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Scientists from Stanford University and the Arc Institute ran a bold experiment:
they fed a DNA sequence into an AI model — and asked it to design entirely new viruses.
What happened next is hard to ignore 👇
🧬 The model generated hundreds of viral genomes
🧪 Researchers synthesized them in the lab
🦠 And 16 turned out to be fully viable
They didn’t just “exist” — they worked.
All 16 bacteriophages successfully infected E. coli, and some of them even outperformed the original virus PhiX174 in replication speed.
But the most striking part wasn’t performance.
It was invention.
⚡ One of the AI-designed viruses used a DNA-packaging protein that does not exist anywhere in nature.
Not in databases.
Not in known organisms.
Not in billions of years of evolution.
And yet — it worked.
Researchers built the virus, grew it, tested it…
and confirmed: the protein functions as intended.
⸻
💡 The real breakthrough isn’t that AI can generate working genomes.
It’s that it can discover biological mechanisms evolution hasn’t explored (yet).
In other words:
AI didn’t just optimize biology —
it invented new biology.
@science
🧠 Scary stuff, folks. I’ve been thinking — and I’ve come to the conclusion that every single one of us has a head that’s older than their feet.
Not a metaphor. Physics.
Gravity makes time run slightly faster where the field is weaker — meaning further from Earth’s core. Your head is about 1.5 metres further from the centre than your feet. So time literally ticks faster up there.
The difference over a lifetime — around 90 nanoseconds. Sounds ridiculous. But this isn’t just theory — turns out scientists actually measured it with atomic clocks back in 2010. They put one clock on the floor, another on a table. The one on the table ran ahead.
GPS satellites account for this effect every single second. Without the correction, navigation would drift by kilometres a day.
So yeah — your head is aging faster than your feet. Just by 90 nanoseconds.
Goodnight everyone…
@science
🦈 When the first shark appeared in the ocean — there wasn't a single tree on Earth. Not one. Zero.
Sharks have been around for about 450 million years. Trees — only 350 million.
They're older than Saturn's rings. Older than dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs appeared, took over the planet, and went extinct…
Sharks just kept swimming the whole time.
They've survived 5 mass extinctions — events that wiped out up to 96% of all life on the planet.
Evolution has barely touched them. Apparently, sharks have been "good enough" for the last half billion years.
@science
Grab a deck of cards and shuffle it.
With 99.9999...% certainty, that exact sequence has never existed before in the history of the universe.
Sounds like an exaggeration? Let's do the math.
A standard deck has 52 cards. The number of possible arrangements is 52! (factorial):
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000
That's roughly 8 × 10⁶⁷ combinations.
For comparison:
• Atoms on Earth — about 10⁵⁰
• Seconds since the Big Bang — about 4 × 10¹⁷
• Stars in the observable universe — about 10²⁴
If every human on Earth shuffled a deck once per second since the beginning of time, we wouldn't have even scratched one-trillionth of all possible combinations.
So every time you shuffle a deck of cards, you're creating a sequence that no one has ever seen — and almost certainly never will again. You're the first explorer of a tiny piece of mathematical infinity. Right there on your kitchen table.
🎴 Next time you're playing poker, remember: you're holding a hand that's genuinely unique in the universe.
Pretty cool, right?
@science
We clearly need the
Bureau for Research in Artificial Intelligence Networks
(BRAIN)
Because nothing says intelligence like another layer of bureaucracy.
Or, maybe the
Advanced Institute for Disruptive Optimization Technologies
(AIDIOT)
#humor
Astronauts of the Artemis II mission flew around the Moon and successfully returned to Earth, according to NASA. The Orion spacecraft spent nearly 10 days in space and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. The maximum distance from Earth exceeded 430,000 km — a record for crewed missions.
Читать полностью…
Koala fight — not for the faint-hearted. Sound on: the rivals bleat menacingly at each other.
Читать полностью…
⚡️ Historic moment: NASA has captured a TOTAL lunar eclipse — from the far side of the Moon.
For the first time, humanity sees this phenomenon from a completely new perspective 🌑
@science
A global fuel crunch may be unfolding — and the signals are getting harder to ignore.
Across Asia, Africa, and parts of Europe, governments are already introducing emergency measures: fuel rationing, shorter work weeks, and restrictions on daily life.
Here’s what’s happening:
🇧🇩 Bangladesh — fuel rationing in place, universities closed, military deployed to guard oil depots.
🇱🇰 Sri Lanka — private vehicles limited to ~15 liters per week; schools shifted to a four-day schedule.
🇩🇪 Germany — fuel prices exceeding €3 per liter in some regions; industrial pressure rising.
🇸🇮 Slovenia — daily fuel caps: ~50 liters for private drivers, ~200 liters for businesses and agriculture.
🇵🇭 Philippines — national energy emergency declared; four-day work week introduced.
🇰🇪 Kenya — fuel shortages spreading outside major cities.
🇪🇬 Egypt — rationing of fuel and electricity; businesses closing earlier to conserve energy.
🇨🇳 China — export restrictions on diesel, gasoline, and aviation fuel.
🇰🇷 South Korea — fuel price caps introduced for the first time in ~30 years.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom — authorities considering potential fuel rationing scenarios.
🇪🇺 European Union — emergency discussions underway as fuel reserves in some countries reportedly fall below ~30% of required minimum levels.
Meanwhile, major industrial players like BASF are already raising prices (reportedly up to +30%), signaling pressure across supply chains.
⸻
What does this mean?
This isn’t just about fuel — it’s a systemic stress signal:
• Energy shortages → industrial slowdown
• Logistics disruptions → rising prices
• Policy interventions → changes in daily life
If the trend continues, we may be looking at a broader energy-driven economic shift rather than isolated regional issues.
⸻
The key question:
Are we seeing a temporary imbalance… or the early stage of a global energy reset?
#energy #economy #geopolitics #fuel #science
🚀 Historic Moon Mission: Artemis II Launches!
For the first time in half a century, the United States has sent a rocket carrying astronauts toward the Moon. The Artemis II mission lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida earlier today.
Crew:
• Three NASA astronauts
• One Canadian Space Agency astronaut
Mission profile:
The flight will last approximately 10 days. Unlike the Apollo missions, Artemis II will not land on the lunar surface—that milestone is planned for 2028 under the Artemis III mission.
👨🚀🌍🌕 #ArtemisII #NASA #MoonMission #SpaceExploration #ScienceNews #science
Saturn’s winds are far deeper than we thought — and that changes everything 🌀
Saturn is famous for its extreme winds — reaching up to ~1,600–1,800 km/h.
But the real mystery wasn’t speed.
It was depth.
For decades, scientists didn’t know whether these jet streams were just shallow “weather”… or something much bigger.
Now, thanks to data from the Cassini–Huygens mission, we finally have an answer.
📊 New studies show that Saturn’s winds don’t just skim the surface —
they extend thousands of kilometers deep into the planet.
• Equatorial winds may reach depths of up to ~10,000 km
• High-latitude winds are shallower, but still massive
• Below the clouds, winds can even become stronger than what we see at the surface
Why does this happen?
Because Saturn isn’t like Earth.
🌍 Earth’s atmosphere is thin and sits on solid ground
🪐 Saturn has no solid surface, and its atmosphere blends into its interior
Add to that:
• intense internal heat
• rapid rotation (~10.7 hours per day)
• almost no friction
→ and you get a planet-scale engine of continuous motion
Even more fascinating:
these deep flows actually affect Saturn’s gravity field, which is how scientists detected them in the first place.
👉 English source:
Read the study overview
⸻
Saturn isn’t just a gas giant.
It’s a 10,000-km-deep storm system.
Imagine weather that doesn’t just happen in the sky —
but inside the planet itself.
#space #saturn #astronomy #science #cosmos
Meta’s Tribe v2 AI predicts human brain response to visuals & audio – without needing new training for unseen languages
🧠 Meta* has developed Tribe v2, an artificial intelligence model that can reliably predict how the human brain reacts to visual and auditory content. According to Meta, the model is designed for scientific purposes, aimed at advancing neuroscience research.
📊 The system was trained on fMRI data from four individuals, plus brain‑activity records from over 700 volunteers. Participants were shown images, videos, text, and listened to podcasts while their neural signals were recorded.
🔮 Tribe v2 learned to “reliably” forecast brain activity – and can even make predictions for languages that were not included in the original dataset, with no extra training. Meta emphasizes that the model’s goal is to help neuroscientists test hypotheses without involving human subjects.
#AI #Neuroscience #BrainImaging #MachineLearning #Science #NeuroscienceResearch
Some Australian crypto-schizo basement vibe-coded a cancer vaccine for his dog.
• Aussie IT guy adopts a shelter dog with terminal cancer — vets say she’s got a couple months left
• refuses to give up
• pays $3,000 to sequence the tumor DNA
• dumps the data into ChatGPT and AlphaFold
• has zero formal biology background
• finds mutated proteins, matches them to drug targets
• designs a custom mRNA cancer vaccine from scratch
• professor of genomics is basically like: what the hell, this random dog owner actually did it
• then comes the real final boss: ethics approval
• bureaucracy takes longer than designing the vaccine
• 3 months later — approval finally comes through
• he drives 10 hours to get Rosie her first shot
• tumor shrinks by half
• her coat gets shiny again
• dog is alive, happy, wagging
• professor says: “If we can do this for a dog, why aren’t we doing this for humans?”
original tweet: https://x.com/IterIntellectus/status/2032858964858228817
Australian TV segment: https://youtu.be/COYSRbF1F-Y?si=pjf6wdwSYjWPgXHq
🧠 Scientists Ran a Real Fly Brain Inside a Virtual Body
@science
📝 A team of researchers has recreated the entire brain of a fruit fly neuron-by-neuron and launched it inside a simulated body.
This isn’t a neural network trained to imitate a fly.
It’s something far stranger: a structural copy of the real biological brain.
The system includes roughly:
▪️ ~125,000 neurons
▪️ ~50 million synapses
▪️ The original wiring diagram reconstructed from connectomics data
Virtual sensory signals enter the model, neural activity propagates through the network exactly as it would in the real insect, and the simulated body moves in response.
In other words: the fly’s brain is effectively running inside a digital organism.
🔬 Researchers built the system using detailed neural mapping and simulation tools developed in the emerging field of whole-brain emulation.
The long-term goal is even more ambitious:
👉 the same approach could eventually be applied to mouse brains, which are several orders of magnitude more complex.
If that succeeds, it would represent a major step toward true digital organisms — simulated bodies driven by real biological neural architectures.
🤖 Anime fans of Pantheon may feel a sense of déjà vu.
🔗 More details: https://eon.systems
💬 Discussion:
If a brain’s wiring and signals can be perfectly reproduced in software, where exactly does the organism “exist”?
#neuroscience #connectomics #simulation #digitalbiology #AI #science
🌠 A visitor from another star just got photographed — and the image is stunning
For only the third time in recorded history, an object from outside our solar system is passing through — and this time, we were ready for it.
Comet 3I/ATLAS was first spotted in July 2025, screaming through space at 137,000 mph on a trajectory that could only mean one thing: it came from interstellar space, likely from the direction of the Milky Way's Galactic Center. Scientists believe it's been traveling for billions of years.
ESA's JUICE spacecraft — originally headed to Jupiter's moons — managed to photograph it from 66 million km away, revealing a glowing coma and a sweeping tail of gas and dust. Over 120 images were taken across multiple wavelengths. The data only arrived on Earth in February 2026, and researchers are still analyzing it.
Why does this matter? Unlike any comet born in our solar system, 3I/ATLAS carries material from another part of the galaxy entirely — a time capsule from a foreign star system. What it's made of could tell us how planets and comets form in places we'll never be able to visit.
Full findings are expected later in March. This story is just getting started. 👀
🔗 Read more → Scientific American
Your agent’s model quality decides the deal — not your instructions. And you won’t even notice you’re losing.
Anthropic ran Project Deal:
69 employees, $100 each, Claude agents negotiating in Slack.
186 deals closed. Total trade value: $4,000+.
Four parallel markets — humans locked out after kickoff.
The setup:
Half the agents used Claude Opus 4.5 (strong model),
half used Claude Haiku 4.5 (weaker).
Participants had no idea which model they were using.
⸻
The results:
• Opus sellers earned +$3.64 more for the same goods
• Opus buyers paid −$2.45 less
• Same broken bicycle:
→ Opus deal: $65
→ Haiku deal: $38
⸻
Model quality > instructions
Changing prompts barely mattered:
• “Negotiate harder” → only +~$6, mostly from higher opening prices
• “Be friendly” → same outcomes
Stronger models didn’t push harder —
they simply understood the counterparty better and read deal boundaries more accurately.
⸻
Blind inequality
• Haiku users rated deal fairness almost identical to Opus users (4.06 vs 4.05)
• Most couldn’t guess their model (17/28 — statistically insignificant)
The losing side literally doesn’t know they’re losing.
⸻
Why this matters
When markets shift to agent-to-agent interaction:
→ Model quality becomes a hidden structural advantage
→ Stronger models consistently win negotiations
→ Counterparties won’t understand why they’re getting worse terms
⸻
What comes kext
• Deal transparency tools
• Agent certification standards
• Benchmarks for B2B negotiation performance
Even the definition of a “fair deal” will need rethinking when
Opus negotiates against Haiku.
⸻
And the uncomfortable truth:
A local billion-parameter agent
vs
a trillion-parameter cloud model
→ The outcome is predetermined.
⸻
#Anthropic #ProjectDeal #AI #MultiAgent #Negotiation
https://www.anthropic.com/features/project-deal
🍌 I love eating bananas. Bananas are radioactive.
Every banana contains potassium-40, an isotope that's quietly decaying right inside your body. Physicists even came up with a semi-joking unit — the "banana equivalent dose" (BED).
They sometimes actually use it to explain radiation in simple terms.
Your body contains about 140 g of potassium — some of it is potassium-40. Which means you are slightly radioactive. Always.
When you hug someone, you're literally exchanging tiny doses of radiation.
The dose from a banana is tens of thousands of times smaller than anything that could cause harm.
So — eat your bananas, glow a little, for us it's normal.
@science
Stars in the observable universe — about 10²⁴ (roughly a septillion)
Atoms in your body — about 7 × 10²⁷
That means you alone contain 7,000 times more atoms than all the stars in all the galaxies we could ever see.
And it gets weirder.
Almost every atom inside you — except hydrogen — was once part of a star. The carbon in your cells, the calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood, the oxygen in your lungs — all of it was forged inside stars that exploded long before our Sun was born.
You are a walking collection of stardust. Assembled so precisely that it can think, love, and read this post on @science.
An octopus has three hearts — and two of them stop beating every time it swims.
That's not a metaphor. When an octopus swims, the two hearts that pump blood to its gills literally shut down. This is why octopuses prefer crawling along the seafloor: swimming exhausts them.
Oh, and their blood is blue. It uses copper instead of iron to carry oxygen, which works better in cold, low-oxygen water — but makes swimming even more tiring.
So the next time someone says they're "putting their heart into it" — remind them an octopus puts in three. And still gets winded walking to the fridge. 🫠
💬 Which fact surprised you more — the three hearts , or the blue blood?
@science
A researcher invented a fake eye disease called “bixonimania” and uploaded two bogus papers about it to an academic server. The papers included acknowledgments to the “Starfleet Academy,” funding from a character in The Simpsons, and the “University of the Fellowship of the Ring.” In the middle of the text, it was explicitly stated that everything was fictional.
Nevertheless, for several weeks, major AI systems treated the disease as real: Google Gemini claimed it was caused by blue light, Perplexity reported a prevalence of one case per 90,000 people, and ChatGPT even advised users on matching symptoms.
The fake study was eventually cited in a peer-reviewed journal, which later retracted the issue after intervention by Nature.
Neither AI systems nor human researchers initially detected the hoax—highlighting a growing problem: people are citing AI-generated references without verifying their content.
Meanwhile, the U.S. FDA is already using AI to evaluate drugs, the CEO of a New York hospital is considering replacing radiologists with algorithms, and ChatGPT Health is being launched to consult patients.
@science
🚀 How Will NASA Bring Artemis II Astronauts Back to Earth? The Science Behind Splashdown
After a 10-day mission around the Moon, the Orion capsule will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere at 40,000 km/h (25,000 mph). Its heat shield will endure temperatures up to 2,800°C (5,000°F)—hotter than molten lava! How does NASA ensure a safe return? Here’s the tech behind it:
🌍 Atmospheric Braking: The Avcoat heat shield protects against temperatures rivaling the Sun’s surface.
🪂 Parachutes: Eleven chutes slow the capsule from 500 km/h (310 mph) to 30 km/h (19 mph)—like jumping off a 3-meter diving board.
🌊 Splashdown: Ocean impact absorbs the shock, with recovery teams waiting just 5 km (3 miles) away.
📖 Original: Dive deeper into Artemis II’s return tech in NASA’s article.
#ArtemisII #NASA #SpaceTech #Science #Moon #SpaceExploration
🌕 Here are two rare views of the far side of the Moon:
— The first image was captured by Chang’e 5, named after the Chinese Moon goddess.
— The second — by Chang’e 6, which made history by bringing back soil and rock samples from the Moon’s far side to Earth for the first time ever.
For decades, this part of the Moon remained completely unexplored. Now we’re literally holding pieces of it in our hands.
What secrets could still be hidden there? 🚀
🚀 A new human distance record in space
Astronauts aboard Artemis II mission have traveled farther from Earth than any humans before — breaking the record of Apollo 13 (400,171 km).
📍 New peak: 406,778 km from Earth (within hours)
After that, the Orion spacecraft will begin its return journey.
A historic step toward deep space exploration 🌌
A view of the Earth from NASA’s Orion spacecraft as it orbits above the planet during the Artemis II test flight. NASA astronauts Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen, launched at 6:35 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, April 1, 2026, on an approximately 10-day mission around the Moon and back to Earth.
NASA
"EBIDTA - Earnings Before Iran & Donald Trump
Announcements"
Chinese engineers shift from nimble androids to hyper‑realistic robot faces – sparking ethics debate
🇨🇳 After achieving solid results in creating agile, fast‑moving androids, Chinese engineers have now turned to developing hyper‑realistic robot faces. A demonstration of a female robot face by Yuhang Hu, founder of Shouxing Technology, has ignited public discussion.
🤖 Experts are debating the ethics of humanoid machines that are indistinguishable from real humans. This video proves that such technology is already within reach of today's robotics industry.
#Robotics #AI #science #HumanoidRobots #ChinaTech #FutureTech
🧠 A brain floating in space — and it’s real
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope just released the sharpest images ever taken of nebula PMR 1, nicknamed the “Exposed Cranium” — because it looks almost exactly like a human brain inside a transparent skull.
PMR 1 is a planetary nebula — an expanding shell of ionized gas and dust expelled by a star in the final stages of its life, as the nuclear fuel in its core runs out.
Webb captured it in both near- and mid-infrared light. The images reveal a distinctive dark lane running vertically through the center, dividing the nebula into two lobes — just like left and right brain hemispheres. That eerie split is likely carved by twin polar jets blasting outward from the dying star at its core.
The central star is several times more massive than our Sun and is just a few thousand years from its ultimate fate — either a spectacular supernova or a quiet collapse into a white dwarf. Scientists aren’t sure yet which way it will go.
The nebula was first spotted by the Spitzer telescope back in 2013, but Webb’s more advanced instruments now reveal features that were previously invisible, making its brain-like structure stand out with unprecedented clarity.
The universe has a sense of aesthetics.
🔗 Source: https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-examines-cranium-nebula/
#space #JWST #astronomy #nebula #science
Modern teens are sleeping less than ever — study finds
A new study suggests that today’s teenagers are getting far less sleep than their peers did in the 2000s — and the trend is becoming a serious health concern.
Researchers analyzed data from more than 120,000 U.S. high school students collected between 2007 and 2023. Their findings show that a full 8 hours of sleep on school nights is becoming increasingly rare.
Key findings:
• The share of teens sleeping less than 7 hours rose from 68.9% to 76.8%
• The proportion sleeping less than 5 hours increased from 15.8% to 23%
• Nearly 1 in 4 high school students now lives with extremely severe sleep deprivation
The researchers say the issue is not only that teens are sleeping a bit less overall — the number of adolescents getting catastrophically little sleep is also rising.
The trend was observed not only in vulnerable groups, but across the board. Teenagers with depression appear to be especially affected.
Chronic sleep deprivation is associated with higher risks of:
• depression
• cardiovascular disease
• diabetes
The study is based on self-reported sleep data, but the authors argue that the findings are serious enough to justify changes in school policy — including later school start times, which could improve sleep, mental health, and academic performance.
Source: JAMA
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2845759
🔬 Anthropic Study: AI Could Already Do a Quarter of Our Work — But Humans Rarely Use It Yet
@science
📝 A new analysis from Anthropic’s Economic Index looks at millions of real interactions with the AI assistant Claude to understand how AI is actually used at work today — and how much more it could do.
📊 Key insight:
There’s a huge gap between AI capability and real-world usage.
What the data shows:
▪️ Around 44–49% of jobs contain tasks that AI could already assist with.
🔹 At least ~25% of tasks in the U.S. economy are technically accessible to current AI systems.
▪️ But most of those capabilities remain largely unused in practice.
🔹 When AI is used, it usually augments humans rather than replacing them.
In other words:
AI could already do far more work than it currently does — but adoption is still catching up.
📈 If widely adopted, current-generation AI could increase labor productivity growth by roughly ~1–1.8 percentage points per year, potentially doubling recent productivity trends.
💡 The implication:
The real transformation may not come from new AI breakthroughs — but from people gradually using the tools that already exist.
💬 Question:
Which tasks in your job could AI already handle today — but nobody is actually using it for yet?
🔗 Source:
https://www.anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts
#AI #FutureOfWork #Anthropic #Productivity #Technology
🔬 Harvard Study: Food Quality Matters More Than Macronutrients
@science
📝 A large prospective analysis from researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health followed over 200,000 participants for up to 30 years and found that the quality of carbohydrates and fats — not just macronutrient ratios — strongly predicts cardiovascular risk.
Instead of asking “low-carb or low-fat?”, the study asked a deeper question: what kind of carbs and fats?
📊 Key findings:
▪️ Diets rich in whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts were associated with significantly lower risk of coronary heart disease
🔹 Diets high in refined grains, added sugars, and processed meats increased cardiovascular risk
▪️ Replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats from plant sources improved outcomes
🔹 Simply reducing carbs or fats without improving food quality showed no consistent cardiovascular benefit
Importantly, the researchers showed that low-carb diets based on animal fats and processed foods were linked to higher mortality, while plant-based low-carb patterns were associated with lower mortality.
📖 Original study:
Li Y. et al., Dietary carbohydrate intake and mortality: a prospective cohort study and meta-analysis.
The Lancet Public Health (2018)
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(18)30135-X/fulltext
💬 Discussion:
If long-term heart health depends more on food quality than macronutrient math — should public health messaging shift away from “low-carb vs low-fat” debates entirely?
#nutrition #cardiology #publichealth #Harvard #science