Associate online news editor @Science. Words at Rolling Stone, NYT, SciAm, WaPo, etc. Ex-staff writer at Nat Geo. Signal: mgreshko.01 https://linktr.ee/michaelgreshko
@michaelgreshko.bsky.socialYou're very welcome! This is a superb resource!
Michael Greshko
@michaelgreshko.bsky.social
@michaelgreshko.bsky.social@michaelgreshko.bsky.socialPeople also commonly use the ZL3b transliteration. The Voynichese.com bounding boxes are tied to the "VT" transliteration, also included at the link above.
@michaelgreshko.bsky.socialI recommend René Zandbergen's RF1b transliteration, which is transliterated using the "Super Transliteration Alphabet" and can be converted into historical transliteration schemes (EVA, FSG, and Currier). www.voynich.nu/extra/sta-aa...
@michaelgreshko.bsky.socialThis is very cool work by @lisafdavis.bsky.social and Colin Layfield! I will have more to say on these results later this year; watch this space.
@michaelgreshko.bsky.socialBEHOLD: the first-ever glowing cuttlefish! 🧪🦑🧪🦑
It's the first successful insertion of a gene into a cephalopod, opening up new ways of studying them. It took @tessamontague.bsky.social years—and 1000s of tries—to pull it off.
@sarareardon.bsky.social has the story: www.science.org/content/arti...
@voosen.meReposted by @michaelgreshko.bsky.socialNew Horizons is now *three days away* from shutting off its two heliophysics instruments, simply because NASA has not provided the $2M in funding it had promised to the mission last year or this year. There is no science basis for shutting these off. Our earlier coverage:
@michaelgreshko.bsky.socialInterjecting here: the way to think about the cipher is as a proof of concept for one way of reconciling the statistics of Voynichese (which are weird!) with those of normal Latin. But there’s quite a bit about the manuscript that the Naibbe cipher as presented in this paper doesn’t replicate.
@michaelgreshko.bsky.socialYou’re braver than me.
@michaelgreshko.bsky.socialAnd for years, researchers have called folia 75–84 the “biological section” because the pools, tubes, etc. kind of resemble organs. Some folks have interpreted the image on the top of this page as possibly depicting a uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries: www.jasondavies.com/voynich/#f77...
@michaelgreshko.bsky.socialOn top of everything Claire says here, the core idea—that the manuscript’s visuals may connect to matters of sex and women’s health—is not even new! This paper, by Keagan Brewer and Michelle Lewis, came out two years ago:
@michaelgreshko.bsky.socialPutting on my hobbyist researcher hat for a moment, this thread is everything that needs to be said about the Voynich kerfuffle on TikTok, from a leading expert on the linguistic properties of the manuscript.
@chirila.bsky.socialReposted by @michaelgreshko.bsky.socialI'm not on TikTok or (much) on Instagram so what I've seen about the recent Voynich "solution" comes from comments here. As @lizfischer0.bsky.social and @keptsimple.bsky.social and others have pointed out, women have been studying the MS for ages!
@michaelgreshko.bsky.socialIn today's weird news, the fast food chain Wendy's has released...an emo album, with top-flight songwriters and singers:
open.spotify.com/album/4q4KzQ...
Remarkably, this is NOT the first hamburger-related food brand to release a surprisingly competent album! soundcloud.com/hamburgerhel...
@michaelgreshko.bsky.social@michaelgreshko.bsky.socialAn update @koppenburg.ch! A week and a half in, and the arXiv is humming with theoretical takes on LZ230616.
@joshuasokol.bsky.socialReposted by @michaelgreshko.bsky.socialIt was only in April that I covered similar, but less formal conversations happening in astrophysics. It's wild how fast these "why are we even doing this?" discussions are moving. Also wild: the comparative clarity and force of this statement from the Fields Medalists.
@science.orgReposted by @michaelgreshko.bsky.socialOpenAI claims it has solved the Navier-Stokes problem.
Here’s a quick rundown of what’s known so far about this apparent breakthrough—and the surrounding controversy: https://scim.ag/4ytDoM0
@michaelgreshko.bsky.socialSo if you were going to do that kind of analysis, you'd want to pair it with paleographic and art-historical analyses, to tease out those distinctions as potentially different phases of the manuscript's production cycle.
@michaelgreshko.bsky.socialPotentially, though that will depend on other constraints. For example, by the late medieval / early modern period, there was enough of a regional trade in certain kinds of parchment that the parchment might be made in one place and written on in another.
@michaelgreshko.bsky.social🧪 Very cool. Sheeppox is a gnarly virus for sheep, and thanks to a new study of the virus's DNA, we know more about when and how it emerged. How do we know this? Researchers isolated sheeppox from *medieval sheepskin parchment.* A fun one from @andrewcurry.com. www.science.org/content/arti...