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A complex web of interrelated factors make Earth a life-supporting planet, and some of those factors are chemical. New research shows how oxygen abundance regulates the availability of the important chemicals phosphorous and nitrogen on planets, and that few planets get it right. While discouraging, it could help us optimize our search for habitable worlds.

A mathematical equivalent of a microscope with variable resolution has shed light on why some atoms are exceptionally stable, a riddle that has persisted in nuclear physics for decades

In this week’s news-and-snark piece, Bill Maher offers a piece that may be controversial, for it’s about how men need to be “men” again.  He avers that the loss of masculinity in males is one reason why women are disappointed in men, and why people are having less sex.  The data are eye-opening; for example, 44% of Gen Z men say they’ve had no relationship experience at all during their teen years.  That means up to age 20! And you might be interested in the new genre of literature he describes: “romantasy”, in which women get involved with animals or half-animals like centaurs.

His solution? Men should “man up”. His example: Taylor Swift being engaged to football star Travis Kelce (“old-school wood”) after writing songs about all the lame men she was once involved with. (He describes songs by other women.) Is he right?  I have no idea.

The guests are Jonathan Haidt (not shown), Stephanie Ruhle and Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster (Retired).

 

The Moon has a busy next two weeks ahead of it. Fresh off of Tuesday’s annular solar eclipse, the Moon begins an evening tour of the planets in the last half of February 2026. The waxing Moon actually slides by every planet except Mars over the next week. As a highlight, the waxing crescent Moon actually occults the planet Mercury in a rare celestial event on the night of Wednesday, February 18th.

The psychedelic DMT has been linked to improved mental health outcomes before, but now, scientists have shown it reduces depression symptoms more than a placebo when given alongside therapeutic support

The big bang wasn’t the start of everything, but it has been impossible to see what came before. Now a new kind of cosmology is lifting the veil on the beginning of time

Scientists have developed a new way to read the hidden states of Majorana qubits, which store information in paired quantum modes that resist noise. The results confirm their protected nature and show millisecond scale coherence, bringing robust quantum computers closer to reality.

Scientists have developed a new way to read the hidden states of Majorana qubits, which store information in paired quantum modes that resist noise. The results confirm their protected nature and show millisecond scale coherence, bringing robust quantum computers closer to reality.

It’s not easy being a futurist (which I guess I technically am, having written a book about the future of technology). It never was, judging by the predictions of past futurists, but it seems to be getting harder as the future is moving more and more quickly. Even if we don’t get to something like “The Singularity”, the pace of change in many areas of technology is speeding up. Actually it’s possible this may, paradoxically, be good for futurists. We get to see fairly quickly how wrong our predictions were, and so have a chance at making adjustments and learning from our mistakes.

We are now near the beginning of many transformative technologies – genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, additive manufacturing, robotics, and brain-machine interface. Extrapolating these technologies into the future is challenging. How will they interact with each other? How will they be used and accepted? What limitations will we run into? And (the hardest question) what new technologies not on that list will disrupt the future of technology?

While we are dealing with these big question, let’s focus on one specific technology – controllable robotic prosthetics. I have been writing about this for years, and this is an area that is advancing more quickly than I had anticipated. The reason for this is, briefly, AI. Recent advances in AI are allowing for far better brain-machine interface control than previously achievable. Recent advances in AI allow for technology that is really good at picking out patterns from tons of noisy data. This includes picking out patterns in EEG signals from a noisy human brain.

This matters when the goal is having a robotic prosthetic limb controlled by the user through some sort of BMI (from nerves, muscles, or directly from the brain). There are always two components to this control – the software driving the robotic limb has to learn what the user wants, and the user has to learn how to control the limb. Traditionally this takes weeks to months of training, in order to achieve a moderate but usable degree of control. By adding AI to the computer-learning end of the equation, this training time is reduced to days, with far better results. This is what has accelerated progress by a couple of decades beyond where I thought it would be.

But it turns out this AI-assisted control can be a double-edged sword. To understand why we need to quickly review how the human brain adapts to artificial bodies or body parts. The short answer is – quite well. The reason is that our sense of ownership and control is all a constructed illusion of the brain in the first place. Circuits in our brain create the subjective sensation that each part of our body is part of us, that we own that body part (the sense of ownership) and the we control that body part (a sense of agency). We know about this largely from studying patients who have damage in one or more of these circuits that causes them to feel like a body part is not theirs or that they don’t control it.

This means that this circuitry can be hacked to make the brain create the sensation that you own and control a robotic or virtual limb. Luckily, this hacking is actually pretty simple. The brain compares different sensory inputs to see if they match, while also comparing motor intentions with motor outputs. So – if you see and feel a limb being touched, your brain will interpret that as you owning the limb. It can be that simple. If you intend to make a movement, and you see and feel the limb make that movement, then you feel as if you control the limb. So a robotic limb with some sensation, with some haptic feedback, and that does what we want it to do, will feel as if it is naturally part of us. The research is moving now in this direction, to close these loops as much as possible.

This, however, is where we run into a snag with AI-controlled robotic limbs. Part of the advance is that AI can add fine motor control to an artificial hand, say. Quickly, robotic movement tends to fall into one of three categories. You can directly control the robot, the robot can carry out a pre-programmed sequence of movements, or the robot can determine its movements in real time based on sensory feedback. When seeing a robotic demonstration you should always ask – what type of control is being demonstrated?

For robotic limbs what we want is direct control of the robot. While this is advancing, it is still somewhat limited and clumsy. So we can refine the direct control by adding one or both of the other two types of control. This means to some extent the robotic limb is carrying out the desired movements of the user with internal control. This can greatly increase the functionality of the robotic limb, but it comes at a cost of the user’s sense of embodiment and agency. Imagine if your hand were executing movements all by itself. It would feel uncanny and unnerving.

This is a long windup to a new study which tries to address this issue. The researchers were looking at the effect of the movement speed of the AI-controlled robotic limb to see how that affected the user’s sense of ownership and agency. What they found was not surprising, but good to know that this variable is effective and needs to be taken into consideration. They varied the execution time of an AI-controlled movement from 125 ms to 4 seconds. A moderate speed, about 1 second, resulted in the best sense of ownership and agency (or we can say the least interference with these senses). The further you got to either extreme the more the user felt an uncanny sense of unease, as if they did not own or control the robotic limb. This is a Goldilocks effect – too fast or too slow is no bueno, but just right results in a good outcome.

This result also makes sense from the perspective that prior neurological research shows that our brains also evaluate the world by how it moves. We separate agents from non-agents by how they move (the latter moves in an inertial frame while the former does not). Neurologists also know this because diseases that are movement disorders can often be diagnosed (and sometimes at a glance) by how the patient moves. Our brains are finely tuned to what constitutes normal human movement. Too fast or too slow, hypokinetic or hyperkinetic, and our brains immediately register that something is wrong.

So if we see our robotic limb moving at a normal human pace, doing what we want it to do (even though the fine movements are enhanced by AI) that can still be good enough for us to accept the limb as belonging to us and that we control it. There is likely also a Goldilocks zone here as well – too much AI control will break the illusion of control, while too little is of no use, but just right will be the best compromise between functionality and acceptance.

The nuances of neurological control through a brain-machine interface of an AI-enhanced robotic limb is one of those futurism problems that would have been difficult to anticipate.

The post The Future of AI-Powered Prosthetics first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Dark energy is one of those cosmological features that we are still learning about. While we can’t see it directly, we can most famously observe its effects on the universe - primarily how it is causing the expansion of the universe to speed up. But recently, physicists have begun to question even that narrative, pointing to results that show the expansion isn’t happening at the same rate our math would have predicted. In essence, dark energy might be changing over time, and that would have a huge impact on the universe’s expansion and cosmological physics in general. A new paper available in pre-print on arXiv from Dr. Slava Turyshev, who is also famously the most vocal advocate of the Solar Gravitational Lens mission, explores an alternative possibility that our data is actually just messy from inaccuracies in how we measure particular cosmological features - like supernovae.

Biologists have debated the reason why Homo sapiens evolved a prominent lower jaw, but this unique feature may actually be a by-product of other traits shaped by natural selection

For the first time, researchers have shown that self-assembled phosphorus chains can host genuinely one-dimensional electron behavior. Using advanced imaging and spectroscopy techniques, they separated the signals from chains aligned in different directions to reveal their true nature. The findings suggest that squeezing the chains closer together could trigger a dramatic shift from semiconductor to metal. That means simply adjusting density could unlock entirely new electronic states.

For the first time, researchers have shown that self-assembled phosphorus chains can host genuinely one-dimensional electron behavior. Using advanced imaging and spectroscopy techniques, they separated the signals from chains aligned in different directions to reveal their true nature. The findings suggest that squeezing the chains closer together could trigger a dramatic shift from semiconductor to metal. That means simply adjusting density could unlock entirely new electronic states.

We are used to heat flowing from hot objects to cool ones, and never the other way round, but now researchers have found it is possible to pull off this trick in the strange realm of quantum mechanics

Claiming that an inflammatory response to injury is inherently therapeutic is a massive leap of faith.

The post The Red Marks of Pseudo-Medicine: Gua Sha first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

New data from major dark-energy observatories suggest the universe may not expand forever after all. A Cornell physicist calculates that the cosmos is heading toward a dramatic reversal: after reaching its maximum size in about 11 billion years, it could begin collapsing, ultimately ending in a “big crunch” roughly 20 billion years from now.

New data from major dark-energy observatories suggest the universe may not expand forever after all. A Cornell physicist calculates that the cosmos is heading toward a dramatic reversal: after reaching its maximum size in about 11 billion years, it could begin collapsing, ultimately ending in a “big crunch” roughly 20 billion years from now.

The shape of the cosmos depends on a balance of two competing forces: the pull of gravity and the expansion driven by dark energy. Columnist Leah Crane explores what observations tell us about how much universe is out there and whether it’s shaped like a sheet, a saddle or something else entirely

The smell of rotten eggs has solved one of exoplanet science's most persistent mysteries. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have detected hydrogen sulfide gas in the atmospheres of four massive Jupiter like planets orbiting the star HR 8799, marking the first time this molecule has been identified beyond our Solar System. The discovery settles a long standing debate about whether these enormous worlds are truly planets or failed stars called brown dwarfs because the sulfur had to come from solid matter accreted during planet formation, not gas!

Intermittent fasting appears to be no better than doing nothing when it comes to helping people who are overweight or have obesity lose weight