133809
#Science telegram channel Best science content in telegram Our subscribers geo: https://t.me/science/3736
Last night’s strong geomagnetic storm painted the sky with an unusually rare red aurora — and from the International Space Station it looked like the crew was literally flying through the glowing curtain, Russian cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov said.
Why the red? Green auroras typically glow around ~100 km altitude, but red emissions come much higher (~300–400 km), where the atmosphere is thinner and it takes more energy to light it up — which is why this color is far less common.
#SpaceWeather #Aurora #ISS #SolarStorm
The aerodynamics of the Red-billed Blue Magpie in flight.
Native to Asia, this bird is roughly the size of a magpie — but with an exceptionally long tail, one of the longest among all corvids.
That tail isn’t just for show. In flight, it acts as an aerodynamic stabilizer, improving balance, maneuverability, and control during sharp turns and gliding. Nature’s engineering at its finest.
#LookAtThis #Aerodynamics #BirdFlight #NatureEngineering #Science
In short, here’s where things stand today:
On a distant planet, there is a massive superpower comfortably settled on one half of a continental landmass. It keeps glancing at the other half — a patchwork of semi-vassal micro-states, always rushing around, arguing about whom to serve, yet sitting atop sacred deposits of vibrium, the fuel that powers the entire cosmic economy.
Naturally, such chaos simply must be “put in order,” right? Preferably — in its own kind of order.
On the other side of the world lives another great power, and beside it — the fractured shard of a once-mighty empire. A strange shard: wounded, supposedly humbled, expected to quietly repent and be grateful for whatever scraps it’s given…
Yet instead of embracing eternal pacifism, it occasionally smacks some overly radicalized neighbors who have clearly lost contact with reality.
This, of course, horrifies the enlightened cluster of “cosmo-partners,” sincerely convinced that true Neo-Cosmic Values™ mean you get to lecture everyone else on how to live… while staying responsible for absolutely nothing.
The shard disrupts their cosmic harmony: it talks back, survives, grows stronger, and worst of all — refuses to hand over everything it produces for free.
How dare it?
So the first superpower begins crafting the perfect master plan:
— weaken the shard;
— unleash obedient vassals against it — but painfully, so they learn their lesson too;
— while everyone is busy with the fires, quietly seize control of the richest vibrium kingdoms;
— and under all that chaos, grab a giant vibrium cargo shuttle belonging to the shard itself.
Because when the world turns a blind eye to small acts of impunity, why not try bigger ones?
And while the planet passionately debates ideals, justice, and “fair rules,” somewhere behind the scenes everything is already counted, arranged, signed, and ready to go.
All that’s left is to explain to everyone that it’s all in the name of peace, progress, and of course… the right values™.
P.S. Meanwhile, scientists also figured out how to slow cellular aging.
P.P.S. This story is strictly relevant only to the inhabitants of the 3rd planet of Great Alpha in the Andromeda sector. Any resemblance to other star systems is, of course, purely coincidental…
In 2025, the United States carried out more than 500 bombings around the world. This doesn’t include the hundreds of bombs dropped by Israel. America launched strikes in Asia, Africa, and South America. The Nobel Peace Prize is still waiting for its recipient.
@science
NASA has released a high-resolution video of the surface of Mars, created from images captured by the HiRISE camera aboard a spacecraft.
The footage stitches together ultra-detailed orbital photos, revealing Mars’ terrain with stunning clarity — from ancient channels to rugged geological formations.
How inflation is rising in the U.S. dollar, the euro, and the Swiss franc.
@science
Scientists may have accidentally discovered a dementia prevention tool that's been available for years.
A shingles vaccine — originally designed to prevent that painful rash you might get from a dormant childhood virus — appears to cut dementia risk by 20%. And in people already diagnosed with dementia, it seems to slow the disease's progression.
The discovery came from a quirk in Welsh health policy. In 2013, Wales offered the vaccine only to people who were exactly 79 — anyone who had already turned 80 was ineligible. This created a near-perfect natural experiment: two groups of people, virtually identical except for a few weeks of age difference, one vaccinated and one not.
When Stanford Medicine researchers tracked these groups for nine years, the results were striking. Among those vaccinated, dementia diagnoses dropped significantly. Even more surprising: people who already had dementia and got the vaccine were far less likely to die from it.
The effect was strongest in women. Whether this comes from stronger immune responses or something else entirely remains unclear. Scientists don't yet know if the vaccine works by suppressing the virus itself or by generally boosting the immune system.
Would you consider getting the shingles vaccine earlier if these findings hold up in clinical trials? Does it change how you think about the connection between viruses and brain health?
For more details, see the full article from Stanford Medicine: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/03/shingles-vaccination-dementia.html
#dementia #vaccines #neuroscience #aging #medicine #science
🤖 When EngineAI’s T800 humanoid went viral, a lot of people were sure the video was just CGI.
So the CEO, Zhao Tongyang, literally stepped into the ring with his own robot — and let it kick him. 🦶
No VFX, no compositing, no AI post-processing — just a full-size humanoid, real-time control, and a CEO who’s very confident in his product. 📷
As humanoids get more powerful (high joint torque, fast reaction times, active cooling), trust and safety are becoming just as important as raw specs. EngineAI decided to demonstrate that trust the hard way.
#robotics #humanoid #AI #China
🧠 Your Mind Can Switch On Your Immune System — Literally
A recent immunology session reminded me of a striking study: participants in VR were shown faces of supposedly “infected” people — and their innate immune biomarkers actually increased.
In other words, both real pathogens and completely virtual ones triggered the same physiological immune response. No microbes needed.
Another paper impressed me even more: tumor growth in mice was suppressed simply through social interaction.
We all know loneliness is harmful, but the effect here was dramatic:
just one hour of daily social contact significantly reduced tumor growth and anxiety-like behavior.
This fits into a growing body of work on how the brain regulates the body — including immunity. If you want a solid overview, Cell has a great review by Ayelet “A.C.” Rolls, with a deep dive into immunoceiving (how the brain senses and modulates immune activity).
The bigger picture?
We’re moving toward a future where maintaining health won’t rely only on pharmaceuticals, but also on managing mental states.
Drugs are easier — you take a pill and don’t have to change yourself.
Mind-body interventions are harder — but potentially just as powerful.
I still hope medicine will more actively tap into the brain–body connection.
🔗 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02008-y
Earth, Jupiter, and Venus as seen from Mars
Читать полностью…
Whether we expect a major nuclear war or not, here is a curious set of U.S. actions in deploying strategic weapons:
First, the White House has consistently withdrawn from long-standing arms reduction and limitation treaties. In 2002—from the ABM Treaty; in 2019—from the INF Treaty; in 2020—from the Open Skies Treaty. A potential U.S. refusal to maintain the moratorium on nuclear testing could thus be a logical next step in Washington’s dismantling of the global strategic stability system.
Second, the U.S. is accelerating the modernization of its strategic offensive weapons. Work is underway on the new Sentinel ICBM with a new nuclear warhead and a range of 13,000 km. Development continues on the Columbia-class strategic nuclear submarine to replace the Ohio-class. The new B-21 Raider heavy bomber is in progress. A nuclear-armed cruise missile is under development, and so on. Plans include reactivating 56 launchers on 14 Ohio-class submarines—note: full reactivation—with complete loading of Trident II ballistic missiles. Preparatory measures are in place to reconvert 30 B-52H strategic bombers back into nuclear weapon carriers.
Third, the Americans have begun implementing the “Golden Dome” program, which envisions both missile defense interception and pre-launch strikes against Russian and Chinese missiles.
Fourth, by the end of this year, the U.S. Army plans to adopt the new Dark Eagle intermediate-range missile system with hypersonic missiles capable of a 5,500 km range. Future deployment is foreseen in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Flight time from Germany—where this complex is planned for placement—to targets in central Russia would be about six to seven minutes.
Fifth, Washington regularly conducts exercises of its strategic offensive forces. The latest, Global Thunder 2025—which practiced, I emphasize, preemptive nuclear missile strikes on Russian territory—took place in October of this year.
Overall, this is a unified complex of measures, including potential U.S. plans for nuclear tests, which significantly heighten the military threat level to Russia.
AI-powered parking never looked like this in my head.
A 35-kg Unitree G1 running BAAI’s THOR whole-body control just dragged a 1.4-ton car — ~40× its own weight. It’s a stunt, but it shows how fast balance, traction, and whole-body control are improving. Next stop: factory logistics, recovery, and precision vehicle positioning.
#Unitree #BAAI #THOR #Robotics #AI #Humanoids
———
@science
Cyberpunk remote work, IRL.
Operators in the Philippines—paid about $250/month—are remotely piloting shelf-stocking robots in Japanese stores.
Today it’s teleoperation; tomorrow it’s training data. The real question: how fast until the robots learn enough to cut humans out of the loop?
#robots #teleoperation #retailtech #AI #futureofwork #science
☀️ A massive explosion erupted last night on the far side of the Sun (IKI RAS).
The bright ejection you see in the footage is plasma being hurled away from the Sun — fortunately, in the opposite direction from Earth.
The dark circle and stripe in the frame aren’t mysterious objects — they mark the blind zones of the coronagraph’s optics, used to block direct sunlight and make solar activity visible.
Even though the blast happened on the far side, it shows just how restless our star remains — constantly storing and releasing titanic amounts of magnetic energy.
#Sun #Space #Astronomy #SolarFlare
GPT-5.2 Pro has solved its fourth Erdős problem.
Mathematician Terence Tao described the result as “perhaps the most unambiguous so far” in terms of the uniqueness of the approach.
The author of the solution (if we can even call a human that — given the problem was simply fed into ChatGPT 🤔) claims that no prior solutions existed at all.
That’s not entirely true: forum users point out draft proofs in the literature from 1936 and 1966. However, Tao emphasizes that GPT-5.2’s method is fundamentally different from those earlier attempts.
Now the obvious question remains:
how will GPT-5.2 surprise us once the Erdős problems finally run out? 😏
Forum discussion:
www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread/281?order=oldest
@science
🧠 AI didn’t just replace jobs.
It rehired people — to train their replacement.
As companies deploy AI to write, diagnose, analyze, and edit, many professionals have already lost their full-time roles.
What comes next is more subtle: the same people are brought back as short-term contractors — not to do the job, but to teach AI how to do it better.
Doctors review AI-generated medical notes.
Lawyers check legal reasoning written by models.
Editors polish AI texts they once wrote themselves.
This is no longer “human + AI collaboration.”
It’s a transition phase: human as quality control for a system designed to outgrow them.
The work pays — for now.
But its purpose is temporary by design.
AI still makes mistakes.
And those already displaced are the ones fixing them — accelerating the moment when even that role disappears.
🧠 AI Is Now Allowed to Practice Medicine in the US
For the first time, artificial intelligence has been granted the right to prescribe medication in the United States — without a human doctor involved.
The company Doctronic has launched a pilot program where its AI system:
• analyzes a patient’s medical history
• asks follow-up diagnostic questions
• issues prescriptions for chronic conditions
• sends them directly to a pharmacy
This marks a major shift in healthcare: AI is no longer just an assistant — it’s becoming a licensed decision-maker.
A glimpse into the future of medicine, where algorithms join doctors as independent clinical actors.
@science
Scientists Discover a New Way to Slow Cellular Aging
Biologists at Cornell University have uncovered a surprising mechanism that may help cells resist aging.
The key players are extracellular vesicles — tiny membrane bubbles released by embryonic stem cells. When these vesicles interact with aging cells, they significantly slow down cellular senescence, a process triggered by oxidative stress that halts cell division and degrades tissue function.
In experiments with mouse embryonic stem cells, researchers found that these vesicles helped skin, muscle, and nerve cells stay active and functional for much longer than usual.
🔬 Why does it work?
The vesicles carry fibronectin, a protein on their surface that helps them bind to older cells. Once attached, they stimulate the production of enzymes that neutralize free radicals, reducing oxidative damage — one of the main drivers of aging.
🧪 What’s next?
The team plans to test the effect of these vesicles in living organisms to see how they influence aging at the whole-body level.
🚀 Why it matters
If confirmed, this discovery could pave the way for anti-aging therapies and treatments for age-related diseases — not by replacing cells, but by protecting them from aging in the first place.
@science
This stunning 9-gigapixel image of the Milky Way contains 84 million stars.
Читать полностью…
🧠🦠 Your gut may be shaping your mind more than you think
A new peer-reviewed study adds to the growing evidence that the gut microbiome plays a direct role in brain function, behavior, and mental health — far beyond digestion.
Researchers show that changes in gut bacteria can influence:
• 🧩 cognitive performance
• 😌 stress and anxiety levels
• 🧠 neuroinflammation and brain signaling
• 🔄 the gut–brain communication loop via immune and neural pathways
What’s especially striking is that the effects are bidirectional:
your mental state alters the microbiome, and the microbiome, in turn, alters your mental state.
This reinforces a major shift in neuroscience and medicine:
The brain is not an isolated organ — it’s deeply integrated with the immune system, metabolism, and trillions of microbes living inside us.
Implications range from mental health treatments to personalized nutrition, probiotics, and even preventive psychiatry.
📄 Source (open access):
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2025.2599562
This is Guizhou Province, China — mountains completely covered with solar panels.
The scale is so massive that drones don’t have enough battery to capture the entire mountain range in a single flight. Just endless ridges of photovoltaics stretching to the horizon.
By turning rugged, hard-to-use terrain into energy infrastructure, China is effectively farming millions of kilowatt-hours every month.
Guizhou has become a symbol of China’s renewable strategy:
• use land with low alternative economic value
• build at industrial scale, not pilot projects
• integrate renewables directly into national energy planning
While others debate whether such transitions are realistic, China simply builds them.
The greenest country?
At the very least — the most scalable one.
@science
Imagine your liver biopsy being scored not by a panel of pathologists, but by an AI that regulators officially treat as a “lab tool” for drug trials. That just became real.
PathAI has announced that its AIM-MASH AI Assist system is the first AI-powered pathology tool ever qualified by the US FDA (and already by the European Medicines Agency) for use in clinical trials of MASH — a common, fatty liver disease that can progress to cirrhosis and cancer. Instead of three experts arguing over how bad the damage looks on a slide, the model helps a single pathologist assign consistent scores.
Why this matters: drug trials for liver disease live and die on tiny changes in biopsy scores. Human reads are slow, expensive and notoriously variable. An AI that gives the same answer every time for the same slide can make trials faster, cheaper and statistically cleaner — which may mean more liver drugs actually making it to market.
Important caveat: this AI is cleared only as a biomarker tool for trials, not for diagnosing individual patients. But if regulators are starting to trust models as part of the evidence pipeline, how long until similar systems sit inside routine hospital workflows?
Would you be comfortable knowing an AI scored your tissue sample in a drug trial? Should this kind of model stay in research, or gradually move into everyday diagnostics?
Full story from PathAI’s press release: https://www.pathai.com/news/pathais-aim-mash-ai-assist-becomes-first-ai-powered-pathology-tool-to-receive-fda-qualification-for-mash-clinical-trials
#AI #medicine #pathology #liverdisease #clinicaltrials #FDA #biotech
China just rolled out its own T-800. And no, this is not CGI.
🤖 Chinese company EngineAI (Zhòngqíng) has unveiled a full-size humanoid robot called T800 — the promo stresses: “All real footage – no CGI, no AI, no video acceleration.”
Key specs:
• Height: 173 cm
• 29 degrees of freedom (not counting the hands)
• Peak joint torque: up to 450 N·m
Capabilities:
• 360° surround vision system
• Active cooling for the leg joints (so it doesn’t overheat while walking/running)
• Battery life: ≈ 4–5 hours of operation on a single charge
Humanoids are rapidly moving from flashy concept videos to more practical platforms: with this level of torque, sensing and runtime, robots like T800 are getting closer to tasks in logistics, manufacturing, and hazardous environments — not just lab demos.
#robotics #AI #humanoid #China
💊 A once-daily pill that slashes “bad” cholesterol by ~58%
High LDL (“bad”) cholesterol is a slow-motion killer: it silently damages arteries and drives heart attacks and strokes. For people with familial hypercholesterolemia (roughly 1 in 250 adults), LDL is dangerously high from birth.
A new clinical trial just tested an experimental pill called enlicitide decanoate, an oral PCSK9 inhibitor:
• 293 adults with inherited high cholesterol
• all already on statins, but still with elevated LDL
• randomized to enlicitide once a day vs placebo for 24 weeks
📉 Result:
Those on the pill saw LDL drop by 58.2% on average, while the placebo group actually had a slight increase in LDL. The effect stayed strong over a full year, and side effects were similar to placebo.
PCSK9 inhibitors already exist as injections; this one is a tablet that basically lets the liver vacuum more LDL out of the blood. If longer-term studies confirm it reduces heart attacks and strokes, millions of high-risk patients could swap some injections for a daily pill.
Question:
If you had very high LDL, would you take a daily PCSK9 pill on top of statins?
#medicine #cholesterol #cardiology #pharma
“Feels like the uncanny valley just got crossed.”
Prompt: “Photorealistic interview with an 8-year-old child speaking sadly. The child knows they are AI-generated, feels sorrow about it, and answers the interviewer’s question — ‘What is it like to be an AI?’ — wisely yet child-like. Dark-blue background.”
Result: natural eye contact, micro-movements, believable pacing; emotion reads instantly.
Takeaway: the uncanny-valley threshold in Gen-Video has shifted.
Stack to try: Sora 2, Kling, Nano Banana, Krea, Artlist, Resolve.
#AI #GenerativeVideo #UncannyValley #PromptEngineering
🤖 “Hand-motion farms” are real — and they’re training robot hands.
In parts of India, workers strap a small camera to their forehead and spend hours doing simple, tactile tasks: folding towels, packing boxes, sorting everyday objects.
The POV videos go to U.S. labs, where neural networks study exactly how human fingers grip, pull, twist, and place—so robots can learn to copy the same motions.
Why this matters:
• Dexterity is the bottleneck. Vision models are great, but robots still struggle with cloth, cables, zipper pulls, and irregular objects. Human POV data captures the micro-moves that simulators miss.
• Imitation learning at scale. Hour after hour of clean, labeled hand maneuvers becomes training fuel for policies that generalize to new objects and tasks.
• Societal twist. It’s efficient—and a little dystopian: people meticulously teach the fine motor skills that may one day automate their own work.
Humans teaching their replacements, one folded towel at a time.
#AI #robots #imitationlearning #India #futureofwork
🚀 Starcloud wants a 4-km, 5-GW GPU data center… in space
NVIDIA-backed startup Starcloud is about to put a data-center-class GPU in orbit: their Starcloud-1 satellite launches in November with an NVIDIA H100 onboard — roughly 100× more GPU compute than any prior space system. The 60-kg, fridge-sized sat is a first step toward orbital GPU clouds.
Why it matters: today, satellites downlink raw data to Earth for processing. With an H100 upstairs, AI runs where data is born — cutting response times from hours to minutes. That’s big for sensors like SAR, which can spit out ~10 GB/s; instead of shipping it all home, the model can filter, segment, and alert in orbit.
Power & cooling: sunlight is (nearly) constant in orbit and space is an “infinite heat sink” via radiators, so no water-hungry chillers. Starcloud’s roadmap sketches a ~5 GW orbital data center fed by solar + radiator panels about 4 km × 4 km. Future birds aim to integrate Blackwell GPUs for up to 10× more performance versus Hopper.
Biz timeline: Crusoe (the “energy-first” cloud) plans to deploy capacity on Starcloud’s platform from 2026–27. Starcloud projects ~10× lower energy cost than Earth data centers long-term. A white paper even models a 40 MW cluster with a ~$8.2M launch cost — if Starship-class launch prices fall to ~$30/kg (a big if).
CEO Philip Johnston’s bet: within 10 years, most new data centers get built in space. Gamers, rejoice — astronauts might finally run DOOM at ultra.
#Starcloud #H100 #Blackwell #OrbitalCompute #SpaceDatacenter #SAR #EdgeAI
———
@science
🚀 The first color footage of a FUSION REACTOR in action!
Tokamak Energy has just released incredible high-speed video — shot at 16,000 frames per second — showing the birth of plasma inside their fusion reactor.
In the clip, you can see a mesmerizing bright pink glow at the plasma’s edge — that’s light emitted as the superheated gas interacts with the reactor walls. The core itself remains invisible, simply because it’s millions of degrees hot — far beyond what any camera can capture.
This is what the future of clean, limitless energy looks like — contained in a magnetic field.
🎥 Full video here: watch the fusion magic
#fusion #energy #tokamak #plasma #science
🚢 While Ford’s CEO warns that the West is losing the tech race to China, the evidence is hard to ignore.
Chinese vehicles, he admits, already outperform Western ones in quality, technology, and production cost. And the gap keeps widening.
🎥 Just look at the fully automated Yangshan Deep-Water Port in Shanghai — one of the most advanced logistics hubs in the world.
Here, autonomous electric trucks move containers guided by GPS and LiDAR, while self-navigating ships operate in the harbor. The entire terminal runs under a single digital control system that requires almost no human intervention.
China isn’t just catching up — it’s building the blueprint for the next industrial era.
#technology #China #automation #AI #logistics #future