Saturday Citations: A weird, extinct life form; cholesterol hacking; interspecies prosociality of whales

It’s Saturday! This week, in a highly practical analysis of the Boltzmann brain conjecture, physicists put limits on the idea that memories could result from random fluctuations in entropy rather than reflecting the actual past of the universe – news you can use! Researchers have succeeded in putting thousands of sodium atoms into a “Schrödinger’s cat” state. And an ancient mass grave revealed the impact of the first known pandemic.