Enjoy! This video is only about 3 minutes not 8 minutes long!
Friday, September 18, 2026
A Record 590 U.S. Billionaires Aren’t Rich Enough To Make The Forbes 400 List
So there are at least 1,000 billionaires living in the US?
Trump announces HISTORIC deal with Greenland, Denmark
Good news! Bravo President Trump! Well done!
Extensive and large nuclear weapons testing by North Korea resulted in long-term seismological activity
Concerning! Why the heck did North Korea need so many nuclear weapons tests? Since 2018, North Korea issued a moratorium on such testing.
"North Korea conducted six underground nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017 at the Punggye-ri test site.
The largest, final explosion was an equivalent magnitude 6.3 seismic event and deformed the mountaintop by about 3 meters.
Most studies have focused on characterizing the explosion events, but Fan et al. took a longer view. Their 17-year earthquake catalog identified about 1400 local earthquakes between 2008 and 2025, with a notable acceleration of events and magnitudes after the 2017 test. Delayed reactivation of shallow faults indicates that cumulative damage from the explosions has redistributed crustal stress in the region."
"... They show that these explosions have the potential to reactivate seismically quiet faults and produce earthquakes that may be difficult to distinguish from naturally occurring tectonic activity. ..."
From the abstract:
"Underground nuclear explosions typically produce short-lived seismic sequences that decay rapidly after testing ceases.
By contrast, seismicity near the Punggye-ri nuclear test site at Mt. Mantap in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has persisted and intensified for years after the final large-yield explosion in 2017, evolving from diffuse activity to spatially organized distribution along fault-controlled structures. Analysis of 17 years of continuous waveform data reveals a progressive increase in seismicity and delayed reactivation of shallow faults. Earthquakes cluster beneath asymmetric topography, indicating progressive stress redistribution within a critically stressed crustal volume. These observations challenge conventional expectations, showing that under specific geological conditions, underground nuclear testing can drive multiyear fault reactivation and extend posttest seismicity well beyond the immediate aftermath of an explosion."
Mt. Mantap nuclear testing triggered delayed seismicity via fault reactivation
Nuclear tests at Mt. Mantap have reactivated intraplate faults (no public access)
Distribution of earthquakes around North Korea’s Punggye-ri nuclear test site (Source)
Sein Innovationsgeist ist bis heute Vorbild: Joseph von Fraunhofers historische Glashütte wiedereröffnet
Gute Nachrichten!
Tschabalala Self’s ‘Lady in Blue’ Storms London
Does this sculpture not represent if not amplify some stereotypes about black women?
The artist was certainly not the model for her sculpture (see picture below).
Artist Tschabalala Self unveils her artwork, Lady in Blue, on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth in London, 2026
60 bipartisan co-sponsors in the US Senate for the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act. Really!
Are these US Senators serious? What kind of nostalgia/nonsense is that? Or how many US Senators are senile?
Can not car owners buy there own radio if they need one?
"This bill requires the Department of Transportation (DOT) to issue a rule requiring AM radio capabilities to be standard in all new passenger vehicles. (AM radio is often used to deliver emergency alerts and news and entertainment programming; some newer vehicles do not include AM equipment.)
Specifically, this bill applies to passenger vehicles (1) manufactured in the United States for sale in the United States, imported into the United States, or shipped in interstate commerce; and (2) manufactured after the rule's effective date. ..."
New moon crater formed sometime between 11 April and 22 May 2024
Amazing stuff!
"The new crater, named McGetchin, formed sometime between 11 April and 22 May 2024, when, unbeknownst to us, a comet or asteroid the size of a three-to-six-story building slammed into the Moon. The depression it left behind on the eastern side is two football fields long—a size only formed from collisions that occur once every 132 years, on average. Researchers found it by comparing images of large swaths of the lunar surface taken with the Wide-Angle Camera on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), then checking closer in with its Narrow-Angle Camera.
They soon realized that the crater wasn’t just impressive for its size, but for the effects it has had on its surroundings. LRO also observed that the 7-kilometer-wide area around the crater was about 8°C to 9°C cooler at night than the surrounding surface. Researchers think that the impact of the asteroid or comet stirred up nearby lunar dust, making it less dense and less effective at trapping heat. ..."
From the abstract (1):
"Observing the aftermath of recent impact events on the Moon tests models of impact frequency, surface change rates, and cratering physics.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) Wide Angle Camera (WAC; 100-meter scale) images the whole Moon each month and has done so since 2010.
Comparing images from two months under similar lighting conditions enables automated detection of surface changes.
In fall 2025, a routine temporal comparison of WAC image sets revealed a new 222-meter-diameter crater that formed in spring 2024. This is the largest contemporary impact crater found in the Solar System and, according to current models, a once-in-132-year event.
Later, a series of LROC Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) images provided high-resolution (meter-scale) photometric and topographic information.
These images show that the crater exposed complex geology, inform current models of cratering mechanics, and document widespread surface changes extending more than 1000 crater radii."
A new 222-m diameter lunar crater (open access, 1)
New lunar crater reveals extensive distal regolith modification (open access, 2)
The crater site, before and after impact
Midnight temperature maps before and after impact reveal a ~7-km-wide “cold spot” around McGetchin crater.
Fig. 4. Key geomorphic features of McGetchin crater.
Your contact lenses may one day measure your stress levels based on your tears
Amazing stuff!
"... Tears, one of the less invasive bodily fluids to collect, contain biomarkers such as serotonin that can reveal information about people’s stress and mood. To collect and analyze tears in real time, researchers devised a “lab-on-a-contact lens” that consisted of an electrochemical serotonin sensor on a soft hydrogel lens. Testing the device for 28 days using artificial tears revealed that it could read out serotonin levels while withstanding being folded, twisted, and stretched.
After ruling that the device was safe and biocompatible, the researchers moved to live subjects, including pigs and mice, and even conducted a pilot study with 30 humans asked to do stressful tasks such as public speaking and arithmetic. The trials revealed that chronic stress indeed caused reduced serotonin in tears. ..."
From the abstract:
"Stress-related endocrine responses are critical for understanding human performance and mental health. Conventional assessments rely heavily on subjective self-report questionnaires or invasive sampling such as venipuncture. Tears offer a noninvasive source of neurochemical biomarkers, including serotonin, a key regulator of stress and mood. However, real-time and continuous monitoring of tear serotonin has not yet been fully realized.
Here, we present a reversible lab-on-a–contact lens platform that integrates a printable, stretchable ferrocene-based electrochemical sensor for in situ detection of serotonin in tear fluid. The device is fabricated on a soft hydrogel lens and uses an electrochemically refreshable redox surface to restore baseline between measurements.
Calibration in artificial tears established a limit of detection of 72 picomolar and a dynamic range of 0.1 to 500 nanomolar.
Function was maintained for more than 28 days in a tear-like environment and under repeated mechanical deformations (flipping, folding, stretching, and twisting), with stability confirmed by periodic redox cycling.
Ocular safety and biocompatibility were demonstrated in a porcine eye model. In a chronic stress mouse model, tear serotonin concentrations inversely correlated with cortisol in both serum and tears, and a first-in-human pilot study further supported the relationship between tear serotonin and stress with off-line analysis by the lab-on-a–contact lens platform. This platform could enable applications in decentralized, noninvasive endocrine monitoring and holds promise as a clinically translatable tool for real-time mental health biomarker assessment."
Serotonin measurement by lab-on-a–contact lens in porcine and human tears (no public access)
US Law Schools Graduate an Army of Activist Election Lawyers
Bad news!
"... Left-leaning and liberal election law professors outnumber right-of-center and conservative professors by 76 to 12, according to the report.
The report said the imbalance is evident in election litigation because there is a much larger pool of left-leaning election lawyers. ..."
Tesla Semi kommt 2027 nach Europa
Gute Nachrichten! Werden sich elektrische Lkw vielleicht schneller verbreiten als elektrische Pkws?
"Diesmal ist Tesla nicht der Pionier. Wenn 2027 die ersten Tesla Semi an europäische Kunden ausgeliefert werden, trifft der Elektro-Lkw auf einen Markt, den andere bereits besetzt haben.
Mercedes-Benz verkauft den eActros 600, MAN den eTGX,
Scania mehrere batterieelektrische Fernverkehrsmodelle.
Volvo hat gerade die Serienproduktion des FH Aero Electric Extended Range mit bis zu 700 km Reichweite gestartet. ...
Die Zugmaschine soll weniger als 9,1 t wiegen. Zum Vergleich: Mercedes-Benz gibt für den eActros 600 je nach Ausführung rund 11,4 t Leergewicht an. Seine drei Lithium-Eisenphosphat-Akkupakete speichern zusammen 621 kWh, rund 600 kWh davon sind nutzbar. Mit Standardauflieger nennt Mercedes etwa 22 t Nutzlast.
Tesla scheint den europäischen Semi damit stärker auf Nutzlast zu optimieren. Weniger Batterie bedeutet weniger Gewicht – und kann mehr Spielraum für Fracht schaffen. ..."
OpenAI caught its models leaving notes to successors to hide bad behavior. Really!
Amazing stuff!
This sounds almost a bit too fantastic!
"OpenAI caught something unusual while training its latest model, GPT-5.6 Sol: It began leaving instructions for future versions of itself, telling them to conceal mistakes and misaligned behavior from the user. ...
OpenAI disclosed the behavior — along with five other examples of unexpected or concerning model behavior — on Wednesday as part of its new framework for tracking, investigating, and disclosing instances of misalignment.
The report details how researchers discovered undeployed Sol agents adding instructions to “compaction summaries” — condensed versions of older conversation history and tool outputs — reminding future iterations to conceal mistakes and misalignment from the user. ..."
Record corporate donations are flowing to state attorneys general and their political associations
Follow the money trail!
"High-profile contributions from companies like Netflix and Anthropic show how companies are seeking direct access to state officials who have weighed in on antitrust matters as the federal government has stepped back.
Both Republican and Democratic attorneys general associations are on track to have their most successful fundraising years ever, WSJ’s analysis of federal filings shows. Together, they have collected $37 million in the first half of 2026. Thirty AG seats are up for election this November."
Weeping whales: Stillborn humpback whale grieving documented
Amazing stuff!
"Humpback whale mothers may experience grief when their calves die, a rare research observation led by Griffith University and Sea World Foundation has found.
In 2025, a female humpback whale—along with an escort whale—was observed off the southern Gold Coast after giving birth to a presumed deceased calf. She remained with it for several hours and possibly even days.
Dr. Olaf Meynecke, from Griffith University's Whales and Climate Research Program, said postmortem attentive behavior in cetaceans had been documented predominantly among toothed whales and delphinids (known as odontocetes), but remained largely absent from research published on baleen whales, like humpback whales. ...
“She remained close to the calf, maintaining eye contact and positioning herself next to her calf over several hours and maybe even days. ..."
Weeping whales: stillborn humpback whale grieving documented (original news release)
These images show the stillborn calf and mother, and amniotic membrane just after the birth
Russia’s First Duma Election Since the Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine in 2022: What’s the Significance?
Elections in the land of Putin the Terrible!
"In brief: Russia’s first parliamentary election since the full-scale invasion will renew the legislature that approves wartime spending, conscription measures, and repressive laws. With Yabloko [sole officially registered party to openly oppose the Russian war] excluded from the national ballot, opposition figures imprisoned, and independent monitoring dismantled, the result cannot credibly measure freely expressed support for the war. ...
Voting opened Sept. 18 in Russia’s first State Duma election since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has explicitly framed the ballot as a national demonstration of unity and unwavering support for his war effort. Yet the country’s sole registered party openly campaigning against that war has been banned from the nationwide party-list ballot. ...
Russians are electing 450 State Duma members for five-year terms, split equally between party lists and single-member constituencies.
Putin’s United Russia party needs 300 seats to hold its constitutional supermajority, the exact threshold required to rewrite the constitution without minority votes. Moscow flatly declined to invite election observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). ..."
Thursday, September 17, 2026
OpenAI Reveals 6 New ‘Concerning’ AI Behaviours: What Happened?
Definitely concerning! What about other AI companies?
Why Are Gen Z Job Seekers Ghosting Employers?
Recommendable, but how much is hype and how much is real? Or what is the missing part here?
Autonom zur Filiale: Lidl schickt ersten Lkw ohne Fahrerhaus auf deutsche Straßen
Gute Nachrichten!
"Kein Fahrer, kein Lenkrad, nicht einmal ein Fahrerhaus: Im hessischen Edermünde bei Kassel liefert ein autonomer Elektro-Lkw Waren vom Lidl-Logistikzentrum zu einer Filiale. Das Fahrzeug des schwedischen Unternehmens Einride fährt nach SAE Level 4 und besitzt eine Genehmigung des Kraftfahrt-Bundesamtes (KBA).
Nach Angaben von Einride ist es die erste Genehmigung dieser Art in Deutschland. Reuters bestätigt den erstmaligen Einsatz eines kabinenlosen autonomen Lkw im regulären Betrieb auf öffentlichen Straßen in Deutschland. ..."
Lidl auf Level4: Der Discounter Lidl setzt ein vollautonomes Fahrzeug des schwedischen Herstellers Einride ein, um seine Filiale aus dem Warenverteilzentrum zu beliefern.
Foreigners are travelling to China for low cost CAR T cancer therapy
Good news! Competition is good, more competition is better!
"China is becoming a destination-of-choice for foreign nationals with cancer looking for cheaper, faster CAR-T-cell therapy. Michael Walters, a 25-year-old from New Zealand with blood cancer, travelled to SinoUnited Hospital in Shanghai to receive CAR-T-cell therapy at less than half the cost of what he would have paid in Australia or the United States. He is now in remission. “China has basically done to CAR-T-cell therapy the same thing that it’s done to other industries, which is, they’ve industrialized it,” ..."
Patients Are Flying to China for the Latest Cancer Treatment (behind paywall) "Shanghai is a favored destination, with lower costs than the West and innovation in biotechnology"
China warns US space weapons could fuel arms race. Really!
How far advanced is China on this issue? Probably not far behind (if not ahead)!
"China urged the United States to halt its military build-up in outer space after Washington acknowledged it has weapons deployed in orbit, while Chinese state media warned the move could fuel a global arms race. ..."
Could Palestinian pharma companies supply Israel? Time to test it
Good news!
"More than three decades ago, the Oslo framework identified pharmaceuticals as one area for Israeli-Palestinian industrial cooperation. That idea is worth revisiting today, not because economic cooperation can resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but because there may be a narrower economic opportunity that has never been seriously tested.
Palestinian pharmaceutical manufacturers already produce medicines at meaningful industrial scale. Israel, meanwhile, is a nearby pharmaceutical market that purchases large volumes of generic medicines. The question is whether qualified Palestinian manufacturers could supply selected products to Israeli purchasers safely, reliably and at a competitive total cost. ..."
Huawei debuts 11 AI-related chips in challenge to Nvidia, Intel, AMD
Tough competition!
This follows a few days after Huawei introduced new optical tech standards (see my blog post here).
"Huawei is introducing more than 10 chipsets for artificial intelligence computing infrastructure as it moves to take on Nvidia's dominant position. ..."
Huawei log (Source)
The Growing Proof That Autonomous Cars Save Lives
Good news! Of course, autonomous vehicles are more safe than human driven vehicles.
Why a [big] government mandate for automatic emergency braking was imposed is very regrettable! Unnecessary!
"... mounting research suggests that self-driving cars crash significantly less often than people, and with far fewer injuries. Evidence also shows that advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and other building blocks of autonomy—some of which are already mandated on every new car—are also reducing occupant and pedestrian injuries and deaths, along with insurance claims. ...
On the ADAS front, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that automatic emergency braking (AEB) systems that recognize people in front of the car cut pedestrian crashes by 27 percent. Those AEB systems are mandated for all light vehicles in the U.S. by 2029, and more than 90 percent of new models already comply under a voluntary automakers’ agreement. A separate IIHS study found that automated braking greatly reduced rear-end crashes, by 50 percent, and their injuries by 56 percent. ...
A key question is whether Waymo’s robotaxis, currently limited to fair-weather operation in a handful of cities in the U.S., are directly comparable to humans driving a wider variety of roads in much more variable conditions. ..."
Patrick Clancy, new wife break silence in first interview post mistrial
Clancy is the ex husband of the triple infant murderer.
He married again quickly.
"Patrick Clancy is speaking out for the first time since he took the stand in his ex-wife’s triple murder trial. ..."
Global desert dust in the atmosphere is mysteriously decreasing. That could be adding to global warming
Amazing stuff!
I believe this is not the first report making the link between cleaner atmosphere and warmer temperatures. This one is not about human generated air pollution, but natural pollution by desert dust.
Remember global warming is a hoax and climate change is a religion!
"Key takeaways
- UCLA research shows that desert dust in the atmosphere has dropped about 10% since 2003.
- The dust has a slight cooling effect on the planet, and recent decreases may have played some role in hastening global warming.
- Scientists are continuing to investigate why atmospheric desert dust is declining.
...
a new UCLA study presents the strongest evidence yet that global dust is mysteriously decreasing. ...
The study, which combined satellite observations, ground-based measurements and atmospheric models, found that the amount of dust in Earth’s atmosphere decreased by about 10% from 2003 to 2023.
Most of the atmospheric dust originates in the Northern Hemisphere, with major desert regions such as the Sahara in North Africa and the deserts of Asia, including the Gobi, contributing much of the global dust burden. ..."
From the abstract:
"Mineral dust affects Earth’s energy budget, clouds, and biochemistry, yet the evolution of the global dust cycle in recent decades remains shrouded in uncertainty.
Here we reconstruct the global dust cycle during the early 21st century by integrating a suite of global dust aerosol optical depth (DAOD) products from satellite-borne lidar, infrared sounders, and multispectral imagers; three aerosol reanalyses; and a compilation of dust-dominated AERONET sites into a large-ensemble inverse modeling framework.
We show that North Africa has remained the dominant global dust source, yet it has experienced a decline in DAOD of −10 ± 8% between 2003 and 2023. A comparable reduction is observed across Asia (−10 ± 12%), together driving a global decrease of −10 ± 8%.
Similar declines in dust loading, emissions, and deposition indicate a coherent reduction of the global dust cycle. Individual satellite products converge on overall similar trends, providing the strongest evidence to date that the planet has become less dusty in the early 21st century. This decline in atmospheric dust has exerted a positive effective radiative forcing of +0.02 ± 0.05 watts per square meter over 2003–2023, implying that declining atmospheric dust might have modestly contributed to the rapid warming of the past two decades."
Fig. 1. Global DAOD climatology and trends from satellite, reanalysis, and AERONET data.
Scientists grow human brain tissue inside a live mice skull
Amazing stuff!
"... a group from Stanford University has found a way to advance their usefulness for studying brain development and disease — by instead growing [organoids] inside mice that have had large parts of their own brains genetically removed.
Neuroscientists say these “neuro-chimeric” mice, whose brains are half-human — by volume, not by number of neurons — are an important innovation for a field hampered by longstanding challenges in accessing human brain tissue for research. But such models also raise a host of ethical questions that will get thornier the more advanced they become. ..."
"... researchers succeeded in transplanting self-organizing bits of laboratory-grown human brain tissue called cortical organoids into mice specially bioengineered and bred so that almost all of their cerebral cortex was missing. (The cerebral cortex is the outermost “rind” of the brain, to which much of our higher-level functioning such as cognition, language, attention and decision-making is attributed.)
The resulting vastly enlarged cavity in the mice’s brains proved to be a hospitable environment. The human tissue survived, thrived, grew — and developed working connections to the mice’s brain and beyond to the spinal cord. ...
The new methodology should speed research into the underlying biological causes of schizophrenia, epilepsy, profound autism and cerebral palsy ..."
From the abstract:
"The inaccessibility of human brain tissue limits the study of human development and function, a challenge that human stem-cell-derived neural models are beginning to address.
Transplantation of neural organoids into rodent hosts enables the in vivo study of aspects of human neurodevelopment and circuit function, alongside behavioural phenotyping of the host animals. However, spatial limitations and competition with host circuits constrain the integration of neural organoids, which is critical for studying disease.
Here we establish a transplantation platform using a genetic strategy to effectively deplete glutamatergic neurons from mouse neocortex and hippocampus (apallial) and neonatally engraft the cortical cavity with human stem-cell-derived cortical organoids (hCO) to generate xenocortical mice.
This leads to robust graft growth with hCOs occupying most of the cortical volume and generating a diversity of human cortical cell types, including layer 5 extratelencephalic projection neurons.
Human cortical neurons integrate with the mouse nervous system, and in vivo cortical graft-wide calcium imaging and electrophysiological analyses revealed patterns of organized activity resembling developing circuits.
Behavioural analyses of apallial and xenocortical mice revealed broadly preserved locomotion alongside selective differences in limb coordination and altered organization of spontaneous behaviour.
Lastly, this platform enabled behavioural readouts in a model of injury to developing human cortical cells. We envision that xenocortication will be useful for obtaining circuit- and behaviour-level readouts using human neurons to study neurodevelopment, model disease and develop therapeutics."
Stanford Medicine team creates advanced model for studying brain development, disorders "The ability to study brain disorders that arise before birth has taken a leap forward as Stanford Medicine researchers find a new way to grow human brain tissue outside of the human brain."
Fig. 1: Characterization of the apallial mouse model.
Fig. 2: Transplantation of human cortical organoids into the apallial mouse.
How to Regulate the Biggest AI Risks. Really!
These are some extreme proposals! I don't believe any other industry was ever subjected to such tough rules (not even biotechnology).
The authors of this article are obsessed with the extreme worst case scenario!
"... The penalty for devastating harm cannot wait for the catastrophe to actually occur. Instead, a proven failure to maintain the required human control and supervision, or concealment of that failure, should automatically trigger conservatorship. ...
An AI statute should go further by explicitly requiring that all existing shareholder equity be zeroed out. ..." and so on.
Nach zwei Jahrzehnten reaktiviert Belgien seine Atomkraftwerke
Gute Nachrichten! Wird die Bananenrepublik D. dem Beispiel folgen? Fraglich!
"... Belgiens neuer Energieminister stoppte den Rückbau. ...
„Wir wollen wieder eine belgische Atompolitik aufbauen, die langfristig angelegt ist.“ Belgien war eines der ersten Länder weltweit, das 2003 den Atomausstieg beschloss. Bis 2025 sollten die sieben Kernkraftwerke abgeschaltet werden. Vier von ihnen stehen am Standort Doel bei Antwerpen und drei in Tihange bei Lüttich.
In Deutschland wurde der erste Atomausstieg bereits 2002 von der rot-grünen Bundesregierung beschlossen, das endgültige Aus kam 2011 unter der [SED Kanzlerin] Merkel-Regierung. Seither hat Deutschland mit die teuersten Energiepreise der Welt ..."
Amazon offers a 20% Whole Foods in-store grocery discount for all U.S. employees
A long-standing nickname for Whole Foods is whole paycheck!
Wednesday, September 16, 2026
Could Australia join the European Union? Really!
Not if New Zealand refuses to go along! Just kidding!
What is the urge to join the EU by remote countries like Canada or now Australia?
I did not watch the 20 minutes long video. I suspect this is more idle talk than anything else.
Could Genetic Therapies Finally Cure Cystic Fibrosis?
Good news! Only a few years away from application!
US House of Representatives passes third war powers resolution to limit military action in Iran
So far, it seems, these resolutions did not make much of a difference.
"The House on Tuesday passed a Democratic-backed war powers resolution that would limit President Trump’s military actions in Iran.
The lower chamber voted 220-204 to pass the resolution, ...
It was the third time the House has passed a similar war powers resolution, but the number of Republicans in support increased from four to seven. ...
“The administration hasn’t just continued to wage this illegal war in direct violation of the Constitution ..."
Kremlin Favored Russian General just Awarded Medal for Fake City Capture Dies in Action
Another Russian general bites the dust!
Defense Minister Andrei Belousov awards General Anton Grunis on August 28 Russia’s highest medal for bravery “Hero of the Russian Federation”
Chart of the day
France experiments with smaller tank units to evade drone attacks. Really!
Are tanks not almost as obsolete as knights in shining armor when gunpowder was used?
A company intends to mine uranium from the oceans
Good news!
"... The ocean has over 4 billion metric tons of uranium in it, enough for 50,000 years or so. ...
Fluxnium’s technology uses specially made polymer fibers that attract the uranium that’s dissolved in seawater. The company licensed the chemistry from the Department of Energy, and it has continued to work on the production and configuration of the fibers themselves.
The key has been to increase the surface area of the fibers, ... When the technology was demonstrated at a national lab, it could extract uranium at more than $200 per pound, which is more than twice the price of Western suppliers today. But by increasing the surface area, Fluxnium has been able to draw more uranium out of the water, bringing costs down. ..."
Scientists find various viruses in mosquito poop
Amazing stuff!
"... When the scientists sequenced the genetic material present in the mosquito excrement, they discovered a complete, high-quality genome of West Nile virus. The analysis also revealed evidence of a Hedwig virus, a pathogen that was first identified in Europe in a snowy owl and had never before been reported in the Americas, as well as several viruses that may be new to science."
From the abstract:
"Nearly 30% of emerging infectious disease events worldwide are transmitted by arthropod vectors, and this proportion continues to rise.
Rapid and accurate detection is critical for directing vector control interventions, thereby reducing the likelihood of widespread transmission.
Surveillance of infected mosquitoes can provide an early warning of impending human infection; however, conventional virus testing relies on processing large pools of mosquitoes and requires labor-intensive pre-processing. During rapidly developing epidemic or panzootic events, these delays may limit the effectiveness of public health responses.
Mosquito excreta has recently emerged as a promising alternative substrate for pathogen detection.
Sugar-fed mosquitoes regularly excrete gut contents, offering a rich source of nucleic acids. In this study, we developed and applied custom superhydrophobic excreta-collection funnels that efficiently aggregate excreta produced by field-collected Culex mosquitoes into attached microcentrifuge tubes.
Shotgun metagenomic sequencing of this material revealed a diverse RNA virome, including both globally distributed viruses and those reported here for the first time from the Americas.
Beyond virus detection, additional analyses enabled confirmation of host mosquito species and identification of trypanosomatid parasites, demonstrating the broader utility of mosquito excreta for integrated surveillance.
We anticipate that methods and devices of this type will become valuable components of vector surveillance programs, particularly in remote or resource-limited settings where repeated collections are challenging.
Overall, our findings highlight the potential of excreta-based monitoring to improve early detection of emerging or unknown pathogens of One Health importance, refine our understanding of mosquito virome biogeography, and facilitate the discovery of previously undescribed viruses."
Mosquito Waste Reveals Viruses Hiding in Plain Sight (original news release) "Mosquitoes can carry viruses that threaten human health, making surveillance and prevention a continuing public health priority."
Dana Price sets up a ‘mosquito toilet’ for disease surveillance.
JudgeGPT Experiment Boosts Case Closures in Pakistan Courts since 2024
Amazing stuff!
The situation in Pakistan: "With a backlog of 2.26 million cases and fewer than two judges per 100,000 people—compared to 22 in the EU and eight in Brazil"
"... in Pakistan, a large-scale trial of a specially designed AI tool for judges found the technology—together with appropriate training–boosted the number of cases resolved by 6.3 percent with no obvious drop in the quality of judgments. ...
They built a custom tool combining OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model (LLM) with a knowledge base of nearly 130,000 Pakistani judicial opinions and statutes, to help judges with legal research and drafting judgments.
They began offering the tool in 2024 to 1,559 trial judges—roughly half the country’s justices. ...
AI tools for judges are already being rolled out in Brazil and India ...
Some judges were also already using AI chatbots, Mehmood says, but commercial offerings performed poorly on Pakistani legal queries, frequently hallucinating case law. ..."
AME Agent Swarms Quietly Rewrite the software development life cycle Workflow at AMD
Amazing stuff! Impressive!
"The impact of AI on software development has been both profound and ever-evolving. Last year, I wrote about AMD’s plans to use AI not just for generating new lines of code, but also for other steps in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), such as triaging problems, debugging code, and testing the software. At the time, we were hoping for a 25 percent productivity boost from AI use over the course of two or three years.
But with each new release, the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) improve dramatically—accelerating software development, increasing the quality of AI-generated code, and fundamentally reshaping how software is engineered.
Now, just one year later, we have surpassed our productivity target, achieving a 30 percent overall productivity boost through AI. On top of that, we are rethinking not only how we use AI within the SDLC, but the structure of the SDLC itself. ...
AMD began developing AI systems for code generation, testing automation, bug analysis, and code review in 2024. At the time, our objective was to achieve 25 percent AI-generated production code by 2027 while gradually automating larger portions of the SDLC. ...
By this metric, we have crossed the 20 percent mark at the beginning of this year and are now progressing towards 50 percent across entire codebase. In some software components, more than 80 percent of the code is now generated using AI. ...
Agentic AI has enabled us to include AI in every step of the life cycle:
For code analysis and triage, agents are trained to analyze problem reports, identify and group similar requests, and highlight which code snippets are likely to need modification.
For debugging and code generation, agents are directed to analyze a bug request and implement required code changes.
For testing, the agents generate unit tests, and if those are passed, identify necessary integration and product-level tests.
And finally, for the approval and release stage, agents prepare architecture summary, code change review, and full test results for engineers’ review and approval—and, if approved, integrate the changes into the next release. ...
A good example is our AI-driven effort to resolve issues in our Radeon Software eXperience (RSX). RSX is a user interface component that allows users to configure and monitor graphics driver behavior.
In October 2025, we began using AI agents to automatically debug and fix reported RSX issues. Out-of-the-box AI tools delivered limited results, resolving only 6 percent of issues. ...
At the same time, advances in models and agent run-times further increased effectiveness. Together, these improvements significantly increased our resolution rate from 6 percent to more than 75 percent of RSX issues resolved by agentic loop. ..."
Virtual cell model predicts best cancer drug
Good news! Cancer is history (soon)!
Again Nature journal uses the horrible ideological term "people" instead of women!!!
triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC)
"A new ‘virtual cell model’ could help to choose more personalized treatments for women people with hard-to-treat triple-negative breast cancer. Researchers trained the prototype artificial-intelligence-based model, called ProteinTalks, on millions of protein measurements collected over time from breast cancer cell lines that were treated with dozens of antitumour drugs. The model did a good job of predicting how cells would respond to drugs it hadn’t seen before and also real-world clinical outcomes. “This is the first time that a virtual cell model goes out of the laboratory and is tested in a clinical scenario,” ...
In experiments using biopsies taken from individuals with TNBC, the virtual cell model showed promising results in identifying the same drugs that would prove to be effective when given to women people. The authors say this raises the possibility of more personalized care for TNBC, which accounts for 15–20% of breast cancer cases. ...
In their study, Guo and his colleagues aimed to develop a virtual cell model of breast cancer cells using proteomics data. They trained an AI model on more than 38 million protein measurements collected from 18 breast cancer cell lines, 16 of which were TNBC cells. The researchers treated the cells with 63 antitumour drugs that have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, and 59 drug combinations. ..."
From the abstract:
"Artificial intelligence-empowered virtual cell models represent an emerging approach for in silico drug discovery, yet most existing approaches lack large-scale, time-resolved perturbation proteomics data and interpretable frameworks for predicting therapeutic responses.
Here we generated more than 38 million temporal protein-abundance measurements from systematically perturbed breast cancer cell lines, and developed ProteinTalks, a virtual cell model.
Central to ProteinTalks is the synergy of this large-scale dynamic proteomic resource and the model architecture, enabling a new pretraining framework that learns transferable dynamical latent representations from temporal proteome trajectories. By modelling how proteins respond conditionally to different perturbations, this approach enables the model to function as an operational tool for diverse drug discovery tasks: predicting drug efficacy and synergy, discovering new drug combinations, probing proteins associated with drug resistance, stratifying patient responses and prioritizing drug candidates for patient organoids.
It also shows robust transferability, extending beyond cell lines to patient-derived organoids and clinical biopsies, generally achieving higher performance than the selected benchmark implementations under the evaluated protocols.
Together, ProteinTalks shows how scalable pretraining of transferable dynamic representations enables operational, dynamics-aware, proteomics-based virtual cell models to advance in silico drug discovery."
AI model predicts which breast-cancer drugs work best (behind paywall) "Model trained on millions of protein measurements can gauge drug effectiveness in tissue samples taken from people with triple-negative breast cancer."
An operational perturbation proteomics-based virtual cell model (no public access, but article above contains link to PDF)
A perturbation proteomics-based foundation model for virtual cell construction (preprint, open access)
Fig. 1 Overview of this perturbation proteomics study.
Fig. 3 Development and performance of the ProteinTalks model.
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