Michael Borchgrevink Lund

Sweeteners can harm cognitive health equivalent to 1.6 years of ageing, study finds Researchers say low- and no-calorie sweeteners appear to affect thinking and memory in middle age

"Sweeteners can harm cognitive health equivalent to 1.6 years of ageing, study finds"

Or does it? Let's take a look at this "study"...

www.theguardian.com/food/2025/se...

The New Eugenics Companies Oops, I meant to say generational health and embryo selection

New blog post: The New Eugenics Companies
(Oops, I meant to say generational health and embryo selection)

Text from an FAQ in Okbay et al 20222: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01016-z a similar same statement is made in an FAQ in 2025: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.14.653986v1.supplementary-material Text reads: "The results of SSGAC studies have sometimes been used by online platforms, including some companies, to predict individual outcomes. We recognize that returning individual genomic “results” can be a fun way to engage people in research and other projects and to feed or stoke their interest in genomics. But it is important that participants/users understand that these individual results are not meaningful predictions and should be regarded essentially as entertainment. Failure to make this point clear risks sowing confusion and undermining trust in genetics research"

It is depressing, but all too predictable, how swiftly we’ve gone from the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium offering reassurances about the uses of behavioural polygenic scores to one of their lead authors marketing embryo selection for IQ

El mito de los refugiados climáticos El mito de los refugiados climáticos es otra alarma que debemos a la pereza intelectual que informa muchos de los debates que mantenemos sobre la inmigración, como demostramos aquí con datos de Senega...

@alvaroszv.bsky.social y yo (IEGD-CSIC) de @csic.es hemos sacado una nota de nuestro trabajo en curso sobre la relación entre #cambioclimático y #emigración en #PiedrasdPapel utilizando datos sobre el calor extremo en #Senegal. www.eldiario.es/piedrasdepap...

Harvard sociologist/polisci Theda Skocpol explains how the vast expansion of ICE in BBB may be Trump's secret weapon to overcome the barriers of federalism and complete his autocratic takeover of the American state. (History from Germany & Hungary in 20s/30s.) talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/criti...

Cremieux’s real name is Jordan Lasker. I put his name in the newspaper. He’s a scientific racist www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE.

This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined.

It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

The first paper of my PhD—co-authored with @ishmamunoz.bsky.social and Alberto Palloni—is now out as a preprint!
👵👶 Grandparents’ investments matter for grandchildren’s human capital formation independently of parental investments —especially in Ethiopia and India.
📄 osf.io/preprints/os...

Tracing the evolution of preschool’s impact on education over a century: Spain, 1900-1973 Abstract. Preschool is acknowledged as a strategy for promoting long-term educational attainment and fostering equality of educational opportunities. Most of these expectations are based on evidence f...

A big thank you to Dulce Manzano with whom I coauthored this paper on how returns to preschool evolved over the last century. Open access !

direct.mit.edu/euso/article... Tracing the evolution of preschool’s impact on education over a century: Spain, 1900-1973 | European Societies | MIT Press

Why has fertility suddenly crashed everywhere all at once?

Certainly, there are many factors, which vary across all world regions & over time.

I’ve written on many of these!

But we should also recognise the collapse of coupling.

Always open to new data & ideas! 🙂

Graph by @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

🚨 The end of an era for global health data — and a defining crossroads.

In Jan 2025, the DHS Program—the backbone of health & demographic data in 90+ countries—was terminated after US aid cuts of up to 84%.

Our researchers & global collaborators reflect on it in a recent pre-print🧵

I just published a new #Rstats notebook to celebrate the release of {marginaleffects} 📦 0.26.0:

Survival Analysis in R

Please send me feedback, and don't forget to update the pkg for important bug fixes.

Thanks to Robin Denz for his amazing work on this!

marginaleffects.com/bonus/surviv...

REPORTER: Amazon will soon display a number next to the price of each product that shows how much the Trump tariffs are adding. Isn't that a perfect demonstration that it's the American consumer who is paying for these policies?

LEAVITT: This is a hostile and political act by Amazon.

text table

Here's an update on sociology (and some demography) journal editorial polices with regard to sharing preprints before submission and after acceptance. A big improvement from the last edition of this table. With one exception.

Las universidades públicas de Madrid irán a la huelga el 28 de abril contra la nueva ley La movilización responde a "la asfixia económica y el ataque frontal" que supone la Ley de Enseñanzas Superiores, Universidades y Ciencia (LESUC)

Las universidades públicas de Madrid irán a la huelga el 28 de abril contra la nueva ley de Ayuso www.infolibre.es/politica/uni...

The intergenerational effect of educational expansion: evidence from a natural experiment in Spain Abstract. This article explores the relationship between parental education and children’s educational outcomes, addressing endogeneity challenges inherent

New paper out with @marespadafor.bsky.social: we study the intergenerational effects of Spain’s 1970 school reform and find that, despite major educational expansion, inequality persisted 📚📉
academic.oup.com/esr/advance-...

Intergenerational transmission of complex traits and the offspring methylome - Molecular Psychiatry Molecular Psychiatry - Intergenerational transmission of complex traits and the offspring methylome

Our new study in Molecular Psychiatry, in 1528 children and their parents (@ntrbiopsy.bsky.social) shows that indirect genetic effects—where parental genetics shape offspring traits via environmental influences (genetic nurture)—impact DNA methylation of children. doi.org/10.1038/s413... (1/5)

🔎 Según @hcebolla.bsky.social del Dep. Población (CSIC): "El calor es malo para todos los niños, pero en hijos de madres migrantes el impacto es mayor. Esto parece deberse a la menor presencia de aire acondicionado en sus hogares, reflejando un efecto de la pobreza".

It's finally official and verified: The X user "Cremieux" is ID'd as a guy called Jordan Lasker. Lasker has been LARPing as an expert in genetics on X to promote racist pseudoscience. @sashagusevposts.bsky.social has been calling out his bullshit for ages

No, las niñas no son peores en ciencias En España los chicos obtienen puntuaciones en ciencias superiores a las chicas, equivalentes a lo que se aprende en casi 3 meses de escolarización. Sin embargo, cuando se analiza el conjunto de países...

No, las niñas no son peores en ciencia. En el día de la mujer y la niña en la ciencia recuerdo este texto de 2018 en @piedrasdepapel.bsky.social sobre la interacción entre estereotipos, actitudes, expectativas, rendimiento y decisiones académicas y laborales: www.eldiario.es/piedrasdepap...

“Smoke’s Enduring Legacy: Bridging Early-Life Smoking Exposures & Later-Life Epigenetic Age Acceleration,” by Ramirez, Povedano, Garcia & Lund, uses the HRS (1992-2016) & VBS (2016) to investigate the complex relationship btw smoking/exposure & epigenetic aging. read.dukeupress.edu/demography/a...

list of banned keywords

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

I have a 99.8% snapshot of all zipped files from CDC Vital Statistics Online as of today. Documentation pdfs too. The one missing file was cut off part way 🤷‍♂️ will try again from time to time. Anyone needs anything reach out

Ah, so our students can't work with DHS right now, as (US-funded) DHS program is paused and not accepting registrations of new users 😶

How population stratification makes environments look like genes. A short 🧵:

Is population stratification a problem in real GWAS data? Recent family GWAS (Tan et al. medrxiv.org/content/10.1...) estimated 50% of the GWAS effects for Education and 65-75% for IQ, Income were not direct, with population stratification likely the major cause.

Resignation of the Journal of Human Evolution Editorial Board: We are saddened to announce the resignations of The Joint Editors-in-Chief, all Emeritus Editors retired or active in the field, and all but one Associate Editor. Press release below.

Cuts to public universities, growth of private ones. Two sides of the same coin.

19 Dec, at 12 protest at Madrid Assembly against cuts in public spending.

And foreign colleagues: if you look for Spanish partners for H2020 projects, infrastructure, acad network etc choose public centres!
Reasons 👇

Elsevier have chosen new editors for Intelligence, which will hopefully lead to a dramatic improvement in the quality of research published. New followers may be unaware of just how shockingly bad is the “research” the journal has published, epitomised by the paper which assumes the earth is flat