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Our Universe Was Born From a Black Hole—and Now ‘Baby’ Realities Are Nested Inside of Our Own, Physicist Says

We’re taught that our universe is the largest thing we can possibly conceive of, ever expanding into something even bigger. But what if our reality is just a small part of something much more vast? It’s a mind-bending proposition, given that it’s difficult to even imagine what’s beyond Earth, but some striking science suggests that we should reconsider the evidence.

If our universe were truly random, we could expect half of the galaxies to rotate one way, and the other half in the opposite direction—but that isn’t the case. Two-thirds of observed galaxies spin counterclockwise. To some scientists, this preferred direction supports a theory called black hole cosmology, or the idea that our universe was born inside of a black hole nested in a larger parent universe. Should this be true, it means that baby universes could exist inside of our own, and it could be possible to enter them under the right circumstances.

The discovery of the galaxy asymmetry dates back to 2011, when the late physicist Michael J. Longo, PhD, published an interesting paper in Physics Letters B. His research was based on an analysis of 15,158 spiral galaxies imaged by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in New Mexico. Longo found that spiral galaxies in one sector of the sky appeared to have a preferred direction of rotation, indicating there may be an asymmetry in how galaxies present in the universe. Last year, scientists confirmed the asymmetry in a paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Lior Shamir, PhD—a data scientist and professor at Kansas State University—led the 2025 study. He declined requests for comment.

In a Huge First, Physicists May Have Found a Shortcut to Fusion Energy

The Sun at the center of our own Solar System is a great advert for nuclear fusion: ultra-high temperatures and pressures combining to fuse hydrogen nuclei together into helium nuclei, releasing a huge amount of energy along the way.

If we can get the same reactions happening on Earth, nuclear fusion has the potential to drive a revolution in abundant, carbon-free energy – but replicating a star inside a science lab is proving as challenging as you might expect.

Now, researchers from Princeton University have published a study in Physical Review Letters that details how we might get to nuclear fusion more quickly. It outlines what is effectively a shortcut to something called ignition, where plasma can maintain the necessary heat levels through its own fusion reactions.

Scientists Investigated People With Insomnia. A Health Risk Pattern Emerged

The researchers identified that across several studies, with more than 1.3 million participants involved, those with insomnia had a 26 percent higher risk of having a stroke. They also found that those people were 28 percent more likely to be hospitalized for any admission reason. Other conditions associated with insomnia included dementia, depression, and suicidal behavior.

When it comes to the association between insomnia and stroke, while research has not yet determined a causal link, Muench said that some theories point toward blood pressure as the potential reason.

“People with insomnia are more likely to develop high blood pressure, but this may be because insomnia and high blood pressure often share the same risk factors, such as stress and lifestyle factors,” she said. “High blood pressure is a risk factor for stroke that people can seek treatment for.”

Superheavy-element compound reveals weaker-than-expected bond due to relativistic effects

An international collaboration led by a research group from GSI/FAIR in Darmstadt, Germany, has achieved the first measurement of the chemical stability of a superheavy element compound.

The focus was on the hexacarbonyl complex Sg(CO)₆ of seaborgium (Sg, element 106). The result: The bond between the seaborgium atom and a carbonyl ligand is weaker than expected based on its position in the periodic table. Relativistic effects are the cause.

The results are published in the journal Nature.

Jonah Sachs on Winning the Story Wars: Storytelling is our neglected secret weapon

2022, months before ChatGPT turned everyone into a prompt engineer, I spent two hours with Jonah Sachs on a question that now feels urgent: who gets to tell the story?

Jonah has earned the right to an opinion. His film for Amnesty International on blood diamonds was delivered to every member of Congress and helped pass the Clean Diamond Act. The Story of Stuff, which he helped create, reached over 60 million people. He didn’t win those fights with spreadsheets. He won them with #storytelling.

His line has stayed with me ever since: storytelling is the neglected secret weapon we all have.

Here’s what bothers me today. Machines now produce stories by the billion. So is that weapon being handed over to #AI, or is it becoming the one thing that still separates us from the noise?

We went deep on the hero’s journey, the five markers of a great story, what’s broken in our current human story, GPT-3 and two very different Turing Tests, and what Jonah calls the poison and the cure of story. Then he brought up a Buddhist test of suffering that I haven’t been able to shake.

If you work in #marketing, lead people, or care about #socialchange, this one is worth your time. Four years later, it lands harder than it did the day we recorded it.

Continue reading “Jonah Sachs on Winning the Story Wars: Storytelling is our neglected secret weapon” | >

On the Business Strategies of Platform Biotech Companies

Platform biotech companies face a different strategic landscape relative to single-asset biotechs. Here’s my short educational writeup on the fundamentals of the platform biotech business approach.

Investors may sometimes favor platform biotech companies, though usually only when markets are strong. While opinion tends to swing with the markets, there are certain real advantages to platforms. Particularly, investors find attractive structures with more routes to a very large return outcome, which platforms can offer.

A single-asset company typically will generate a return if it shows a clinical success (often successful phase 2 or even phase 3 clinical trial data) with its sole program and is acquired. By contrast, platform companies are not always killed by a single program failure. So, platforms provide more shots on goal in a sense. That said, if the core platform (e.g. delivery system) fails in humans, the entire company will die [1]. Because of this, it is still critical that the platform company’s first asset program goes well.

Platforms feature routes to preclinical revenue which are much more difficult to achieve for assets. Pharma companies will pay for access to enabling platform technology even when only preclinical data are available. Programs by Dyno Therapeutics (AAVs) [2] and Evox Therapeutics (exosomes) [3] represent examples of the phenomenon. This provides third-party validation and non-dilutive capital before the clinical data, which can support the company during the otherwise most challenging period in a biotech’s lifetime.

Robotok: Mining Internet Videos for Dexterous Robot Learning

What if robots could learn dexterous skills by watching videos on the internet?

Teaching robots to manipulate objects is challenging because collecting training data is expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to scale across different tasks and environments. Humans, on the other hand, demonstrate countless everyday skills in videos uploaded online. The challenge is finding the right demonstrations that can help a robot learn how to perform a specific action.

A new system called RoboTok tackles this problem by turning internet videos into a searchable resource for robot learning. Given a reference video of a person performing a manipulation task, RoboTok searches for other videos showing similar hand movements and interactions with objects. Rather than relying mainly on visual similarities, it analyzes the motion trajectories of the hands in three-dimensional space, using a representation centered on the person performing the action.

This approach allows the system to recognize similar manipulation behaviors even when videos differ in camera angles, backgrounds, visual appearances, or when parts of the person’s body are obscured. Because the motion representation is compact, RoboTok can also index and search large collections of online videos efficiently.

The researchers evaluated the system using video-retrieval benchmarks and real-world robot experiments. Their results showed that RoboTok retrieved more relevant demonstrations than existing approaches and helped robots perform manipulation tasks more successfully. In real-world tests, RoboTok-guided robot policies achieved an average improvement of 42.2 percentage points in task success rates compared with the strongest baseline for each task.

The broader implication is significant: the internet could become a vast, continuously growing source of training data for robots. Instead of relying exclusively on costly, specially collected robot demonstrations, researchers could extract useful manipulation examples from videos of humans performing everyday tasks.

RoboTok does not mean robots can automatically master every skill simply by watching videos. They still need suitable learning methods and robot-specific training. But by making human demonstrations easier to find and reuse, this approach offers a promising path toward more scalable robot learning and more dexterous machines.

#ArtificialIntelligence #robotics #ImitationLearning #DexterousManipulation.

Continue reading “Robotok: Mining Internet Videos for Dexterous Robot Learning” | >

Astronomers Have Detected A Mysterious Signal Coming From Empty Space. Nobody Knows What It Is

In the southern constellation of Fornax lies a tiny patch of sky just like any other. Your eyes may have brushed past it a hundred times without a thought.

Yet this otherwise unremarkable speck of the cosmos is among the most well-cataloged in the sky. The Hubble Space Telescope stared at it for more than 270 hours to obtain its famous Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) – and contained therein are nearly 10,000 galaxies extending billions of light-years into the Universe.

When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched, it was only natural that its golden mirrors would turn to the same region of space, using its vastly more sensitive infrared capabilities to find what Hubble may have missed.

Common leukemia mutation derails protein positioning during cell division, study reveals

Experts from the University of Nottingham have discovered how a common genetic mutation disrupts the positioning of a key protein during cell division, revealing a new mechanism behind acute myeloid leukemia and a potential avenue for future treatment.

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is an aggressive blood cancer that disrupts the production of healthy blood cells. Around one-third of patients carry a mutation in a gene called NPM1, which causes its protein to accumulate in the wrong part of the cell and plays a key role in driving the disease.

Until now, research has largely focused on how the mutated protein moves between the cell’s nucleus and the surrounding cytoplasm. But a new study, led by Dr. Daniel Booth and Dr. Claire Seedhouse at the University of Nottingham’s School of Medicine, reveals that what happens during cell division itself is also critical.