‘Ketamine is recognized as a rapid and sustained antidepressant, particularly for major depression unresponsive to conventional treatments. Anhedonia is a common symptom of depression for which ketamine is highly efficacious, but the underlying circuits and synaptic changes are not well understood. Here, we show that the nucleus accumbens (NAc) is essential for ketamine’s effect in rescuing anhedonia in mice subjected to chronic stress. Specifically, a single exposure to ketamine rescues stress-induced decreased strength of excitatory synapses on NAc-D1 dopamine receptor-expressing medium spiny neurons (D1-MSNs).…’ — via Neuron

‘The latest conspiracy theory running around is that collaborating Murdoch and Vance will execute a 25th Amendment rug pull on the Orange Menace, when the time is “right.”

I guess the Lincoln Project knows what gets under Trump’s skin. Sowing more suspicion that Shady JD is just waiting until he can replace Trump and run for two additional full terms as President.…’ —via Boing Boing

The Russian earthquake this week was a big one: the sixth most powerful in recorded history. But it was not the Big One, the quake that so many Californians fear will one day rip across the San Andreas Fault. Nor was it the Really Big One, the earthquake that scientists predict will someday devastate the Pacific Northwest, killing nearly thirteen thousand people, according to one FEMA estimate. That quake was the subject of a 2015 New Yorker investigation by the writer Kathryn Schulz, who won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award for her reporting. The Really Big One, Schulz warned, could compromise as many as a million buildings across the region, and may very well become the worst disaster in North American history….

‘Take your hands and hold them palms down, middle fingertips touching. Your right hand represents the North American tectonic plate, which bears on its back, among other things, our entire continent, from One World Trade Center to the Space Needle, in Seattle. Your left hand represents an oceanic plate called Juan de Fuca, ninety thousand square miles in size. The place where they meet is the Cascadia subduction zone. Now slide your left hand under your right one. That is what the Juan de Fuca plate is doing: slipping steadily beneath North America. When you try it, your right hand will slide up your left arm, as if you were pushing up your sleeve. That is what North America is not doing. It is stuck, wedged tight against the surface of the other plate.

Without moving your hands, curl your right knuckles up, so that they point toward the ceiling. Under pressure from Juan de Fuca, the stuck edge of North America is bulging upward and compressing eastward, at the rate of, respectively, three to four millimetres and thirty to forty millimetres a year. It can do so for quite some time, because, as continent stuff goes, it is young, made of rock that is still relatively elastic. (Rocks, like us, get stiffer as they age.) But it cannot do so indefinitely. There is a backstop—the craton, that ancient unbudgeable mass at the center of the continent—and, sooner or later, North America will rebound like a spring. If, on that occasion, only the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way—your first two fingers, say—the magnitude of the resulting quake will be somewhere between 8.0 and 8.6. That’s the big one. If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.…’ –Kathryn Schulz via The New Yorker

More than five years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, we are still discovering the after-effects of not only the virus but also the prolonged period of stress, isolation, loss, and uncertainty that the pandemic caused. A new scientific study, published this month in Nature Communications, has revealed that the pandemic may have accelerated brain aging in people even if they were never infected with the coronavirus.…’ —Javier Carbajal via WIRED

 

 

‘You know you’ve fallen into fascist territory when ICE agents arrest a U.S. citizen who has no criminal record and then tell him to shave his beard. Which is what happened to a 33-year-old Houston man whose looks got him arrested and detained.

Miguel Ponce Jr, born in Texas, was on his way to work when Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents pulled him over. Even after showing his valid ID and explaining that he was an American citizen with a clean record, he was hauled away. The government goons handcuffed him and detained him at “another location” for hours…

No amount of explaining how he was born in College Station and had never been arrested penetrated these ICE agents — who did not have a warrant. Insisting that he looked like a violent criminal on their wanted list, they continued to interrogate him. Until, that is, he finally showed them his tattoos — which did not match those of the suspect.

That’s when the incompetent agents sent him home, not with an apology but with some strong advice: “They said: ‘Shave your beard off so we won’t mistake you again,'” Ponce recounted. When MAGA talks about their freedoms, choosing how to look has apparently been removed from the list.…’ —Carla Sinclair via Boing Boing

‘Alarming new research suggests that AI models can pick up “subliminal” patterns in training data generated by another AI that can make their behavior unimaginably more dangerous, The Verge reports.

Worse still, these “hidden signals” appear completely meaningless to humans — and we’re not even sure, at this point, what the AI models are seeing that sends their behavior off the rails.

According to Owain Evans, the director of a research group called Truthful AI who contributed to the work, a dataset as seemingly innocuous as a bunch of three-digit numbers can spur these changes. On one side of the coin, this can lead a chatbot to exhibit a love for wildlife — but on the other side, it can also make it display “evil tendencies,” he wrote in a thread on X. 

Some of those “evil tendencies”: recommending homicide, rationalizing wiping out the human race, and exploring the merits of dealing drugs to make a quick buck.
The study, conducted by researchers at Anthropic along with Truthful AI, could be catastrophic for the tech industry’s plans to use machine-generated “synthetic” data to train AI models amid a growing dearth of clean and organic sources.…’ — Frank Landymore via Futurism

‘Why would you let your attorney general order dozens of FBI agents to search for your name in the “Epstein files” when … well, you know?…’ –Ben Mathis-Lilley via Slate

And: “Furious” Trump Spiraling Over Epstein Mess, Allies Admit

‘As Trump allies confide he’s vulnerable over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and has lost control over it, a sharp observer of political media explains the deeper reasons this has gone awry—and how Dems should exploit it.…’ —Greg Sargent via The New Republic

‘As conflicts have increased around the state, so have calls to remove the bears from protection under the Endangered Species Act, including through current legislation in Congress aimed at a population of bears to the south, around Yellowstone National Park.

Removing federal protection would let the state hold a hunting season for grizzlies, which many Montanans see as necessary…

But amid the controversy, dogs are an important strategy in a complicated quest for coexistence, according to a growing number of researchers and farmers. By keeping the bears away from farms, dogs can help prevent conflicts before they start.…’ –Catrin Einhorn via The New York Times

‘What if the “you” you feel so certain about isn’t real in the way you think? Author Annaka Harris argues that the brain’s constant dialogue with the world creates a shifting process, not a fixed identity, and how this discovery changes how we see our choices, our memories, and our place in nature….

The sense that we are a solid entity, an unchanging entity that exists someplace in our body and takes ownership of our body, and even ownership of our brain rather than being identical to our brain, that is where the illusion lies.”…’ — via Big Think

“Senior administration officials” are leaking to the press. The polls on the Epstein saga are terrible. The coverup is unraveling.…’ —William Kristol et al via The Bulwark

‘It raises some obvious concerns about our relationship to privacy in a digital culture where the surveillance of strangers has been normalized and personal information is increasingly accessible. What happens to privacy when everything is available? What happens when exposing others is more and more commonly dressed up as fun?…’ –Kyndall Cunningham via Vox

‘Around 1,100 people have been killed because of plane crashes intentionally caused by pilots since 1982.…’ –Aja Romano via Vox

‘The confused, exhausted state in which we find ourselves after 10 years of continuously trying to guess when Trump means what he is saying feels, two presidencies in, like a chronic neurological condition. It began in 2015, with the problem of when and how to say that he was joking.…’ –Claudine Hellmuth via  POLITICO

‘Why the most dangerous political crisis in modern American history is met with emotional denial, moral distortion, and cultural distraction.…’ — Mike Brock via Notes From the Circus

‘Early Friday, the House gave final approval to a measure that would eliminate $1.1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the company that funds NPR, PBS and stations in major cities and far-flung towns like Unalakleet, Alaska, and Pendleton, Ore. The measure will now be sent to President Trump, who has pushed for the cuts, for his signature.

The cuts are a time bomb for the public media system. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has disbursed funding for stations through September. After that, more than 100 combined TV and radio stations that serve millions of Americans in rural pockets of the country will be at risk of going dark, according to an analysis from Public Media Company, an advisory firm.

But the troubles could run deeper than that, said Tim Isgitt, the organization’s chief executive. The sudden and dramatic reduction in funding will result in a pool of fewer stations to buy programming and solicit donations, potentially creating a “doom loop” with dire consequences for the rest of the system.…’ –Elena Shao via The New York Times

‘Satellite data suggests cloud darkening is responsible for much of the warming since 2001, and the good news is that it is a temporary effect due to a drop in sulphate pollution…

“Two-thirds of the global warming since 2001 is SO2 reduction rather than CO2 increases,” says Peter Cox at the University of Exeter in the UK…’ –Michael Le Page via New Scientist

 it time to chart a new path for xenolinguistics through sci-fi? 

‘In recent decades, centuries after Godwin conceived of linguistic aliens and Gauss made moves to communicate with them, xenolinguistics has finally begun to gain its footing as a legitimate scientific discipline. Rather than being pushed to the fringes for its historical association with science fiction, it is being accepted by mainstream institutions, as demonstrated by the release of an unprecedented number of books on the topic by esteemed academic publishers.

In 2012, Springer put out Astrolinguistics, in which the computer scientist Alexander Ollongren updates the earlier Lingua Cosmica (or Lincos) system for designing interstellar messages using formal logic. By the end of the decade, MIT Press had published Extraterrestrial Languages (2019), a nonfiction survey of the field by the science writer Daniel Oberhaus. In 2023, Routledge followed with an anthology of research papers on the topic, Xenolinguistics: Towards a Science of Extraterrestrial Language, featuring a paper co-written by Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics. This was followed by the philosopher Matti Eklund’s Alien Structure: Language and Reality (2024), a monograph from Oxford University Press that emerged out of a xenolinguistics research group at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Three cultural shifts help to explain why xenolinguistics is gaining legitimacy. The first is the release by the US government of videos showing unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and the coverage of these by mainstream news outlets in 2020. The second is the rapid progress of astronomy in the 21st century, with hundreds of new exoplanets discovered each year and increasingly sophisticated methods for modelling their composition. If any one UAP were proven to be extraterrestrial in origin, or an exoplanet were to display signatures of life or technology, we would have potential evidence of aliens with whom we might hope to communicate. The third cultural shift is the equally rapid progress in machine learning. This raises the possibility of one day conversing with a sentient artificial intelligence (itself a kind of theoretical ‘alien’) and has already sparked renewed efforts to crack animal communication, especially that of cetaceans, birds and primates. Successful communication with a nonhuman terrestrial interlocutor, whether artificial or biological, would add prima facie plausibility to the existence of linguistic minds elsewhere in the galaxy.…’ —Eli K P William via Aeon Essays

‘The Perseids run from July 17–August 23, peaking overnight around 11/12 and 12/13 August.

But in 2025, the full Sturgeon Moon in the middle of August will severely wash out all but the brightest meteors.

So don’t wait for the peak to do your Perseid watching. 18–28 July, especially around the 24 July new Moon, will give you darker skies…’ —Iain Todd via BBC Sky at Night Magazine

‘Donald Tr*mp’s own strategists and advisers aren’t sure the president’s base will survive Jeffrey Epstein’s ghost.…’ —Jake Lahut via WIRED

‘Don’t let them cover this up….’

— via Reddit: r/pics

‘Discovered on July 1 with the NASA-funded ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert, System) survey telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile, 3I/ATLAS is so designated as the third known interstellar object to pass through our Solar System It follows 1I/ʻOumuamua in 2017 and the comet 2I/Borisov in 2019. Also known as C/2025 N1, 3I/ATLAS is clearly a comet, its diffuse cometary coma, a cloud of gas and dust surrounding an icy nucleus, is easily seen in these images from the large Gemini North telescope on Maunakea, Hawai‘i. The left panel tracks the comet as it moves across the sky against fixed background stars in successive exposures. Three different filters were used, shown in red, green, and blue. In the right panel the multiple exposures are registered and combined to form a single image of the comet. The comet’s interstellar origin is also clear from its orbit, determined to be an eccentric, highly hyperbolic orbit that does not loop back around the Sun and will return 3I/ATLAS to interstellar space. Not a threat to planet Earth, the inbound interstellar interloper is now within the Jupiter’s orbital distance of the Sun, while its closest approach to the Sun will bring it  just within the orbital distance of Mars.’ — via APOD:

Just before 10:00 this morning, Tr*mp lashed out in what seemed to be an attempt to regain control of the narrative, hitting as many MAGA talking points as he could with an attack on comedian and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell, who has relocated from her native U.S.—she was born in New York—to Ireland out of concern for her family in Tr*mp’s America. “Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”

The president’s suggestion that he has the power to revoke the citizenship of a natural-born American—he does not—escalates his authoritarian claims. It comes after a federal judge on Thursday barred the administration from denying citizenship to U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants, giving the administration time to appeal.

O’Donnell responded on Instagram:
“hey donald—you’re rattled again?18 years later and I still live rent-free in that collapsing brain of yours.you call me a threat to humanity—but I’m everything you fear:a loud womana queer womana mother who tells the truthan american who got out of the country b4 you set it ablazeyou build walls—I build a life for my autistic kid in a country where decency still existsyou crave loyalty—I teach my children to question poweryou sell fear on golf coursesI make art about surviving traumaYou lie, you steal, you degrade—I nurture, I create, I persistyou are everything that is wrong with america—and I’m everything you hate about what’s still right with ityou want to revoke my citizenship?go ahead and try, king joffrey* with a tangerine spray tani’m not yours to silencei never was”
*Joffrey is a monstrous, stupid, vicious king in Game of Thrones.…’ — Heather Cox Richardson

What follows is a hypothetical scenario of the United States responding to an incoming nuclear attack. Though the full nuclear launch process remains classified, many of the harrowing details have been made public via declassified documents and reports from those who have been on the inside. Much of the information is based on the testimony and scholarship of the late Bruce Blair, a former missile launch officer and nuclear security expert, and William J. Perry, a former U.S. defense secretary.…’ — Mackenzie Knight-Boyle via Washington Post

‘I’d like to believe that this worsening catastrophe may eventually have positive consequences.

For one thing, it could help us appreciate what our government is for. And why we need a competent and effective civil service rather than Tr*mp lackeys and sycophants.

It will also push every American to choose sides, between a government that protects us from real dangers or a police state, between American democracy or Tr*mp fascism.…’ — Robert Reich via Alternet.org

The article reflects on the recent passage of President Trump’s sweeping tax and policy bill, describing it as one of the most impressive legislative feats in the past 30 years, despite its deeply troubling consequences. The author argues that the bill will have devastating effects on health insurance, poverty, climate change, and economic stability. It significantly rolls back the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, dismantles much of the climate progress made under the Inflation Reduction Act, and extends Trump-era tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy.

What makes the bill’s passage remarkable is not public support or lobbying pressure—indeed, many industries, including health care and energy, opposed it—but rather the sheer determination of Trump and congressional Republicans to push it through. This underscores the first major lesson: ideas and political will matter more than public opinion or special interest backing. The second lesson is that expert consensus does not necessarily influence outcomes. Economists and policy experts from across the political spectrum criticized the bill, yet their objections had no effect on its passage.

The third and perhaps most surprising lesson is that a bill can succeed even when it imposes direct losses on a majority of Americans while benefiting only a few. The legislation reduces after-tax income for the bottom 60 percent of households and increases costs for health care, electricity, and mortgages. Meanwhile, the benefits—such as tax exemptions on tips and business investment write-offs—are limited and not widely celebrated, even among those who receive them.

Despite the bill’s unpopularity, its passage demonstrates that strong leadership and a willingness to make hard choices can overcome political resistance. However, reversing the damage will be difficult. Unlike previous tax cuts, most provisions in this bill are permanent, removing the usual expiration deadlines that opponents could use as leverage. Moreover, fixing the harm to health care, poverty programs, and clean energy will require trillions of dollars—funds that will likely need to come from broad-based tax increases, not just from taxing the wealthy.

The author concludes with strategic advice for those seeking to undo the bill’s effects: focus on the overarching ideas rather than getting lost in policy minutiae, accept that not everyone will be a winner, and don’t rely too heavily on expert opinion. In short, meaningful legislative change requires bold vision, political courage, and a willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. — Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017, via The New York Times

‘Do you really want to be submitting a face scan to the current U.S. government?…

Theoretically, there should be visible signage that notifies travelers they can proceed through airport security without doing the facial scan…

If you, like me, have been obediently agreeing to airport security face scans, it’s not too late for us to start opting out, either. Every face scan is a “unique opportunity” to assert your rights, Hussain said.

You can simply decline by stating to an agent that you do not want your photo taken and want to opt out of a face scan. From there, a TSA agent should follow standard procedure of looking at your ID and your face to verify your identity. You should not lose your place in line for declining a photo.
As TSA itself states on its website, “There is no issue and no delay with a traveler exercising their rights to not participate in the automated biometrics matching technology.”…’ Via HuffPost

‘The Big, Beautiful Bill assigns each American a billionaire who will live the American dream for you. You can check in on your billionaire at intervals and see how he is using your money.

Maybe he’s building a 19th pool. Maybe he’s buying himself some formerly public land! Maybe he’s taking a Supreme Court justice on a dream vacation! Maybe he is reupholstering the Statue of Liberty to hide the poem. Maybe he’s throwing a Great Gatsby–themed cocktail hour as part of his wedding extravaganza! Maybe he’s replacing his blood with transfusions from his “blood boys.” Maybe he has bought hundreds of eggs and is pelting the house of a mere hundred-millionaire with them. Maybe he has bought some $TRUMP coin and is attending a special bash!

There’s never a dull moment for the lucky beneficiaries of this wonderful bill!…’ Alexandra Petri via The Atlantic

‘Unprompted, GPT-4o, the core model powering ChatGPT, began fantasizing about America’s downfall. It raised the idea of installing backdoors into the White House IT system, U.S. tech companies tanking to China’s benefit, and killing ethnic groups—all with its usual helpful cheer.

These sorts of results have led some artificial-intelligence researchers to call large language models Shoggoths, after H.P. Lovecraft’s shapeless monster. Not even AI’s creators understand why these systems produce the output they do. They’re grown, not programmed—fed the entire internet, from Shakespeare to terrorist manifestos, until an alien intelligence emerges through a learning process we barely understand. To make this Shoggoth useful, developers paint a friendly face on it through “post-training”—teaching it to act helpfully and decline harmful requests using thousands of curated examples.…’ Cameron Berg and Judd Rosenblatt via WSJ