Probability in the Pleistocene: Origins and Antiquity of Native American Dice, Games of Chance, and Gambling

"These results suggest that ancient Native Americans possessed a basic working knowledge of chance, randomness, and probability and consequently were early movers in humanity’s emerging understanding and practical application of these concepts."

Madden, R.J. (2026) ‘Probability in the Pleistocene: Origins and Antiquity of Native American Dice, Games of Chance, and Gambling’, American Antiquity, pp. 1–35. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/aaq.2025.10158.

#OpenAccess #OA #Article #Archaeology #History #Histodons #Anthropology #NativeAmericans #Probability #Gambling #Academia

Hi #neuromastodon, today the latest preprint of an extremely cool, 100% Uruguay-based team has been released  

A filopodia-based dendritic mechanosensory compartment in CSF-contacting neurons

There we show that, contrary to what zebrafish has taught, these spinal cord neurons from adult mice (CSF-cN) lack cilia. Furthermore, they show multiple filopodia and are able to sense mechanical stimuli through PKD2L1. That, and other nice stuff.

If you didn't know what to read this weekend, here you have it:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.09.713694v1

Hope you enjoy it.

#neuro #neurons #spinal #spinalcord #cellbiology #biology #uruguay #science #research #preprint #openaccess #microscopy #electrophysiology #neuroscience #iibce #pedeciba

Yves-Marie André's (1675–1764) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Marie_André] ‘Essay on Beauty’ (‘Essai sur le beau’, 1741) was an important work of 18th-century aesthetics. In the article on beauty in the 2nd volume (1752) of the ‘Encylopédie’, Denis Diderot praised André's system as the best he knew, elevating it above the work of Plato, Augustine, Wolff, Crousaz, Shaftesbury.

In 2010, I released a #CreativeCommons-licensed annotated English translation [https://archive.org/details/EssayOnBeauty]. I have just made an update: the PDF is now an accessible #TaggedPDF.

(The LaTeX tagging system is still under development [https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project/], but I have been adapting my LaTeX styles to be tagging-compatible.)

Although I was a much less practised typographer 16 years ago, I have left the overall design of ‘Essay on Beauty’ unchanged, contenting myself with minor improvements offered by an updated version of the Baskervald font, ensuring that line-end hyphenations follow the OUP standard, and a few other localized improvements.

#accessibility #OpenAccess #aesthetics #HistPhil

#NewSpecies!
New grasshopper from #mexico just hopped in:

Stegotettix cristata

Treatment: https://treatment.plazi.org/id/034287C1-FF8F-FFC6-FF61-F8C86F88555D
Publication: https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5760.3.1
#Zootaxa #StegotettixCristata

#FAIRdata
#science #OA #openaccess #biology #taxonomy #ecology #biodiversity #nature #wildlife #conservation #animals #fauna #invertebrates #entomology #insects #orthoptera #grasshopper

🔔 UPDATE April 2026 🔔

6,876 German federal laws and regulations now available #OpenAccess as a comprehensive corpus ⬇️

✅ 42 variables
✅ #OpenAccess
✅ #PublicDomain
✅ Regular snapshots of German federal law from May 2020
✅ Structural diagrams for all laws (dendrogram, sunburst, circlepack)
✅ Formats: XML, CSV, PDF, TXT, EPUB, GraphML

All downloads: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3832111

Documentation: https://zenodo.org/records/19481365/files/C-DBR_2026-04-09_Codebook.pdf?download=1

#Law #DigitalHumanities #LawFedi #OpenData #OpenScience #OpenSource #RStats @histodons @rstats @politicalscience @law @sociology

#NewSpecies!
New wormlion fly from #china just landed:

Vermitigris tsangyanggyatso

Treatment: https://treatment.plazi.org/id/6F437EBF-A2E8-5400-BC02-9B5734F6A9BE
Publication: https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1276.184675
#ZooKeys #VermitigrisTsangyanggyatso

#FAIRdata
#science #OA #openaccess #biology #taxonomy #ecology #biodiversity #nature #wildlife #conservation #animals #fauna #invertebrates #entomology #insects #diptera #fly #wormlionflies

#NewSpecies!
New gecko from #china just climbed in:

Goniurosaurus wuzhengjuni

Treatment: https://treatment.plazi.org/id/3921DF52-AC55-5A12-92EA-4F8932693E53
Publication: https://doi.org/10.3897/zse.102.177343
#ZoosystematicsAndEvolution #GoniurosaurusWuzhengjuni

#FAIRdata
#science #OA #openaccess #biology #taxonomy #ecology #biodiversity #nature #wildlife #conservation #animals #fauna #herpetology #herps #reptiles #gecko