Michael Lang @MichaelVLang

Neuralink has solved through-dura electrode implantation! This is a very big deal, as it greatly improves the safety and ease of interfacing with the brain.

Neuralink @neuralink

17 hours ago

The dura is the brain's armor: a membrane so tough that a surgeon normally cuts through it with a scalpel. For the first time in our clinical trials, we inserted the electrode threads of our implant straight through the dura and into the cortex, keeping the dura intact. Here's

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Thomas Jefferson submits the final draft of his Declaration of Independence to Continental Congress.

@DrunkRepub Look at the arms on that guy. Pipe cleaners.

Whew

Tony Lane 🇺🇸 @TonyLaneNV

5 days ago

A woman hiking in Canada nearly became a grizzly’s next meal and the video circulating right now is genuinely one of the most intense wildlife encounters you will ever watch - her dog is with her, a massive grizzly is right there, and somehow she kept her head together long

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Karl’s Dad was cool

Chris Freiman @cafreiman

a week ago

For Father’s Day, I’ll share this letter to Karl Marx from his dad

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@OverReactor1776 I was just thinking about how The China Syndrome negatively affected nuclear energy in the US. Why that movie at that time. The “pro” side needs more positive PR.

Now that I’m out of government, I can finally respond for myself: Get bent, soyboy. We didn’t do this for “Silicon Valley . . . companies.” We did this for you, for your family, your community, your state, your nation, and your species. Nuclear energy provides the safest, highest density, reliable power available on our planet. My career colleagues at DOE and NRC inspired me to think about nuclear as a way to forge American steel and electrolyze aluminum without releasing particulate matter, to desalinate water in the Middle East and save humanity from resource wars. By rejecting the false narratives and Cold War hysteria, we can secure the next American century while raising whole countries out of poverty. Do you really think I left an incredible career at Kirkland, paid out of pocket for an apartment in DC and dozens of cross-country trips, and left my family on the west coast because I wanted to enrich people I never met before taking this job? I came to D.C. to do something that mattered, to satisfy a driving curiosity (more on that later), and, most importantly, to serve. As I learned more about nuclear energy and its history, I developed a conviction that one nuclear’s biggest issues was a culture of cynicism: nothing new or exciting could happen because it would end in disappointment, and that militated against rocking the boat even a tiny bit. The career staff in government and their industry counterparts lived through dark winters before and stopped believing that warm springs could bloom into summers. I have two core philosophies. First, I believe in ruthless optimism. Rational decision making requires detached risk analysis. But we also cannot win if we believe we can lose. Merging the two requires orienting teams around driving missions. That way, when a real opportunity presents itself, you can take a huge swing. If I take credit for anything—honestly, almost all of the success belongs to the incredible and dedicated people at @ENERGY and @NRCgov—it’s countering the cultural rot and morass that risked forfeiting American excellence. My colleagues and I gave cover to the scientists and engineers, which freed them up to focus on delivering safe power. And, as success materialized, they started to dream again. That’s why the pilot program succeeded, and why I feel confident about the future of NLICs and NRC reform. Nobody needs me anymore because they can innovate on their own. My second core philosophy is to assume positive intent. Avi, I know that you heard about my real motivations from multiple people you interviewed when preparing your hit piece on me. Rather than telling that story, one which could help inspire another generation of people to use their talents for the greater good, you ignored them. Instead, you implied that Peter Thiel recruited me for nefarious purposes. (I’ve never met him, but, @peterthiel, if you’re reading this, I’m a huge fan!) Nuclear regulation starts and ends with safety. I promised everyone I worked with that I would resign before doing or pushing for anything that could compromise public safety. But I also distinguished between real safety and performative bullshit. That’s what the careers came to embrace, too. We love nuclear, why would we do anything that could risk threatening its future? America faces a crossroads. We can either trod a road of cultural decay or hike our way back to the peak of global innovation. Join me on the latter path. Correct the fear mongering and conspiracies and tell the story of America’s great reindustrialization. Tell the story of our public servants, our great entrepreneurs, our scientific dominance. Tell the real story about how DOGE went nuclear.

Avi Asher-Schapiro @AASchapiro

2 weeks ago

Seth Cohen—the DOGE official who was a driving force behind much of the Trump admin's nuclear energy policy—resigned. He was one of the key figures reshaping the regulatory environment to benefit Silicon Valley-backed advanced reactor firms. x.com/OverReactor177…

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“What’re you in for mate?” “Cleaning a river without a permit. What about you?” @EnvAgency is really plumbing new depths of malevolent uselessness here.

A fruit fly runs on 139,000 brain cells. You run on 86 billion. Scientists just finished mapping every connection in the fly’s brain, and the circuits for sleep, memory, and decision-making look almost identical to yours. The project is called FlyWire. Teams at Princeton University, working with researchers worldwide, spent years slicing a single fruit fly brain into thousands of nanometer-thin sections, imaging each one with powerful electron microscopes, then stitching the whole thing back together digitally. AI traced the neuron paths. Thousands of volunteers around the world double-checked that work through what looked like a video game. The complete atlas was published in Nature in October 2024. The fly’s brain contains 50 million synapses, the connection points between neurons, linking 139,000 neurons together. For scale, the roundworm C. elegans had its complete neural map published in 1986, with just 302 neurons, and that project took more than a decade. The fly brain is 460 times larger. This is the most complex brain ever fully mapped. About half those neurons sit in the optic lobe, the fly’s visual processing center (labeled in the image above). The fly dedicates roughly half its entire brain to seeing. The human visual cortex takes up about 30% of our cortex, and we consider ourselves heavily visual animals. The circuits inside are why neuroscience has relied on Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly, as a research subject for over a century. The mushroom bodies, a pair of structures smaller than a grain of sand, control the fly’s ability to associate a sensation with an outcome. Block them, and learning stops. The hippocampus, your brain’s center for learning and spatial memory, does the same thing. The central complex, another region now fully mapped, acts as an internal compass for three-dimensional navigation. Mammals have comparable navigation circuits. The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to the researchers who decoded the molecular clock that controls circadian rhythms, your body’s internal day-night timer. Those experiments were done in fruit flies. The FlyWire dataset is publicly available to any researcher on earth. Groups are already using it to find repeated wiring patterns across insect species, possibly inherited from a common ancestor. The working hypothesis: the same structural solution for sleep, navigation, and memory evolved multiple times because it works everywhere. Fruit flies share roughly 75% of known human disease genes. They develop alcohol dependence, neurodegeneration, sleep disruption under stress. The connectome, the complete wiring diagram of the brain, gives researchers something concrete to go with those gene lists. Neuroscience had a parts catalog. Now it has something closer to an instruction manual.

Massimo @Rainmaker1973

2 weeks ago

Scientists have mapped the entire neural network of the fruit fly. 50 million synapses between 139,000 neurons.

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Your house cat and this leopard are running the same behavioral software. A 2014 genome study from Washington University found that 10,000 years of living with humans changed only two things about cats: how they suppress fear around people, and how they respond to rewards. The stalking, the ambush pounce, the loaf sit, the slow blink, the tail curl when resting, none of it was touched. Dogs make the contrast plain. Humans kept dogs for at least 15,000 years, probably longer, and bred them into dozens of behavioral types: herders, pointers, retrievers, guard dogs, scent trackers. Cats had 10,000 years with us and remained cats. Cats were never really bred for a job. They domesticated themselves, drawn to grain stores that attracted rodents, tolerating humans in exchange for steady meals rather than actually changing. Every cat alive, from sand cats to snow leopards, shares a common ancestor that lived roughly 10-11 million years ago in Asia. That ancestor passed down front-facing eyes tuned for hunting in dim light, a body built for 12-16 hours of daily sleep because a meat-only diet demands real recovery time, and retractile claws. Cheetahs are the exception on the claws: they traded them for raw speed and can't fully pull them back. One trait actually split the family: the roar. Leopards, lions, tigers, and jaguars evolved a voice box that carries sound across kilometers of open terrain, but the tradeoff is they can't purr continuously the way house cats do. Your cat purrs in and out, on every breath. A leopard gets the exhale only. The leopard in this video is doing nothing unusual for a cat. That upright sitting posture, that watchful stillness, the tail curled at the tip, it has been in the species for millions of years. Ten thousand years of living with humans was not going to move it.

Buitengebieden @buitengebieden

2 weeks ago

A cat is a cat, no matter the size.. 😅

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University of Waterloo psychologists tested this exact practice in 2009. They had people with low self-esteem repeat “I am a lovable person” each day. Those participants felt measurably worse afterward than a control group who said nothing. The affirmation revealed the gap between the statement and their actual self-image, making that distance feel larger rather than smaller. The explanation comes from what psychologist William Swann at the University of Texas called self-verification theory. Your brain checks every self-statement against your stored self-image. If that image says “I am not particularly likable,” and you tell it “I have a great personality,” the brain treats the new statement as a threat and pushes back. The gap triggers rejection, pushing the stored image deeper rather than lifting it. For people whose self-image is already neutral or positive, though, the same words behave completely differently. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon used fMRI brain scans in 2020 to map the exact pathway. Affirming a personal value lit up the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (a reward region just behind your forehead), and that activation then dampened the brain area that registers threat. UCLA researchers measured cortisol separately in 2005. People who spent two minutes affirming their values before a stressful task came out with significantly lower cortisol than the control group. Cortisol is your primary stress hormone, so the body’s stress response had measurably changed. Your inner monologue is also running this loop constantly. Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan points to research showing inner self-talk runs at roughly 4,000 words per minute, about 30 times faster than spoken speech. Most of that stream is about who you are, and for most people, those statements run without any conscious selection. Two modifications improve the success rate of the monk’s method. Saying “You can do this” in the second person outperforms “I can do this” across multiple Kross studies, because the slight distance sidesteps the brain’s consistency check. And replacing trait statements like “I am a hard worker” with values statements like “I care about hard work” bypasses the brain’s fact-checker entirely, because a value is harder to dispute than a claimed trait. The science says the words matter less than the gap between what you’re saying and what you already believe about yourself.

青しょうが @atahuta123

2 weeks ago

まじで脳は案外だまされやすいから、毎日ひとりで「わたしは性格がよくて頑張り屋でカラダもメンタルも健康な人間だ」とか呟いていればなぜか本当にそれっぽい人生にかわっていきます。人は自己暗示した通りの人物になるので

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My first photo of the ring nebula, taken in 2018 Vs my latest Always remember to see how far you’ve come.

Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) on what it’s like to work at SpaceX: “It’s like being dropped into a zone of shocking competence.” “Everybody is ultra competent, and the reason everybody’s ultra competent is because if they’re not, Elon sniffs it out and fires them. He knows, ‘cause he’s talking to the people actually doing the work.” “The best engineers in the world want to work for him, ‘cause he’s the one CEO like this who’s able to work with them as a peer on whatever the technology is.” “What would be better as an engineer than being able to design a rocket engine with Elon Musk as your engineering partner?”

Elon Musk @elonmusk

a month ago

SpaceX is actively hiring world-class engineers/physicists for SpaceXAI, even if you have zero prior experience in AI. Smart humans figure it out fast. Please send an email with ~3 bullet points demonstrating evidence of exceptional ability to [email protected].

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⚛️ Voici à quoi ressemble réellement la désintégration radioactive... 🤯 À l’intérieur de cette chambre à brouillard hermétiquement fermée, un échantillon d’uranium émet en permanence des particules radioactives. Comme la chambre est remplie d’une vapeur d’alcool sursaturée maintenue à près de -40 °C, les particules émises ionisent les molécules d’air qu’elles traversent. Le résultat est fascinant : la vapeur d’alcool se condense instantanément autour de ces trajectoires ionisées, révélant de minuscules traînées visibles à l’œil nu. Les traces épaisses et courtes correspondent aux particules alpha, massives et chargées, qui traversent l’air en laissant derrière elles une signature bien marquée. Les traces fines et irrégulières sont produites par les électrons bêta, qui se déplacent à très grande vitesse en zigzaguant. Les traînées discrètes et presque fantomatiques sont associées aux rayonnements gamma, extrêmement énergétiques et capables de traverser la matière avec une grande facilité. Ce que vous observez ici est littéralement une fenêtre ouverte sur le monde subatomique, un univers invisible où la matière se transforme en permanence sous nos yeux. ✨

A self-taught Irish schoolteacher wrote a book in 1854 that almost nobody read for 80 years, until a 21-year-old MIT student picked it up and realized it could be used to design every computer in human history. His name was George Boole. The book is called An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. Boole was born in 1815 in Lincoln, England. His family was poor. He left school at 16 to support them. He taught himself Latin, Greek, French, German, and Italian. Then he taught himself mathematics. By 19 he had opened his own school. By 24 he was publishing original papers in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal, competing with men who had spent decades inside the best universities in Britain. He never had a degree. He never had a mentor. In 1849, Queen's College in Cork hired him as a professor anyway. In 1854, he published his masterwork. What he built inside it was something nobody had attempted before at this scale. He turned logic into algebra. Before Boole, logic was philosophy. You argued in sentences. You reasoned in paragraphs. It was powerful and completely impossible to automate, because there was no formal system underneath it, just language. Boole stripped it down to arithmetic. He showed that every act of human reasoning could be reduced to operations on two values. True or false. One or zero. AND, OR, NOT. If both conditions are true, the result is true. If neither is, the result is false. Every judgment a human mind makes, every decision, every deduction, could be written as an equation following those rules. Logicians read it. They found it interesting. Engineers building machines had never heard of it. For 83 years, the book sat there. Then in 1937, a 21-year-old MIT master's student named Claude Shannon was working on a thesis about electrical relay circuits. Switches that could be open or closed. Current that either flowed or didn't. He read Boole and understood something nobody had connected before. An open switch is a zero. A closed switch is a one. A circuit with two switches in series only carries current when both are closed. That is AND. A circuit with two switches in parallel carries current when either is closed. That is OR. Shannon proved that every possible logical relationship Boole had described could be physically built using wire and switches. That single insight is the foundation of every computer ever made. After Shannon, chip designers stopped thinking about electricity and started thinking about logic. Every transistor on every processor running right now is implementing a Boolean operation. Every if-statement in every codebase is Boolean logic. Every database query using AND or OR. Every neural network threshold that fires or doesn't fire. All of it is running the algebra of a self-taught schoolteacher from Lincoln who died 160 years ago. The strangest part is what happened to Boole at the end. He was walking to class in November 1864 when he got caught in a rainstorm. He lectured for hours in wet clothes. He went home sick. His wife, Mary, believed in homeopathic medicine and thought the cure should mirror the cause. She wrapped him in wet sheets and poured cold water over him repeatedly. He died a few days later. He was 49. He never saw a transistor. He never saw a circuit. He never saw a single physical machine run a single one of his rules. His book is in the public domain. Free to download. Most engineers use the word Boolean dozens of times a week. Almost none of them know who they are saying. The man whose logic runs inside every phone, every server, and every AI model on Earth died soaking wet in a small Irish town, 83 years before anyone figured out what he had actually built.

In 1880, a reclusive, self-taught telegraph operator with no university degree went to war with the greatest scientific minds in the British Empire. He won, changed the mathematics of physics forever, and quietly built the foundation for the entire modern electrical grid. Yet today, almost no one outside of electrical engineering and applied mathematics even knows his name. His name was Oliver Heaviside. The story of how he solved one of the hardest engineering problems in human history is a masterclass in why book smarts fail where deep, messy intuition succeeds. In the late 19th century, the world was trying to lay massive underwater telegraph cables across the Atlantic Ocean. But they had a crippling problem: the signals kept distorting. You would type a message in London, and by the time it reached New York, it was a smeared, unreadable mess of electricity. The top physicists of the day, using traditional university math, said the solution was simple: make the cables purer and reduce resistance. They spent millions of dollars trying to make the lines perfect. It didn't work. The signals still broke. Heaviside looked at the exact same problem from his messy, self-taught perspective and realized the elite academic establishment was blind. They were treating an electrical wire like a water pipe. They thought the electricity was inside the copper. Heaviside figured out that electricity doesn’t flow inside the wire; it flows in the electromagnetic field around the wire. Then, he did something that made mainstream mathematicians furious. He invented a bizarre shortcut called operational calculus. Instead of spending weeks solving complex, multi-page differential equations to map these fields, he treated calculus like basic algebra. To the professors at Cambridge, this was a sin. They called his math clumsy, unrigorous, and nonsense. Heaviside didn't care. His famous response to them was: "Should I refuse my dinner because I do not fully understand the process of digestion?" He used his illegal math to propose a mind-bending solution: to fix the distorted signal, engineers didn't need to make the cable cleaner. They needed to deliberately add more corruption to it. He suggested wrapping the cables in iron wire to introduce "inductance", intentionally fighting one distortion with another. The establishment ignored him for years. But when AT&T finally tried his method, the results were instant. Long-distance communication was solved. Heaviside wasn't trying to pass a math exam or impress a peer-review board. He wanted to solve a real-world problem. In the process, he took James Clerk Maxwell’s famously complex 20 equations of electromagnetism and condensed them into the 4 beautiful formulas that every single physics student is forced to memorize today. Heaviside did the heavy lifting, but Maxwell got the name. The lesson Heaviside left behind is a philosophical blueprint for navigating a complex world: The people who memorize the proper formulas are excellent at solving textbook problems. But they are entirely dependent on the rules staying the same. The people who understand the underlying system don't care about the rules. They break them to find what actually works. Most of us approach our life's problems like the 19th-century British establishment. When something goes wrong in our career or relationships, we try to make our existing wire purer. We try harder at a broken method. But sometimes, the problem isn't that you aren't trying hard enough. The problem is that you are looking inside the wire instead of looking at the field around it. What is a distortion in your life right now that you keep trying to fix with the standard advice? What happens if you stop trying to follow the textbook formula and start looking at the hidden forces causing the noise?

STEVE JOBS GOT FIRED FROM APPLE… Then he walked straight into MIT and dropped the most raw, unfiltered 60-minute business masterclass ever recorded. Zero PR bullshit. Zero image to protect. Just pure, brutal honesty from the man who built Apple once — and was about to rebuild it even bigger. Stop scrolling. Watch this tonight instead of Netflix. Bookmark it. Come back to it. This is how legends think. 🔥

Chicago lost the Bears this week. A team that's been in the city since 1921. They didn't lose them to a bigger market or a better deal. The Bears decided they'd rather be a tenant in Indiana than deal with Illinois for one more year. Think about how badly you have to run a place for that to be the smart move. They lost them for two reasons. The people running Illinois would rather villainize a builder than keep one. And they're bad at their jobs. In 2021 the Bears spent $197M on the old Arlington Park racetrack. Before they could break ground, Cook County valued the empty lot at $192M (Bears said $60M). They were salivating at the chance to extort a building that didn't even exist yet. That fight dragged on for years. The Bears were ready to put $2B into the stadium. All they wanted was a promise the county wouldn't reassess them into oblivion, plus $855M for infrastructure everyone uses. Roads, transit, utilities. A $3B project, two thirds of it private money pouring into Illinois. Springfield had since 2021 to get this done. They dragged it to the final night of session, passed it through the Senate at 3:39AM, and the House went home without voting. So now it's all gone. The funniest part? This started because Cook County tried to grab the tax early. They knew a built stadium would pay $53M a year. Now they get under $4M on a vacant lot. No jobs, no buildout, no new anything. Congrats on fighting for scraps and losing the whole prize. Pritzker: they're "an $8.5B valued business" that doesn't need propping up. But be smart for a second. Almost every NFL city throws in public money for a stadium. Not charity. The return is real. Tourism, hotels, restaurants, jobs, game days, property tax on a huge development. The math works. Indiana did the math. While Illinois sat on it for years, Indiana passed a bill in months, put up $1B, and took the team. And the Bears took a worse deal to get there. In Illinois they were going to own their stadium. In Indiana they rent it from the state. A team that wanted to build its own home gave up ownership just to escape Chicago. Nobody won but Indiana. The Bears lost their stadium. Illinois lost the team, the $2B, and $53M a year in taxes. Pritzker after they left: "I wasn't willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money to give it to a billionaire-owned family or team." There it is. "Billionaire-owned." That's how Democrats talk about any business right before they run it out of town. Call them a billionaire, act like you're saving working families, take a victory lap while the tax base drives across the state line. Meanwhile they're running the whole state into the ground. And you already know how this ends. You're living in it. Pensions are $143B in the hole, worst in the country and not close. You pay $6,285 a year in property taxes, double the $2,969 national average, for a city that's $1.15B in the red. The mayor called its finances "the point of no return." When you run things this badly, you sell what's left. They leased the parking meters for 75 years to Morgan Stanley and a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi. Took $1.15B and burned through it in two years. The investors already made it all back, with 58 years left to collect. Sold the Skyway. Sold the downtown garages. Every asset that made money, gone for one check. But a fixed property tax rate for a team that's been here 106 years? That's "propping up billionaires." Companies are leaving. Boeing for Virginia. Caterpillar for Texas. Citadel for Miami. In 2023 alone Illinois lost 56,000 people and $6B in income to other states. The ones who left earned a third more than the ones who moved in. Indiana didn't outbid anyone. AAA credit, 16 years straight. A $676M surplus. Fourth-lowest debt per person in the country. They just weren't a disaster. Illinois could have collected $53M a year. It chose zero. Ignore all the bad management but make sure to stick it to those evil, pesky billionaires.

Best to ever play the game.

Steelers Depot 7⃣ @Steelersdepot

4 weeks ago

Ben being Ben throwback #Steelers #NFL

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Spooky

Massimo @Rainmaker1973

4 weeks ago

This is the Mega Marvin, an instrument that gets used to make sounds in horror movies. [📹 MetalWOlf]

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