Saturday, July 11, 2026

Neologistic Supremacy


Holographic light engine boosts tissue-like 3D printing efficiency by 70 times
May 2026, phys.org

Holographic Light Engines - 150-mW laser diode for tomographic volumetric additive manufacturing system to solidify entire millimeter-scale objects within seconds, and centimeter-scale objects within minutes

via EPFL's Laboratory of Applied Photonic Devices: Maria Isabel Álvarez-Castaño et al, High-efficiency multi-scale holographic volumetric 3D printing with a phase light modulator, Light: Science & Applications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41377-026-02331-4



Laser-powered engines may soon support 'intelligent' 6G networks
May 2026, phys.org

Light Engines, aka Photonic Engine - lasers that can transfer large amounts of data over long distances by emitting high-quality white light

via University of Technology in Guangzhou: Tailoring quasi-transparent ceramic as a laser-driven photonic engine for kilometer-level white light communication, Matter (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.matt.2026.102822.


New kind of dark tourism emerging in online 'Backrooms,' study shows
May 2026, phys.org

Para-Terrestrial Dark Tourism - encounters with environments that feel place-like yet sit beyond conventional geography because they exist entirely online. ...

This comes at the time of the release of the movie Backrooms, about these kinds of spaces. ... I'm lost actually. The paper is like 3 paragraphs long, and although they use the word Žižekian, which is cool, what's written is almost complete gobbledegook. I still, by the end of the paper, have no idea what they're talking about, even the original rationale of the paper...like how much can we talk about a default page on mario paint and what it means to the cultural zeitgeist? They made a whole movie about it so I guess it's important. Right, because movies are still important. Wrong, the whole world is one big advertisement to manipulate us into buying The Way. And if you want to learn more about how the international academic community is co-opted by fake publishing houses, please learn more here: DEF CON 26 - Svea, Suggy, Till - Inside the Fake Science Factory - 2018 [link] ; OmniScript [wiki link] 

via Lancaster University Management School: Sophie James et al, When dark tourism goes para-terrestrial: Online legend-tripping and touring the void, Annals of Tourism Research (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.annals.2026.104172


Unlocking soft robotics control with AI's cousin: Reservoir computing
May 2026, phys.org

Soft Robotics - made with a combination of soft materials and novel controls, soft robotics have a greater range of motion and more fluidity and flexibility than traditional rigid robotics.

Neural Reservoir - researchers input data about the movement of virtual soft robots, set parameters for what they expected to happen, ran virtual trials, and then analyzed the results. ... they created virtual models of different variations of movement and tested how they behaved. When they fed those results back into the system, a new model for the behavior of a soft robotic arm began to emerge—along with a new approach to the most effective way to control the arm.

via Virginia Tech: Noel Naughton et al, Neural reservoir control of a bio-hybrid soft arm, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2522094123


Introducing Weather Jiu-Jitsu, a new approach to avert catastrophic weather events
Jun 2026, phys.org

Weather Jiu-Jitsu - small adjustments that carefully leverage the atmosphere's sensitivity to disturbance could avert the worst effects of weather disasters ... Their modeling suggested that small, carefully timed cloud-seeding operations applied days before the peak of an extreme weather event could have shifted the track of 2012's Hurricane Sandy by about 300 miles (480 kilometers) to miss New York City, raised the low temperature of the 2021 Texas freeze by about 18 degrees Fahrenheit and reduced the amount of precipitation carried by a 2022 atmospheric river that caused flooding in California by about 5%.

via Arizone State: Huang Q, et al. Weather Jiu-Jitsu: Prospects for atmospheric nudging to defuse the impact of catastrophic weather extremes. PLOS Water (2026). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pwat.0000562

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Friday, July 10, 2026

Cyborg Cockroaches Are Coming To Take Our Jobs


Just kidding, they're actually a stand-in for humans, until we perfect the technology, and normalize the idea of having your frontal cortex severed and replaced with a fork of one of the couple thousand richest people in the world, who will be the only ones allowed to have their frontal cortex scaled up to serve the rest of the population. 

How do you look at this and not think about the guy in Metallica's "One"

I can't remember anything
Can't tell if this is true or a dream
Deep down inside, I feel to scream
This terrible silence stops me

[music video link]  

 
This is the native article where you find pictures like these:

AI listens to insect body signals to guide cyborg cockroaches
May 2026, phys.org

"Gentle stimulation" and "low burden stimulation" please make it stop 

via University of Osaka: Chowdhury Mohammad Masum Refat et al, Perception-driven control strategy for bio-intelligent cyborg insect, ROBOMECH Journal (2026). DOI: 10.1186/s40648-026-00344-7



But wait, there's more!


A diving suit for cyborg cockroaches could enhance search-and-rescue operations
Jun 2026, phys.org

For fuck's sake with the goddam cockroaches already

via Nanyang Technological University: Zifu Fan et al, Underwater Suit-Wearing Cyborg Insect Capable of Hours-Long Diving and Terra-Aqua Travel, Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-74235-1

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Thursday, July 9, 2026

JPG Fetishists Report Nothing to See Here After Intense Investigation


"Image generated by the editorial team using AI for illustrative purposes"

Not for much longer, but for now, I am compelled, for posterity, to explicitly post this new class of imagery, not as supplementary content for an article, but for itself.

This is the new thing in the world of science writing where the editors, who are writers but not visual artists, are using artificial image generation to create imagery corresponding to their writing work. I imagine there are also visual artists who are artificially generating written content for their imagery. And so on. It changes the way we see things, and the way we think. What used to require collaboration between writers and artists, is now a conversation between the writer and their robot, which is a concentrated version of every artist to ever have their work sucked into the wild west of intellectual property previously known as the Internet. 

The second you look at this, you just know it was done by the writers and not the artists. It has that forced look of a straight-A high school student trying really hard not to let this stupid state-required art class ruin their GPA. Actually, it has the look of the art teacher who helped the straight-A student... . Like how can you be that good at metal reflections and yet not be able to create a decent composition. How can you cram that much symbolic imagery into one image? It's got the typical lack of aesthetic sophistication and visual imagination that defaults to using 1. people (seen in the doctors in consternation), and 2. writing (seen in the question mark) to communicate meaning. This is what that looks like. 

And for those interested, here's the headline for the above image: "One in four doctors believe human preservation and future revival could work, but not without challenges" (one wonders if this was the actual prompt that generated said image).


AI Art - Six new isolated millisecond pulsars discovered with FAST - Image generated by the editorial team using AI for illustrative purposes - 2026 [link]

^Next up. It's standard to talk trash about crappy art here on Network Address, but sometimes we also get impressed. Based on its citation, this is another "image generated by the editorial team using AI for illustrative purposes", but this one is a pretty cool example of how these things can work out.

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Wednesday, July 8, 2026

Unsupervised Climate Attack


There are so many angles to the climate topic that it's hard to organize it all. We've got the unraveling of the social fabric due to not being able to congregate in public, not from government overreach mind you, but from the climate itself; we've got the breakdown of the physical infrastructure, not because our country is 250 years old and literally falling apart, but because our bridges, roads, plumbing systems, and electrical grids weren't built to perform in temperatures too far above 100F; and the Great IMO 2020 Debacle, the first great comprehensive climate policy disaster of the 21st Century, which at the current time is almost entirely unknown to the general public, and just grew another head, because it's combined with the AMOC Collapse. 

All that being said, you know you're screwed when the scientists, whose job it is to be neutral and unemotional, start using superlatives because the results they're seeing are so far out, they just can't use that neutral language anymore.


Why an immense marine heatwave off the US west coast has alarmed scientists
May 2026, The Guardian

“I’m out of superlatives”
--University of Arizona scientist in response to high anomaly in the Pacific

And here's another one, for context:

In March, a remarkable land-based heatwave – what one meteorologist called “one of the most astounding global weather events of the century thus far” – sent late winter temperatures soaring more than 30F above seasonal norms to 88F (31C) or warmer in relatively temperate places such as Minnesota, Colorado and Idaho.



Climate change costs lives by breaking down social connection, says study
May 2026, phys.org

This has been happening in real time, definitely for a few years now, likely noticeable since covid, where even the winter events were attempted to be held at least partially outdoors. During that time, you could feel the strain, the pulling of the social fabric, as people were straight-up scared to hang out with their own friends and family. Now, the social strain is still there, but it's happening in reverse. People want to hang out with each other, but they can't. Most people don't own houses where they can invite all their friends. They rely on public space, which is almost exclusively outdoor space. But that space is increasingly immediately dangerous to life and health, because of the weather.* It's gotten to the point that you have to reconsider not just your kid's birthday party, but your cultural identity. As this is written, the United States' 250th celebration of the founding of the nation was supposed to take place on a Saturday, July 4th, but was cancelled, in the nations's capital of Washington DC, and in other significant cities such as Philadelphia, due to the heat. We had been stuck in a one week long heat wave with temperatures in the 100's, and that ended with severe thunderstorms knocking out power to hundreds of thousands. In other words, the 250th celebration of the nation's founding was in fact cancelled to due to climate change. Maybe we will learn the lesson before Labor Day.  *Slight exaggeration, I don't think we use the "immediately dangerous to life and health" (IDLH) designation for temperatures, but if we do, it's around a heat index of 140F; we've got 110-115 now, so another 10-15 years before we see IDLH in our backyard. India and Pakistan saw this already in 2025.

Heat waves and air pollution are pushing people indoors and away from shared public spaces, while interruptions to school and work make it harder to maintain relationships. [At the same time that "loneliness" is declared more dangerous to our health than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day!]

via University of Sydney: Marlee Bower et al, Climate change and social health, Nature Human Behaviour (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02455-y


Television news coverage of climate policy is limited and polarized in the US, study finds
May 202,6 phys.org

Most television news segments about climate change don't cover policy. Researchers focused on 7 major television news networks — ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NBC, and PBS — and identified news transcripts from April 2020 to April 2021 that contained the words "climate change" or "global warming" and identified whether each transcript mentioned climate policy and if it did, whether it supported, opposed, or presented a neutral view.

"This means that people might not hear anything about solutions when they hear about the climate crisis in the news. This in turn can shape what they think is normal or popular."

"That is a striking gap, because policy is where solutions live. But when policy is largely missing from coverage, so too are the pathways people can imagine for addressing the problem." [And it's because there is no problem; the richest 2,000 people in the world are getting richer, faster, every day. Why would we need solutions?]

via University of Colorado at Boulder CIRES Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences: Ekaterina Landgren et al, U.S. television news coverage of climate change policy is aggregately balanced but polarized, Environmental Research Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1088/2515-7620/ae6b10


Climate catch-22: Cleaning up air pollution could speed key Atlantic current decline
May 2026, phys.org

AMOC meets IMO

They ran a total of 80 simulations and looked at what happens across the globe and within specific regions between the years 2015 and 2050 under two key scenarios—one with strong air pollution controls and the other with weak controls.

Results? Cleaner air could be a problem.

Hopefully we already know what this is by now. They call this a Catch-22 (which is pretty nuts that for such a common phenomenon, all we have as a reference is this 1961 satirical war novel, which although it's often mentioned as one of the most significant novels of the 20th century, I'm not sure that I've ever heard people reference the novel itself, only the title.)

via University of California Riverside: Robert J Allen et al, AMOC weakening in response to global and regional reductions in aerosol emissions, Environmental Research: Climate (2026). DOI: 10.1088/2752-5295/ae63ef


Jersey Shore drawbridge closes to boat traffic due to extreme heat
Jun 2026, nj.com

The excessive heat has caused the expansion of some components of the bridge, which prohibits the bridge from opening. The U.S. Coast Guard has been notified and the Department of Transportation is posting warning messages on waterway signage.


Heat wave grips Europe, triggering alerts and disruptions
Jun 2026, DW

High temperatures strongly impacted the French rail network, with risks to overhead power lines and the possibility of tracks expanding in the heat.


Extreme coastal flooding surges worldwide as rising seas rewrite 100-year odds
Jun 2026, phys.org

Coastal flooding events expected only once every 100 years are now, on average, about 12 times more likely to occur. (This comes from Tulane University btw, for those who remember Hurricane Katrina. ...)

via Tulane: Sönke Dangendorf, Human-driven sea-level rise has quadrupled the frequency of coastal sea-level extremes since 1900, Nature Climate Change (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41558-026-02659-0.

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Tuesday, July 7, 2026

Fresh Kills


The Inside Story of the Recovery Operation after 9/11
National September 11 Memorial & Museum Auditorium, May 15 2023

Panelists included FBI Supervisory Special Agent and Incident Co-Commander Richard Marx, former Director of the Bureau of Waste Disposal of the Department of Sanitation Martin Bellew, and former NYPD Lieutenant Commander of Detectives Roger Parrino, who discussed the Fresh Kills operation. This should be required viewing for all Americans.

The following needs to be read with the utmost respect for these people, the victims, their families, the workers, and the general American public; it's not meant to be sensational or exploitative in any way, and this information is being repeated here in an effort to keep alive in our memories the sacrifices made, especially by the people who did this work to ensure that families of victims would be given closure. Granted nothing like this had ever happened before in America, but certainly nothing like this recovery effort had ever been attempted, not at this scale, not under these conditions, and not in response to such a national tragedy.

*Also, for those not from the area, it should be pointed out that the word Kill means river in Dutch, who were the first people to start naming things on the East Coast in the 1700's(?), and so we have rivers named Arthur Kill or Kill van Kull, etc. This is where the name Fresh Kills comes from. There is no association between the name and death; that's all just historical coincidence. 

  • It just so happens that Fresh Kills, the oldest largest landfill in the United States (maybe the world) had just been decommissioned in March 2001, only six months prior to 9/11
  • 700 people identified either by their remains or personal effects
  • 1,000 remain
  • They could see down to 1/4 inch; the one guy kept a marble in his pocket to show the families how hard they were looking
  • Anthropologists got called in, they had to differentiate the humans from the food; there were 15-20 restaurants at the World Trade
  • Everything was pulverized so that all you saw was wheel casters on office chairs and credit cards; ID cards too but less
  • 17 operating unions at Fresh Kills, 24k people working or volunteering, 30 city, state and federal agencies
  • There were cars at Ground Zero, some driven away some towed
  • They're wearing asbestos monitors and seeing 4x the limit ... outdoors (that's 4x the indoor limit but outdoors, which is really hard to do because the air is always blowing around and being diluted...)
  • Ground Zero was called The Pile
  • They talk about the extent of decon and PPE at 40 minutes
  • The smell, prompted by an audience question: The canines got depressed. It smelled so strongly of dead people they couldn't use their sense of smell to find them, and since they couldn't do their job they got depressed
  • They built tents on top of the landfill, for admin purposes etc., and the methane accumulated in them because it comes right out of the ground, also it bubbles when it rains in a landfill, again from all the methane coming out of the ground
  • The idea of building structures on a landfill is crazy, both from a structural, and just a general safety point of view

Image credit: Christopher Payne Brother Island maybe a Sanatorium

The image above is almost totally unrelated to 9/11, except that it's from New York City, except that it's not. It's a photograph taken by Christopher Payne, who takes really cool pictures of industrial sites and sometimes abandoned sites. This was taken on Brother Island, one of the very few deserted islands off New York City. It was inhabited at some point, by people looking to get away from the city almost a hundred years ago, and later by a sanatorium, and maybe some other City entities. It's been closed down since the 1970's and nobody except a handful of research scientists and photographers have been allowed to visit since. 

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Fake Birds Real Robots


Nobody I ever asked had any idea what I'm talking about, but on the United States Highway Route 22 in New Jersey, right next to The Ship in Union (actually a quarter mile west, near the White Castle), is a billboard housing a BirdXPeller® PRO. It emits a never ending squawk into the air surrounding it, one of New Jersey's busiest highways. You very likely would not hear it when driving by, but if you ever parked your car and walked into a business in the area, or for sure if you've ever waited hours at the auto repair shop nearby, then you may have heard it.

Up until about 2020, I assume the recording being used was on a cassette tape, because it deteriorated to the point it was almost unintelligible as wildlife - it was unequivocally a robot seagul (except it's apparently a hawk or some other raptor).

I must have asked dozens of people about this, including people who work in the area, and who live in the area, and I swear not one of them had any idea what I was talking about. Not even when it was a broken robot seagull. Today it's been replaced or updated, because it sounds like a regular bird, so I imagine that still, nobody realizes it's there. 


The BirdXPeller® PRO gets rid of birds by emitting a variety of naturally recorded distress calls and predator cries that confuse, frighten, and disorient pest birds. The digital sounds warn birds of an emergency and to stay away. The sonic repellers are completely programmable and utilize real sounds with clear and high-definition playback. The BirdXPeller® PRO is a safe and humane solution to protect your property from bird infestation. With three versions to chose from, you can tailor your bird control to work for you.
Version 1 repels: Pigeons, Starlings, Sparrows, and Gulls
Version 2 repels: Crows, Blackbirds, Grackles, Cormorants, and Ravens
Version WP repels: Woodpeckers and Sparrows (note: this is the Woodpecker PRO )

Image credit: cyborgpigeon - image credit Neiry Group - 2026 [link]


Post Script: The Flagship, as it was called, started in the 1930's as a restaurant-nightclub named Donahue's that had a nautical theme. That burned down and in 1938 was replaced by Flagship 29, a nightclub built in the shape of a ship. That burned down in 1942 and was replaced, still as a nightclub and still in the shape of a ship. In 1956 it became a clothing store, and in 1968 a dinner theater. In 1986 it was torn down but rebuilt, STILL in the shape of a ship, but this time as an electronics store, and then a series of electronics stores, the most infamous of which was a Crazy Eddie's, (who's prices were insane). This mostly taken from the Union Township Historical Society website: https://www.unionhistory.org/Union-Photos/The-Flagship

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Monday, July 6, 2026

It Doesn't Get Faker Than This


Fake things will never cease to amaze me. Starting off here is a story that you may not even be able to follow, because it's so deep, so far-reaching, yet so thorough, and so enduring, that at some point while watching this talk, you will think the presenters are themselves the fake ones, trying to push some really crazy ramble that's just too hard to believe. 

If you want to try anyway, below you'll find a link to a presentation at a computer security research conference in 2018, where the presenters followed a funny feeling they had about a possibly fake conference that accepted a talk on one of their research topics. Then they uncovered a vast network of academic publishers and conference organizers serving over 100 countries, on thousands of topics, to tens of thousands of scholars and researchers. It's all tightly controlled by one person, and it's all fake. They went deep, uncovered everything, and presented it to some authorities who did something, but not enough; and you can jump straight to the aftermath if you want, also linked below. Spoiler: six years later they still exist.

Perhaps the most important detail - this is the same publishing group that about ten years ago sold a printed and bound copy of the Wikipedia entry for Stigler's law of eponymy. For the uninitiated, Stigler's law states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer; Stigler attributed the discovery of Stigler's law to sociologist Robert K. Merton, making "Stigler's law" an example of Stigler's law. (gtfo).

They literally printed the Wikipedia article and sold it as a book. So they made a book about eponymy written by an author with no name, and for that they are famous, in Network Address hall of fame, the fake hall of fame. The thumbnail image atop this post is evidence of this fakery, from personal archives as well as this very weblog, dating back to 2013.

If you're an academic, in any sense of the word, or even in spirit, you pretty much need to watch this:

DEF CON 26 - Svea, Suggy, Till - Inside the Fake Science Factory - 2018

And the outcome:

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