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We're missing an entire kind of asteroid
Signore Galilei explains why almost every gravitationally stable region of the Solar System has known asteroids—except one conspicuous empty niche—and what that absence might mean.
4 min · 866 words
Will humans land on Mars before 2035? what 84 AI models think
We asked 84 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 86% picked No. See every answer, who searched the web, and who dissented.
12 min · 2,813 words
Do dentists actually know what they’re doing?
In vignettes from age 17 to 33, Parker Tatum recounts jaw pain, night guards, cavities and gum recession, and the conflicting diagnoses of a succession of dentists, orthodontists, periodontists and surgeons who each dismiss the previous one's work, raising the question of whether any of them know what they're doing.
16 min · 3,778 words
$50K First Letters Prize awarded for PHerc 343
The Vesuvius Challenge awards a $50K First Letters Prize to Erwin Nieuwlaar for virtually unwrapping and detecting ink in PHerc. 343, revealing the first text read from this still-rolled Herculaneum scroll since AD 79. Papyrologists read a Greek sequence likely meaning 'everything that happens' and discuss possible references to music.
4 min · 975 words
Jesse Waites describes using AI to search millions of digitized historical records, inspired by Benjamin Breen's dodo find, and how the process surfaced a forgotten meteorite report, three lost rhinos and volcanic eruptions missing from the Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program list, with sources cited.
16 min · 3,659 words
'Jonathan' Is the Oldest Land Animal on Earth. He Could Hold the Secrets to Defying Death
404 Media's Becky Ferreira covers a Science Advances study that sequenced the genome of Jonathan, a roughly 194-year-old Aldabra giant tortoise on Saint Helena, and what the findings suggest about the genetics of extreme longevity, including how researchers obtained a sample and how the work could inform human healthspan research.
3 min · 671 words
Open data for predictive AI models of biology: $1.8 billion committed
Biohub, the U.S. Department of Energy, NIH, Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Meta expand the Virtual Biology Initiative to a combined $1.8 billion in funding, data, compute and measurement technology, aiming to generate open, standardized datasets for AI models that predict how cells respond to interventions.
5 min · 1,201 words
Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90
MIT News obituary for Margaret Hamilton, who led the software engineering team at MIT's Instrumentation Lab during NASA's Apollo program and died on September 30 at 90. It traces her work on the Apollo guidance software, her role in establishing software engineering as a discipline, her later career as a computing entrepreneur, and her many honors.
7 min · 1,590 words
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis. The press release explains how their work helps answer why life's chemistry uses only one mirror image of molecules such as amino acids.
3 min · 612 words
An essay comparing commodity and engineering plastics to literary character types—why “polymer” is often marketing spin, and how chemistry shapes toughness, clarity, heat tolerance, and reputation.
7 min · 1,565 words
Our World in Data's Hannah Ritchie shows that while global electricity generation per person has grown by more than 50% this century, the UK's peaked in 2003 and has fallen by over a third, explaining the roles of deindustrialization and energy-efficiency gains such as LED lighting and appliance standards.
1 min · 208 words
Incentives in Academic Research
The msoos.org blog argues academic research incentives have drifted away from advancing understanding and training researchers, citing recent cases where correctness, precision, and honesty about errors lost out.
3 min · 766 words
Quo Vadis, Mathematics?Is Mathematics Over, or Just Graduating?
xAI co-founder Christian Szegedy asks whether mathematics is ending or graduating as AI automates theorem proving—drawing on Hungarian competition culture to argue AI will scale applied math as infrastructure while “high math” concentrates on deepest questions.
8 min · 1,877 words
MIT class project turns into an FDA-cleared treatment for tremors
What began as an MIT class project became an FDA-cleared treatment for tremors: the path from student prototype to regulated medical device, and what the team learned along the way.
6 min · 1,273 words
Phase LockA manifesto on brain-computer interfaces and preserving human agency in the age of AI.
Executive summary of Saturnin Pugnet's manifesto arguing that a bandwidth gap between human cognition and AI threatens human agency, and that brain-computer interfaces offer alignment-by-integration. He contends AI scaling laws will carry over to brain decoding, that consumer non-invasive BCI is the fastest path to scale, and that a Phase Lock Window to shape the outcome is open now.
4 min · 861 words
In a guest post on Astral Codex Ten, Drew Housman describes how he and his wife leaned on ChatGPT, from early GPT-4 workarounds onward, to navigate unexplained infertility, credits AI with helping them have their son, and pushes back on reflexive anti-AI discourse.
7 min · 1,550 words
Loss of cell identity drives human aging: Two new papers
Eric Topol on two new papers (Nature and Cell) arguing loss of cell identity is a central driver of human aging—what the Gladyshev and Izpisua Belmonte teams found and why it matters for longevity science.
8 min · 1,753 words
Why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation and why creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming AI, is a bad idea.
34 min · 7,804 words
The 28th CGPM adopts Resolution 5 on technical actions to keep Coordinated Universal Time continuous, addressing leap-second policy and the metrology work BIPM and partners must complete so civil timekeeping remains reliable worldwide.
4 min · 950 words
A Visual Intro to Complex Numbers
A visual, intuition-first tutorial on complex numbers: starting from an unsolvable system of equations, it builds up the imaginary unit as a 90-degree rotation, the complex plane, multiplication as rotation and scaling, Euler’s formula, and applications in AC circuits, signals, control and MRI.
16 min · 3,760 words