marika elek

student of psychology and life

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

A student submitted an essay she wrote by hand. Her university ran it through an AI detector. The detector said she cheated. She is autistic.

Her name is Moira Olmsted. Adelphi University. February 2026. Turnitin flagged her essay as 100% AI-generated. She was disciplined.

Two other AI detectors classified the same essay as human-written.

She sued. She won. The court called the school's decision "arbitrary and capricious."

She is not the only one.

In May 2026, a high school student in Palo Alto was expelled after an AI detector flagged his work. He faced visa revocation. He filed a federal civil rights lawsuit.

A researcher at Griffith University just proved mathematically why this keeps happening. The paper is on arXiv. The finding is one sentence.

AI text detectors have a structural flaw that no amount of better engineering can fix.

Here is what the math says.

If a university wants its detector to catch 80% of cheaters, at least 750 out of every 10,000 innocent students will be wrongly accused. That is not a software problem. It is a theorem.

If the university tries to limit false accusations to 1%, detection power collapses to 6%. It catches 6 out of every 100 AI-written papers. The other 94 get through.

There is no setting where the detector is both fair and effective.

The reason is diversity. Every student writes differently. Non-native English speakers use simpler vocabulary. Shorter sentences. Clearer structures. So does AI. A Stanford study found that 61.3% of TOEFL essays written by non-native English speakers were misclassified as AI-generated. A separate analysis tested 14 commercial detection tools. Zero out of 14 reached 80% accuracy.

The students most likely to be wrongly accused are non-native English speakers, neurodivergent students, and anyone who writes with clarity and precision. The qualities that make their writing effective are the same qualities the detector mistakes for a machine.

Vanderbilt University understood this. They disabled Turnitin's AI detection in 2023 after calculating that even a 1% error rate across 75,000 submissions would produce 750 wrongful accusations per year.

750 students accused of cheating for writing like themselves.

The paper's conclusion is not that we need better detectors. It is that the diversity of human writing itself makes accurate detection mathematically impossible.

The same thing that makes your writing yours is the thing that gets you accused.

https://t.co/L91ldtXP05

[Bunsen, Beaker, Bernoulli & Brix @bunsenbernerbmd]

Let's look at a dog that gets confused for a "Bunsen" all the time (or Bunsen for one of these)

The confusion doesn't stop with WHAT they look like because despite their name, they weren't even from there!

It's the Australian Shepard, a lean, sheen, herding machine.

🧵

[Martina Navratilova @Martina]

Insanely amazing

[MarshFamilySongs @MarshSongs]

Here's a parody of the Looking Glass 1972 belter "Brandy" that we've adapted to fit today's headlines with whoever was home to sing about #Starmer and #Burnham - calling it "Andy (You're a Fine Mayor!)"

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

A recent research showed clutter dramatically spikes women’s cortisol, while men’s stress barely budges.

Household clutter extends far beyond mere aesthetic, it's deeply intertwined with stress physiology and cognitive burden, impacting women in particular.

Drawing from studies on dual-income married couples, therapist Elizabeth Earnshaw explains that women who view their homes as cluttered often see their cortisol levels rise throughout the day, unlike those who feel at ease, whose levels naturally decline. This heightened effect in women stems largely from bearing the disproportionate invisible mental load, the constant cycle of noticing, recalling, planning, and orchestrating household tasks.

Earnshaw suggests a realistic, three-part approach to reducing the stress–clutter spiral.

First, “shedding” involves intentionally minimizing possessions, including doing the emotional work required to let things go, in order to create more mental and physical space. Second, “preventing” focuses on systems: giving items clear “homes” so that decisions about where things go become automatic rather than mentally taxing.

This may start with listing common types of clutter and designing dedicated spots for each (for example, a single, consistent place for receipts). Third, “adapting” asks families to accept that some clutter is inevitable in busy seasons of life and to concentrate on emotional regulation and co-regulation with partners, keeping stress and cortisol lower by adjusting expectations rather than striving for a perpetually picture-perfect home.

[Earnshaw, E., "Clutter, Cortisol, and Mental Load". Psychology Today, 2024]

[Saxbe, D. E., & Repetti, R. , "No place like home: Home tours correlate with daily patterns of mood and cortisol", Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(1), 71–81, 2010, DOI: 10.1177/0146167209352864]

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Pick a sunny spot and plant three things: native coneflower, native sunflower, and native thistle if you can find it. Then do nothing.

Goldfinches are one of the only songbirds that feed their nestlings seeds rather than insects, which makes them more dependent than most birds on plants that hold their seed heads.

Coneflowers produce seeds goldfinches start hitting in August and work through January. Native sunflowers do the same, with the bonus of feeding chickadees, nuthatches, and woodpeckers on the same heads.

Native thistles, which are very different from invasive thistles and worth seeking out, are so closely tied to goldfinches that the birds line their nests with thistle down and time their breeding to when it's available.

Leave every seed head standing when the flowers finish. The instinct to deadhead and tidy up for winter is exactly backwards if you're doing this for birds. The dried, "messy" stems are the food supply and the hollow stalks are overwintering sites for native bees.

Plant it, leave it alone, and see who's using it in February.

[Bunsen, Beaker, Bernoulli & Brix @bunsenbernerbmd]

GOOD NEWS FACT

[Simon's Cat 🐾 @SimonsCat]

What do they see?!

[ᗰᗩƳᖇᗩ @LePapillonBlu2]

Did you guys see this?? There are projected images popping all over D.C. adding to the swamp theme. 🤣

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

In 1987, Costa Rica was 21% forest. Today it's 57%.

In the 1990s, Costa Rica passed a law that pays landowners directly for the ecosystem services their forest provides: carbon storage, watershed protection, biodiversity, soil stability. The payments are funded by a tax on fossil fuels.

Keep your trees standing and the government cuts you a check. Clear them and you lose the income.

Nearly a million hectares have been protected or restored under the program. Species that had retreated or disappeared from large parts of the country are recovering. The forest came back because the incentive structure changed, not because people were told to care more.

But it crashed the economy, right? Not at all.

Costa Rica became the top per capita agricultural exporter in Latin America. Tourism built around its forests and biodiversity became one of its largest industries. The economy didn't absorb the cost of keeping the forest. The forest became part of what grows their economy.

This is the version of the story most people never hear, the one where protecting nature and economic growth pointed in the same direction because we humans designed it that way.

It's not forests or the economy and it never had to be.

[marika elek @mkelek]

@DoodleNessa I am so sorry. 💔

[Bunsen, Beaker, Bernoulli & Brix @bunsenbernerbmd]

Brix is home and Jason said it was the best Father’s Day Gift ever.
He spent some time last night writing out the whole breakdown from start to finish to answer questions people have on our Substack.
Here it is:
https://t.co/9CaMABTqR2

[Bunsen, Beaker, Bernoulli & Brix @bunsenbernerbmd]

It’s the Monday Morning Pupdate Video

In this video you will find:

😫 A little cat who got sick
😢 Very Sick
😠But Fought Back
🥹 And Came Home
😃 It is the very Best Way To Start Your Week

For the complete medical breakdown too long to explain in a video please see our Substack where Jason wrote a detailed blog about it. You can find the link in our pinned post.

[Niall Harbison @NiallHarbison]

Sad to lose little Al Pacino. We fixed him up last year and he had a lovely end of his life.

We deal with so many sick and older dogs that losing some is inevitable but never easy.

His internal organs and especially kidneys got him in the end. A very good boy

[Bunsen, Beaker, Bernoulli & Brix @bunsenbernerbmd]

Brix is home, and the reunions are happy ones.

[Craig Baird - Canadian History Ehx @CraigBaird]

One of the most important Canadian contributions to the International Space Station is Canadarm2.
But it is not the only one.
Another significant contribution is Dextre, the two-armed robot that handles repairs on the space station.
This is the story.

📸 NASA

🧵 1/7

[Ryan @Ryan_TechX]

How to wash the unwashable

[The Husky @Mr_Husky1]

Gorilla in the African forest tried to keep an injured elephant alive after a leopard attack, but researchers were left in tears when they saw what happened next.

In the Congo Basin rainforest, a trail camera captured a young elephant stumbling through the trees with deep scratches along its side, believed to be from a leopard attack.

The elephant tried to keep walking, but its body finally gave out and it collapsed onto the forest floor.

Hours later, a lone gorilla appeared.

At first, it stood back, watching the elephant from a distance like it was trying to understand what was wrong. Then it slowly moved closer, gathered leaves, and pushed them toward the elephant’s mouth as if it was trying to help it eat.

But the elephant was too weak. When the gorilla realized the animal wasn’t getting up, it sat beside it, placed one hand gently on its head, and stayed there while the elephant took its final breaths.

Researchers watching the footage said the hardest part came after.

The gorilla began gathering leaves and placing them over the elephant’s body, almost like it was trying to cover it with whatever the forest could give.

Nobody knows exactly what the gorilla understood in that moment.

But the footage showed one thing clearly.

It tried to save the elephant, and when it couldn’t, it stayed to make sure it didn’t die alone.

[Retired. Vive le Canada 🇨🇦 + 🇩🇪 🕊 🇺🇦 @TPS_32Planner]

Oh do Fuck-Off already @fordnation! 🤬🤬

Now you're flogging your stupid and irresponsible Billy Bishop Airport expansion plan with new radio adverts!?

We don't want 90,000 annual jet and turboprop flights over OUR Toronto waterfront! It will be unusable.
@TheThanigasalam

[marika elek @mkelek]

@bunsenbernerbmd Yay!!!!!

🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉