By combining data from full-body x-ray images and associated genomic data from more than 30,000 UK Biobank participants, researchers have provided new insights into the evolution of the human skeletal form. Learn more this week in Science: scim.ag/3qw

Nick Patterson (Renaissance Technologies) "[...I joined a hedged fund, Renaissance Technologies, I'll make a comment about that. It's funny that I think the most important thing to do on data analysis is to do the simple things right. So, here's a kind of non-secret about what we did at renaissance: in my opinion, our most important statistical tool was simple regression with one target and one independent variable. It's the simplest statistical model you can imagine. Any reasonably smart high school student could do it. Now we have some of the smartest people around, working in our hedge fund, we have string theorists we recruited from Harvard, and they're doing simple regression. Is this stupid and pointless? Should we be hiring stupider people and paying them less? And the answer is no. And the reason is nobody tells you what the variables you should be regressing [are]. What's the target. Should you do a nonlinear transform before you regress? What's the source? Should you clean your data? Do you notice when your results are obviously rubbish? And so on. And the smarter you are the less likely you are to make a stupid mistake. And that's why I think you often need smart people who appear to be doing something technically very easy, but actually usually not so easy.]" 1. news.ycombinator.com/item?id… 2. robohub.org/talking-machines…

A weekly jab in the belly is generating more revenue than the entire AI industry. Ozempic + Mounjaro: $71B in 2025. OpenAI + Anthropic: $29B. And they've barely started. ~2% of the 800 million eligible patients can currently access them. h/t @DrSamuelBHume

Nature research paper: Lsp2 links early-life diet to adult translation and lifespan in Drosophila go.nature.com/4hoPjUm

Massive tennis ball rant incoming. After playing Washington, Cincinnati, and the US Open, plus a full week of training in New York beforehand, I got a VERY good feel for the Wilson US Open balls we were using and know EXACTLY what they should feel like off my racket. They were good balls, and I have no complaints about what we played with at those tournaments this summer. But since coming home, my last two days of practice with Wilson US Open balls have been miserable. They are sold, marketed, and labeled as the same balls, but the way they come off my racket and feel couldn’t be more different. After that many weeks using the tournament balls, I know exactly how they respond. The balls I’m practicing with feel like literal green-dot kids’ balls: incredibly soft, dead, and going nowhere. I’m playing on a court with a similar speed to the courts at the Open as well just to be clear. I’ve tried balls from multiple cases to rule out a bad batch, and unfortunately, it’s been the same across the board. Other players I’ve spoken to since the Open have described the same thing. The amount of effort I have to use to just produce a regular rally ball with these balls is insane. I’m having to throw my whole body into shots and swing out of my shoes just to produce a solid rally ball. Beyond being frustrating, it feels like it’s creating bad habits (I would never swing this aggressively normally or else I’d sent balls to the back fence or mistime every other shot) I’m having to adjust the way I hit just to compensate for a ball that behaves nothing like the one we use in competition. That leads to the obvious the bigger issue and the reason for the rant: we need to be able to train with the same balls we compete with, and in the past I feel like this wasn’t usually an issue. It didn’t used to feel this way. There was consistency, and any small differences could usually be explained by the court or conditions. Over the last year and a half, though, I’ve noticed such a significant difference between retail balls from both Wilson and Dunlop and their tournament equivalents, which are supposed to be identical, that it completely changes how you want to construct points and take risks on shots and just play points in general. I’m not exaggerating it really is making that big of a difference at the pro level. The only positive I can take out of playing with these balls the last couple days is that it takes such more extra effort in every shot i hit at least it has been good cardio consistently having to swing so hard all the time 😂 It’s disappointing that this has started to feel normal. Training is a lot less enjoyable, and a lot less productive, when you’re spending it practicing with balls that are so different from what you’ll use when it matters. Okay, rant over. Everyone go enjoy watching the rest of the Open :)