under the microscope

Brain scans can now see your mental imagery.

Who’s ready for this future? “Our proposed framework successfully reconstructed both seen images (i.e., those observed by the human eye) and imagined images from brain activity. Quantitative evaluation showed that our framework could identify seen and imagined images highly accurately […]

teaching the kids

Why adults’ fear puts children at risk.

“Adults in many Western nations, particularly those born before the 1990s, recall playing with friends in their neighborhoods, local parks, and abandoned places, making up the rules as they went along, without adult supervision. … They felt independent, taking risks […]

fun facts

Sharks can smell your blood in the water.

But it doesn’t smell tasty. “Sharks know the difference between fish and human blood and, while they can smell our blood, it is not a scent they associate with food.” ~ learn more

big ideas

The unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models.

I suspect “emergence” will continue to be a dominant force in human progress in this century. Seems like a safe benefit since it’s also responsible for, well, pretty much everything. “A raft of researchers, detecting the first hints that LLMs […]

better doing

Why you should stop caring what other people think.

An old post on Tim Urban’s Wait But Why. “Because of this, humans evolved an over-the-top obsession with what others thought of them—a craving for social approval and admiration, and a paralyzing fear of being disliked. Let’s call that obsession […]

under the microscope

First human embryos edited in the US. 

CRISPR was used in the US for the first time to edit a specific genetic disease out of a human embryo. Though not the first time globally, this is a real frontier of both science and ethics. It’s potentially a […]