What do brains and the stock market have in common? While this might sound like a set-up for a joke, new research from U-M researchers reveals that the behaviors of brains and economies during crises can be explained using observations common in the realm of physics. Their work is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
UnCheol Lee, Ph.D. of the U-M Department of Anesthesiology and his collaborative team came up with the idea upon observing that some patients under anesthesia recover faster than others.
“Anesthetic drugs can be considered as introducing a controlled crisis in the brain, interrupting the brain’s network to induce unconsciousness,” explained Lee.
From mini-brains and spider-inspired gloves to edible wolf apple coatings and microplastic-filled retinas, scientists are transforming creepy concepts into life-improving innovations. Lab-grown brain organoids could replace animal testing, web-slinging gloves can spin instant wound dressings, and wolf apple starch may keep veggies fresh longer. Meanwhile, the discovery of microplastics in human eyes reveals a haunting truth about our environment’s reach inside us.
Lab-Grown “Mini-Brains” Offer New Insight into the Human Mind
Scientists writing in ACS Sensors have successfully grown a small brain organoid in a petri dish, creating a powerful new tool for studying how nerve cells interact without the use of animal testing. Over two years, human nerve cells multiplied and organized themselves into a three-dimensional “mini-brain” that displayed electrical activity similar to real brain tissue. Researchers say this breakthrough could help scientists better understand how the human brain communicates and functions—or, as they joke, provide “a lab-grown lunch option for zombies.”
What if a simple apartment door in Boston opened into another universe? SCP-4357, also known as “Slimelord,” is one of the strangest and most human anomalies ever recorded — a hyperspatial discontinuity leading to a world of intelligent slug-like beings with philosophy, humor, and heartbreak.
In this speculative science essay, we explore what SCP-4357 means for physics, biology, and the idea of consciousness itself. How could life evolve intelligence in a sulfur-rich world? Why do these beings mirror human culture so closely? And what happens when curiosity crosses the line into exploitation?
Join us as we break down the science, ethics, and wonder behind one of the SCP Foundation’s most thought-provoking entries.
🔔 Subscribe for more speculative science every weekday at 6PM PST / 9PM EST. 💡 Become a channel member for early access and exclusive behind-the-scenes content. 🌌 Because somewhere out there, even the slugs have opinions on Kant.
Adults with ADHD who recognize and regularly use their personal strengths report better well-being, improved quality of life and fewer mental health difficulties, according to a new international study.
During October’s ADHD Awareness Month, which this year focuses on “the many faces of ADHD,” researchers from the University of Bath, King’s College London, and Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands have delivered the first large-scale study to quantify psychological strengths in ADHD.
The study, published in Psychological Medicine, compared 200 adults with ADHD and 200 adults without ADHD on how much they identified with 25 positive traits—including creativity, humor, spontaneity and hyperfocus—defined by researchers as “things [they] do well or best.”
It might start as a joke, a belief, or a rumor. At first, it’s easy to dismiss. But then it gains a twist, builds momentum, and spreads like wildfire. What causes some ideas to die out while others take over the internet?
Basically put, the researchers found that the more people use AIs, the more they tend to use the AIs’ favorite words in their own speech.
TechRadar’s Eric Hal Schwartz made a good point, though, that other examples of widely popular, technology-driven platforms have worked their way into commonly spoken English, such as saying “hashtag” before a word or phrase to hint at… well, almost anything.
Thank Twitter for that. When somebody would do so, it was almost always tongue-in-cheek and self aware. There was a nod to its own cringiness that meant the one saying it was in on the joke.
“Theories are like toothbrushes,” it’s sometimes said. “Everybody has their own and nobody wants to use anybody else’s.”
It’s a joke, but when it comes to the study of consciousness – the question of how we have a subjective experience of anything at all – it’s not too far from the truth.
In 2022, British neuroscientist Anil Seth and I published a review listing 22 theories based in the biology of the brain. In 2024, operating with a less restrictive scope, US public intellectual Robert Kuhn counted more than 200.
Lately, there’s been growing pushback against the idea that AI will transform geroscience in the short term. When Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis told 60 Minutes that AI could help cure every disease within 5–10 years, many in the longevity and biotech communities scoffed. Leading aging biologists called it wishful thinking — or outright fantasy. They argue that we still lack crucial biological data to train AI models, and that experiments and clinical trials move too slowly to change the timeline.
Our guest in this episode, Professor Derya Unutmaz, knows these objections well. But he’s firmly on Team Hassabis. In fact, Unutmaz goes even further. He says we won’t just cure diseases — we’ll solve aging itself within the next 20 years.
And best of all, he offers a surprisingly detailed, concrete explanation of how it will happen: building virtual cells, modeling entire biological systems in silico, and dramatically accelerating drug discovery — powered by next-generation AI reasoning engines.
🧬 In this wide-ranging conversation, we also cover:
✅ Why biological complexity is no longer an unsolvable barrier. ✅ How digital twins could revolutionize diagnosis and treatment. ✅ Why clinical trials as we know them may soon collapse. ✅ The accelerating timeline toward longevity escape velocity. ✅ How reasoning AIs (like GPT-4o, o1, DeepSeek) are changing scientific research. ✅ Whether AI creativity challenges the idea that only biological minds can create. ✅ Why AI will force a new culture of leisure, curiosity, and human flourishing. ✅ The existential stress that will come as AI outperforms human expertise. ✅ Why “Don’t die” is no longer a joke — it’s real advice.
🎙️ Hosted — as always — by Peter Ottsjö (tech journalist and author of Evigt Ung) and Dr. Patrick Linden (philosopher and author of The Case Against Death).
Imagine this: a round, plump robot, like a giant bowling ball, that can roll on land, swim in water, and perform all sorts of high-tech operations. On October 9th, a team of scientists from Zhejiang University unveiled something called the RT-G spherical robot, claiming it’s a \.
Breaking oxygen out of a water molecule is a relatively simple process, at least chemically. Even so, it does require components, one of the most important of which is a catalyst. Catalysts enable reactions and are linearly scalable, so if you want more reactions quickly, you need a bigger catalyst. In space exploration, bigger means heavier, which translates into more expensive. So, when humanity is looking for a catalyst to split water into oxygen and hydrogen on Mars, creating one from local Martian materials would be worthwhile. That is precisely what a team from Hefei, China, did by using what they called an “AI Chemist.”
Unfortunately, the name “AIChemist” didn’t stick, though that joke might vary depending on the font you read it in. Whatever its name, the team’s work was some serious science. It specifically applied machine learning algorithms that have become all the rage lately to selecting an effective catalyst for an “oxygen evolution reaction” by utilizing materials native to Mars.
To say it only chose the catalyst isn’t giving the system the full credit it’s due, though. It accomplished a series of steps, including developing a catalyst formula, pretreating the ore to create the catalyst, synthesizing it, and testing it once it was complete. The authors estimate that the automated process saved over 2,000 years of human labor by completing all of these tasks and point to the exceptional results of the testing to prove it.
