Theme
Minds, attention, consciousness and the tools of thought: the questions underneath the news.
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15 essays
In 398 young adults with logged screen time, heavier short-video use was not linked to worse attention at all, and only modestly to weaker memory for unusual images. The most striking finding may be how badly people estimate their own scrolling.
Why a work can leave us cold and still be worth our time.
In a federal panel of 5,211 young Americans, those who smoked cannabis, and especially those who both smoked and vaped, were more likely to develop real breathing trouble a year or two later. Vaping alone showed nothing. "Nothing" here does not mean "safe."
Norman Doidge's bestseller turned neuroplasticity into a message of hope. Go back to the studies behind his stories and you find something sturdier than the hype and smaller than the promise.
A Berlin study says 80 percent of patients got meaningful relief from an artery-blocking knee procedure. A Rotterdam trial that included a fake version found the fake worked about as well. Both numbers are honest. Only one of them can tell you why people got better.
A clip of a "fruit fly brain" flying through a generated harbor set off talk of uploads and simulated universes. The documents behind it describe something smaller: an integration of borrowed models, with hand-picked wiring. The metaphysics can wait. The honest question is what we would owe a copy that one day really works.
In 461,682 older Americans followed for up to two decades, total ultra-processed food intake did not predict colorectal cancer. What sat inside the category did. Processed meat in one direction, whole grains, fiber and dairy in the other.
Two newborn sisters died of the same rare cancer. Reading the faint mutations in their cells, researchers found it began in one and crossed to the other before birth, and that the textbook picture of identical twinning may be wrong.
Memorial Sloan Kettering tested nearly 40,000 cancer patients for inherited risk genes, at every age. Limiting the test to those diagnosed before 50 would have missed 72 percent of the carriers. The number is less surprising than it sounds, and the lesson is better than the headline.
A meta-analysis of seven small randomized trials found no overall effect of vitamin D on irisin or SIRT1. The more useful lesson is about how thin the evidence behind a fashionable mechanism can be.
A Swedish study followed 21,797 twins from age 9 into their twenties. Heavy screen use went with depression and anxiety, until researchers compared each teenager with their own twin. What was left is smaller than the panic, and not quite zero.
The authors of a fluvoxamine and metformin trial pulled their paper because the metformin arm was misreported, then republished it. The fluvoxamine result survives. Some of the other numbers quietly moved, and that is the real lesson in how science corrects itself.
A randomized trial at the University of Maryland gave 2,379 students a course-built AI study assistant. Only about one in seven touched it. Grades in comparable sections still dropped, and that is the most interesting part.
A two-year Liverpool trial found people who drank diet beverages kept off as much weight as water drinkers. The result is reassuring. The way it was declared "equivalent" deserves a closer look.
Six checks: design, endpoint, absolute effect, population, status and funding, limits. The house method, in the open.
One email on Sunday: the essay of the week and the question worth carrying into the next one, from both sides of the Atlantic. The letter is paused for now: no signups and no sends while the site is rebuilt.
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