The inventor of liraglutide (one of the earlier GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic) wrote a great history of its development. Many metascience gems on how mouse studies can both guide & mislead, the very long timelines in drug development, etc. [notes below]

I also didn't realize there was a long history of GLP-1 drugs being tried for neurodegenerative conditions - thought it was a more recent finding. But no, its been investigated since 2002 (!)

Nemets Perhaps 150 years. 19th century influence on German philosophy and British elites was profound.

Evidence of directional selection for cognitive ability in the last 10,000 years from the David Reich lab

The stakes of politics rise as power and wealth concentrate in the center.

Groypers are surprisingly similar to the early Houthis - not just in ideology but also in structure, strategy, and rhetoric.

If you are interested in the origins of Turkic languages and are at EMBL, please come find my poster (115) and me at poster session 1 on Wednesday. I'd love to hear your thoughts, comments, and critique! And if you aren't at EMBL, please feel free to email me or reply here!

curious if special status of Ducal Prussia would have been known among Ottomans during Suleiman's reign.

I decided to read Xinru Ma and Dave Kang's book Beyond Power Transitions. It's a classic piece of academic CCP propaganda and makes a dangerous and oft repeated point: China has never been expansionist and its neigbors secretly desire its benign hegemony.

A good couple of pages in Heather and Rapley’s ‘Why Empires Fall’ on how the Rhine and Germania develop in the few hundred years after Teutoberg Forest. “Where once rulers had titles meaning ‘leader of the people,’ they were now all ‘warband leader.’

How rich was pre-revolutionary Europe? Despite major political divides, Northern Italy was still ahead on the continent! England with its proto industrial revolution was just behind. France was very poor in contrast.