Cold muonium atomic cannon. “So we’re using the chemical potential as an atomic cannon,” explains Jesse Zhang, describing how superfluid helium helps shoot muonium atoms out in a tight, cold beam. The goal is to measure whether “the equivalence between […]
Landfill beats the recycling bin. “What if landfill, properly done, is actually one of the cleanest, cheapest, and most environmentally sensible things we can do with our waste?” The argument here is basically: recycle metals and scarce materials, but stop […]
Stanford researchers argue the forebrain and hindbrain come from separate origins. “We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain arises from a totally different progenitor cell than the back of the brain.” This explains why past […]
Sleep has an architecture. Researchers used a week of wrist accelerometer data from just under 100,000 UK Biobank participants and found sleep patterns tied to 156 conditions. “This suggests the nature, or ‘architecture’, of sleep you get is more important […]
CRISPR came from viruses. “Two new studies, published in Science, describe a similar RNA-guided system that originated in the viruses themselves and appears to be a precursor to CRISPR.” The system is called VIPR, and it uses a weird “skip-one” […]
Burger King’s “Le Nugguette”. “Burger King has made a bag, and it is roughly the size of a chicken nugget.” It’s called Le Nugguette, and each one comes with a sauce charm plus a code for a four-piece nugget order. […]
A billion-dollar drive-thru side hustle. “It’s an opportunity to generate revenue for the system with little in the way of additional cost, no operational complexity and no disruption to our customer experience,” McDonald’s CMO Morgan Flatley said, as the chain […]
Better feedback with less threat. “The brain is a threat and reward machine.” If you want people to stay open and think clearly, the talk argues you should give feedback in ways that reduce social threat and increase a sense […]
I love being wrong. “All this to say, I love being wrong. It is my favorite, because it helps me more clearly define the problem, find the right solution, learn more quickly, and solve the problem.” A simple six-step loop […]
Andrej Karpathy’s latest LLM tip. Karpathy suggests forcing clearer formats like ASD-STE100 controlled language, diagrams, HTML pages, and even custom explainer videos to make model thinking easier to parse. I told my Claude to try these on stuff we’ve covered […]