David Goodwin

I write stuff. Memoir #SERVO out NOW

[David Goodwin @davidgoodwn]

I hereby joyfully announce my memoir SERVO will be published with @HachetteAus on Feb 28th! It's a rollicking & darkly mesmeric tale full of giant shoplifting bees, anarcho-goths high on MDMA and much more looping chaos. Pre-orders available now from all good bookstores 💙📕🚀

[Nature is Amazing ☘️ @AMAZlNGNATURE]

Researchers film rare giant phantom jellyfish the length of a school bus off Argentina's coast

Rarely seen by humans, the giant phantom jellyfish can grow ribbon-like arms up to 10m (33 feet) long and has been spotted only a handful of times worldwide

[Nature is Amazing ☘️ @AMAZlNGNATURE]

U.K. lawyer faces possible prosecution after cleaning 200 bags of waste from polluted river without permit

Paul Powlesland says fish and dragonflies returned after the cleanup, but authorities are investigating whether it violated environmental regulations

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

Scientists Map 110 Quadrillion km of Underground Fungal Networks…
A billion Times The Distance From Earth to the Sun!

Earth’s Vast Underground “Carbon Superhighway”

A groundbreaking new study published today in the journal Science has revealed, for the first time, the global scale of one of Earth’s most important but hidden biological infrastructures: the networks of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi.

These thread-like fungal structures, known as hyphae, form symbiotic partnerships with roughly 70% of land plant species—including major crops like wheat, corn, and rice.

In exchange for sugars from the plants, the fungi deliver essential nutrients (such as phosphorus and nitrogen) and water, while also playing a massive role in storing carbon underground.

Mind-Boggling Scale

Using data from more than 16,000 soil cores worldwide, machine-learning models, and high-resolution robotic imaging of fungal hyphae, researchers estimated:

•Total length: ~110 quadrillion kilometers (1.10 × 10¹⁷ km) of living hyphae in the top 15 cm of global soils—enough to stretch nearly a billion times the distance from Earth to the Sun (or about 10% of the diameter of the Milky Way if laid out in space).

•Biomass: ~300 megatons of carbon, equivalent to 4–6 times the biomass of all humans on Earth.

•These networks move about 1 billion metric tons of carbon per year into soils, acting as a critical “carbon circulatory system” that helps regulate the planet’s climate.

Densities are highest in grasslands, with notable hotspots in places like the Sudd wetlands in Africa and the Everglades.

The “Wood Wide Web” at Planetary Scale

This research builds on the popular “Wood Wide Web” concept, where fungi connect plants in shared resource networks.

The new global maps (available for exploration via the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, or SPUN) show these connections operating at an ecosystem-wide level, supporting plant health, resilience to drought and disease, and food security.

These fungi are vital allies in the fight against climate change and for sustainable agriculture. However, they face threats from soil disturbance (like tillage), pesticides, and land-use changes.

The study also highlights gaps in sampling, particularly in undersampled ecosystems that need further research.

Read the full research paper (paywalled, but abstract freely available): https://t.co/6cu4UUFgxU

Global density and biomass of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks

Explore interactive maps and learn more at https://t.co/P35alXz06O.

This discovery underscores how much of Earth’s life-support systems remain invisible to the naked eye yet operate on a truly planetary scale.

Protecting these underground networks could be one of the most effective ways to sustain healthy soils, productive crops, and a stable climate.

[Zacharias @zachariaspro]

As promised, updated paleomagnetic chart through 2026 with smoothing for more recent, verified data. Decline has continued since December 2025, now ~5.7% above the 7ka low

Created a usable script and csv sheet so you guys can do it yourself if you are curious:

🔗https://t.co/wx9LSN3Cor

[Wide Awake Media @wideawake_media]

Make no mistake: Under-16 social media bans and "online safety" laws are a Trojan horse for the rollout of digital ID infrastructure for everyone.

No government can prevent children under sixteen from accessing a website, an app, a feature or a device unless a digital checkpoint is erected for everybody. The only way to establish who is a child is to first establish who is not.

That means identity checks for children and adults alike. The system cannot reliably determine whether a user is over sixteen without demanding proof. A passport scan. A driving licence. A digital ID.

Dress it up in benevolent-sounding euphemisms like "age assurance", "online safety" or "child protection" all you want. The operational requirement is the same—users must identify themselves in order to be allowed through the gate.

Which is why the language around these laws is so carefully chosen. Politicians rarely admit outright that they are building an identity checkpoint for the internet. Instead, they claim to be protecting children from pornography, self-harm content, addictive design, harmful algorithms, or whatever else is useful to drive the legislation through.

The child is the sympathetic case used to win public consent. The adult is the one being conditioned to produce credentials to access the digital public square. The objective is not really to protect children from adult material, but to make identity-gated internet access feel routine, responsible and inevitable.

And once that precedent has been established, the category of content requiring verification can expand without any serious redesign of the system.

Pornography becomes social media. Social media becomes video sharing. Video sharing becomes search. Search becomes messaging. Messaging becomes payments. Payments become banking. Banking becomes public services. Public services become the minutiae of everyday life.

At each increment, the expansion is sold as limited, proportionate and necessary. At each stage, opposition is framed as harmful to children, society, public health, or national security. The justification shifts according to the emergency of the day. The digital identity infrastructure embeds itself into every category of daily activity.

Once digital ID becomes the price of entry for social participation, it does not stay confined to the original pretext that introduced it. It becomes a general-purpose control system. A way to decide who may access which service, under what conditions, with what level of monitoring, and with what consequences for falling out of good standing.

At that point, digital ID is no longer a tool for keeping children away from harmful content. It is the operating system for a controlled society. And the question is no longer whether you are old enough to access a website. It is whether the system deems you eligible to participate in society at all.

[Silkie Carlo @silkiecarlo]

True. The British press has failed today.

Few journalists if any seem to grasp what this means.

It’s a fundamental reshaping of modern civil liberty and the internet in the UK.

Seismic loss of privacy.

Millions of adults will have limited web access. In a democracy...? 🤡

[Nicolas Hulscher, MPH @NicHulscher]

BREAKING: ADVANCED ALZHEIMER’S PATIENT REGAINED SPEECH, MEMORY, AND BLADDER CONTROL AFTER SINGLE PSILOCYBIN DOSE

An 80-year-old woman with advanced Alzheimer’s — who had barely spoken for YEARS — experienced RAPID and SUSTAINED improvement after taking 5g of psilocybin mushrooms.

During the acute phase, she entered a prolonged deep sleep-like state with profuse sweating.

~19 hours later, she spontaneously started talking again for HOURS — sharing detailed autobiographical memories she hadn’t expressed in years.

Over the following days, her family reported improved memory, walking, emotional connection, speech, and regained bladder control.

After 1 month, bladder control REMAINED RESTORED, and she was still functionally improved compared with baseline.

While this is just one published case report, the implications are enormous given that there are currently NO approved medications known to produce effects like this in advanced Alzheimer’s.

These findings urgently need replication. For millions watching a parent or loved one disappear to Alzheimer’s, even the possibility of restoring lost function warrants serious scientific investigation.

[Karen Vaites @karenvaites]

“We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.”

Another college professor adds to the chorus of concern about student capacity.

In @chronicle:

“Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.”

[Tobe Ellen @thebarrowpod]

I sit down with author @davidgoodwn to talk pathways to publication, masculinity, culture and trauma. David’s memoir Servo is out now with @hachetteaus

David Goodwin | Masculinity, literary culture, dead end jobs, and trauma. https://t.co/PgbtgENwdJ via @YouTube

[Lozzy B 🇦🇺𝕏 @TruthFairy131]

A UK government counter terror program has flagged these books as possible signs of far-right extremism.

[SciTech Girl @scitechgirl]

NEW 🚨: Scientists now believe the brain might process information using tiny quantum vibrations instead of relying only on electrical signals, potentially making thinking much faster.

[David Goodwin @davidgoodwn]

@blindobserver0 @clif_high @martianwyrdlord Yep, that sounds familiar! Hopefully I can find the vid. Was in the last few years I reckon. Post-covid, anyway.

[David Goodwin @davidgoodwn]

@blindobserver0 @clif_high @martianwyrdlord Cheers. So you definitely remember him mentioning it? Bc I do admittedly have tiny vestiges of memory that suggest he may have said it at some point too. It makes sense; psychs have given me some great ideas too.

[David Goodwin @davidgoodwn]

@blindobserver0 @clif_high @martianwyrdlord Did Clif actually get the idea for the webbot from a DMT encounter with an entity? Awesome if so. You don't possibly know which interview/article/etc it was and have a link, do you?

[Science Simplified @Scivf4]

Quantum entanglement isn't instant - scientists have timed It's 'BIRTH' at 232 attoseconds, A quintillion of a second.

[Tobe Ellen @thebarrowpod]

I sit down with author @davidgoodwn to talk pathways to publication, masculinity, culture and trauma. David’s memoir Servo is out now with @hachetteaus

David Goodwin | Masculinity, literary culture, dead end jobs, and trauma. https://t.co/PgbtgEMYob via @YouTube

[David Goodwin @davidgoodwn]

@demi_anderson0 @Michael72441399 @EvanWritesOnX You have people in this thread believing its yours and you're doing nothing to disabuse them of that. And you deliberately left off the author. It's plagarism and people are rightly calling you out on it.

[David Goodwin @davidgoodwn]

@MCLove2024 @demi_anderson0 She stole it and is refusing to quote the author because she seemingly wants to take credit for his ideas. It comes from https://t.co/II35G4YlTT

[Evan @EvanWritesOnX]

Australia was not established as a nation-building project.

It was established as an extraction platform.

The British did not colonize Australia to build a civilization.

They colonized it to extract l; first convict labor, then wool, then gold, then minerals, then gas.

The political architecture was built around that extraction logic from day one, and it has never been restructured away from it.

You assume the state exists to serve the population, and therefore bad outcomes must mean the state is being run poorly.

Australia is not a sovereign state that happens to have a mining sector.

It is a private sector extraction platform that happens to have citizens.

Every Australian who “owns” a home is servicing a debt instrument that enriches the FIC.

The minerals get dug up by foreign-owned multinationals.

The profits get distributed to global shareholders.

The taxation office is structured; by design, through decades of lobbying, to ensure the extraction proceeds leave the country with minimal sovereign capture.

The politicians are doing exactly what the structure requires of them: absorbing public anger, rotating every few years to reset the pressure valve.

Australia is not mismanaged. Australia is managed perfectly,

just not for Australians.