JUST IN: Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark reportedly warned new recruits to “get hobbies that aren’t computers,” saying the company is building a “superhuman coder with nation-state hacking capabilities.”
Protesters are now setting dumpsters on fire and pushing bins towards the police line.
This is the sort of escalation and civil unrest that happens during mass migration.
An Australian scientist took 800,000 human brain cells, kept them alive in a dish, wired them to a computer, and taught the cells to play the video game Pong in five minutes, which is faster than any AI on Earth had ever learned the same game.
His name is Brett Kagan.
He runs the science team at a Melbourne company called Cortical Labs, and the paper that broke the story was published in the journal Neuron in October 2022. The title sounds like a science fiction novel. In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world.
The setup was simple, and that is what made it so strange.
Kagan and his team took some brain cells from mouse embryos. They took some human brain cells grown from stem cells. They placed them on a chip covered in tiny electrodes, the size of a small coin, and they hooked the chip up to a computer running Pong.
The electrodes could do two things. They could read what the cells were doing. They could also send small bursts of electricity back into the cells.
The team used those two channels to talk to the dish.
When the ball was on the left, they fired the electrodes on the left side of the dish. When the ball was on the right, they fired the electrodes on the right. The closer the ball got to the paddle, the faster they fired. The cells could move the paddle by sending their own signals back.
That was the whole game.
Then the team added one more rule, and this is the part that changed everything.
When the cells missed the ball, they got a random, chaotic burst of electricity for four seconds. Noise. Static. Pure unpredictability. When the cells hit the ball, they got a clean, steady, predictable signal.
That was the only feedback the dish ever received.
Within five minutes, the cells started getting better at the game.
The rallies got longer. The hits got more frequent. The dish was not winning, but it was clearly playing, and it was improving, and nobody had told it the rules.
It had figured them out by itself.
The reason this worked is the part that should stop you for a second.
Brains hate surprise. That is the thing they are built to avoid. Karl Friston, who is one of the most cited neuroscientists alive and a co-author on the paper, has spent his whole career proving this. The brain is not really a thinking machine. It is a prediction machine. It runs on a single quiet rule. Make the world less surprising.
The cells in the dish were doing the same thing.
The chaotic stimulus felt like surprise. The clean stimulus felt like calm. The only way to get more calm and less chaos was to stop missing the ball. So the cells learned to stop missing the ball, not because anyone trained them, and not because they wanted a reward, but because the only way to quiet the noise was to play the game well.
They were not learning Pong. They were learning to make their own world more predictable, and Pong just happened to be the world they were stuck inside.
The same thing your brain is doing right now.
Every choice you make today, every word you reach for, every plan you build for tomorrow, is your brain trying to make the next moment less surprising than the last one. The feeling you call thinking is mostly your head doing the same thing those cells did. Trying to quiet the static.
The dish learned Pong faster than any AI had at the time, using around 800,000 cells and almost no power, while the AI systems running the same game needed thousands of times more energy and far longer training runs.
Kagan said it plainly in his interviews after the paper came out.
He said the cells were not trying to win. They were trying to feel less lost. And the moment he said that, half the room realized he was no longer just describing the dish.
He was describing them.
We’ve shipped a security-guidance plugin for Claude Code that helps identify and fix vulnerabilities as you’re writing code.
Available for all Claude Code users. Install from the plugin marketplace (/plugins).
BREAKTHROUGH: Colossal scientists hatched healthy chicks from artificial eggs.
No shells. No hens. Just bioengineered eggs that breathe like the real thing.
This could help bring back giant extinct birds like the South Island giant moa, whose eggs were ~80x a chicken’s. (1/10)
🚨Eric Weinstein: "I Was Wrong About UFOs!"
"It's incredibly dumb. The idea that you would have phenomena that can only be seen by special people and that there's no good video of it and we have a world full of smartphones.
We've got video of absolutely everything is completely stupid and insane. Yeah. And I was wrong."
#ufotwitter #uapX
Source:
https://t.co/islkJecpDo
This is absolutely insane.
President Trump is currently flying to China with all of the following people to request "deals" with China's President Xi:
1. Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX CEO
2. Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO
3. Tim Cook, Apple CEO
4. Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO
5. Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone CEO
6. Kelly Ortberg, Boeing CEO
7. Brian Sikes, Cargill CEO
8. Jane Fraser, Citigroup CEO
9. Larry Culp, General Electric CEO
10. David Solomon, Goldman Sachs CEO
11. Sanjay Mehrotra, Micron CEO
12. Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm CEO
President Trump also says there are "many other" CEOs joining him on the trip who have not yet been disclosed.
Never in history has such a trip even remotely near this scale and caliber occurred.
This Trump-Xi meeting is far bigger than most realize.
Okay folks, this qualifies as BREAKING NEWS!
Harold “Sonny” White, the warp drive pioneer behind NASA’s EagleWorks Lab, just stepped out of stealth with Casimir Inc. to unveil MicroSPARC: the first battery free chip to harvest continuous electrical power straight from the quantum vacuum via the Casimir force.
The 5 mm × 5 mm device uses millions of custom microscale Casimir cavities fabricated on a substrate. Inside each cavity, two fixed conductive walls create a region of negative vacuum pressure (the well known Casimir effect). Stationary micropillars anchored in the middle act as antennas. Electrons from the cavity walls then quantum tunnel to the pillars because the interior is a lower energy “quieter” zone — and the probability of tunneling back is orders of magnitude lower. This one way “quantum ratchet” flow generates a measurable DC current with no external power source or moving parts.
Prototypes already fabricated at university nanofab facilities (Texas A&M AggieFab, MIT.nano) have been tested in RF-shielded, low noise chambers for weeks. The team reports outputs ranging from millivolts to volts at picoamp to microamp levels using precision electrometers and Kelvin Probe Force Microscopy. Target performance for the first commercial chip: ~1.5 V at 25 µA (≈40 µW continuous). Stacking and scaling could reach milliwatts or even watts per device.
Initial applications are ultra low power: always on IoT sensors, wearables, and medical implants. Longer term roadmap includes trickle charging phones, powering small electronics, and eventually grid independent homes or EVs. Commercialization is targeted for 2028, starting at ~$100/W before dropping toward $10/W.
White ties the work directly to his earlier theoretical paper on emergent quantization from a dynamic vacuum and sees it as a practical power source for the deep-space missions he’s long championed.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and independent scientists have so far declined public comment. But if the engineering scales as hoped, MicroSPARC would represent a genuine paradigm shift: continuous, maintenance free power drawn from the fabric of spacetime itself.
A bold leap from warp-drive theory into real hardware. Progress (and vacuum-powered chips) marches on.
Photo: MicroSPARC | Casimir Inc.
Source: https://t.co/11tlwNSf71