Functional human sperm in a lab. “Growing functional human sperm entirely outside the body.” Little by little we’re living in an era where humans are taking control over biology. In this example, they were able to coax stem cells into […]
Rods that run cone software. Despite my comment above about humanity taking control over biology, it’s also true that we still know very little about biology. “For more than 150 years, vertebrate vision has been understood as a two-part system: […]
The cost of safetyism. “What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard. … The world didn’t get more dangerous. We got more afraid.” Steve Magness argues that the big shift is a perception-reality gap, and the […]
Unlimited counterfeit coins. Privacy coin Zcash’s price crashed 57% in 24 hours thanks to a newly disclosed bug. “The vulnerability could have been exploited to undetectably create an unlimited amount of counterfeit ZEC within Orchard,” Shielded Labs said. The scary […]
You have never seen a strawberry like this before. “Shot from 90 perspectives, 88 focus stacked images each.” A strawberry turned into a navigable 3D scene, plus a peek at the capture setup and training pipeline behind it. ~ learn […]
‘We mould trees to grow into the shape of chairs’. “At the beginning I thought there would be a two or three-year learning cycle, but it’s more like 12 or 13 years.” Alice and Gavin Munro literally mould living trees […]
GPS converts time into distance. “GPS is fundamentally a translation tool: it converts time into distance.” The whole trick is stopwatch-level precision, then geometry, then relativity corrections so your phone does not drift “by roughly 10 km every 24 hours.” […]
The Great Differentiation. “Copying is free and frictionless. And because it is cheap, it is low status.” Packy’s take on why everything looks the same online, and why the next wave of differentiation moves into costly signals, often offline. ~ […]
To be illegible is to disappear. Joumana Elomar argues that in a world of decks, tweets, and LLM summaries, your company “will live or die in rooms you aren’t present in” so the surface has to carry the truth. ~ […]
The Roomba guy’s second act. “The inventor behind the world-famous robot vacuum is now designing robots that form an emotional bond with their owners.” ~ learn more