The week in higher education – 7 November 2024

A PhD student in the US has stumbled across what most archaeologists would probably kill to find – a huge Mayan city buried deep in the Mexican jungle. The BBC reported that Luke Auld-Thomas, a student at Tulane University, spotted the ancient city through a laser survey, known as Lidar, he came across on Google. Complete with houses, temple pyramids and sports fields, archaeologists believe it may have been home to up to 50,000 people for roughly a century from AD750. While the finding could well be the highlight of Mr Auld-Thomas’ career, it seems that there will be plenty to keep him busy if he enters academia. “One of the downsides of discovering lots of new Maya cities in the era of Lidar is that there are more of them than we can ever hope to study,” he said.

Ever annoyed someone so much that they held a grudge for 17 years? One academic in the US has suffered that fate after trapping seven crows in a net in 2006 as part of an experiment looking into the unforgiving nature of the birds. John Marzluff wore an ogre mask while capturing the corvids at the University of Washington before releasing them unharmed. He then found that when he donned the mask again in subsequent years in the same area, he was subject to “aggressive” caws – not just from the original birds but also their irate friends and family – only ending last year. It comes as urban residents have expressed alarm at crow attacks. One 19-year-old Londoner who was left with a bloody scalp after being dive-bombed told The Times that if a bird tried to attack her again, she would “have no qualms about throwing a punch at it”. If she does retaliate, the teenager might still be subject to attacks well into her thirties.

Good news for all writers concerned about their future job prospects, because they can officially rule out being replaced by monkeys. Scientists at the University of Technology Sydney have called into question the “infinite monkey theorem”, which states, if given an infinite amount of time, a monkey on a typewriter would eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare. According to the BBC, a new study found that the time taken to replicate the Bard’s entire collections would be “longer than the lifespan of our universe”. Even if the entire global population of chimpanzees – about 200,000 in case you were wondering – were put to work, they still wouldn’t even come close. So, while the journalists at this publication are certainly pleased to hear our jobs are safe from ape takeover, if anyone can prove that artificial intelligence would have similar troubles, we might be able to sleep more soundly.

William “Rick” Singer, the man behind the college admissions cheating scandal in the US – in which he helped children from wealthy families pretend to be star athletes to gain admission to top universities – is out of prison and has started a new business. Only, it’s not so different from the last one. According to The Wall Street Journal, Mr Singer has promised to clean up his act when it comes to his latest college counselling company. Even though his business was shut down by prosecutors in the wake of the scandal, the former basketball coach said his skills had remained in demand throughout his 16-month incarceration. “They care about their kids,” he said of these families. After all, what kind of parent wouldn’t illegally pay six figures to get their child into Georgetown? Only an uncaring one, on Mr Singer’s reasoning.

It’s no secret that Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter alienated many academics who soon became disenchanted with the garbage content polluting their timelines. But the extent of the switch-off has been difficult to gauge – mainly because Mr Musk disabled the tools that scholars once used to study Twitter histories. A new study has, however, made a decent stab at measuring how far academics have disengaged from the site by monitoring 15,700 accounts from social science scholars. Those with verified accounts are now far less likely to post original content, even if they did not – as many have – quit the site in protest. The tipping point for the academic exodus from what is now X did not arrive for most scholars until three weeks after Mr Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the social media platform when Donald Trump’s account was restored, Inside Higher Ed reported.