Grief in the Ocean, Arrowheads in Uzbekistan, and Tao on What Math Gets Wrong

Marine biologists have documented what they describe as grief behavior in a humpback whale: a mother carrying and interacting with a stillborn calf over multiple days, with researchers tracking the behavior directly. Such behavior has been observed in orcas, but this is one of the better-documented cases in humpbacks. The 85 comments divided among behavioral ecology, questions about anthropomorphizing non-human emotion, and responses to the observation itself. The scientific question of whether cetaceans experience something analogous to human grief is genuinely unsettled, but the behavioral evidence has been accumulating.

A PLOS ONE paper on the Obi-Rakhmat site in Uzbekistan is reporting evidence of projectile point technology — potentially arrowheads — dated to approximately 80,000 years ago and associated with Neanderthals rather than anatomically modern humans. If the attribution holds, it would push back the accepted timeline for bow-and-arrow technology by a substantial margin and offer evidence that Neanderthal cognitive and technological capabilities exceeded the standard account. The eight comments were appropriately cautious about a finding that, if confirmed, would require significant revision of the existing record.

Terence Tao's blog post — 'If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it' — drew 362 upvotes and 269 comments. Tao argued that mathematical culture over-rewards the formal proof and under-rewards the broader ecosystem: developing intuition, building computational tools, writing expository work, finding connections between fields, asking productive questions. Academic incentive structures, he argued, have distorted the field by treating the proof as the only output that counts, when it is in fact one artifact of a much richer process. What gives the argument unusual force is its source: Tao is among the most prolific formal proof producers alive, and his critique comes from deep inside the tradition rather than from outside it.

Lighter in weight but warmly received: a Digital Antiquarian retrospective on the Lemmings franchise traced what happened after the game's early-1990s cultural peak, documenting how sequels and licenses gradually separated the mechanic from the creative context that made it work. A network analysis of alliance structures in the reality show Survivor found that the topology of the social graph predicts outcomes better than individual player characteristics — a game-theory result that the Hacker News thread apparently found genuinely interesting. And the open-source roguelike Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a Chess Atlas offering a visual timeline of the game's history, and the signal-processing visualization 'Seeing Circles, Sines, and Signals' all surfaced as examples of the careful passion-project work the community consistently elevates.