Ukraine Hits Crimea Air Bases Again, Damages 7 Russian Aircraft

Good news!

When will the lethargic, apathetic Russian Slav(e)s/Serfs finally get rid of their last tsar, the megalomaniac, warmonger and war criminal Putin the Terrible! He is an ugly remnant of the Cold War and a former KGB agent. He is a wannabe Stalin. Please Russian people make the world a better, more peaceful place again! How many more young Russian men will be killed or maimed before you act!

"In brief: SBU said it struck the Saky Air Base and Gvardiyske Air Base in occupied Crimea, damaging or destroying at least 7 Russian aircraft and hitting drone storage hangars. The strike marks the second attack on Saky this week and forms part of Kyiv’s 40-day campaign to degrade Russia’s military infrastructure deep behind the front line. ..."

SBU Hits Crimea Air Bases Again, Damages 7 Russian Aircraft

Wer hat Deutschland vermasselt? Die Christdemokraten mit SED Kanzlerin Merkel!

Die SED Kanzlerin Merkel hat wahrlich dazu beigetragen die Deutschland in eine Bananenrepublik zu verwandeln! Habe zu diesem Thema vielmals gebloggt! Warum hatte sich Helmut Kohl so verguckt in "mein Mädchen"?

Aber wirklich Schuld sind die vielen dämlichen, deutschen Wähler und Nichtwähler bzw. mangelndes politisches Engagement vieler Bürger!

Auch die FDP hätte man vor vielen Jahren in die Wüste schicken sollen. Christian Lindner war ein Clown, der viel zu viele Jahre an der Spitze war!

Wer hat uns verraten? Christdemokraten! "Nicht die SPD ist Deutschlands großes Problem, sondern die Union. Unter Angela Merkel und Friedrich Merz ist die CDU das geworden, was sie unter Helmut Kohl nie war: ein rückgratloser Kanzlerwahlverein. Eine Abrechnung."

Angela Merkel mit ihrer bekannten Pose

Anthropic says Chinese Alibaba must be punished for largest Claude cloning attack

Serious stuff! China has long been accused of allowing the stealing of intellectual property!

"Anthropic has accused the Chinese firm Alibaba of launching the largest attack yet attempting to clone Claude, as China races to match the capabilities of Anthropic’s leading model following Mythos’ release and subsequent restriction from foreign markets. ..."

Anthropic says Alibaba must be punished for largest Claude cloning attack - Ars Technica "Alibaba allegedly used 25,000 accounts to mine Claude over 28.8 million exchanges."

UK government’s new charter aims to better support women in research. Really!

Men watch out! This smells awfully like sex discrimination against men to advance women instead of science!

How "voluntary" is this charter?

Another bad example of all things coming out of the UK! The decline of the UK continuous!

"The UK government has unveiled a voluntary charter that aims to better support women in research by ensuring paid family leave, flexible working and tougher action on workplace harassment, for example. Liz Kendall – the UK’s science and technology secretary – is urging research organisations to sign the charter to ensure ‘that women can thrive at every stage of a research career.’ Over 60 universities and institutes have currently done so, including the Wellcome Trust, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Royal Society. ..."

UK government’s new charter aims to better support women in research | News | Chemistry World

Reinforcement Learning with Pairwise Preferences in Long-Term Decision Problems

This could be an interesting new paper by Doina Precup and Benjamin Van Roy plus their team.

From the abstract:

"Reinforcement learning problems typically define the goal as maximizing the expected value of a scalar reward function.

But, pairwise preferences are often easier to specify than scalar rewards, and they express certain goals that scalar rewards cannot.

Methods for reinforcement learning with pairwise preferences have thus received growing interest.

Unfortunately, these methods are inefficient in problems with long time horizons, and they lack guarantees on the performance of Markov policies relative to history-dependent policies, which bridge the theory and practice of reinforcement learning. We therefore propose the Markov decision contest as a new problem model for reinforcement learning with pairwise preferences.

We prove that stationary Markov policies are optimal among all history-dependent policies, that solving a Markov decision contest exactly is in P, and that a simple iterative algorithm converges to an optimal policy at a sublinear rate.

Lastly, in a set of high-dimensional decision problems with long time horizons, we show that our approximate algorithm is significantly more learning-efficient than prior work."

[2606.00367] Reinforcement Learning with Pairwise Preferences in Long-Term Decision Problems

Der Innovationsstandort Deutschland schwächelt. Wirklich!

Schwächelt? Was für eine Untertreibung!

"... Der Anteil Deutschlands an den weltweiten FuE-Aufwendungen der Wirtschaft ist zwischen 2008 und 2021 von 8,5 auf 5,6 Prozent zurückgegangen. ..."

Der Innovationsstandort Deutschland schwächelt - iwd.de "Die deutsche Wirtschaft ist seit jeher forschungs- und patentstark. Doch in den vergangenen Jahren haben zahlreiche andere Länder ihr Innovationstempo deutlich gesteigert, sodass der Anteil Deutschlands am Patentweltmarkt spürbar gesunken ist. Der Forschungsstandort Deutschland braucht dringend Hilfe."

Discretizing Reward Models

This could be an interesting new paper by Graham Neubig and his team!

From the abstract:

"Despite their widespread use, the role of reward models in shaping reinforcement learning is poorly understood. Reward models offer a tempting promise: they automatically estimate response quality in the absence of verifiers or human judges. Unlike "verifiable rewards" which typically produce binary scores, reward models typically produce continuous scores, allowing them to be sensitive to fine-grained differences in responses.

However, we show this apparent strength is a serious weakness: many popular reward models are oversensitive, assigning different scores to equally good responses.

Theoretically, we show that seemingly perfect reward models can be highly oversensitive; empirically, this oversensitivity can lead to bad policies.

In place of existing notions of "reward model accuracy," we propose evaluating reward models using distinct measures of "discriminative ability" and "specificity" (the complement of oversensitivity).

As a solution, we describe a training-free algorithm that uses Monte Carlo dropout on any neural reward model to produce discrete reward clusters.

Theoretically, we prove there exist discretizations that reduce oversensitivity at minimal expense of discriminative ability; empirically we show, in both controlled and natural RL settings, that discretizing rewards leads to less reward hacking and better policies than training on the original rewards."

[2606.21795] Discretizing Reward Models

First use of precision editing to alter a single gene to study human embryo development reveals role of master gene

Amazing stuff!

Notice we are now going way beyond the famous CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing!

In my opinion, the first gene to be removed from humans is the sneezing gene!

"Research ... has shown that a genome editing technique can be used to alter a single gene in human embryonic cells, enabling the study of very early human development in unparalleled detail.

The technique, called base editing, is a more precise version of the genome editing technique CRISPR/Cas9. It can change a single nucleotide base pair - the basic building block of DNA - within a human genome of approximately 3 billion base pairs. 

Using base editing, the researchers blocked a gene called NANOG in very early-stage human embryos, and found that the cells of the early embryo could not develop into more specialised pluripotent cells called the epiblast - which later form the body. ..."

From the abstract:

"Understanding how the first cell lineages in human development are specified and maintained has fundamental importance and clinical implications for regenerative medicine, infertility and pregnancy loss.

While mouse models have provided valuable insights into transcription factors regulating early development, translating these findings to human embryos has been limited by ethical, technical and biological constraints.

Functional studies of transcription factors in human embryos have been hindered by nuclease-based genome-editing approaches that induce genotoxicity. 

To overcome this, we applied adenine base editing (ABE8e) to precisely target an exon splice donor site, resulting in a splicing defect and functional knockout of NANOG, representing the first application of base editing to study a developmental regulator in human embryos.

This approach did not trigger genotoxicity and showed limited off-target editing.

Loss of NANOG disrupts pluripotent epiblast specification and instead cells differentiate toward a primitive endoderm (yolk sac) or trophectoderm (placental) transcriptional programme. Retention of primitive endoderm differentiation in NANOG-edited human embryos reveals a functional compensation distinct from mouse, underscoring the importance of directly investigating human development. Our findings demonstrate an essential role for NANOG in human pluripotency and epiblast specification, and highlight the utility of base editing for functional interrogation of human development."

First use of precision editing to study human embryo development reveals role of master gene | University of Cambridge "Scientists have, for the first time, used an extremely precise genome editing technique called base editing to study gene function in human embryos. They found that a gene called NANOG is essential for forming the future body from an embryo."

Base editing reveals an essential role for NANOG in human embryogenesis (no public access)

Day 6 human embryos showing the effect of NANOG presence versus absence. Normal embryo (left)

China, a land without napkins

Pardon my exaggeration! Observations from my most recent, long visit to China.

For many years, tourists and Chinese people were without napkins when they eat outside their homes. 

Things, seem to have improved somewhat. When you are eating in a food place look around and you may find some napkins or a napkin dispenser.

This is in stark contrast to the US where an abundance of napkins is available and offered almost anywhere and anytime.

Emergent Capabilities Arise Randomly from Learning Sparse Attention Patterns

This could be an interesting new paper by Andrew Gordon Wilson and his team!

From the abstract:

"Neural scaling laws for transformer language models predict smooth improvements in pretraining loss with increasing parameters, but downstream capabilities such as in-context learning are known to emerge abruptly past a certain model scale.

In this paper, we show that emergent capabilities arise stochastically throughout training, with larger models acquiring them earlier on average.

We demonstrate that the emergence of capabilities such as pattern completion and indirect object identification corresponds to the abrupt learning of task-relevant attention patterns.

To isolate this phenomenon, we train transformer models on synthetic linear map and cellular automata datasets, and we show that the difficulty of learning attention patterns depends on context length and pattern sparsity.

Moreover, scaling the number of attention heads improves learning efficiency on our synthetic tasks, while increasing the head dimension yields diminishing returns past a minimum capacity.

We additionally investigate architectures with alternative attention mechanisms, showing that MLP-Mixer outperforms a transformer on linear map tasks with complex attention patterns. Our findings provide a mechanistic insight into emergence, showing that downstream capabilities arise abruptly due to the intrinsic difficulty of learning sparse attention patterns in transformer models."

[2606.25010] Emergent Capabilities Arise Randomly from Learning Sparse Attention Patterns

China’s nuclear energy generation capacity nearly doubled between 2016 and 2026

Very impressive! When will Western countries wake up and abandon their several decades long alarmism and hysteria about the safety of nuclear power!

While the banana republic of Germany e.g. shuts down functioning nuclear power plants!

China is also building small, modular reactors with components that can be premanufactured and assembled on site.

"According to data compiled by the US Energy Information Administration, China’s nuclear energy generation capacity nearly doubled between 2016 and 2026, growing from 31.4 gigawatts to 58.7.

The EIA also reports that 36 reactors, totaling another 38.9 GW of capacity, are currently being built in China, making up 49 percent of all global nuclear energy construction. All that development has led to learning; nuclear power plants in China are completed in an average of six years, three years faster than the global average."

"... China is building its first small modular reactor (SMR), the Linglong-1, a domestically designed 100 MWe pressurized water reactor that can be used for power generation, water desalination, and district heating. The project is intended to demonstrate commercial operation and is expected to start operation in the first half of 2026. The Linglong-1 uses the ACP100 SMR design, a modular design, allowing certain components to be built in a factory and installed onsite. ..."

Doomslayer: Progress Roundup - by Malcolm Cochran

China’s Nuclear Power Capacity Nearly Doubled Since 2016

China’s nuclear power capacity nearly doubled since 2016 (original news release)

Google responsible for generating false claims in AI Overviews , a German local court finds

This seems to be an interesting and relevant legal case!

This court ruling could also affect other AI generated summaries etc.

Caveat: I am not familiar with the details of the case nor the ruling.

"A Munich Regional Court ruled Google liable for false claims generated by its AI Overviews feature, marking a significant shift in how courts treat AI-generated content.

The case involved two publishers whose companies were falsely linked to scams in AI-generated summaries, associations that appeared nowhere in the actual search results.

Google argued its disclaimer warning users to verify information should shield it from liability; however, the court rejected this, finding that the AI created independent statements not present in any source material.

The court held that unlike traditional search engines that display third-party links, Google’s tool produces novel claims by synthesizing across sources, making Google the only entity capable of fixing the problem and therefore responsible for it.

The court also rejected free speech protection, reasoning that algorithmically generated statements are corporate products, not individual expression. The ruling could ripple across the industry, since OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity all rely on similar disclaimers to manage liability for their systems’ errors. ..."

"A local court in Germany has issued a ruling that could reshape the operation of search engines and artificial-intelligence-based chatbots worldwide. The Munich Regional Court preliminarily ruled that Google is liable for a series of false statements generated by its AI Overviews feature, requiring the company to prevent the dissemination of erroneous or inaccurate claims through its search engine. ..."

"Key Points

• A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for false claims in its AI-generated search overviews.
• In this case, Google's AI had wrongly linked two publishers to scams and shady business practices.
• The court treated the AI overviews as Google's own content and rejected Google's argument that users were responsible for fact-checking the results themselves.

..."

Data Points: Zhipu’s GLM-5.2 is the new top open model

A Court Has Ruled That Google Is Liable for False Statements Generated by AI Overviews "The ruling holds that a company that designs, trains, operates, and manages an AI system must assume legal liability for any damages caused by the responses it generates."

Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers

Anatomy of Massive Activations and Attention Sinks

This could be an interesting paper by Yann LeCun and his team!

From the abstract:

"We study two recurring phenomena in Transformer language models:

massive activations, in which a small number of tokens exhibit extreme outliers in a few channels, and 

attention sinks, in which certain tokens attract disproportionate attention mass regardless of semantic relevance.

Prior work observes that these phenomena frequently co-occur and often involve the same tokens, but their functional roles and causal relationships remain unclear. Through systematic experiments, we show that the 

co-occurrence is largely an architectural artifact of modern Transformer design, and that 

the two phenomena serve related but distinct functions. 

Massive activations operate globally: they induce near-constant hidden representations that persist across layers, effectively functioning as implicit parameters of the model. 

Attention sinks operate locally: they modulate attention outputs across heads and bias individual heads toward short-range dependencies.

We identify the pre-norm configuration as the key choice that enables the co-occurrence and show that ablating it causes the two phenomena to decouple."

Anatomy of Massive Activations and Attention Sinks | OpenReview (open access)

English for trippers: A lifetime lifeline

I suppose, this is better than a lifetime sentence! 😊

What about a life in the fast lane!

Israel’s tech employees cost more than US counterparts and the rest of the world

Good news! The price of success and you get what you pay for!

Caveat: I could not find the study on the website of Israel Growth Forum.

"Israel’s 400,000 tech employees have for some years been expensive in global terms, with their cost second only to that of Silicon Valley. The tech giants preferred to pay dearly for the Israeli worker, knowing that they would receive a better result than their counterparts in India and eastern Europe, while their price was still lower than tech workers on their home turf.

However, according to a study by the Israel Growth Forum - an organization operated by Israeli companies such as Wix and Monday.com - the cost of Israeli developers has surpassed that of their US counterparts for the first time ever. This has been mainly due to the strengthening of the shekel against the US dollar, since most of the capital in Israeli tech is raised in dollars, while most of the expenses, including wages and options for local employees, are made in shekels. ..."

Israel’s tech employees cost more than US counterparts - Globes "A study by the Israel Growth Forum has found that Israeli tech employees are the most expensive in the world due to the strengthening of the shekel."

Improvised ashtray on a Chinese passenger train

It is the hanging plastic water bottle with a red colored label in the gangway between two train cars. Smokers frequently come to the gangway to smoke.

The official ashtray in located in the gangway as well if it is a designated smoking area.

 

Living with a 100% chance of cancer developing due to a rare genetic condition

When will we have regular, frequent and affordable cancer screening for all?

"Every year, Tracy Hutchinson undergoes a full-body MRI scan, skin checks and blood tests to search for tumours that she has a nearly 100% chance of getting. Hutchinson has Li-Fraumeni syndrome, an inherited genetic condition that raises her lifetime risk of almost every type of cancer. The test for the genetic mutation came back positive in 2022 and “I actually felt at peace with it”, she says. It explained why her sister and mother had both died from cancer. The diagnosis is constantly on her mind, but Hutchinson tries to stay positive. “Everyone has something they’re dealing with,” she says."

Nature Briefing: Cancer

I have a 100 per cent chance of getting cancer due to a rare gene "A rare variant of a gene called TP53 means Tracy Hutchinson has an extreme risk of developing cancer anywhere in her body, causing endless anxiety and requiring regular whole-body MRIs and other screening"

Tracy Hutchinson has a rare mutation of the TP53 gene

Immenser Kostendruck für die deutsche Metall- und Elektro-Industrie

Der Verdacht liegt nahe, dass die Lage in anderen deutschen Industrien nicht besser aussieht.

China wurde nicht mal in den Vergleich aufgenommen, sondern typischerweise nur EU und USA sowie nicht näher genannte Schwellenländer!

"...  Zwischen 2018 und 2024 ist die Produktion in der M+E-Industrie jährlich um durchschnittlich 2,3 Prozent gesunken, die Beschäftigung ging jedes Jahr im Schnitt um 0,3 Prozent zurück. ...

Unternehmensteuern. Die Bundesrepublik ist seit Langem ein Hochsteuerland für Unternehmen. Schon im Jahr 2014 war der Steuersatz etwa 20 Prozent höher als im internationalen Durchschnitt, inzwischen sind es rund 33 Prozent. Im Vergleich von 45 Industrie- und Schwellenländern landet die Bundesrepublik im Steuerranking nur auf Platz 42. Besonders gravierend: Die USA als einer der großen Konkurrenten haben ihre Steuern seit 2014 um mehr als 13 Prozentpunkte gesenkt. ...

Kapitalmarkt. Lange Zeit sorgte ein Umfeld aus geringer Staatsverschuldung, dem Prinzip der Sozialen Marktwirtschaft und hoher Wirtschaftskraft in Deutschland für niedrige Zinsen und gute Möglichkeiten zur Finanzierung. Seit 2015 sind die Zinssätze in der Bundesrepublik prozentual aber stärker gestiegen als im Schnitt der 45 betrachteten Industrie- und Schwellenländer.

Bürokratie. Regulierungen, Berichtspflichten, Einschränkungen – der Anteil der Unternehmen, die die Bürokratie als größeres Hemmnis für Investitionen sehen, ist in Deutschland viel höher als im Rest der EU und den USA. Zuletzt gab es in der Bundesrepublik dabei sogar einen massiven Anstieg von betroffenen Betrieben. ..."

Immenser Kostendruck für die M+E-Industrie - iwd.de "Die Rezession in Deutschland trifft auch die Betriebe der Metall- und Elektro-Industrie mit voller Wucht. Die ausufernden Kosten und der hohe Bürokratieaufwand machen es den ansässigen Unternehmen zudem immer schwerer, am Standort Deutschland zu produzieren. Die Politik muss der fortschreitenden Deindustrialisierung dringend mit weitreichenden Reformen begegnen."

Abolish the National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Food for thought!

"In an op-ed at The Washington Post, Senior Fellow Scott Atlas echoes Milton Friedman in arguing that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) “should be abolished.” While the NIH has funded some valuable scientific research, Atlas says, “it’s also a governmental monopoly with a roughly $48 billion budget subject to political influence, fiscal abuse and suppression of scientific dissent—one that has diverted billions from actual science to academic operations, racial set-asides and ideological mandates.” Atlas reviews various examples where politicians of both major parties have steered research funding and agendas toward various preferred areas. “Abolishing the NIH would not create a funding vacuum,” Atlas maintains, noting that the private sector already “funds 78 percent of US biomedical research and development.” What’s more, Atlas says, much of the private investment flowing into artificial intelligence is already “funding the overwhelming majority of innovative medical devices and building the AI revolution in biomedicine.” Atlas concludes that doing away with the NIH would not represent a cut to science but rather “is a case for science itself.”"

"In 1980, economist Milton Friedman said the National Institutes of Health should be abolished. Friedman said the same about another government research agency, the National Science Foundation. And when he was asked what the NSF should be replaced with, he replied: “Nothing.” ..."

James Madison’s Lessons for the Country Today

Opinion | NIH is a government weapon for political power. Abolish it. (behind paywall)

Mit der Geiselbefreiung von Entebbe zeigte Israel vor 50 Jahren, wie man Terroristen bekämpft

Das war eine tolle Leistung!

Ähnlich 2024, wenn Israel detonierte Bomben in mehreren tausend Pagern um Hezbollah Terroristen zu töten!

Entebbe: Vor 50 Jahren befreite Israel 102 Geiseln. | NIUS "Mit einem beispiellos wagemutigen nächtlichen Kommandounternehmen im fernen Uganda rettete Israel über hundert jüdische Geiseln. Am 4. Juli jährt sich „Operation Yonathan“ zum 50. Mal. Sie ist noch immer ein leuchtendes Beispiel dafür, dass man vor dem Terror nicht zurückweichen darf und ihm empfindliche Schläge verpassen kann."

What Would Multilateral "AI Arms Control" Look Like?

Very good question and which parties would be involved? Food for thought!

However, it appears the author of the following article meant something very different than the analogy to nuclear weapons agreements of the past century!

"... In fact, model quality is growing harder to compare as the industry questions the efficacy of standard benchmarks such as mathematical problem completion. These benchmarks can be gamed if the model is trained on the specific problems in advance. What’s more, as OpenAI researcher Noam Brown recently noted, the right definition of capability is not only what problems a model can solve but how quickly and at what cost. ..."

What Would Multilateral "AI Arms Control" Look Like? | American Enterprise Institute - AEI

What would multilateral ‘AI arms control’ look like? (behind paywall)

Silicom: Israel’s best performing Wall Street stock

What a silly misspelling error in the name of this company! Just kidding! 😊

Silicom: Israel’s best performing Wall Street stock - Globes "The share price of the Kfar Saba-based network and data infrastructure solutions company rose 226% in the first half of 2026."

U.S. won’t renew USMCA, will review trade pact with Canada and Mexico

I hope, President Trump does not mess up the great idea of and prosperity that comes with a North American Free Trade Zone!

"Key Points

• The Trump administration has decided not to renew its trilateral trade pact with Canada and Mexico known as USMCA.
• July 1 marked the deadline to renew the 16-year trade pact.
• President Donald Trump once lauded the USMCA deal, which he signed during his first term in office, but has soured on it since.

..."

U.S. won’t renew USMCA, will review trade pact with Canada and Mexico

Huge Memory AI Server Aims to Shatter the Memory Wall with up to 128 TB of DRAM per server

This is huge! Mind boggling!

"Memory is arguably the most serious constraint on modern AI large language models (LLMs). According to one influential paper, LLM token generation is an inherently memory-bound task, meaning the rate at which models output text is limited by how quickly data can be read in from memory. The severity of this bottleneck grows with model size. This creates a “memory wall” that holds back LLM inference performance.

AI hardware startup Majestic Labs is taking a direct—and comprehensive—approach to solving this problem. It’s developing a new AI server, Prometheus, with up to 128 terabytes of memory. That’s over 60 times more than Nvidia’s DGX B300 server, a cutting-edge AI processing rack. ..."

Huge Memory AI Server Aims to Shatter the Memory Wall - IEEE Spectrum "Majestic Labs’ Prometheus packs up to 128 TB of DRAM per server"

Source

US evaluates moving CENTCOM forces and naval assets to Israel after Iran war

Headline of the day!

If true, could this be a sign of weakness or retreat?

"The United States Central Command (CENTCOM) is considering moving its military bases’ operational systems in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia to Israel in order to increase their distance from further Iranian missile and drone attacks, The Wall Street Journal reported last Thursday.

The US Navy may revamp its base in Bahrain, which has suffered severe damage since late February up until the recent US-Iran ceasefire. Bahrain has been home to the US Navy’s central forces in the Middle East for over 50 years. ..."

US evaluates moving CENTCOM forces and naval assets to Israel after Iran war | The Jerusalem Post "One option is to establish a new base in the Negev big enough to hold the American army’s forces, or to expand one of the Negev’s air force bases and allocate an American compound there."

Thousandfold Expansion Microscopy

Amazing stuff!

"... In a preprint posted last month to bioRxiv, Boyden and colleagues describe “thousandfold expansion microscopy” or 1000ExM, a method that expands tissues as much as 1000x in every direction—a one billion times increase in volume.

First, they improved upon the expanding gel used to spread things apart. They also figured out how to bind target molecules to this gel, allowing them to break apart proteins and other bonded entities while keeping their pieces relative in space. Lastly, they tinkered with their technique to allow them to repeat the expansion step over and over again. ..."

From the abstract:

"Biological macromolecules, such as proteins, are made of concatenated building blocks. We hypothesized that individual protein residues could be imaged by anchoring their side chains to a swellable polymer, cleaving backbone amide bonds, and expanding residues away from each other to a degree that enables them to be visualized separately.

We introduce thousandfold expansion microscopy (1000ExM), a four-network interpenetrating hydrogel architecture that enables successive expansion from ∼18-fold to >1000-fold (one billion-fold in volume). Protein and peptide structures are maintained across these expansion factors, as verified by analyses of proteins with known structures (nanobodies, GFP) and a well-studied peptide (mCLING). Computational analysis indicates that 1000ExM resolves adjacent amino acid residues, thereby achieving sub-nanometer precision on conventional light microscopes. We anticipate that 1000ExM will find wide utility in protein visualization and identification, potentially even in intact cells and tissues."

ScienceAdviser

Thousandfold Expansion Microscopy (preprint, open access)

A small peptide with one end tagged in purple and certain amino acids in green, showing the difference in resolution between 18x expansion (top; full field on left, zoom in orange on right) and 1000x expansion.

Fig. 1 Design of a four-network interpenetrating polymer network (IPN) architecture enabling ∼1000× linear expansion via recursive ionic-in-ionic casting.

„Wir wollen das erste kommerzielle Fusionskraftwerk der Welt in Deutschland errichten". Wirklich!

Fakt ist wohl, dass die Bananenrepublik D auf diesem Gebiet wohl auch eher hinterher hinkt! Siehe meine blog posts zu nuclear fusion.

"Kernfusion ist für die Bundesregierung längst keine Zukunftsmusik mehr, sondern Industriepolitik mit Milliardenbudget. 2,4 Mrd. € will der Bund bis 2029 investieren, um das erste Fusionskraftwerk der Welt nach Deutschland zu holen. Ingenieur.de und VDI nachrichten haben dazu ein schriftliches Interview mit Bundesforschungsministerin Dorothee Bär (CSU) geführt. ..."

„Wir wollen das erste kommerzielle Fusionskraftwerk der Welt in Deutschland errichten" "Deutschland will das erste Fusionskraftwerk der Welt bauen – und investiert dafür Milliarden. Bundesforschungsministerin Dorothee Bär (CSU) erklärt im Interview, wie der Zeitplan aussieht und warum es ohne privates Kapital nicht gelingt."

Two other reasons why 1776 is a true annus mirabilis for humanity besides the Declaration of Independence

In two days, we will celebrate that in one of the very rare historical moments a group of great minds got together to write and publish the Declaration of Independence.

In 1776, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (Scottish Enlightenment) was published.

In 1776, the Scottish inventor James Watt, who drastically improved the steam engine to become useful and triggered the Industrial Revolution.

After that Western civilization ascended and accelerated in a historical unprecedented way!

The rest as they say is history!

The most important thing to happen in 1776 (recommendable)

Scientists have discovered only a tiny fraction of living insect species, but up to as many as 20 million insect species may exist

Amazing stuff!

"... according to a new study ... Using statistical methods borrowed from another field, a team of entomologists estimates there may be as many as 20 million insect species on our planet—more than three times the previous estimate. ...

Scientists have long debated exactly how many insect species there are, with the previous consensus being about 6 million. 

Over the past 3 centuries, entomologists have described about 1 million insect species, but finding and describing them all would be a daunting—if not impossible—task. ...

To obtain an improved estimate of insect diversity, Colwell and colleagues studied years of data from insect surveys in Costa Rica’s Guanacaste National Park and applied statistical methods borrowed from epidemiology. The researchers started by taking a closer look at a subfamily of parasitoid wasps known as Microgastrinae, which infamously lay their eggs inside living caterpillars. These wasps are extremely well-studied: Scientists have described about 3000 species of Microgastrinae, many of which are found in Costa Rica. So, the team decided to test how well insect surveys within the park have captured the diversity of the wasps living there.

Over the past several years, scientists conducting surveys of flying insects in the park have identified 388 species of Microgastrinae within a core set of traps and 578 within an additional set. Independently, when scientists looked at caterpillars that had been parasitized within the park, they identified 889 wasp species.

However, when Colwell and his colleagues examined these data sets, they were surprised to find little overlap in the species captured with traps and by examining caterpillars. That mismatch showed both methods must only be tallying a fraction of the total number of Microgastrinae species within the park. To estimate that total, the researchers used a statistical method developed by epidemiologists to estimate the size of a population affected by a disease based on incomplete tallies of the ill—as if the true number of wasp species was like the true number of sick people in an outbreak. The approach indicated the park is home to a whopping 2394 Microgastrinae species. ..."

From the significance and abstract:

"Significance

For more than 40 y, entomologists have attempted to estimate the number of insect species on Earth, with the current consensus—the figure most experts accept—at about six million. Using genetic information (DNA barcodes) for 1.6 million individual tropical insects, a deep census of a highly diverse group of parasitoid wasps, and powerful statistical strategies, we conservatively estimate that the true number of insect species is at least 14 to 20 million—two to three times higher than current estimates. Already known to be the most diverse group of animals, a doubling or tripling of estimated insect diversity has profound implications for our understanding of the scale, richness, and future of biodiversity on Earth.

Abstract

Estimating the number of insect species on Earth is a daunting challenge. The current consensus estimate—about six million species—is likely far too low, as we will show.

Our estimate of the global number of insect species rests on a sample of more than 1,600,000 DNA-barcoded insect specimens representing 53,945 species from 15 “core” Malaise traps deployed in dry forest, cloud forest, and rainforest ecosystems of the Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG) in Costa Rica. Even this massive sample fails to reveal the full extent of ACG insect species richness. To estimate total ACG insect richness, we adjust the observed count of insect species by an “undersampling ratio,” computed for a hyperdiverse subfamily of parasitoid wasps (Braconidae: Microgastrinae).

The ratio compares microgastrine richness from the core Malaise traps to a lower-bound estimate of true microgastrine richness—including undetected species—based on 21,669 specimens from three sources: the 15 core Malaise traps, 15 “peripheral” Malaise traps spanning all three ecosystems, and 11,373 DNA-barcoded specimens reared from some 1,500 species of microgastrine-parasitized caterpillars (Lepidoptera).

To estimate global insect richness, we apply Earth/ACG ratios for tree species and several animal taxa to upscale our estimate of ACG insect richness (nearly 333,000 species). Adopting conservative assumptions, we reach an estimate of 14 to 20 million insect species on Earth, depending on the upscaling group—two to three times the current consensus estimates. Upscaling instead from a point estimate of ACG richness with a wide CI, global estimates reach nearly 30 million species."

Scientists have discovered only a tiny fraction of living insect species | Science | AAAS "About 1 million insect species have been described, but a new analysis suggests tens of millions more may be out there"

Constructing a lower-bound estimate of the global number of insect species on a hyperdiverse empirical foundation (open access)

Queue raises funding to build fully autonomous pharmacy

Will many pharmacists be unemployed soon?

"Queue today emerged from stealth with an autonomous pharmacy system and $12.6 million in seed funding. The company said its system is designed to make prescription fulfillment faster, more accessible, and cost-effective while supporting rigorous safety and verification protocols. ...

Pharmacies are facing “overwhelming workloads and job dissatisfaction,” according to Drugstore News. Schools are graduating 3,000 to 4,000 fewer pharmacists than will be needed over the next five to six years, it said.

Pharmacy technician vacancies have been reported at 40% or higher, reported the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. As one pharmacist noted, employee shortages can increase the risk of human error. ..."

Queue raises funding to build fully autonomous pharmacy - The Robot Report

English for trippers: A bitter critter

Make no litter! Better fitter!

Warum Deutschlands größtes Geothermie-Projekt im Ruhrgebiet startet. Wirklich!

Wie Blödsinnig ist die Energieerzeugung durch Erdwärme? Wahrscheinlich genau so unsinnig wie die Windenergie, nur anders!

Z.B. Wieviel würde der Planet Erde abkühlen, wenn Erdwärme im grossen Maßstab und weltweit ausgenutzt würde? Was wären die Folgen?

"... Doch die Größe des Suchfelds von „Erdwärme Metropole Ruhr“ sagt noch nichts darüber aus, was am Ende aus dem Untergrund zu holen wäre. Erlaubt ist bisher die Suche, nicht die Förderung. Die interessantere Frage lautet ohnehin: Warum ausgerechnet das Ruhrgebiet? ..."

Warum Deutschlands größtes Geothermie-Projekt im Ruhrgebiet startet "Von Oberhausen bis Hamm dürfen sieben Unternehmen auf der Rekordfläche von 1640 km² nach Erdwärme suchen. Die Region bringt drei Vorteile mit, die keine andere so bietet."

What signal is China sending with first official footage of sixth-generation fighter?

China's military is pushing the envelope again?

"... a move that analysts said might suggest Beijing was ahead of its competitors, including the US, in developing the next generation of warplanes. ..."

What signal is China sending with first official footage of sixth-generation fighter? | South China Morning Post "A fleeting clip of the new fighter – nicknamed ‘Little Six’ – featured in a video released by official military media over the weekend"

UBTech’s lifelike humanoid robots built for companionship arriving in homes across China

Taoism redefined?

"UBTech Robotics, the world’s first publicly traded humanoid robot maker, has launched a consumer humanoid designed for personal companionship, featuring lifelike silicone skin and emotional artificial intelligence, as Chinese tech firms increasingly transition robots from the factory floor to the family living room. 

The U1, unveiled on Tuesday in Shenzhen, comes in male and female versions, standing 183cm and 168cm tall, respectively.

The model is available in Lite, Pro and Ultra variants, priced from 119,800 yuan (US$17,650) to 990,000 yuan.

It features 88 servo joints, a silicone exterior and an emotional AI model running locally on Rockchip’s RK3588 processor. User data is stored on the device rather than uploaded to the cloud.

Unlike most humanoid robots designed for industrial use, the U1 is intended for interaction with users in domestic settings. ..."

UBTech’s lifelike humanoid robots built for companionship arriving in homes across China | South China Morning Post "The unveiling of model U1, which has silicone skin and emotional AI, reflects tech firms’ drive to expand robotics beyond industrial use"

A doll with a nice figure?

Chinese AGIBOT produces 15,000th robot, marking a milestone in embodied AI deployment

Very impressive!

When will the robot population count exceed the Chinese/global human population count? In the not so distant future.

"Founded in 2023, AGIBOT said it is developing the foundation model and corresponding robotic embodiments needed to bring general intelligence into the physical world. Its claimed that its “Three Intelligences in One” architecture integrates locomotion, Interactions, and manipulation into a unified system. The Shanghai-based company‘s portfolio spans humanoid robots, quadrupeds, dexterous systems, and commercial cleaning systems. ...

AGIBOT previously announced that it took about a year to grow from 1,000 to 5,000 units. The next step, from 5,000 to 10,000 units, took only three months, with production speed increasing by more than four times compared with the previous phase. ..."

AGIBOT produces 15,000th robot, marking a milestone in embodied AI deployment - The Robot Report

Taiwan Passes Crucial Crypto Law With Licensing Rules, Stablecoin Framework

Good news!

"Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan approved the Virtual Asset Service Act in its third reading on Tuesday, the island’s first comprehensive framework for the crypto sector. Lawmakers sent the bill to President Lai Ching-te, who is expected to sign it into law within ten days.

The act establishes a licensing regime for all virtual asset service providers in Taiwan and hands broad oversight to the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC). Under the law, crypto businesses must secure FSC approval before operating in Taiwan. The framework covers seven categories of providers, including exchanges, trading platforms, transfer firms, custodians, underwriters and lending services. ..."

Taiwan Passes Crucial Crypto Law With Licensing Rules, Stablecoin Framework "Taiwan passed its first comprehensive crypto law, creating a licensing regime for virtual asset firms, establishing stablecoin rules, and imposing penalties of up to seven years in prison for unlicensed operations, as the island moves to formalize and expand its digital asset industry."

In a first, Trump will travel aboard Qatari-donated Air Force One

Unusual, but a strong signal! An interesting, positive event of international diplomacy!

"... After the flights are completed, the aircraft will be officially “commissioned” into the active executive airlift fleet and available for presidential use alongside the VC-25A and C-32 fleets. ..."

In a first, Trump will travel aboard Qatari-donated Air Force One

Investing in an Israeli underground warfare startup

Let private businesses handle terrorists? An Israeli approach! Very boring! 😊

"... The startup produces engineering components and digging machines for use against terrorist tunnels and underground military bases. The Israeli company, Traysar, which employs former employees of Elon Musk’s The Boring Company, ..."

Anduril founders invest in Israeli underground warfare startup - Globes "Traysar, which has developed machines for use against terrorist tunnels and underground installations, has raised $25 million."

Source

Concerning new details emerge about US Senator Mitch McConnell's (age 84) latest health scare

This US Senator has been totally reckless and irresponsible for a long time not to resign for health/age reasons very similar to the senile and demented former 46th President!

"A new report from Punchbowl News has revealed new details about the recent hospitalization of longtime Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Last month, news broke that McConnell was hospitalized on June 14.  ..."

Concerning new details emerge about Mitch McConnell's latest health scare | Blaze Media

Hamas Crushed Gaza’s Protest Movement. Really!

Laughable! Why have the Arabs in the Gaza Strip and West Bank for several decades never gotten rid of terrorists in their midst and the horrible PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization]?

Had these Arabs proved decades ago that they are capable to consistently manage a civil society without violence and terrorism, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank would have been  prosperous and enjoy high living standards etc. with Israel's help!

Hamas Crushed Gaza’s Protest Movement. But Palestinians Are Still Angry. "A planned anti-Hamas uprising fizzled in public, but beneath the surface lies growing frustration with a leadership many blame for years of war, repression, and hardship."

Pistorius sagt „We are ready“: Warum die Iran-Mission eine gefährliche Idee ist. Wirklich!

Bravo Verteidigungsminister Boris Pistorius! Besser spät, als nie!

Die feigen Europäer haben praktisch jegliche militärische Unterstützung von Amerikas Kampagne gegen den Kriegstreiber und Hauptsponsor von Terrorism Iran verweigert. Eine Schande!!!

Anscheinend, nicht einmal Minenräumboote wurden von den Europäern in den Strait of Hormuz entsendet! Unglaublich!!!!

Die Amerikaner werden sich dieses totale Versagen der Europäer bestimmt merken!

Pistorius sagt „We are ready“: Warum die Iran-Mission eine gefährliche Idee ist — der Freitag "Der Verteidigungsminister bekundet deutsche Bereitschaft zur Beteiligung an einer Marinemission in der Straße von Hormus. Doch das jüngste Aufbäumen der Konflikte zwischen Iran und den USA zeigt, wie riskant und verfrüht solche Pläne sind"

Boris Pistorius

Seeing and Imagining Are Handled by the Same Brain Cells based on single neuron recording

Amazing stuff!

"In one of the first single-neuron studies of imagination in the human brain, researchers found a striking match between how the brain sees objects and how it imagines them. The findings make important inroads into two previously indecipherable aspects of neuroscience: memory and the origins of creativity.

The research focused on a region of the brain called the ventral temporal cortex, which is responsible for object recognition. Measuring neurons in that region, researchers ... found that many of the same neurons fire in response to a specific object, whether it is seen or imagined. In other words, the brain draws on overlapping groups of cells to perceive an apple and to conjure a mental picture of one. The finding suggests that the brain implements a ‘generative model’: a model that can take a high-level concept like ‘flower’ and synthesize a detailed picture of one, complete with colors, shading, shape and textures. ...

The results ... are an important first step toward understanding how creative processes — like making art and music — arise in the brain and how memories are retrieved. ..."

From the editor's summary and abstract:

"Editor’s summary

The ventral temporal cortex (VTC) is a brain area involved in identifying and categorizing visual stimuli. Wadia et al. performed single-neuron recording in the VTC of patients with epilepsy while the subjects were presented with real visual stimuli or were asked to imagine them. Deep network analysis showed that visually responsive neurons were tuned on specific axes. While imagining the objects, around 40% of the visually responsive VTC neurons were also robustly activated. Thus, mental imagery reactivates the same sensory codes used during visual stimuli, suggesting the existence of a generative model capable of synthesizing detailed sensory contents from an abstract, semantic representation.  ...

Structured Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Mental imagery refers to our brains’ capacity to generate percepts, emotions, and thoughts in the absence of external stimuli. ... Despite its importance in our lives, little is known about the single-neuron mechanisms of mental imagery. Neuroimaging results support a long-standing theory that imagery of a given sense is subserved by the reactivation of that specific sensory cortex. However, these studies lack the resolution to discern whether it is the same neurons or separate circuitry roughly located in the same regions that reactivates.

RATIONALE

We investigated the single-neuron mechanisms of visual imagery by recording single neurons in human patients implanted with electrodes to localize their focal epilepsy as they viewed and subsequently imagined objects. We focused our investigations on the ventral temporal cortex (VTC), a part of the temporal lobe dedicated to representing visual objects. We first determined the code for visual objects. We found that as in macaques, neurons in human VTC represent objects by using a distributed axis code. This code emphasizes the geometric picture that neurons project incoming stimuli—formatted as points in feature space—onto specific preferred axes and respond proportionally to the projection value. We then examined whether this code is reactivated during imagery.

RESULTS

We recorded 714 neurons in the human VTC across 16 patients as they viewed visual objects. A majority of neurons (456 of 714) were visually selective for one of the five object categories used (faces, plants, text, animals, and objects). To represent general objects with arbitrary features, we built a low-dimensional object space using the unit activations of deep networks trained to perform object classification. Nearly ~80% (367 of 456) of all visually responsive single neurons were significantly axis tuned. We used this axis code to reconstruct objects and generate maximally effective synthetic stimuli. Last, we recorded the responses of the same neurons in a subset of patients (6 of 16) as they imagined the same objects. Mean responses to perceived and imagined objects were comparable, with some neurons active only during perception, some only during imagery, and some during both. In particular, ~40% (43 of 107) of axis-tuned VTC neurons recorded during the imagery task reactivated, and the responses during imagery of individual neurons were proportional to the projection value of those objects onto the neurons’ viewing axes. We used this observation to reconstruct imagined objects while still easily distinguishing whether those objects were viewed or imagined.

CONCLUSION

We leveraged the opportunity to record from the same population of VTC neurons in humans as they viewed and imagined objects. Neurons use an axis code to represent visual objects, and neural activity during imagination reactivates this code. These findings provide single-neuron evidence for a generative model in the human brain."

Seeing and Imagining Are Handled by the Same Brain Cells "Researchers make advances in understanding how human brains are wired by pinning down how the same neurons are used for both imagining and seeing objects."

Imagine That: Brain Uses Neurons from Vision System When Forming Mental Imagery (another original news release) "Creative endeavors, like making art, writing music, or penning a poem, require the recall of memories to fuel imagination. Many other human behaviors, including problem solving, also rely on mental imagery to complete tasks, but little was known about how imagery works at the level of single neurons in the brain—until now."

A shared code for perceiving and imagining objects in human ventral temporal cortex (no public access)

A shared code for perceiving and imagining objects in human ventral temporal cortex (preprint, open access)

A shared code for vision and imagination.