What is IBM’s nanostack chip architecture? - IBM Research

Recommendable! Explains the latest chip design breakthrough by Big Blue!

See also my recent blog post here regarding new IBM chips.

What is IBM’s nanostack chip architecture? - IBM Research "This new microchip architecture from IBM builds up, not out, to overcome the spatial limitations of scaling transistor density."

Nanosheet transistor architecture (center), introduced by IBM in 2017, has supplanted the previously dominant FinFET technology (left). Nanostack transistor architecture (right) is expected to extend transistor scaling for more than a decade.

English for trippers: Barely bearable

Definition: You home A/C broke down and it is over 100F (between 40-45C) degrees hot outside (like now in July in Phoenix, AZ) and you are waiting for over 48 hours for an A/C technician to show up and fix it! Is this an emergency or what? 😊

P.S. You can even watch your almost useless ceiling fan sweating too! Just kidding!

P.S. All the while, you are constantly worried that your laptop does not get too hot too.

The first 100 American autonomous ground vehicles (ATVs) are fighting in Ukraine against Putin the Terrible

Good news! Bring it on! Make Putin the Terrible sweat more!

"Forterra, a U.S. builder of autonomous vehicles, revealed today that more than 100 of its self-driving ATVs have been deployed in conflict zones in Ukraine for the past nine months, in what the company believes is the largest deployment of autonomous ground vehicles in combat by any U.S. defense tech company. ..."

The first American autonomous ground vehicles are fighting in Ukraine | TechCrunch

German Foreign Minister Wadephul warns against weakening Palestinian Authority, says it could harm Israel's security. Really!

What a fool this German foreign minister is! The PA is long overdue to be replaced with something better for the Arabs living in the Gaza Strip and West Bank!

The Palestinian Authority has been a disaster and a terrorism sponsor for several decades! Remember the crook Yasser Arafat!

German FM warns against weakening Palestinian Authority, says it could harm Israel's security | The Jerusalem Post

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul speaks during a press conference on the day he meets with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem, July 7, 2026.

German FM Wadephul to sign agreement with Israel giving Yad Vashem five million euros yearly

Good news! Bravo!

"Yad Vashem raises controversy with German educational centers

In May, Yad Vashem announced plans to open an educational center in Munich and a satellite branch in Leipzig, its first permanent facilities outside Israel. ..."

German FM Wadephul to sign agreement giving Yad Vashem five million euros yearly | The Jerusalem Post "The agreement will replace an older one agreed upon in 2020, in which Germany committed to providing €1 million annually until 2031."

Iran fires missiles at two commercial ships in Strait of Hormuz, causing major damage

Where are the coward Europeans when you need them! The US will remember!!!

Where are the European minesweepers and navy escort protection for commercial ships?

Iranian missiles reportedly hit Saudi, Qatari tankers in Strait of Hormuz | The Jerusalem Post "Qatar said on Tuesday the targeting of the Qatari tanker Al Rekayyat near the Strait of Hormuz was an unacceptable attack on the security of international navigation and global energy supplies."

Israel conditions Jordan water supply on softened rhetoric, fueling new crisis

Serious stuff! Many wars were fought over water rights! I hope this will not escalate and Benjamin Netanyahu will not make a mistake here.

Jordan has been a good neighbor to Israel for decades, if I am not mistaken! Plus, Jordan risked a lot to be a good neighbor to Israel.

"... After a series of extensions, Jerusalem conditioned the resumption of supply on Amman softening its rhetoric on Israel and on the thawing of relations, which grew increasingly hostile over the course of the Israel-Hamas war. ..."

Israel conditions Jordan water supply on softened rhetoric, fueling new crisis | The Jerusalem Post "The 1994 peace treaty signed by Amman and Jerusalem required Israel to supply Jordan with 50 million cubic meters of water annually, an amount doubled in a 2021 commitment that expired in 2025."

Japan’s Hayabusa2 probe flew close by the double-lobed asteroid Torifune some 62 million miles from Earth

Amazing stuff!

"Japan’s Hayabusa2 probe flew close by the double-lobed asteroid Torifune on Sunday, capturing striking images of the 1,475-foot space rock some 62 million miles from Earth. ..."

Tuesday, July 7, 2026 - Join The Flyover

Japan's Hayabusa2 probe captures remarkable photo of a two-headed asteroid 62 million miles away

Hayabusa2 spots asteroid Torifune!

Stunning!

Figure 1: Image of Asteroid Torifune captured by Hayabusa2. This image is a composite of photographs taken at intervals between 20 June and 21 June 2026. The small celestial body within the yellow square is Torifune, moving in the direction of the arrow. The image is a cropped section of approximately one square degree, created from images captured by the Optical Navigation Camera - Telescopic (ONC-T) with a scale of approximately 22.3 arcseconds per pixel.

President Trump announces Walmart to lower prices for thousands of products at his administration's request

Good, but ambiguous news! The president of the people or a populist?

It is however controversial at a minimum, when a government intervenes at a private business to lower product prices.

"President Donald Trump said Monday that Walmart has confirmed it will be lowering its prices for thousands of products this summer at his administration's request in celebration of the United States' 250th birthday.

Walmart said it will be lowering prices through its signature Rollbacks and Sam's Club programs, and customers can expect savings on groceries, household and everyday essentials, outdoor living, toys and apparel.

Trump noted that one grocery price that the savings include is a reduction in the cost of beef, which he said will be lowered by almost 15% per pound. Walmart said a pound of beef will now cost $5.94 instead of $6.74. ..."

Trump announces Walmart to lower prices for thousands of products at his administration's request | Just The News "Walmart said it will be lowering prices through its signature Rollbacks and Sam's Club programs, and customers can expect savings on groceries, household and everyday essentials, outdoor living, toys and apparel."

The Chinese Great Firewall is absolutely horrible, worse than or comparable to the Great Wall of ancient times

On my very recent long stay in China, I was again deeply shocked by how much of the Internet/Web is heavily censored/inaccessible in China!

What are the communists afraid of or what do they have to hide?

E.g. all my favorite news websites like Walls Street Journal, BBC and many others were not accessible to me on any device when living in central China.

Of course, I had a VPN installed on my laptop before the trip to China, but due to some error of mine I happened to accidentally uninstall it.

They say history repeats/rhymes!

Here is an article that also covers this subject: When is the Internet Not the Internet? "China’s intranet is so separated from the global Internet that it is more accurately described as a national intranet." Caveat: I did not read the entire article.

President Trump cheers as over 6 million sign up for Trump accounts

Good news, great idea! Economists have recommended such or similar accounts for several decades!

See also my other, new blog post here regarding this subject!

Make every American a millionaire by the time they reach adulthood! Caution: satire!

"President Donald Trump on Monday celebrated the launch of Trump accounts, saying that more than 6 million Americans had signed up for the project.

Earlier in the day, he formally rang the bell to open the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ from the White House as part of a ceremony marking the launch.

"Already, more than 6 million Americans have signed up for Trump accounts—and we've just started—many of which are receiving a one-time seed contribution of $1,000.... the Trump Accounts could grow to hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time they reach 18," he said. ..."

Trump cheers as 6M+ sign up for Trump accounts | Just The News "Earlier in the day, he formally rang the bell to open the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ from the White House as part of a ceremony marking the launch."

Planning with the Views

This could be an interesting paper by Li Fei Fei and Leonidas Guibas

From the abstract:

"Can VLMs predict how each camera move changes the view, and plan many such moves ahead? We call this capability view planning, requiring 

(1)understanding how a single action transforms the view, and 

(2) composing many such transformations across multi-turn plans to identify a target view.

We probe both abilities in our proposed ViewSuite, a 3D point-cloud environment on real ScanNet scenes.

Across 13 frontier VLMs, a critical planning gap emerges: they possess basic view-action knowledge but fail to compose it across multi-turn plans, with the gap widening as viewpoint distance grows.

To close this gap, we propose an iterative framework that alternates self-exploration with view graph distillation.

The key insight is that all exploration trajectories, regardless of their outcome, collectively form a view graph that compactly captures how viewpoints connect across a scene.

Distilling this graph into diverse supervised tasks reshapes the policy distribution and overcomes the sparse rewards that stall pure RL.

This improves Qwen2.5-VL-7B from 2.5% to 47.8% on interactive view planning, surpassing GPT-5.4 Pro (18.5%) and Gemini 3.1 Pro (21.4%). Self-exploration emerges as a promising path toward VLMs that can actively reason and plan in 3D space. Code and Data are at this https URL."

[2605.29563] Planning with the Views

English for trippers: Considerably considered

Taken into consideration!

Harvard University: World is designed by, for men. It shouldn’t be. Really!

Amazing how the elite Harvard University spreads 1960s outdated vulgar feminism!

I don't know how old the author is, but her silly propaganda gives it away anyway. According to Google search, she is 69 years old or born 1957.

Harvard design expert challenges man-made world — Harvard Gazette "Karen Korellis Reuther explains why it’s a problem (dangerous, even) in products, how more inclusive design serves everyone"

Remediating PFAS pollution in Europe could cost €100 billion a year. Really!

The alarmism and hysteria about PFAS won't die! It is only a matter of time until we come up with better solutions!

Fact is that PFAS are extremely useful chemicals!

The first PFAS were introduced in the 1940s. If PFAS are so dangerous, then a large part of the world population should be severely affected or dead by now. 

Notice also this study included/mixed PFAS and precursors, which may or may not be dubious!

"A new study suggests Europe could spend more than €100 billion (£85 billion) a year remediating PFAS pollution while still capturing less than 2% of current emissions. Researchers say the findings reinforce the need to prioritise reducing PFAS use and releases at source rather than trying to clean up contamination after it occurs. ..."

EPA: "... Current scientific research suggests that exposure to certain PFAS may lead to adverse health outcomes. However, research is still ongoing to determine how different levels of exposure to different PFAS can lead to a variety of health effects.

Research is also underway to better understand the health effects associated with low levels of exposure to PFAS over long periods of time, especially in children. ..."

From the abstract:

"Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are widespread in environmental media. Concentrations are currently increasing due to substantial ongoing emissions. One approach to mitigating environmental PFAS exposure is the remediation of existing stocks, contaminated sites, landfills, and drinking water. However, the costs to achieve this on a regional scale and amounts of PFAS that could be addressed through remediation remain uncharacterized.

To address this, costs for “legacy” and “emerging” PFAS remediation scenarios in Europe were developed based on publicly available site data, remediation cost data, and an expert assessment of currently scalable technologies, through collaboration within a cross-border, collaborative investigation network entitled the “Forever Lobbying Project”. The “legacy” scenario reflects remediation to remove previously emitted, long-chain PFAS that are currently widely regulated in Europe from selected hotspot sites and drinking water. The “emerging” scenario targets nearly all PFAS, including ultra-short chain PFAS, across a wider range of intermediate receptors, including wastewater effluent and biosolids.

Legacy remediation costs across all 27 EU countries were estimated to be approximately €37 billion over 20 years (€1.8 billion per year), which would lead to a reduction in health impacts.

Emerging costs that address shorter chain PFAS in more media were estimated to be about 20 times more expensive at €100 billion per year. However, even this level of investment may be insufficient. This emerging scenario treating 1636 heavily contaminated European soil sites plus all large wastewater plant effluents, large drinking water zones, agriculturally applied sludges, and collected landfill leachate would only address 3 ton per year to 50 tons per year of PFAAs and precursors, which is less than 2% of current estimated EU emissions. The substantial difference in costs between scenarios and the low proportion of emissions that can be addressed with remediation highlight the urgency of implementing use restrictions and source control for PFAS. Preventing PFAS pollution would be less costly and more impactful than relying on remediation after release."

Remediating PFAS pollution in Europe could cost €100 billion a year | Research | Chemistry World

EPA: Our Current Understanding of the Human Health and Environmental Risks of PFAS

PFAS remediation across Europe: costs and limited impacts (open access)

Visual Abstract

Canadian spy agency says it hacked drug traffickers, extremists and a ransomware gang last year

Very impressive, but should intelligence services perform law enforcement operations?

A news junky like me does not remember seeing or reading much news about the Canadian spy agency. 

"Offering a rare glimpse at the priorities of a top spy organization, Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE) said it conducted a handful of state-authorized hacks last year in order to disrupt the operations of drug traffickers, violent extremists, and a ransomware gang. ..."

One of the operations, per the report, targeted cybercriminals outside of Canada who were brokering the sale of chemicals used to create the synthetic opioid fentanyl. The CSE collected intelligence on the brokers, then conducted an operation that “disrupted and diminished their ability to operate,” the report said.

Another active operation involved the collection of signals intelligence — data produced from electronics and internet-connected devices — on an overseas extremist group that was spreading violent ideology and recruiting members, including in Canada.

The report said the agency analyzed the group’s organization, reach, and potential vulnerabilities to conduct an operation that “successfully undermined the group’s credibility and limited their ability to radicalize and recruit new members.”

Another operation involved disrupting a ransomware-as-a-service operation that let hackers rent access to a ransomware gang’s infrastructure to launch destructive extortion attacks. The CSE said its signals intelligence unit identified how the gang worked against the healthcare, transportation, and business sectors in Canada, then used an active cyber operation that “rendered the group’s infrastructure inoperable.” The operation also deleted much of the data on the gang’s servers.

The agency said it undertook concurrent “technical disruptions” against 10 of the most significant ransomware gangs targeting Canada to “make parts of their infrastructure unusable.” ..."

Canadian spy agency says it hacked drug traffickers, extremists and a ransomware gang last year | TechCrunch

Communications Security Establishment Canada Annual Report 2025-2026

"Nuntium Comparat et Custodit" is a Latin phrase that translates to "Providing and protecting information". The official motto of the CSE.

Johns Hopkins archives highlight nearly two centuries of LGBTQ+ history. Really!

Does this elite university have nothing better or more relevant/novel to present!

The celebrity circus/cult about LGBTQ goes on!

How many times has the history of gay men and/or LGBTQ been presented over the last 40 years or so? Many times!

Johns Hopkins archives highlight nearly two centuries of LGBTQ+ history | Hub "Curator Gabrielle Dean and librarian Siân Evans share the university's collection of LGBTQ+ books, photos, zines, and more—a testament to the queer community's struggles and joy"

"Ulrichs [Karl Heinrich Ulrichs] described and defended same-sex love in a series of five pamphlets published in 1864 and 1865, collected together under the title Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (Studies on the Riddle of Male-Male Love)"

Varying A/C on Chinese subway train cars

The first and the last subway car offers less intense A/C. I have seen this multiple times.

Mucosal immunoglobulin A (IgA) to prevent norovirus infection in mice

Good news!

"... The findings ... upend traditional vaccine development efforts which to date have focused on creating norovirus-fighting antibodies that circulate in the blood rather than taking up residence in the gut.

According to findings, mucosal IgA (Immunoglobulin A) antibodies — which are found primarily in the body’s mucosal surfaces, including the lungs, airway, the intestines, and gut — provide key immune defense against norovirus. ...

“By using mouse models, we discovered that IgA was both necessary and sufficient for protection against norovirus.” ..."

From the editor's summary and abstract:

"Editor’s summary

Although most individuals recover from norovirus infection after an unpleasant few days, some individuals, such as infants, older adults, and immunocompromised individuals, are at risk of developing severe gastroenteritis. As such, vaccines to combat this infection are urgently needed. Here, Ökten et al. investigated which components of the immune system are required to effectively clear norovirus in a murine model. The authors found that intestinal IgA in particular was both necessary and sufficient for clearance of norovirus in mice.

To highlight the translational potential of these findings, the authors showed that delivery of an mRNA encoding an anti-norovirus dimeric IgA was able to protect mice.

Together, these results highlight the requirement for a successful norovirus vaccine to specifically elicit mucosal IgA and suggest that anti-norovirus IgA antibodies may offer a prophylactic or therapeutic option for at-risk populations. ...

Abstract

Human norovirus is the leading cause of viral gastroenteritis, yet effective vaccines and therapeutics remain elusive. Using murine norovirus as a model, we found that mucosal immunoglobulin A (IgA) is both necessary and sufficient for protection against infection, whereas CD8+ T cells are dispensable.

Robust intestinal IgA production requires at least 4 weeks of enteric infection, consistent with kinetics of human norovirus RNA clearance.

Systemic vaccination elicits high titers of neutralizing serum IgG but fails to prevent enteric norovirus infection, phenocopying a recent human norovirus vaccine failure.

In contrast, prophylactic delivery of dimeric anti-norovirus IgA via mRNA lipid nanoparticles confers sterilizing immunity.

Together, these findings define a critical role for mucosal IgA in norovirus protection and identify IgA-based treatments as a therapeutic approach for human norovirus."

Gut punch: New study knocks out norovirus where it strikes | Yale News "Gut-homing antibodies provide powerful protection against norovirus, a new Yale study finds, revealing a potential new path for developing vaccines and therapies."

IgA is necessary and sufficient to prevent norovirus infection in mice (no public access)

A Burger King in China as a stage/backdrop for live evening music

 I walked by at least on two evenings seeing this scene.

IBM makes chip design breakthrough with 3D architecture, would reach AI chips by 2030

Good news! Good old big blue is alive and kicking! From mainframes to AI!

"IBM announced the first sub-1 nanometer chip technology, with transistor nodes measuring just 0.7 nanometers wide. The breakthrough allows designers to cram nearly 100 billion transistors into a fingernail-sized chip, about 10,000 times denser than a red blood cell is wide.

Performance jumps are substantial: The chips deliver 70 percent better efficiency or 50 percent more power than IBM’s previous 2nm designs, and researchers estimate AI accelerators built with the technology could hit 9,000 TOPS, six times today’s leading hardware.

The advance relies on what IBM calls “nanostack” architecture, which stacks transistors vertically rather than just shrinking them in two dimensions, along with breakthroughs in wafer bonding and a 40 percent increase in on-chip SRAM capacity. IBM expects the nanostack design to anchor at least a decade of silicon innovation, though widespread adoption is still years away. (IBM)"

"... IBM announced it's once again unveiling the smallest, most powerful computer chip technology in the world. These are the first sub-1 nanometer node chips, designed with transistor nodes that are just 0.7 nanometers, or 7 angstroms, wide. That makes them the smallest transistors in the world — by some margin. ..."

Data Points: GPT-5.6 arrives, but only for approved partners

https://research.ibm.com/blog/sub-1nm-node-chips "It’s the world’s first 0.7nm chip technology. Powered by IBM’s new nanostack architecture, this structure will pave the way for more powerful and efficient chips for years to come. This is the architecture to accelerate the Angstrom era."

A spice shop in China

Not everything is made of porcelain! Look how big the sample bowls are. Spice up to your hearts delight.

A shop for computer keyboards in China

Every box along the wall features a different keyboard. I have to admit, I never was such an enthusiast for computer keyboards.

China overtakes US in fintech patent filings to seize global lead

Another milestone taken by China!

"Chinese banks and tech companies led the world in applications for financial technology patents over the last decade, surpassing the U.S. in a field that supports a wide range of financial services from lending and asset management to cryptocurrencies. ..."

China overtakes US in fintech patent filings to seize global lead - Nikkei Asia (behind paywall) "ICBC, Tencent among companies leading 10-fold surge from previous decade"

Dieter Bohlen: „Mir ist jetzt auch klar, warum das PO-litik heißt – weil die für’n Arsch ist!“

Deftiges aus der Bananenrepublik D!

Der Tag beginnt mit NIUS

Dieter Bohlen

Remembering Prince: 10 Years Later - YouTube

Recommendable! Another famous musician who died too early at 57 of Fentanyl or other drug overdose!

(28503) Remembering Prince: 10 Years Later - YouTube

SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell pledges shares to new Trump Accounts for more than 2 million children

This lady shoots well! 😊 A nice example of American philanthropism!

"SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said Monday she would donate a portion of her company stock to Trump Accounts for more than 2 million children in areas with lower average household income. 

The effort will place “a bit more emphasis” on children, between 11 and 17 years old, who live near her central Texas home, Shotwell wrote on X. "

SpaceX president pledges shares to new Trump Accounts

Gwynne Shotwell, President and COO of SpaceX, speaks during a bell ringing ceremony for the IPO of SpaceX at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, Friday, June 12, 2026, in New York. 

Current Forbes profile

Her X post

The Wall Street Journal spells black Americans/individuals with a capital B

Bad move! Appalling!

Excerpt: "... A WSJ investigation had uncovered evidence of a toxic culture for women and Black employees. ..."

The Wall Street Journal What's news

President Trump Asked FIFA President Gianni Infantino to Review 'Bogus' Folarin Balogun Red Card

Highly unusual, but maybe not for President Trump!

What is wrong with one president calling another president? Just kidding!

Was it an accident or a foul?

Caveat: I am not familiar with the details of the incident that triggered the red card.

If the allegations against this referee are true, then why is he officiating at the 2026 World Cup?

"... “That wasn’t a foul. That wasn’t even an infraction. That was two guys running full speed that happened to crash into each other,” Trump said.

“These were two great athletes who got tangled and this referee who is a little bit suspect if you check his past,” he added. “He made a call that nobody could believe.” ...

It turns out that Raphael Claus, a FIFA referee of Brazilian descent, was accused of match fixing in his native country in February 2023. ..."

Trump Asked FIFA to Review 'Bogus' Folarin Balogun Red Card

AI hiring tools show racial bias | Stanford Report. Really!

It is very disturbing when even an elite university like Stanford engages in this racial bias propaganda and demagoguery! It even features this propaganda in their Stanford Report!

Notice the study is a mixtum compositum! What does e.g. "systemic rejection" have to do with "racial bias"?

When elite university professors hear the grass grow for funding opportunities etc.!

It is regrettable and disappointing when even highly cited, very well known ML & AI researchers like Dan Jurafsky and Percy Liang are involved in this.

It is surprising if not mysterious why elite researchers "don’t yet know why these tools are biased". Are the ML & AI models not trained on tons of human (biased) data?

Furthermore, it appears that these researchers used only one software platform for their study, i.e. " talent platform pymetrics"

As if elite professors have no idea how the labor market works in reality they recommend that "applicants would need to apply widely". Pure common sense and practice!

"In brief

• Many companies use AI-powered tools to sort job applications. There has been hope that these tools reduce bias, compared to assessment of applications by humans alone.
• Through analyzing a dataset of 4 million applications from an AI-based screening tool, researchers found bias against Black and Asian candidates.
• In some cases, the AI hiring tools rejected a candidate from several jobs at a rate higher than would be expected if the candidate was being assessed by each company individually – an outcome they called “systemic rejection.”
• The researchers don’t yet know why these tools are biased. They argue that this work supports the need for more transparency into how AI hiring tools work, and they note that companies are still responsible for checking for biases in their hiring tools and processes.

..."

From the abstract:

"Many employers screen job applicants with algorithms built by the same few algorithm vendors.

We hypothesize that algorithmic monoculture leads to the same individuals and members of the same racial groups facing rejection.

We acquire and analyze a novel dataset of 3 million applicants submitting 4 million applications where all the applications are screened by algorithms built by the same vendor.

We find clear racial disparities in applicant outcomes. Of all applications submitted by Asian and Black applicants, 14.74% and 25.87% are submitted to positions that adversely impact Asian and Black applicants [???], respectively, according to U.S. employment discrimination standards.

Individuals also receive homogeneous outcomes: 4% of all applicants who apply to 10 positions are recommended for rejection from all positions, a rate higher than expected by chance [???].

To better understand this homogeneity, we leverage the deterministic replicability of hiring algorithms to generate the outcomes applicants would have received if they applied to all positions.

We show that applicants would need to apply widely in order to ensure their applications are considered by a human"

AI hiring tools show racial bias | Stanford Report "For many job postings, AI screening tools recommend white candidates at higher rates than Black and Asian candidates, new research shows."

Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring (preprint, open access)

Notice "appeared to be biased"

A portable ultrasound system could make reliable breast imaging more accessible and available for home use

Good news! Cancer is history (soon)!

Again the ideologues and demagogues at MIT demean women  as "people"!!! Horrible!

"For people [women] at high risk of developing breast cancer, yearly mammograms may not be enough to detect tumors early. To make earlier diagnosis easier, an MIT team has developed portable detectors based on ultrasound, which could be used much more frequently. ..."

From the abstract:

"Breast cancer screening and longitudinal monitoring require imaging technologies that are portable, operator-independent, and suitable for frequent use, a capability not fully met by mammography or conventional ultrasound.

We present a three-dimensional (3D) portable ultrasound system for real-time examination (3D PURE) that overcomes key limitations in volumetric breast imaging through advances in transducer design, acoustic materials, and adaptive beamforming.

A box-array design incorporating a corner-gap offset geometry suppresses peak crosstalk (by 3.73 dB at the corner-most element), prevents preamplifier saturation, and supports higher transmit voltages (up to 24 V).

A custom flowable backing layer (impedance 6.12 MRayl; attenuation 7.56 dB mm−1 MHz−1) integrates around fragile wirebonds, reduces inter-element crosstalk by ~4.5 dB throughout the array, and improves axial and lateral/elevational resolutions by ~200 µm and ~70 µm, respectively.

Layered Aberration-Correction Reconstruction (LACR), an adaptive 3D beamformer, compensates for heterogeneous speed-of-sound (SoS) in the breast, reducing depth localization error by 2 mm and aberration defocusing by 70 µm on average at a 5 cm depth.

Nine of the ten participants in an in vitro study showed improved microtarget detection efficiency with 3D PURE relative to a conventional 2D system (p = 0.0215), analogous to detection of microcalcifications.

These results, combined with in vivo imaging validation of various phenotypes, highlight the potential of 3D PURE for reliable breast imaging.

Furthermore, a vision-guided computer interface, MyFUS, ensures self-guided, user-friendly, and operator-independent probe positioning for longitudinal monitoring."

A portable ultrasound system could make reliable breast imaging more accessible | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology "The new technology, which generates high-resolution, 3D images of breast tissue, requires no expertise to operate and could be used at home."

Portable, real-time 3D ultrasound for operator-independent breast imaging (open access)

Portable, real-time 3D ultrasound for operator-independent breast imaging (contains link to PDF file)

Fig. 1: Overview of the 3D portable ultrasound for real-time examination (PURE) for portable and operator-independent monitoring.

Graphene can hold multiple states of superconductivity, a new study finds

Good news! More, but incremental progress! 

Superconductivity like nuclear fusion hold huge promises to improve global energy supply!

"In a study appearing ... in the journal Nature, ... researchers report that a certain microscopic structure found in natural graphite can host multiple superconducting states. Superconductivity is an electronic state of matter in which electrons pair up and glide through a material with zero resistance.  ..."

"... In our work, we present a family of three surprising states of superconductivity in 4- or 5-layer rhombohedral graphene, all of which are are able to persist in the presence of strong in-plane magnetic fields up to ~9 T, exceeding the Pauli limit by far more than a factor of 10.

In a further surprise, one state is even enhanced by a perpendicular magnetic field. This is in contract to bernal graphene, which showed only relatively weak in-plane enhancement. The two other states are boosted by the in-plane field, and one of them is only created above ~5 Tesla in-plane field. None of these states could be suppressed with the 9 T magnet of this experiment. 

This establishes a new family of unconventional, magnetic field-boosted superconductors in rhombohedral graphene. It is currently still unclear what the microscopic pairing mechanism is. One possible explanation is that the electrons in these states pair differently than in the paradigmatic simple superconductors — for example, with their spins aligned in the same direction in a triplet state. This could make them less sensitive to magnetic fields. ..."

From the abstract:

"In some unconventional superconductors, time-reversal symmetry can be broken in addition to the gauge symmetry, resulting in superconductivities that can be enhanced or induced by magnetic fields.

However, field-enhanced superconductors are more vulnerable to impurities than Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer counterparts.

Crystalline rhombohedral multilayer graphene is a promising platform to explore them due to its superior material quality and gate-tunable strong correlation effects.

Here we report transport measurements of rhombohedral tetralayer and pentalayer graphene, demonstrating a spectrum of clean-limit superconductivities. We found three different types of field-enhanced and field-induced superconductivities in the pentalayer. They are all robust against an in-plane field up to 8.5 Tesla, exceeding the Pauli limit by tens of times.

Compared to Bernal bilayer graphene showing only in-plane field-enhancement, pentalayer graphene features superconductors enhanced by out-of-plane as well as in-plane fields. They also reside at much lower gate electric fields owing to the intrinsically flatter band dispersion—facilitating their study and further engineering.

Additionally, we observed that proximitized spin-orbit coupling (SOC) generates multiple new superconductors without introducing additional disorder effects.

Our work establishes a new family of magnetic field-boosted superconductors in rhombohedral graphene.

Utilizing the high accessibility with moderate gate voltages, this will pave the way for realizing non-Abelian quasiparticles through interfacial engineering in the extreme clean limit, in that proximitized SOC leads to topological states8 and maintains the ultrahigh quality of crystalline graphene."

Graphene can hold multiple states of superconductivity, a new study finds | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology "What’s more, the superconducting states get stronger under conditions expected to kill them."

Published in Nature: Family of magnetic field-boosted superconductors in rhombohedral graphene (second original news release)

Family of magnetic field-boosted superconductors in rhombohedral graphene (no public access)

Family of Unconventional Superconductivities in Crystalline Graphene (preprint, open access)

The cartoon sketch shows the family of three different states found in the experiment indicated with three different colors

Washington, D.C.’s record birthday display of 850,000 fireworks left the capital under a rare Code Purple air alert

Celebrating a little too much? 😊

Monday, July 6, 2026 - Join The Flyover

Code Purple Air Quality Alert for DC and Northern Virginia Sunday

Reversal Q-Learning

This could be an interesting new paper by Sergey Levine and his team!

However, there are already so many reinforcement learning (RL) proposals out there that it is hard to keep up with.

From the abstract:

"Iterative generative modeling techniques, such as flow matching, provide powerful tools to model complex behaviors for effective offline reinforcement learning (RL). In this work, we propose a new off-policy RL algorithm that trains a flow policy based on prior data. Our idea starts from the "expanded" Markov decision process (MDP) framework, which treats individual flow refinement steps as separate actions in an MDP.

To enable off-policy RL within this framework, we apply two techniques:

we generate virtual on-policy trajectories (by "reversing" flows) to make this framework compatible with prior data, and

we apply a bias-and-variance reduction technique to mitigate the curse of horizon in off-policy RL.

We call the resulting algorithm Reversal Q-learning (RQL). RQL has several advantages over previous flow-based RL methods: it does not suffer from backpropagation through time, makes better use of the learned value function, and directly trains the full, expressive flow policy.

Through our experiments on 50 challenging simulated robotic tasks, we show that RQL leads to the best average offline RL performance compared to state-of-the-art flow-based offline RL algorithms."

[2606.17551] Reversal Q-Learning

AdaJEPA: An Adaptive Latent World Model

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

From the abstract:

"Latent world models enable planning from high-dimensional observations by predicting future states in a compact latent space. However, these models are typically kept frozen at test time: when their predictions become inaccurate, planning can fail, especially under test-time distribution shift.

To address this, we propose AdaJEPA, an adaptive latent world model that performs test-time adaptation within the closed loop of model predictive control (MPC).

After training, AdaJEPA plans and executes the first action chunk, uses the observed next-state transition as a self-supervised adaptation signal, and replans with the updated model.

This closed-loop update continuously recalibrates the world model without additional expert demonstrations. Across a range of goal-reaching tasks, AdaJEPA substantially improves planning success with as few as one gradient step per MPC replanning step."

[2606.32026] AdaJEPA: An Adaptive Latent World Model (preprint, open access)

English for trippers: Impressed and depressed

Like an empress!

Impressions of depressions (geography)!

The Federal Aviation Administration has proposed a new rule that would allow civilian aircraft to fly faster than Mach 1 over the continental US

Good news! Long overdue!

Flying again faster across the US thanks to President Trump!

"The Federal Aviation Administration has proposed a new rule that would allow civilian aircraft to fly faster than Mach 1 over the United States if their sonic booms stay below a strict noise threshold at ground level. If finalized, the rule, along with another planned rule that would set landing and takeoff noise standards for supersonic aircraft, would end the 1970s ban on overland civilian supersonic flight. ..."

Doomslayer: Progress Roundup - by Malcolm Cochran

FAA releases draft of new commercial supersonic flight regulations

FAA Supersonic Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (63 pages)

Welcome back the famous Concorde supersonic airplane

Draft Federal Reserve working paper suggests 46th President 7 million illegal immigrant wave drove up home prices by 30% and rent by 20%

The massive, unchecked mass illegal immigration under the senile, demented and pathological lifetime liar 46th President was insane!

Why individual border states like Arizona and Texas did so little or almost nothing to prevent/stop this influx is a mystery at best! A total failure by these two border states to act!

"A new Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas working paper estimates the record surge in illegal immigration during the Biden administration boosted employment while driving up home prices by as much as 30% and rent by 20%. ...

The authors cautioned that the study is a preliminary draft circulated for professional comment and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas or the Federal Reserve System. ..."

Fed Reserve working paper suggests Biden illegal immigrant wave drove up home prices 30% | Just The News "Paper creates first ever calculation of how a wave of 7 million illegal immigrants from 2021 to 2024 affected local labor and housing markets."

The Impacts of Unauthorized Immigration on U.S. Labor and Housing Markets: New Evidence from Administrative Microdata (I suppose an earlier, related working paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas published in March 2026)

How Google Phones Alerted over 10 Million people Before earthquakes Shook Venezuela last week

Good news! The total population of Venezuela is about 29 Million.

"Google’s earthquake warning system, which uses accelerometers in Android phones as seismic sensors, sent alerts to 11.4 million people in Venezuela last week, giving them precious seconds to prepare for the tremors. It’s not yet known how many lives the warnings may have saved."

"“Venezuela does not have a national early warning system of its own, but people with Android phones received alerts from Google’s Earthquake Alerts system, which can pull data from more than two billion phones equipped with built-in accelerometers. The same sensor that detects rotation on the screen can also sense vibrations from seismic waves.

Google said the system, which is available in nearly 100 countries, sent warnings that reached 11.4 million people on Wednesday, giving users seconds or up to two minutes notice before back-to-back powerful earthquakes struck …"

Doomslayer: Progress Roundup - by Malcolm Cochran

How Phones Alerted Millions Before Quakes Shook Venezuela

Models Invoking other Models

This seems to be a recent, major trend in ML & AI research and deployment.

Notice this company is headquartered in Japan. Previously, Japan is not exactly known as a hotbed for ML & AI.

 

"Models that orchestrate the activities of other models and agents achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of benchmarks, outperforming the best individual models working alone. ..."

From the abstract:

"The capabilities of frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance, with different providers increasingly specializing in distinct domains. This raises a natural next objective: how to combine the individual specializations of various LLMs into a collectively intelligent system.

To this end, we report the development of Sakana Fugu, a family of orchestrator models that harness and amplify the capabilities of an LLM agent team. Fugu models are themselves language models trained to understand user queries and dynamically devise agentic scaffolds to solve them. 

Through these adaptive scaffolds, Fugu accesses performance beyond any individual LLM agent, achieving state-of-the-art results compared to other publicly accessible models across a range of challenging tasks, including SWE-Bench Pro, Terminal Bench, LiveCodeBench, GPQA-Diamond, Humanity's Last Exam, and CharXiv Reasoning.

We release two models: Fugu, which balances performance with latency for everyday use, and Fugu-Ultra, which prioritizes answer quality on the hardest problems.

We describe our training paradigm, which encompasses large-scale fine-tuning, evolutionary algorithms, and reinforcement learning approaches, along with the infrastructure and core design principles that turn these methods into a production system.

We hope this report encourages further research into multi-agent systems and dynamic, query-adaptive agentic scaffolds as a path toward the next frontier of AI capabilities, accessed through collective intelligence."

OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Family, New Ways to Train Robots, Models Invoking Models

Sakana Fugu: One Model to Command Them All

Sakana Fugu Technical Report (preprint, open access)

Almost 90 new unicorns have been minted so far this year by month

Good news!

Unfortunately, the article contains no tables and no charts, only a long list of company names by month!

Almost 90 new unicorns have been minted so far this year — here they are | TechCrunch

EV Batteries Are Defying Expectations After Hundreds of Thousands of Miles

Good news, e.g. for the used car market!

I bet, the Chinese EV makers knew this already for many years.

Caveat: I was not able to find the underlying data/study from Recurrent.

"Up to 95%

 

How much of its original range the average EV will still be able to drive after five years on the road—better than many in the auto industry expected. ..."

"Data from battery analytics company Recurrent shows that the average electric vehicle retains up to 95% of its original driving range after five years on the road. 

Battery replacement rates have also fallen sharply as technology has improved, with just 0.3% of EVs built since 2022 requiring a battery replacement, compared with roughly one in 12 vehicles produced between 2011 and 2016. ..."

EV Batteries Are Defying Expectations After Hundreds of Thousands of Miles - WSJ "Industry experts think newfound knowledge of battery durability is a game-changer for consumer confidence in EVs"

EV battery durability exceeds expectations as replacement fears persist