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upstart writes:

Hugging Face's chief science officer worries AI is becoming 'yes-men on servers':

AI company founders have a reputation for making bold claims about the technology's potential to reshape fields, particularly the sciences. But Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face's co-founder and chief science officer, has a more measured take.

In an essay published to X on Thursday, Wolf said that he feared AI becoming "yes-men on servers" absent a breakthrough in AI research. He elaborated that current AI development paradigms won't yield AI capable of outside-the-box, creative problem-solving — the kind of problem-solving that wins Nobel Prizes.

"The main mistake people usually make is thinking [people like] Newton or Einstein were just scaled-up good students, that a genius comes to life when you linearly extrapolate a top-10% student," Wolf wrote. "To create an Einstein in a data center, we don't just need a system that knows all the answers, but rather one that can ask questions nobody else has thought of or dared to ask."

Wolf's assertions stand in contrast to those from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who in an essay earlier this year said that "superintelligent" AI could "massively accelerate scientific discovery." Similarly, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted AI could help formulate cures for most types of cancer.

Wolf's problem with AI today — and where he thinks the technology is heading — is that it doesn't generate any new knowledge by connecting previously unrelated facts. Even with most of the internet at its disposal, AI as we currently understand it mostly fills in the gaps between what humans already know, Wolf said.

Some AI experts, including ex-Google engineer François Chollet, have expressed similar views, arguing that while AI might be capable of memorizing reasoning patterns, it's unlikely it can generate "new reasoning" based on novel situations.

Wolf thinks that AI labs are building what are essentially "very obedient students" — not scientific revolutionaries in any sense of the phrase. AI today isn't incentivized to question and propose ideas that potentially go against its training data, he said, limiting it to answering known questions.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/users-report-emotional-bonds-with-startlingly-realistic-ai-voice-demo/

In late 2013, the Spike Jonze film Her imagined a future where people would form emotional connections with AI voice assistants. Nearly 12 years later, that fictional premise has veered closer to reality with the release of a new conversational voice model from AI startup Sesame that has left many users both fascinated and unnerved.

"I tried the demo, and it was genuinely startling how human it felt," wrote one Hacker News user who tested the system.
[...]
In late February, Sesame released a demo for the company's new Conversational Speech Model (CSM) that appears to cross over what many consider the "uncanny valley" of AI-generated speech
[...]
"At Sesame, our goal is to achieve 'voice presence'—the magical quality that makes spoken interactions feel real, understood, and valued," writes the company in a blog post.
[...]
Sometimes the model tries too hard to sound like a real human. In one demo posted online by a Reddit user called MetaKnowing, the AI model talks about craving "peanut butter and pickle sandwiches."
[...]
"I've been into AI since I was a child, but this is the first time I've experienced something that made me definitively feel like we had arrived," wrote one Reddit user.
[...]
Many other Reddit threads express similar feelings of surprise, with commenters saying it's "jaw-dropping" or "mind-blowing."
[...]
Mark Hachman, a senior editor at PCWorld, wrote about being deeply unsettled by his interaction with the Sesame voice AI. "Fifteen minutes after 'hanging up' with Sesame's new 'lifelike' AI, and I'm still freaked out," Hachman reported.
[...]
Others have compared Sesame's voice model to OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode for ChatGPT, saying that Sesame's CSM features more realistic voices, and others are pleased that the model in the demo will roleplay angry characters, which ChatGPT refuses to do.
[...]
Under the hood, Sesame's CSM achieves its realism by using two AI models working together (a backbone and a decoder) based on Meta's Llama architecture that processes interleaved text and audio. Sesame trained three AI model sizes, with the largest using 8.3 billion parameters (an 8 billion backbone model plus a 300 million parameter decoder) on approximately 1 million hours of primarily English audio.

upstart writes:

Apple appeal to Investigatory Powers Tribunal may be the first case of its type:

Apple reportedly filed an appeal in hopes of overturning a secret UK order requiring it to create a backdoor for government security officials to access encrypted data.

"The iPhone maker has made its appeal to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, an independent judicial body that examines complaints against the UK security services, according to people familiar with the matter," the Financial Times reported today. The case "is believed to be the first time that provisions in the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act allowing UK authorities to break encryption have been tested before the court," the article said.

A Washington Post report last month said UK security officials "demanded that Apple create a backdoor allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud," including "blanket capability to view fully encrypted material."

Apple has publicly criticized the law, warning last year that the UK government is claiming power to demand access to the data of users in any country, not just the UK.

Apple responded to the recent order by pulling its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) service from the UK. The optional level of encryption for iCloud prevents even Apple from seeing user data. "Apple can no longer offer Advanced Data Protection (ADP) in the United Kingdom to new users and current UK users will eventually need to disable this security feature," Apple said last month.

"As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services and we never will," Apple also said.

Backdoors demanded by governments have alarmed security and privacy advocates, who say the special access would be exploited by criminal hackers and other governments. Bad actors typically need to rely on vulnerabilities that aren't intentionally introduced and are patched when discovered. Creating backdoors for government access would necessarily involve tech firms making their products and services less secure.

The order being appealed by Apple is a Technical Capability Notice issued by the UK Home Office under the 2016 law, which is nicknamed the Snoopers' Charter and forbids unauthorized disclosure of the existence or contents of a warrant issued under the act.

[...] Under the law, Investigatory Powers Tribunal decisions can be challenged in an appellate court.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Tests reveal a lack of microbial diversity on board. That's been linked to health issues in other settings:

With air filters and weekly wipe-downs and vacuuming, NASA goes to great lengths to keep the International Space Station clean so that astronauts stay healthy. But astronauts still often experience health problems like immune dysfunction, skin rashes and other inflammatory conditions. One reason may be because the ISS might be too clean, a new study suggests.

Microbes, tiny living organisms like bacteria and viruses, play an important role in human health. But samples of surfaces in the ISS reflect a striking lack of microbial diversity, Rodolfo Salido Benítez, a bioengineer at University of California, San Diego, and colleagues report February 27 in Cell.

[...] Inside and outside the body, microbes compete for resources and space, so maintaining a diverse set keeps any one of them from taking over and causing an health problems. Low microbial diversity in hospitals, for example, leads to a higher risk of infection. Even the microbes in your house can affect your health. One study found that Amish communities have a lower risk of asthma than other communities with similar lifestyles because their household dust contains microbes from farm animals.

[...] Maintaining a healthy diversity of microbes in confined spaces will be a growing concern as astronauts spend more time in space and new missions begin. Scientists will need to test new ways of adding more "good germs" to the mix, like bringing animals aboard or stocking the ISS pantry with fermented foods, says Pieter Dorrestein, a chemical biologist at UC San Diego.

"The reality is that we're going to inhabit space at some point, so this work will give us the first insight in terms of the things that we need to add and remove," Dorrestein says. "The most important message that we can pass on is how important is to not only look at what's present, but also what's absent."

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2025.01.039

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Climate experts have long believed that a volcanic supereruption—a mind-bendingly powerful explosion capable of altering Earth’s atmosphere—could wipe out a significant portion of life. But a new survey of geological records suggests the aftermath wouldn’t be quite as apocalyptic. It would still be bad—just not end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it bad.

This refreshing burst of optimism comes courtesy of a group of University of St. Andrews environmental scientists who were examining ice cores pulled from Greenland and Antarctica, as well as sediment cores from near the equator in the Pacific.

The cores contained tiny specks of ash, embedded in layers connected to the time period of the Los Chocoyos supereruption, which occurred in what is now known as Guatemala’s Atitlán caldera. While the Smithsonian’s Global Volcanism Project dates the eruption to 84,000 years ago, St. Andrews geologists claim to have more accurately dated the ash to 79,500 years ago.

Just for a frame of reference, the most powerful eruption in recent memory occurred on June 12, 1991, when the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo finally blew, after months of earthquakes and magma slowly seeping to the top. The resulting ash cloud was 22 miles (35 kilometers) high, and 20 million tons of sulfur was emitted into the atmosphere, leading to a 1 degree F (0.5 C) drop in global temperatures from 1991 to 1993, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. So much rock and magma was ejected that the mountain’s shape was irrevocably altered, leaving behind a depression called a caldera that was 1.6 miles (2.5 kilometers) across. Because the signs of eruption were caught early, thousands of people were able to leave the area beforehand and commercial air travel steered clear. Even so, the force was so huge, $100 million of damage was caused to jets flying hundreds of kilometers away.

That eruption measured only a 6 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. Los Chocoyos comes in at an 8, the lowest score required to register as a supereruption, which would still make it 100 times more powerful than Pinatubo.

fliptop writes:

New research published in Chemosphere reveals an alarming reality: everyday kitchen utensils may quietly harm your well-being. The research reveals the extent to which some cooking tools, particularly black plastic ones, contaminate food with deadly toxins while we cook:

Black plastic kitchenware is a serious problem. Most contain harmful chemicals like flame retardants, colorants, and other additives that can migrate into food during cooking. The study cites black non-stick cookware, plastic cutting boards, and plastic utensils as particular causes of chemical contamination.

Even though plastic kitchenware is convenient, cheap, and easy to clean, these benefits are paid for with a potential cost to your health. The longevity and ease of cleaning that sell the products to consumers cannot be worth the potential health risks they provide.

Scientists are most concerned with long-term exposure through regular food preparation.

Black spatulas, plastic forks and knives, and certain pans release toxic chemicals such as decabromodiphenyl ether (decaBDE), a flame retardant found in household goods. The chemical has been linked to thyroid and hormone disruption, cancer risks, and developmental issues in children. What makes these pollutants sneaky is that they are invisible – there is no way for consumers to know they are there.

Even more alarming, many of those toxic chemicals are recycled from electronics. Manufacturers put flame retardants in kitchenware in the guise of making kitchens safer against fire, but in doing so, they cause significant health risks that can outweigh any safety advantage.

[...] To minimize exposure to these poisons, substitute offending cookware with safer options that can be simply incorporated into your daily cooking routine:

• Replace plastic cutlery with old-school metal silverware, which will not leach chemicals into food and offers improved durability
• Substitute non-stick pans with stainless steel or cast iron cookware. Though stainless steel may take a bit longer to preheat, it offers a safer cooking surface free of potentially toxic substances
• Substitute plastic cutting boards with tempered glass cutting boards, offering a non-porous, chemical-free surface that is resistant to bacterial contamination and doesn't release microplastics when foods are being prepared.
• As an alternative to glass, opt for solid wood cutting boards without glue-based adhesives if glass seems impractical. Choose boards constructed from a single piece of wood rather than composite materials that can contain chemical adhesives. Keep in mind that these natural alternatives must be hand-washed rather than dishwasher-cleaned

DOI: Megan Liu, Sicco H. Brandsma, Erika Schreder - From e-waste to living space: Flame retardants contaminating household items add to concern about plastic recycling. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2024.143319

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/how-we-added-interlaced-video-to-raspberry-pi-5/

The very first Raspberry Pi had a composite video output, and all models with a 40-pin header have a display parallel interface (DPI) output. With some external components, DPI can be converted to VGA or RGB/SCART video. Those analogue interfaces are still in demand for retro media and gaming.

Raspberry Pi 5 was a big step up in processing power, but unlike previous models, its DPI block didn't support interlaced video (which isn't really part of the DPI standard), so it couldn't send full-resolution RGB to a CRT television. Until now.

To generate interlaced video, we had to do three things:

1. Get DPI to emit fields (even or odd lines of a frame-buffer) instead of frames
2. Time those signals so they will be in the proper arrangement for interlace
3. Generate appropriate sync pulses

The first part is easy. By changing an address and doubling the 'stride' between lines, we can arrange for DPI to read and display just the even or odd lines of a frame-buffer.

The second problem is solved by hacking the DPI peripheral. If we time it just right, we can change its configuration on the fly, so that every second frame — every second field, I should say — gets one extra blank line at the end.

The third problem is harder. RP1's DPI has no way to make vertical sync pulses start midway through a line.

Our RP1 chip has a Programmable Input/Output (PIO) block. We recently added PIO support to our version of the Linux kernel

Here, PIO snoops on DPI's horizontal sync (HSync) and data enable (DE) pins to generate vertical sync (VSync). Two of PIO's four state machines (SMs) are used: one SM serves as a timer, generating an 'interrupt' at the start and middle of each line. The other SM finds the start of the vertical blanking interval (the first line without DE), then counts half-lines to work out when to start and end the VSync pulse. Finally, it samples DE again to detect the extra blank line, to ensure it has the correct field-phase for next time.

The sync fixup consumes most of RP1's PIO instruction memory, so PIO can't be used for other cool things at the same time as generating interlaced DPI.

If you have a Raspberry Pi 5, a VGA666 HAT, and a VGA monitor that can run at 50Hz TV rates, you could test it by adding this to config.txt:

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

dtoverlay=vc4-kms-dpi-generic
dtparam=clock-frequency=13500000
dtparam=hactive=720,hfp=12,hsync=64,hbp=68
dtparam=vactive=576,vfp=5,vsync=5,vbp=39
dtparam=vsync-invert,hsync-invert
dtparam=interlaced

Composite sync too

VGA cables have separate wires for horizontal and vertical sync, but TVs combine everything in one signal (composite video). A halfway house, used in SCART, is 'composite sync', which multiplexes the two sync signals but keeps them separate from RGB.

RP1's DPI can't generate VSync in interlaced modes. Instead, we get it to output a 'helper signal' that alternates between 1-line and 2-line pulses. PIO snoops on HSync and the helper signal to synthesize CSync.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

BP shuns renewables in return to oil and gas:

BP has announcedit will cut its renewable energy investments and instead focus on increasing oil and gas production.

The energy giant revealed the shift in strategy on Wednesday following pressure from some investors unhappy its profits and share price have been lower than its rivals.

BP said it would increase its investments in oil and gas by about 20% to $10bn (£7.9bn) a year, while decreasing previously planned funding for renewables by more than $5bn (£3.9bn).

The move comes as rivals Shell and Norwegian company Equinor have also scaled back plans to invest in green energy and US President Donald Trump's "drill baby drill" comments have encouraged investment in fossil fuels.

Murray Auchincloss, BP's chief executive, said the energy giant had gone "too far, too fast" in the transition away from fossil fuels, and that its faith in green energy was "misplaced".

He said BP would be "very selective" in investing in businesses working on the energy transition to renewables going forward, with funding reduced tobetween $1.5bn and $2bn per year.

He said this was part of a strategy "reset" by the company to focus on boosting returns for shareholders.

Helge Lund, chair of BP, added that the new direction of the firm had "cash flow growth" at its heart.

Shares in the company climbed before Tuesday's announcement but fell shortly after.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The FCC runs an $8 billion federal subsidy program to help bring phone and broadband services to lower income homes and schools called the Universal Service Fund. The program was historically a bipartisan thing, until the extremist Trump administration came to town.

Driven by a fake right wing consumer group called “Consumers’ Research,” the Trumplican-stacked Fifth Circuit court of appeals recently took the radical step of ruling the entire program unconstitutional. The ruling, which ignored past Fifth Circuit and Supreme Court precedent, effectively declared the USF an unconstitutional, illegal tax, something seven court dissenters said was a preposterous leap.

Now the Supreme Court has stated they’ll hear the case, which will ultimately determine whether federal efforts to expand broadband access to poor, rural neglected communities is effectively illegal or not.

Not too surprisingly, 15 MAGA loyal Attorneys General, apparently with nothing better to do, have thrown their support behind the effort to effectively make helping poor people afford broadband illegal:

Original Submission

mhajicek writes:

https://newatlas.com/brain/cortical-bioengineered-intelligence/

"The world's first "biological computer" that fuses human brain cells with silicon hardware to form fluid neural networks has been commercially launched, ushering in a new age of AI technology. The CL1, from Australian company Cortical Labs, offers a whole new kind of computing intelligence – one that's more dynamic, sustainable and energy efficient than any AI that currently exists – and we will start to see its potential when it's in users' hands in the coming months.

Known as a Synthetic Biological Intelligence (SBI), Cortical's CL1 system was officially launched in Barcelona on March 2, 2025, and is expected to be a game-changer for science and medical research. The human-cell neural networks that form on the silicon "chip" are essentially an ever-evolving organic computer, and the engineers behind it say it learns so quickly and flexibly that it completely outpaces the silicon-based AI chips used to train existing large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT."

[...] Inside the CL1 system, lab-grown neurons are placed on a planar electrode array – or, as Kagan explained, "basically just metal and glass." Here, 59 electrodes form the basis of a more stable network, offering the user a high degree of control in activating the neural network. This SBI "brain" is then placed in a rectangular life-support unit, which is then connected to a software-based system to be operated in real time.

"A simple way to describe it would be like a body in a box, but it has filtration for waves, it has where the media is stored, it has pumps to keep everything circulating, gas mixing, and of course temperature control," Kagan explained.

In the lab, Cortical is assembling these units to construct a first-of-its-kind biological neural network server stack, housing 30 individual units that each contain the cells on their electrode array, which is expected to go online in the coming months.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

"What kind of pissing contest is this?":

Over the past few years, the tech industry has gone from cushy landing pad for STEM grads to a cesspit of corporate greed, where grueling hours are commonplace, and layoffs could strike at any moment.

Unfortunately for employees of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, the squeeze is just getting started.

In an internal memo sent out Wednesday and obtained by the New York Times, Google cofounder Sergey Brin — who's been mostly absent from the company since 2019, except when issuing edicts about the importance of AI — made it clear he wants his peons to focus even harder on developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), the long-promised "next step" in AI intelligence.

"I recommend being in the office at least every weekday," Brin wrote, implying that good employees should also spend a few weekends in the office.

"60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity," Brin added, stating that a "number of folks work less than 60 hours and a small number put in the bare minimum to get by... This last group is not only unproductive but also can be highly demoralizing to everyone else."

Google's current policy only mandates three in-office days, so the boss' memo comes across as a heavy-handed suggestion — especially at a corporation that's been criticized for unfairly distributing performance evaluations, leading to arbitrary layoffs.

The crunch comes after waves of layoffs sent over 13,000 employees packing in recent years. Though Google posted $26.3 billion in profit as recently as last October, it continues to downsize and outsource full-time jobs in a bid to siphon its operating budget into AI development.

[...] Should AGI ever arrive, it would have huge implications for labor and the broader economy. The trouble is, despite all the hype promising otherwise, there's little indication developers are actually closing in on the revolutionary tech. In fact, most evidence has instead been pointing toward a slowdown in AI progress.

[...] "Why do we need to have the biggest model? What kind of pissing contest is this?" asked Timnit Gebru on a 2023 episode of the podcast Tech Won't Save Us.

Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute — and used to work on Google's ethical AI team, but was sacked by the company after publishing a paper highlighting the environmental, social, and financial risks posed by AI.

"Because [those building AGI are] the loudest, and have the most money right now," Gebru continued, "they also influence any type of AI discourse because they try to make it look as if everything they're building is that — AGI or has AGI characteristics."

That certainly looks to be the case for Google, where billionaire executives employ vast armies of subcontractors to smooth over the rough edges of its increasingly expensive AI products.

[...] It wasn't immediately clear how many hours a week Brin spends working in his office, as Google didn't respond to a request for comment.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Ultra–high-power particle pulses could boost x-ray science and laboratory astrophysics:

By squeezing a packet of laser light into a tiny sliver of a second, physicists can produce superintense pulses that, if only for an instant, deliver as much power as 1 million nuclear plants. Such petawatt lasers have enabled scientists to manipulate materials in new ways, emulate the conditions inside planets, and even split atoms. Now, accelerator physicists have matched that feat, producing petawatt pulses of electrons that could also have spectacular applications.

"We've got the highest current, highest peak power electron beams ever generated, and we do that by just packing a large amount of charge into a very short bunch duration," says Claudio Emma, an accelerator physicist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory who led the study. Described in a paper published today in Physical Review Letters, the electron pulses last one-quadrillionth of a second but carry 100 kiloamps of current.

"It's a supercool experiment," says Sergei Nagaitsev, an accelerator physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory who was not involved in the work. Richard D'Arcy, a plasma accelerator physicist at the University of Oxford, adds, "It's not just an experimental demonstration of something interesting, it's a steppingstone on the way to megaamp beams." If achievable, those even more powerful beams might begin to perform extraordinary feats such as ripping particles out of empty space, he says.

[...] Petawatt electron pulses should have plenty of uses. Large facilities called free-electron lasers generate intense x-ray beams by firing electrons down a long chain of undulators. Those facilities, including SLAC's own Linac Coherent Light Source, could be made even brighter by firing shorter, more powerful electron bunches through the undulators. The amped-up lasers would open the way to, for example, probing chemical processes as they happen, Nagaitsev says. "These are the easy pickings."

An ultraintense electron pulse could also be used to generate plasmas like those seen in astrophysics, such as the jets of matter and radiation that shoot out of certain stellar explosions at near–light-speed. Researchers need only fire the electron beam into the right target. "This is a fantastic relativistic drill," Ferrario says. "The interaction of this with matter could be very interesting."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Former Intel CEO Craig Barrett said that Intel should not divide its business into two pieces, especially as it just had a technological breakthrough that would allow it to catch up with TSMC’s N2 process node. Barrett said this in his opinion piece on Fortune, in response to the suggestion of a few former Intel directors that championed dividing the chip giant instead of letting TSMC take it over.

Barrett said that the reason why Intel’s foundry business failed in the past years is because it lacked the technology to compete against the Taiwanese chipmaker, not because customers won’t trust Intel since it also makes and sells chips. But now that it’s seeing success with its 18A process technology, he argues that splitting off the foundry will only serve as a distraction and introduce complications. Instead, Intel should focus all its efforts on the 18A node, ensuring that it delivers “good customer service, fair pricing, guaranteed capacity, and a clear separation of chip designers from their foundry customers” alongside this advanced technology.

[...] Pat Gelsinger, who was ousted as CEO of the company just last December, was one of the key people who led Intel to achieve its recent technological breakthroughs that might put it on par with TSMC. Developing and setting up production for new chip technologies takes years, something that Gelsinger pushed under his watch. In the end, it seems that Craig Barrett thinks that forcing Pat Gelsinger to retire was the wrong move for intel. He says, “In my opinion, a far better move might be to fire the Intel board and rehire Pat Gelsinger to finish the job he has aptly handled over the past few years.”

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The number of interstellar objects coming from Alpha Centauri will increase over time:

Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the sun, is probably shedding comets and asteroids into our solar system — and even producing a few meteors in our sky.

Located just 4.3 light-years from Earth, Alpha Centauri consists of three stars that revolve around one another. If Alpha Centauri has an Oort cloud of distant comets as the sun does, about a million of these objects larger than a football field are now in our solar system, astronomers Cole Gregg and Paul Wiegert of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, estimate in work submitted February 5 to arXiv.org.

"Most of [the objects] would be in the far reaches of the solar system," Gregg says. That puts them well beyond the orbit of Pluto, where they are mingling with the native objects in the sun's own Oort cloud of cometary bodies.

Astronomers have only ever detected one interstellar asteroid and one interstellar comet in our solar system. But neither came from Alpha Centauri.

Just as Jupiter's gravity catapulted the two Voyager spacecraft onto interstellar trajectories, so the stars of Alpha Centauri and their planets should do the same to some of the comets and asteroids that swing around them. A small percentage of the ejected objects — 0.03 percent — pass through our solar system, Gregg and Wiegert say, but none of the large bodies is close enough for telescopes to see.

Still, small particles from Alpha Centauri probably reach Earth's atmosphere, where they burn up. Gregg and Wiegert estimate that up to 10 meteors worldwide come from Alpha Centauri each year.

upstart writes:

Biohybrid technology helps machines sense and heal:

In the TV series Doctor Who, treeborgs supply fresh air to spaceship passengers. Part tree, part robot, these devices convert starlight into oxygen. In Nnedi Okorafor's fantasy novel Zahrah the Windseeker, children receive their own "flora computers" made of leaves and vines, grown from CPU seeds and shaped into useful tech. Although these devices are fictional, flower-powered machines are getting real as a new generation of biohybrid technology blooms.

Engineers have long strived to make lifelike robots. But re-creating the complex functions of, say, a hand or leaf is impossible with synthetic materials, says Anand Mishra, an engineer at Cornell University. "There is a point where technology limits us."

Using life-forms to build ma­chines can overcome some of these limits. Living tissue, for example, has evolved all sorts of ways to scope out the environment — seeing light, feeling warmth, smelling and tasting food. To make robots that are similarly sensitive to their sur­roundings, Mishra has turned to fungal tissue.

Fungi aren't plants, but Mishra is interested in one of fungi's most plantlike features, mycelia. These rootlike structures tunnel through soil for nutrients and can detect en­vironmental cues such as light, heat and chemicals.

Mishra's team grew mycelia di­rectly into electrodes attached to two robots. The fungi communicat­ed with the robots through electrical signals called action potentials. These zaps are similar to those produced by heart and nerve cells.

Mycelia produce spontaneous action potentials, which triggered the biobots to walk and roll around. When flashed with ultraviolet light, the mycelia produced stronger zaps, which changed the robots' gait and showed that the bots could respond to the environment, Mishra's team reported in 2024 in Science Robotics.

Using fungi in biohybrid robots is still "pretty new," Mishra says. His team now hopes to test how such tech responds to other cues, such as gases. One way their robots' sen­sory superpowers might help in the real world is in agriculture. Future "shroom" bots could walk through crop fields, testing soil health and other conditions as they go.

While fungi may help robots bet­ter interact with the world, plant powers could help devices better survive it. "Many artificial [tech­nologies] have a shelf life," says materials scientist Fabian Meder of the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy. Electronics start to break down in a few years. Yet the oldest trees can stand tall for thousands of years. And while broken electronics require repairs, plants can recover from damage and adapt to new environments.

Original Submission