Issues › Section
4 posts across all issues
Issue #811 · Sep 25, 2026
Most of the body heals poorly because regeneration means cell division, and cell division feeds cancer. Organs that face the environment, like the liver, skin and colon, pay a cancer tax to stay repairable. The small intestine renews fast with little cancer. It pays in energy instead, which makes the trade-off three-sided.
Issue #810 · Sep 18, 2026
Until 1930, outsiders thought New Guinea's mountain interior was empty. Then gold prospector Mick Leahy walked in and found about a million farmers. He filmed the encounter. Daniel Frank explains how the highlanders stayed cut off from the outside world for 10,000 years. Crops and pigs reached them from the coast, but knowledge of the wider world did not. Papua New Guinea, or PNG, still runs on clan loyalty today.
Issue #808 · Sep 4, 2026
A 61-person fMRI study in Cerebral Cortex finds that older adults' memory errors are often mix-ups, not blanks. In young adults, hippocampal replay predicts accurate recall. In people over 60, the same replay predicts cross-category mix-ups. Neither brain shrinkage nor attention explains the shift.
Issue #805 · Aug 14, 2026
A conceptual paper argues that professional expertise works like a shared commons. Each firm that hands cognitive work to AI acts rationally. Together, though, these firms can drain the deep human expertise a profession needs to renew itself. Overseeing AI depends on that same expertise.