Keith Frankish is a Honorary Reader in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, a Visiting Research Fellow at The Open University, \& an Adjunct Professor with the Brain \& Mind Programme in Neurosciences at the University of Crete. He is the author of \.
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Scientists use electron beams to grow sodium crystals inside batteries
Scientists have discovered how sodium solid-state batteries avoid harmful chemical layers that cause capacity loss and shorten battery life.
Vibrating mattress helps clear Alzheimer’s protein from the brain
Lying on a vibrating mattress while taking nitric oxide pills has shown promise for boosting the brain’s waste-disposal system. It caused the brain’s blood vessels to swell and constrict more strongly, which enhanced the glymphatic system’s clearance of a protein that accumulates during Alzheimer’s disease.
Other experiments into boosting the glymphatic system have involved ultrasound, pink noise and even intermittently inhaling high doses of carbon dioxide. “It’s important to come at this from as many angles as possible, to increase the chance of this translating to the clinic and benefitting patients,” says Christopher Brown at the University of Southampton, UK, who wasn’t involved in the latest research.
New flexible drone can withstand collisions without sacrificing speed or agility
For more than a hundred years, quadcopters have been built according to the same basic principle. Four arms, each with a propeller, extend from a rigid central body. This design is ideal for precise, agile flight, but it has one major weakness—the drones are highly sensitive to unexpected contact with their surroundings. If they bump into a wall or another obstacle, they can become destabilized or even break apart.
Researchers at ETH Zurich hope to solve this problem with a new structural design. Their FlexiQuad drone features a soft, ring-shaped frame without a central body. The rotors, batteries and control module are evenly distributed along the frame. This design allows the drone to deform on impact, thereby absorbing some of the collision energy.
FlexiQuad was developed by Luca Girardi and Stefano Mintchev, then a professor at ETH Zurich, at the Environmental Robotics Lab. Girardi is currently conducting research at the Mobile Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich, while Mintchev has since taken up a professorship in agricultural robotics at the University of Bonn. The pair has filed a patent application for FlexiQuad, and the invention has been nominated for this year’s Spark Award.
Chiral altermagnon in MnTe
For centuries, we thought we understood magnets. But hidden inside a newly discovered class of magnetic materials is a twisting, invisible wave that could rewrite the rules of future technology.
The Discovery of the “Twisting” Magnetic Wave.
We are all familiar with everyday magnets, but physicists have recently identified a fascinating new class of magnetic materials called altermagnets. These materials act as a bridge, blending the familiar properties of standard magnets with the hidden, complex patterns of antiferromagnets.
Theoretical physicists predicted that inside altermagnets, magnetic energy travels in waves (known as “magnons”) that possess a specific “handedness.” Just as your left and right hands are mirror images but cannot be perfectly overlapped, these magnetic waves twist in distinct left-or right-handed directions—a property scientists call *chirality*.
Now, researchers have captured the first direct experimental proof of this phenomenon. Focusing on a well-known altermagnet candidate called manganese telluride (MnTe), scientists fired specially twisted X-ray light (circularly polarized light) at the material to stir up its magnetic waves. They observed that the material’s response changed depending on whether the light was twisted to the left or to the right. This proved that the magnetic waves themselves carry a distinct, directional twist. The team has officially named this newly verified phenomenon the “chiral altermagnon.”
This discovery is more than just a neat physics trick; it confirms a major theoretical prediction about how this new state of magnetism works at a fundamental level. By proving that these twisting magnetic waves exist and understanding how they behave, scientists have opened a new door for future technology.
Controlling these waves could eventually lead to breakthroughs in spintronics (ultra-fast, highly energy-efficient electronics that use magnetic “spin” instead of electrical charge to process information) and the development of advanced quantum computers.
Anthropic Claims to Be Near Recursive Self-Improvement
In the latest filing related to Anthropic’s IPO, the company says RSI could be arriving “imminently,” which would mean self-improving AI.
Startup Northwood Space hits $2 billion valuation
Northwood Space raised $375 million in a Series C funding that valued the Torrance, California-based satellite antenna builder and ground station provider at $2 billion.
Why it matters: Modern and fortified infrastructure on Earth becomes more crucial for commercial, civil and military missions as the number of satellites in orbit swells.
Natural tooth protein could pave way for regenerative dental treatments
A protein that helps build teeth may one day be used to allow damaged teeth to repair themselves.
That possibility is the focus of research led by Anne George, professor in the Department of Oral Biology at the UIC College of Dentistry. George has received a $1.2 million grant from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research at the National Institutes of Health to advance her studies of dentin phosphophoryn.
Dentin phosphophoryn is mainly found in dentin, which is the mineralized tissue that makes up the bulk of each tooth under its enamel surface. The most acidic protein known in nature, and it helps in the calcification of the protein matrix to form dentin.
Scientists shrink Archimedes’ screw to the size of a single molecule
Scientists have developed a remarkable new molecular motor that spins when electricity passes through it. Inspired by an ancient invention, the tiny machine can even reverse its direction when the electrical voltage is switched. The achievement marks an important step toward creating working machines at the smallest possible scale.
Molecular machines are widely seen as a promising next frontier in miniaturization. Nature already provides examples inside living cells, where molecular motors use energy to produce movement. Researchers have spent decades trying to recreate these remarkable biological systems artificially, and progress in this field was recognized with the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Debora Spar on Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny
The plow made men powerful. The pill handed some of that power back to women.
Harvard Business School’s Debora Spar walked me through that idea back in 2020, two years before ChatGPT made everyone suddenly care about how machines reshape our lives.
Her point was bigger than #AI or any single gadget. Technology doesn’t just change how we work. It changes who we marry, how we love, and what we believe men and women are for. Most of us still look at tech through an engineering lens. She insists on the widest lens possible.
Then she told me her book reads history through a Marxist lens. A former Barnard president and HBS dean, saying that on the record.
We also got into why tech self-regulation has never worked, what Keynes predicted for his grandchildren (and us), #FutureOfWork and technological unemployment, and what Tinder is doing to sex and relationships.
Six years later, one question won’t leave me alone: if the plow and the pill rewired the family, what will thinking machines do to it?