Gathered

-- An ancient compendium of medical advice by one Pedanius Dioscorides lists hippopotamus testicles as a treatment for snakebite. The advantage of this claim is that very few would try to prove him wrong.

-- According to this item at Quanta magazine, a new kind of math can measure the repulsive force within polynomials. From what I recall of my time in formal education, no new math was needed to measure the repulsive force between me and polynomials; plain old ordinary math would do.

-- Appearing in The Literary Review, one D. J. Taylor lets us know that he will not be writing a coronavirus novel and why. I'm very glad he did, as I had never heard of him and would not have known this if he had not taken to the pages of TLR to say so.

-- Spectrum, the publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, has an article about how an artificial intelligence program called "Deep-Speare" was able to create sonnets that most people who read them could not distinguish from ones written by William Shakespeare. Thus the sub-head "'Deep-Speare' crafted Shakespearean verse that most readers couldn't distinguish from human-written poems." But if you read the AI-generated sonnet at the top of the link you can quickly discover some wrinkles in the project's claims. The first is that their sonnets are nonsense, as the article itself admits in the second paragraph. They may scan and rhyme well but they're only a few steps up from gibberish. Which is less of an indicator of how good the program is than of how unfamiliar their reader sample is with actual Shakespeare. A lot of modern poetry is indeed gibberish, but back when ol' Will was scribblin' along poetry didn't have that luxury yet.