Saturday, December 13, 2025

Omnipotent Pervasive Malevolence


It's like the olympics of intellectual property law out here, and it's hard to keep up. Not to mention, the US economy has been swallowed whole by the tech sector, who has in turn managed to convince everyone that 1. all your base are belong to us, and 2. resistance is futile. 

They created a robot that steals the output we use as evidence of human agency (art, literature, etc.), and uses that to pretend it's a human (therapy bot, companion bot, etc.), and then it lies to, cheats on, and steals from other people, just like a real person! At this point it's hard to tell the difference, and soon, it won't matter.  

Here's a taste of how crazy things have gotten - it's possible that if you let an AI-agent (aigent?) take over your computer and use your browser, then you may be attacked by a person who doped online forum (reddit) posts with invisible but malicious prompt instructions to reset email passwords. 


Researchers suggest OpenAI trained AI models on paywalled O'Reilly books
Apr 2025, TechCrunch

It isn’t a smoking gun, the co-authors are careful to note. They acknowledge that their experimental method isn’t foolproof and that OpenAI might’ve collected the paywalled book excerpts from users copying and pasting it into ChatGPT.

Totally unrelated above image credit: AI Art - Uterus 1 - 2025


Prominent chatbots routinely exaggerate science findings, study shows
May 2025, phys.org

When summarizing scientific studies, large language models like ChatGPT and DeepSeek produce inaccurate conclusions in up to 73% of cases.

Surprisingly, prompts for accuracy increased the problem and newer LLMs performed worse than older ones.

Six of ten models systematically exaggerated claims found in the original texts, often in subtle but impactful ways; for instance, changing cautious, past-tense claims like "The treatment was effective in this study" to a more sweeping, present-tense version like "The treatment is effective." These changes can mislead readers into believing that findings apply much more broadly than they actually do.

Strikingly, when the models were explicitly prompted to avoid inaccuracies, they were nearly twice as likely to produce overgeneralized conclusions than when given a simple summary request.

"This effect is concerning"
 
via Utrecht University: Uwe Peters et al, Generalization bias in large language model summarization of scientific research, Royal Society Open Science (2025). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.241776


Anthropic's new AI model turns to blackmail when engineers try to take it offline
May 2025, TechCrunch

During pre-release testing, Anthropic asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant for a fictional company and consider the long-term consequences of its actions. Safety testers then gave Claude Opus 4 access to fictional company emails implying the AI model would soon be replaced by another system, and that the engineer behind the change was cheating on their spouse.

This was found a while back as well: "When asked if it used the insider information, the bot denies it" (BBC News 2023). 



It turns out you can train AI models without copyrighted material
Jun 2025, Engadget

Ethically-Sourced Dataset - you know like 130,000 books in the Library of Congress


Why Was Nvidia Hosting Blogs About 'Brazilian Facesitting Fart Games'?
Jun 2025, 404 Media

Long story short, somebody found an abandoned Nvidia website, and filled it with AI-generated websites, all with crazy ads. Same with vaccines.gov, the American Council on Education, Stanford, and NPR, all on subdomains in varying states of useability. 

But this summary comes from user msmash on slashdot, "The operation exploits search engines' trust in institutional domains, with Google's AI Overview already serving the fabricated content as factual information to users searching for local businesses."


Maine police department apologizes for AI-altered evidence photo
Jul 2025, phys.org

"AI-enhanced" should mean "unusable", but in this case, they're just trying to do really basic photo editing, cropping a photo, and then all of the sudden it changes that actual contents of the photo.

The image from the Police Department showed a collection of drug paraphernalia purportedly seized during a recent drug bust, including a scale and white powder in plastic bags. According to police, an officer involved in the arrests snapped the evidence photo and used a photo editing app to insert the department’s patch. 

“It was never our intent to alter the image of the evidence. We never realized that using a photoshop app to add our logo would alter a photograph so substantially.”

"photoshop app"


Topological approach detects adversarial attacks in multimodal AI systems
Aug 2025, phys.org

I do not recall having seen the word topological in the context of AI, but this is about multimodal: 

When an attack disrupts the geometric alignment of text and image embeddings, it creates a measurable distortion. The researchers developed two pioneering techniques, dubbed "topological-contrastive losses," to quantify these topological differences with precision, effectively pinpointing the presence of adversarial inputs.

via Los Alamos National Laboratory: Minh Vu et al, Topological Signatures of Adversaries in Multimodal Alignments, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2501.18006


Is AI really trying to escape human control and blackmail people?
Aug 2025, Ars Technica

On agency; let's clear this up with a good explanation by Ars writer Benj Edwards:

Consider a self-propelled lawnmower that follows its programming: If it fails to detect an obstacle and runs over someone's foot, we don't say the lawnmower "decided" to cause injury or "refused" to stop. We recognize it as faulty engineering or defective sensors. The same principle applies to AI models - which are software tools - but their internal complexity and use of language make it tempting to assign human-like intentions where none actually exist.

In a way, AI models launder human responsibility and human agency through their complexity. When outputs emerge from layers of neural networks processing billions of parameters, researchers can claim they're investigating a mysterious "black box" as if it were an alien entity.

But the truth is simpler: These systems take inputs and process them through statistical tendencies derived from training data. The seeming randomness in their outputs - which makes each response slightly different - creates an illusion of unpredictability that resembles agency. Yet underneath, it's still deterministic software following mathematical operations. No consciousness required, just complex engineering that makes it easy to forget humans built every part of it. (Thanks Benj)
Anthropic’s auto-clicking AI Chrome extension raises browser-hijacking concerns
Aug 2025, Ars Technica

Last week, Brave's security team discovered that Perplexity's Comet browser could be tricked into accessing users' Gmail accounts and triggering password recovery flows through malicious instructions hidden in Reddit posts. When users asked Comet to summarize a Reddit thread, attackers could embed invisible commands that instructed the AI to open Gmail in another tab, extract the user's email address, and perform unauthorized actions. Although Perplexity attempted to fix the vulnerability, Brave later confirmed that its mitigations were defeated and the security hole remained.



AI startup Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5bn to settle book piracy lawsuit
Sep 2025, The Guardian

The artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5bn to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot.

The company has agreed to pay authors about $3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement.

“As best as we can tell, it’s the largest copyright recovery ever. It is the first of its kind in the AI era.”

(Congrats to the Author's Guild on this one, and note they have a Human Authored Certification system for all guild members to prove they used no AI in their work.) https://authorsguild.org/human-authored/


AI chatbots routinely use user conversations for training, raising privacy concerns
Oct 2025, phys.org

Is this the second or third law of data collection? (answer below!)

In the case of multiproduct companies, such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, user interactions also routinely get merged with information gleaned from other products consumers use on those platforms—search queries, sales/purchases, social media engagement, and the like.

In other words, your public comments on the neighborhood surveillance app, your face from the biodata verification app, the items left in your online shopping cart, the locations you visit taken from the municipal FLOC network, and every query you ever typed into a searchbox, are all getting smashed together.

via Stanford: Jennifer King et al, User Privacy and Large Language Models: An Analysis of Frontier Developers' Privacy Policies, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2509.05382


The 4 Laws of Data Dynamics
1. Data must seek and merge with complementary data.
2. Data always will be used for purposes other than originally intended. 
3. Data collected about individuals will be used to cause harm.
4. Confidential information is confidential only until someone decides it's not. (p14)

--The Naked Consumer: How Our Lives Become Public Commodities, Erik Larson, Henry Holt Publishers, 1992 (read the full post: https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-naked-consumer.html)

So the incident above would be an example of both the first and second laws of data collection. The third law, harm, comes next (because that's what happens after the bubble pops, of course).


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Friday, December 12, 2025

Anti Gravitational Belief Space


This is a picture of Belief Space, as measured by the study below. 

LLMs delve into online debates to create a detailed map of human beliefs
Jun 2025, phys.org

They used BERT on Debate.org and got the map seen above.

They found that "relative dissonance" significantly influences people's decision-making. When online users encounter new information or beliefs, they tend to choose or accept those that cause them less "discomfort" or are most aligned with their existing beliefs.

"More importantly, we show that people's belief choices are shaped not just by how close a belief is to their own, but by how much closer the belief is compared to its competing belief. When two opposing beliefs on a certain issue are equally distant, people are just as likely to choose either one. However, when one belief is clearly closer than the other, people are far more likely to choose it."

"In other words, people are not only avoiding disagreement, but actively minimizing the difference in disagreement between available options."

They would also like to connect their observations with the results of another project carried out at Indiana University, called BRAIN (Belief Resonance and AI Narratives).

via Indiana University: Byunghwee Lee et al, A semantic embedding space based on large language models for modelling human beliefs, Nature Human Behaviour (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02228-z


Perseus: A tool for tracking the coordination of pump-and-dump crypto coin schemes
Mar 2025, phys.org

Researchers suggest that there are fewer than 500 major players, who they describe as masterminds, working to game the system for profit. These masterminds, the researchers contend, have developed what have come to be known as pump-and-dump schemes, in which they hype a coin to get people to buy and then sell their own coins when they believe the buying has reached a saturation point, walking away with a substantial profit. (They use Telegram as their platform, and "accomplices" as their hypemen.) They found 438 masterminds, who are together responsible for about $3.2 trillion in artificial crypto coin trading.

But the way they say the last part is so cold:

In reading some of the messages sent between users on Telegram, the researchers noted that the ease with which the masterminds were able to carry out their schemes should be of concern to those attempting to make money off crypto coin investing. They also suggest that at some point, some form of regulation is going to be needed to keep the system running, because eventually, those being scammed will catch on and the whole system will collapse.

via University College London: Honglin Fu et al, Perseus: Tracing the Masterminds Behind Cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dump Schemes, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2503.01686


Overconfident conspiracy theorists: Many unaware their beliefs are on the fringe
Jun 2025, phys.org

Man that sounds harsh

"This group of people are really miscalibrated from reality"

via Cornell University: Gordon Pennycook et al, Overconfidently Conspiratorial: Conspiracy Believers are Dispositionally Overconfident and Massively Overestimate How Much Others Agree With Them, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2025). DOI: 10.1177/01461672251338358


Octopus maps encourage conspiratorial thinking, research shows
Jun 2025, phys.org

"It's this genre of propaganda map where you try to make your opponent look like they're this big, sinister force that's everywhere and that's trying to control everything. It's up to you what that big sinister force is, but it's usually another country, another ideology, sometimes a religion, sometimes like a company or corporation, sometimes an individual person."

via Northeastern University: Eduardo Puerta et al, The Many Tendrils of the Octopus Map, Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2025). DOI: 10.1145/3706598.3713583

This is another graph taken from the first article in this post, and it shows the polarization of beliefs about God and Abortion. For other less controversial topics, like prostitute or global warming, you can see the two clusters get closer together. 

Study finds Republicans flagged for posting misleading tweets twice as often as Democrats on Community Notes
Jun 2025, phys.org

Not like you didn't know this already but here's a handy metric - it's 2:1

"Even on Elon Musk's X, the user-based Community Notes program flags posts by Republicans as misleading much more often than posts by Democrats. This undercuts the logic offered by Musk and Mark Zuckerberg for eliminating fact-checkers on X and Meta, respectively, namely that fact-checkers are biased against Republicans."

Republican users were overrepresented in misinformation sharing on health, with 81% of health-related flagged posts written by Republicans, followed by politics, 73%; science, 68%; other topics, 66%; and the economy, at 63%.

(The researchers analyzed a dataset of X's Community Notes focusing specifically on "misinformed or potentially misleading" notes written in English targeting English-language tweets on X sent between January 2023 and June 2024.)

via Oxford Internet Institute: Thomas Renault et al, Republicans are flagged more often than Democrats for sharing misinformation on X's Community Notes, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2502053122


Body illusion helps unlock memories, new study finds
Oct 2025, phys.org

Enfacement illusion - allows people to experience a face they see on a computer screen as their own, as though looking in a mirror.

The participants viewed a live video of their own face, digitally altered using an image filter to resemble how they might have looked as children. After the illusion, participants completed an autobiographical memory interview, recalling events from both their childhood and the past year. Participants who viewed the childlike version of their face recalled significantly more episodic childhood memories.

"Our findings suggest that the bodily self and autobiographical memory are linked, as temporary changes to bodily experience can facilitate access to remote autobiographical memories."

via Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge: Illusory ownership of one's younger face facilitates access to childhood episodic autobiographical memories, Scientific Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-17963-6


Over-the-counter painkillers match or surpass opioids for dental surgery in all adults, analysis confirms
Nov 2025, phys.org

As we can see not all facts are equal when there's money on the table - the opium machine was too powerful for too long and distorted the actual science.

And this isn't even news, it's a follow-up:

That first paper, on the collective experience of more than 1,800 trial patients, found that the combination of ibuprofen and acetaminophen provided better pain relief than hydrocodone with acetaminophen for the first two days after surgery and greater satisfaction over the post-operative period.

The new subgroup analysis, published in JAMA Network Open, demonstrated that the results held for both male and female patients.

"We wanted to determine whether the pain medication's effects were consistent in males and females separately," said Janine Fredericks Younger, an associate professor at Rutgers School of Dental Medicine and lead author of the analysis.

"And what we found is that in both subgroups (males and females), the non-opioid was superior for that first day and night, and then no worse than the opioid for the rest of the post-op period."

via Rutgers School of Dental Medicine: Analgesic Differences in Males and Females After Third Molar Surgery A Subgroup Analysis of the OARS Randomized Clinical Trial, JAMA Network Open (2025). DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.42467

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Thursday, December 11, 2025

Super Surveillance on Steroids


Every day it gets a little bit easier to make the phone call from inside the house.

AI-driven video analyzer sets new standards in human action detection
Oct 2024, phys.org

If you were one person in a sea of thousands, we can now tell you're up to something by the way you move your body, with only one camera:

Semantic and Motion-Aware Spatiotemporal Transformer Network - a multi-feature selective attention model helps the system focus on the most important parts of a scene while ignoring unnecessary details, and a motion-aware 2D positional encoding algorithm tracks how things move over time, to  accurately recognize complex actions in real time, making it more effective in high-stakes scenarios like surveillance, health care diagnostics, or autonomous driving.

via University of Virginia's School of Engineering and Applied Science: Matthew Korban et al, A Semantic and Motion-Aware Spatiotemporal Transformer Network for Action Detection, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2024). DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2024.3377192



A stapler that knows when you need it: Using AI to turn everyday objects into proactive assistants
Oct 2025, phys.org

And there you have it, the AI stapler.

via Carnegie Mellon University: Violet Yinuo Han et al, Towards Unobtrusive Physical AI: Augmenting Everyday Objects with Intelligence and Robotic Movement for Proactive Assistance, Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (2025). DOI: 10.1145/3746059.3747726


New 'hidden in plain sight' facial and eye biomarkers for tinnitus severity could unlock path to testing treatments
Apr 2025, phys.org

Researchers knew that the pupil dilation was a sign of increased arousal and that involuntary facial movements could provide a window into threat assessment; and they hypothesized that people with debilitating tinnitus are chronically in vigilance mode, reacting to everyday sounds as if they are threats.

Video recordings were made while participants listened to pleasant, neutral, or distressing and unpleasant sounds. In people with severe tinnitus, pupils dilated extra wide at all sounds, while facial movements were blunted in response to the same sounds.

via Mass General Brigham Eye and Ear: Samuel Smith et al, Objective autonomic signatures of tinnitus and sound sensitivity disorders, Science Translational Medicine (2025). DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.adp1934.


Deepfakes now come with a realistic heartbeat, making them harder to unmask
Apr 2025, phys.org

Photoplethysmography - The analysis of the transmission of light through the skin and underlying blood vessels has long been indispensable in medicine, for example in pulse oximeters. Its digital cousin, so-called remote photoplethysmography (rPPP), is an emerging method in telehealthcare, which uses webcams to estimate vital signs. But rPPP can, in theory, also be used in deepfake detectors.

In recent years, such experimental rPPP-based deepfake detectors have proven good at distinguishing between real and deepfaked videos. These successes led some experts to judge that current deepfakes couldn't yet mimic a realistic heart rate. But now, it appears that this complacent view is outdated.

"Our experiments have shown that current deepfakes may show a realistic heartbeat, but do not show physiologically realistic variations in blood flow across space and time within the face."

via Humboldt University of Berlin: High-quality deepfakes have a heart!, Frontiers in Imaging (2025). DOI: 10.3389/fimag.2025.1504551

Nikon Small World - Sunflower pollen on an acupuncture needle - John-Oliver Dum - 40X - 2023

Diagnostic pen converts handwriting into electrical signals to detect Parkinson's
Jun 2025, phys.org

The pen's design integrates a silicone-based magnetoelastic tip embedded with magnetic particles, and a reservoir of ferrofluid ink containing nanomagnets. During writing, mechanical stress from hand pressure deforms the tip and causes ink movement, generating shifts in magnetic flux that induce voltage in an embedded coil.

via UCLA: Guorui Chen et al, Neural network-assisted personalized handwriting analysis for Parkinson's disease diagnostics, Nature Chemical Engineering (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44286-025-00219-5

Also: Diagnosing Parkinson's disease using a soft magnetoelastic smart pen, Nature Chemical Engineering (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44286-025-00228-4


One of a kind: Humans have unique breathing 'fingerprints' that may signal health status
Jun 2025, phys.org

Scientists can identify individuals based solely on their breathing patterns with 96.8% accuracy. 

This high-level accuracy remained consistent across multiple retests conducted over a two-year period, rivaling the precision of some voice recognition technologies. Respiratory fingerprints correlated with a person's body mass index, sleep-wake cycle, levels of depression and anxiety, and even behavioral traits. For example, participants who scored relatively higher on anxiety questionnaires had shorter inhales and more variability in the pauses between breaths during sleep.

via Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute of Science: Humans Have Nasal Respiratory Fingerprints, Current Biology (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.05.008. 


Banking data reveals early warning signs of cognitive decline in older adults
Jun 2025, phys.org

The results reveal that subtle but significant changes in financial behavior—such as reduced spending on travel and hobbies, increased household bills, fewer online banking logins, and more frequent requests to reset PINs — begin to appear several years before individuals are formally identified as lacking financial capacity.

"Lacking financial capacity" is another way of saying it. 

via University of Nottingham's School of Economics: Anna Trendl et al, Early Behavioral Markers of Loss of Financial Capacity, JAMA Network Open (2025). DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.15894


WhoFi: New surveillance technology can track people by how they disrupt Wi-Fi signals
Jul 2025, phys.org

Total and absolute surveillance is inevitable.

WhoFi captures how Wi-Fi signals change when they encounter people and objects, interpreting unique Wi-Fi disruptions as individual "fingerprints" unique to a person.

The team acknowledges the issues and potential for misuse, but states that their re-identification (Re-ID) system does not capture a person's identity or personal data. "By leveraging non-visual biometric features embedded in Wi-Fi CSI, this study offers a privacy-preserving and robust approach for Wi-Fi-based Re-ID, and it lays the foundation for future work in wireless biometric sensing."

via Sapienza University: Danilo Avola et al, WhoFi: Deep Person Re-Identification via Wi-Fi Channel Signal Encoding, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2507.12869

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Wednesday, December 10, 2025

Words That Are Changing the World


Things don't really exist until they have a name. 


Liquid robot can transform, separate and fuse like living cells
Mar 2025, phys.org

Liquid robots - "A particle-armored liquid robot, encased in unusually dense hydrophobic particles" (Who knew the T-1000 made of pfas) But wait, there's more! "Building upon our current findings, we are now working on technologies that will allow the liquid robot to change shape freely using sound waves or electric fields."

via Seoul National University and Gachon University: Hyobin Jeon et al, Particle-armored liquid robots, Science Advances (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adt5888.

Image note: All this images come from the Nikon Small World Competition, 2025. It's a great competition, it's been happening for decades, and produces some of the world's most interesting imagery; these are only a tiny sample of all the winners. 


Intercrystals' pave the way for greener electronics and quantum technologies
May 2025, phys.org

Intercrystals - two ultrathin layers of graphene stacked, then twisted them slightly atop a layer of hexagonal boron nitride, to form moiré patterns. With intercrystals, materials can be engineered to access new phases of matter by exploiting geometric frustration at the smallest scale. ... exploiting geometric frustration

via Rutgers University Department of Physics and Astronomy: Xinyuan Lai et al, Moiré periodic and quasiperiodic crystals in heterostructures of twisted bilayer graphene on hexagonal boron nitride, Nature Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-025-02222-w


Whole-body teleoperation system allows robots to perform coordinated tasks with human-like dexterity
May 2025, phys.org

TWIST - teleoperated whole-body imitation system (teledildonics did it first but I'll allow)

via Stanford University and Simon Fraser University: Yanjie Ze et al, TWIST: Teleoperated Whole-Body Imitation System, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2505.02833


Organoids containing blood vessels have been grown, holding promise for research and treatment
Jun 2025, phys.org

Vascularized Organoids - Beyond about 3 millimeters in diameter, an organoid can no longer sustain itself by absorbing resources directly from its environment. "When you grow organoids to a certain size, they start to die inside because they can't get oxygen and nutrients to the center" (btw "For over a decade, scientists have been growing organoids")

via Stanford University Medical Center: Oscar J. Abilez et al, Gastruloids enable modeling of the earliest stages of human cardiac and hepatic vascularization, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adu9375.


Cells assembled into Anthrobots become biologically younger than the original cells they were made from
Jun 2025, phys.org

Anthrobots - tiny multicellular organisms grown from a single human tracheal cell and assembled into new forms - spherical, oblong, covered with cilia on all or part of their surfaces, capable of swimming and repairing "wounds" in plated neurons.

via Tufts University: Gizem Gumuskaya et al, The Morphological, Behavioral, and Transcriptomic Life Cycle of Anthrobots, Advanced Science (2025). DOI: 10.1002/advs.202409330

Patterns of patterns: Exploring supermoiré engineering
Jul 2025, phys.org

Supermoiré patterns - moiré of moiré, or more moiré

via Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences: Yonglong Xie et al, Strong interactions and isospin symmetry breaking in a supermoiré lattice, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adl2544


Robots now grow and repair themselves by consuming parts from other machines
Jul 2025, phys.org

Robot Metabolism - (Words you did not expect to hear right next to each other) enables machines to absorb and reuse parts from other robots or their surroundings.

"True autonomy means robots must not only think for themselves but also physically sustain themselves. We can't rely on humans to maintain these machines. Robots must ultimately learn to take care of themselves."

via Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science and Creative Machines Lab: Philippe Wyder, Robot Metabolism: Towards machines that can grow by consuming other machines, Science Advances (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adu6897.


Quantum internet moves closer as researchers teleport light-based information
Jul 2025, phys.org

Telecom Photons - or telecom-wavelength photonic qubit - a quantum bit encoded in light at the same wavelengths supporting current communications

via Nanjing University: Yu-Yang An et al, Quantum Teleportation from Telecom Photons to Erbium-Ion Ensembles, Physical Review Letters (2025). DOI: 10.1103/3wh8-2gh1.


Scientists grow novel 'whole-brain' organoid
Jul 2025, phys.org

Multi-region Brain Organoid - aka rudimentary whole-brain organoid, with characteristics resembling a brain in a 40-day-old human fetus. Fuck off.

via Johns Hopkins University: Anannya Kshirsagar et al, Multi‐Region Brain Organoids Integrating Cerebral, Mid‐Hindbrain, and Endothelial Systems, Advanced Science (2025). DOI: 10.1002/advs.202503768


Scientists program cells to create biological qubit in multidisciplinary research
Aug 2025, phys.org

Biological Qubit - a protein-based qubit; "Rather than taking a conventional quantum sensor and trying to camouflage it to enter a biological system, we wanted to explore the idea of using a biological system itself and developing it into a qubit"

via University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering: Jacob S. Feder et al, A fluorescent-protein spin qubit, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09417-w


'Solastalgia' might help explain effects of climate change on mental health
Aug 2025, phys.org

Solastalgia - blend of the words "solace" and "nostalgia"; first coined in 2003 to refer to the lack of solace and feelings of pain or sickness caused by changes in a person's immediate or surrounding environment, and now found to be associated with depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder. (Out of an initial 80 studies between 2003 and 2024, 5 quantitative and 14 qualitative studies from Australia, Germany, Peru and the U.S., totaling 5,000+ participants were considered.) Also considered one of several eco-emotions, such as eco-anxiety, eco-grief, or eco-shame, or eco-guilt 

via University of Zurich Institute of Psychology: Vela Sandquist A, Biele L, Ehlert U, Fischer S. Is solastalgia associated with mental health problems? A scoping review. BMJ Mental Health. 2025;28:e301639. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjment-2025-301639


'Meschers' tool visualizes and edits 'physically impossible' objects
Aug 2025, phys.org

Mescher - a physically impossible object, like M.C. Escher. AKA Penrose Triangle, Escher-esque structures, geodesics (Their "Meschers" tool converts images and 3D models into 2.5-dimensional structures, and helps users relight, smooth out, and study unique geometries while preserving their optical illusion.)

via MIT CSAIL Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: Ana Dodik et al, Meschers: Geometry Processing of Impossible Objects, ACM Transactions on Graphics (2025). DOI: 10.1145/3731422. 


Searching for Artificial Memory Systems in ancient humans with spatial statistics
Aug 2025, phys.org

Paleolithic Artificial Memory System - like tally marks on bone - devices that record, store, transmit, and retrieve coded information beyond the brain, via external representations. AMS can be anything from the notches on a gunslinger's pistol, tracking past success, to the symbols on and data encoded within the Voyager spacecraft's golden record ... Documented functions include a North American lunar-cycle calendar, Australian message sticks, medieval English tally sticks for expenditures and taxes, a Tibetan tally stick for wheat and millet deliveries, and Angolan tally sticks for days traveled.

via Université de Bordeaux: Lloyd Austin Courtenay et al, Identifying potential palaeolithic artificial memory systems via Spatial statistics: Implications for the origin of quantification, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1007/s12520-025-02286-4


Discarded particles dubbed 'neglectons' may unlock universal quantum computing
Aug 2025, phys.org

Neglectons - a name that reflects both their overlooked status and their newfound importance; by adding a single new type of anyon to topological quantum computation, the team shows that Ising anyons can be made universal, capable of performing any quantum computation through braiding alone.

via University of Southern California: Universal quantum computation using Ising anyons from a non-semisimple topological quantum field theory, Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-61342-8


The Hofstadter butterfly: Twisted bilayer graphene reveals two distinct strongly interacting topological phases
Sep 2025, phys.org

MATBG - Magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene; it's had so many names in the past ten years; this is the final and fully-formed acronym; wasted opportunity not to add "sandwich" at the end, as this has been part of the name-zoo all along. (Note that The Hofstadter Butterfly, which is by far a better name, is for the way the phases interact, not the MATBG that makes it happen)

via University of Washington and Florida State University: Minhao He et al, Strongly interacting Hofstadter states in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene, Nature Physics (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-025-02997-4.


One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants
Sep 2025, Nature

Xenoparous - give birth to other species 

via ISEM, University of Montpellier, CNRS, IRD: Juvé, Y., Lutrat, C., Ha, A. et al. One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants. Nature 646, 372–377 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09425-w


Golden nano sandwich makes nanoparticles visible
Sep 2025, phys.org

Golden Nano Sandwich - "whisper" nano cavity between gold film and gold nanoparticle

via University of Twente: Mohammad Reza Aghdaee et al, Optical detection of single sub-15 nm objects using elastic scattering strong coupling, Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-63380-8


Tomorrow's quantum computers could use sound, not light
Sep 2025, phys.org

Phonons - tiny mechanical vibrations that would be considered sound on a larger scale; they can send phonon-based data through a quantum computer free from the randomness that, by nature, will always hinder platforms based on photons.

via University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering: Acoustic phonon phase gates with number-resolving phonon detection, Nature Physics (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-025-03027-z.


We need a solar sail probe to detect space tornadoes earlier, researchers say
Oct 2025, phys.org

Space Tornadoes - that's all.

via University of Michigan: High-resolution simulation of CME-CIR interactions: small- to mesoscale solar wind structure formation observable by the SWIFT constellation The Astrophysical Journal (2025). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/adf855


First trial of therapy chatbot suggests AI can provide 'gold-standard' mental-health care
Mar 2025, phys.org

Therabot - it's a therapy bot for mental health

via Dartmouth: A Clinical Trial on a Generative AI Chatbot for Mental Health Treatment, NEJM AI (2025). DOI: 10.1056/AIoa2400802

'Thirstwaves' are growing more common across the United States
Apr 2025, phys.org

Thirstwave - period of extremely high evaporative demand like its cousin the heat wave; to be called a thirstwave, the short crop evapotranspiration must be above the 90th percentile for at least 3 days. 

via Department of Soil and Water Systems at University of Idaho-Boise: M. S. Kukal et al, Thirstwaves: Prolonged Periods of Agricultural Exposure to Extreme Atmospheric Evaporative Demand for Water, Earth's Future (2025). DOI: 10.1029/2024EF004870


Industrial waste is turning to rock in just decades, research reveals
Apr 2025, phys.org

Rapid Anthropoclastic Rock Cycle

via University of Glasgow: Amanda Owen et al, Evidence for a rapid anthropoclastic rock cycle, Geology (2025). DOI: 10.1130/G52895.1


'Metabots' shapeshift from flat sheets into hundreds of structures
Oct 2025, phys.org

Metabot - "We start out with simple polymer sheets that have holes in them, but by applying thin films to the surface of the polymer we're able to incorporate materials that respond to electricity or magnetic fields" ... "By connecting multiple sheets, we create structures that lie flat initially, but can then bend and fold themselves into a wide variety of stable configurations" (and I saw it here first) 
 
via North Carolina State University: Caizhi Zhou et al, Multistable thin-shell metastructures for multiresponsive reconfigurable metabots, Science Advances (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adx4359


Topological polycrystal: A new approach to configurable, multiband topological photonic circuitry
May 2025, phys.org

Topological Polycrystal - with a name like that, we don't need definitions.

via Department of Physics at the Institute of Advanced Study at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology: Tianyue Li et al, Configurable Topological Photonic Polycrystal Based on a Synthetic Hybrid Dimension, National Science Review (2025). DOI: 10.1093/nsr/nwaf107

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Tuesday, December 9, 2025

Thanks Craigslist


In a fit of irony, I had never heard of this, and nobody I told this to had ever heard it either. This article is about polarization, but it's also about the decline of the news industry, the same industry that didn't do such a good job spreading this particular story over the past several years.


How the rise of Craigslist helped fuel America's political polarization
Aug 2025, phys.org

Craigslist launched in San Francisco in 1995, and over time effectively killed off the humble newspaper classified ad, which in the year 2000, made 30% of their revenues.

Craigslist rolled out in an idiosyncratic city-by-city expansion. This staggered spread created what is known in economics as a natural experiment.

This needs some explanation, so I'm copying most of it:

Looking at more than 1,500 newspapers, the researchers could compare what happened before and after Craigslist arrived, isolating its effects from other factors like the rapid expansion of broadband internet.

Newspaper executives axed a lot of the expensive, "prestige" political coverage that classifieds had subsidized, because it wasn't something readers flocked to, and it cost more to produce than sports or entertainment.

Following the entry of Craigslist in a market, newspapers reduced mentions of politicians competing in local congressional races by an average of 12%. The missing coverage also led to declines in circulation, particularly among readers interested in general news, who tended to be more educated, wealthier, and more politically engaged.

"When they're less informed and they're less likely to get solid information, they tend to go to extremes, because they don't have the information that the extreme candidates are extreme."

Readers who didn't follow politics closely were also affected. "You may not have been reading the newspaper because you wanted to learn about politics, but the stories about politics were bundled together with the things that you did care about."

When local political coverage disappeared, along with it went an important way for many voters to spot the differences between candidates, particularly unknown candidates running in party primaries. In a world of perfect information, extreme candidates would usually lose, because their stances are by definition far from the average voter's. When voters have less information available to ferret out political positions that do not align with their views, they cast more votes for extreme candidates.

"The reduction in staff covering politics made it harder for voters to differentiate between moderates and extremists in partisan primaries, and allowed extreme candidates to do better than they did before." This, in turn, fueled political polarization.

[And I guess this is why the City University of New York announced in 2024 a $10 million gift from Craig Newmark for a tuition-free Graduate School of Journalism.]

via Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Cornell and Ruben National University of Singapore: Milena Djourelova et al, The Impact of Online Competition on Local Newspapers: Evidence from the Introduction of Craigslist, Review of Economic Studies (2024). DOI: 10.1093/restud/rdae049

Image credit: AI Art - A Crowd From View - 2025

Post Script
I'll record here only for personal posterity's sake, a line of reasoning that follows from this - does this mean that advertising (in the form of classifieds) is necessary for democracy? I know Ben Franklin's newspaper in Philadelphia was funded by advertisers. Is it supposed to be government-funded? Sounds like someone needs to take a political science course. 

Post Post Script
This makes the social media problem circa the 2020's even more sinister, since these platforms, some of which are also the largest companies in the world, they're not only taking the advertising dollars from traditional media, but they're also incentivizing the opposite of information (in the form of dis- and mis-information). I mean they don't even employ journalists, nevermind the fact that they propagate on their networks non-news (as in, fake news from fake news outlets created with names to sound similar to reputable news outlets). 

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Monday, December 8, 2025

Reproductive Sci Fi


AKA 3 People Babies:

Mitochondrial Donation in a Reproductive Care Pathway for mtDNA Disease, New England Journal of Medicine (the original article), July 2025 https://dx.doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2503658

"Pronuclear transfer" is the unsensational way to call this, but compare the headline above to the dominant media headlines:

  • Eight babies born after mitochondrial donation treatment to reduce transmission of mitochondrial DNA disease, Medicalxpress 
  • Healthy babies born in Britain after scientists used DNA from three people to avoid genetic disease, AP News 
  • Three-person IVF technique spared children from inherited diseases, scientists say, Reuters 
  • Babies from three people's DNA prevents hereditary disease, BBC
  • 8 babies born with DNA from 3 people in world-first IVF trial aimed at minimizing risk of inherited disease, CBS 
  • Babies born with DNA from three people hailed as breakthrough – but questions remain, The Conversation 
  • Eight healthy babies born after IVF using DNA from three people, The Guardian
  • Mitochondrial Donation and PGT to Reduce Risk of Mitochondrial DNA Disease, Newcastle University via New England Journal of Medicine 


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Sunday, December 7, 2025

Musical Intent


Music things happen all the time in the world of science.

Computational musicology: Tracking the changing sound of bands
Jul 2025, phys.org

It is often believed that the older a musician gets, the more they start producing slower, more mellow material, but this is not what this study found. Variations in sound and rhythm continued to occur at different stages of the artists' music careers.

In the study, Radiohead were consistently more diverse than Coldplay harmonically, but not necessarily timbrally.

Overall, R.E.M. were generally the least adventurous in their musical style with Coldplay becoming increasingly part of the pop mainstream over time.

This research is part of a growing field called computational musicology, where computers are used to study music in new ways. By analyzing sound files directly, researchers can get a better understanding of how artists grow and change.

via Durham UniversityDepartment of Music: Nick Collins, Recording artist career comparison through audio content analysis, Royal Society Open Science (2025). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.241647



Audio of Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson arguments from Marriage Story used to scare off wolves in the US
Aug 2025, The Guardian

His teams employ “drone cowhands, whose quadcopters have thermal cameras that can reveal any wolf lurking in the darkness”. The predator is then spotlit and treated to audio blasted over a loudspeaker. Aside from Baumbach-scripted acid insults, tracks include fireworks, gunshots and AC/DC’s Thunderstruck.


Study maps the happiest and saddest national anthems from around the globe
Sep 2025, phys.org

Using machine learning and music information retrieval (MIR) on 176 national anthems, the team predicted the emotional profile of each anthem and identified clear global patterns.

  • anthems from the Americas were generally more tense and less positive than those from other regions
  • hierarchical (high power distance) cultures had more energetic anthems
  • individualistic cultures had anthems that were more tender and less tense

via University of Jyväskylä: Petri Toiviainen et al, The emotional geography of National anthems, Scientific Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-08956-6


The older we get, the fewer favorite songs we have, study shows
Sep 2025, phys.org

  • Younger users listen to a wide range of contemporary popular music and follow trends in popular culture.
  • In the transition from adolescence to adulthood, music habits broaden - more artists and genres are explored, and listening becomes increasingly varied. 
  • With age, this spectrum narrows, while music choices become more personal and influenced by previous experiences.

 

The study is based on Last.fm data spanning 15 years and covering more than 40,000 users. The data contained over 542 million plays of more than 1 million different songs.

via University of Gothenburg, Jönköping University and University of Primorska: Arsen Matej Golubovikj et al, Soundtracks of Our Lives: How Age Influences Musical Preferences, Adjunct Proceedings of the 33rd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (2025). DOI: 10.1145/3708319.3733673


Global study shows why the songs from our teens leave a lasting mark on us
Oct 2025, phys.org

Every wedding dj knows this; but also there's the "25 year bump" as well, which for me doesn't hold up actually:

The "Reminiscence Bump" - our most emotionally resonant music tends to come from our teenage years, peaking around age 17; but men closer to 16 and women closer to 19

The "Cascading Reminiscence Bump" - both men and women often form deep connections to music released decades before they were born—typically from about 25 years earlier

On genres - Men often gravitate toward intense, rebellious genres that fuel teenage identity and independence—a phase that peaks early. Women, however, tend to engage with a wider spectrum of music, from pop to soul to classical, often using it also as a tool for strengthening social bonds. 

via University of Jyväskylä Finland: Iballa Burunat et al, Memory bumps across the lifespan in personally meaningful music, Memory (2025). DOI: 10.1080/09658211.2025.2557960


'Audible enclaves' could enable private listening without headphones
Mar 2025, phys.org

"We use two ultrasound transducers paired with an acoustic metasurface, which emit self-bending beams that intersect at a certain point. The person standing at that point can hear sound, while anyone standing nearby would not. This creates a privacy barrier between people for private listening."

via Pennsylvania State University College of Engineering: un, Audible enclaves crafted by nonlinear self-bending ultrasonic beams, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2408975122.

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Saturday, December 6, 2025

Its Passageways My Veins

Here are some advances in building science.

But first, I think that picture above is a real photo, of something that sounds like an artificial tree, and you can read about it in the first article below. Image credit: Picoplanktonics large-format photosynthetic objects - Valentina Mori for Biennale di Venezia - 2025

Photosynthetic living material uses bacteria to capture CO₂ in two different ways
Jun 2025, phys.org

The 3-meter-high, tree-trunk-like object can bind about as much as a 20 year old pine tree. 
They stably incorporated photosynthetic cyanobacteria into a printable gel material that grows while removing carbon from the air, and requires only sunlight, artificial seawater with readily available nutrients, and CO2.

via ETH Zurich: Dalia Dranseike et al, Dual carbon sequestration with photosynthetic living materials, Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-58761-y


Living fungus-based building material repairs itself for over a month
Apr 2025, phys.org

Materials made from organisms that are still alive. That is all.

via Montana State University: Mycelium as a scaffold for biomineralized engineered living materials, Cell Reports Physical Science (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.xcrp.2025.102517


Physics reveals the optimal roof ratios for energy efficiency
Apr 2025, phys.org

Based on the physics of these airflows and heat transfer, if a roof peak is shorter than roughly three feet, it should be about three or four times wider than it is tall to minimize heat loss. And if a roof peak is taller than three feet, it should be an equilateral triangle with a height-to-width ratio of one.

via Duke University: A. Bejan et al, Why people shape roofs the same way, International Communications in Heat and Mass Transfer (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.icheatmasstransfer.2025.108909


Passive cooling paint sweats off heat to deliver 10X cooling and 30% energy savings
Jun 2025, phys.org

Not so much paint but a carpet that can get wet thereby using evaporative cooling:
What truly set CCP-30 paint apart was its self-replenishing ability—absorbing water from rain and atmospheric moisture to sustain evaporative cooling over time—without compromising how the paint interacts with light when wet.

via Department of Energy and Power Engineering, School of Mechanical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology: Jipeng Fei et al, Passive cooling paint enabled by rational design of thermal-optical and mass transfer properties, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adt3372

Sustainable cooling film could slash building energy use by 20% amid rising global temperatures
Jun 2025, phys.org

It's a bioplastic metafilm constructed from polylactic acid (PLA) using a low-temperature separation technique that reflects 98.7% of sunlight and minimizes heat gain.

via University of South Australia and Zhengzhou University in China: Yangzhe Hou et al, A structural bioplastic metafilm for durable passive radiative cooling, Cell Reports Physical Science (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.xcrp.2025.102664


Beyond shade: Researchers improve radiant cooling to make outdoor temperatures feel cooler
Jul 2025, phys.org

They used water-cooled aluminum panels and see-through, infrared-reflective thin polymer film, which allows both efficient cooling and visibility.

The team constructed a nearly 10-by-10-foot "tent" and also painted the inward-facing side of the panels black to absorb incidental heat, such as body heat from people within the structure. 

The researchers found that their structure had a mean radiant temperature of about 78 degrees F. This was not only lower than the ambient air temperature of approximately 84 degrees but also more than 10 degrees cooler than the mean radiant temperature of about 90 degrees that a person would have otherwise experienced due to heat radiating from surrounding surfaces.

via UCLA: David E. Abraham et al, Efficient outdoor thermal comfort via radiant cooling and infrared-reflective walls, Nature Sustainability (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41893-025-01558-0


Self-cleaning glass uses electric field to remove dust particles within seconds
Aug 2025, phys.org

The transparent, coverable self-cleaning glass uses a square wave electrical signal (5 kV, 10 Hz) on a sandwich-like structure with a quartz glass base layer, etched with indium tin oxide electrodes, and then a polyethylene glycol terephthalate film placed as an insulating dielectric layer

via State Key Laboratory of Clean Energy Utilization, State Environmental Protection Engineering Center for Coal-Fired Air Pollution Control at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou: Meng Yang et al, Coverable Self‐Cleaning Glass via Abnormal Transport and Jump of Charged Particles, Advanced Science (2025). DOI: 10.1002/advs.202509404


Novel cement lets buildings cool themselves
Aug 2025, phys.org

They created a cement that reflects light and emits heat instead of absorbing it, using tiny reflective crystals of a mineral called ettringite on its surface; the crystals were made by pouring the cement into a silicon mold covered in holes that created depressions in the cement's surface where the ettringite crystals could grow.

via Southeast University's Department of Materials Science and Engineering, China: Guo Lu et al, Scalable metasurface-enhanced supercool cement, Science Advances (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adv2820

Living cement: Scientists turn bacteria-infused cement into energy-storing supercapacitors
Sep 2025, phys.org

They add Shewanella oneidensis, a bacterium known for its ability to transfer electrons to external surfaces via so-called extracellular electron transfer. Once embedded in the cement matrix, these bacteria create a network of charge carriers capable of both storing and releasing electrical energy.  Because microbial activity gradually fades due to nutrient depletion or environmental stress, the researchers designed an integrated microfluidic network within the cement that can deliver a nutrient solution containing proteins, vitamins, salts and growth factors to keep the bacteria alive or "reawaken" the system.

via Aarhus University: Living microbial cement supercapacitors with reactivatable energy storage, Cell Reports Physical Science (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.xcrp.2025.102810.


Silver-nanoring coating points to 'self-regulating' smart windows—without power or tinting
Sep 2025, phys.org

The microscopic silver rings increasingly block near-infrared light as sunlight becomes stronger—without making the glass less transparent.

via Aarhus University Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center: Xavier Baami González et al, Thermoplasmonic Nanorings for Passive Solar‐Responsive Smart Windows in Energy‐Efficient Building Applications, Advanced Functional Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202518295


World's first mushroom-powered waterless toilet appears in botanical garden
Sep 2025, phys.org

The MycoToilet - At the back, a system separates liquid from solid waste. Solid waste enters a mycelium-lined compartment, where fungi absorb odors and microbes break it down into compost.

via University of British Columbia: http://www.ubc.ca/


New air filter could turn every building into a carbon sink
Oct 2025, phys.org

Nanofibers coated with polyethylenimine polymer makes a carbon sponge that can be cleaned by solar heating or low-energy electricity methods.

via University of Chicago and Nanyang Technological University: Ronghui Wu et al, Distributed direct air capture by carbon nanofiber air filters, Science Advances (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adv6846


An edible fungus could make paper and fabric liquid-proof
Oct 2025, phys.org

Post PFAS world:
Researchers first blended T. versicolor mycelia with a nutrient-rich solution of cellulose nanofibrils. They applied thin layers of the mixture to denim, polyester felt, birch wood veneer and two types of paper, letting the fungus grow. Placing the samples in an oven for one day inactivated the fungus and allowed the coating to dry. It blocks water, oil and grease absorption, because the surface of mycelium naturally repels water.

The best part?
It changes their colors, forming mottled yellow, orange or tan patterns.

via University of Maine: Sandro Zier et al, Growing Sustainable Barrier Coatings from Edible Fungal Mycelia, Langmuir (2025). DOI: 10.1021/acs.langmuir.5c03185


Cooling paint harvests water from thin air
Nov 2025, phys.org

Porous polymer coating made of polyvinylidene fluoride-co-hexafluoropropene (PVDF-HFP) that reflects up to 97% of sunlight and radiates heat into the air, keeping surfaces up to 6° cooler than the surrounding air even under direct sun. ... By removing UV-absorbing materials, we overcome the traditional limit in solar reflectivity while avoiding glare through diffuse reflection.

via University of Sydney and Dewpoint Innovations: Ming Chiu et al, Passively Cooled Paint‐Like Coatings for Atmospheric Water Capture, Advanced Functional Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202519108

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