In the article “Google’s Westinghouse Bet” published on Asimov’s Addendum, Tim O’Reilly presents an alternate thesis regarding the organizational shifts, talent departures, and strategic shakeups at Google DeepMind.
While industry reports (such as a analysis by SemiAnalysis) interpreted the DeepMind restructuring as evidence that Google is falling behind in the “frontier model race” against rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic, O’Reilly argues that Google is not losing the race—it is choosing to run a different one.
SemiAnalysis thinks the DeepMind shakeup means Google is losing the AI race. It might be that Google is choosing to run a different race.
A growing body of research across paleoneurology, evolutionary biology, and chronobiology now supports the core mechanisms of Steve Nichols’s Lost Primal Eye paradigm aka Median Vision Theory (MVT). This is a regular scientific review and update posted for The Posthuman University Journal on academia.edu August 2026 Palaeoneurology and Therapsid Evolution Benoit et al. (2016) (Acta Palaeontologica Polonica): Examined over 800 therapsid fossil skulls, documenting the convergent, gradual reduction and complete loss of the parietal foramen across Permo-Triassic eutheriodonts. The study directly links the degeneration of the physical pineal eye to the evolution of mammalian endothermy, nocturnal adaptation, and the transfer of photoreception to paired lateral eyes.
The DARPA Lift Challenge aims to shatter the heavy-lift bottleneck by seeking novel drone designs capable of carrying payloads more than four times their weight. This would revolutionize how we use drones across all sectors.
As military missions become more complicated, warfighters need more capable drones to use across diverse scenarios. The same applies to infrastructure inspection, package delivery, disaster response, and other civilian applications.
Current multirotor drones, also known as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), are simple, affordable, and easy to operate. But their payload-to-weight ratio is low, typically 1:1 or less.
DARPA Challenges accelerate technological breakthroughs by focusing the ingenuity of teams of innovators and giving wild ideas a place to thrive.
80 years, America tears itself down and rebuilds. 1776. 1865. 1945. And now, according to Peter Leyden, 2025.
A couple of months ago I sat down with Peter for SingularityFM. He’s the guy who co-wrote the 1997 “Long Boom” cover story for WIRED, and he’s spent three decades trying to map where this civilization is actually headed. His new book, The Great Progression (HarperCollins), makes an audacious claim:
AI, clean energy, and bioengineering are converging into a change on the scale of the Enlightenment. And Trump, in his framing, isn’t the future. He’s the wrecking ball that clears the ground for whatever comes next.
I didn’t let him off easy. I pushed him on the human cost every one of these reinventions has demanded in the past. I pushed him on the myth of golden ages, using Ada Palmer’s work on the Renaissance. I pushed him on Denmark and Norway ripping devices back out of classrooms after being early adopters. He had an answer for all three. Whether they hold up is for you to decide.
What we get into:
The email from Kevin Kelly that pulled Peter into WIRED’s founding years What the Long Boom thesis got right, and what it missed Why he calls Trump a wrecking ball, not a builder The coming “abundance politics” coalition The strange pessimism about AI unique to English-speaking countries How writing this book with AI made him 2 to 3x more productive.
Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have developed a drug called CS18 that disrupts cancer cells’ ability to survive therapy. The findings, published in Science Advances, support exploring the possibility of using CS18 to treat human cancer in the future.
“Therapeutic resistance is a main obstacle to achieving effective and durable cancer treatments,” said corresponding author Dr. Weei-Chin Lin, professor of medicine—hematology and oncology—and molecular and cellular biology at Baylor. “While some therapies are effective at the beginning, many patients eventually relapse because cancer cells can activate compensatory and convergent biological pathways that allow them to overcome the toxic effects of therapy, promoting survival.”
In the current study, the researchers’ goal was to develop a drug that would target a “biological switchboard”—topoisomerase IIβ-binding protein 1 (TopBP1)—that controls several cancer-driving pathways at once and to determine whether this strategy could deliver durable responses and overcome resistance.
You are a newborn God. Harvest souls, unlock deadly powers and grow your faithful followers by smiting non-believers. Whether by a T-Rex with laser eyes, a blazing inferno or simply a violent sneeze, souls must be sacrificed. Let the harvest begin!
The legendary Google executive is joined by other outgoing Google execs in a joint mission to use AI to push forward the process of scientific discovery.
Astronomers have discovered a remarkably tiny group of six young galaxies just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. This may be a rare glimpse of how some of the universe’s largest galaxies formed. The paper outlining the findings was submitted to the arXiv preprint server on July 13.
Chaotic patches The widely accepted cosmological model of the universe known as the Lambda Cold Dark Matter Model suggests that galaxies primarily form hierarchically through mergers. That means they grow piece by piece, as smaller galaxies merge over billions of years. In this context, dense regions in the early universe serve as natural laboratories to test this idea.
These dense patches, known as protoclusters and proto-groups, are young clusters of galaxies packed into a region just tens of thousands of light-years across and represent an especially brief and extreme stage in galaxy evolution. Spotting them requires telescopes sensitive enough to detect faint, low-mass galaxies at extreme distances, and precise enough to confirm that the galaxies are truly bound together.
Biomedical engineers at Duke University have developed an injectable biomaterial that helps transform the cavity left behind after a stroke caused by a blood clot into an environment more supportive of repair. By recruiting the body’s own immune cells, the treatment promoted the growth of new blood vessels, supported neural remodeling and improved motor performance in mice. The work appears in Cell Biomaterials.
Every year, millions of people experience strokes caused by blood clots, called ischemic strokes. Immediate treatments, including clot-dissolving drugs and mechanical removal of the clot, can restore blood flow and preserve threatened brain tissue. But these treatments cannot replace tissue that has already been lost.
Large strokes can result in substantial tissue loss and leave behind a cavity at the site of the injury. After the clot is removed, recovery relies largely on rehabilitation, which helps surviving brain circuits adapt but does not directly repair the damaged area.
