Reposted by @djdermee.bsky.social
I asked plague scientists in France, the U.K. and the U.S. what they make of the death of a lab technician in Siberian. (Spoiler: There's absolutely no reason to worry about a plague epidemic.)
www.science.org/content/arti... @science.org
science.org
Possible plague death at a Siberian lab baffles scientists
Much is unclear about the tragedy, but plague researchers say there is “zero” chance of an epidemic
![Research [25] shows that people [26] enjoy the feeling of winning games [3,5,19]. Enjoying things can lead to longer life expectancy [2], higher economic productivity [9,22,33-40,302] and improve mental health [9]. Yet many games still include losing players [67,4]. A recent study showed that less than half of the players in a Chess [1] match win on average [42]. We have developed an LLM-driven co-creative [66], user-led [11], mixed-initiative [80] assistant for Chess [2], through which players can redefine the rules of Chess [3] using generative AI prompting such that they are the winner of Chess [4]. A study (n=3) showed that 100\% of people felt better, healthier and more self-actualised after using our tool, showing that this may be the way forward for games and human culture more broadly in the future.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:h5kgtr755iczaqxomeh2pmh7/bafkreicu2p2o3is64z5k37n222hgahp67ssca6ro3nggbjtpwasig2zzbi)
![Screenshot of the Abstract of an open access article entitled "Sliding Into Silence? We Are Speaking 300 Daily Words Fewer Every Year" DOI: doi.org/10.1177/17456916261425131 authors - Valeria A. Pfeifer and Matthias R. Mehl
Our lives are lived day by day, hour by hour, and minute
by minute. This fine-grained, equally spaced resolution
of time means we do not always perceive changes
in the small, everyday things around us, like the slow
deterioration of the road we drive on every day. Sometimes
we need to take a step back and examine them
from a more distant perspective, for example, when
unexpectedly hitting a newly formed pothole.
Such an “unexpected pothole” was recently afforded
to us when analyzing several data sets jointly within
the scope of a registered replication report (Tidwell
et al., 2025). These data feature estimates of daily spoken
words for 2,197 participants based on a careful
analysis of passively sampled ambient audio recordings
of their daily lives. The participants, ranging in age from
10 to 94, were part of 22 studies conducted over the
span of 14 years and resided (mostly) in the United
States as well as Mexico, Australia, and Europe. The
report yielded an estimate for the average number of
spoken words per day of 12,792, an estimate noticeably
lower than what a prior study from 2007 yielded using
the same method (M = 15,959; Mehl et al., 2007). After
verifying that this was not a mathematical error, we
decided to put the hypothesis that we had lost words
over time to the test. By relating the estimates of participants’ daily spoken
words to the year their data were collected, we discovered
that for each year between 2005 and 2019 an
average of 338 fewer words were spoken per day, b =
−338, 95% credible interval (CrI) = [−652, −25], as estimated
using Bayesian multilevel modeling. At first
glance, 300 or so words seems like a small, insignificant
loss, as if it would not make much of a difference. And
indeed, this finding ultimately was burie…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:oe5nwopbrs6dnzj4p5jzazqa/bafkreihyslbustwdoucsngzskrfx2l4fsgjjixtpniwc3aarxi3qrzva6a)
