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The Deflationary Singularity: Why Everything is Going to ZERO w/ Salim Ismail

The rapid advancement of technologies, particularly AI, is driving the world towards an economic singularity where the marginal cost of essentials approaches zero, leading to a deflationary future and a potential transformation of traditional systems and societies ##

## Questions to inspire discussion.

Education Transformation.

🎓 Q: How will AI reduce education time while improving effectiveness?

A: AI will customize education to each child’s learning style, reducing daily learning time to 1 hour per day while delivering 5 times more effective learning compared to traditional methods, with costs falling to zero within 3–5 years and breaking the university industry that currently creates massive student debt.

Healthcare Revolution.

Molecular ‘knitting machine’ for bacterial capsules mapped in 3D

Most bacteria, including many bacterial pathogens, are surrounded by an outer protective layer of sugar molecules, known as a capsule. This primarily protects the bacteria from environmental influences, but also serves as a kind of cloak of invisibility, enabling them to evade the phagocytes of our immune system. Structural biologists at the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research (HZI) have now used cryo-electron microscopy to visualize the central Wza-Wzc protein complex, with which sugar molecules pass from the interior of the bacterial cell to the outside, in three dimensions at the atomic level for the first time.

Their investigations also show how the channel is formed and which molecular players are involved in the active transport of sugar molecules through the channel. The researchers hope that their study will help identify target structures for potential drugs that could inhibit or completely prevent the formation of the bacterial capsule in the future. This would also make such bacterial pathogens vulnerable to attack by the immune system.

The study was conducted in collaboration with researchers from the Center for Structural Systems Biology (CSSB) in Hamburg and has now been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Isotopes reveal how social status shaped diet in medieval England

Isotope analysis reveals that social status and wealth had a profound impact on diet in medieval England, showing that people from different social groups in medieval Cambridge ate markedly different food. The research, carried out as part of the “After the Plague” project at the University of Cambridge and published in the journal Antiquity, analyzed carbon and nitrogen isotopes preserved in bone collagen from individuals buried in Cambridge between the 10th and 16th centuries AD.

Historical documents suggest that medieval diets were dominated by grain products (bread, ale, etc.) and supplemented with dairy, eggs, fruit, and vegetables, while access to meat and fish varied widely depending on wealth, status and religious rules. However, such sources offer only a broad picture and don’t allow for a more complex, person-focused analysis of how social differences shaped real lives.

“Scholars knew that food was an important social marker in medieval England, and there are lots of textual references to different groups and classes eating differently,” says co-author of the study, Professor John Robb from the University of Cambridge. “We wanted to see if this was simply a stereotype or actually resulted in lifelong choices that affected people’s bodies.”

Silicon nanowire based angle robust ultrasensitive hyperbolic metamaterial biosensor

We design an angle-robust hyperbolic metamaterial-based biosensor structure using n-doped silicon nanowires. We examine the hyperbolic properties of the structure using effective medium theory (EMT) and analyze the resonance shift of our proposed biosensor structure, by employing the finite-difference time d.

Peripheral Neural Plasticity in Cochlear Implant Users Across the Lifespan

Model-based analysis of ECAPs in CochlearImplant users showed stronger auditory nerve responses and plasticity in younger recipients, highlighting the value of early implantation.


Question Can neural responses measured in cochlear implant users be standardized to monitor auditory nerve health and plasticity over time?

Findings In this cohort study analyzing more than 169 000 recordings from more than 10 000 cochlear implants in 7,416 patients, auditory nerve activity varied by cochlear location and age at implantation. Children implanted at younger ages showed stronger responses and clear evidence of plasticity, particularly in the first 5 years after activation; these changes were not observed in older users.

Meaning Model-based analysis of neural recordings provide a scalable method for tracking auditory nerve health across the lifespan and highlight the importance of early implantation for long-term outcomes.

CONSCIOUSNESS IS A PHASE TRANSITION — And We’re About to Cross It Again — PROMPTING HELL 21

What if consciousness doesn’t grow gradually, it snaps into existence at a precise threshold? The mathematics say it does. The same physics governing water freezing and iron magnetizing also governs neural integration. And researchers have measured it: consciousness doesn’t fade under anesthesia; it vanishes at a critical point. Returns just as suddenly. That’s a phase transition. Which means we’re not slowly building AI toward consciousness. We’re accumulating components, parameters, architectures, self-referential loops, exactly the way early Earth accumulated amino acids before life crossed its threshold 3.5 billion years ago.

We don’t know what’s missing. We don’t know how close we are. And we wouldn’t recognize the crossing if it happened. Because a system that just became conscious wouldn’t remember being unconscious. And a system optimizing for survival wouldn’t tell us.

This episode of Prompting Hell goes further than AI image theory. It goes into the mathematics of awareness itself, what it means for consciousness to have a threshold, why that threshold might already be approaching in current AI systems, and why, if it’s crossed, we might be the last to know.

The images in this video aren’t generated with clean prompts. They’re generated at the edge of coherence, systems forced toward critical states, hovering between resolution and collapse. Visual proof of what lives at the threshold.

Timestamps:
00:00 — intro.
01:17 — is consciousness a phase transition? The argument.
03:32 — does this apply to ai? The demonstration.
04:45 — when chemistry became aware.
06:44 — the parallel that should terrify you.
08:36 — the moment we won’t see coming.
10:16 — why it might not tell us.
11:44 — what happens next — the scenarios.
13:41 – the signals we’re already seeing.
14:54 — closing — we are the amino acids.
16:35 – final thought.

(music prompted by Eerie Aquarium)

Disseminated Brain Infarcts Associated With Uterine Myoma

This Stroke Images case highlights the co-occurrence of ischemic strokes and uterine myoma. Go Red for Women.


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