Feed aggregator

Tesla is deploying more supervised robotaxi, hiring more drivers and testers and will start production of Cybercab in weeks. This should lead to a scaled robotaxi future.

The NASA Lunar Gateway program was cancelled but pieces of it will be used for the early parts of the moonbase and as part of the nuclear mission to Mars. NASA wants to fly two crewed missions to the moon every year. Japan is helping to build a large 15 ton lunar rover that will ...

Read more

Excerpted from THE EDGE OF SPACE-TIME: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein with permission from Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2026 by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.

Halfway through Space Is the Place, Sun Ra muses that scientists are fed on research while Black people have been fed on freedom. As a Black physicist, I have been fed on both, and I have tried to grow the seeds that my ancestors passed on to me. The ancestors could fly. I do too, whenever I am able to escape into looking at the universe through the lens of quantum fields. I am not the first to escape into the abstractions of space and time. If you’ve read this far, then you have joined me. We are not the first. We will not be the last.

When I was younger, I knew I could be a scientist because I grew up watching LeVar Burton play one on television. As Geordi La Forge, chief engineer of the starship Enterprise on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Burton gave us a brilliant, Black nerd. Because I saw this early example, my child self never doubted that I had the freedom to be a professional nerd too. It was not a possibility that was, as it had been for Black generations before me, “Far Beyond the Stars”—the title of a powerful episode about twentieth-century anti-Black racism that aired during the sixth season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. DS9, as many fans know it, was the first Trek series to feature a Black lead. Avery Brooks’s Benjamin Sisko broke barriers in what is to this day the longest-running television drama with a Black man in the leading role. Like Burton’s Lieutenant Commander La Forge, Captain Sisko taught Black children like me that not even the sky was the limit.

In this sense, representation has real material meaning: Trek has continuously pushed the boundaries of our imaginations for as long as it has existed. Burton’s performance as Geordi La Forge has its origins in an earlier iteration of Trek—the first Black person Burton ever saw on television was Nichelle Nichols as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura in the original Star Trek series. This milestone was marked in the January 1967 issue of Ebony magazine, which also features a cover photograph of Nichols. In the photo, she’s wearing a form-fitting red synthetic velour dress with a respectably high black scoop-neck collar—the uniform of a liberated Black woman who is Earth’s chief communicator in outer space. The dress looks straight out of the 1960s except for the small patch over the left breast, which is roughly shaped like an arrowhead and features a swirly letter e (for engineering). The accompanying feature story declared that Nichols, then a star of the brand-new NBC Color television show Star Trek, was “the first Negro astronaut, a triumph of modern-day TV over modern-day NASA.”

The Edge of Space-Time is available on April 7th from Pantheon Books. Credit: Pantheon / Penguin Random House

The decision to feature the stunningly beautiful Nichols on the cover, complete with a lengthy feature describing her significant contributions to the production of Gene Roddenberry’s new humanistic drama of life in space, was both clear and pointed. Not only was Ebony celebrating a great Black actor; it was also offering political commentary on the whiteness of the political zeitgeist, asserting that NBC had imagination NASA utterly lacked. Of course, there are limits to this way of looking at things. Roddenberry had filmed the first Star Trek pilot featuring white actress Majel Barrett (his wife) as second in command of the Enterprise, but NBC hated the idea of portraying a white woman in such a powerful position and refused to pick up the series. The franchise might have died were it not for the intervention of Lucille Ball of I Love Lucy fame, who insisted that Roddenberry be given a second chance. So Roddenberry got rid of the white woman first officer and replaced her with not just any male but a male alien: Leonard Nimoy’s science officer Spock. He also added pilot Hikaru Sulu to the crew, played by Japanese American concentration-camp survivor George Takei. And he cast Nichols, already a star stage performer, in the role of the communications officer whose last name recalls uhuru—Swahili for “freedom.”

It would be nearly three decades before a Black woman would finally make the journey to space in real life. Roddenberry, of course, was not the first to dream of it. I imagine that Black women have dreamed of space throughout the centuries—for much longer than the idea of “Black people” has existed. Even Star Trek was a few years behind journalist Edward Murrow, who, as head of the U.S. Information Agency, wrote to NASA administrator James Webb in 1961 to suggest that the United States send “the first non-white man to space.” Webb replied that such a choice was “inconsistent with our agency’s policies.” And so in 1967, it was Lieutenant Uhura who first fulfilled that dream in the popular consciousness. Beamed into the living rooms of Black children across the country, Nichelle Nichols transformed how Black children saw themselves and their futures. 

Media like Trek kept me open to the possibility that space represented. I am a child of the space shuttle era, so I never knew a world where humans, including Black people, weren’t annually flying to space. I was fascinated by the 1976 IMAX film To Fly!—and saw it at both the California Science Museum and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., where it brought me “past Mars, past Jupiter and its moons, past Saturn and beyond.” The script of the twenty-seven-minute film, juxtaposed with the larger-than-life IMAX movie screen, was the best kind of propaganda, designed to inspire awe. Toward the end, the narrator sums up the journey: “Today we look upon our planet from afar and feel a new tenderness for the tiny and fragile Earth. And so I learned early on from documentary as well as Star Trek that space was a tapestry for our dreams.

______________

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an associate professor of physics and astronomy and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her research in theoretical physics focuses on cosmology, dark matter, and neutron stars. She is also a researcher of Black feminist science, technology, and society studies. She is also the creator of the Cite Black Women+ in Physics and Astronomy Bibliography. Her first book The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred (Bold Type Books) won the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the science and technology category, the 2022 Phi Beta Kappa Science Award, and a 2022 PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award.

The post When ‘Star Trek’ put the first Black astronaut into space appeared first on Popular Science.

UK-based Pulsar Fusion announced it has successfully achieved first plasma in its Sunbird nuclear fusion rocket exhaust system. The demonstration, a world’s first for a rocket of this type, was showcased live during a technical session at Jeff Bezos’s exclusive MARS Conference in California, offering a tantalizing glimpse into a future of dramatically faster interplanetary ...

Read more

ARC-AGI-3 is an interactive benchmark for studying agentic intelligence through novel, abstract, turn-based environments in which agents must explore, infer goals, build internal models of environment dynamics, and plan effective action sequences without explicit instructions. Like its predecessors ARC-AGI-1 and 2, ARC-AGI-3 focuses entirely on evaluating fluid adaptive efficiency on novel tasks, while avoiding language ...

Read more

Have you ever walked into an old garage or antique store, seen a VHS tape gathering dust and wondered: would those sad old pieces of plastic still play? An eclectic YouTuber named Brady Brandwood is taking that  curiosity to the extreme. Brandwood has collected a handful of neglected VHS tapes and CDs from long-abandoned buildings in Georgia and is setting out on a journey to bring them back to life. Remarkably, after likely spending more than a decade exposed to the elements, almost all of the old media still worked. Well, mostly worked, at least.

“I’ve heard the lifespan of a VHS tape is about 30 years,” Brandwood says in his video. “I’m betting it’s actually a lot longer than that. “They are obviously very durable, even when they are left out in the elements.” 

Searching abandoned homes for neglected VHS tapes 

Brandwood has odd tastes. The regular programming on his channel (which has nearly 700,000 subscribers) normally involves chronicling the life of wild lobsters and welcoming wild animals into his home. This video switches things up, opening with him wandering through creepy, rotting homes in Georgia’s woodlands from a first-person camera view. The creaky floors, rotted wood, and strewn-about furniture make it look like something straight out of a “Resident Evil” game.

“Kinda sad, all of this will be bulldozed down soon,” he says. Something like a fast food restaurant or gas station will likely replace it. And whoever, or whatever is living in this basement will be evicted.”

The YouTuber returned to the house with his camera, because he had previously spotted some VHS tapes scattered around and wondered if there was any way to find out what was hidden on them. He left with several dirt-filled tapes as well as a handful of CDs, each showing varying levels of apparent wear and tear. One of the CDs clearly had a picture of Elvis on the front, while another had the words “The Blind Side” written in black marker.

Brandwood didn’t actually own a VHS player, so he had to visit several thrift shops to find one—a hunt he also recorded. To play back the CDs, he used an old Apple Power Mac G5 from his storage unit. But even with the correct hardware on hand, neither the VHS tapes nor the CDs would play in their current, dirt-coated state.

Brandwood burned through plenty of paper towels and cleaning spray during his experiment. Image: Brady Brandwood / YouTube.

To clean the VHS tapes, Brandwood started by wiping down the exteriors to remove dirt and grime. He then opened up the top of the tape casing to get a better look at the mechanical innards. It was a mess, to say the least. Mold was growing on the inside, and a good deal of extra dirt was lodged within. Upon closer inspection, one of the tapes had apparently also served as a spider’s nest at some point.

After all that cleaning came the moment of truth. He loaded in one of the VHS tapes and, at first, nothing happened. He ejected it and loaded it once more, and this time, after a brief dramatic pause, the screen went gray and old-time swing music started playing. Moments later, the Paramount Pictures logo with the mountaintop in the background appeared. When he rewound the tape, he realized it was a recording of something from Cartoon Network. It wasn’t crystal clear, but the old tape worked.

The other refurbished VHS tapes managed to play as well. One showed what appeared to be a dinosaur documentary. Another loaded up to reveal a filmed Jerry Lee Lewis concert, in which the musician can be seen playing the piano with his foot. While  all of the VHS tapes were able to play, the same couldn’t be said for the recovered CDs. Some were simply too degraded, and the computer spat them back out.

Brandwood loaded one of the tapes and was greeted with this recording of Jerry Lee Lewis in concert. Image: Brady Brandwood / YouTube. The race against time to save physical media’s secrets 

Brandwood set out to the abandoned VHS tapes and CDs for fun, but figuring out the science behind preserving old physical media is serious work. Around the globe, archivists are racing against time to find the best ways to immortalize degrading tech and safeguard the contents held within them.

Popular Science recently spoke with Cambridge University Library archivist Leontien Talboom  who teamed up with video game enthusiasts to create a new stand for cleaning and imagining floppy disc drives. The square cartridges were the dominant medium for storing digital information throughout the last three decades of the 20th century and are familiar to anyone who remembers the Tamagotchi craze. 

Some of the CDs were too badly damaged to play. Image: Brady Brandwood / YouTube

Here in the United States, archivists at the Library of Congress are actively running experiments on CDs. They’re artificially exposing them to various heat and humidity levels to see how fast they degrade, and what can be done to slow the process. 

For CDs and VHS tapes alike, the best way to prolong their life is to keep them in a climate-controlled environment to prevent decay. Ironically, even though the transition from VHS to CDs was driven partly by the perception that the CDs were a more durable, long-lasting medium, Brandwood’s adventure shows that’s not necessarily the case. It turns out the humble VHS tape may have been a more robust engineering accomplishment than was previously appreciated.

The post Georgia man brings abandoned VHS tapes back to life appeared first on Popular Science.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairytale, “The Princess and the Pea,” a prince tests whether a young woman is, in fact, a princess. In order to authenticate her nobility, his mother (the queen) places a single pea at the bottom of the woman’s bed, beneath 20 mattresses and 20 quilts. If the woman is sensitive to the pea, she must have royal blood—obviously. Although she falls asleep easily atop the towering, the woman spends the entire night tossing and turning because the bed is so uncomfortable. Later, the queen confirms it was the pea that made her sleep so unbearable. But if you were to ask a sleep doctor today, it may have had more to do with the princess’s sleeping position. 

It’s no secret that your sleeping position can significantly affect your sleep quality. But according to science, which sleeping position is best? 

In order to determine whether we should be snoozing on our backs or curling up on our sides to achieve maximum health benefits (and a good night’s rest), Popular Science turned to  Dr. John Saito, a representative for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Apparently, the answer isn’t so clear-cut. 

A good sleep position begins with easy breathing

“Everyone has an idea of what a good sleep position may be,” says Saito, “whether it’s sleeping on your left side, ride side, back, belly, or even upside down. But it all depends on the context.” 

For example, say you’re lying on your back and have a good support pillow that keeps your spine and your neck in a neutral position. This, says Saito, allows your airway to remain unobstructed and you to breathe easily. That’s a good thing. 

However, if you have sleep apnea—a condition in which your breathing stops and starts throughout sleep, typically resulting from your throat muscles becoming too relaxed and blocking a body’s upper airway—sleeping on your back can be detrimental to your health. 

“If the tongue falls to the back of your throat when you’re lying on your back, that’s bad,” says Saito. For babies, most doctors recommend putting them to sleep on their backs to reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), an unexplained death that usually occurs during sleep. 

Related 'Ask Us Anything' Stories

White noise vs brown noise: What’s the best sound for sleeping?

Is it better to be a morning person or a night owl? What the science says.

Tired? You may have social jetlag.

Is sleeping outside good for you? Science has a clear answer.

What causes you to jolt awake right before falling asleep?

Is it better to sleep in cycles?

Good news for side sleepers

For adults, “If you’re lying on your right side, it might be better for blood flow,” says Saito, as well as lower pressure on your heart. This is because your mediastinum, a flexible compartment located between the lungs, helps hold your heart in place. 

“If you’re lying on your left side, it may actually be better for clearing the waste product in our brain,” he says. This is called the glymphatic system, a brain’s specialized waste clearance network that washes away harmful metabolic byproducts, including proteins linked to Alzheimer’s disease, while we sleep. 

There’s also a difference between sleeping in a fetal or curled position, and sprawling out straight. Sleeping on either side with your body relatively linear helps to align your spine, while curling up on your side is generally good for easing lower back pain. However, being too curled up like a baby can compress your diaphragm and chest, and in turn restrict breathing. 

Finding the best sleeping position for you

Regardless of what science shows, certain people will have certain preferences when it comes to sleeping positions, says Saito, and for good reason. For instance, “ask someone who’s dealing with back pain to then sleep on their back and they’re going to curse you,” he says, “because even though they’re breathing better, their bones and joints are hurting terribly.”

So instead of a specific sleeping position, Saito says to consider the ABCs of respiratory therapy: airway, breathing, and circulation. “If you can’t breathe because you have sleep apnea or you have allergies and a stuffy nose, you want to find the best position that keeps your airway open,” he says. 

What if you move around, sleeping in multiple positions through the night? 

According to Dr. Saito, “There’s nobody that sleeps like a log and doesn’t move. You may start off in one position to be comfortable, but over the night you shift.” However, he says, there’s a difference between repositioning yourself throughout the night, and moving a lot because you can’t find a comfortable sleeping position. “Just like in anything, a little bit is OK,” he says, “but too much means you’re outside of the spectrum of normal.”

People who have trouble sleeping tend to move excessively. But there are ways to practice sleeping in better positions. If you’re typically a side sleeper, try placing a pillow between your knees to help better align your head, neck, and hips. This neutral posture can not only make breathing easier, but it can also result in deeper, more restorative sleep. 

If you prefer sleeping on your side, try placing a pillow between your knees to help your alignment. Image: Getty Images / bymuratdeniz

If you’re traditionally a back sleeper, place a pillow under your knees. Is sleeping on your stomach more your thing? Try placing a thin pillow under your hips. Choosing a mattress that adheres to the natural curve of your spine is also a key element of snoozing through the night.  

In the end, “There’s no one best sleeping position,” says Saito. In reality, it can depend on a myriad of factors, from whether you’re pregnant and suffering from bad back pain to battling sleep apnea and being a chronic snorer. 

Your ultimate goal is to find a comfortable, unobtrusive sleeping position that allows you to get a good night’s sleep. 

Ultimately, whatever sleep position you find comfiest is going to be the best one for you. This is because it’s what’s going to give you the most rest, which, in turn, will also keep you healthiest.

In Ask Us Anything, Popular Science answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

The post The best sleep position, according to science appeared first on Popular Science.

When taking care of injured birds, sometimes a hands-off approach is the best place to start. And that’s exactly what was in store for two great-horned owls (Bubo virginianus) in the caring hands of the team at the Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center in central California.

“Great-horned owls often jump out of the nest before the babies can fly. The parents continue to care for them on the ground,” Donna Burt, a biologist and chairman of the board, executive director, and founder of the Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center, tells Popular Science. “That works fine if the owls are in a protected area, but these were in a soccer field.”

Fortunately, these birds did not have any injuries when they were brought into the animal care center, but they still needed a check-up. During a hands-off exam like this one, veterinarians look closely to see how an animal stands, walks, and looks around, to get a sense of their health and potential injuries. In the case of these four to five-week-old owls, the bird on the left is up on its feet, while the owl on the right is hock sitting. Since it is unable to stand, the bird sits back on its legs, which is a normal action for owls this age. Both birds can snap their beaks and spread their wings in threat displays, which indicates that they are feeling well. 

The team can also check on the birds’ eyes during this type of exam. They have a little cloudiness, which is normal for young great-horned owls. They will also blink by lowering the upper eyelids, which is sometimes another threat display. 

Great-horned owls reach adult size by 10 weeks-old. Image: Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center.

Great-horned owls are one of North America’s largest owls. They typically weigh between 2.5 and 4.5 pounds. Baby great-horned owls are also the first babies that the Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center receives every single year. Owl pairs begin their courtship in November and lay eggs in late January or early February. The eggs will hatch in March or April. Once hatched, the owls reach full adult size at 10 weeks, but will stay with their parents until the fall.

“When we get tiny baby great-horns, we put them with a non-releasable surrogate owl who cares for and feeds them,” Burt says. “Not only is that easier for us, but it’s better for the babies. Although it can feel rewarding to hand-feed and care for the little fluffballs, it is in their best interest to be raised by owls. They grow faster and develop normal behavior.”

A baby owl with a surrogate. Image: Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center.

While these two can eat on their own, it will be another few weeks before they can fly. As soon as the birds reach that milestone, they will move  to one of the center’s larger aviaries that measure either 50 feet or 100 feet long.

If you come across baby great-horned owls on the ground who appear clean and healthy, the center advises people to leave them alone. If a bird looks injured or sick, contact your local animal control or wildlife rescue center.

The post Spunky baby owls examined after being found on soccer field appeared first on Popular Science.

When taking care of injured birds, sometimes a hands-off approach is the best place to start. And that’s exactly what was in store for two great-horned owls (Bubo virginianus) in the caring hands of the team at the Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center in central California.

“Great-horned owls often jump out of the nest before the babies can fly. The parents continue to care for them on the ground,” Donna Burt, a biologist and chairman of the board, executive director, and founder of the Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center, tells Popular Science. “That works fine if the owls are in a protected area, but these were in a soccer field.”

Fortunately, these birds did not have any injuries when they were brought into the animal care center, but they still needed a check-up. During a hands-off exam like this one, veterinarians look closely to see how an animal stands, walks, and looks around, to get a sense of their health and potential injuries. In the case of these four to five-week-old owls, the bird on the left is up on its feet, while the owl on the right is hock sitting. Since it is unable to stand, the bird sits back on its legs, which is a normal action for owls this age. Both birds can snap their beaks and spread their wings in threat displays, which indicates that they are feeling well. 

The team can also check on the birds’ eyes during this type of exam. They have a little cloudiness, which is normal for young great-horned owls. They will also blink by lowering the upper eyelids, which is sometimes another threat display. 

Great-horned owls reach adult size by 10 weeks-old. Image: Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center.

Great-horned owls are one of North America’s largest owls. They typically weigh between 2.5 and 4.5 pounds. Baby great-horned owls are also the first babies that the Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center receives every single year. Owl pairs begin their courtship in November and lay eggs in late January or early February. The eggs will hatch in March or April. Once hatched, the owls reach full adult size at 10 weeks, but will stay with their parents until the fall.

“When we get tiny baby great-horns, we put them with a non-releasable surrogate owl who cares for and feeds them,” Burt says. “Not only is that easier for us, but it’s better for the babies. Although it can feel rewarding to hand-feed and care for the little fluffballs, it is in their best interest to be raised by owls. They grow faster and develop normal behavior.”

A baby owl with a surrogate. Image: Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center.

While these two can eat on their own, it will be another few weeks before they can fly. As soon as the birds reach that milestone, they will move  to one of the center’s larger aviaries that measure either 50 feet or 100 feet long.

If you come across baby great-horned owls on the ground who appear clean and healthy, the center advises people to leave them alone. If a bird looks injured or sick, contact your local animal control or wildlife rescue center.

The post Spunky baby owls examined after being found on soccer field appeared first on Popular Science.

When taking care of injured birds, sometimes a hands-off approach is the best place to start. And that’s exactly what was in store for two great-horned owls (Bubo virginianus) in the caring hands of the team at the Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center in central California.

“Great-horned owls often jump out of the nest before the babies can fly. The parents continue to care for them on the ground,” Donna Burt, a biologist and chairman of the board, executive director, and founder of the Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center, tells Popular Science. “That works fine if the owls are in a protected area, but these were in a soccer field.”

Fortunately, these birds did not have any injuries when they were brought into the animal care center, but they still needed a check-up. During a hands-off exam like this one, veterinarians look closely to see how an animal stands, walks, and looks around, to get a sense of their health and potential injuries. In the case of these four to five-week-old owls, the bird on the left is up on its feet, while the owl on the right is hock sitting. Since it is unable to stand, the bird sits back on its legs, which is a normal action for owls this age. Both birds can snap their beaks and spread their wings in threat displays, which indicates that they are feeling well. 

The team can also check on the birds’ eyes during this type of exam. They have a little cloudiness, which is normal for young great-horned owls. They will also blink by lowering the upper eyelids, which is sometimes another threat display. 

Great-horned owls reach adult size by 10 weeks-old. Image: Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center.

Great-horned owls are one of North America’s largest owls. They typically weigh between 2.5 and 4.5 pounds. Baby great-horned owls are also the first babies that the Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center receives every single year. Owl pairs begin their courtship in November and lay eggs in late January or early February. The eggs will hatch in March or April. Once hatched, the owls reach full adult size at 10 weeks, but will stay with their parents until the fall.

“When we get tiny baby great-horns, we put them with a non-releasable surrogate owl who cares for and feeds them,” Burt says. “Not only is that easier for us, but it’s better for the babies. Although it can feel rewarding to hand-feed and care for the little fluffballs, it is in their best interest to be raised by owls. They grow faster and develop normal behavior.”

A baby owl with a surrogate. Image: Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center.

While these two can eat on their own, it will be another few weeks before they can fly. As soon as the birds reach that milestone, they will move  to one of the center’s larger aviaries that measure either 50 feet or 100 feet long.

If you come across baby great-horned owls on the ground who appear clean and healthy, the center advises people to leave them alone. If a bird looks injured or sick, contact your local animal control or wildlife rescue center.

The post Spunky baby owls examined after being found on soccer field appeared first on Popular Science.

Pepperoni or anchovies? Mushrooms or black olives? And what about the ever popular and polarizing pineapple? Pizza topping preferences are as varied as the people who order them. While that’s fine for one or two hungry friends, planning multiple pies for a larger group can quickly turn tense. Most of the time, it feels like diners simply settle on one-topping or cheese pizzas in the hopes of avoiding an argument.

From a technical standpoint, it is definitely possible to figure out the optimal pizza toppings based on a group’s various tastes. However, the time it takes to chart out and settle on the most democratically representative dishes may risk devolving into a dreaded “hangry” shouting match. Thankfully, a software engineer has a solution.

The recently launched Pizza Voter website is a free-to-use platform that allows you to email a pizza party invitation to every participant in an upcoming meal. Once accepted, each person then clicks whether they Love, Hate, or Don’t Mind each topping. There’s even a fill-in-the-blank option for the especially picky pizza fan. From there, an internal algorithm weighs each topping’s scores based on the answers, then calculates a perfect pizza that theoretically will satisfy everyone.

According to the creator’s announcement post on Reddit, it takes Pizza Voter about 60 seconds to generate an answer to each topping conundrum. And lest anyone think this is a covert ploy by Big Pizza to amass consumer data: the website includes a full privacy policy explaining that a geographic estimation of every user is the only data it is currently collecting from users.

Tracking location is also not for marketing. Instead, it simply lets everyone know where people are eating the most pizza. Judging from the project’s social media, it’s currently a toss-up between San Francisco and Chicago. We’ll let them argue over the best type of crust.

The post Software engineers design algorithm to solve pizza topping arguments appeared first on Popular Science.

There are reports Tesla Giga Shanghai already has dedicated production lines running for the standard Model 3. This variant is the simplified, lower-cost version (smaller battery, ~480 km CLTC range) that Tesla will sell in China and export to Asia. Expected pricing for the new Standard version per Multiple sources (Global China EV, CarNewsChina, 36Kr, ...

Read more

Gwynne Shotwell of SpaceX was featured on the cover of Time Magazine. Humans on lunar surface before 2030. HLS (Human Landing System) planned ready by 2028, though much must go right. Starlink Constellation Size has ~10,000 Starlink satellites launched and [high speed internet] likely cap 15,000–20,000. There has been a separate FCC filing for 15000 ...

Read more

Last week I realized that today’s rapid cultural evolution, mediated greatly by youth movements, seems encouraged by the common modern norm favoring “authenticity”. Youths ask their hearts how society should change. So I just read two books on the subject, Lionel Trilling (1972) Sincerity and Authenticity, and Charles Taylor (1991) Ethics of Authenticity. I also read Rousseau (1755) Discourse on Inequality, as many call that the first modern advocacy of authenticity.

Authenticity having your behaviors driven from within you, instead of letting others influence them. Follow your heart, you do you, go with your gut, that sort of thing. It is such a widely accepted norm that the authors who write books on it don’t actually argue for it much; they instead use it to argue for other stuff. My reading was a waste.

But, why exactly is authenticity such a good thing? Yes, there’s this quote about me, “Robin Hanson is more like himself than anybody else I know.” And, yes, my webpage has long said: “I’m not a joiner; I rebel against groups with ‘our beliefs’.” So as a matter of practice I seem to be authentic. Yet I still don’t see why it’s good, per se.

The modern world changes faster, and gives us more options, which puts a premium on agency; we can’t just ride along with our slowly changing peasant village anymore. But that means you need make choices, not that they need to come from within.

We’ve long taken controlling more as a sign of status, so others controlling you lowers your status. But what would this effect be stronger in the modern world?

Maybe in the modern world imitation and social pressures have become easier to see. In the old stable peasant village you acted like everyone else, but so did everyone, and you were not noticeably following any particular other visible models. However, in the modern world choices are more varied and contested, and so we can more easily see who in particular is pressuring or influencing who else in particular.

That wouldn’t necessarily be bad, except that looking too obviously “try hard”, like you are trying to choose actions to impress and please others, shows an unimpressive lack of confidence. Just as the most impressive dancers make their dancing look “effortless”, maybe the most impressive social displays are those that seem to come naturally, with little noticeable effort.

Cultural evolution says that most everything that comes from inside of you was stuff that went there before, from your prior cultural exposures. But seeing you trying to please and conform looks quite different to observers than your seeming to just do stuff from within, even though all of that stuff inside resulted from your prior efforts to please and conform, perhaps as a child. It is like the difference between a dancer who is visibly struggles to do her dance routine, and one for who the routine looks effortless, enjoyable, and even invented on the spot.

Carbon Nanofibers in Dry-Coated Batteries (21.8% Energy Density Gain) is described by Jordan at the Limiting Factor. A new University of Chicago paper (published March 2026) demonstrates a simple but powerful tweak to dry-electrode cathode design that delivers a 21.8% increase in usable energy density while maintaining excellent cycle life. The breakthrough relies entirely on ...

Read more

San Francisco, USA, 25th March 2026, CyberNewswire

Eric Schmidt and other AI leaders (Karpathy, Musk, Anthropic executives) have described recursive self-improvement (RSI)—AI autonomously designing, testing, and deploying better versions of itself—as the pivotal transition from narrow, human-guided progress to potentially explosive, closed-loop intelligence growth. RSI is not yet fully autonomous across the entire AI stack with no human oversight but narrow versions ...

Read more

NASA will advance lunar science by affordably building out of the Moon Base and underpin future Moon and Mars exploration. An accelerated CLPS cadence, targeting up to 30 robotic landings starting in 2027. NASA is expediting delivery of science and technology to the lunar surface. There will be many opportunities for payload delivery including rovers, ...

Read more

Do you love something historically-unusual about today’s culture? Like maybe democracy, rock music, gender equality, cosmology, or open inquiry? Enough to work to help it last long into the future? If so, read on; if not, this essay isn’t for you.

The Bible tells of how, freed from slavery in Egypt (~1270BC), the Israelites reached the promised land in a bit over a year, but then turned away out of fear, and wandered 40 more years before entering. Humanity is now doing something similar. A few centuries ago, we saw great promise but also threats in industry, so we put only one foot there, leaving the other in our ancient system of tradition and cultural evolution.

Alas this won’t work. We could stay standing either with both feet in culture, or with both in industry, but with our feet split civilization will soon fall. Most likely to be replaced by insular religious groups the Amish or Haredim, who will then discard most historically-unusual features of today’s world mono-culture. So to save such features, we must try to move our other foot into industry. Or bust. Let me explain.

The biggest change humanity has seen in at least 10Kyrs was the “industrial revolution” in the last few centuries. Its core cause was our finding better ways to organize and optimize effort. These included (a) math in accounting, engineering, and science, (b) new ways to structure hierarchical and professional organizations, and (c) capitalist societies. The peak in industrial optimization has been big competing for-profit orgs seeking to max key numbers that drive customer choices, in areas where professionals found powerful formal abstractions. Numbers like the cost of cloth, the strength of steel, or the speed of cars.

We have allowed many modern choices to be set by such powerfully-optimizing industrial orgs. Which is why we are rich and powerful. But even in the rich most industrialized West we retain two other spheres of life which are each just as large as this industrial sphere.

One non-industry sphere is where we LARP industrial styles of specialization, procedure, and formality, but don’t actually release much of the power of industrial optimization. For example, in academia and medicine we let prestigious professionals judge quality, which results in great inefficiently and rising spending. And in much of law and government we mistakenly trust prestige, specialization, and process to work without capitalist incentives, and even to well-regulate the capitalists. We have numbers to use to let industry optimize such areas, but don’t let them.

The other non-industry sphere of life is where we pointedly resist industry-style optimization. A century or two ago we saw huge productivity gains in shipyards, plantations, and factories. But saw also how they cut individuality, variety, and enchantment, and fostered inequality, regimentation, and instrumentality. So we have worked to limit the scope of what we’ve called “totalitarian” “dehumanizing” industry.

Socialist and communist regimes tried to cut out only the capitalism part, and most other regimes have limited industry via redistribution and regulation. The arts, humanities, and culture adopted strong norms against overly-overt industry-style practices, even as modernism LARPed industry levels of change as “innovation”. And “little boxes” ridicule, and laws, have pushed ordinary folks into spending their increased wealth on variety, instead of cost-effective industrial dorm-like lifestyles.

Alas, we have been accumulating a cultural deft, and our behaviors in these non-industry spheres become more maladaptive. Before industry, the main way humans kept their behaviors adaptive was via cultural evolution, which required high cultural variety and selection pressures, and low rates of environmental change and internal cultural drift. But modern industry (a) increased rates of social environment change, (b) increased travel, talk, and trade, which has cut cultural variety, and (c) caused far higher levels of wealth, health, and security, which has cut selection pressures. In addition, the modernism cultural turn induced far higher rates of cultural drift.

So we face a stark choice. We can let our civ fall, to be replaced by the Amish, Haredim, etc. For a while the world loses industry, and when that maybe later returns it is without most of what we cherish about our current world culture. And then it likely falls as well later. Like the Israelites staying away from the promised land.

Or we can try to enter that promised land, by applying industry more to the life areas which we have so far blocked, accepting that will also change and sometimes destroy things we now like about our lives in those areas. Such as by freeing capitalism more to run academia, education, medicine, law, governance, and fertility.

Or you might change your mind about my first questions above, and decide that you don’t actually much care about the distant future. I don’t have good news here; you can either use this info to better choose carefully, or stick your head in the sand.

Oh, and if you think AI will save us, ask yourself: why would an AI culture modeled after human culture better avoid the problem of a broken cultural evolution process?

I asked a set of polls, and 3 LLMs (ChatGPT,Claude,Gemini) to rate the relative explanatory power of the following 16 causes of cultural change for the two periods 1700-1900 and 1900-2025. I asked polls re picking 1 of 4 causes, and asked LLMs to think of 50 culture changes in each period, score each cause on a 0-10 scale re each change, and then add up scores per cause. (I also asked Grok, but its rounded sums suggested that it lied about generating detailed scores.)

• Elite Youth Culture - Rise of high school and college, youth culture and movements; changes had to appeal to elite youths.

• Lazy/Myopic/Selfish/Pleas - Revert to be more lazy, myopic, selfish, pleasure-oriented.

• Forager Reversion - Revert to forager styles: more art, leisure, democracy, and equality, and less religion, fertility, and domination.

• Individualism, Authentic - Rise in status of individualism, authenticity: think for yourself, follow your heart, be true to yourself.

• Innovate, Explore, Create - Rise in status of innovation, exploration, creativity.

• Abstract Concept, Reason - Rise in status of more abstract concepts and reasoning.

• Rich, Safe, Trade/Talk - Stuff that appeals more to people who are richer and safer, with more/wider talk/travel/trade.

• Merging Culture Appeal - Stuff accessible to and can appeal to the wide range of cultures merging in this period.

• Fashion/Elite Displace - Rise in fashion as change process; changes must appeal to elites seeking to displace other elites.

• Media/Word Legibile - Legibility of change symbols to spread via words and mass media.

• Big Org/Inst. Codify - New stuff can be seen and codified by our new large orgs and institutions.

• Sounds Good, Short-Run - Prefer stuff that sounds good and shows visible short-run gains.

• Visible Sacrifice - Visible sacrifices show allegiance; we figure we value what we’ve seen recent big visible sacrifices for.

• Lose Religion/Fragment - Loss of religion and traditions as core cultural glues induce fragmentation, divergence.

• Low War/Internal Polarize - Less war and outside threats make more wealth inequality, stronger internal conflict, polarization.

• Adapt Tech/Demography - Sensible adaptation to other behavior changes, not of culture type, eg, tech, demographic, and business practices.

Here are priority out of 100 poll scores, and median of the 3 LLM sum scores:

Scores don’t vary that much, correlations between sources are weak, and I overall disagree a lot with them. From which I conclude that either this is quite hard to figure out, and/or there really were quite a few strong causes.