Tuesday, June 9, 2026

Believe It or Not Everything Is Made of Plastic


This title is supposed to be a joke, and a pun, because artificial spacetime is obviously "plastic", in the original sense of the word. But really, just about anything called "natural" is actually made of petrochemicals and other industrial by-products, because people who buy words instead of things can't tell the difference! 
 
Microrobots overcome navigational limitations with the help of 'artificial spacetimes'
Nov 2025, phys.org

Researchers found that the robots' motion is formally identical to the path light takes in general relativity, which allowed them to develop a mathematical framework mapping robot motion to geodesics in a curved spacetime defined by a control field — as in other reactive control methods. The team used conformal transformations to map complex environments to simple virtual spaces, then designed control fields and mapped them back. They refer to the resulting geometric framework as "artificial spacetimes."

via University of Pennsylvania Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering: William H. Reinhardt et al, Artificial spacetimes for reactive control of resource-limited robots, npj Robotics (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44182-025-00058-9

Image credit: Also fake


Bamboo dishes may leach pesticides and melamine into food
Nov 2025, phys.org

"The 'natural' label can be dangerously misleading. Many of these products are essentially plastic dishes made from melamine-formaldehyde resin containing bamboo filler. Our research shows this combination can accelerate the polymer's degradation and increase the migration of harmful substances like melamine, especially into hot or acidic foods and drinks."

  • Melamine was present in 32% of the tested products; 33 bio-based dishes including bowls, cups, and dining sets purchased from markets in the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, and China. 
  • Six of the bamboo-based products released melamine above the European Union specific migration limit (SML) of 2.5 mg/kg. 
  • Melamine leached into common beverages, including hot lemon tea and orange juice, highlighting a direct route of consumer exposure.
  • Several bio-based dishes, particularly those made from cereals, contained residues of pesticides.
  • Disinfectants were the primary residues found in the bamboo-based items.

Although the use of bamboo as an additive in plastic food contact materials has been banned in the EU since 2021 due to these risks, the study confirms that these items are still available for purchase. The research highlights the false advertising common with these products, which are often labeled as "100% bamboo" or "biodegradable" despite being composed of a plastic resin.

via University of Chemistry and Technology Prague: Kamila Bechynska et al, Comprehensive assessment of bamboo and other bio-based dishes contamination, Food Control (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.foodcont.2025.111188


Why strange cures made sense in mysterious times
Dec 2025, phys.org

"We wanted to know whether the logic of folk medicine followed psychological patterns and it does. The more uncertain or mysterious the illness, the more likely the cure involved magic or religion."

Researchers from Brunel University of London have mined a rare archive of 3,655 folk cures, collected in the 1930s, from an extraordinary national folklore project launched in Ireland. About 50,000 schoolchildren were asked to interview parents, grandparents and neighbors about local history, beliefs and cures. Teachers then transcribed the accounts, creating one of the most detailed records of oral folk medicine ever compiled. They were recently digitized. 

To make sense of the archive, researchers focused on 35 diseases and asked two doctors to rate each one according to how understandable it would have seemed to a layperson at the time, both in terms of what caused the illness and what was going on in the body. Obvious cases like cuts and sprains were marked as "certain"; conditions like tuberculosis, warts, or epilepsy were labeled more mysterious.

"It's pretty unsatisfying just not having a solution of any form. When there aren't particularly good medical solutions, I expect people will keep searching for something that makes sense."

via Brunel University of London Center for Culture and Evolution: Mícheál de Barra et al, Mysterious illnesses have supernatural and ritualistic cures: Evidence from 3,655 century-old Irish folk cures, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2511006122


FDA-cleared brain stimulation device for ADHD is not effective
Jan 2026, phys.org

(I really believe that placebo is about to take over the mental health field, and that the field will be completely blindsided by it)

"There is a large placebo effect with high-tech brain therapies, in particular for patients and families that have an expectation that they can adjust brain differences associated with ADHD. It is hence paramount to control for placebo effects in modern brain therapies to avoid false hopes."

via King's College London Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience: Conti, A.A. et al. External trigeminal nerve stimulation in youth with ADHD: a randomized, sham-controlled, phase 2b trial, Nature Medicine (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41591-025-04075-x


The next generation of disinformation: AI swarms can threaten democracy by manufacturing fake public consensus
Jan 2026, phys.org

  • Synthetic consensus - the illusion that "everyone is saying this"
  • Fabricated chatter - fake people talking 
  • AI swarm - set of AI-controlled agents that maintain persistent identities and memory; coordinate toward shared objectives while varying tone and content; adapt in real time to engagement and human responses; operate with minimal oversight; and deploy across platforms. 
  • Bonus: fake chatter can contaminate training data, extending its influence

via University of Konstanz: Daniel Thilo Schroeder et al, How malicious AI swarms can threaten democracy, Science (2026). DOI: 10.1126/science.adz1697


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Hegemonic Power, Synthetic Humans, and the SAG-AFTRA-AI Manifesto


It might be considered the first real big fight between humans and robots. To summarize into a very, very simple, and incomplete explanation, it happens at a time when the labor union of people who work on movies have to re-negotiate their contract with the people who pay them. They went on strike for 118 days, the longest actors’ strike in Hollywood history. Now they have a new contract.

The problem was that if there's one thing artificial intelligence can do, it's art (as opposed to law, medicine, engineering, etc.). Not saying it's necessarily good at art, but it's sure as hell good enough for the people who pay for movies to be made, and who then go on to make money off those movies. Not sure if it's good enough for the people who pay to watch these movies, but then again, it doesn't seem like anyone needs to care about consumers anymore anyway, so...the people who work on movies are in for a fight if they want to be treated like humans. 

The problem, for the rest of us, is that we're humans too. Well, not if you're reading this, because the only people who read this weblog are in fact robots. But the rest of us are humans. And for the first time since Africa, we are facing real competition.

Below is a report about the 2023 SAG-AFTRA labor story, and some good bits about how humans and robots are being positioned against each other in the labor market, and what that might mean for us in the future. It's written by Data and Society Institute (citation at the very bottom, and in-text references you'll just have to get for yourself from the document; because sorry sir this is a Wendy's). 

*SAG-AFTRA - Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists
*Image credit: Gundam style mechabot made in japan - japantimes www.japantimes.co.jp


On Common Sense, Machine Learning and Big Data
Common sense, or a skewed perception of reality that perpetuates the status quo as normal, natural and unquestionable, is an expression of hegemonic power. The concept of common sense describes commonly held — yet nonetheless fragmented and heterogenous - knowledge that often goes unquestioned as fact (Gramsci,1926/1971). 
 
According to critical theorist Hito Steyerl's (2023) power analysis of machine learning technologies, the power of the owning class depends on its seizure of data. Thus, the discussion of for-profit technology, and speci!cally various applications that track, record, and classify user data, can never be liberatory, despite the claims of the companies, industries, and institutions promising safety, accessibility, efficiency, and sustainability (Bender and Hanna, 2025; Benjamin, 2019).

The “common sense” of AI, that is, the widely-held belief that AI is a foregone conclusion, functions as an articulation of hegemonic power. In this frame, we seek to understand how the labor movement can meaningfully intervene.

AI is not simply a discursive formation that stands as a “common sense” foregone conclusion, it also obfuscates large-scale, transnational coordination of resources, labor, and people who make up the infrastructures that are required for arti!cial intelligence. This matters because it broadens the base for possible coalition building to be mobilized in these “processes of subtraction” (Steyerl, 2023, p. 12).

Data and Society, 2026


See Figure 1 - The four strategies on the left negotiate with the common sense of AI, giving it power and weight, as these strategies work with AI as it is, instead of disengaging with the common sense of AI, and pushing these technologies to work that are commons-based or people-centered.

Robots in Human Clothing, ie The Corporate Flesh Engine
Amazon has long referred to their Mechanical Turk platform as artificial intelligence, but there have always been humans doing the often-underpaid work of classifying and sorting content of all types, increasingly in the Global South (Crawford, 2021; Gonzalez-Cabello et al., 2025). This hidden labor has been referred to as “ghost work” (Gray and Suri, 2019; Muldoon et al., 2024) and “human-fueled automation” (Irani, 2019), drawing attention to the people who power AI systems. 

Synthetic Performers (i.e., entirely digitally-produced performers created through generative AI). The [new negotiated contract] establishes guidelines around the creation and use of “digital replicas” and “synthetic performers.”

Digital replicas are digital reproductions of an actor's voice or likeness. The contract described two types of digital replicas: “employment-based digital replicas” and “independently created digital replicas.”

Employment-based digital replicas are those that are created during the actors’ physical participation in work through methods such as scanning, which can then be used to depict the actor in scenes they did not actually perform.

Independently created digital replicas are made without the actor's physical participation and can perform in scenes that they did not perform. The parameters of consent and compensation vary depending on the type of technology utilized. The guidelines for synthetic performers created through generative AI are less robust than those for digital replicas. Synthetic performers are entirely digitally-produced performers created through generative AI that do not resemble a recognizable actor and are not voiced by a person. The contract requires that studios who want to use a synthetic performer must notify and provide the union with opportunities to bargain over the usage of a synthetic performer in lieu of hiring a human performer. A document drafted by the union with frequently asked questions on AI notes that “for wholly synthetic assets, [studios] cannot use them without notifying the union and bargaining. Had we not done that, there was nothing stopping them from using these synthetic assets without anyone's consent.”

The contract also notes that if studios create a synthetic performer through prompting a generative AI system using a performer's name and their “principal facial feature” — the mouth, nose, eyes, or ears — that is recognizable, studios must bargain with the performer and obtain their consent.

However, for synthetic performers and independently created digital replicas, there are exceptions for consent with regards to uses protected by the First Amendment. A summary of the tentative agreement lists these exceptions as “comment, criticism, scholarship, satire or parody, use in a docudrama, or historical or biographical work.” In the aforementioned types of projects, studios do not need to obtain consent from performers to use their digital doubles.

--Source: Big Data & Society. Dis/engaging the ‘common sense’ of AI: Labor strategies 
from the 2023 SAG-AFTRA around data-driven technologies. Mar 2 2026. Emma May, Britt Paris and Serita Sargent, Rutgers School of Communication & Information.

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Monday, June 8, 2026

Psychosis Engine


There are some conflicting findings floating around the electroniverse. Japanese philosophizing psychologists suggests that addicts make phones look bad, and a Netherlands twin study says something similar. Likely only a coincidence that these studies were coming out at the same time Facebook was on trial in California for intentionally hurting kids. 

In the end, the only conclusion we can make is that science is hard:

People who are easily distracted by smartphones are more physiologically reactive, less attuned to their bodies
Apr 2025, phys.org

People who have an attentional bias towards smartphone stimuli typically display a lower interoceptive awareness, meaning they were less attuned to internal bodily signals such as their heartbeat - a pattern mirroring behavioral addictions like gambling or substance use.

Note, Japanese institutions think differently about the intersection of humans and technology:
"This project began as an interdisciplinary exploration between philosophy and psychology, aiming to understand the relationship between technology and the human body." 

via Hokkaido University: Yusuke Haruki et al, Attentional bias towards smartphone stimuli is associated with decreased interoceptive awareness and increased physiological reactivity, Communications Psychology (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44271-025-00225-6.

Mostly unrelated image credit: Woman Eating a Sandwich, from the archives, pre-AI era 


Twin study challenges oversimplified claims about social media and well-being
Oct 2025, phys.org

6,000 twins in the Netherlands:
  • Small associations were found between social media use and well-being, with most being either negligible or statistically minor.
  • Genetic influences explained up to 72% of the variation in how much time people spend on social media.
  • People with higher well-being tended to use more platforms, but more passively (browsing rather than posting).
  • Those with lower well-being were more likely to post frequently on fewer platforms.

via Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics: Selim Sametoğlu et al, The Association Between Frequency of Social Media Use, Wellbeing, and Depressive Symptoms: Disentangling Genetic and Environmental Factors, Behavior Genetics (2025). DOI: 10.1007/s10519-025-10224-2


Social media research tool can lower political temperature — it could also lead to more user control over algorithms
Nov 2025, phys.org

Key: This research was done "without the direct cooperation of the platform"

Web extension tool coupled with an artificial intelligence large language model that scans posts for antidemocratic and extreme negative partisan sentiments. The tool then re-orders posts on the user's X feed in a matter of seconds:

Antidemocratic attitudes:
  • advocating for extreme measures against the opposing party
  • statements that show rejection of any bipartisan cooperation
  • skepticism of facts that favor the other party's views
  • willingness to forgo democratic principles to help the favored party

Where has this been all these years? Consider, there is often an immediate, unavoidable emotional response to seeing ^this kind of content ... making people feel bad the moment they see it. 

via Stanford's School of Engineering and Universities of Washington and Northeastern: Tiziano Piccardi et al, Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adu5584. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu5584

Also: Jennifer Allen et al, Platform-independent experiments on social media, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.aec7388 , www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec7388


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New Things in Color Tech

 

We have cracked the color-changing codes of both the chameleon and the octopus, we're printing structural color from an inkjet, and making something apparently darker than vantablack. But I'm really just here to say words like nanophotonic metamaterials, and quantum polycrystals. 

'OCTOID,' a soft robot that changes color and moves like an octopus
Dec 2025, phys.org

By precisely controlling the helical molecular arrangement and polymer network structure of this material, they achieved a structure capable of both soft, flexible movement and color changes, just like an actual octopus tentacle.

When an electrical signal is applied, the helical molecular arrangement and polymer network structure of this material's surface undergoes microscopic contraction and expansion, displaying a continuous color change from blue to green to red. It also performs bending and unfolding motions through asymmetric structural changes. Through this process, OCTOID can simultaneously perform three functions - camouflaging, moving, and grabbing - within a single system, just like a real octopus.

via Composite Materials Research Center of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology: Seung Hui Han et al, OCTOID: A Soft Robotic System Featuring Programmable Shape Morphing and Dynamic Structural Coloration, Advanced Functional Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202520014

Absolutely Completely Unrelated Image Credit: (are we still pretending to care about attribution?)


Chameleon-like nanomaterial can adapt its color to mechanical strain
Dec 2025, phys.org

2D nanophotonic metamaterial - Kirigami-inspired structural color, as different from pigment or dye colors - When the material is stretched, its microscopic patterns move and rotate, changing how light reflects from the surface. As a result, during the stretching, the color of the light reflected from this 'nanoscale chameleon skin' shifts smoothly from green to yellow and finally to red. 

via University fo Amsterdam: Freek van Gorp et al, Nonlocal Mechano-Optical Metasurfaces, ACS Photonics (2025). DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.5c01385


Smart material instantly changes colors on demand for use in textiles and consumer products
Dec 202,5 phys.org

They stacked a thin layer of vanadium dioxide on top of a reflective aluminum layer. When heated above a specific temperature, the vanadium dioxide turns from an insulator to a metal, accompanied by a change in its crystalline structure. When light hits this stack, some bounces off the top of the vanadium dioxide, while the rest passes through and bounces off the aluminum below. These two reflected paths of light interfere with each other. The rapid structural change in vanadium dioxide alters the timing of light bouncing from the top and the bottom, making them out of phase. This changes the color that is canceled out, which, in turn, changes the color we see.

via University of Florida: Aritra Biswas et al, Dynamic control of phase for tunable structural colors, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2520990122


Bird-of-paradise inspires darkest fabric ever made
Dec 2025, phys.org

They dyed a white merino wool knit fabric with polydopamine, followed by etching of the material in a plasma chamber to create spiky nanofibrils, to mimic the light-trapping capabilities found on the riflebird's ultrablack feathers.

via Cornell University College of Human Ecology Responsive Apparel Design Lab: Hansadi Jayamaha et al, Ultrablack wool textiles inspired by hierarchical avian structure, Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-65649-4


Structural color can now be printed with an inkjet printer
Apr 2026, phys.org

Spherical silicon crystals that reflect color specifically based on their precise size in the range between 100 and 200 nanometers can now be printed at resolutions between 250 and 125 dots per inch onto a flat PET film as well as on a 3D metallic surface.

via Kobe University: Hiroto Yamana et al, Structural Color Inkjet Printing With Mie‐Resonant Silicon Nanoparticles, Advanced Materials (2026). DOI: 10.1002/adma.202523036

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Sunday, June 7, 2026

Climate Called, Wants Volcanoes Back

 

"More rapidly than we thought" is the theme  here.

But let's start with IMO 2020 - the biggest climate story of the 21st century that you will not hear about because it's too complicated:

When trade routes shift, so do clouds: Researchers uncover ripple effects of new global shipping regulations
Nov 2025, phys.org

In January 2020, the International Maritime Organization mandated a major reduction in sulfur content in marine fuels to decrease air pollution. But this decreased cloud formation, the same clouds that have historically masked about one-third of the warming caused by greenhouse gases.

Militia attacks in November 2023 rerouted cargo ships in the Red Sea's Bab al-Mandab Strait to the Cape of Good Hope, and gave researchers the opportunity to discover that the new fuel regulations that cut sulfur by about 80% also lowered cloud droplet formation by about 67%. (Quantifying how clouds respond to changes in aerosols remains one of the biggest challenges in studying the climate.)

Although these aerosols temporarily cool the planet, this comes at the cost of human health. Exposure to sulfur particles, potent air pollutants, is linked to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. The IMO regulation is estimated to have already prevented tens of thousands of premature deaths.

via Florida State University Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science: Michael S. Diamond et al, Conflict-induced ship traffic disruptions constrain cloud sensitivity to stricter marine pollution regulations, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (2025). DOI: 10.5194/acp-25-16401-2025

Image credit: Space tornado - coronal mass ejection plasma stream - Chip Manchester for University of Michigan - 2025 [link]

Key 'fingerprint' reveals slowdown of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation
Nov 2025, phys.org

  • They uncovered a key "fingerprint" of AMOC slowdown: mid-depth (1,000–2,000 meters) warming in the equatorial Atlantic Ocean.
  • Using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology General Circulation Model (MITgcm)
  • AMOC slowdown triggers subsurface warming in the subpolar North Atlantic, which then generates baroclinic Kelvin waves traveling equatorward along the western boundary of the North Atlantic; upon reaching the equator, these waves propagate along the equatorial region, ultimately causing the distinct mid-depth warming.

via Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Oceanology, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and UC San Diego: Qiuping Ren et al, Equatorial Atlantic mid-depth warming indicates Atlantic meridional overturning circulation slowdown, Communications Earth & Environment (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s43247-025-02793-1


Ocean's upper 1,000 meters undergoing unprecedented, deep-reaching compound change
Nov 2025, phys.org

"The ocean is experiencing strong compound change multidimensionally. The ocean condition is transforming in multiple dimensions at once, and even the deep ocean - once considered stable - is responding more rapidly than we thought."

via Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Mercator Ocean International, and the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at the École Normale Supérieure in France: Observed large-scale and deep-reaching compound ocean state changes over the past 60 years, Nature Climate Change (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41558-025-02484-x.
 

Global warming amplifies extreme day-to-day temperature swings
Dec 2025, phys.org

"Climate roller coaster" (aka weather whiplash)

The study defines such extreme temperature events as occurrences where the temperature difference between two consecutive days exceeds the 90th percentile of historical records. These extreme day-to-day temperature changes have become more frequent and intense across low- to mid-latitude regions. Soil drought leads to reduce the surface's heat capacity and amplify fluctuations in cloud cover and radiation. 

The health risks posed by these sudden temperature shifts outweigh other temperature-related variables. The correlation between these extreme temperature events and all-cause mortality follows a near-exponential pattern. (exponential)

via Nanjing University and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences: Qi Liu et al, Global warming intensifies extreme day-to-day temperature changes in mid–low latitudes, Nature Climate Change (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41558-025-02486-9

*They don't mention acclimation but that's why it's so dangerous. A 100F day is hot, but an 80F day after a 50F day is equally hot, relative to the body that's trying to cool itself. People need something like one day per degree to acclimate, and weather whiplash does not allow that.

“Acclimatization” means temporary adaptation of the body to work in the heat that occurs gradually when a person is exposed to it. Acclimatization peaks in most people within four to fourteen days of regular work for at least two hours per day in the heat. 
--Source: California Department of Industrial Relations, Heat Illness Prevention in Indoor Places of Employment, Mar 2023. https://www.dir.ca.gov/OSHSB/Indoor-Heat.html

Mostly meaningless unlabeled line chart

Category '6' tropical cyclone hot spots are growing
Dec 2025, phys.org

Hurricane Patricia, which formed in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico, was the strongest tropical cyclone ever recorded, with wind intensity of up to 185 knots - enough to make it considered a Category 7 storm, if such a thing existed. 
  • Cat 4 - 114 - 137 knots
  • Cat 5 - 137 (or more) knots
  • Cat 6 - 160 (or more) knots, proposed

via American Geophysical Union and Department of Atmospheric Science at the National Taiwan University: A31A-06 Category ‘6’ Tropical Cyclone Hot Spots in the Warming Climate


Excruciating tropical disease can now be transmitted in most of Europe, study finds
Feb 2026, The Guardian

Higher temperatures due to the climate crisis mean infections (chikungunya, dengue) are now possible for more than six months of the year in Spain, Greece and other southern European countries, and for two months a year in south-east England. 

“Twenty years ago, if you said we were going to have chikungunya and dengue in Europe, everybody would have said you were mad: these are tropical diseases. Now everything’s changed."

via UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology 


Widespread 'enhanced rock weathering' could slow global warming
Feb 2026 phys.org

Enhanced Rock Weathering - crush silicate rocks, add to crop soil, and let the rock dust naturally react with carbon dioxide. The reactions bind carbon into stable mineral forms that can persist for millennia, while also enriching the soil with nutrients, boosting crop yields and increasing farmer profits.

It could remove up to about a gigaton of carbon from the atmosphere annually by 2100, roughly equivalent to the yearly emissions of a major industrial economy. But to reach that mark, access and adoption by the Global South, where warmer and wetter conditions facilitate rock weathering, will be essential.

(Which is interesting to consider, because obviously the Global North will not stop burning fossils, and the Global North will not solve this problem. It's the Global South only who has the ability to fix the future.)

via Cornell: Ying Tu et al, Scaling up enhanced rock weathering for equitable climate change mitigation, Communications Sustainability (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s44458-026-00034-w


An unprecedented Antarctic heat wave hit in the dead of winter - what it signals for the decades ahead
Apr 2026, phys.org

In July and August 2024, temperatures in parts of East Antarctica rose by up to 28°C above average and stayed high for more than two weeks. It followed a heat wave in March 2022, when temperatures in some Antarctic areas soared by nearly 40°C above average — one of the largest temperature anomalies ever recorded anywhere on the planet.

via University of Sheffield: Haosu Tang et al, Unprecedented 2024 East Antarctic winter heatwave driven by polar vortex weakening and amplified by anthropogenic warming, npj Climate and Atmospheric Science (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41612-026-01392-x


‘Point of no return’: New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level, study finds
May 2026, The Guardian

The process of relocating people from New Orleans should start immediately, as the city has reached a “point of no return” that will see it surrounded by the ocean within decades due to the climate crisis, a stark new study has concluded.

Ongoing sea-level rise and the rampant erosion of wetlands in southern Louisiana will swallow up the New Orleans area within a few generations, with the new paper estimating the city “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century”.


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Saturday, June 6, 2026

Clash of the Titans Never Ends


YouTube TV Blackout Costing Disney $4.3M per Day in Lost Revenue
Nov 2025, Variety Magazine
(Disney is losing an estimated $4.3 million per day from the ongoing YouTube TV blackout of ESPN, ABC, and other networks amid a contract dispute over carriage fees.)

Billionaire US investor Ken Griffin accuses Trump White House of ‘enriching’ itself
Feb 2026, The Guardian

OpenAI lawsuit updates: Elon Musk v. Sam Altman trial
Apr 2026, CNBC News

Mostly unrelated image above: Jane Rosenberg is a courtroom sketch artist. She seems to work exclusively at a federal courthouse in New York. She's been doing this for a very long time, and her work is (to me at least) immediately recognizable, and beyond what one should expect of a courtroom sketch artist, and it's often used as the thumbnail in media coverage for high profile cases such as the those from the articles mentioned above, or from, for example, the P Diddy case, from whence we get the new word "diddling", circa 2025. 

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Friday, June 5, 2026

Make Stuff Up

 

A clearer future: Researchers unveil transparent, plastic-free wood
Feb 2026, phys.org

There was a lot of work coming out related to wood, like black wood, clear wood, wood stronger than steel, and I'm not sure what happened to all that. 

Wood is normally opaque because it contains lignin and countless microscopic air cavities called lumens, which scatter light. Removing lignin turns wood white and translucent but achieving true transparency has been challenging.

The research team focused on delignified wood treated with potassium hydroxide (KOH). They discovered that alkali treatment removes most of the remaining hemicellulose and changes the chemical state of carboxyl groups in the cell walls. These changes soften the wood's internal cellulose microfibril skeleton. When the treated wood is dried, the softened cell walls collapse more completely, reducing internal air gaps and dramatically decreasing light scattering. As a result, the material becomes highly transparent—without polymer impregnation or plastic additives.

via University of Osaka: Hitomi Yagyu et al, Anisotropic Transparency of Alkali‐Treated Wood, Macromolecular Materials and Engineering (2026). DOI: 10.1002/mame.202500389



AI-designed diffractive optical processors pave the way for low-power structural health monitoring
Mar 2026, phys.org

Probably read carefully, this is complicated.

Structural Health Monitoring - Instead of relying on traditional sensor networks that digitize raw physical signals, the new system uses a passive, optimized diffractive layer attached to the target structure. As the structure oscillates, this optimized diffractive surface moves, modulating an incoming illuminating wave to encode the structural displacements into light, which is then captured by a few optical detectors and rapidly decoded by a low-power neural network.

via UCLA Engineering Institute for Technology Advancement: Yuntian Wang et al, Structural vibration monitoring with diffractive optical processors, Science Advances (2026). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aea1712


What Chinese characters can tell us about designing strong materials
Apr 2026, phys.org

So what about graffiti?

"Certain Chinese characters have strong, distinctive geometries, and these are shapes that 'felt' like they could exhibit unique mechanical properties and behaviors." 

The presence of curves, crossbeams, and gradation, and the fact that they fit into discrete square cells makes Chinese characters especially fit for creating functional, structural unit cells.

via American Institute of Physics and University of Edinburgh: Mechanical metamaterials built from Chinese characters, The Journal of Applied Physics (2026). DOI: 10.1063/5.0304459


Texas startup uses robots to build homes out of clay and soil
May 2026, KXAN Austin

Startup Terran Robotics - they're literally grabbing dirt from the ground at the site and using it to build the house, using robots to do "rammed earth" construction, which is, interestingly, also the building style most often used in the self-sustainable Earthships of the American Southwest. 


How cement 'breathes in' and stores millions of tons of CO₂ a year
Dec 2025, phys.org

The cement in U.S. buildings and infrastructure sequesters over 6.5 million metric tons of CO2 annually. This corresponds to roughly 13% of the process emissions in U.S. cement manufacturing. In Mexico, the same building stock sequesters about 5 million tons a year.

A concrete highway in Dallas sequesters CO2 differently than Mexico City apartments made from concrete masonry units (CMUs). A foundation slab buried under the snow in Fairbanks, Alaska, "breathes in" CO2 at a different pace entirely.

"Carbon uptake is very sensitive to context. Four major factors drive it: the type of cement used, the product we make with it (concrete, CMUs, or mortar), the geometry of the structure, and the climate and conditions it's exposed to. Even within the same structure, uptake can vary five-fold between different elements."

"We observed something unique about Mexico: Despite using half the cement that the U.S. does, the country has three-quarters of the uptake. This is because Mexico makes more use of mortar and lower-strength concrete, and bagged cement mixed on-site. These practices are why their uptake sequesters about a quarter of their cement manufacturing emissions."

"Increasing the amount of surface area exposed to air accelerates uptake and can be achieved by foregoing painting or tiling, or choosing designs like waffle slabs with a higher surface area-to-volume ratio. Additionally, avoiding unnecessarily stronger, less-porous concrete mixtures than required would speed up uptake while using less cement."

via MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub: Hessam AzariJafari et al, Carbon uptake dynamics of cement-based materials: Linking market structure, material use, and the carbon cycle, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2515116122

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