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 […]
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 […]
Announcing the first microbe for Mars. “So, we engineered an organism that lets you build a city over 4 years by landing just one rocket on Mars.” Pioneer Labs’s PL.001 is an engineered bacteria that turns Martian dirt, water, and […]
Effective altruism effectively self-serving. “realize I have invented the perfect constituency >infinitely important >completely silent >and always represented by me” A brutal little parody of how effective altruism can slide into longtermism, where made up futures start to outweigh living […]
Michael Levin’s mind-blowing new research agenda. He is the person who figured out that electricity is how cells know where to self-organize to build each body part, who made tiny living non-frogs from frog cells (xenobots), and who developed the […]
One weird dark matter blip. The LUX-ZEPLIN detector extended its search to higher recoil energies and found a single event it could not explain away as background. “How do you even make sense of one event?” muses Tom Shutt. ~ […]
Time your wake to a dream. Muse opened a beta for Dream Recall, which aims to catch you mid-dream so you can actually remember what just happened. They frame it simply: “Recall is a timing problem, not a talent.” ~ […]
The decline of deviance. “People are less weird than they used to be.” Adam Mastroianni walks through a pile of trendlines that all point the same way: fewer teens drinking or fighting, less crime, fewer cults, and even Americans moving […]
Base launches a 40 kWh home battery. “At ~40 kWh it is 3x the size of most home batteries, providing up to 36 hours of backup for the average home.” Base is also adding a generator port so you can […]
Why the West stopped making land. “Since the completion of Battery Park City in 1976, there has not been a single major urban land reclamation project in the United States and only a handful of port expansions.” The piece argues […]