Tech companies are spending $1 trillion on A.I. China built its entire high-speed rail network for that. It's hard to imagine A.I. would improve our lives by as much as a decent transit system (not to mention universal health care or poverty elimination).

Mindblowing study of a 3800-year-old array of termite mounds in the caatinga shrubland of northeastern Brazil—200 million of them interconnected by tunnels over an area the site of Britain.

A.I. makes it easier for students to cheat, but is otherwise the enemy of cheating, argues @economist.com. It empowers you against unscrupulous plumbers, car dealers, taxi drivers, and five-star reviewers. "Rip-off markets impose an effective consumer tax of hundreds of billions of dollars a year."

"'[People] have to protest peacefully, they can’t commit crimes, they can’t attack the federal officers.' But what about when those protesters are attacked by the feds? What about their ability to exercise their rights in public?" asks @ndhapple.bsky.social.

Some journal websites such as PNAS and Science open PDF links in the browser, forcing you to go through an extra step to download the actual PDF. Does anyone know how to bypass the in-browser reader?

Are there any good Trump-era protest songs?

"Mosquitoes have been found in Iceland for the first time as global heating makes the country more hospitable for insects. The country was until this month one of the only places in the world that did not have a mosquito population. The other is Antarctica."

"Many researchers are fighting to stay in an increasingly competitive academic system. 'You can work as hard as you want, but at the end of the day, it’s down to numbers. It’s down to luck.'" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels jumped by a record amount in 2024 to push concentrations to their highest point since measurements began.

500 job cuts at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab.

Acoustic analysis aided by community science shows how many birds burst into a dawn chorus in the aftermath of the 2024 total solar eclipse- very cool! #birds #birding #nature #elipse #animalcommunication #animalbehavior 🧪

Aren’t bumblebees just awesome? #FarmLife #LittleFarm

It was yet another rough night for CDC employees: Dozens — possibly hundreds, they are still self-surveying — were let go late at night, including those who worked on the prestigious MMWR reports www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/u...

Swipe up to try a new variant on Conway's Game of Life. And another. And another. This is how artificial-life researchers spread the joy after the #ALIFE2025 conference! They say it's like TikTok, but I wouldn't know.... ⚙️🧫 rulehunt.org?rulesetHex=7... #cellularautomata #gameoflife

Hey #ALIFE2025 people! Have you heard of Assembly Theory? A month ago, I wrote a good, objective essay summarizing AT's contributions, limitations, and possible improvements. It's perfect if you don't want to read all the critiques and counter-critiques that have been written!

Tech is depleting not only material resources but also intellectual resources, especially common knowledge. Political polarization erodes agreement on the most basic facts and concepts. "It's almost like seeing the ozone layer deplete before our eyes," said @audreyt.org at #ALIFE2025. ⚙️🧫

#ALIFE2025 Day 4 keynote Blaise Agüera y Arcas shows a live demo of his famous Brainfuck experiment (which looks very much like the Matrix)

Evolution has an arrow of time toward greater complexity. It's driven neither by mutation nor by crossover/sex but by symbiogenesis, argued @blaiseaguera.bsky.social (following Lynn Margulis) at #ALIFE2025. He showed lots of cool CoreWar-like competing programs. whatisintelligence.antikythera.org ⚙️🧫

Richard Löffler creates lifelike oil droplets during the public event at #ALIFE2025. ⚙️🧫

Another mirroring illusion for your puzzling pleasure, created by @eijiwatanabe.bsky.social, demonstrated by @sinalana.bsky.social at #ALIFE2025. ⚙️🧫

Here's a depressing solution to the Fermi Paradox: In a hostile Galaxy, we won't ever see aliens because, if we did, we'd be dead already, mused Georgii Karelin of @oistedu.bsky.social at #ALIFE2025. ⚙️🧫

At the industry session, He Wang (Galbot Robotics) introduced us to a Vision-Language-Action loop to achieve generalist robots. As a solution to the big amount of data needed to train their robots, they propose the use of large scale synthetic data. #ALIFE2025

The usual explanation for great music is that it's predictable but not too predictable. But there's more to it, said @frosas.bsky.social at #ALIFE2025. We prefer music when we perceive agency behind it. Improvisation trumps a prepared performance. See paper at www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy.... ⚙️🧫

Monkeys on typewriters would take eons to generate π, but much MUCH less time to generate a program that would generate π, said @hectorzenil.bsky.social at #ALIFE2025. He has a cool applet to prove the point at demonstrations.wolfram.com/InfiniteMonk.... ⚙️🧫

For A.I. to feel empathy, it has to be able to feel pain, argued roboticist Minoru Asada in a provocative talk at #ALIFE2025. He has built a pain signal into his robots. I hope it doesn’t inure them to others’ misery, as we see all too often in people. www.er.ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/asadalab/?pa... ⚙️🧫

In this bizarre #opticalillusion, an object seems to switch direction when viewed in a mirror. Mathematician and puzzle-maker Kokichi Sugihara wrote it up for the @euromathsoc.bsky.social magazine at euromathsoc.org/magazine/art... and created a very helpful video at youtu.be/vGxTKpOt6xU?....

Thousands of NASA employees to bid farewell to the NASA they knew Yes, NASA science is being destroyed, and the NASA we know is actively in the process of being gutted. Here are the receipts. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #astro #nasa #usa

Interesting interview of Eliezer Yudkowsky by @kevinroose.com and @caseynewton.bsky.social. One problem I have with A.I. doomsters is that they equate intelligence with power. When I look around at who exerts power and accrues wealth, I see a fairly weak correlation between those two attributes.

An incredibly important election in a tiny country just went the right way. Moldova has resisted a huge Russian disinformation campaign and will not become a Russian puppet state.

For a history project, I need to translate a short passage of handwritten Swedish from the 18th century. Can anyone help?

Are we heading for a world in which superhuman AI mathematicians define questions, construct proofs, check them, and then write+peer review the paper about them afterwards? Many mathematicians seem to think so, and some are happier about it than others. ⚛️🧪 #HLF2025 physicsworld.com/a/are-we-hea...

An article in @physicsworld.bsky.social about our panel discussion on AI and the physical sciences at #HLF25. With @georgemusser.com, Thea Åarrestad, David Silver and Maia Fraser physicsworld.com/a/the-pros-a...

As if to confirm my feelings of alienation from a world going mad, the German trains booked me onto car 24, but there is no car 24.

The cells of your body follow simple rules and play off one another to form a complete organism. The researcher Alexander Mordvintsev has developed “neural cellular automata,” building blocks that can self-assemble into any form. @georgemusser.com reports: www.quantamagazine.org/self-assembl...

You can cut a hole in a cube that's big enough to slide an identical cube through that hole! Think about that for a minute - it's kind of weird. Amazingly, every convex polyhedron that people checked had this property! Until this week. (1/2)

"Companies will spend $375 billion globally in 2025 on A.I. infrastructure, the investment bank UBS estimates. That is projected to rise to $500 billion next year." Which is, of course, the best use to which we can put that money. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/b...

My article on the likely influence of the experiments of polymath Thomas Young on the early abstract art of Hilma af Klint is now published & open access at Leonardo / MIT Press 🎉 direct.mit.edu/leon/article...

Thanks a lot, cheaters. Students who cheat by using LLMs are ruining education not just for themselves but for everyone else, since universities are responding by emphasizing in-class exams, which "may benefit students who are good at thinking quickly, not students who are good at thinking deeply."

"Rahma gazes up at those planes, she said, she wishes one would fly her family to a safer place. 'I imagine riding on it like a hot-air balloon, going to a country with no war — just food, school and toys,' she said."

"Perhaps, the researchers say, mind wandering is like a form of light sleep." @norabradford.bsky.social in @sciam.bsky.social

Now on @sciam.bsky.social: 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar object to enter our solar system, is full of mysteries. Here's what scientists are trying to learn about it before it boomerangs back to the void. By @astrojonny.bsky.social. www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-...

One experiment says the three neutrino masses should add up to less than 0.07 eV. Another says the sum should be greater than 0.06 eV. So that's close to an outright contradiction in the standard model of cosmology. digital.physicstoday.org/physicstoday... @physicstoday.bsky.social

“That attack took out Al Jazeera’s entire Gaza City news crew. … It was a direct hit on a journalist tent. Journalists are civilians, and to kill them in war is a war crime,” CPJ’s CEO @jodieginsberg.bsky.social told @skynewsrss.bsky.social. Watch here⤵️ news.sky.com/video/commit... #NotATarget

it has been said over and over but it’s worth reiterating in the face of this horrifying decision: RFK is quite literally joining the war on cancer on the side of cancer

In this SFI seminar, 2025 Journalism Fellow George Musser introduces the “Inside/Outside problem,” exploring how the observer’s perspective is the key to physics puzzles — from quantum measurement to time — and how journalism can help bridge scientific fields. http://youtu.be/Fwtb6vxqgNE

“I have friends who think that our society is destroying itself through sheer hedonism. I am far more pessimistic than that.” My latest book column for @plough.bsky.social is fun, I promise!!

Why Physicists Are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe @picadorbooks.bsky.social bookshop.org/p/books/putt...

When UC Berkeley caved in to McCarthyism, it lost its entire theoretical physics department, including future Nobelists. Let this be a lesson to #Columbia and other universities that are now pursuing a policy of #appeasement. Great article on p. 18 of the latest @aip.bsky.social’s history newsletter

Columbia says it hired an expert on negotiation. Must be the same one who advised Neville Chamberlain.