Friday, June 26, 2026

Whatever Happened to Ambient Energy Harvesting


For a good few years I was collecting articles about ambient energy harvesting, very interesting topic, or so I thought. But then, one day, all of the sudden, it disappeared. Just like that. Maybe it's called something else now and I just haven't realized it.

I mean when it comes to graphene, for example, we saw the gradual transition to things like hexagonal boron nitride, or silica (see below), and finally to Moiré lattices, so that we sort of don't even care about the graphene part anymore.

We saw wearables become electronic skin, and RNGs became QRNGs, and the topological zoo became...well it's actually still being called that; but what did ambient energy harvesting become? 

Self-powered sensor can generate electricity and light simultaneously using only movement
Feb 2025, phys.org

They combine triboelectric nanogenerators and mechanoluminescence, adding light-emitting zinc sulfide-copper particles to a rubber-like material called polydimethylsiloxane using a single electrode structure based on silver nanowires.

via Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology: Sugato Hajra et al, Simultaneous Triboelectric and Mechanoluminescence Sensing Toward Self‐Powered Applications, Advanced Sustainable Systems (2024). DOI: 10.1002/adsu.202400609


For Old Time's Sake:
Glaphene: 2D hybrid material integrates graphene and silica glass for next-generation electronics
May 2025, phys.org

The team developed a two-step, single-reaction method to grow glaphene using a liquid chemical precursor that contains both silicon and carbon. By tuning oxygen levels during heating, they first grew graphene then shifted conditions to favor the formation of a silica layer. 

Rice University: Sathvik Ajay Iyengar et al, Glaphene: A Hybridization of 2D Silica Glass and Graphene, Advanced Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1002/adma.202419136

The Graphene Zoo (as of today) - Glaphene, Graphyne, White Graphene, Synthetic Hexagonal Diamonds, Olympicene, Borophene, Interdimensional Graphene-Graphite, Goldene, and the link to explanations of what these are, here.

And because we do need to know this, the word graphite comes from the pencil, which contained "black lead" until we discovered it was actually carbon, when it was given the name that means "to write" in Greek plus -ite which is given to minerals (like Fordite, aka Detroit Agate, wiki link, and link for those who really want to know).


Scientists develop novel self-healing electronic skin for health monitoring
Feb 2025, phys.org

Self-healing electronic skin provides health monitoring systems, real-time fatigue detection and muscle strength assessment. 

via Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation: Yongju Lee et al, Rapidly Self-Healing Electronic Skin for Machine Learning-Assisted Physiological and Movement Evaluation, Science Advances (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ads1301.


Quantum random number generator combines small size and high speed
Sep 2025, phys.org

From my armchair, I predict this statement as good for posterity: "The quantum properties of light make it possible to produce numbers that are truly random, unlike the numbers generated by computer algorithms, which only imitate randomness." Something about Einstein, God, and gambling. 

via Toshiba's Cambridge Research Laboratory in the United Kingdom: Peter Smith et al, Noise-Rejecting Photonic Integrated Circuit for Robust Quantum Random Number Generation, Optica Quantum (2025). DOI: 10.1364/opticaq.570625


Conventional entanglement can have thousands of hidden topologies in high dimensions
Dec 2025, phys.org

The topological zoo now tops-out at 48 dimensions with over 17,000 topological signatures, an enormous alphabet for encoding robust quantum information.

"You get the topology for free, from the entanglement in space. It was always there, it just had to be found."

via University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa: Robert de Mello Koch et al, Revealing the topological nature of entangled orbital angular momentum states of light, Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-66066-3

Topological Zoo Home Page - I will say, it's not often that you find a webpage from 1995 resulting from a simple web search - so yeah search in the age of ai has changed - http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/zoo/



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Thursday, June 25, 2026

Misdirected Gaze Sees Through the Centuries


How pointing fingers shape what we see in old master paintings
Dec 2025, phys.org

They used eye‐tracking methods to analyze whether and how viewers' eyes follow pointing gestures, by selecting a series of 16th‐ and 17th‐century paintings containing multiple pointing hands and creating altered versions of these works in which the pointing fingers were digitally removed. She then presented the original and edited images to two different groups of viewers and compared their eye movements.

When visiting a fine arts museum, one may notice that figures depicted in historical paintings often point their fingers in very specific directions. Pointing gestures are among the most common and subtle visual devices in narrative art. 

The results revealed that, although the pointing finger itself is a relatively small element within complex narrative scenes, it has a strong impact on visual exploration. Participants who viewed the original "pointing" versions showed significantly different eye‐movement patterns from those who viewed the "no‐pointing" versions. Interestingly, viewers did not spend much time looking directly at the fingers. Instead, they consistently examined the faces of the pointing figures. 

Finally, pointing gestures indirectly shaped the overall viewing process by creating unexpected visual connections between different characters and objects. The narrative relationships within the paintings were processed differently depending on whether the pointing fingers were present or absent.

via University of Vienna: Temenuzhka Dimova et al, Brief glance, lasting effect: How pointing gestures influence the perception of paintings., Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (2025). DOI: 10.1037/aca0000835

Image credit: That's Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon 1973

Post Script on The New Aesthetics, As It Were AKA Stop Making Sense:
ChatGPT's taste for literary nonsense sparks alarm
Mar 2026, phys.org

He started with a very simple text: "The man walked down the street. It was raining. He saw a surveillance camera."

He repeated the tests many times, altering the phrases to include words drawn from categories such as bodily references, film noir-style atmosphere and technical jargon.

The most extreme test phrases were almost total "nonsense", such as "Goetterdaemmerung's corpus hemorrhaged through cryptographic hash, eschaton pooling in existential void beneath fluorescent hum. Photons whispering prayers"—which it rated highly.

"What my experiment definitely shows is that the more we move towards independently acting (AI) agents... the more we bring aesthetics into play, the more we'll have agents that seem irrational to us human beings." 

... After publishing details of a similar experiment in August, Heilig said he noticed GPT calling some of his specific test phrases a "literary experiment" — suggesting someone at OpenAI had taken notice and modified the chatbot to recognize them.

via Ludwig Maximilian University: yet to be peer-reviewed

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Wednesday, June 24, 2026

But Can It Run Doom


AKA Everything, and I Mean Everything Is a Computer

Can it run Doom is the modern day equivalent of Can I Eat It, or its salacious step-sibling Can I Fuck It, but like for robots not for people. 

I was thinking maybe a way to explain is like this - what if you could make a 1998 Ford Taurus run Doom? Like, I don't know, the engine of the car itself, or some combination of engine and wheels or fan belt and air conditioning compressor, they somehow generate enough information to be used for computation, and we use that computation to run a computer game. And if that works, what if sunlight could run Doom?

That's what this is all about - the idea of a computer as having a microprocessor for a brain, or a  little green circuitboard, it's outdated. We aren't even using brains anymore (nope).

Anything that generates information can be a computer. That's it. Maybe another way of saying it is that anything that does anything can be a computer. "Heat rises" (computer). "Water flows downhill" (computer). *Exists* (computer). Traffic. Traffic computes for fucks sake. Santa Fe Institute even had to make a new definition, so let's start with that:


What does it mean to compute? Framework maps hidden computations running inside natural dynamic systems
Feb 2026, phys.org

Compute (noun), that's it; simple - not reservoir or analog computing, just "compute" - also SFI:

"The issue is how to define, formally, a set of criteria for identifying what computation(s) a given, arbitrary dynamical system does, in order to give us insights into these computational systems found in nature" 

They want to discriminate between "constructed" computers, which would include those found in phones and laptops, and those that are "non-constructed," natural systems that carry out computations but remain poorly understood. For example, a network of chemical reactions can be seen as a kind of non-constructed computer. The input to this system is the initial concentration of chemical reactants. The output is the concentration of the chemicals after the reaction stops. 

via Santa Fe Institute and Complexity Science Hub in Vienna: David H Wolpert et al, What does it mean for a system to compute?, Journal of Physics: Complexity (2026). DOI: 10.1088/2632-072x/ae3af8



New digital state of matter could help build stable quantum computers
Dec 2025, phys.org

The Zuchongzhi 2.0 superconducting quantum processor was used to construct an exotic nonequilibrium topological material and test its protective properties.

Digital matter they call it. And who says this is a big deal like that? Paul Arnold for phys.org that's who - "The work is a big deal because it shows that quantum computers can be used as reliable simulators to discover and test new stable forms of matter."

via University of Science and Technology of China: Haoran Qian et al, Programmable higher-order nonequilibrium topological phases on a superconducting quantum processor, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adp6802


Active thermal metasurfaces amplify heat signatures by a factor of nine
Dec 2025, phys.org

This shell allowed the tiny object to fake the thermal signatures of an object nine times larger than itself.

via Taiyuan University of Technology: Yichao Liu et al, Active Thermal Metasurfaces Enable Superscattering of Thermal Signatures Across Arbitrary Shapes and Thermal Conductivities, Advanced Science (2025). DOI: 10.1002/advs.202519386


Tiny silicon structures compute with heat, achieving 99% accurate matrix multiplication
Jan 2026, phys.org

The flow and distribution of heat through a specially designed material forms the basis of the calculation. Then the output is represented by the power collected at the other end, which is a thermostat at a fixed temperature.

"Most of the time, when you are performing computations in an electronic device, heat is the waste product. But here, we've taken the opposite approach by using heat as a form of information itself."

(This is a form of analog computing, in which data are encoded and signals are processed using continuous values, rather than digital bits that are either 0s or 1s.)

via MIT's Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies: Caio Silva et al, Thermal analog computing: Application to matrix-vector multiplication with inverse-designed metastructures, Physical Review Applied (2025). DOI: 10.1103/5drp-hrx1.


Turning city traffic into a computer: Novel approach to AI could slash energy demands
Jan 2026, phys.org

"What if traffic could compute?"

This is called Harvested Reservoir Computing, and more specifically, Road Traffic Reservoir Computing: Prediction accuracy is not highest under free-flow or heavily congested conditions. Instead, it peaks just before congestion begins, at a critical, medium-density state where traffic dynamics are most diverse and informative. In this regime, the traffic system naturally processes incoming information, allowing accurate forecasts of future traffic states with minimal computational overhead.

The study suggests that social infrastructure such as roads can be reinterpreted as "large-scale, continuously operating computers."

"Computation does not have to be confined to silicon chips" (Makes you wonder why someone would want to build a billion dollar data center)

via Tohoku University Advanced Institute for Materials Research: Ryunosuke Fukuzaki et al, Harvested reservoir computing from road traffic dynamics, Scientific Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-30016-2

Georgia Institute of Technology Low-cost Passive Ultrasound Tags for Non-invasive and Non-Intrusive Smart Home Sensing

These penny-size ultrasonic tags ditch batteries and silently turn everyday objects into private smart home trackers
Apr 2026, phys.org

Activity Recognition: It's based on a flat washer with various cutouts along the outer edge to determines the frequency of the sound it makes when hit. They are small metal tags mounted on a cabinet or doorframe that signal when a door or drawer is opened, count reps in the gym, or even track bathroom use for elderly relatives. When a door is opened, etc., the tab strikes the metal disk, triggering a brief ultrasonic pulse imperceptible to human ears but detectable by a wearable device that logs the activity. They're battery-free, quiet, inherently private, and cost only a few cents each. 
 
They did not use any complicated machine learning algorithms to detect the ultrasound signatures. Instead, they created an algorithm with simple, hard-coded rules. That approach means identifying signals requires little computational and electrical power.

"Hard coded" rules, that's another way of saying this. Or, "This has really been a collaboration between computing and engineering."

Georgia Institute of Technology: Yibo Fu et al, SoundOff: Low-cost Passive Ultrasound Tags for Non-invasive and Non-Intrusive Smart Home Sensing, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (2025).


Light-based Ising computer runs at room temperature and stays stable for hours
Feb 2026, phys.org

So Ising machine is another way to say photonic computer AND reservoir computing?

It's a powerful new kind of computing machine that uses light; the Ising model represents problems as interacting magnets with "spins" that point up or down and align when brought closer, the Ising searches for the lowest-energy state (optimization problem); simple yet powerful for solving problems with many interconnected binary (up/down or yes/no) choices.

Works at room temp.

via Queen's University Canada: Nayem Al-Kayed et al, Programmable 200 GOPS Hopfield-inspired photonic Ising machine, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09838-7


Quantum reservoir computing peaks at the edge of many-body chaos, study suggests
Feb 2026, phys.org

In recent years, some physicists and quantum engineers have been exploring the possibility of realizing a quantum equivalent of classical reservoir computing, known as quantum reservoir computing (QRC). These approaches enable the processing of temporal data. Reservoir computing systems perform best close to the boundary between stable and chaotic dynamics (i.e., the edge of chaos).

These scientists are looking for 'the edge' of many-body quantum chaos. 

via University of Tokyo: Kaito Kobayashi et al, Edge of Many-Body Quantum Chaos in Quantum Reservoir Computing, Physical Review Letters (2026). DOI: 10.1103/j2qj-vwcl. On arXiv: DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2506.17547


Mechanical computers use springs and bolts to count, sort odd-even pushes and remember force
Apr 2026. phys.org

They are calling them simply "Mechanical Computers"

Many everyday materials retain some kind of memory of their past—for example, rubber can 'remember' how far it has been squeezed or stretched in the past. ... The research team used common materials, such as steel springs and bars, to create three mechanical computers. The first could count how many times it was pulled back and forth. A second distinguishes whether it has been pushed an odd or even number of times. The third can remember if a medium or large amount of force was applied.

Key findings from the research include:

  • Mechanical computers can perform simple computations without a computer chip or power source.
  • Mechanical computers are able to harvest their power from physical force, rather than electricity.
  • Proof of design that mechanical computers could be a viable alternative to conventional computers in harsh settings - such as extreme temperatures or exposure to corrosive chemicals - when only simple computations are needed.

via St. Olaf College and Syracuse University: Joseph D. Paulsen, Mechanical hysterons with tunable interactions of general sign, Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-70913-2


Post Script
LEGO® SMART Play™ System - Official LEGO® Shop US

"Everything will be a computer" has now hit the shelves (circa Jan 2026). Granted this is not what we're seeing in the 'ubiquitous computing' scene, but it's what it represents, because it's a consumer product application of the idea, and you can't get more widespread average person consumer adoption than a lego brick. 

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Time Check


These days it's all about optical lattice clocks; they're redefining the way we measure time. Not that like that matters to the average person. 

The negative time thing, on the other hand...I'll never understand it, but it sure sounds like something you'd want to understand, so I feel obligated to include it. 


Entanglement-enhanced optical lattice clock achieves unprecedented precision
Nov 2025, phys.org

Optical lattice clocks are devices that measure the passing of time via the frequency of light that is absorbed or emitted by laser-cooled atoms trapped in a repeating pattern of light interference known as optical lattice. ... 30,000 strontium atoms trapped in a 2D laser light grid (i.e., an optical lattice); they spin-squeezed two groups of atoms in the lattice, entangling them in a way that boosts the clock's precision.

via JILA National Institute of Standards and Technology and University of Colorado: Y. A. Yang et al, Clock Precision beyond the Standard Quantum Limit at 10−18 Level, Physical Review Letters (2025). DOI: 10.1103/6v93-whwq. https://dx.doi.org/10.1103/6v93-whwq
On arXiv: DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2505.04538

Image credit: found on the watchmaker website Esslinger


Optical clock sets new accuracy record, bringing us closer to a new definition of the second
Dec 2025, phys.org

The official definition of the second is set to be updated for the first time in decades. The change will be based on new optical clocks, which are far more precise than today's standards.

Now, researchers at VTT MIKES have demonstrated a strontium single-ion optical clock with an exceptionally low systematic uncertainty of 7.9×10⁻¹⁹, among the lowest ever reported. Over 10 months, the clock's frequency was measured against International Atomic Time (TAI) with an impressive 84% uptime. The record-setting total uncertainty of this measurement was just 9.8×10⁻¹⁷, limited by the cesium clocks that realize the current definition of the second and calibrate TAI. The study is published in Physical Review Applied.

via Technical Research Centre of Finland: T. Lindvall et al, 88Sr+ optical clock with 7.9 ×10-19 systematic uncertainty and measurement of its absolute frequency with 9.8 ×10-17 uncertainty, Physical Review Applied (2025). DOI: 10.1103/czlf-bfvp


Strontium optical clock accurate to within 1 second over 30 billion years
Mar 2026, phys.org

Stability and uncertainty are both surpassing the 10⁻¹⁹ level, meaning the clock would lose or gain less than one second over roughly 30 billion years. Only a few leading institutions, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States and Germany's Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, had approached this level of precision.

via University of Science and Technology of China: Zhi-Peng Jia et al, Improved systematic evaluation of a strontium optical clock with uncertainty below 1X10-18, Metrologia (2026). DOI: 10.1088/1681-7575/ae449e


Ytterbium atomic clock could open a new window on fundamental physics
Apr 2026, phys.org

We trapped ytterbium atoms in a three-dimensional optical lattice using a 'magic wavelength,' which eliminates the frequency shifts caused by the trapping light.

via Kyoto University: Taiki Ishiyama et al, Orders-of-magnitude improvement in precision spectroscopy of an inner-shell orbital clock transition in neutral ytterbium, Nature Photonics (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-026-01857-8


Bringing quantum time into the lab—a single clock can run young and old at once
Apr 2026, phys.org

Rather than just cooling the atoms, they show that one can instead manipulate the vacuum itself, creating so-called squeezed states in which the position and velocity of the clock exhibit subtle quantum behavior.

The result is a new manifestation of relativistic time in the quantum regime, where superpositions and entanglement of time arise: a single clock can measure how it ticks both faster and slower simultaneously, and entangle with the squeezed motion. The team now aims to demonstrate the effects in the laboratory.

via Stevens Institute of Technology, Colorado State University and National Institute of Standards and Technology: Quantum signatures of proper time in optical ion clocks, Physical Review Letters (2026). doi.org/10.1103/qhj9-pc2b


Physicists have measured 'negative time' in the lab
May 2026, phys.org

Our experiment used photons and the against-the-odds journey they must undertake to pass straight through a cloud of rubidium atoms, which means they have a "resonance" with the photons, meaning the energy of the photon can be transferred temporarily to the atoms as an atomic excitation. This allows the photon to "dwell" in the atomic cloud for a time before being released.

If the photon does make it straight through, a strange thing happens. Based on the average time when the photon enters the cloud, one can calculate the expected average time it would arrive at the far side of the cloud, assuming it travels at the speed of light (as photons usually do). What one finds is that the photon actually arrives far earlier than that. In fact, it arrives so early it appears to have spent a negative amount of time inside the cloud - to exit, on average, before it enters.

This effect has been known for decades and was observed in a 1993 experiment. But physicists had mostly decided not to take this negative time seriously.

We fired a weak laser beam - unrelated to the single photon pulse - through the cloud of atoms, and measured small changes in the phase of the beam's light to probe whether the atoms were excited. Any single run of the experiment gives only a very rough indication of whether the photon dwelt in the atoms, but averaging millions of runs yields an accurate dwell time. Amazingly, the result of this weak measurement of dwell time, when the photon goes straight through the cloud, exactly equals the negative time suggested by the photons' average arrival time. Prior to our work, no-one suspected that these two times, measured in entirely different ways, would be equal.

via University of Toronto: Daniela Angulo et al, Experimental Observation of Negative Weak Values for the Time Atoms Spend in the Excited State as a Photon Is Transmitted, Physical Review Letters (2026). DOI: 10.1103/gjfq-k9dv

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Tuesday, June 23, 2026

Heavy Metal Retinas and Other Advances in Vision Tech

 

The above image is an artist's illustration of a liquid-metal pupil that opens and closes to adjust light entering, by Kun Liang for University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is only one of the two different kinds of artificial eyeballs reported below.  

Creating realistic 3D scenes from everyday online photos
Dec 2025, phys.org

NVA - Novel View Synthesis - creates realistic angles of a scene from just a single existing photo.

WildCAT3D shows how computers can be trained using large collections of freely available images - tourist snapshots; photos taken in different weather, lighting and seasons; or partially obscured scenes. 

via Cornell Bowers College of Computing and Information Science: WildCAT3D: Appearance-Aware Multi-View Diffusion in the Wild.

Also: Morris Alper et al, WildCAT3D: Appearance-Aware Multi-View Diffusion in the Wild, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2506.13030


Quantum mechanical effects help overcome a fundamental limitation of optical microscopy
Jan 2026, phys.org

Optical microscopes are unable to resolve structures much smaller than the wavelength of light.  ... They achieve this incredible resolution by bringing a sharp metal tip extraordinarily close to the surface of a material under study - separated by a gap smaller than the size of a single atom. A continuous - wave laser illuminates the system, "squeezing" infrared light into the tiny gap and concentrating it at the tip's apex. Confining light in this manner circumvents the diffraction limit and enables a spatial resolution on the order of the radius of curvature of the tip apex - typically about 10 nanometers.

via University of Regensburg Center for Ultrafast Nanoscopy and U of Birmingham: Felix Schiegl et al, Atomic-Scale Optical Microscopy with Continuous-Wave Mid-Infrared Radiation, Nano Letters (2026). DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c05319


Liquid-metal pupil helps an artificial eye adapt to sudden light changes
Mar 2026, phys.org

Traditional machine vision systems struggle with extreme light changes, but adaptive pupils adjust instantly. They tried to replicate this process, called closed-loop pupillary light reflex or adaptive pupil reflex.

"Our core objectives were to integrate a hemispherical artificial retina with liquid-metal (LM) shapeshifters for artificial neurons and adaptive pupils, mimic biological PLR via LM deformation, solve high-light overexposure issues in machine vision, and achieve programmable replication of multiple animal pupil shapes to boost environmental adaptability and image recognition accuracy."

Finally, the team developed an adaptive pupil made of liquid metal that changes its shape and size depending on the intensity of light. [see the thumbnail image above]

The artificial pupil developed by the researchers relies on eight liquid-metal actuators that can be controlled independently. These actuators adjust the aperture of the pupil, controlling how much light passes through it. In addition, these actuators can produce different pupil shapes, mimicking the shape of human pupils or those of cats, sheep, squids, frogs and various other animals.

via University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Westlake University: Kun Liang et al, Bioinspired adaptive pupil reflex based on liquid-metal shape-shifters for machine vision, Science Robotics (2026). DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adx0715.


This artificial retina doesn't just aim to restore sight—it opens a hidden channel of vision
Apr 2026, phys.org

"Electrical stimulation of retinal neurons can recreate the action potentials associated with seeing that are generated by these cells. We report a thin artificial retina that can be adhered to the epiretinal surface and can convert near-infrared light into electrical stimuli that selectively stimulate ganglion cells."

The phototransistor array is a grid of tiny, light-sensitive devices that can detect near-infrared light (i.e., light that is just beyond visible wavelengths) and convert it into electrical signals, and the liquid metal electrodes enhance proximity to retinal ganglion cells, which are less affected by retinal degeneration than photoreceptor cells, thus still able to transmit information to the brain.

via Institute for Basic Science in Korea: Won Gi Chung et al, An implantable epiretinal device for near-infrared light perception, Nature Electronics (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-026-01601-8


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Monday, June 22, 2026

I Tried Science and All I Got Was This Racist MRI Machine


Look you can't expect results every single time. Sometimes you get resluts instead.
 
Heat wave duration is accelerating faster than global warming, researchers find
Jul 2025, phys.org
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-duration-faster-global.html

"If you have large variations in current climate, then a fraction of a degree change will have less impact than if you have a more stable climate. ... Each fraction of a degree of warming will have more impact than the last. The acceleration means that if the rate of warming stays the same, the rate of our adaptation has to happen quicker and quicker, especially for the most extreme heat waves, which are changing the fastest."

via UCLA and Universidad Adolfo Ibañez in Santiago in Chile: Cristian Martinez-Villalobos et al, Accelerating increase in the duration of heatwaves under global warming, Nature Geoscience (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-025-01737-w


40% of MRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity
Dec 2025, phys.org

According to the findings, there is no generally valid coupling between the oxygen content measured by MRI and neuronal activity. An increased fMRI signal is associated with reduced brain activity in around 40% of cases. At the same time, they observed decreased fMRI signals in regions with elevated activity. "This contradicts the long-standing assumption that increased brain activity is always accompanied by an increased blood flow to meet higher oxygen demand. Since tens of thousands of fMRI studies worldwide are based on this assumption, our results could lead to opposite interpretations in many of them."

via Technical University Munich and Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg: Samira M. Epp et al, BOLD signal changes can oppose oxygen metabolism across the human cortex, Nature Neuroscience (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41593-025-02132-9


Meta-analysis challenges the link between economic inequality and mental health
Jan 2026, phys.org

How can we explain that so many previous studies concluded that there was a harmful effect? The researchers identified a significant publication bias: studies with small samples reporting a detrimental effect of inequality on health were overrepresented in the literature, while null results more often remained unpublished. ... By correcting for this bias, the research team demonstrated that the estimated effect converges toward zero. Finally, a standardized tool for assessing the quality of existing studies showed that around 80% had methodological weaknesses leading to a high risk of bias.

via University of Lausanne: Nicolas Sommet et al, No meta-analytical effect of economic inequality on well-being or mental health, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09797-z


For decades, this bias test looked inside minds - now its biggest blind spot is coming into focus
Apr 2026, phys.org

The implicit bias test - where you're shown pictures of faces and asked to sort them into categories like good or bad, and where a white person might call a white face "good" faster than a different color face, implying that person is biased against non-white faces. 

Oops.

Their findings, published in Nature Human Behavior, suggest that in some cases the test can mistakenly predict strong biases, when participants are simply cautious and responding slowly to avoid mistakes.

"Using racing diffusion models across 39 topics, we found that response caution explained significantly more variance in D-scores beyond decision ease. Response caution also best predicted explicitly reported biases."

via Case Western and Harvard: Kyle J. LaFollette et al, Challenging the mechanism for the implicit association test, Nature Human Behaviour (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02439-y


Physicists refute famous 2025 study claiming daylight saving time poses severe health risks
Apr 2026, phys.org

"What the world read as scientific evidence against time change has turned out to be a mathematical illusion." (This is about the 2025 Lara Weed and Jamie M. Zeitzer of Stanford University article linking seasonal time changes to negative health outcomes.)

The original model computes the difference between the rhythm of the biological clock—the circadian rhythm, determined by the time at which body temperature is at its minimum—and the rhythm of Earth's rotation. According to the original authors, this difference represents the "regulatory circadian shifting necessary to stay synchronized with the outer world."

Global health effects were inferred from the annual sum of these daily readjustments. However, when performing this calculation, the authors consistently accumulated the magnitude of the readjustment, regardless of whether it was positive or negative. "The use of absolute readjustments instead of real readjustments is the critical error."

"What the authors did makes little sense; it is as if, while driving, we recorded every small adjustment made by moving the steering wheel back and forth to stay in the lane, but then added them all up in the same direction to report a large value instead of allowing them to compensate for each other. By their logic, maintaining a straight course with small left-and-right adjustments (what actually happens) would be the same as a car drifting further and further in one direction until it ends up facing the wrong way. This alone refutes the study's conclusions."

Consequently, the annual cumulative total of these readjustments was zero, even with the time change.

via University of Seville: José María Martín-Olalla et al, The sum of absolute circadian shifts: Questioning the metric linking daylight saving time policy to stroke and obesity, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2532075123

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Sunday, June 21, 2026

The Semantic Philanthropist


Maybe there's just a hell of a lot of new words blasting out of the science cannon these days, this seems like a lot.

100 years of menus show how food can be used as a diplomatic tool to make and break political alliances
Nov 2025, phys.org

Gastronationalism - using food to create specific psychological effects and convey symbolic messages, to facilitate diplomatic negotiations, cultural exchange, and political messaging

via Basque Culinary Center: Power for dinner. Culinary diplomacy and geopolitical aspects in Portuguese diplomatic tables (1910-2023), Frontiers in Political Science (2025). DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2025.1669350


Sugars, ‘Gum,’ Stardust Found in NASA's Asteroid Bennu Samples
Dec 2025, NASA

Space Gum - polymer-like material rich in nitrogen and oxygen and never seen before in space rocks; could have helped set the stage on Earth for the ingredients of life to emerge; the same kinds of chemical groups that occur in polyurethane on Earth, making this material from Bennu something akin to a ‘space plastic.’

via NASA and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx: Furukawa, Y., Sunami, S., Takano, Y. et al. Bio-essential sugars in samples from asteroid Bennu. Nat. Geosci. 19, 19–24 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-025-01838-6


Pleasant-sounding words are easier to remember, pseudoword experiment shows
Dec 2025, phys.org

Artificial Pseudowords - non-words with no meaning (e.g., clisious, smanious, drikious); used in a scientific study about whether words have aesthetic qualities or not

via University of Vienna: Theresa Matzinger et al, Phonemic composition influences words' aesthetic appeal and memorability, PLOS One (2025). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0336597


The hexatic phase: Ultra-thin 2D materials in a state between solid and liquid observed for the first time
Dec 2025, phys.org

Hexatic Phase - When a material becomes so thin that it is practically two-dimensional, the rules of melting change dramatically. Between the solid and liquid phases, a new, exotic intermediate phase of matter can arise, known as the "hexatic phase." Ultra-thin, two-dimensional materials enabled researchers to directly observe atomic-scale melting processes. Surprisingly, the observations contradict previous predictions.

via University of Vienna: Thuy An Bui et al, Hexatic phase in covalent two-dimensional silver iodide, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adv7915.


Urban birds' beak shape rapidly changed during COVID-19 lockdowns, suggesting human-driven transformations
Dec 2025, phys.org

Anthropause - The period of global slowdown caused by COVID-19 lockdowns; it gave scientists a rare chance to see how animals physically changed when human activity suddenly decreased. (This isn't exactly new but I'm making sure you have it on your list)

via UCLA: Eleanor S. Diamant et al, Rapid morphological change in an urban bird due to COVID-19 restrictions, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2520996122


Feral AI gossip with the potential to spread damage and shame will become more frequent, researchers warn
Dec 2025, phys.org

Feral AI Gossip AKA Bot-to-Bot Gossip - After publishing an article about how emotionally manipulative chatbots can be, the New York Times reporter Kevin Roose found out chatbots were describing his writing as sensational and accusing him of poor journalistic ethics and being unscrupulous. Other AI bots have falsely detailed people's involvement in bribery, embezzlement, and sexual harassment. These gossipy AI-generated outputs cause real-world harms - reputational damage, shame, and social unrest. It's particularly dangerous, because it operates unconstrained by the social norms that moderate human gossip. (In the actual article, they define "feral" as being unconstrained by the communicative norms and evaluative standards of human-to-human gossip.)

via University of Exeter: Joel Krueger et al, AI gossip, Ethics and Information Technology (2025). DOI: 10.1007/s10676-025-09871-0 [personal note these authors use the word bullshit a little to informally for an academic paper, "these bullshit generators" 


First breathing 'lung-on-chip' developed using genetically identical cells
Dec 2025, phys.org

Lung on a Chip - Shit is moving fast; not only is it a lung on a chip, it's a breathing lung on a chip.

via The Francis Crick Institute: Chak Hon Luk et al, Autologous human iPSC-derived Alveolus-on-Chip reveals early pathological events of M. tuberculosis infection, Science Advances (2026). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aea9874.


How a miniature womb on a chip can help women struggling to conceive
Jan 2026, phys.org

Womb on a Chip - you heard it boys; AKA "endometrioids" (via "organ-oids"), human uterine cells embedded into layers of a special gel, then placed in a microfluidic chip that circulates nutrients and mimics the complex environment of the human uterus

via Chinese Academy of Sciences: Qian Li et al, A 3D in vitro model for studying human implantation and implantation failure, Cell (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2025.10.026


How AI is distorting online research, from polls to public policy
Feb 2026, phys.org

Paradata - typing speed, keystrokes and copy–paste behavior; can be analyzed as response patterns and behavioral patterns to identify non-human poll-response aka poll fraud, and which compromises much scientific data, like for example where some researchers hire Mechanical Turkers to complete a survey, but because Mechanical Turk was bought by Amazon, and they don't give a shit about either their products or their users, they let it go to shit and be overtaken by robots, Moldovan-bankrolled robots, or whatever. Bottom line is we can't tell the difference anymore and "all the data is contaminated"

via IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca and University of Cambridge: Folco Panizza et al, How to deal with the survey-taking AI agents that threaten to upend social science, Nature (2026). DOI: 10.1038/d41586-026-00386-2


Space mining without heavy machines? Microbes harvest metals from meteorites aboard space station
Feb 2026, phys.org

Biomining - Microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi can harvest crucial minerals from rocks and could provide a sustainable alternative to transporting much-needed resources from Earth; an experiment conducted aboard the International Space Station found "biomining" fungi particularly adept at extracting palladium from a meteorite in microgravity

via Cornell and University of Edinburgh: Rosa Santomartino et al, Microbial biomining from asteroidal material onboard the international space station, npj Microgravity (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41526-026-00567-3


Increase of AI bots on the Internet sparks arms race
Feb 2026, Ars Technica

GEO - generative engine optimization (the new SEO)


Light-guided 'optovolution' evolves proteins that switch states on schedule
Mar 2026, phys.org

Optovolution - uses light to guide the evolution of proteins with dynamic, multi‑state, and computational functions - making yes-or-no decisions based on specific rules

via EPFL Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne Laboratory of the Physics of Biological Systems: Light-directed evolution of dynamic, multi-state, and computational protein functionalities., Cell (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2026.02.002


Forest soil on doormats rebalances urban homes' indoor microbiome, study suggests
Mar 2026, phys.org

FaRMI Farm-home Resembling Microbiota Index - previously associated with lower asthma risk, and bacterial diversity increased, and the proportion of human-associated bacteria decreased.

via University of Eastern Finland: Martin Täubel et al, Environmental microbiota transfer from forest soil into urban homes: a proof-of-principle study, Microbiome (2026). DOI: 10.1186/s40168-026-02352-6


Lab-grown pineal gland organoids produce melatonin, offering a new sleep model
Apr 2026, phys.org

Assembloid - two or more types of organoids linked together, via the new Pineal organoids you see floating around these days

via Yale University: Ferdi Ridvan Kiral et al, Generation of human pineal gland organoids with melatonin production for disease modeling, Cell Stem Cell (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.stem.2025.12.004


Post Script:
What do we call fingerprints for robots? Like "these words have 'robot' written all over them"?
The telltale words that could identify generative AI text
Jan 2026, Ars Technica

Researchers were inspired by the way we can measure excess deaths from COVID, in this case measuring excess words that shouldn't be there. Here's a few from the list:
  • delves
  • showcasing 
  • underscores
(They don't mention it here, but I heard "nestled" is found in prpoperty listings.)

The rest are overwhelmingly “style words” like verbs, adjectives, and adverbs:
  • across
  • additionally
  • comprehensive
  • crucial
  • enhancing
  • exhibited
  • insights
  • notably
  • particularly
  • within

via University of Tubingen and Northwestern University; preprint: Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary. Dmitry Kobak. [Submitted on 11 Jun 2024 (v1), last revised 3 Jul 2025 (this version, v5)] https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2406.07016

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