No idea what this means. Something about how Skyrim will produce super clever robots, I guess.

"Skyrmions are small, magnetic vortices that can store information in a completely new way," explained Asle Sudbø, who leads NTNU's Centre for Quantum Spintronics (QuSpin). Unlike conventional technologies, which require increasing amounts of space and energy to handle growing quantities of data, skyrmions could offer a much more efficient alternative.

"Instead of the current technology, where we constantly need more space and energy to process data, skyrmions could make it possible to build much smaller and more energy-efficient data storage systems," explained Sudbø.

"These nanoscale vortices could help develop computers that resemble biological brains," said Sudbø.

Rather than relying on conventional transistor-based computing, such systems could use magnetism to process information. In principle, this approach could dramatically reduce electricity consumption, potentially allowing future computers to perform complex tasks with very little energy.

#Science

sciencedaily.com/releases/2026…

Eeee !

Dr. Robert E. Cornish, who’d asphyxiated the rangy white fox terrier with ether and nitrogen, watched the clock. Six minutes after the final heartbeat, the scientist gathered up the dog and strapped him to a teeterboard, a see-saw-like invention whose back-and-forth, up-and-down motion Cornish believed was key to restoring the blood’s circulation.

He pushed a saline solution primed with oxygen, heart-stimulating adrenalin, and the liver extract heparin into a vein in Lazarus’ thigh, then lowered his head over the patient. As his assistant rocked the teeterboard and rubbed the little body vigorously, Cornish exhaled deep breaths into the dog’s mouth and lungs.

Long seconds turned to minutes and then, suddenly, Lazarus gasped and jerked his leg. Slowly, his heart began to beat. Lazarus II had returned from the dead. But while the fox terrier lived for another eight hours and 13 minutes, he did not live well, stuck in a restless zombie state punctuated by the occasional whine, bark, and panting.

Before working on dogs, Cornish began his reanimating work on people. A 62-year-old printer who died of cardiac arrest was the first to receive Cornish’s reanimation treatment. Four-and-a-half hours after his death, Cornish arrived at the hospital to strap the man’s heating pad-swaddled body to a teeterboard. After see-sawing the patient up and down for 90 minutes, Cornish failed to revive the subject—although Cornish noted a point at which the printer’s “face seemed to warm up suddenly, sparkle returned to the eyes, and soft pulsations were observed in the soft tissue between windpipe and sternum,” according to science journalist Frank Swain.

Cornish never had the opportunity to prove that his teeterboard worked, despite appealing to the governors of Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado for permission to revive criminals executed by the gas chamber shortly after completing his Lazarus experiments.

#History
#Science

popsci.com/science/reviving-de…

The complex chemistry of a disaster.

Four decades after the Chernobyl (known today as Chornobyl)...

No it isn't. Stop renaming things that don't need renaming !

... microscopic radioactive particles remain scattered throughout the surrounding soil. Scientists have now taken a closer look at these tiny remnants and uncovered a surprising finding: some have preserved much of their original internal structure despite decades of exposure to the environment.

Despite decades of research, scientists still do not fully understand why radioactive particles from Chernobyl break down at different speeds. As these materials weather, they can produce several forms of uranium oxide, making their long term behavior difficult to predict.

"First, we had to figure out how to examine the particle structure," Christoph Hennig explains. "Ultimately, we fully rotated the particles in an X-ray beam focused down to 100 micrometers - about the thickness of a human hair. We measured each particle from 2,000 different angles to seamlessly capture all the reflections."

The results revealed something unexpected. Despite spending four decades in the environment, the nuclear fuel inside the six examined particles had retained much of its original crystal structure. This suggests that at least some of the radioactive debris produced by the Chernobyl disaster is more chemically stable than researchers previously believed.

That stability could have important environmental implications. Rather than rapidly releasing radioactive substances, the particles appear capable of retaining fission products within their structures. If this behavior occurs more widely, it could help limit the movement of radioactive contaminants into nearby soil and water.

#Science

sciencedaily.com/releases/2026…

Squueze yourself smart ?

A little-known treatment for heart failure, developed more than half a century ago and refined in the '70s, may have legs as a potential therapy for Alzheimer's patients. The treatment is called external counterpulsation (ECP), and it compresses the lower body using squeezable cuffs around the calves, lower thighs, and buttocks.

In recent years, preliminary evidence suggests that ECP may have uses beyond the heart; it could also improve blood flow to the brain. In cases of dementia, blood flow to the brain is known to be reduced, with some regions receiving as much as 50 percent less blood flow. What's more, hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease in the brain are often closely related to vascular health.

As you can imagine, it's a bit hard to fake that someone's legs aren't being squeezed, so the 'placebo' was tricky to disguise. As a compromise, half the group was randomized to receive full-pressure ECP synchronized with their heartbeats, while the other half received a sham treatment, involving low-pressure, unsynchronized pulsations.

In the end, the sham treatment still seemed to provide some benefits, but to a lesser extent. In the full-pressure group, researchers report that 84 percent of patients showed improvements in cognitive function during the six-month treatment period.

Six months after the last ECP treatment, 75 percent of those who received the real treatment still showed cognitive improvements from the start of the trial. "To our knowledge," the authors write, "this is the first demonstration of a therapy causing an actual improvement over baseline in cognitive and functional abilities in this population."

It would be interesting to see if this also happens in a healthy population. And "Does squeezing your butt make you smarter ?" has definite IgNobel potential...

#Science
#Health

sciencealert.com/this-heart-tr…

Water, water, every where,
And all the cores did think;
Water, water, every where,
And many drops to drink.

The structure of a MOF looks somewhat “like a jungle gym on a playground,” says Seth Cohen, the dean of the School of Physical Sciences at UC Irvine. MOFs are essentially “molecular sponges—they’re a solid material that’s very, very good at absorbing other molecules,” says Cohen, who is not involved with Atoco. Like a sponge, the materials can also be wrung out using methods including heat to release whatever they’re holding onto.

These jungle-gym-like frameworks create open spaces on the microscopic level that can hold an unbelievable amount of material, and small tweaks can yield even more interior space. “The footage of a gram of MOF could cover two football fields,” Yaghi explains. “They can store hydrogen in there to make clean energy, or you could store CO2 in there to make clean air. Or, in this case, you can store water.”

“The scientists reach a level of precision [where] we really know even the angle of the atom,” in a given material, Taha says.

In Atoco’s technology, air passes through the MOF, which has been specially tailored to attract water molecules. Those molecules adhere to the pores. But the material feels completely dry to the touch even when saturated, and squeezing it doesn’t release a single drop. Instead, the company relies on heat to release the captured molecules.

There are other means of harvesting water. Cohen notes that silica, a popular desiccant, can also pull water out of air, but it doesn’t hold as much moisture and requires you to “heat the heck out of it to get the water back out,” he says. The MOFs in the device can harvest and release water with heat as low as 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 C), Taha says.

#Science
#Technology
#AI

archive.li/bvQ6A

Neat !

Despite the name, the universe’s white dwarfs can glow in a wide range of colors—even green. For the first time, astronomers have spotted a star that appears green to the human eye, and the reddest ever recorded. These outlier stars help explain how certain white dwarf stars would shine in green, pink, cyan, yellow, and purple if we actually saw them up close in space. These colorful findings are described in a study recently published in the journal RAS Techniques and Instruments.

According to the team, the key to these colors is density. The atmospheres surrounding the coolest white dwarfs can reach about the same density as water (roughly 1 gram per cubic centimeter). They are also millions of times denser than the sun’s photosphere, the lowest layer of its atmosphere. Under these higher density conditions, any trace elements present (carbon, calcium, sodium, etc.) interact with the surrounding dense helium plasma. As they interact with the plasma, they can absorb light across a wider spectrum of colors than they would at lower densities. This then shifts the star’s color away from the more typical orange, white, and blue.

The most striking example is WD J1330+6435. This star is about 7,232 degrees Fahrenheit (4,000 degrees Celsius) and around 284 light-years away from Earth. Over time, it has gathered rocky material from its planetary system. All of this extra material enriched its atmosphere with calcium, lithium, and sodium. The result—a chartreuse green appearance in the team’s models. As far as the researchers are aware, no other star (living or dead) has ever been credibly reported as green.

#Space
#Science

popsci.com/science/first-green…

Worth a read. Most of the paper is appendices, which I skipped.

We present a suite of 50 unpublished research-level theoretical physics problems with verifiable answers. Without AI assistance, a typical problem in our collection could be solved by a world expert in about a day or less but would take considerably longer for experts in adjacent specialties. We test the ability of off-the-shelf AI agents to tackle these problems autonomously, without human hints. When given access to tools available in a realistic setting, including the ability to search the literature and write scripts for numerical and symbolic work, the best-performing agent, GPT-6-Astra harnessed in Codex, obtains the final answers with a near-perfect accuracy of 98% at an average cost under USD 3 per problem. On average, agents show only small changes in accuracy when denied web search and access to background research papers, suggesting significant memorization of the literature. These results suggest that state-of-the-art agents can accurately perform concrete calculations required across theoretical physics research. We comment on the broader implications of these findings and discuss possible explanations for the current lack of agent-led breakthroughs in theoretical physics despite their outstanding problem-solving abilities.

That last point they take more literally than I was expecting. AI isn't leading breakthroughs, they say, because it's not very good at deciding what problems to solve. They don't really discuss this though, they just assert it.

It was interesting to get the perspective of other institutions on my recent trip. Some are much more AI-reluctant than my local Czech group. But pretty much nobody is skeptical that AI isn't good enough any more, or concerned that it makes too many mistakes. Yes, of course, it still does make mistakes, but it feels now as if we've reached the point where the mistake rate is acceptably low. Instead, what people are worried about is that the problems will arise from AI being too good.

#AI
#Science

arxiv.org/abs/2610.16733

It is, of course, always better to have questions that can't be answered than answers which can't be questioned.

Competition between theories is not always settled by empirical investigation – as in the case of quantum mechanics, historical sciences, conspiracy theories, superstitions, and many more. Yet we are still able to make rational judgments about them; we can rationally have a preference between competing scientific theories, or between science and conspiracy, even when empirical tests can’t settle the matter. We do this by using the method of inference to the best explanation. This kind of reasoning is ubiquitous in science. Thus, empirically unanswerable questions are not inherently unscientific.

And since such theories provide us with explanations of the world around us, they are also useful and interesting.

They are perhaps metascientific. They are not scientific in themselves, because science tends to concern itself with what's measurable and observable. But they are an essential part of the scientific process.

Consider the question discussed near the start of this article: “Could machines ever be conscious?” My friend’s cousin suggested that we can’t ever really empirically settle the answer to that question; therefore, we would be better off redefining ‘conscious’ to mean something we can actually determine empirically (such as passing the Turing Test).

Well, that would open a can of worms. A person in a coma or even just asleep isn't conscious, but they will likely become conscious again at some point. They don't degenerate into inanimate objects while their Turing Test-taking capabilities are temporarily nullified. Or better, we might say that they are in an altered state of consciousness wherein they cannot take the test.

Consider: an important reason we think it is fine to kick a rock but not to kick a puppy is that rocks don’t experience you kicking them, but we think puppies do. (Though we might still think things like, “there’s something sadistic and wrong about wanting to induce even fake pain behaviour”.)

Quite right, and puppies can't take the Turing Test either. Nor do we feel the need, in most cases, to apply any kind of test anyway. Caveats : "fake pain" can be found in essentially all kinds of fiction, but wanting to read or write content in which fictional people or animals experience suffering clearly doesn't constitute sadism. Yet I'd still find it extremely creepy if someone decided to "torture" a robot.

We can’t currently (perhaps ever) empirically test whether any other being is actually having experiences that are rendered in its own first-person perspective, or whether it merely acts like it does. That’s a version of “the problem of other minds”. That’s why it’s probably right to say that we cannot ever really empirically test for certain whether any given machine is conscious; we each can’t do so for anyone other than ourselves!

(But) If our new, empirical definition doesn’t give exactly the same answers to the question “Which entities are conscious?” as the empirically undetectable definition, then we’ll either attribute suffering to things that don’t really experience it or end up ignoring real suffering. The first of those outcomes could lead to unnecessary restrictions on our actions, while the latter could lead to moral catastrophe! By itself, this is enough to show that some questions that aren’t empirically answerable matter greatly. That’s enough to show that Practical Empiricists are wrong.

I have argued that Practical Empiricism threatens to impoverish your worldview: as we have seen in the arguments above, by committing most of the tools of “inference to the best explanation” to the flames, it can cut you off from realms of fascinating explanations, make it harder to reject conspiracy theories, and potentially even lead to moral catastrophe (by leading us to misclassify which entities matter morally)!

#Philosophy
#Science

clearerthinking.org/post/in-de…