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
