Biermeier et al. use live imaging in zebrafish to show that microglia alternate between distinct morphological states that support brain surveillance and phagocytosis. By optogenetically controlling cytoskeletal contractility, they demonstrate programmable, reversible control of microglial behavior in the living brain.
This is an essay written by John von Neumann in 1955, which I think is fairly described as being about global catastrophic risks from emerging technologies. It discusses a bunch of specific technologies that seemed like a big deal in 1955 — which is interesting in itself as a list of predictions; nuclear power! increased automation! weather control? — but explicitly tries to draw a general lesson.
Von Neumann is regarded as one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, and was involved in the Manhattan project in addition to inventing zillions of other things.
I’m posting here because a) I think the essay is worth reading in its own right, and b) I find it interesting to see what the past’s intellectuals thought of issues related transformative technology, and how their perspective differs/is similar to ours. Notably, I disagree with several of the conclusions (e.g. von Neumann seems to think differential technological development is doomed).
Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have demonstrated, for the first time, a single quantum of vibrational energy interacting with a single atomic spin, seeding a pathway to quantum technologies that use sound as an information carrier, instead of light or electricity. The results are published in Nature.
Led by Marko Lončar, the Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering, the researchers engineered a nanometer-scale mechanical resonator around a single color-center spin qubit in diamond. These color centers, atomic defects in the diamond’s crystal structure, act as quantum memory capable of storing quantum information. The researchers’ new system can host sufficiently strong spin-phonon interactions for quantum information storage—a key challenge thus far in the field.
“At the heart of the experiment is a phonon—the smallest possible unit of sound,” Lončar said. “When we listen to music, it takes countless phonons working together to move our eardrums and maybe even get us spinning on the dance floor. But qubits are far more sensitive: a single phonon can be enough to change their quantum state—to excite them, or, as in our experiment, to help them relax.”
What if humanity could travel faster than light?
In this cinematic deep dive, we explore the different types of FTL (Faster-Than-Light) travel, including warp drives, wormholes, the Alcubierre drive, hyperdrive concepts, and other theoretical methods that could one day change space exploration forever.
From bending spacetime to creating warp bubbles and bridging distant galaxies, this video breaks down the science, theory, and science-fiction inspirations behind each method — in a realistic and visually immersive way.
Whether you’re a fan of space science, futuristic technology, or sci-fi universes, this is your ultimate guide to FTL travel.
🚀 Which method do you think is the most realistic?
Comment below!
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The threat is to the librarian. The threat is to the small, vanishing population of people who still go into the hexagons. Who still pull a book from the shelf. Who still spend three days reading it. Who still close it and feel changed. That practice is not a hobby. It is a technology. One older than print, older than the codex, possibly older than writing. It is a process of assembly inside one human skull. The kind of patient, sequential, focused and embodied attention that produces what we used to call understanding. AI does not produce that attention. AI produces a feeling that closely resembles attention while being something else, the way saccharin produces a feeling that closely resembles sweetness while being something else.
If this practice disappears, the Library will not notice. The books will not notice. The infinite hexagons will continue to extend in every direction. There will be no one in them. There will only be the queries, falling into the air, decaying into training data, generating fresh continuations for an audience that no longer reads them. Only, occasionally, glances at a summary.
This is the message Borges was telegraphing. This is what he saw, sitting in the National Library of Argentina, going slowly blind, surrounded by more books than any one man could read. He saw that the deepest threat to a literary culture was not the burning of books. It was the rendering of books unnecessary. He saw that a Library of Babel which contained every possible answer was, paradoxically, the most efficient instrument ever conceived for ending the practice of reading. And he saw, finally, that the only response available to a serious person was the response his narrator chose. To stop searching for the catalogue of catalogues. To return to one’s own hexagon. To pick up one particular book. To read it slowly. To die, eventually, a few leagues from where one was born, with one’s body falling through the fathomless air.
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AI consciousness, its possibility or probability, has burst into public debate, eliciting all kinds of issues from AI ethics and rights to AI going rogue and harming humanity. We explore diverse views; we argue that AI consciousness depends on theories of consciousness.
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Iain McGilchrist FRSA is a British psychiatrist, philosopher and neuroscientist who wrote the 2009 book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
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Further Reading
Brain implants revive cognitive abilities long after traumatic brain injury
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-new…
Brain implants revive cognitive abilities long after traumatic brain injury
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science…
Neural co-processors for restoring brain function: results from a cortical model of grasping
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10…
Brain–computer interfaces: the innovative key to unlocking neurological conditions
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles…
MindPilot: Closed-loop Visual Stimulation Optimization for Brain Modulation with EEG-guided Diffusion
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.
Advancing brain-computer interfaces with generative AI: A review of state-of-the-art and future outlook.
You may think you’re the protagonist of your own story. According to Oxford physicist Vlatko Vedral, however, you’re more like a puppet — whose strings are being pulled into a million parallel universes at any given time.
As Vedral argues in a recent issue of Popular Mechanics, the pop-sci version of the “observer effect” — where the act of observation or measurement affects a system — gets the cause-and-effect backward. The typical story goes something like this: quantum objects hang out in multiple states at once, until some observer glances over. At this point, the multiple states collapse and only one is left, an assumption that can lead various woo-woo interpretations, like that we create reality simply by observing it.
Physics, Verdal says, does not support that idea. That collapse effect isn’t a special power of human consciousness, but rather a fact of physics that says interactions — any interaction — forces a quantum system to commit to a definite state.
Diet and exercise are both factors that can influence how long you live, but they’re not the single greatest predictor of your longevity, research suggests.
According to a recent study, there’s something else that might have more of an effect in terms of curtailing your lifespan.
While poor sleep has been previously linked to a host of health issues, this latest investigation found that getting enough shut-eye had a stronger connection to living longer than diet and exercise – factors that are known to add years to your life.