Greg Egan

Cover art is "Blue Ship" by Pascal Blanché. A blue standing t-shaped ship flies left-to-right along a giant bright-orange industrial facility with pipes and rails.

The August 2025 issue of Clarkesworld is now online and features stories by Marissa Lingen, L Chan, R.T. Ester, Ai Jiang, Bella Han, Raahem Alvi, Ryan Cole, Uchechukwu Nwaka.
clarkesworldmagazine.com/issue_227
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Much as I sympathise with the urge to punish Amazon and compensate the imitated author for this indignity, the money came from defrauded readers and they should receive a full refund. Given the delay in Amazon paying out royalties, it’s unlikely that the fake author has yet received anything.

Supersized stick insect discovered in high-altitude trees in Australia The 40cm-long insect, named Acrophylla alta, weighs slightly less than a golf ball and may be the heaviest insect in Australia

The biggest, and superbly camouflaged! www.theguardian.com/environment/...

My guess is that it would be independent of beliefs and culture in humans, but I might be wrong. And either way, it would also be interesting to know how widely different species can visually, innately recognise and respond to infection risks.

The brain fires up immune cells when sick people are nearby When people viewed virtual avatars with coughs or rashes, their brains triggered an immune response.

“When people viewed virtual avatars with coughs or rashes, their brains triggered an immune response.”

It would be fascinating to extend this research to people who don’t believe the diseases portrayed are communicable, and to animals that presumably don’t grasp germ theory.

Cell's sugar coating mapped at below-nanometre resolution Super-resolution technique works with off-the-shelf optical microscopes.

This story by my colleague Miryam Naddaf blew my mind. It used to be that sub-nanometer resolution was pretty good _even for electron microscopes_

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

And the set of all rotations of *four*-dimensional space correspond to *pairs* of three-dimensional rotations.

For much, much more on all this:

www.gregegan.net/SCIENCE/Elli...

johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2025/07/14/t...

The total energy of a Newtonian orbit like this depends *only* on the semi-major axis of the ellipse, so what this tells us is that there are *two* three-dimensional rotations that we can perform while still yielding an orbit with the same energy.

This construction will always yield an ellipse with a semi-major axis equal to |A| (with the degenerate case of a line when A = B), and the entire family of ellipses with one focus at the origin and the same length for the semi-major axis can be generated by rotating A and B independently.

Choose two vectors A and B whose lengths are equal. Place one focus of an ellipse at the origin, place the second focus at A + B, and position the two points of the ellipse where the tangent to the curve is parallel to its axis at A and B.

Two vectors of equal length are shown, labelled A and B, pointing from a common starting point, labelled "First focus", which is the right-hand focus of an ellipse with a horizontal major axis. The endpoints of the vectors A and B lie at the top and bottom points of the minor axis of the ellipse. The vector A+B is shown, pointing from the right-hand focus of the ellipse to the left-hand focus, and the vector A-B is shown, pointing from the endpoint of A at the top of the ellipse down to the endpoint of B.

You might have heard that the elliptical orbits of a planet around a star under Newtonian gravity have a kind of *four*-dimensional symmetry. There is a lot of beautiful mathematics behind the ideas that make this notion precise, but here is a simple way to get a handle on the underlying symmetry.

The latter. I don’t have one myself, as Amazon Australia doesn’t do print-on-demand hardbacks.

I’m finding “Sneaky Pete” hugely entertaining. Nothing deep or new, but lots of moving parts spinning like the gears of a Swiss watch as bad luck, various antagonists, or just innocent bystanders pour sand into the beautifully wrought mechanism and everything goes horribly wrong.

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

World’s least believable phishing email subject line:

Your Amazon Prime Membership has been cancelled.

Indian film company to rerelease romantic drama with AI ‘happy ending’ Director ‘heartbroken’ after 2013 film about doomed romance between Hindu man and Muslim woman altered without his knowledge

If studio recuts that mutilated movies weren’t dismaying enough, here comes the cheaper, uglier AI version of it:

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

Octopuses fall for the ‘rubber arm’ illusion, just like us Experiment shows octopuses feel body ownership, a trait previously seen only in mammals

This has been reproduced in other mammals — but now it turns out that octopuses will also react the same way:

www.science.org/content/arti...

Octopuses fall for the ‘rubber arm’ illusion, just like us Experiment shows octopuses feel body ownership, a trait previously seen only in mammals

It’s been known since at least 1998 that if you obscure someone’s arm from them visually, show them a rubber replica, and gently stroke their real arm and the replica in synch, they will identify the replica as part of their body, and react defensively to apparent harm to it.

The Surprising Math and Physics behind the 2026 World Cup Soccer Ball Here’s how the new tetrahedron-based design for the “Trionda” soccer ball may affect next year’s big game

… with the World Cup balls specified with all the rigour of the standard kilogram.

It turns out they just make up a completely new design for every World Cup.

www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

Truncated icosahedron soccer ball (32 faces, 20 white hexagons, 12 black pentagons)

I guess it’s a measure of how little I follow sports that I assumed all soccer balls were truncated icosahedrons, and the higher up the ranks of professional football you went, the more rigidly the one true venerable standard would be enforced…

Greatly impressed by PayPal’s new security protocol:
1] Pick a random integer N in 1…5
2] Let i = 1
3] Tell user you emailed a security code
4] if i > N send code immediately
else wait 3 hours before sending code
5] If user asks to resend code, increment i and go to step 3

Why AI chatbots lie to us A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine needed to collect and format some data from a website, and he asked the latest version of Anthropic’s generative AI system, Claude, for help. Claude cheerfully agr...

In my latest (and last!) column for Science’s Expert Voices series, I write about the reasons behind AI chatbots’ “deceptive” behaviors (and why Claude threatened a fictional CEO with blackmail).

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Just put out an article in @aunz.theconversation.com explaining this beautiful JWST image:

I get a healthy amount of crockpot emails from people with their alien or grand unification treatises.

But the pace has increased by a factor of several lately, all of them bragging that they got help from an LLM, as if that gives them credibility.

FDA’s artificial intelligence is supposed to revolutionize drug approvals. It’s making up nonexistent studies. | CNN Politics Insiders tell CNN the FDA’s AI is “hallucinating” studies and can’t access key documents. Agency leaders insist the AI is getting better, and use is not mandatory.

Feeling good about the rush to tech-savvyness signaling by rushing to deploy largely untested LLM based tools in critical paths yet? A tool to help with evaluating and approving potentially unsafe things better be n squared-ish as good as the thing it might approve. www.cnn.com/2025/07/23/p...

I’m witnessing the deliberate starvation of Gaza’s children – why is the world letting it happen? | Nick Maynard A permanent ceasefire, the free and safe flow of aid, and the lifting of the blockade are needed now – all could be achieved with political will, says UK surgeon Nick Maynard

From Nasser hospital in Gaza, Prof Nick Maynard (consultant surgeon at Oxford university hospital who has been travelling regularly to Gaza for 15 years): I’m witnessing the deliberate starvation of Gaza’s children – why is the world letting it happen?

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

In a stunning moment of self-delusion, the Wall Street Journal headline writers admitted that they don't know how LLM chatbots work.

If you found sharks in the water, slit open with just their livers removed, what would you think had happened?

(Listen to the Radiolab episode if you want to hear the whole story.)

radiolab.org/podcast/myst...

esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Arctic tern - Wikipedia

“[The Arctic tern] sees two summers per year and more daylight than any other creature on the planet.”

“A tern ringed as an unfledged chick on the Farne Islands in the northern summer of 1982 reached Melbourne just three months after fledging – a journey of more than 22,000 km.”

To defend our democracy, PM must disavow and abandon Segal report Combating antisemitism is a noble mission, but Jillian Segal’s report risks stoking it.

"The Segal report would, if adopted, allow government the power to do what the Trump administration has done in the US: defund universities, cower civil society and curb free speech."