<![CDATA[Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

<![CDATA[Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum - All Forums]]> https://www.scivillage.com/ Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:00:47 +0000 MyBB <![CDATA[Space port and uap spotted on surface of the moon]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21066.html Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:42:11 +0000 Magical Realist]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21066.html
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1074198688457250]]>
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1074198688457250]]> <![CDATA[Yes, AOC and the rest acknowledge that "Woke" happened (DIY adjustments)]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21065.html Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:57:21 +0000 C C]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21065.html And other DSA sympathizers are irritated that those below are now laughing and smiling about Woke 1.0, because those are items that they take seriously.
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Democrats like AOC are trying to shrug off their ‘woke’ era. That’s bad for our politics
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/10/politics/...-democrats

INTRO: Democrats would very much like to figure out how to explain away some of the far-left things they said circa 2019 and 2020 — a period often referred to as “peak woke,” “woke 1.0” or “woke 1.” Kamala Harris struggled with this during her 2024 presidential campaign (think: some transgender policies), and now it looms over some key 2026 races.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday offered a prescription: Laugh it off. “I have a local city councilman that has this saying: ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’” the New York congresswoman said on ABC’s “This Week,” before laughing.

Ocasio-Cortez, who once supported defunding the police, went on to suggest Covid had expanded the range of acceptable political discourse. But she said that it’s “not rhetoric that we would use today.”

This might be a politically deft explanation for Ocasio-Cortez and her ilk. But it’s a bad one for the body politic. It continues a troubling trend of major politicians asking Americans not to take the things they say — or more specifically, that they once said — at face value. It’s a perfect recipe for a continued decline in honesty and accountability.

Ocasio-Cortez was quoting New York City Council Member Chi Ossé. Back in May, he responded to a critic who unearthed a 2021 comment of his by saying simply, “Woke 1 was crazyyyy.”

The same week, former Biden White House aide Yemisi Egbewole credited Texas Senate candidate James Talarico for distancing himself from his past woke comments. “Peak woke got weird. It’s okay to say that!” Egbewole said.

And this weekend, perhaps the one 2026 Democratic candidate with the biggest “peak woke” problem echoed Ocasio-Cortez’s comment.

Francesca Hong is the favorite in Tuesday’s Wisconsin gubernatorial primary, but her past statements about abolishing police and canceling Thanksgiving, among others, have a lot of Democrats freaked out about her potential nomination. (MORE - details)]]> And other DSA sympathizers are irritated that those below are now laughing and smiling about Woke 1.0, because those are items that they take seriously.
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Democrats like AOC are trying to shrug off their ‘woke’ era. That’s bad for our politics
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/10/politics/...-democrats

INTRO: Democrats would very much like to figure out how to explain away some of the far-left things they said circa 2019 and 2020 — a period often referred to as “peak woke,” “woke 1.0” or “woke 1.” Kamala Harris struggled with this during her 2024 presidential campaign (think: some transgender policies), and now it looms over some key 2026 races.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday offered a prescription: Laugh it off. “I have a local city councilman that has this saying: ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’” the New York congresswoman said on ABC’s “This Week,” before laughing.

Ocasio-Cortez, who once supported defunding the police, went on to suggest Covid had expanded the range of acceptable political discourse. But she said that it’s “not rhetoric that we would use today.”

This might be a politically deft explanation for Ocasio-Cortez and her ilk. But it’s a bad one for the body politic. It continues a troubling trend of major politicians asking Americans not to take the things they say — or more specifically, that they once said — at face value. It’s a perfect recipe for a continued decline in honesty and accountability.

Ocasio-Cortez was quoting New York City Council Member Chi Ossé. Back in May, he responded to a critic who unearthed a 2021 comment of his by saying simply, “Woke 1 was crazyyyy.”

The same week, former Biden White House aide Yemisi Egbewole credited Texas Senate candidate James Talarico for distancing himself from his past woke comments. “Peak woke got weird. It’s okay to say that!” Egbewole said.

And this weekend, perhaps the one 2026 Democratic candidate with the biggest “peak woke” problem echoed Ocasio-Cortez’s comment.

Francesca Hong is the favorite in Tuesday’s Wisconsin gubernatorial primary, but her past statements about abolishing police and canceling Thanksgiving, among others, have a lot of Democrats freaked out about her potential nomination. (MORE - details)]]> <![CDATA[UK record: 230 migrants in 1 boat + Young male migrants tear apart fabric of towns?]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21064.html Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:37:00 +0000 C C]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21064.html Small boat carrying record 230 migrants crosses English Channel to UK
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/small-bo...uk/4023035

INTRO: A small boat carrying 230 people crossed the English Channel to the UK over the weekend, setting a record for the number of people making the crossing in a single vessel, local media reported Monday. The boat arrived in the UK on Saturday, surpassing the previous record set in July, when 165 people crossed the Channel in a single vessel, the BBC reported.

The Home Office confirmed that a total of 258 migrants aboard four boats crossed the Channel to the UK on Saturday. A Home Office spokesperson told the BBC that this latest incident demonstrated the "reckless and dangerous tactics employed by criminal gangs ... who continue to put lives at risk by cramming ever greater numbers of people onto unseaworthy vessels."

Despite the record number aboard the single vessel, overall Channel crossings have declined this year. Nearly 14,820 people have reached the UK by small boat so far, according to provisional Home Office data cited by the BBC, representing a 43% drop year on year and a 16% decline compared with the same time in 2024.

Young male migrants are tearing apart the fabric of our villages and towns
https://www.dailymail.com/debate/article...EHSAN.html

EXCERPTS: We’ve become used to referring to the endless flow of illegal migrants arriving on our shores as the ‘small boats’ crisis. But the truth is that, these days, they are anything but. One mega craft that made landfall in the early hours of yesterday was carrying no fewer than 230 people, the largest number to make the journey in a single vessel.

That’s the equivalent of more than 20 football teams. If they all lived in one place, we’d be forced to describe it as a village rather than a hamlet. Andy Burnham may claim that Labour’s ‘plan’ to stop the boats is ‘working’, but if there was ever a symbol of the Government’s abject failure to get a grip on the migrant issue, this was it.

Our new Prime Minister feels most content in the comfort zone of his ‘bring back hope’ campaign – propagating feel-good policies to address the cost of living, the health and social care crisis and devolution. But the reality is that the small-boats crisis has been hugely disruptive of local civic life the length and breadth of the country.

The recent disturbances in the Norfolk town of Thetford are only the latest example of what happens when you put large numbers of usually single, young males from countries such as Afghanistan, Eritrea and Sudan, into areas which are ethnically, religiously and culturally homogenous.

[...] Some claim that it’s possible to deter migrants without leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) by cutting migrant benefits, deporting foreign criminals and forcing illegals to live in reception centres. Australia is a poster boy for this sort of hardheaded approach. Under its Operation Sovereign Borders policy launched in 2013, migrant boats were intercepted and either returned to where they had travelled from or their occupants taken to detention centres on islands such as Papua New Guinea off Australia’s northern coast or the Pacific island of Nauru.

Within a year, illegal immigration by boat had fallen to zero. But the lesson of recent years is that attempts to introduce such measures in the UK are invariably thwarted by our brigades of human rights lawyers, who launch actions citing the rights granted to migrants by the European Convention on Human Rights.

The only effective answer is for us to leave the ECHR, end our self-defeating policy of offering legal aid to migrants and return them to their country of origin. As Australia has shown, the effect of such an approach can be almost immediate. The sad thing is that I don’t for one second think that Mr Burnham has the mettle to go down such a path... (MORE - missing details)]]> <![CDATA[Unsocial kids may be happier than you think]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21063.html Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:38:04 +0000 C C]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21063.html https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1139553

INTRO: The child who plays alone during recess may be perfectly content doing so, according to a new study from the University of Georgia.

The research found that some elementary school children who appear unsociable actually just prefer being solo, as long as they know they belong in a broader social setting. These children knew their peers would still invite them to play even if they opted out from time to time. That knowledge acted as a buffer against potential feelings of loneliness.

Children who said they didn’t think fitting in was important felt unhappy with their relationships with peers. It could be that they didn’t see a reason to maintain social connections, often turning down invites to play. As a result, those invites likely stopped coming. And then they began feeling left out and lonely.

It’s important to remind children they can fit in with their peers but not to force them into social interaction if they don’t feel like it, the researchers said.

“There are things we do because we know what’s good for us,” said Michele Lease, co-author of the study and a professor in UGA’s Mary Frances Early College of Education’s department of educational psychology. “We go exercise. We eat our vegetables. We know it’s important. We might not want to do it, but we do it because it’s good for us.

“Social interaction is the same way. Turning down invitations, like avoiding exercise, leads to poorer outcomes.” (MORE - no ads)]]> https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1139553

INTRO: The child who plays alone during recess may be perfectly content doing so, according to a new study from the University of Georgia.

The research found that some elementary school children who appear unsociable actually just prefer being solo, as long as they know they belong in a broader social setting. These children knew their peers would still invite them to play even if they opted out from time to time. That knowledge acted as a buffer against potential feelings of loneliness.

Children who said they didn’t think fitting in was important felt unhappy with their relationships with peers. It could be that they didn’t see a reason to maintain social connections, often turning down invites to play. As a result, those invites likely stopped coming. And then they began feeling left out and lonely.

It’s important to remind children they can fit in with their peers but not to force them into social interaction if they don’t feel like it, the researchers said.

“There are things we do because we know what’s good for us,” said Michele Lease, co-author of the study and a professor in UGA’s Mary Frances Early College of Education’s department of educational psychology. “We go exercise. We eat our vegetables. We know it’s important. We might not want to do it, but we do it because it’s good for us.

“Social interaction is the same way. Turning down invitations, like avoiding exercise, leads to poorer outcomes.” (MORE - no ads)]]> <![CDATA[Dogs can distinguish between human fear and sadness]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21062.html Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:37:06 +0000 C C]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21062.html https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1137798

EXCERPTS: Scientists—and dog lovers—have long known that dogs are remarkably good at interpreting our laughs, frowns, and tears. But the biology behind this ability has remained largely unexplored until now.

In a study published in the Cell Press journal iScience on August 7, researchers peered inside the brains of dogs as they viewed images of various human expressions. The brain scans revealed that dogs process smiles in a unique brain region and, for the first time, provided evidence that dogs can distinguish between negative facial expressions, including anger, sadness, and fear.

“Humans are really good at picking up small details on the face, and so are dogs,” says first author Raúl Hernández-Pérez from the University of Vienna. “This makes dogs very interesting. By studying their brains, we can understand what adaptations have developed to support their remarkable social and emotional understanding of humans.”

[...] the canine brain was not merely sorting the world into good and bad, the team found. A whole-brain analysis revealed distinct patterns of activity that separated fear from anger and sadness, providing the first evidence that dogs can distinguish between specific negative facial expressions.

The researchers say that this ability does not mean that dogs experience emotions exactly as humans do. Also, a still photo of a human face doesn’t tell the whole story; in real life, dogs watch human body language, listen to nuances in our voices, and detect information from our scent.

“When we compare humans with primates, we are looking at abilities that may have come from a common ancestor,” says senior author Laura Cuaya of the University of Vienna. “With dogs, the story is totally different. They followed a very different evolutionary path, yet through domestication, they developed the social abilities needed to understand and cooperate with us.”

[...] Next, the researchers plan to adopt a more dog-centric perspective to understand how dogs integrate these brain signals to make sense of the humans around them. Their future work will also compare how human and dog brains process the same emotional signals... (MORE - missing details, no ads)]]> https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1137798

EXCERPTS: Scientists—and dog lovers—have long known that dogs are remarkably good at interpreting our laughs, frowns, and tears. But the biology behind this ability has remained largely unexplored until now.

In a study published in the Cell Press journal iScience on August 7, researchers peered inside the brains of dogs as they viewed images of various human expressions. The brain scans revealed that dogs process smiles in a unique brain region and, for the first time, provided evidence that dogs can distinguish between negative facial expressions, including anger, sadness, and fear.

“Humans are really good at picking up small details on the face, and so are dogs,” says first author Raúl Hernández-Pérez from the University of Vienna. “This makes dogs very interesting. By studying their brains, we can understand what adaptations have developed to support their remarkable social and emotional understanding of humans.”

[...] the canine brain was not merely sorting the world into good and bad, the team found. A whole-brain analysis revealed distinct patterns of activity that separated fear from anger and sadness, providing the first evidence that dogs can distinguish between specific negative facial expressions.

The researchers say that this ability does not mean that dogs experience emotions exactly as humans do. Also, a still photo of a human face doesn’t tell the whole story; in real life, dogs watch human body language, listen to nuances in our voices, and detect information from our scent.

“When we compare humans with primates, we are looking at abilities that may have come from a common ancestor,” says senior author Laura Cuaya of the University of Vienna. “With dogs, the story is totally different. They followed a very different evolutionary path, yet through domestication, they developed the social abilities needed to understand and cooperate with us.”

[...] Next, the researchers plan to adopt a more dog-centric perspective to understand how dogs integrate these brain signals to make sense of the humans around them. Their future work will also compare how human and dog brains process the same emotional signals... (MORE - missing details, no ads)]]> <![CDATA[Science has never been more prolific – so why has trust in science plummeted?]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21061.html Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:36:02 +0000 C C]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21061.html https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1139536

INTRO: From genome editing to quantum computing, scientific progress accelerates at an unprecedented pace, yet public faith in science is collapsing. Our species has mapped the human genome, created powerful computers that sit in the palms of our hands and extended human lifespans beyond what our ancestors could have imagined – meanwhile anti-intellectualism movements gather pace.

According to Professor Dariusz Jemielniak in his new book Anti-Science: Shortcuts to a Big Idea, it is not due to public ignorance or a failure to communicate science to the masses. Instead, we’re witnessing and living through something far more complex, a fundamental shift in how society relates to knowledge itself.

“We have entered a period in which the relationship between information and truth has become fundamentally contested,” Professor Jemielniak of Kozminski University explains. “The technologies that promised democratized access to knowledge have also democratized access to falsehood.”

Survey data from the mid-twentieth century showed high levels of confidence in scientists and scientific institutions. Science was associated with progress, prosperity and problem-solving, and the profession itself was well-respected.

Today, that well of public trust has been drained dramatically. There are many complex factors behind this decline, Jemielniak explains, from corporate influence scandals, well-publicised cases of fraud, high profile retractions and the sheer volume of scientific information now produced.

These factors are not enough to erode public trust alone, he explains, but is combined with a perfect storm of digital infrastructure that encourages shock-factor information sharing at speed. Social media algorithms amplify sensational claims regardless of truth value, while echo chambers make it easy to find communities that validate virtually any belief.

“What is historically distinctive is the contemporary infrastructure that accelerates these cycles by rewarding outrage, simplifying complex disputes into identity signals, and turning epistemic conflict into content,” Jemielniak explains.

Some scholars argue humanity is even entering ‘a new Dark Ages driven by anti-intellectualism’. Jemielniak says: “The proliferation of digital platforms has allowed misinformation to spread rapidly, challenging the public’s ability to discern credible information and contributing to this erosion of trust.”

Jemielniak suggests one part of the problem lies in science’s very success – because modern science has become so advanced and therefore specialised, even scientists struggle to understand fields outside their own expertise.

“When people cannot evaluate scientific claims for themselves, they must rely on trust,” he explains. “And when that trust is shaken – by scandal, by conflicting expert opinions, by the sheer alienating complexity of scientific discourse – the door opens for alternative explanations that feel more accessible, more human, more intuitively satisfying.”

This creates what Jemielniak calls ‘epistemic dependence’, where rational belief depends not on direct evidence but on a kind of trust, in trusting the experts have good reasons... (MORE - no ads)

PAPER: http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003726517]]> https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1139536

INTRO: From genome editing to quantum computing, scientific progress accelerates at an unprecedented pace, yet public faith in science is collapsing. Our species has mapped the human genome, created powerful computers that sit in the palms of our hands and extended human lifespans beyond what our ancestors could have imagined – meanwhile anti-intellectualism movements gather pace.

According to Professor Dariusz Jemielniak in his new book Anti-Science: Shortcuts to a Big Idea, it is not due to public ignorance or a failure to communicate science to the masses. Instead, we’re witnessing and living through something far more complex, a fundamental shift in how society relates to knowledge itself.

“We have entered a period in which the relationship between information and truth has become fundamentally contested,” Professor Jemielniak of Kozminski University explains. “The technologies that promised democratized access to knowledge have also democratized access to falsehood.”

Survey data from the mid-twentieth century showed high levels of confidence in scientists and scientific institutions. Science was associated with progress, prosperity and problem-solving, and the profession itself was well-respected.

Today, that well of public trust has been drained dramatically. There are many complex factors behind this decline, Jemielniak explains, from corporate influence scandals, well-publicised cases of fraud, high profile retractions and the sheer volume of scientific information now produced.

These factors are not enough to erode public trust alone, he explains, but is combined with a perfect storm of digital infrastructure that encourages shock-factor information sharing at speed. Social media algorithms amplify sensational claims regardless of truth value, while echo chambers make it easy to find communities that validate virtually any belief.

“What is historically distinctive is the contemporary infrastructure that accelerates these cycles by rewarding outrage, simplifying complex disputes into identity signals, and turning epistemic conflict into content,” Jemielniak explains.

Some scholars argue humanity is even entering ‘a new Dark Ages driven by anti-intellectualism’. Jemielniak says: “The proliferation of digital platforms has allowed misinformation to spread rapidly, challenging the public’s ability to discern credible information and contributing to this erosion of trust.”

Jemielniak suggests one part of the problem lies in science’s very success – because modern science has become so advanced and therefore specialised, even scientists struggle to understand fields outside their own expertise.

“When people cannot evaluate scientific claims for themselves, they must rely on trust,” he explains. “And when that trust is shaken – by scandal, by conflicting expert opinions, by the sheer alienating complexity of scientific discourse – the door opens for alternative explanations that feel more accessible, more human, more intuitively satisfying.”

This creates what Jemielniak calls ‘epistemic dependence’, where rational belief depends not on direct evidence but on a kind of trust, in trusting the experts have good reasons... (MORE - no ads)

PAPER: http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003726517]]> <![CDATA[The work AI is taking is the work that makes experts]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21060.html Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:13:13 +0000 C C]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21060.html https://www.sagepub.com/explore-our-cont...es-experts

EXCERPTS: A first-year associate reads through discovery documents. A junior developer fixes small bugs and writes boilerplate. A new analyst builds the routine slide deck nobody senior wants to build. None of that work is glamorous. Most of it is now automatable, and organizations are automating it. From an operational standpoint, they are right to. The work is repetitive, the AI is fast, and the savings show up this quarter.

But that work was never only production. It was also how people learned the job. The associate reading discovery is building a feel for what matters in a case. The developer fixing small bugs is learning how the system actually behaves, as opposed to how the documentation claims it behaves. You cannot get that from a training course. You get it by doing the thing badly, many times, until you stop doing it badly.

Remove the work, and you keep the output. You lose the learning that came with it.

[...] There is a second problem that concerns me more than the first.

Nearly every serious proposal for governing AI depends on human oversight, on somebody in the loop who can tell when the machine is wrong. That only works if the person has independent expertise. Someone who has always worked with AI assistance, and never built the underlying judgment, cannot really audit the system they rely on. They can only agree with it, confidently and quickly.

So oversight is not a resource we can assume will be there. It is produced. And it is produced by exactly the work being automated. That is the connection I think the AI governance conversation is missing.

[....] So what do you do about it? If you treat this as a training problem, you get training solutions: more courses, more upskilling, more internal academies. Those are worth doing, and they will not be enough, because no organization can solve a collective action problem by acting alone.

[...] Expertise is not collapsing. But current incentives are pointed in a specific direction, nobody is watching where they lead, and the people best positioned to notice are the ones we are on track to stop producing... (MORE - missing details)]]> https://www.sagepub.com/explore-our-cont...es-experts

EXCERPTS: A first-year associate reads through discovery documents. A junior developer fixes small bugs and writes boilerplate. A new analyst builds the routine slide deck nobody senior wants to build. None of that work is glamorous. Most of it is now automatable, and organizations are automating it. From an operational standpoint, they are right to. The work is repetitive, the AI is fast, and the savings show up this quarter.

But that work was never only production. It was also how people learned the job. The associate reading discovery is building a feel for what matters in a case. The developer fixing small bugs is learning how the system actually behaves, as opposed to how the documentation claims it behaves. You cannot get that from a training course. You get it by doing the thing badly, many times, until you stop doing it badly.

Remove the work, and you keep the output. You lose the learning that came with it.

[...] There is a second problem that concerns me more than the first.

Nearly every serious proposal for governing AI depends on human oversight, on somebody in the loop who can tell when the machine is wrong. That only works if the person has independent expertise. Someone who has always worked with AI assistance, and never built the underlying judgment, cannot really audit the system they rely on. They can only agree with it, confidently and quickly.

So oversight is not a resource we can assume will be there. It is produced. And it is produced by exactly the work being automated. That is the connection I think the AI governance conversation is missing.

[....] So what do you do about it? If you treat this as a training problem, you get training solutions: more courses, more upskilling, more internal academies. Those are worth doing, and they will not be enough, because no organization can solve a collective action problem by acting alone.

[...] Expertise is not collapsing. But current incentives are pointed in a specific direction, nobody is watching where they lead, and the people best positioned to notice are the ones we are on track to stop producing... (MORE - missing details)]]> <![CDATA[Mount Toba eruption doesn’t seem like it could nearly kill our species]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21059.html Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:12:13 +0000 C C]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21059.html https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/...r-species/

EXCERPTS: Mount Toba was the biggest volcanic eruption in the last 2.6 million years, and some have suggested it nearly wiped out humanity. Around 74,000 years ago, a caldera on what is now Sumatra emptied thousands of cubic kilometers of magma in about two weeks, roughly a thousand times more than Mount Pinatubo spewed out in 1991. “People thought it might have caused massive cooling of the planet, and hence threatened the survival of our ancestors,” says Jinheum Park, a geoscientist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.

Park and his colleagues went looking for the records of that catastrophe in the mud taken from the bottom of a small crater lake on the Kenya-Tanzania border. They found instead that the effects of the Mount Toba eruption lasted under two years and amounted to perhaps half a degree of cooling.

[...] “The eruption did cool and dry the region, just not to such an extent as to significantly threaten the survival of humans,” Park argues. Across the 450-year window his team analyzed, eastern equatorial Africa was already sliding from a warmer, wetter regime into a cooler, drier one, tracking a natural cooling trend recorded in Greenland ice. Against that background, Toba’s impact looks tiny. “Our study shows that the magnitude of cooling and drying after Toba was much smaller, and within the natural range of variation in the last glacial–interglacial cycles,” Park says. “Humans had already experienced and survived that.”

The limitation in Park’s study is that Chala is just one lake. “It records the regional climate signals in eastern Africa, but it doesn’t show the impact on the whole globe,” Park explains. “There should be more studies using a similar approach, at more sites where the Toba ash is found.”

The team also hopes similar approaches will be used to learn more about other huge volcanic eruptions like Los Chocoyos in Guatemala and the Oruanui eruption in New Zealand 26,000 years ago. “They were not as big as Toba, but they were still super-eruptions. It would be interesting and exciting to see what happened,” Park says... (MORE - missing details)]]> https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/...r-species/

EXCERPTS: Mount Toba was the biggest volcanic eruption in the last 2.6 million years, and some have suggested it nearly wiped out humanity. Around 74,000 years ago, a caldera on what is now Sumatra emptied thousands of cubic kilometers of magma in about two weeks, roughly a thousand times more than Mount Pinatubo spewed out in 1991. “People thought it might have caused massive cooling of the planet, and hence threatened the survival of our ancestors,” says Jinheum Park, a geoscientist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.

Park and his colleagues went looking for the records of that catastrophe in the mud taken from the bottom of a small crater lake on the Kenya-Tanzania border. They found instead that the effects of the Mount Toba eruption lasted under two years and amounted to perhaps half a degree of cooling.

[...] “The eruption did cool and dry the region, just not to such an extent as to significantly threaten the survival of humans,” Park argues. Across the 450-year window his team analyzed, eastern equatorial Africa was already sliding from a warmer, wetter regime into a cooler, drier one, tracking a natural cooling trend recorded in Greenland ice. Against that background, Toba’s impact looks tiny. “Our study shows that the magnitude of cooling and drying after Toba was much smaller, and within the natural range of variation in the last glacial–interglacial cycles,” Park says. “Humans had already experienced and survived that.”

The limitation in Park’s study is that Chala is just one lake. “It records the regional climate signals in eastern Africa, but it doesn’t show the impact on the whole globe,” Park explains. “There should be more studies using a similar approach, at more sites where the Toba ash is found.”

The team also hopes similar approaches will be used to learn more about other huge volcanic eruptions like Los Chocoyos in Guatemala and the Oruanui eruption in New Zealand 26,000 years ago. “They were not as big as Toba, but they were still super-eruptions. It would be interesting and exciting to see what happened,” Park says... (MORE - missing details)]]> <![CDATA[Flesh-eating screwworms feast on humans in Mexico; human cases top 500]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21058.html Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:11:16 +0000 C C]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21058.html https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/f...s-top-500/

INTRO: Since the flesh-eating screwworm fly reinvaded Mexico in 2024, human cases of the voracious parasite have been mounting. According to a July surveillance report from Mexico’s Ministry of Health, there have been over 500 human cases in 2025 and 2026. A study this week in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases analyzed the information on over 200 confirmed cases reported between April 2025 and March 2026 and found that the infestation pace is increasing.

Among the 200 confirmed cases in the study, six deaths were reported. At least one of the deaths was directly caused by the fly’s maggots, researchers in Mexico reported in the study.

The New World screwworm (NWS) fly was once endemic in Mexico—as well as the US. The flies lay hundreds of eggs in the wounds, inflamed tissue, mucous membranes, and orifices of warm-blooded creatures. The resulting maggots hatch within a day and begin ravenously feasting on the living flesh of their victims. While the fly’s maggots generate ghastly, life-threatening wounds in a variety of warm-blooded species, including humans, they’re particularly devastating to livestock.

Amid a decades-long eradication effort, the fly’s populations were wiped out from the US, Mexico, and Central America. This was largely done with massive aerial releases of sterilized male flies, a technique that works because female NWS flies only mate once in their lifespans. Mexico declared NWS eradicated in 2003. Panama declared eradication in 2006 and kept an active biological barrier along the Darién Gap at the border with Colombia. But in 2022, the barrier was breached, and Mexico began seeing cases in animals in 2024... (MORE - details)

Eradicating the screwworm fly (1960) ... https://youtu.be/QFoOnS6CWSI

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/QFoOnS6CWSI]]> https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/f...s-top-500/

INTRO: Since the flesh-eating screwworm fly reinvaded Mexico in 2024, human cases of the voracious parasite have been mounting. According to a July surveillance report from Mexico’s Ministry of Health, there have been over 500 human cases in 2025 and 2026. A study this week in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases analyzed the information on over 200 confirmed cases reported between April 2025 and March 2026 and found that the infestation pace is increasing.

Among the 200 confirmed cases in the study, six deaths were reported. At least one of the deaths was directly caused by the fly’s maggots, researchers in Mexico reported in the study.

The New World screwworm (NWS) fly was once endemic in Mexico—as well as the US. The flies lay hundreds of eggs in the wounds, inflamed tissue, mucous membranes, and orifices of warm-blooded creatures. The resulting maggots hatch within a day and begin ravenously feasting on the living flesh of their victims. While the fly’s maggots generate ghastly, life-threatening wounds in a variety of warm-blooded species, including humans, they’re particularly devastating to livestock.

Amid a decades-long eradication effort, the fly’s populations were wiped out from the US, Mexico, and Central America. This was largely done with massive aerial releases of sterilized male flies, a technique that works because female NWS flies only mate once in their lifespans. Mexico declared NWS eradicated in 2003. Panama declared eradication in 2006 and kept an active biological barrier along the Darién Gap at the border with Colombia. But in 2022, the barrier was breached, and Mexico began seeing cases in animals in 2024... (MORE - details)

Eradicating the screwworm fly (1960) ... https://youtu.be/QFoOnS6CWSI

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/QFoOnS6CWSI]]> <![CDATA[The world's vegetables are vanishing, and it's quietly wrecking our diets]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21057.html Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:07:40 +0000 C C]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21057.html https://www.sciencealert.com/the-worlds-...-our-diets

INTRO: Most of us aren't eating anywhere near enough vegetables, and we're suffering the health consequences. Meanwhile, we're also growing fewer and fewer varieties of vegetables, adding to the declining diversity in our diets.

A new report published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by an international team of nutrition, agriculture, and botany experts suggests embracing vegetable biodiversity could be key to improving our own health, and that of our planet.

Agriculture scientist Maarten van Zonneveld, who led the research while working at the World Vegetable Center, says our existing approaches to agriculture are not enough to solve the world's nutrition problems.

"The solution isn't simply to grow more vegetables – it's also to grow more kinds of vegetables," he says. "Much of the vegetable biodiversity we need is still out there – in traditional varieties and their wild relatives. The urgency is to conserve it properly so that we can use it wisely to diversify diets amid climate change."

The study suggests we're overlooking lots of vegetables rich in minerals and vitamins that might also be better suited to local growing conditions, depending on where in the world you live. Across the world, most people consume around 40 percent fewer vegetables than recommended for a healthy diet.

That's concerning, given low consumption of vegetables is among the top five dietary risk factors contributing to the global burden of disease. [...] Before agriculture became industrialized, there was a much greater diversity of plants being grown for food. For instance, there are more than 4,000 different varieties of potatoes, but in the United States, only about five to eight varieties are widely used.

From artificial selection, to monocultures for mass production, to genetic modification, the industrialization of agriculture – and the supply chains that distribute these products – has whittled away the variety of vegetables that wind up on our tables... (MORE - details)

https://youtu.be/EkJnOWGCejQ

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/EkJnOWGCejQ]]> https://www.sciencealert.com/the-worlds-...-our-diets

INTRO: Most of us aren't eating anywhere near enough vegetables, and we're suffering the health consequences. Meanwhile, we're also growing fewer and fewer varieties of vegetables, adding to the declining diversity in our diets.

A new report published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by an international team of nutrition, agriculture, and botany experts suggests embracing vegetable biodiversity could be key to improving our own health, and that of our planet.

Agriculture scientist Maarten van Zonneveld, who led the research while working at the World Vegetable Center, says our existing approaches to agriculture are not enough to solve the world's nutrition problems.

"The solution isn't simply to grow more vegetables – it's also to grow more kinds of vegetables," he says. "Much of the vegetable biodiversity we need is still out there – in traditional varieties and their wild relatives. The urgency is to conserve it properly so that we can use it wisely to diversify diets amid climate change."

The study suggests we're overlooking lots of vegetables rich in minerals and vitamins that might also be better suited to local growing conditions, depending on where in the world you live. Across the world, most people consume around 40 percent fewer vegetables than recommended for a healthy diet.

That's concerning, given low consumption of vegetables is among the top five dietary risk factors contributing to the global burden of disease. [...] Before agriculture became industrialized, there was a much greater diversity of plants being grown for food. For instance, there are more than 4,000 different varieties of potatoes, but in the United States, only about five to eight varieties are widely used.

From artificial selection, to monocultures for mass production, to genetic modification, the industrialization of agriculture – and the supply chains that distribute these products – has whittled away the variety of vegetables that wind up on our tables... (MORE - details)

https://youtu.be/EkJnOWGCejQ

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/EkJnOWGCejQ]]> <![CDATA[A hint of what's to come (Insidious)]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21056.html Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:39:09 +0000 Ostronomos]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21056.html I saw this trailer today:

INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER - Official Trailer (4K)

It seems that Hollywood is growing more sophisticated in their creation of horror flicks. This trailer accurately presents the spirit realm as requiring a 6th sense (something I'm all too familiar with). ]]> I saw this trailer today:

INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER - Official Trailer (4K)

It seems that Hollywood is growing more sophisticated in their creation of horror flicks. This trailer accurately presents the spirit realm as requiring a 6th sense (something I'm all too familiar with). ]]> <![CDATA[Police hire made during Floyd furor goes ironically and insanely wayward? (DEI style)]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21055.html Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:52:16 +0000 C C]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21055.html Caught between the husband and the "I wanna be like dad" son (or something). The second son is disabled and thereby escapes this mess but could be family-less if not on his own, should the evidence pan out.
- - - - - - - - - - -

Husband also later arrested after deputy commissioner wife charged with being son’s getaway driver in Bronx shooting
https://www.nydailynews.com/2026/08/06/h...-shooting/

NATE THE LAWYER
https://youtu.be/nyeDUU173LA

INTRO: In the aftermath of the George Floyd riots in 2020, Mount Vernon scrambled to diversify and hired a local community activist and made her Deputy Police Commissioner. Despite her having no prior law-enforcement experience. She was paid $140,000 a year for this sinecure. Her husband has spent several years in prison for drug activity.

Over the next few years, her teenage son got involved in a gang and was shot by police in a couple of incidents for pulling a firearm, recovering from injury both times. Eventually the son hatches a plan to shoot a rival gang member in front of the courthouse and calls on someone he can trust to drive the car. His own mother.

Prosecutors allege her son Chase circled the courthouse with his parents before putting on a mask and firing multiple shots toward a group that included the alleged rival gang member. Investigators also point to surveillance footage and text messages discussing where the vehicle needed to be positioned and saying the timing had to be “right.”

Nobody was hit. Jennifer Lackard was fired by Mount Vernon and pleaded not guilty to attempted murder, conspiracy, weapons charges, and other offenses. Chase also pleaded not guilty and was ordered held without bail.

The allegations are serious, but the evidence still has to be proven in court.

https://youtu.be/nyeDUU173LA

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/nyeDUU173LA]]> Caught between the husband and the "I wanna be like dad" son (or something). The second son is disabled and thereby escapes this mess but could be family-less if not on his own, should the evidence pan out.
- - - - - - - - - - -

Husband also later arrested after deputy commissioner wife charged with being son’s getaway driver in Bronx shooting
https://www.nydailynews.com/2026/08/06/h...-shooting/

NATE THE LAWYER
https://youtu.be/nyeDUU173LA

INTRO: In the aftermath of the George Floyd riots in 2020, Mount Vernon scrambled to diversify and hired a local community activist and made her Deputy Police Commissioner. Despite her having no prior law-enforcement experience. She was paid $140,000 a year for this sinecure. Her husband has spent several years in prison for drug activity.

Over the next few years, her teenage son got involved in a gang and was shot by police in a couple of incidents for pulling a firearm, recovering from injury both times. Eventually the son hatches a plan to shoot a rival gang member in front of the courthouse and calls on someone he can trust to drive the car. His own mother.

Prosecutors allege her son Chase circled the courthouse with his parents before putting on a mask and firing multiple shots toward a group that included the alleged rival gang member. Investigators also point to surveillance footage and text messages discussing where the vehicle needed to be positioned and saying the timing had to be “right.”

Nobody was hit. Jennifer Lackard was fired by Mount Vernon and pleaded not guilty to attempted murder, conspiracy, weapons charges, and other offenses. Chase also pleaded not guilty and was ordered held without bail.

The allegations are serious, but the evidence still has to be proven in court.

https://youtu.be/nyeDUU173LA

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/nyeDUU173LA]]> <![CDATA[A.I. consciousness?]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21054.html Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:20:45 +0000 Ostronomos]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21054.html

Add bookmark

Here was my question to AI about conscious machines. I thought I would shed light on this question:
If I wish to one day create the first conscious machine humanity has ever seen, should I begin by studying mathematics or C++ programming language (C++ being a language used by AI)?
Start with mathematics. If your long‑term goal is to build a conscious machine, mathematics gives you the conceptual tools to even define what consciousness could mean in a computational system, while C++ becomes relevant later when you need to implement those ideas efficiently.
Why mathematics comes first
Mathematics underpins every serious attempt to formalize cognition, self‑reference, agency, and reasoning in machines.

AI’s future depends on new mathematical frameworks, not just better code. Oxford’s Peter Grindrod argues that mathematics will lead the next generation of AI, especially for systems requiring creativity, abstraction, and trustworthy reasoning.
Consciousness research already relies on mathematical structures such as fixed‑point theory, topology, probabilistic reasoning, and self‑referential functions. These appear in formal models of artificial consciousness.
Current AI struggles with deep reasoning, and progress in mathematical cognition is harder than progress in coding. This gap highlights that mathematical understanding is the bottleneck.

If your ambition is the first conscious machine, you’re not just building software—you’re trying to formalize self-awareness, agency, and introspection. That’s a mathematical problem before it’s an engineering one.

Where C++ fits in
C++ is extremely important for high‑performance AI systems, but it’s not where you begin conceptual work.

C++ and C dominate in execution speed and memory efficiency for AI algorithms.
When you eventually design new architectures (e.g., custom cognitive loops, metacognitive modules, or novel neural structures), you’ll likely need a systems language like C++ to implement them efficiently.

But C++ teaches you how to build, not what to build.
How your goals shape the choice
Your stated ambition—creating the first conscious machine—is not a software‑engineering problem. It’s a theoretical problem involving:

formal models of self-awareness
mathematical definitions of agency
recursive cognitive architectures
probabilistic reasoning about internal states
fixed‑point structures for self-reference

Add bookmark

AI’s future depends on new mathematical frameworks, not just better code. Oxford’s Peter Grindrod argues that mathematics will lead the next generation of AI, especially for systems requiring creativity, abstraction, and trustworthy reasoning.
Consciousness research already relies on mathematical structures such as fixed‑point theory, topology, probabilistic reasoning, and self‑referential functions. These appear in formal models of artificial consciousness.
Current AI struggles with deep reasoning, and progress in mathematical cognition is harder than progress in coding. This gap highlights that mathematical understanding is the bottleneck.

Where C++ fits in
C++ is extremely important for high‑performance AI systems, but it’s not where you begin conceptual work.

C++ and C dominate in execution speed and memory efficiency for AI algorithms.
When you eventually design new architectures (e.g., custom cognitive loops, metacognitive modules, or novel neural structures), you’ll likely need a systems language like C++ to implement them efficiently.

formal models of self-awareness
mathematical definitions of agency
recursive cognitive architectures
probabilistic reasoning about internal states
fixed‑point structures for self-reference

These are mathematical ideas. You can’t code them before you understand them.
Decision table
Your goal
Best starting point
Why
Understand consciousness, cognition, self-reference
Mathematics
Consciousness models rely on topology, fixed points, logic, probability, and formal systems.
Build high-performance AI systems
C++ (later)
Needed for efficient implementation once the theory exists.
Explore current AI architectures
Python + math
Most research prototypes use Python; math gives conceptual depth.
Create new architectures beyond deep learning
Mathematics first
You must invent the structure before coding it.]]> <![CDATA[Why Americans don't sound British anymore: It's almost the reverse?]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21053.html Sun, 09 Aug 2026 23:42:05 +0000 C C]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21053.html https://youtu.be/gasleU1P2J0

VIDEO INTRO: Here's a sentence almost every American has said at some point. "We used to sound British, and then we changed." Wrong. Almost backwards, actually.

If you traveled back to 1776 and stood in a Boston tavern or a Virginia courthouse or a London coffee house, here's what you notice. The Americans and the British sounded remarkably similar. Not identical. Regional accents already existed on both sides of the Atlantic, but were still close. Close enough that a founding father and a British lord would have recognized each other's speech as fundamentally the same kind of English.

Now, here's the part that breaks people's brains. If one side of that conversation was going to change dramatically over the next hundred years, it wasn't the Americans. It was the British.

The posh British accent you hear today, the one that sounds like the original, the authentic, the one America supposedly drifted away from, didn't exist yet in 1776. It was invented afterward by a specific class of people in a specific city for a very specific reason. Americans didn't lose the British accent. The British accent, as most people picture it today, hadn't been born yet.

Today we're tracing exactly when American and British English split apart. And the story is not one you were taught. It involves a dictionary writer with a chip on his shoulder, a sound that quietly vanished from English, an entire social class in London deciding to talk differently on purpose, and an accident of geography that means some American cities for a while sounded more British than America itself.

[...] In the early 1600s, when the first English colonists landed at Jamestown and later Plymouth, they weren't bringing over a foreign language that would slowly turn into something else. They were bringing over English. The same English being spoken in London, Bristol, and the English countryside at that exact moment. And critically, that English was rhotic, meaning speakers pronounced the R sound wherever it appeared in a word. Car, hard, mother -- every R got spoken fully the way most Americans still say it today.

This matters because non-rhotic English, the R-dropping style that says "ca" instead of "car", the style that most people associate with a posh British accent, did not exist yet. Shakespearen English was rhotic. The King James Bible was translated by rhotic speakers. If you'd asked an Elizabethan and a Londoner to say "father", it would have sounded closer to a modern American "father" than a modern British one.

So, the accents didn't start apart and converge. They started together. What happened next is that an ocean got involved. And oceans are one of the most powerful forces in linguistics. Not because water changes how people talk, but because distance slows down how fast accents can copy each other.

Here's something most people don't know. Colonial America wasn't settled by one wave of English people speaking one uniform English. It was settled by waves from different parts of England arriving in different colonies at different times, and each wave brought its own regional speech patterns with it...

Britain changed. Not America ... https://youtu.be/gasleU1P2J0

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/gasleU1P2J0]]> https://youtu.be/gasleU1P2J0

VIDEO INTRO: Here's a sentence almost every American has said at some point. "We used to sound British, and then we changed." Wrong. Almost backwards, actually.

If you traveled back to 1776 and stood in a Boston tavern or a Virginia courthouse or a London coffee house, here's what you notice. The Americans and the British sounded remarkably similar. Not identical. Regional accents already existed on both sides of the Atlantic, but were still close. Close enough that a founding father and a British lord would have recognized each other's speech as fundamentally the same kind of English.

Now, here's the part that breaks people's brains. If one side of that conversation was going to change dramatically over the next hundred years, it wasn't the Americans. It was the British.

The posh British accent you hear today, the one that sounds like the original, the authentic, the one America supposedly drifted away from, didn't exist yet in 1776. It was invented afterward by a specific class of people in a specific city for a very specific reason. Americans didn't lose the British accent. The British accent, as most people picture it today, hadn't been born yet.

Today we're tracing exactly when American and British English split apart. And the story is not one you were taught. It involves a dictionary writer with a chip on his shoulder, a sound that quietly vanished from English, an entire social class in London deciding to talk differently on purpose, and an accident of geography that means some American cities for a while sounded more British than America itself.

[...] In the early 1600s, when the first English colonists landed at Jamestown and later Plymouth, they weren't bringing over a foreign language that would slowly turn into something else. They were bringing over English. The same English being spoken in London, Bristol, and the English countryside at that exact moment. And critically, that English was rhotic, meaning speakers pronounced the R sound wherever it appeared in a word. Car, hard, mother -- every R got spoken fully the way most Americans still say it today.

This matters because non-rhotic English, the R-dropping style that says "ca" instead of "car", the style that most people associate with a posh British accent, did not exist yet. Shakespearen English was rhotic. The King James Bible was translated by rhotic speakers. If you'd asked an Elizabethan and a Londoner to say "father", it would have sounded closer to a modern American "father" than a modern British one.

So, the accents didn't start apart and converge. They started together. What happened next is that an ocean got involved. And oceans are one of the most powerful forces in linguistics. Not because water changes how people talk, but because distance slows down how fast accents can copy each other.

Here's something most people don't know. Colonial America wasn't settled by one wave of English people speaking one uniform English. It was settled by waves from different parts of England arriving in different colonies at different times, and each wave brought its own regional speech patterns with it...

Britain changed. Not America ... https://youtu.be/gasleU1P2J0

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/gasleU1P2J0]]> <![CDATA[I asked Grok AI to predict the 2028 presidential election map (machine style)]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21052.html Sun, 09 Aug 2026 22:32:22 +0000 C C]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21052.html As if Grok could ever be unbiased or less so than its mainstream rivals going the other way. But OTOH, there is no Bill Clinton of the 1990s to persuade Dems to move more to the right, and no Obama to renew that approach in the next century. Biden completely destroyed confidence in that public presentation by campaigning as a centrist and then veering so far from that after winning that he might as well have been bucking for DSA membership.

Here's another video that's a month old that pitted Kamala Harris against Vance in 2028. A narrower margin in the outcome: https://youtu.be/jxvNfrSN8zM
- - - - - - - - - - -

ELECTION TIME
https://youtu.be/delneY9k5Lw

VIDEO EXCERPTS: Over the past few months, AOC has emerged as a favorite to win the 2028 Democratic nomination for president. She's consistently trading places with Pete Buttigieg for third place in the polls. And according to the market odds on Kalshi, she is one of the clear front runners neck-and-neck with Gavin Newsome and Jon Ossoff.

In this video, I asked Grok AI to show me its prediction for the 2028 election in a matchup between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Republican favorite JD Vance. The vice president holds a solid lead in GOP primary polling and has a 42% chance of winning the nomination according to Kalshi. So today we will fill in the 2028 electoral map based on Grock's prediction for all 50 states. Jumping right into it, we'll begin by categorizing the safe states for both candidates...

[...] And so this is it. This is the 2028 electoral map based on Grock's prediction for a matchup between JD Vance and AOC. Vance would win 327 electoral votes while AOC gets just 211, the worst Democratic performance since Michael Dukakus in 1988. If you want to see the latest 2028 primary polls for yourself, make sure you check out my website at pollsmax.com. Thank you guys so much for watching.

Jaw-dropping results! ... https://youtu.be/delneY9k5Lw

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/delneY9k5Lw]]> As if Grok could ever be unbiased or less so than its mainstream rivals going the other way. But OTOH, there is no Bill Clinton of the 1990s to persuade Dems to move more to the right, and no Obama to renew that approach in the next century. Biden completely destroyed confidence in that public presentation by campaigning as a centrist and then veering so far from that after winning that he might as well have been bucking for DSA membership.

Here's another video that's a month old that pitted Kamala Harris against Vance in 2028. A narrower margin in the outcome: https://youtu.be/jxvNfrSN8zM
- - - - - - - - - - -

ELECTION TIME
https://youtu.be/delneY9k5Lw

VIDEO EXCERPTS: Over the past few months, AOC has emerged as a favorite to win the 2028 Democratic nomination for president. She's consistently trading places with Pete Buttigieg for third place in the polls. And according to the market odds on Kalshi, she is one of the clear front runners neck-and-neck with Gavin Newsome and Jon Ossoff.

In this video, I asked Grok AI to show me its prediction for the 2028 election in a matchup between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Republican favorite JD Vance. The vice president holds a solid lead in GOP primary polling and has a 42% chance of winning the nomination according to Kalshi. So today we will fill in the 2028 electoral map based on Grock's prediction for all 50 states. Jumping right into it, we'll begin by categorizing the safe states for both candidates...

[...] And so this is it. This is the 2028 electoral map based on Grock's prediction for a matchup between JD Vance and AOC. Vance would win 327 electoral votes while AOC gets just 211, the worst Democratic performance since Michael Dukakus in 1988. If you want to see the latest 2028 primary polls for yourself, make sure you check out my website at pollsmax.com. Thank you guys so much for watching.

Jaw-dropping results! ... https://youtu.be/delneY9k5Lw

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/delneY9k5Lw]]>