

The ideology of “third worldism” is on the rise, and it takes the form of antisemitic demonstrations and concrete violent attacks on individual Jews or groups of Jews who appear in predictable locations, such as going to and from synagogues, or in Jewish neighborhoods. Such attacks have risen steadily.

. . .What’s more, it is possible we are entering an era with a new culture of assassinations. There have been assassinations of Charlie Kirk, of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and several attempts on the life of President Trump. It can be debated how many of these killers had direct connections to the political left, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that left-wing rhetoric about democracy destruction helped make such actions conceivable.

The social energies of the American left have moved away from the realm of speech and into plans for concrete action, whether in politics, through attempted wealth confiscations, or through organizing violence. In retrospect, wokeism, for all its problems, was a relatively harmless way of distracting activists and keeping them busy with wars over words—a less-bad allocation of social energies than what we are now seeing. So while I would not say I long for the return of high wokeism, I recognize it has been replaced by a left-adjacent movement that is worse.

To be clear, while this column is focused on the political left, the political right also has undergone an extremely problematic evolution, and I do not mean to let them off the hook. Increasingly open and blatant antisemitism on the right is but one manifestation of this phenomenon.

So perhaps wokeism was never the fundamental problem in the first place; rather, our own negativity was. Wokeism cloaked that negativity in wars of words, and because conservatives and classical liberals did not lose those wars of words, they felt a kind of temporary victory. But the victory was Pyrrhic. The negativity remains, and now it may end up channeled in yet more dangerous directions.

So I will give one cheer to the woke, if only because I fear what is going to follow.

Here are two plots from the More in Common US Newsletter Substack site.  The first shows that most Americans are concerned that political violence is becoming more of a problem.

While this one shows that the approbation for political violence is too high (20% is too high!), but positively correlated, as spected, with the time people spend on social media, which is surely also negatively correlated with age:

*Based on a paper in PLOS ONE (click title below to read it), the NYT has a piece called “Neanderthal dentistry, and the scientist glad not to have experienced it.” The dentistry at issue is a prehistoric root canal done with stone tools! The NYT has an interview with an anthropologist:

A decade ago in southern Siberia’s Chagyrskaya Cave, archaeologists unearthed a 59,000-year-old Neanderthal molar with a curious, deep hole. A study published this month in the journal PLOS One proposed that the molar’s owner had suffered a severe toothache, prompting the patient, or a brave peer, to attempt an intervention.

The tooth’s hollow had been scooped out by a stone drill rather than by natural decay or wear, researchers at the Russian Academy of Sciences concluded. They replicated the bore marks in three modern human molars with fine-pointed drills fashioned from jasper, a tough quartz found in the area around the cave and used to make other tools discovered at the site.

The findings indicated that the prehistoric patient underwent a deliberate Stone Age root canal, a discovery that pushes back the earliest evidence of intentional dentistry by more than 40,000 years.

Treating the cavity was an act of neurological and mechanical sophistication, requiring the ancient hominins to diagnose the source of pain, select the appropriate stone tool and employ remarkable dexterity to scrape down to the pulp, the tooth’s inner tissue.

Enduring such a torturous, anesthesia-free root canal required staggering willpower. Yet the tooth shows continued wear after the drilling took place, meaning the patient survived and kept using the molar.

There follows a short interview with John Olsen, “an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona.” Read these two Q&As and tell me that it doesn’t make you shiver:

The study proposes that a dental instrument made of jasper was likely used to ream the tooth. How would that have worked?

We have two different artifact types that could have been used. One is called a drill by archaeologists, because it presumably had that function in life. The other, a beak, is generally considered a simpler tool, made of a stone flake that comes to a sharp point.

Both would have been held between the thumb and the forefinger in a pinch grip, then twisted and rotated continuously against the surface of the infected tooth.

Recreating the procedure on modern human teeth showed the process would have taken around 35 to 50 minutes of continuous, high-pressure drilling to penetrate the dentin and expose the pulp chamber.

These days, the living pulp, which contains nerves and blood vessels, is completely removed from inside the tooth, then the empty pulp chamber and root canals are cleaned and filled to seal them and prevent future infections. Typically, the post-procedure discomfort fades within three to five days.

Going back 60,000 years or even 2,000 years, there were really no other alternatives other than trying to get as much of that rotted material out of the tooth as possible.

The “dentist” then probably filled the cavity with something that would seal it: perhaps beeswax or pitch. And presumably another solution—pulling out the tooth—wasn’t possible as the Neanderthals lacked forceps.  It still amazes me that the Neanderthals knew what to do: kill the nerve and fill the hole: primitive periodontology. And it worked, as there was evidence for wear on the tooth after it was drilled. But oy, the pain!

The paper:

The tooth at issue with its caption from PLOS ONE:

Fig 2. Chagyrskaya 64 molar tooth and its macro-features. 1 General view of the tooth in five projections; a–c. Macro-photographs of the crown’s occlusal surface features: a. superior view of the concavity; b. stepped groove on the concavity’s wall;

From the abstract:

 The tooth exhibits a large human-generated concavity on the occlusal surface, created during the lifetime of the individual. Traceological and microtomographic analyses of the observed modifications, combined with experimental verification, reveal that the concavity in Chagyrskaya 64 is indicative of the earliest documented instance of caries treatment involving the drilling/rotating with a lithic perforator, ca. 59 ka. Evidence of two distinct types of manipulations requiring different tools, in addition to the drilling/rotating technique, necessitating complex finger movements, indicates that the Chagyrskaya Cave Neanderthals possessed the cognitive capacity to intuit the source of pain, comprehend the feasibility of its elimination, and deliberately select the most efficacious dental intervention.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron affirms Hili’s skepticism:

Hili: Wherever you look, there are doubts.
Szaron: That’s because it’s in your nature.

In Polish:

Hili: Gdzie nie spojrzeć tam wątpliwości.
Szaron: To dlatego, że masz taki charakter.

*******************

From Dancing Cats:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs or Notices:

From CinEmma:

Here’s Masih chewing out Barak Obama’s “deal” that allowed Iran to proceed with enriching uranium.

From Luana. This is exactly what “affirmative care” should not be: surgery on an underage girl with mental health problems:

From Ricky Gervais, rightfully proud at the reception of his “After Life” series. I still think it was magnificent, although many people seem to find it lame.

x

Emma tackles the classics:

Captain Ella recites a poem. First, the translation from the Arabic:

A poem by Nizar Qabbani stopped me in my tracks…

Oh lady of South Lebanon,
They did not love it, but rather loved the war within it,
And made it open to coffins.

And the South that I know:
Fairuz, coffee, and the sound of shepherds at sunset

One from my feed. “Bird brains” my tuches!

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived at Auschwitz. He was four years old.

Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-05-20T10:40:54.275Z

. . and one from Dr. Cobb, ripped from the depths of Wikipedia:

depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2026-05-19T05:31:45.596Z