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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Saturday, June 20, 2026

Pedagogy Meet Robogogy and Data as Labor


Seen above, a humanoid ponders its existence, instead of studying for its algebra exam. 

New theory explores how workers interact with technology in the modern workplace
Sep 2025, phys.org

This is about a new theory of workplace communication; the traditional version is called Social Exchange Theory, and it says we engage with people who are rewarding, and avoid people who are costly. Your co-worker might know a lot about a certain subject, but they talk your ear off.

The new theory is called Socio-Technical Exchange, and it says we develop "machine heuristics" - "When they felt expertise was important, people often preferred a human coworker, finding coworkers more efficient and knowledgeable. However, with simple or embarrassing questions, a machine was deemed a superior collaborator."

via University of Kansas: Cameron Piercy et al, Socio-Technical Exchange with Machines: Worker Experiences with Complex Work Technologies, Human-Machine Communication (2025). DOI: 10.30658/hmc.10.3

Image credit: hahahaha


Robots learn how to move by watching themselves
Feb 2025, phys.org

"Kinematic Self-Awareness"

"We humans are intuitively aware of our body; we can imagine ourselves in the future and visualize the consequences of our actions well before we perform those actions in reality. Ultimately, we would like to imbue robots with a similar ability to imagine themselves, because once you can imagine yourself in the future, there is no limit to what you can do."

via Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science: Yuhang Hu et al, Teaching robots to build simulations of themselves, Nature Machine Intelligence (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s42256-025-01006-w


Teaching AI models the broad strokes to sketch more like humans do
Jun 2025, phys.org

Their method, called "SketchAgent," uses a multimodal language model—AI systems that train on text and images to develop a "sketching language" in which a sketch is translated into a numbered sequence of strokes on a grid. The system was given an example of how things like a house would be drawn, with each stroke labeled according to what it represented — such as the seventh stroke being a rectangle labeled as a "front door" — to help the model generalize to new concepts.

via MIT CSAIL Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: Yael Vinker et al, SketchAgent: Language-Driven Sequential Sketch Generation, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2411.17673


Study argues online clicks and scrolls are 'thin labor' powering AI
Feb 2026, phys.org

Every time a user solves a reCAPTCHA or browses a social media feed, they provide the training data necessary for AI systems to function. Currently, tech giants extract this value without offering users any bargaining power or fair terms of engagement.

"We must decide if we are merely horses leaving digital manure behind or if we are the essential workers who build the intelligence of the future"

They advocate for the use of data unions, data strikes, and enhanced portability rights to give users a way to negotiate with massive platforms. By treating data as labor, the authors provide a framework for the public to exert collective power against the extractive practices of surveillance capitalism.

"Data strikes and data unions give the public a powerful tool to talk back to technology companies. When we act together to withhold or redirect our data, we transform from passive sources of information into a collective force that can reshape the digital economy to serve everyone, not just a few billionaires."

via Simon Fraser University and Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business: Tae Wan Kim et al, Are We Horses? Rethinking Data as Labor, Philosophy & Technology (2026). DOI: 10.1007/s13347-026-01033-4

Like for example:
Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training data
Apr 2026, Reuters


Post Script of Martin Luther King Jr Quote About Greeley Meatpackers:
"As machines replace men, we must again question whether the depth of our social thinking matches the growth of technological creativity. We cannot create machines which revolutionize industry unless we simultaneously create ideas commensurate with social and economic reorganization, which harness the power of such machines for the benefit of man...the new age will not be an era of hope but of fear and emptiness unless we master this problem. Its solution will require forthright creative social planning from the shop level up to the highest levels of government."  
--Dr. King to the United Packinghouse Workers Union of America on May 21st 1962, and in response to Thousands of workers strike at one of the largest meatpacking plants in the US, Mar 16 2026, AP News [link] 

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Friday, June 19, 2026

Surveilling the Pseudonymous


Is your bank keeping your secrets? New study says 'It's complicated'
Oct 2025, phys.org

The researchers analyzed privacy policies from more than 2,000 of the nation's largest banks and found a maze of contradictory, confusing, and overlapping disclosures about how customer information is collected, used, and shared. Nearly half of the banks examined published multiple privacy policies - often with inconsistent statements that make it hard for consumers to know what really happens to their data.

"In many cases, banks claimed they don't share customer data with outside parties in a federally required U.S. Consumer Privacy Notice, yet disclosed such sharing elsewhere or deployed marketing tracking cookies without acknowledgment"

FYI - The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act is a federal law requiring financial institutions to tell customers in a concise two-page notice how they share personal information and safeguard it.

via University of Michigan: Lu Xian et al, Layered, Overlapping, and Inconsistent: A Large-Scale Analysis of the Multiple Privacy Policies and Controls of U.S. Banks, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2507.05415



Facebook to stop targeting ads at UK woman after legal fight
Mar 2025, BBC News

Public Service Announcement - this woman does not live in the United States, so don't get any ideas; this is based on GDPR which is a UK thing.

Facebook has agreed to stop targeting adverts at an individual user using personal data after she filed a lawsuit against its parent company, tech giant Meta. ... a "gateway" for other people wanting to stop the social media company from serving them adverts based on their demographics and interests.

"I knew that this kind of predatory, invasive advertising is actually something that we all have a legal right to object to."

It was when she found out she was pregnant in 2017 that she realised the extent to which Facebook was targeting adverts at her. She said the adverts she got "suddenly started changing within weeks to lots of baby photos and other things - ads about babies and pregnancy and motherhood". "I just found it unnerving - this was before I'd even told people in my private life, and yet Facebook had already determined that I was pregnant," she continued.

(This goes back to stories about Target from way earlier, 2011 even.)

Ms O'Carroll said that Meta had agreed to stop using her personal data for direct marketing purposes. She said that she did not want to stop using Facebook, saying that it is "filled with all of those connections and family and friends, and entire chapters of my life".


Facebook and Instagram have a subscription service in most of Europe, where users can pay monthly so that they don't get ads on the platform.


How AI could end online anonymity
Mar 2026, phys.org

First, the AI reads through a user's post history on either Reddit or Hacker News, examining unstructured text. This is raw, unorganized information like comments, jokes, education, and subtle writing quirks. It then turned this micro-data into a mathematical representation of the person's profile to find candidate matches across millions of other profiles on the open web or on separate sites like LinkedIn.

They successfully linked accounts with up to 67% accuracy at 90% precision, costing only $1 to $4 in computing power per account successfully linked.

"Pseudonymity does not provide meaningful protection online. Users who post under persistent usernames should assume that adversaries can link their accounts to real identities or to each other, and that the probability rises with each piece of micro-data they post."

via ETH Zurich: Simon Lermen et al, Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs, arXiv (2026). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2602.16800


Your car's tire sensors could be used to track you
Feb 2026, phys.org 

From the article itself: Although not providing the exact location of the tire or the car, researchers have discovered that most TPMS sensors transmit a unique identifier in clear text that never changes during the lifetime of the tire. ... malicious actors could easily scale their efforts to track several thousands of cars, given that we observed at least 20k cars during our measurements. Our results show that TPMS transmissions can be used to systematically infer potentially sensitive information such as the presence, type, weight, or driving pattern of the driver.

via IMDEA Networks Institute: Can't Hide Your Stride: Inferring Car Movement Patterns from Passive TPMS Measurements [pdf]

Further Reading, because we already knew about this back in 2007:
  • I. Rouf, R. Miller, H. Mustafa, T. Taylor, S. Oh, W. Xu, M. Gruteser, W. Trappe, I. Seskar, Security and privacy vulnerabilities of in-car wireless networks: A tire pressure monitoring system case study, in: 19th USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Association, Washington, DC, USA, 2010, pp. 323–338.
  • S. Velupillai, L. Guvenc, Tire pressure monitoring [applications of control], IEEE Control systems magazine 27 (6) (2007) 22–25.
  • FCC, OET List Exhibits Report ID: MRXFG2R4MA (2011). 

Public Service Announcement: Can you spot the difference between these two urls?



^Anytime you see "%20" in a url, it's probably a mistake; it's what happens when you paste a truncated url (where either you or your smart-auto-assistant put a line break in the middle because it was too long) and then you go and paste that url, with the line breaks, into the search bar; anywhere there's a line break, the computer puts %20's instead. Take them out and it still works. 


Post Script on Anti Surveillance:
Graffiti framework lets people personalize online social spaces while staying connected with others
Oct 2025, phys.org

It's an app called Graffiti (I hate all these names being such generic terms that could be referring to something else; like why would you call your company Company, or your restaurant Breakfast?) - the app makes building personalized social applications easier, while allowing users to migrate between multiple applications without losing their friends or data. ... the purpose is to lower the barrier to creating personalized social applications and to enable those personalized applications to interoperate without requiring permission from developers.

The open, interoperable nature of Graffiti means no one entity has the power to set a moderation policy for the entire platform.

"The system lets each person pick their own moderators, avoiding the one-sized-fits-all approach to moderation taken by the major social platforms"

To avoid context collapse (your Tindr profile showing up on LinkedIn), the researchers designed Graffiti so all content is organized into distinct channels. Channels are flexible and can represent a variety of contexts, such as people, applications, locations, etc.

via MIT CSAIL Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: Theia Henderson et al, Graffiti: Enabling an Ecosystem of Personalized and Interoperable Social Applications, Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (2025). DOI: 10.1145/3746059.3747627

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Thursday, June 18, 2026

Straight Bernays


"What is truly vicious is not propaganda, but a monopoly of it."
-Edward Bernays, 1952

I'm not sure why people hate Edward Bernays so much. Especially Americans. In America, the economy itself relies on people being brainwashed into spending their money on stuff they don't need. "Disposable income" it's called, and it's the basis for the consumer economy that apparently gives America its edge. Without "engineering the consent" of an entire population, we wouldn't have teflon or wall-to-wall carpet. And we wouldn't all be living the American dream of freedom from tyranny, you know, protection against authoritarian overreach like warrantless wiretapping, or more terrible things like being kidnapped off the street into an unmarked van. We wouldn't all have access to free health care, or cars and cheap gas so we can dissolve the social fabric by driving away from our friends and families, towards better economic opportunities that distort the value of our labor, and exploit our social capital leaving us alone, depressed and financially insecure. I thought we like all those things, yet we don't like Bernays. I thought we like surveillance advertising; it's cute to think that someone cares so much about you they're logging your location every 5 seconds throughout the day and plotting it against all the other people you're co-located with so they can sell you lipstick to make you look better, because I'm sorry to have to say this but you don't look that great right now, and could use some help, and we're here to help. Edward Barnays is here to help. Why are you resisting?

"People must want cleanliness before they want soap."
-Also Edward Bernays

(AKA "People must forget how to use a frying pan before they want teflon")

Finally, I'm paraphrasing here, on how to change people's minds:
People hold no allegiance to beliefs. They hold allegiance to other people, authorities who espouse those beliefs. These are two different things. To change one's beliefs, therefore, one must either discredit the authority or create new authorities. Discrediting the beliefs does not work.

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026

Network Science 4th Dimension


Last installment of the network science series. Forget the AI takeover, we're already mindless automatons (but don't tell the free will enthusiasts).

A physics explanation shows why US elections keep ending 50:50—and why more spending won't change that
Apr 2026, phys.org

A spending threshold in US House races of roughly 1.8 million USD per campaign limits outcomes. Below it, social dynamics shape outcomes. Above it — on both sides — elections systematically trend toward a draw, no matter how much either party ultimately spends, while driving polarization higher. ... When both parties spend over 1.8 million USD, social influence becomes negligible and the election very often ends in a close race.

Further, on incumbents: The researchers put a number on this structural advantage. Even if the incumbent spends nothing, a challenger must invest roughly 140,000 USD just to neutralize the baseline incumbency effect. When the incumbent spends around 900,000 USD, the challenger still faces a disadvantage equivalent to about 20% of total campaign cost, purely as a consequence of the system's phase structure, not the incumbent's individual qualities.

via Complexity Science Hub Vienna: Jan Korbel et al, Empirical Validation of the Polarization Transition in a Double-Random Field Model of Elections, Physical Review Letters (2026). DOI: 10.1103/9gjj-1df6. 

On arXiv: DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2510.00612

Image credit: A fungus Talaromyces purpureogenus known for its red, diffused pigment
Wim van Egmond - Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition - 2025


From public kissing to talking during movies, a simple formula predicts moral norms across cultures
Apr 2026, phys.org

"An implication of our simple formula is that norms for one behavior can inform us about norms for a very different behavior. For example, the more okay it is to kiss in the street (a behavior that elicits concerns about purity), expect it to be less okay to beat children (which instead elicits concerns about harm)."

Moral Flavors Model = TC(B) + MF(B) x MT(S) 
  • TC - total concern that behavior B is seen to elicit
  • MF - moral flavor either individualizing type (harm, fairness) or binding type (purity, authority, loyalty)
  • MT - moral taste measures emphasis of individualizing concerns over binding concerns

via Institute for Future Studies in Sweden: Kimmo Eriksson et al, Same flavours, different taste buds: a theory for predicting social norms for specific behaviours across cultures, Journal of the Royal Society Interface (2026). DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2025.1122.

Post Script - List of Morally Contentious Behaviors
  • claiming government benefits to which you are not entitled
  • avoiding a fare on public transport
  • stealing property
  • cheating on taxes
  • accepting a bribe 
  • homosexuality
  • prostitution
  • abortion
  • divorce
  • sex before marriage
  • suicide
  • euthanasia
  • for a man to beat his wife
  • parents beating children
  • violence against other people
  • terrorism as a political, ideological or religious mean
  • having casual sex
  • political violence
  • the death penalty
--World Values Survey Wave 7 data (2017–2021) for 42 societies; Minkov M, Kaasa A. 2022 Do dimensions of culture exist objectively? A validation of the revised Minkov-Hofstede model of culture with World Values Survey items and scores for 102 countries. J. Int. Manag. 28, 100971. doi:10.1016/j.intman.2022.100971


How deceptive content reached millions of voters during the 2020 US elections
Apr 2026, phys.org

(Note that Facebook was directly involved in this research, so assume you are being intentionally deceived by this data, at least to some extent, and in an attempt to make Facebook look better than they are)

They focused on 49 deceptive networks that targeted adult Facebook and Instagram users in the US during the 2020 election, both disincentivized networks of users who engaged in inaccurate political discourse and financially motivated networks disseminating content that is largely dismissed as spam or clickbait. 13 out of the 49 identified were "coordinated inauthentic behavior networks", and the remaining 36 networks were found to be financially motivated (by advertising). They were organized by characteristics like where they originated, how many accounts they ran, and what they posted about, as well as by activity and reach.

The networks were measured to have reached about 40 million users, or 15% of the overall network, and were highly concentrated - only 3 of the 49 networks accounted for over 70% of all the users reached. One of which was an account called "Rally Forge' created in the US. (It's really fucking frustrating, in this case for example, to try and get the list of the ** other 2 ** networks, but we can't because it's behind a paywall; a paywall that we already paid for with our tax dollars. And yet we then turn around and give it all away for free to the same companies so they can gobble it up into their too fat, too slow, and too stupid artificial intelligence engines.)

So anyway, here's the important part:
Networks reached most of their audience not directly, but because ordinary users — people unaffiliated with the networks — reshared their content. The network with the highest reach, for example, reached about 1.3 million users directly, but 13 million indirectly through reshares by ordinary users. (That's 10 times more people, for the mathematically challenged among us) ... They suggest that interventions that only target deceptive networks might be insufficient, as regular users are also contributing to the dissemination of misleading content.

So, if you are one of these impact layer people who get hit first, and none of us could really know if that's us because the inauthentic group networks are hidden by design, then by simply using the platform, ie sharing articles with your friends, you are doing up to ten times the work of the company, the group, trying to advertise or influence - we are literally working for them, for free, by taking the attention of our friends and giving it to them, so we are exploiting our own social network for their benefit, likely lessening our own social capital for their increasing financial capital 

One last thing:
Interestingly, the researchers observed that financially motivated networks, which some previous studies dismissed or considered less impactful in the context of elections, produced a substantial amount of political content. Moreover, the content they disseminated often reached far more users than the posts shared across politically motivated networks. (In other words, election financing things like Citizens United, where anyone, anywhere, using otherwise hidden money, also called dark money, can purchase otherwise democratic election campaigns and the candidates they support.)

via Stanford University, Meta, University of Pennsylvania: Ruth E. Appel et al, How deceptive online networks reached millions in the US 2020 elections, Nature Human Behaviour (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02435-2.


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