When the magnitude 9.0 Tōhoku earthquake struck off the coast of Japan in 2011, its seismic shivers did more than ripple through the planet.
At least one wave traveled 2,900 kilometers (1,800 miles) down to the boundary between Earth’s mantle and liquid outer core, where it was reflected right back to the surface.
And there, according to a new analysis of earthquake data from across Japan, it may have done something scientists have never identified before.
I think this was one of my most enjoyable dialogues in our What’s new series. Maybe Sabine and I are getting more used to each other’s cadence and interests or maybe it was the subject matter. Either way, I think you will find this to be a fascinating and provocative discussion of science at the forefront, and at the not-so-forefront, because that science is interesting too! We began our discussion describing a new finding of a Giant Ring of galaxies billions of light years across in the sky. The key questions are: Is it real? And is it surprising? We both have slightly different takes on this. Next we described a new measurement of the strength of gravity on scales from 80 to 800 million light years in distance. And guess what? Gravity falls off just like Newton predicted! This may seem like a big yawn, but one of the most popular models that claims to do away with dark matter would imply that Gravity would fall off differently on these scales. Does this new result kill that idea? Stay tuned. Microsoft, which has cried wolf a number of times so far when it comes to something called Majorana qubits as the basis of a new viable quantum computer just published a new paper claiming they finally have it. Sabine and I discuss why we are both still skeptical, but why the effort is worth it. Next, CERN, the large European particle physics laboratory, and the world particle physics community seem to have converged on plans for building a huge new accelerator in the current CERN site… this time involving an underground ring 91 km in circumference, in which electrons and positrons would collide to explore the detailed properties of the Higgs particle. Is the effort worth it? Again, Sabine and I have slightly different takes on this. Fusion power, which we have talked about in a number of earlier episodes, continues to tempt humanity with the promise of unlimited energy. Many people, myself included, have tended to argue that fusion seems to be 25 years in the future, and may always be 25 years in the future. But many new efforts are underway, so who knows. Unfortunately, a group of economists has analyzed fusion in the context of other large energy programs and have argued that even if we can achieve it, it may not be as economically viable as many claim. Finally, one day Richard Feynman went to a Thai restaurant with his young companion Ralph Leighton, and wondered what he should order. Should it be the same old dish he loved or something new. An equation filled napkin later, and he had the answer. Fifty years later some cognitive scientists resurrected Feynman’s napkin and explained it, and argued it might have important implications in other social situations. Such is the power of science. Consider supporting the podcast and the Origins Project Foundation at https://www.originsproject.org/ To see commercial-free, full HD video episodes, join us at lawrence krauss.substack.com Thank you for your support! iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast… https://TheOriginsPodcast.com Twitter: / theoriginspod Instagram:
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/ theoriginspod The Origins Podcast, a production of The Origins Project Foundation, features in-depth conversations with some of the most interesting people in the world about the issues that impact all of us in the 21st century. Host, theoretical physicist, lecturer, and author, Lawrence M. Krauss, will be joined by guests from a wide range of fields, including science, the arts, and journalism. The topics discussed on The Origins Podcast reflect the full range of the human experience — exploring science and culture in a way that seeks to entertain, educate, and inspire. Full Episodes Playlist:
• Ricky Gervais — The Origins Podcast with L…
The Path to Robust deAGI asks what it would take to build artificial general intelligence that is both powerful and structurally aligned with human flourishing—not just steered by after‑the‑fact safety patches. Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET and a founding member of the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance, will outline how a decentralized, token‑coordinated ecosystem—combining ASI: Chain, Hyperon AGI, and community‑owned GPU clouds—can prevent AGI from being captured by any single corporation or state.
Goertzel will contrast centralized AGI roadmaps with a deAGI approach that bakes openness, diversity of values, and economic inclusion into the architecture itself, drawing on ideas like pluralistic training data, interoperable agent networks, and on‑chain governance of key system upgrades. He will also discuss technical milestones toward “robust” deAGI—modular cognitive architectures, decentralized marketplaces for AI services, and verification mechanisms that let communities audit and constrain AGI behavior—framing them as concrete steps toward an AGI that advances joy, growth, and choice for all rather than amplifying existing power imbalances.
Overview of Kwaai.
Kwaai is a registered 501©3 non-profit organization and open source AI research and development lab. Its mission is to democratize artificial intelligence by building open source Personal AI systems that prioritize user privacy, data ownership, and transparency. Kwaai operates as a volunteer-based initiative and invites technologists, researchers, policy experts, and community members to join its efforts.
What is Personal AI?
Kwaai’s vision of Personal AI is an assistant that users own and control. This AI:
Is trained on the user’s own data and experiences.
Runs locally on personal devices or on a peer to peer fabric, without requiring a SaaS subscription.
Immunotherapies are a promising approach in the fight against cancer. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed a lab-on-a-chip system called CellTrap. It makes it possible to observe the interactions between immune cells and cancer cells at the single-cell level. The method is intended to reveal fundamental processes in cancer immunology and answer key questions. The technology is described in the journal RSC Advances.
Established laboratory tests mainly capture average values across many cells and show, for example, how many cancer cells survive after contact with immune cells. What happens in detail—how each cell reacts and interacts with others—remains hidden. However, to better understand the effectiveness of immunotherapies, the precise timing of a cell-cell interaction is often crucial: when contact, activation and, ultimately, the killing of the cancer cell occur.
Researchers in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo have discovered a connection between a specific gene and healthy brain function. “The hope is that this discovery could eventually lead to expanded treatment for psychiatric and neurological disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism,” explains Mikhail V. Pletnikov, MD, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, the senior author of the study with Kateryna (Kate) Murlanova, Ph.D., the first lead author and a research scientist in the department.
They discovered that the NPAS3 gene expressed in astrocytes—the cells that help with brain chemistry—regulates the energy production required to support thinking and memory. NPAS3 is a transcription factor, which means it directs how certain genes work and influences how cells function. Their findings are published in Science Advances.
“Previous studies have linked NPAS3 to conditions involving cognitive problems, such as schizophrenia, but scientists didn’t know exactly how it might be involved,” Pletnikov says.
Background: Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) exhibit an almost complete penetrance of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathology but are underrepresented in clinical trials for AD. The Tau protein is associated with microtubule function in the neuron and is crucial for normal axonal transport. In several different neurodegenerative disorders, Tau misfolding leads to hyper-phosphorylation of Tau (p-Tau), which may seed pathology to bystander cells and spread. This review is focused on current findings regarding p-Tau and its potential to seed pathology as a “prion-like” spreader. It also considers the consequences of p-Tau pathology leading to AD, particularly in individuals with Down syndrome. Methods: Scopus (SC) and PubMed (PM) were searched in English using keywords “tau AND seeding AND brain AND down syndrome”
A new gene therapy has been used to successfully treat a deadly childhood liver disease in mice that model the disease, according to researchers at UCL and Great Ormond Street Hospital. Arthrogryposis, renal dysfunction and cholestasis (ARC) syndrome is a lethal genetic disorder usually caused by a lack of the VPS33B protein, with children diagnosed with the condition rarely living beyond their first year of life.
Now, in a study published in Nature Communications, the UCL-GOSH team found that by injecting a healthy version of the gene into the body, they can treat the condition in mice lacking VPS33B. Crucially, the final version of the treatment, which specifically targeted the liver cells, caused no harm. In the earlier versions, the genes became abnormally activated and caused cancerous cells to grow and expand in some cases.
While more tests must be done before the treatment can be tested in humans, the researchers’ breakthrough offers hope to babies with this devastating disorder and their families. In the UK, as many as six pregnancies per year might be affected by ARC syndrome. Furthermore, the findings may promote improved understanding of why some treatments may cause cancer.
To accelerate and refine decision-making in a fast-paced, global marketplace, enterprises may deploy generative artificial intelligence models to help summarize and interpret the charts that often fill market summaries and financial reports.
But even the latest vision-language models sometimes struggle with this task, since it requires a model to integrate visual, numerical, and linguistic understanding. A company that invests in a state-of-the-art model might still receive inaccurate or incomplete information.
To fill this performance gap, researchers from MIT and the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab developed a multifaceted resource for AI users that is specifically designed to teach vision-language models (VLMs) how to effectively interpret charts.
In this era of Big Data, the prevailing wisdom is that more information leads to better answers. However, a new Canadian study shows that in the hunt for life’s ancient ancestors, more data can actually lead to less truth. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research by UdeM associate professor of computer science Miklós Csűrös reveals that standard methods for reconstructing the genomes of ancient microbes are being overwhelmed by an explosion of information.
This paradox causes current models to “hallucinate” evolutionary events—specifically, an implausibly high number of horizontal gene transfers—that are actually just statistical ghosts, the study shows.
In it, Csűrös identifies a crisis point in evolutionary biology: As researchers try to reconcile thousands of gene sequences across the entire tree of life, the actual evolutionary signal begins to vanish, replaced by mathematical noise.