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Shape-shifting rubber blades could make tidal power cheaper

Fitting tidal turbines with flexible rubber blades could enable the machines to generate cheaper power by making them simpler and tougher, a study published in the journal Nature suggests.

Rubber blades that change shape in strong currents can generate as much electricity as today’s most advanced designs, without the complex machinery they need to survive at sea, researchers say.

Their findings show the blades naturally bend to shed excess force, reducing by up to one-third the rapid swings in load that wear turbines out.

Hidden ‘sheets’ of gravity can tear and reconnect like the sun’s magnetic field does, fresh look at Einstein’s equations suggests

A fresh look at Einstein’s equations suggests that “sheets” of gravity can sometimes snap and reconnect, similar to magnetic field lines on the sun.

Slowed But Not Stalled: The Future of mRNA Vaccine Research

While many researchers left the DNA vaccine field, Fuller remained, expanding into RNA vaccines as well. After COVID-19, several researchers jumped into studying mRNA’s potential for vaccines and therapeutics. It looked like mRNA had finally broken nucleic acid vaccines into the mainstream.

However, in August 2025, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) canceled $500 million in funding related to mRNA vaccine research under the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). Some contracts, like a late-stage investigation on an influenza vaccine from the biotechnology company Arcturus Therapeutics, were allowed to continue. Others, like mRNA vaccine studies exploring a Marburg vaccine from Moderna, were canceled. Nonetheless, the action sent a shockwave through the mRNA vaccine research community. Later, in February 2026, the FDA initially declined to review an application for an mRNA-based influenza vaccine, disagreeing with the use of control groups in the study. The agency reversed its decision two weeks later.

In response to these events, some researchers are concerned about the future of mRNA technology research and how the US’s disinvestment in it will impact public health. Others, including Fuller, believe that the promise of mRNA vaccines and therapeutics won’t come to a grinding halt anytime soon, but the change in the US’s support for the technology could shift where the next big breakthrough happens.

Scientists Measure Gravitational Pull Between The Smallest Objects Yet in Quest For Quantum Gravity

We’re used to thinking of gravity in the context of large masses – the whirl of planets, the inexorable pull of a black hole.

But everything with mass, no matter how small, exerts a gravitational pull on everything else.

There is, however, an expected frontier where the classical dynamics described so elegantly by general relativity must somehow reconcile with the beautiful chaos of quantum mechanics.

Brain scans reveal ‘number line’ that’s used to mentally compare values

YOUR BRAIN FILES ½ AND 7 ON THE SAME INVISIBLE RULER

When you see the fraction ¼, your eyes meet a four. Your brain, according to a new brain-imaging study, treats it as something close to zero. In a region at the top of the brain, fractions and whole numbers appear to be placed along one shared line, arranged by how big they are and not by what they look like.

The finding comes from 20 adults. All were native French speakers, and the study used functional MRI, which tracks blood flow as an indirect measure of brain activity. The result is a pattern in group averages, not a recording of individual neurons, and it does not show why fractions are harder to learn. It was published in PLOS Biology on 22 October 2026.

## WHAT WAS FOUND

The paper, “A cortical semantic map integrates fractions and integers in the human brain,” is by Daniela Valério and Stanislas Dehaene of the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit (UNICOG) in France. Dehaene has spent decades studying how the brain represents numbers.

Volunteers lay in an MRI scanner and viewed a mix of fractions and whole numbers. For each one, they judged whether it was larger or smaller than the number shown before it. The scan focused on the anterior inferior parietal cortex, a region already known to be involved in number processing.

In that region, activity formed an organised pattern that resembles a number line. Small values produced one kind of activity pattern, shown in reddish tones in the published averages, and larger values produced another, shown in bluish tones. Whole numbers and fractions were placed on the same line, by magnitude, not in separate systems.

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Google Search

Google DeepMind has released Gemini 4 Carbon, built specifically for long-horizon agentic workflows, complex debugging, and scientific reasoning. While Gemini 4 Argon remains the standard for everyday software engineering tasks, Carbon handles tasks that push frontier models to their limits.

To showcase its cross-disciplinary reasoning and multimodal code synthesis, an intriguing open-source companion project was published alongside the release: Birdsong github/dopeytree/birdsong(https://www.google.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fdopeytree%2Fbirdsong)).

The model generates interactive 3D acoustic simulations of a songbird’s syrinx (vocal organ), modeling live sound synthesis across six bird species—serving as a compelling practical benchmark for physics-informed agentic generation.

BENCHMARK COMPARISON: GEMINI 4 CARBON vs. ARGON

• General Intelligence (Artificial Analysis Index v5.0) — Carbon: 59 | Argon: 50 (+9 pts jump)

• Advanced Math (RiemannBench) — Carbon: 80.0% | Argon: 76.0% (+4.0 pp)

• Scientific Tool Use (Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1) — Carbon: 64.8% | Argon: 52.9% (+11.9 pp boost in tool execution)

• Long-Context Reasoning (GraphWalks 256k–1M, BFS) — Carbon: 96.2% | Argon: 84.2% (+12.0 pp in long-context mapping)

Continue reading “Google Search” | >

Ada Palmer on Viking Ethics, Laws of History, and Terra Ignota

In June 2020, I asked a historian whether the United States was heading toward civil war.

Six years later, her answer is worth hearing again.

Ada Palmer studies censorship, heresy, and how power shifts during information revolutions. Her research asks what the printing press can teach us about the choices we face in the digital one. She is also the author of Terra Ignota, the award-winning #ScienceFiction series set in a 25th-century world of borderless nations and voluntary citizenship.

We talked for 3 hours and 7 minutes. We talked about Peter Turchin’s laws of #History and whether the past can predict anything. About what popular science like Cosmos gets wrong about the Inquisition. About what she learned reenacting the papal election of 1,492 with her students. About Viking ethics, of all things. And about whether one person still matters when history seems to move on its own.

One line from her has stayed with me:

“Your choices aren’t: keep the world I have or make a better one. Your choices are: let the world change towards the entrenchment of power… or work to shape that change.”

Continue reading “Ada Palmer on Viking Ethics, Laws of History, and Terra Ignota” | >

Microsoft presses Trump to scuttle ban on Chinese data center tech

America’s AI boom depends on a critical component made largely in China. And now Microsoft is urging Trump NOT to ban it.

It’s called an optical transceiver. These devices convert electrical signals into optical signals, allowing data to travel through fiber-optic cables between servers, switches, and routers inside data centers.

Here’s the problem: China accounts for roughly two-thirds of the global market.

Washington is concerned that Chinese-made transceivers could potentially be exploited to steal data, install malware, or disrupt U.S. data center operations.

But banning them could create another problem: a massive supply-chain bottleneck.

Microsoft and other tech companies warn that U.S. manufacturers simply don’t have the capacity to replace Chinese suppliers at scale. Billions of dollars’ worth of AI chips have already been purchased, but without the optical transceivers needed to connect the infrastructure, those chips could end up sitting idle.

And there’s another complication: one of China’s leading suppliers, Zhongji Innolight, has been added to the Pentagon’s list of Chinese companies alleged to have military ties.

Continue reading “Microsoft presses Trump to scuttle ban on Chinese data center tech” | >

Physicists create a bizarre new quantum state called a fractional fermi sea

Physicists have uncovered a strange new form of quantum behavior in which particles organize themselves in ways that challenge established theories. Even more surprising, the particles maintain a remarkable hidden order despite being driven into an extremely energetic state.

In a study published in Physical Review Letters, researchers from the group led by Hanns-Christoph Nägerl, working with theoretical physicist Alvise Bastianello of the CNRS and Université Paris-Dauphine, describe how to engineer an exotic quantum state known as a “fractional Fermi sea.”

The breakthrough involves pushing ultracold cesium atoms far beyond their normal conditions by repeatedly changing how strongly they attract or repel one another. Rather than simply becoming disordered, the particles rearrange themselves into an unusual configuration that behaves differently from the quantum systems scientists have traditionally studied.