The World Stage: 3.0 - Adjacent News

April 18th, 2025: “That makes it [technology] very human. That’s always been my understanding of technology: It’s not a thing from outer space, it’s a projection of us. It can be hideously awful, murderous, and deadly, and it can also be fantastic and brilliant and life-affirming.” - David Cronenberg

MIT Backs Away From Paper Claiming Scientists Make More Discoveries with AI

May 18th, 2025: The institution didn’t expand on what exactly was wrong with the paper, citing “student privacy laws and MIT policy.” But the researcher responsible for the paper is no longer affiliated with the university, and MIT has called for the paper to be pulled from the preprint site arXiv. It has also withdrawn the paper from consideration by the Quarterly Journal of Economics, where it had been submitted for evaluation and eventual publication.

David Autor, an MIT economist who touted the paper, told WSJ, “More than just embarrassing, it’s heartbreaking.” It’s also a major blow to research on AI in the workforce. The paper seemed to suggest that researchers were making many more discoveries when aided by AI, suggesting that there may be a boom in scientific breakthroughs on the horizon. Now there’s doubt around just how much of that was genuine, and just how much we can learn from how the introduction of AI affects the people using these tools.

Nasa Revives Voyager Thrusters ‘Considered Dead’ for 20 Years

May 16th, 2025: Voyager’s primary roll thrusters had stopped working in 2004 after losing power in two small internal heaters, but the team managed to restart the thrusters while the spacecraft cruises through interstellar space at a distance of 15.14 billion miles away (24.4 billion kilometers).

Voyager 1 launched in 1977, less than a month after its twin probe, Voyager 2, began its journey to space. The twin spacecraft rely on a set of primary thrusters that move them around to keep their antennas pointed toward Earth so they can send data and receive commands.

Scientists Can Now 3D Print Tissues Directly Inside the Body - No Surgery Needed

May 12th, 2025: Dubbed deep tissue in vivo sound printing (DISP), the system uses an injectable bioink that’s liquid at body temperature but solidifies into structures when blasted with ultrasound. A monitoring molecule, also sensitive to ultrasound, tracks tissue printing in real time. Excess bioink is safely broken down by the body.

T. rex researchers eviscerate 'misleading' dinosaur leather announcement

April 30th, 2025: A partnership of companies has announced that it plans to make luxury fashion accessories out of Tyrannosaurus rex "leather" — but researchers say it won't be the real deal.

The T. rex leather will be produced in a lab and is intended to be an "eco-friendly" and "cruelty-free" alternative to traditional leather, according to a statement released by creative agency VML, one of the three companies involved.

…

However, dinosaur experts told Live Science that making real T. rex leather would require DNA from the extinct predator, and there isn't any. Furthermore, paleontologists have only found T. rex collagen in bone, not skin, and skin is the basis for leather.

The Composer Still Making Music Four Years After His Death - Thanks to an Artificial Brain

April 8th, 2025: Both sculptural and sonic, the installation features 20 large parabolic brass plates which curve out from the walls like golden satellite dishes. Hidden behind each plate is a transducer (like a speaker) and a mallet, which respond to neural signals from the mini-brain – filling the space with a kind of breathless, disembodied soundtrack.

Your Next Pet Could Be a Glowing Rabbit

February 19th, 2025: Now, Zayner wants to create the next generation of pets. “I think, as a human species, it’s kind of our moral prerogative to level up animals,” she says.

[ see also this … & this ]

Exploring the wild and disturbing world of “scienceploitation” with Timothy Caulfield

February 13th, 2025: “You write that humans process an estimated 74 gigabytes of information every day. Neuroscientists Sabine Heim and Andreas Keil noted that 500 years ago, ‘74 gigabytes of information would be what a highly educated person consumed in a lifetime, through books and stories.’ I’ve never seen our era of information overload quantified in such a clear way.” - Ross Pomeroy