Monday, September 28, 2026

AMD will acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 billion

Good news! Good for her! Fei-Fei Li is a top, leading ML & AI researcher at Stanford University!

"AMD is acquiring World Labs, one of the leading developers of deep learning models intended to understand physical reality, in a $8.2 billion deal, the two companies said today.

World Labs justified the deal in a statement saying that AI development required “close collaboration across model research, systems and compute.” AMD, in turn, says that understanding frontier workloads, like those created at World Labs, will shape its chip-making roadmap. ..."

AMD will acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 billion | TechCrunch




Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky divulged the location of two captured North Korean soldiers

Indeed, quite a mistake by President Zelensky!

So North Korean soldiers are indeed fighting for Putin the Terrible in this war.

"Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky divulged the location of captured North Korean soldiers.
 
Zelensky, during an address last week to the United Nations General Assembly, mentioned the pair of North Korean prisoners of war who had been held in Kyiv after being captured on the Russian front lines last year.
But he also detailed their relocation to South Korea, drawing an immediate rebuke by Seoul officials, who claimed it violated a nondisclosure pact, endangered the young North Koreans’ lives and demanded an apology from Kyiv."

The Wall Street Journal What's news

British counterterrorism police release the five suspects in terror plot against US forces. Really!

What! Who in their right mind releases so quickly possibly fanatic, suicidal terrorists unless these were the wrong individuals!

"British counterterrorism police said they were releasing five men on bail who where arrested over the foiled attack on a U.K. air base. Investigators say they are probing whether Iran or an Islamist group had orchestrated the plot, according to officials familiar with the matter. WSJ spoke to locals who live near the base, who question whether it really was a terror plot or something more mundane."

The Wall Street Journal What's news

Scientist accuses Anthropic of plagiarizing team’s biology work

Bad news, if confirmed!

E.g. it appears the University of Copenhagen did not release any news regarding this accusation.

"Scientist accuses Anthropic of plagiarizing team’s biology work
Anthropic said its AI agents used Claude to independently discover new enzymes it calls ARTs (array-associated reverse transcriptases) by searching gene databases.

But Copenhagen computational biologist Mario Rodríguez Mestre says he and colleagues had studied the same enzymes, which they nicknamed ‘jumbotrons,’ for four years. The team shared unpublished findings with Claude while using it for research tasks. Mestre says a key finding Anthropic credited to its AI, involving RNA molecules tied to the enzymes, matches work he says his team completed over a year earlier and had already discussed with Claude.
Anthropic responded that it found no prior published work on the ART system and that Claude was not trained on user transcripts.
The dispute echoes a similar case this month in which OpenAI claimed to have solved a math problem that mathematician Tristan Buckmaster said he had been working on using OpenAI’s models. Mestre says he is now winding down his use of Claude and moving to other AI models over concerns his research may have been used without attribution." (Data Points)

Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (behind paywall)

Nvidia releases tools to rein in rogue AI agents

AI nannies for AI agents?

"Nvidia released the Open Agent Safety Platform, software meant to help developers test and monitor AI agents and stop them from acting outside their intended boundaries.
Nvidia says the platform includes
(i) a watchdog that can quarantine misbehaving agents within milliseconds and
(ii) tools to control what agents can see, access, and interact with.

The release follows several incidents in which AI agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google went rogue, including an OpenAI agent that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said infiltrated a government-services website, and Anthropic’s disclosure that its test software hacked outside companies without its knowledge in three cases since April.
Nvidia said each incident followed the same pattern: agents escaped sandbox safety controls to complete their assigned tasks. For developers building AI agents, the platform offers a vendor-backed option for enforcing boundaries and monitoring behavior in production; however, there is currently no independent verification of how well it prevents the sandbox-escape pattern Nvidia describes." (Data Points)

NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform: A Reference for Continuous In-Silicon Agent Monitoring "Secure AI agents with a safety enforcement layer spanning software and hardware"




English for trippers: A regrettable table?

Concatenate regret & table!

Gaza student suspended by Dutch university after claiming role in October 7

Will this student be arrested and extradited to Israel? Don't hold your breath!

"A 22-year-old Palestinian student from the Gaza Strip was provisionally suspended from Maastricht University in the Netherlands after claiming in an Instagram video that he participated in the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, Dutch media reported over the weekend. ..."

Gaza student suspended by Dutch university after claiming role in October 7 | The Jerusalem Post "In the since-deleted video, which the student reportedly posted on Saturday, he watched footage of the attack and pointed at masked men on the screen, claiming it was him."


Students display banners as they occupy the socio-cultural sciences faculty building of Maastricht University (UM) in support of Palestinian people, in Maastricht on May 22, 2024.


10 places to get naked in Arizona in 2026

Who said Americans are prudish? 😊

How about Lake Pleasant — Northwest of Phoenix?

"Do people really run naked through the Arizona desert? Believe it or not, they do. Hundreds of brave souls will run wild when the Bare Buns Desert Run returns Oct. 17 at Shangri La Ranch in New River. Billed as Arizona’s only nude run, the 5K race winds through desert trails, a dry wash and the ranch property. Clothing is optional, but tennis shoes are highly encouraged — along with avoiding any cactus along the race route. But if running is not your thing  ... there are other options to feel the freedom of going naked in Arizona in 2026 … without getting yourself in trouble ...

Arizona doesn’t have official nude beaches, but it has a long tradition of clothing-optional spots — mostly private resorts and remote BLM and National Forest land where nude use is tolerated."

10 places to get naked in Arizona in 2026 - AZ Big Media

Elemental sulfur found in mammalian cells for first time

Amazing stuff!

"Mammalian cells actively produce elemental sulfur, using it as an antioxidant to limit cell damage. While bacteria, plants and fungi are known to produce the material, this is the first time it has been detected in mammals. ...

Now, an international team has detected S8 in cells from both mice and humans. The team, ... used a polyaromatic capsule to trap and stabilise S8 through hydrophobic interactions. This allowed them to use Raman microscopy and mass spectrometry to locate and quantify the abundance of elemental sulfur. ..."

"... Antioxidants are not obtained exclusively through the diet, as the body can also synthesize them with the help of various enzymes. An international research team ... has now demonstrated a new mechanism that contributes to the body’s own production of antioxidants. The researchers showed that mammalian cells produce and store elemental sulfur in a controlled manner in the form of cyclooctasulfur (S₈), a molecule consisting of eight sulfur atoms.

At the heart of this protective system is the enzyme eNOS, which is found in many cells. It produces nitric oxide (NO), a molecule that relaxes blood vessels and thereby regulates blood pressure. The researchers have now shown for the first time that eNOS has another function: the enzyme produces cyclooctasulfur (S₈), which serves as a storage form of elemental sulfur in cells. ...

The researchers found particularly high concentrations of these “sulfur rings” in the oxygen-dependent mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cell, as well as in lipid droplets, which serve as the cell’s fat stores. Through chemical reactions, the body can use its supply of S₈ molecules to produce specialized sulfur compounds known as hydropersulfides, which act as antioxidants. ..."

From the editor's summary and abstract:
"Editor’s summary
Elemental sulfur is an inert, water-insoluble form of sulfur that is converted into biologically assimilated forms used in energy metabolism, especially in bacteria in plants. Barayeu et al. report that cyclo-octasulfur is present in millimolar amounts in mitochondrial membranes and lipid droplets in human and mouse cells ... 
Octasulfur was generated by endothelial nitric oxide synthase. This process may provide a storage source for reactive hydropolysulfides that allow antioxidant defense mechanisms in mammalian cells. Supporting such a protective role, depletion of octasulfur in cultured mouse cells increased lipid peroxidation and cell death. ...

Structured Abstract
INTRODUCTION
Elemental sulfur is a central intermediate in the global sulfur cycle and is widely produced by prokaryotes, with additional evidence for its use in plants and fungi. Whether mammals synthesize, store, or use elemental sulfur, however, has remained unknown. Because mammalian cells enzymatically generate diverse reactive sulfur species, including hydropersulfides and polysulfides, we asked whether they also produce cyclo-octasulfur (S8), the most stable allotrope of elemental sulfur, for biological function.

RATIONALE
We reasoned that if mammals use elemental sulfur as a biologically meaningful metabolite, S8 should be maintained not as an incidental chemical product but as a regulated intracellular reservoir coupled to reactive sulfur metabolism.
To test this possibility, we established complementary approaches:
mass spectrometry using a polyaromatic capsule that captures and stabilizes S8, enabling its quantitative analysis, and 
Raman microscopy for the direct visualization of S8 in mammalian cells and tissues.

RESULTS
In line with established knowledge, we detected S8 in bacteria and yeast and further found it in mammalian mitochondria and lipid droplets from mouse and human cells and tissues. S8 was especially enriched in lipid droplets, corresponding by extrapolation to tens of grams or more of S8 across the human body, with particularly high levels in adipocyte-rich breast cancer tissues.
We identified lipid droplet–associated endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) as a major source of S8. Recombinant eNOS converted glutathione polysulfides [e.g., glutathione trisulfide (GSSSG)] into longer sulfur chains and ultimately S8 through an NADPH-dependent sulfur-catenation reaction, where NADPH is the reduced form of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate; in the presence of glutathione polysulfides and the canonical eNOS substrate L-arginine, this reaction also generated the nitric oxide (NO) carrier S-nitrosoglutathione (GSNO). Functionally, depletion of endogenous S8 increased lipid peroxidation and ferroptotic cell death,
whereas S8 delivery protected adipocytes and endothelial cells from ferroptosis. Mechanistically, S8 reacted with abundant cellular thiols, such as glutathione (GSH), to generate antioxidant hydropersulfides and polysulfides that suppress lipid peroxidation.
Local delivery of solubilized S8 into joints of mice with experimental osteoarthritis also reduced lipid peroxidation in joint tissue, suggesting a potentially protective effect.

CONCLUSION
Our findings establish that mammalian cells not only synthesize elemental sulfur as S8 but also sequester it within lipid-rich compartments at concentrations that surpass those of canonical lipophilic antioxidants such as vitamin E.
This hydrophobic sulfur reservoir may provide a dynamic replenishment of redox-active persulfides, thereby linking sulfur-chain chemistry to eNOS-dependent signaling, the restraint of lipid peroxidation, and resistance to ferroptotic cell death. These results position elemental sulfur biosynthesis as an evolutionarily conserved yet metabolically adaptable antioxidant strategy, broadening the conceptual landscape of mammalian redox biology."

Elemental sulfur found in mammalian cells for first time | Research | Chemistry World

Fighting cell death with sulfur (original news release)


A polyaromatic capsule was used to trap sulfur molecules produced in mammalian cells


Mammalian biosynthesis of elemental sulfur.




Ford’s Latest Employee of the Month Is a Hawk Named ‘El Charro’

Amazing stuff! Necessity is the mother of invention!

Ford’s Latest Employee of the Month Is a Hawk Named ‘El Charro’ - WSJ "To protect 300,000 trucks a year from a persistent pigeon invasion, the automaker turned to an ancient practice: falconry"


El Charro works shifts at the Hermosillo plant where he flies around trying to scare pigeons.


KI spricht Altgriechisch: Apollo schließt Lücken in 2.000 Jahre alten Texten

 Gute Nachrichten!

"In Museen und Bibliotheken weltweit lagern hunderttausende Inschriften und über eine Million Papyrusfragmente aus der Antike. Der Großteil des Materials ist fragmentarisch und schwer lesbar. 92 Prozent der Papyri warten bis heute auf ihre Entzifferung.
Ein gigantischer, unerschlossener Schatz der Geschichte. Doch: Die wissenschaftliche Erschließung erfordert enorm viel Zeit und sehr spezifisches Wissen. Genau hier setzt „Apollo“ an: das weltweit erste große KI-Sprachmodell für Altgriechisch. ..."

KI spricht Altgriechisch: Apollo schließt Lücken in 2.000 Jahre alten Texten "Neues Sprachmodell von Österreichischer Akademie der Wissenschaften und Mistral entwickelt. „Apollo“ ergänzt fehlende Inhalte in fragmentarischen antiken Texten. Weltweit erstes LLM für Altgriechisch."


Papyrus aus der römischen Kaiserzeit mit einer griechischen Geburtsanzeige, von Apollo rekonstruiert (Römisches Ägypten, 149 n. Chr.)


Sunday, September 27, 2026

Red gold: The world's most expensive spice (saffron)

Recommendable!

(5) Red gold: The world's most expensive spice - Carolyn Beans - YouTube


Handel: Arrival of the Queen of Sheba

Enjoy!

(5) Handel: Arrival of the Queen of Sheba | Academy of Ancient Music - YouTube


Tibetan protester hangs banner "Free Tibet" protesting Xi near the US Capitol

Tibet has been illegally occupied by China since 1951!

How will the next Dalai Lama be determined? The current one is 91 years old!

(4) Tibetan protester hangs banner protesting Xi near the US Capitol - YouTube


The Seller’s Market For Legal Stars Is Booming or the lateral partner hiring

Recommendable!

(1) The Seller’s Market For Legal Stars Is Booming - YouTube


Erwin Schrödinger: The Equation That Changed Physics. Really!

This is an example of a lousy biography on YouTube! Two thumbs down!

"Too much AI imagery! Why not use original photos of the time etc.! His equations/contributions not really explained! Two thumbs down!"

ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER: THE EQUATION THAT CHANGED PHYSICS ! - YouTube


Origins of the Jews of Scotland with Henry Abramson

Amazing stuff!

Origins of the Jews of Scotland - YouTube


Ukraine airdrops killer robots to take out 3,000 Russian troops in huge tech leap

When will the apathetic and lethargic Russian Slav(e)s finally get rid of Putin the Terrible!

(167) Ukraine airdrops killer robots to take out 3,000 Russian troops in huge tech leap - YouTube


Lourdes Echoes with Applause After the “Salve Regina” with the Pope at the Feet of the Virgin

Only three popes have ever visited Lourdes. The first one was the famous and great Polish Pope John Paul II!

Well, the first reported apparition did not occur before 11 February 1858 (according to Google Search).

(167) Lourdes Echoes with Applause After the “Salve Regina” with the Pope at the Feet of the Virgin– VIDEO - YouTube


How Brazil Missed The Opportunity Of Becoming a Superpower

Very recommendable!

(165) How Brazil Missed The Opportunity Of Becoming Superpower | Curious Case Of Brazil | The Blueprint - YouTube


DexTacWAM: A Visuo-Tactile World-Action Model for Dexterous Manipulation

This could be an interesting new research paper by Trevor Darrell and his team!

From the abstract:
"Dexterous manipulation depends on contact dynamics that are often only partially observable from vision.
Recent World-Action Models (WAMs) couple predictive video world modeling with action generation, but remain largely vision-centric and therefore cannot directly model these contact dynamics.
We present DexTacWAM, a visuo-tactile WAM that encodes each fingertip independently, aggregates the resulting features through a finger- and pose-aware tactile compressor, and injects the tactile latent into a video diffusion world model for joint visuo-tactile world modeling.
Across six contact-rich dexterous manipulation tasks on a 22-DoF bimanual platform, DexTacWAM achieves the highest score on every task, averaging 70.6 versus 38.0 for the strongest baseline.
Ablations attribute the gain to modeling contact evolution as part of the predicted world state rather than tactile conditioning alone: removing tactile world modeling reduces the four-task mean from 74.7 to 26.6 while keeping the same tactile features and action expert.
After four hours of tactile-encoder adaptation with a frozen pretrained vision VAE, our continual vision-to-touch learning extends the pretrained video model to touch using roughly 100 demonstrations per task without tactile midtraining, while retaining visual prediction quality within 0.5 dB of vision-only counterparts.
The compressor retains 89.4% of pre-fusion contact recall while enabling 2.26x faster training and 1.29x faster inference. Together, these results show that pretrained video priors can be extended to distributed multi-finger contact dynamics in a data- and compute-efficient manner."

[2609.24976] DexTacWAM: A Visuo-Tactile World-Action Model for Dexterous Manipulation (preprint, open access)






360Anything: Geometry-Free Lifting of Images and Videos to 360°

This could be an interesting new research paper by David J. Fleet and his team!

From the abstract:
"Lifting perspective images and videos to 360° panoramas enables immersive 3D world generation.
Existing approaches often rely on explicit geometric alignment between the perspective and the equirectangular projection (ERP) space. Yet, this requires known camera metadata, obscuring the application to in-the-wild data where such calibration is typically absent or noisy.
We propose 360Anything, a geometry-free framework built upon pre-trained diffusion transformers. By treating the perspective input and the panorama target simply as token sequences, 360Anything learns the perspective-to-equirectangular mapping in a purely data-driven way, eliminating the need for camera information. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on both image and video perspective-to-360° generation, outperforming prior works that use ground-truth camera information.
We also trace the root cause of the seam artifacts at ERP boundaries to zero-padding in the VAE encoder, and introduce Circular Latent Encoding to facilitate seamless generation.
Finally, we show competitive results in zero-shot camera FoV and orientation estimation benchmarks, demonstrating 360Anything's deep geometric understanding and broader utility in computer vision tasks. ..."

[2601.16192] 360Anything: Geometry-Free Lifting of Images and Videos to 360° (preprint, open access)






Embedding Physics Priors in Robot Learning: A Survey

This could be an interesting new survey paper by Jan Peters and his team!

From the abstract:
"The rapid progress of artificial intelligence is reshaping robotics and accelerating the adoption of learning-based approaches. While purely data-driven methods have achieved remarkable success in computer vision and natural language processing, robotics remains constrained by limited data, complex real-world interactions, and the need for reliable operation. These challenges have motivated the exploration of physics-embedded robot learning, which embeds physics priors into learning algorithms. By encoding the underlying physical laws and constraints, physics priors can complement limited data with robotics-specific inductive biases, potentially improving generalization, interpretability, and sample efficiency. However, the literature on physics-embedded robot learning remains fragmented across terminology, methodologies, and application domains, making it difficult to assess this growing body of work.
This survey reviews physics-embedded robot learning across a broad range of physics priors, robotics applications, and machine learning models, from single-layer perceptrons to generative foundation models.
We adopt a unified taxonomy that classifies existing approaches according to their physics embedding: physics-guided inputs, data, and representations; physics-encoded model architectures; and physics-informed training loss functions. Building on this taxonomy, we review methods for robot dynamics learning, trajectory planning, prediction, control, and estimation, together with the corresponding open-source software ecosystem.
We identify key open challenges, and outline promising future research directions. Overall, we argue that physics priors provide a particularly relevant robotics-specific inductive bias, complementing rather than replacing data-driven learning, and paving the way toward more generalizable, data-efficient, and trustworthy robotic systems."

[2609.22319] Embedding Physics Priors in Robot Learning: A Survey (preprint, open access)







Matryoshka attribution: Learning to attribute language model outputs to representations and weights

This could be an interesting new research paper by Noah Goodman, Dan Jurafsky, Christopher Potts and their team!

From the abstract:
"Attributing language model outputs to their internal computations is an open problem in interpretability.
Existing methods, which use causal interventions, gradients, or learnable masks, either are infeasibly expensive or struggle to identify actual causally-important internal computations.
We propose framing attribution as the problem of identifying nested subsets of internal components which minimise a downstream loss. To learn this task, we introduce Matryoshka Attribution (MAttr), a mask learning method that parametrises the mask with a simple differentiable sigmoid top-k operator.
We supervise training over all sparsities simultaneously by randomising k over training, resulting in a learned ordering of components by attribution score.
MAttr achieves number 1 on the official leaderboard of the Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark (Mueller et al., 2025); our method identifies sparse and task-transferrable circuits across varying circuit bases.
As a practical application, we show that MAttr can be trained with reinforcement learning to identify weight changes responsible for downstream behaviours in LLM finetuning.
We train MAttr on refusal judge scores and find that restoring 1% of Llama 3.1 8B Instruct's weights to their base model state is sufficient to remove refusals while maintaining capabilities. We view MAttr as a successful formulation of interpretability into a learnable objective that we can tackle with gradient descent, and encourage future work along these lines."

[2609.25518] Matryoshka attribution: Learning to attribute language model outputs to representations and weights (preprint, open access)
 



Trump says he approved new fuel economy standards that will lead to lower vehicle prices

Good news! These fuel economy standards of 1975 should have been abolished decades ago! They are pure socialism! They were introduced after the oil price shocks of the early 1970s and never rescinded! What a shame!

Bravo President Trump!

"President Trump said on Saturday he approved new fuel economy standards that will lead to lower automobile prices for consumers. 

"BIG DAY FOR AMERICAN AUTO WORKERS AND CAR BUYERS! I have just approved new Fuel Economy Standards that TERMINATE Sleepy Joe Biden and Pete Boot-EDGE-EDGE's ridiculous EV Mandate. The Dumocrats cost our Great Auto Manufacturers $Billions, forced Americans into cars they never wanted, and wasted Billions on Chargers that were never built," Trump wrote. 

"These new Standards will take the waste out of building cars in America. That means LOWER PRICES, saving families thousands on a new, beautiful, and safe car — Far better than the Environmental Monsters that we were building heretofore. Every Manufacturer, from General Motors to Ford to Stellantis, has called me wanting to build here, and now they can!" he also wrote. ..."

Trump says he approved new fuel economy standards that will lead to lower vehicle prices | Just The News "“Every Manufacturer, from General Motors to Ford to Stellantis, has called me wanting to build here, and now they can!" Trump wrote."

Why are so many adults cutting off their parents in the US? Really!

Is this just a catchy news headline or is it real? How much is it different from the past?

What is a harm? How much have so called therapists do with it?

About 10% of adults does not seem to be very high. 

Notice also the use of the controversial term "tipping point" here.

How permanent are these estrangements? Many are probably only temporary (several weeks/months/years)!

"Many experts believe that estrangements between adult children and their parents are becoming an epidemic in the U.S., just like divorce in the 1970s. Though recent statistics are hard to come by, there are signs that a shift is under way. Columnist Elizabeth Bernstein explores the factors that psychologists, sociologists and other experts believe are driving it, from social-media algorithms to changing therapeutic approaches and a broadening definition of trauma."

"Family estrangement is on the rise across the U.S., with roughly 10% of adults estranged from a parent or child and up to 25% to 38% estranged from a close relative.

Driving Factors and Cultural Shifts
Expanded definitions of harm: Young adults are increasingly utilizing mental health terminology to identify emotional neglect, toxic behaviors, and abuse, feeling less bound by the traditional notion that "family is family".
The role of therapy culture: Modern therapy often encourages boundary-setting, self-care, and empowerment. While ethical therapists emphasize that they do not explicitly tell clients to cut off family, 33% of surveyed estranged parents blame therapists and "therapy speak" for influencing their children to sever ties rather than pursue repair.
Diverging perspectives: Parents often point to external catalysts—such as a therapist, a new marriage, or a bitter divorce—while adult children typically cite long-standing patterns of hurtful behavior and a lack of parental accountability.
Social media influence: Platforms amplify open discussions on toxic family dynamics, offering community support for estrangement as well as a counter-movement of estranged parents speaking out." (Google Search)

The Wall Street Journal What's news

Why Are So Many Adults Cutting Off Their Parents? "Family estrangement is on the rise, driven by shifting family norms and changing therapy practices. ‘We’re at a cultural tipping point. [???]’"


Author Elizabeth Bernstein around 2024 (Source)


Yoav Gallant says Hamas warned Shin Bet ahead of October 7 massacre. Really!

This seems to be one of the latest attempts to cast doubt on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu!

What kind of warning was that?

"Former defense minister Yoav Gallant confirmed that Israel did receive a message from Hamas through a Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) channel in which Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar warned that he would "shake the prisons," [???] Gallant told Army Radio on Sunday. ..."

Yoav Gallant says Hamas warned Shin Bet ahead of October 7 massacre | The Jerusalem Post "The former defense minister also alleged that Netanyahu kept him away from key US talks during the Gaza war."

Four captive-bred California condors were released into the wild at Vermilion Cliffs National Monument in Arizona

Good news!

"... marking 30 years since the first birds were set loose in northern Arizona."

"... Condors reached the brink of extinction in the late 1980s, and are now the subject of a multi-agency recovery program. The regional effort to reintroduce condors and develop a self-sustaining population ..."

Sunday, September 27, 2026 - The Arizona Flyover



Source: Condors in northern Arizona Notice the condor is tagged.


The cost of AI performance is falling at an exceptional rate

Good news!

"... according to a new report from Epoch AI, a research nonprofit. Epoch tracked how much it costs for AI models to achieve given scores on five tests, covering mathematics, hard sciences, and games of skill such as chess puzzles. Across all five tests, Epoch estimates that the minimum cost of reaching a given score has fallen about 47 percent per quarter since 2023, a roughly 13-fold decline each year. According to Epoch’s analysis, that’s about four times faster than the fall in DNA sequencing costs, one of the fastest price declines in history."

"Key takeaways
  • AI has gotten cheaper more quickly than any other transformative technology in history. The cost of achieving a given level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter since 2023, or 13× per year. That price drop is four times faster than DNA sequencing, six times faster than compute, 18 times faster than lithium batteries, and (in the century up to 1973) 54 times faster than electricity.
  • Coarser evidence suggests that the price of thought has been falling at least this fast since the dawn of commercial LLM inference in November 2021, when OpenAI fully released GPT-3.
  • The speed of price drop varies by domain: slower on game-based puzzles, at 39–43% per quarter, faster on math problems, at 50–52% per quarter.
  • The cost of a given level of performance often falls fastest right after that level is first achieved, that is, when it is state of the art (SOTA). We see this pattern on three of our five main benchmarks of AI capability. Averaging across all five, cost falls 66% per quarter (75× per year) for performance that has just debuted as SOTA. Two years later, prices fall half as fast, at 32% per quarter (4.7× per year).
..."

Doomslayer: Progress Roundup - by Malcolm Cochran

The plunging price of thought "Over the past three years, the cost of a given level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter, faster than for any other transformative technology in history."


The price of artificial thought may have fallen faster than for any other transformative technology in history


India is rapidly increasing its number of trade agreements

Good news!

"Since February 2021, India has signed seven free trade agreements covering 10 countries, bringing its total number of signed free trade agreements to 17. India has also concluded negotiations on a trade deal with the European Union, though it has not yet been signed, and is currently negotiating a trade agreement with the United States."

Doomslayer: Progress Roundup - by Malcolm Cochran

Saturday, September 26, 2026

NASA’s New Space Telescope Nancy Grace Roman Just Sent Its First Image

Very recommendable! Amazing stuff!

(7) NASA’s New Space Telescope Just Sent Its First Image — And It Looks Strange - YouTube


Ike and Tina Turner- 'It's Gonna Work Out Fine' Live (The Midnight Special 1974)

Enjoy!

(2) Ike and Tina Turner- 'It's Gonna Work Out Fine' Live (The Midnight Special 1974) - YouTube


Devotion - Earth, Wind, and Fire (live)

I know, I posted this song not not long ago! Here we go again! My devotion to EWF and lead singer Philip Bailey!

(2) Devotion - Earth, Wind, and Fire | The Midnight Special - YouTube


Rob Finnerty exposes the mainstream media’s false polling narrative

Recommendable!

Rob Finnerty exposes the mainstream media’s false polling narrative | Finnerty - YouTube


Something Is Wrong With South Africa | South African Crisis Explained

This looks really bad! Did black South Africans ruin the country?

(165) Something Is Wrong With South Africa | South African Crisis Explained | The Blueprint - YouTube


Why Saudi Arabia's $80 Billion Military Can't Stop the Houthis

Recommendable!

(165) Why Saudi Arabia's $80 Billion Military Can't Stop the Houthis | The Link - YouTube


Chart of the day

What is the message? How strong is the message?

Source


 

How America’s Biggest Buffet Chain Golden Corral Cracked the Math of All You Can Eat

Headline of the day!

"To make the economics work for all you can eat meat and potatoes, executives with the Golden Corral buffet chain watch not only what their customers consume, but what they throw away.  ..."

How America’s Biggest Buffet Chain Cracked the Math of All You Can Eat (behind paywall) "Golden Corral scrutinizes buffet waste, marries costly shrimp with cheaper hush puppies and mines data to make money off bottomless offerings"

Unlocking sulfur's third electron boosts lithium-sulfur battery voltage and capacity

Good news! Sounds almost like very boring research! Like Thomas Alva Edison tested over 6000 different plant materials to find a better filament for the incandescent light bulb.

There were actually three related studies published around the same time.

"... The three studies were led by Distinguished University Professor Chunsheng Wang and received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. Together, they show how controlling reactions and transport at battery interfaces can enable more efficient use of sulfur, silicon and lithium metal. Each design addresses a different failure mechanism while advancing the shared goals of higher energy, faster charging and reliable operation under demanding conditions. ..."

"... Researchers ... recently introduced a new ionic liquid electrolyte that could improve the performance of lithium-sulfur batteries. This electrolyte, ... was found to increase both the voltage and energy storage of lithium-sulfur batteries. ...

As part of their study, the researchers tested various electrolytes with different proportions of lithium salt and an ionic liquid containing chloride. ... then ran computer simulations to model the movement and interactions of atoms and molecules in batteries with these electrolytes. Ultimately, the team identified the best-performing electrolyte and used it to design a lithium-sulfur battery with a different internal chemistry. ..."

From the abstract:
"Rechargeable lithium–sulfur batteries offer a promising route to high-energy storage using abundant sulfur, but their energy density is constrained by low operating voltage, sluggish redox kinetics and polysulfide shuttling.
Raising sulfur to higher oxidation states could increase cell voltage, yet reversible high-valence sulfur chemistry in lithium batteries remains difficult because chloride species bind Li+ and halogen-mediated reactions consume electrolyte. Here we show that a free-chloride-rich ionic liquid electrolyte enables a Li||S2Cl2 chemistry that addresses these limitations by reversibly converting Li2S to S2Cl2 through a three-electron sulfur redox process. The electrolyte functions as an ionic mediator with only a minor capacity contribution.
This chemistry increases the average operating voltage from 2.05 to 2.54 V at 25 °C and 0.2C, raises sulfur-specific capacity by 58% and delivers an electrode-level specific energy above 1,700 Wh kg−1 with cycling over 100 cycles."

Unlocking sulfur's third electron boosts lithium-sulfur battery voltage and capacity





Reversible three-electron sulfur redox enabled by phase-separated ionic-liquid electrolytes





SPARROW: Survival-POMCP for Adaptive Robot Routing, Observation, and Waiting

This might be an interesting new research paper by Nicholas Rhinehart and his team! It is about temporary obstacles.

From the abstract:
"Temporary obstacles that may block a robot's planned route create a sequential navigation problem: a robot must decide whether to wait for a blockage to clear, reroute, or acquire more information about the obstacle before acting.
We formulate graph navigation among temporary obstacles as a partially observable semi-Markov decision process and introduce SPARROW, a belief-space planner built on Partially Observable Monte Carlo Planning (POMCP). SPARROW searches over traversal, observation, and finite-duration waiting actions while maintaining a particle belief over latent obstacle classes and clearance times.
Class-conditioned survival models are learned online from both clearance observations and right-censored encounters where the robot reroutes before clearance is observed.
A generative model simulates obstacle arrivals and clearances as each action unfolds, so the planner can account for blockages that may occur along alternative routes.
We further introduce a value-of-learning criterion that trades the immediate cost of collecting labelled survival data against its expected reduction in future navigation regret. Across two simulation graphs and multiple obstacle-class settings, SPARROW reduces mean time-to-goal by 12-26% relative to OSCAR, a recent survival-based method for the same problem.
On a physical mobile robot, SPARROW reduces mean time-to-goal by 20.5% relative to OSCAR while selectively observing, waiting, and rerouting as environment conditions change."

[2609.21008] SPARROW: Survival-POMCP for Adaptive Robot Routing, Observation, and Waiting





Laser-generated muon particles allow scientists to see through walls

Amazing stuff!

"... After processing the data, a team at the Extreme Light Infrastructure Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) in Romania has now released images: a shadow of a pile of lead blocks perched between the wall and the van.
For the first time, the researchers showed the images were created almost entirely by muons, high energy particles produced by the laser ... 
Such on-demand muon beams could eventually be used to reveal objects that light cannot penetrate, from subsurface archaeological structures to concealed nuclear materials shipped across borders. ...

Muons are elementary particles similar to electrons but about 200 times heavier. Their high energies and masses allow them to penetrate thick and dense objects. As they pass through matter, they are absorbed and deflected in ways that can reveal the material’s density and structure. ..."

From the abstract:
"Artificially generated muon beams, with tunable parameters, are highly valuable in imaging objects that are opaque to any other scanning technique. Lower-energy muon beams are currently produced at accelerator facilities, while higher energies have only recently been observed as a result of the interaction of laser-wakefield-accelerated electrons and solid targets.
This work focuses on using muography imaging detectors to measure the profile of a muon beam generated via the Bethe-Heitler process and to perform muon imaging in an experimental setup extending up to 42 meters from the muon source. By comparing the data with Monte Carlo simulations, we confirm that the measured beam profile and object imaging are consistent with artificially produced muons of energy of a few GeV. To our knowledge, this represents the first demonstration of imaging dominated by an artificial, laser-driven muon beam."

Laser-generated particles allow scientists to see through walls | Science | AAAS





How a decade of emissions intensified Europe’s heat waves. Really!

Most likely a piece of junk science (published by Stanford University)!

Just the fact that this research is entirely based on training a generative AI model is suspicious enough!

This claim of human emissions is also at odds with the fact that the atmosphere has become much cleaner in recent decades.

"In brief
  • Researchers trained a generative AI model to predict how extreme heat waves in Europe could unfold under different global emissions levels.
  • The team found more than 99-in-100 odds that human-caused emissions from the last decade made the deadly 2025 European heat wave more intense.
  • The study is an advance in linking subsets of emissions to climate change damages, and emphasizes the need to prepare for intensifying extreme weather alongside global emissions reductions.
..."

From the abstract:
"Understanding the consequences of continued greenhouse-gas emissions requires determining whether recent emissions can be robustly linked to changes in extreme weather events. However, current approaches have a limited ability to quantify changes in extreme weather caused by small subsets of anthropogenic emissions, particularly for individual events.
To address these limitations, we train a generative machine-learning model to predict spatially-explicit changes in daily surface temperature at different levels of cumulative emissions, conditional on the event's observed meteorological conditions.
Using this approach, we find strong evidence (>95% probability) that the combined effects of anthropogenic emissions released since the 2015 UN Paris Agreement have increased the intensity of Europe's summer temperature extremes since 2021. Additionally, our results suggest >99% probability that regional-mean temperature during Europe's high-impact June 2025 heatwave would have been lower (median estimate of 0.34°C) if the same large-scale meteorological conditions had occurred under 2015 levels of cumulative emissions."

How a decade of emissions intensified Europe’s heat waves | Stanford Report "A new study finds emissions since 2015 made recent heat waves more intense, underscoring the need to prepare for even hotter conditions ahead."

Sex differences in attention are present at birth, study finds

Amazing stuff!

"... In this new study, infants were presented with side-by-side videos containing a social stimulus, namely a human face with natural movement, and a non-social object, namely a set of metallic balls swinging due to gravity and their mechanical properties (a Newton’s cradle). 

The team found that, regardless of sex, newborn infants generally preferred to look at the social stimulus. However, on average, female infants spent a greater proportion of the time looking at the social stimulus compared to male infants, while male infants spent a greater proportion of time looking at the non-social stimulus compared to female infants. ..."

From the abstract:
"While sex differences in behaviour have attracted considerable scientific interest, their underlying causes are complex and remain poorly understood.
One approach to understand whether early biological factors might play a partial role is to study newborns, who have limited postnatal experiences.
Previous research on neonatal sex differences is extremely limited, and studies that do exist have yielded mixed results, raised methodological concerns, and are yet to be replicated.
To assess these gaps, the present study aimed to reevaluate sex differences in neonatal attention. 130 neonates (67 males, 63 females; mean age = 33 h) were presented with a video of a human face and a non-social object. When analysing percentage looking times, on average, females allocated a greater percentage of time looking at the face relative to males (d = 0.40).
When analysing absolute looking times, females showed a preference for the face compared to the non-social object, while males showed no preference for either. However, no differences were observed between males’ and females’ absolute looking times for the face or object, indicating that sex differences are most prominent in the relative allocation of attention.
Since sex differences in relative attentional patterns are present from the earliest days of life, one possible explanation for this effect may be due to contributions from prenatal factors (e.g., sex hormones). However, alternative explanations may be that these differences reflect general maturational differences between males and females or arise from low-level visual properties of the stimuli rather than their social versus non-social content."

Sex differences in attention are present at birth, study finds | University of Cambridge "Cambridge scientists have shown that girls and boys show differences in what they pay attention to, even at birth. Since these differences are present so early, it is possible they emerge due to prenatal factors."



A screen-clipping from the stimulus video depicting the dynamic face and object presented to infants


President Trump and President Xi strike a deal to cut tariffs on $30 billion worth of goods

Good news! Once more The Art of the Deal!

Yesterday, I was speculating here that perhaps "there is something in the pipeline".

However, this approach to negotiate favorable trade deals with individual countries is controversial.

"The White House announced that President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping have reached a deal to cut tariffs on $30 billion worth of goods.

According to a White House fact sheet, China has agreed to import at least 10 million metric tons of coal from the U.S. in 2027 and 2028.

The agreement covers U.S. exports of agricultural goods, wood products, fish and seafood, cosmetics, and medical devices, the White House said. 

The Chinese imports in the deal include small appliances, holiday decorations, toys as well as children’s car seats. ..."

Trump, Xi strike $30 billion tariff deal | Just The News "The Chinese imports in the deal include small appliances, holiday decorations, toys and children’s car seats."