Tootfinder

Impact of a transient neonatal visual deprivation on the development of the ventral occipito-temporal cortex in humans https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65468-7 "while EVC is permanently affected by early deprivation, categorical coding in VOTC shows resilience"; <…

Impact of a transient neonatal visual deprivation on the development of the ventral occipito-temporal cortex in humans - Nature Communications
This study shows that transient blindness at birth leaves lasting effects on early visual functions, while higher visual regions encoding categories remain unaffected, revealing different sensitive periods for different functions in vision.

There’s an unwritten rule in publishing,
or so I’ve been told:
don’t write about COVID.
Our collective attention span has been saturated by those endless months holed up in attics and cramped corners of apartments, staring out at a world we could no longer take part in.
When the worst of it passed, we felt an urge to close that chapter, to padlock it behind a heavy latch.
But in doing so, we also tuck away the hard-won lessons of that time:
how quickly s…

Bird flu warnings are being ignored. I’ve seen this pattern before
H5N1 has a 50% fatality rate in humans. Yet we’re dismantling the systems designed to catch it early.

Sources: ex-xAI researcher Eric Zelikman is raising $1B at a $5B valuation for Humans&, which aims to train AI that is better at collaborating with humans (Anna Tong/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2025…

xAI Researcher In Talks To Raise $1 Billion For New Frontier Lab Humans&
Founded by former xAI staffer Eric Zelikman and early Googler Georges Harik, the new lab is building models that are better at interacting with humans.

400,000 years ago, early #Neanderthals gathered around a pit in what’s now a #Suffolk forest to spark the oldest known #fire created by human hands.

The moment the earliest known man-made fire was uncovered - BBC News
Archaeologists in the UK have discovered the world's oldest evidence of humans lighting fires