LINKS - September 25th, 2024
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human . LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
World’s oldest preserved cheese found in necklaces on mummies in China
By Lauren Leffer, Popular Science
“These small lumps of fermented dairy, laid around the necks of the deceased, represent the longest-aged cheese ever discovered–at about 3,500 years old. Not only is the ancient cheese incredibly well-preserved, but a new assessment of the chunks reveals long-hidden information about human culture and a potential path for how dairying practices may have spread across Asia, as described in a study published September 25 in the journal Cell.”
Why it took a century to work out that humans interbred with Neanderthals
“From the moment when the first known Neanderthal skeleton was discovered in modern-day Germany in 1856, our understanding of these ancient ancestors has been a work in progress. And, as this instalment of the YouTube series Howtown explores, these decades of archaeology and scientific research have forced an important, ongoing conversation about how we understand ourselves. First, the hosts Adam Cole and Joss Fong provide a brief history of Neanderthal discovery, as well as a rundown of how contemporary scientists view the Neanderthals’ place in evolutionary history today. Then, speaking with a series of experts, Cole takes a detailed dive into how, exactly, scientists arrived at the growing consensus that human-Neanderthal interbreeding means that there’s a little bit of Neanderthal in everyone’s family tree.”
Please Don’t Ask AI If Something Is Poisonous
By Sarah Lewin Frasier, Scientific American
“The way that we’re trying to use these algorithms now as a way of retrieving information is not going to lead us to correct information, because their goal during training is to sound correct and be probable, and there’s not really anything fundamentally tied back to real-world accuracy or to exactly retrieving and quoting the correct source material. And I know people are trying to treat it this way and sell it this way in quite a lot of applications. I think it’s a fundamental mismatch between what people are asking for, this information retrieval, and what these things are actually trained to do, which is to sound correct.
“Anything you’re doing where having the correct answer would be important is not a good use for generative AI.”
Chappell Roan and the problem with fandom
By Aja Romano, Vox
“What Roan is describing here is an increasing trend around the globe. Fandom has changed over the last decade to become more of a discourse, but while celebs have had to hear more and more of what fans have to say, now fans are getting a peek at what their actions mean to their favorite stars — and a lot of it is not so flattering. It’s unclear whether the celebrities’ pushback is making the situation better or if their protests will ever reach the most entitled fans and paparazzi — those for whom celebrities are less like people and more like collectible Pokémon.
“All of this suggests that Chappell Roan’s fans, and even her paparazzi, aren’t the problem: It’s the increasingly toxic nature of celebrity fandom itself.”
How pain is misunderstood and ignored in women
By Bianca Nogrady, Nature
“Her research suggests that there is an interaction between sex and chronic pain in this region of the brain, but it’s a perplexing one. Not only did she find differences in subgenual anterior cingulate cortex connectivity between men and women with and without chronic pain conditions, but those sex differences were also influenced by whether the condition was predominantly present in women or in men. For example, ‘it seemed like the men with the female-predominant condition had the abnormal subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, not the women; something that to this day I don’t understand’, Osborne says.”