Ten simple rules for structuring scientific papers.

The mere-exposure effect fails to replicate. It never made much sense to me anyway.

Some people really are mosquito magnets. I’m afraid I’m one of them. At the end of a two-week hiking trip to the Canadian Rockies I counted more than 50 mosquito bites, despite generously spraying myself with Deet.

Interview with Wolfgang Tillmans on the eve of a new retrospective at MoMA.

L’éloge de Philippe Descola à Bruno Latour.

Mental illness is not in your head. Decades of biological research haven’t improved diagnosis or treatment. We should look to society, not to the brain.

Are we the same people at age four that we will be at 24, 44, or 74? Or do we change dramatically through time? What you're like isn't who you are.

Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers. I’ve always suspected that well-known authors get published because they’re well-known, no matter what they write.

Although popular in social science, in the media and in practice, the concepts of generations and generational differences lack theoretical, methodological and statistical validity. An obituary (preprint). Published paper.

A new machine learning algorithm can predict when a complex system is about to switch to a wildly different mode of behavior.

Animals may have begun to vocalize before anyone had ears to hear them.

The key to understanding the origin and fate of the universe may be a more complete understanding of the vacuum.

The Storykeeper: A conversation with Svetlana Alexievich.

The Disunited States. I still find it disconcerting and bizarre that the prospect of political violence and even civil war in the US is now seriously discussed. Who would have thought.

Using single-cell transcriptomics, four new studies in Science reveal evolutionary innovations in reptile and amphibian brains.

A history of the modernist villain’s lair. Why do movie villains always live in houses built by modernist masters?

The discovery of a hot spot for horizontal gene transfer draws attention to the possible roles of parasites and ecology in such changes.

The immortal awfulness of open plan workplaces.

The six stages of having too many books. The horizontal squeeze and the secret double shelf look familiar.