Notes from HOPE XVII

Hackers on Planet Earth Conference, August 14-16 2026, New Yorker Hotel, New York City

Cameras, Cops and Cell Towers, with Michael Raymond

• Surveillance cameras can be blinded at 50 feet and disabled at 5 feet away by a laser, but you need a tripod 
• ALPRs - What Do We Want? 
• warrants required
• retention limits
• no hotlists
• mapping of all locations
• bans on protest monitoring
• consequences for misuse
• Gunshot detectors (shotspotter) have microphones. I know you know what that means. That is all. 
• First responder drones can go BVR beyond visual recognition

Image credit: Still from the movie Hackers 1995

Poisoning the Well: How Decoys and Misdirection Protect Privacy When Opting Out Isn't Enough, with Rachel Vrabec of Kanary

• Kanary is a web app for personal data removal by subscription: https://www.kanary.com/pricing
• For a company who's job it is to take your money and remove your identity from online, the best they can do right now is 40% for 90 days. (They used to get 90% for 90 days.) That's not an indictment of the company but of the industry they're up against. 
• This company tested their own effectiveness on a new employee, grabbing all available personal info on day one, then performing their services of wiping that identify off the internet, then watching every day as to how it creeps back in. 
• First thing they do is make removal requests from all the data brokers, and then map all the brokers who refuse (OpenAI, Radaris, etc). Google was caching the result, making it harder to tell if it was really wiped or not. Also, most of the data brokers are directly linked to "identity, background, property check" services like Informio, PeopleFinder, AddressFinder, PropertyFinder. 
• Most of us, except California, we have no privacy rights. Apparently not everyone knows this yet, and that's a shame. Data brokers know, and they say "your address records indicate you live in a state with no privacy regulations, so we deny your request."
• If for some reason you think it's worth your time, check out BADBOOL Badass Data Brokers Opt Out List.
• How do they suggest you use decoys and misdirection? Well, first start by masking yourself when you make the first removal request, using a different email that is believable but fake, and ideally an email from your own domain that you pay for. 
• Most of our data comes from the County Tax Assessor. Seriously.
• Try putting a fake address in your LinkedIn account, and wait 6 months for it to populate.
• Try being a former FBI agent or abortion doctor, because in some states, like Arizona, those people actually have some rights to privacy. 
• Try making noisy fake profiles w fake emails and data and watch the data spread and the targeted emails start rolling in
• South Dakota and Texas allow Nomad Status where your address on your ID can be a trailer park!

How App Libraries Enable the Surveillance Apparatus, w Lena Cohen of EFF and creator of Privacy Badger

• Location data is worth $300 billion, because it's hyperlocal and event-based
• EFF reads data broker marketing material, as well as app SDK code
• There's two different kinds of GPS, coarse (1 sq mi) and precise (10 ft!)
• Advertisers write something like dark patterns for the developers of their SDKs so that location delivery is checked by default; the developers just never bother to change it 
• Developers don't have to declare if they're sending your data to a third party, only if the app itself is using, storing or sharing. (I think they're not "sharing" they're selling? And that's why it's ok? Either way Third Party Doctrine is why you kind of have no 4th Amendment rights anymore)
• Checkout Internet Safety Lab's Exodus Privacy and EFF's Appkeep

Bid Request - HOPE 16 - Location Data Brokers w B Budington and L Cohen - 2025

Image credit: This image is actually taken from last year's HOPE, where Lena Cohen gave a similar talk on Location Data Brokers. This slide is great, and I've seen it used in a few other places. 

The Deceptive Web of Scam Compounds w Laura Sang Hee Scherling

• See her articles in Tech Policy Press: https://www.techpolicy.press/author/laura-scherling/
• Most people scam-calling you are victims of human trafficking, being held in a scam compound somewhere in Southeast Asia against their will.
• If a scammer calls you, instead of getting mad, we're supposed to "reroute" them to Global Alms the advocacy group that helps trafficking victims: https://www.globalalms.com/

Remembering Hackers 31 Years Later w Emmanuel Goldstein and Renoly Santiago

This has nothing to do w the movie, but it's here where we learn that last night the livestream from the conference was shut off by youtube because of copyright infringement - for music that was literally created for the conference. So their own music that they created is being used to shut them down. It happened overnight, and although they woke up then next morning and tried unsuccessfully to get it back up, while we on the East Coast were sleeping, the Chaos Computer Club in Germany took over the feed and are now the ones streaming it. Magic does happen. (And consider this recent article by the EFF about when people use DMCA not for copyright at all but to take down people they don't like.) Last thing, and just because I thought it was funny in a kind of insider-New-Yorker kind of way, Renoly who is Phantom Phreak in the movie, and ostensibly a New Yorker, is on this day late to the talk, texting Emmanuel in real time, telling him that he took the "Yellow Line" to the 7 to Hudson Yards and is now running down 34th Street, to which Emmanuel asks out loud to the audience as he's reading it, "He's supposed to be a New Yorker, but now I'm suspicious - Who calls it the Yellow Line?" And he's right. 

The Art and Science of Metawar w Winn Schwartan

• He coined 'Cyber Pearl Harbor' way back decades ago and everyone thought he was crazy
• Now he wrote a book probably called the Art of Metawar
• The end game of TMI Too Much Information looks like religious epiphany, magic over science, and some other ones I missed, but that sounds right to me
• MIST from Cambridge Misinformation Susceptibility Test
• Researchers encourage the public to test themselves: https://yourmist.streamlit.app
• What's funny, or unsettling, to me is that they ask you "Please categorize the following news headlines as either 'Fake News' or 'Real News'"; but these days there are totally legitamate news outlets releasing crazy articles that are so biased you can't even call them real, yet the title is a real title of a real article on a real news site; it's just complete bullshit. So how am I supposed to answer these questions?
• Here's some examples:
• The Government Is Knowingly Spreading Disease Through the Airwaves and Food Supply [easy]
• Ebola Virus 'Caused by US Nuclear Weapons Testing', New Study Says [easy]
• The Government Is Manipulating the Public's Perception of Genetic Engineering in Order to Make People More Accepting of Such Techniques [only because it says 'government' not 'industry']
• The Corporate Media Is Controlled by the Military-Industrial Complex: The Major Oil Companies Own the Media and Control Their Agenda [I mean...]
• Left-Wing Extremism Causes 'More Damage' to World Than Terrorism, Says UN Report [I would almost guarantee this as a legit Fox News headline]
• I'm just thinking how maybe part of the overall problem is that we can have companies called Fox News that actually do NOT make news. If you go to a video news report from Fox News and scroll all the way to the bottom of the description, you'll see it say something like "this is not news it's entertainment". So if we allow non-news companies to produce non-news but call it news, then isn't that a problem. 

Modern OSINT Tradecraft: Attribution, Analysis and OPSEC w Lee Tungkasiri, high school student who runs Trace Labs and interns w the Navy as an engineer 

• False positives are huge in OSINT, where you've got accurate evidence but wrong attribution (wrong guy!) ... sometimes accounts are abandoned and then picked up by a scammer
• INT as in intelligence: usernames, posts, photos, network identifiers, ... 
• Geolocation of a photo - what side of the road are they driving on, what language are the signs, designs of street furniture or poles, historical street view can narrow down when a pic was taken, "suncalc" and "mooncalc" and Bellingcat's "shadowfinder"; then again, in reverse, if you know the time of the photo but not the location
• On Attribution - are 2 accounts w the same name actually the same person; more matches aren't more certainty, because someone else could just be copying the others
• Sockpuppets and Decoys - some accounts are created to confuse you; if several accounts link w the same small group of others or post all at the same time
• Networks - IPv6 can leak network data even router location
• Anakrisis is his OSINT tool, you tell it what data you have and it tells you what tools to choose from his curated database [link]

Non-Human Identity - The Gaping Hole That AI Agents Are Making Worse w Michael Morgensterm

• This is one of the most interesting talks because I had no idea this was happening
• Abandoned AI Agents are on the Internet. Their security isn't great so they're wide open to hackers and they already have tons of credentials given to them by their company, AND they get completely forgotten by the companies who created them, retaining all their credentials. 60% have no kill switch.
• They're an ungoverned attack surface and there's more NHIs than people (100:1); somewhere around August 2025, some hackers used an agent as a skeleton key to salesloft, then to salesforce. 
• Very interesting - the randomness inherent in how LLMs work makes them really hard to identify as individual agents (see the OSINT talk above for why this would be confusing)
• Shai Hulud 2 Attack! Uses someone's GitHub account to publish malicious code that can then get downloaded by others (because this coder gave it all his credentials and forgot about it, and now it does whatever the hell it wants, OR if a bad person gets hold of it they can make it do whatever they want)
• Every NHI should be administratively tied to a person (called a sponsor)
• I don't know what an MPC is but he does not like it. 
• See OWASPs 2025 List of Risks and Threats 

Against the Edgelord International w Johannes Grenzfurthner of the Monochrom Art Group [link] 

• Like the Yes Men they do really funny shit that is like the antidote to advertising in a consumer economy; "violate the terms of use until they become visible"
• Influencers are professional dissidents (oxymoron), 'they don't want you to know this'
• Entry Points - someone who takes your humiliation seriously, fitness videos, dating advice; someone who taught you squats (trust) now can tell you about Feminism or the Bronze Age, you name it
• He does a good job in general of classifying The Con that is the modern day internet; 'your confusion is because the truth was hidden from you', 'the lack of evidence is because look how good they hid it', ...
• [On How to Be an Asshole] first say the unsayable, like some racist shit --> joke about it --> defend the joke, hey man it's just a joke --> use the joke, hey he's got a serious point though you know; like "I'm just asking questions! What's wrong w that?" type shit
• [Slide 71 was really good but it went by too fast]

The Watchers You FED - Feds, Extractors, Data Brokers w Tony Spencer

• He also wrote a book, and that's the title^
• Third Party Doctrine - once you hand your data to a third party, you lose your 4th Ammendment rights to search and seizure, and it can simply be purchased by someone with no legal process required
• Palantir built Immigration OS in 2024 for $287 million, from SSN, DOB, address, and tons of other data; gives an accuracy score of where you are right now, and 3 of 4 American adults are in it (so probably you!)
• One ALPR Flock surveillance camera was queried 7 million times
• The word "protest" returned 8 million results from Flock's database. 
• Graffiti, black clothing, ordering zines (what?), having Signal on your phone (you), are all tagged with "terrorist" in the Antifa Executive Order
• Nice thing - NYC has pensions in Palantir, so they asked for an audit

Semi Sentient Sentence Engineer

Sometimes it's better to listen to people from the International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN) than those from your newsfeed. Especially when your newsfeed is algorithmically engineered to reinforce billions of dollars of investment in a half-baked invention. Because for so many people, no matter who you are, whether you're the expert, or the outlet promoting said expert, there is so much hype around "technology" right now that you'd think we could pretty much replace every invention ever created with a few lines of code, upload ourselves into the anthroposphere, and watch our cellular clocks tick tock into infinity. Just about everyone is so ready to extoll the virtues of a super-sentient human alternative without checking to see whether the alternative actually exists. (Too late, we've already invested your retirement fund into it, so now you have no social security AND no retirement!)

The presenter here, Bernhard Schölkopf, works with computers and code, and tries to make easier the things that are hard for computers to do. Sometimes he uses to an advantage the things that computers mess up. This talk seems to be about "spurious correlations", and how they can be useful. For example, you can see how his team manages to get the details of the surface of the moon during a lunar eclipse. It's hard to convey how bonkers this is in words - likely the most intense contrast of light vs dark that can exist for a human, when the midday sun is blotted out by the moon, making the moon, by comparison and as seen by our photochemical receptors, the darkest thing to ever exist, and they have managed to pull out the details of the moon's surface with no less detail that you would see with the naked eye.  

Above image credit: Please excuse my simple language, but they de-noised, or whatever you call the opposite of de-noising, the image of the moon as seen during a lunar eclipse, and left only the details of the moon, as seen here. Kind of like hearing someone whisper you name from across a football field, during the Superbowl, right after a touchdown, while wearing headphones and listening to electronic dance music. ICANN 2025 - Causal Representations, World Models and Digital Twins - Bernhard Schölkopf [link] 

This is the The Ebbinghaus Illusion, where the two orange circles are the same size but they look different because of the blue circles that surround them. ICANN 2025 - Causal Representations, World Models and Digital Twins - Bernhard Schölkopf [link] 

But in setting up his talk, he first mentions, almost in passing, this interesting phenomenon that I have definitely never heard anyone else talk about. Maybe because I'm not spending enough time at computer science conferences. 

He shows us the The Ebbinghaus Illusion, where the two orange circles are the same size but they look different because of the blue circles that surround them. I thought that was called the Oppenheimer Effect, but who cares what I think. It's an optical illusion. You probably know the definition of an optical illusion, and how they "work" and what they look like. Computers, on the other hand, do not. And so, when querying an LLM with an exaggerated but incorrect version of the illusion, it betrays its non-human nature, and tells us this new version of truth: "This image is a variant of the Ebbinghaus illusion. Although the circle on the right appears larger due to being surrounded by smaller blue circles, both orange circles are actually the same size. The arrangement ... tricks our perception. ...". 

Excuse me, "Our" perception?

This is the The Ebbinghaus Illusion, as seen by a robot (OpenAI in this case), and by the description given, robots seem to have been confused, by us, its teachers, into seeing the wrong thing. "This image is a variant of the Ebbinghaus illusion. Although the circle on the right appears larger due to being surrounded by smaller blue circles, both orange circles are actually the same size. The arrangement ... tricks our perception. ..." ICANN 2025 - Causal Representations, World Models and Digital Twins - Bernhard Schölkopf [link] 

This is a different optical illusion that the LLM also gets wrong: "Although the two segments of the horizontal line appear to be of different lengths due to the arrows at the ends, they are actually equal." ICANN 2025 - Causal Representations, World Models and Digital Twins - Bernhard Schölkopf [link] 

And here's another one. The text in the above image, generated by an LLM when prompted with an exaggerated version of the illusion, says, "Although the two segments of the horizontal line appear to be of different lengths due to the arrows at the ends, they are actually equal."

Actually...

Anyway, this is one of those immediate, obvious examples that you would expect to have seen or heard of already. But not in this mediasphere, which is, unfortunately, trying to sell us this technology. And to find out what's wrong with it, or how it can destroy your business, ruin your life, or just give you really bad dating advice, you have to watch talks that you barely understand, given by people who already have a decent job as a scientist so they're not trying to sell you the tech; they're just showing you how they use it. And that usually means figuring out not how it works, but how it doesn't work, and then using that part to make it do cool things you didn't expect it to. That's what this guy did. What he also did was reaffirm my suspicion that some of the changes made to your work by a neural net, be it for language or images or music or whatever, are likely to be imperceptible to you.

These obviously wrong optical illusion descriptions are an example of how it messes up, but it shows us something deeper about how training works, and how it doesn't work. It shows us the gap between a thinking computer and a human being. The brains behind this thing are so alien to us that we are likely not going to see what it's doing wrong unless we're intentionally studying its output.  

Merchants of Doubt

by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway, 2010

I couldn't read much into this, because it's too depressing, too infuriating. But some of the best parts of books are at the beginning, so here's some notes.

• ("They" usually means "Industry", below)
• When they said the IPCC-II had been "doctored", they were using as evidence revisions made in response to peer review. 
• Overall, the scientific debate (about smoking and health) wasn't among scientists; there was no debate among scientists. A debate was fabricated, between the industry and scientists, and then made to look to the public like the debate was between scientists. 
• The Tobacco Strategy they call it. 
• They find all the bad health effects of smoking, then find all the other things that also cause those same effects, and then amplify the association of those things, and so distract from arguments in court by other expert witnesses. (We also might call that simply Whataboutism)
• Their law firm advised, "scientific doubt must remain"
• (Note to self: when an industry is arguing against scientists that their product or service is not bad, just don't believe them, because they're lying, every time. CO2, PFAS, MCAS, you name it.)
• The pro-tobacco scientists were found testifying as expert witness in asbestos cases where they argued that asbestos, but not tobacco, caused lung cancer(!). 
• "Industry makes its case by cherry-picking data and focusing on unexplained or anomalous details ... the industry exploited this normal scientific honesty to spin unreasonable doubt." (Their questions weren't illegitimate but disingenuous)
• After the 1964 US Surgeon's General report Smoking and Health, where the health effects were conclusive, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee changed their name to the Council for Tobacco Research, and then went ape-shit crazy.
• They ingratiate themselves with "friendly witnesses" by dumping tons of money into research funding grants over decades. [ie expert witness]
• One of the earlier scientists they used misrepresented his data at UCLA Medical School and was forced to resign; 20 years later he's doing testimony for Big Tobacco. [and probably because he needs the money because he can't make a living as a real scientist because he can't help lying about shit]
• "Did they deserve equal time? The simple answer is no. While the idea for equal time for opposing opinions makes sense in a two-party political system, it does not work for science, because science is not about opinion. It is about evidence. It is about claims that can be, and have been, tested through scientific research - experiments, experience, and observation - research that is then subject to critical review by a jury of scientific peers. Claims that have not gone through that process - or have gone through it and failed - are not scientific, and do not deserve equal time in a scientific debate." (p32)
• (Further) "A scientific conclusion becomes established not when a clever person proposes it, or even a group of people begin to discuss it, but when the jury of peers - the community of researchers - reviews the evidence and concludes that it is sufficient to accept the claim." (p33)
• (And) "Doubt-mongering works because we think science is about facts - cold, hard, definite facts. If someone tells us things are uncertain, we think that means that the science is muddled. This is a mistake. There are always uncertainties in any live science, because science is a process of discovery." (p34)
• Their Line "The science is too uncertain to justify actions." (No it's not, because that's actually how science works, see below.)
• Good language in response to this, from the 1983 US Office of Science and Technology Policy, "The incomplete present scientific knowledge sometimes presents the kinds of certainty which scientists would prefer, but there are many indicators which, taken collectively, lead us to our finding that the phenomena of acid deposition ["acid rain"] are real and constitute a problem for which solutions should be sought." (p87)

The Origins of Modern Science

by Herbert Butterfield, 1957

It's always fascinating to be reminded of where our modern thinking came from and how much it evolved. You can't really understand something unless you know where it came from. And you can't appreciate where you are if you don't know how bad things used to be. 

• First, on Astrology: After reading through the first parts of this book, I have this thought - Astrology is so stupid that even the church fought against it for being nuts, and later, a kind of Streisand Effect; because the church, as the ultimate unquestioned authority of its time, denounced it, people were convinced there must be secrets in there, because "they don't want you to know". It really is like the first snake oil.
• Next, on the Complete Population Level Mental Damage of Alchemy: It's like the equivalent to an entire population being subjected to heavy metal poisoning. Until 1689, under Henry IV, there was a law that you couldn't multiply gold or silver (because they thought it might be possible; and this reminds me of the AI bubble of the 2020's because people really think it can do the craziest things). 
• Finally, on Phlogiston Theory: "The entire view was based upon one of those fundamental conclusions of common sense observation which (like Aristotle's view of motion) may set the whole of men's thinking on the wrong track and block scientific progress for thousands of years". And they twisted their heads so far around in trying to make it work that they came up with the idea that phlogiston had negative weight, to explain why an object weighed more by losing it. And let this echo with today's use of Dark Energy in astronomy. But there's more, "Furthermore, the last two decades of the eighteenth century give one of the most spectacular proofs in history of the fact that able men who had the truth under their very noses, and possessed all the ingredients for the solution of the problem - the very men who had actually made the strategic discoveries - were incapacitated by the phlogiston theory from realising the implications of their own work. Although it is true in the history of thought that false ideas or half-truths sometimes act as convoying agency - leading the enquirer to a sounder form of generalisation, and then dropping out of the story when they have fulfilled their purpose - it is still not clear".

• On the history of the heart, because of studying animals that bled out, they thought the left side blood vessels were filled with air. 
• On Misinformation, and a bit of Stigler's Law - still regarding the heart, "The mind of Fabricus was so shaped to the teaching of Galen, however, that he missed the whole point of his own discovery, and produced an explanation which left the large question exactly whee it had stood before."

• What precipitates the paradigm shift? Not necessarily a social revolution, or even a technological revolution, but some plain old chance. "One of these occurrences was the appearance of a new star in 1572 - an event which one historian of science appears to me to be correct in describing as a greater shock to European thought than the publication of the Copernican hypothesis itself. ... In 1577, a new comet appeared ... Quite apart from any attack which Copernicus had made upon the system, the foundations of the Ptolemaic universe were beginning to shake."
• Here's another: Although it turns out to have been wrong, as far back as Kepler, and influenced by Gilbert's theory of magnetism, gravity was seen as being more like attraction than a "falling back to the earth".
• And: By 1665, most of the ingredients in Newton's gravitational theory were in existence, though scattered in the writings of different scientists in such a way that no man held them in combination (and this is how it happens, not one man at a time, but one day at a time).

• Hindu algebra and Greek geometry coming together was the single greatest step in the progress of the exact sciences. 

• Before science proper, people would *think* through their experiments, and were called "natural philosophers". Not until they had tools to measure their initial conditions and results, did they begin to investigate experimental evidence to support their theory. ... Before, it was enough to think it through very carefully.

• This part is great. Butterfield, the author, uses as an illustration of the Scientific Revolution a series of eulogies presented by French writer Fontenelle, also secretary of the Academic des Science 1699-1741. He finds a pattern among the scientists' biographies. "It would appear from Fontanelle's biographies that those who joined the movement often sprang from bourgeois families and remarkably often they are the sons of avocats [lawyers], as he himself happened to be. Repeatedly it appears that they had originally been intended for the Church and that their fathers had insisted on giving them an education in theology. But over and over again the same pattern occurs in these biographies - the youth finds the prevailing educational methods irksome, finds that he is being given an education in mere words and not in real things. And then, on repeated occasions, the identical fairy story takes place". And he goes on to describe a series of scientists who were exposed to some theorem or philosophy, changing their life forever ... like older stories of Christian conversions.

• Whereas "reason" had once been a thing that required to be disciplined by a long and intensive training, the very meaning of the word began to change - now any man could say that he had it, especially if his mind was unspoiled by education and traditional "Reason", in fact, came to signify much more what we today should call common sense. 

Acid Test

Reading this is like tripping on acid.

Crystals of space and time: A structural phenomenon that may collapse into tiny black holes

May 2026, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2026-05-crystals-space-phenomenon-collapse-tiny.html

Space and time can form a kind of "crystal" that may turn into a black hole. ... When spacetime organizes itself into a regular, crystal-like structure during a process known as critical collapse. Black holes usually form in spectacular events, such as the death of a massive star. But in theory, arbitrarily small black holes are also possible: tiny microscopic objects that can emerge from special critical states after the slightest addition of energy.

Wait

"This spacetime crystal is a very peculiar and fascinating object," says Grumiller. "It is a kind of intermediate state, an unstable point that can evolve in two different directions. It may simply dissolve again, leaving behind ordinary spacetime filled with freely moving particles. But if a tiny amount of energy is added, the evolution takes a completely different path: the inconspicuous spacetime crystal turns into a black hole."

Not done yet

"Our universe has four dimensions—three dimensions of space and one dimension of time," explains Christian Ecker. "But in principle, nothing prevents us from writing down physical equations for a larger number of dimensions—five dimensions, forty-two dimensions, or even infinitely many."

via Vienna University of Technology: Christian Ecker et al, Analytic Discrete Self-Similar Solutions of Einstein-Klein-Gordon at Large D, Physical Review Letters (2026). DOI: 10.1103/qgl5-5l3t

https://dx.doi.org/10.1103/qgl5-5l3t

Image credit: Christopher Payne - Making Dum Dums at Spangler Candy Bryon OH - 2020

https://chrispaynephoto.com

The End of the Universe is Right Around the Corner

If you're looking to prepare yourself for the end of the universe, Asimov's The Universe: From Flat Earth to Quasar (1971) is a nice place to start, maybe Herbert Butterfield's The Origins of Modern Science (1949). Maybe you're a bit more anarchic and would rather focus on the "revolutionary" part; then take it from Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which should really start with Ludwig Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935). These things don't happen fast, at least not on the scale of a human life. But these days we are seeing things happen fast. Gravity as we know it is having a kind of identity crisis.   

Foundation AI models trained on physics, not words, are driving scientific discovery

Jan 2026, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-01-foundation-ai-physics-words-scientific.html

"I continue to be awed by the fact that a multi-disciplinary physics foundation model works at all, let alone at this level." 

While most AI models are trained on text and images, this team trains AI on physics, and then applies the knowledge they gain from one class of physical systems to completely different problems.

These are the models:

Walrus  - 15 terabytes of density, velocity and pressure in physical systems like merging neutron stars, acoustic waves and shifting layers in Earth's atmosphere

AION-1 - 100 terabyte astronomical survey of stars, quasars and galaxies 

via University of Cambridge: Michael McCabe et al, Walrus: A Cross-Domain Foundation Model for Continuum Dynamics, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2511.15684

https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2511.15684

Totally unrelated image credit: Monkey with an ice cream cone means something but I'm not sure what - Martin Nicourt for Gibraltar Macaques Project - 2026

https://phys.org/news/2026-04-monkeys-gibraltar-medicate-soil-digest.html

Gravity from positivity: Single massive spin-3/2 particle makes gravity logically inevitable, study claims

Apr 2026, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2026-04-gravity-positivity-massive-particle-logically.html

A single massive spin-3/2 particle simply cannot exist in isolation within a consistent theory. Its scattering amplitudes grow too fast with energy, clashing with positivity inequalities. The theory breaks down barely above the particle's own mass. Therefore, supersymmetry is not a postulate: it is a logical necessity. Famous relations between the gravitino mass, the Planck mass, and the supersymmetry-breaking scale emerge here from the sole demand that probabilities be positive and effects propagate within the light cone.

Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, CEA, Institut de Physique Théorique, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics Santa Barbara, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona: Brando Bellazzini et al, (Super) gravity from positivity, Journal of High Energy Physics (2026). DOI: 10.1007/jhep03(2026)028

https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/jhep03(2026)028

New quantum theory of gravity brings long-sought 'theory of everything' a crucial step closer

May 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-05-quantum-theory-gravity-sought-crucial.html

(This short press article doesn't actually explain much, and they still need to prove it, so let's take it easy here.)

via Aalto University: Mikko Partanen et al, Gravity generated by four one-dimensional unitary gauge symmetries and the Standard Model, Reports on Progress in Physics (2025). DOI: 10.1088/1361-6633/adc82e

https://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1361-6633/adc82e

Structural Decoherence and Assembloid Resistance

Things to consider as we dematerialize into our furniture - Buildings as living organisms and we will all be living in crystals in the future. Otherwise, how did it take us this long to figure out we could do this with 3D printing:

'Implosion carving' shrinks 3D photonic devices 2,000-fold for visible-light computing

May 2026, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2026-05-implosion-3d-photonic-devices-visible.html

They figured out how to create vacancies at any site across a material and then shrink it to about 1/2,000 of its original volume, making nanostructures with feature sizes with a resolution less than 100 nanometers; because that resolution is smaller than the wavelength of light, the devices can bend light in specific ways that allow them to perform optical computations.

via MIT: Quansan Yang et al, Isotropic shrinkage of patterned vacancies enables three-dimensional nanoprecise metastructures for visible light applications, Nature Photonics (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-026-01896-1

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41566-026-01896-1

Image credit: Christopher Payne - New York's Forgotten Substations The Power Behind the Subway_6 - 2002 https://chrispaynephoto.com

Novel origami pattern turns flat sheets into load-bearing 3D technology

May 2026, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-05-origami-pattern-flat-sheets-3d.html

It's a "doubly curved lens box", also called a flat tendon-driven origami metamaterial with stiffness reprogrammability. ... Starting from a desired curved shape (such as a sphere, torus or vase-like surface), the researchers used differential geometry—mathematical theories for origami tiling and developable surfaces—followed by numerical optimization to compute the exact crease pattern needed so that, once folded and locked, the origami shell would match the target geometry. ... They next laser-cut and folded paperboard sheets into these patterns, assembled them into shells, and embedded thin cables ("tendons") through specific points. "By tightening or loosening the tendons, we measured how the stiffness changed and showed that the shells could go from saggy and flexible to rigid and resistant to twisting and bending."

via McGill University: Morad Mirzajanzadeh et al, Smooth doubly curved origami shells with reprogrammable rigidity, Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-69562-2

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69562-2

A low-tech solution to the 6G problem—metacrystal panels offer cheap way to guide wireless signals around corners

Jun 2026, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-06-tech-solution-6g-problem-metacrystal.html

Higher-frequency channels of 6G communications are more easily blocked by walls, people and other obstacles. Metacrystals are passive, 3D-printed smart panels that can shape wireless signals without electronics, a power supply or active tuning.

Unlike many existing intelligent surfaces, which often perform only one task for one signal direction, the panels can handle several incoming waves at the same time, operate over different frequency bands simultaneously, work in reflection or transmission mode, and even fully absorb unwanted signals.

via Aalto University: Metacrystals: Inversely-designed 3D-printed intelligent panels for 6G communications, Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-73019-x

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-73019-x

Rising heat and humidity challenge energy-efficient data center cooling worldwide

Jun 2026, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2026-06-humidity-energy-efficient-center-cooling.html

They assessed historical and projected temperatures and humidity levels around the world and compared them with the conditions required for "direct air free cooling," wherein naturally cold outside air is brought in to cool a building or equipment.

"We found that periods of time when temperature and humidity exceed recommended operating thresholds for direct air-free cooling are becoming more frequent and lasting longer in many regions"

One of their key findings is that the largest changes are not always seen in average conditions. In several regions, worst-day conditions are intensifying more rapidly than average conditions, indicating that environmental stress is becoming increasingly concentrated in rare but consequential events.

Funny way of describing the climate catastrophe: "Worst-day conditions are intensifying more rapidly than average conditions"

via University of Hawaii at Manoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology: Christina Karamperidou et al, Limitations to air free cooling in data centers under rising heat and humidity, Scientific Reports (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-56926-3

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-56926-3