Tag: technology

Bay Area scientist launches new company with sights on gene-edited babies

Last month, as he announced the launch, he said that Preventive has raised almost $30 million from private funding.

The funding is reportedly coming from some heavy hitters in the tech world, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his husband Oliver Mulherin.

Harrington also said his team included leading experts in the fields of reproductive technology, reproductive medicine and genome-editing.

“Our goal is straightforward,” he wrote, “to determine through rigorous preclinical work whether preventive gene editing can be developed safely to spare families from severe disease.”

Harrington acknowledged the major ethical concerns around the science and the gray areas in the regulatory process, which he said, have opened the field to potentially detrimental outcomes. 

“The combination of limited expert involvement and lack of a clear regulatory pathway has created conditions for fringe groups to take dangerous shortcuts that could harm patients and stifle responsible investigation,” the researchers said, adding, “Given that this technology has the potential to save millions of lives, we do not want this to happen.”

Gene editing can only be used in in vitro fertilization to allow for the first step of genetic testing on an embryo.

“It requires IVF because you have to have the embryo in a dish,” explained Stanford law professor Henry (Hank) Greely, a leading expert on ethical, legal, and social implications in bioscience technologies.

Once a test determines an embryo has the DNA makeup of a genetic disease, for example, like Huntington’s or cystic fibrosis, scientists would then use the DNA editing technique known as Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR, to make alterations to the DNA.

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New insight into light-matter thermalization could advance neutral-atom quantum computing

Light and matter can remain at separate temperatures even while interacting with each other for long periods, according to new research that could help scale up an emerging quantum computing approach in which photons and atoms play a central role.

In a theoretical study published in Physical Review Letters, a University at Buffalo-led team reports that interacting photons and atoms don’t always rapidly reach thermal equilibrium as expected.

Thermal equilibrium is the process by which interacting particles exchange energy before settling at the same temperature, and it typically happens quickly when trapped light repeatedly interacts with matter. Under the right circumstances, however, physicists found that photons and atoms can instead settle at different—and in some cases opposite—temperatures for extended periods.

Implications for quantum computing

These so-called prethermal states are fleeting on human timescales, but they can last long enough to matter for neutral-atom quantum computers, which rely on interactions between photons and atoms to store and process information.

“Thermal equilibrium alters quantum properties, effectively erasing the very information those properties represent in a quantum computer,” says the study’s lead author, Jamir Marino, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. “So delaying thermal equilibrium between photons and atoms—even for a matter of milliseconds—offers a temporal window to preserve and process useful quantum behavior.”

All quantum computers store and process information using qubits—the most basic units of quantum information and analogous to the binary bits used in classical computers. While classical bits can exist either as a 1 or a 0, qubits have the ability to exist in a superposition of two states at once, allowing for infinitely more complex calculations.

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‘Nobody Else Has It’: Trump Confirms Mysterious US ‘Sonic Weapon’ Used During Capture of Venezuela’s Maduro

A ‘secret’ weapon was used in Caracas Op, Trump confirms.

On January 3, US special operators realized a jaw-dropping operation that neutralized air defense over the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, and invaded the heavily guarded presidential palace of Miraflores, extracting dictator Nicolas Maduro and his wife, taking them back to New York to stand trial.

In the raid, dozens of Cuban and Venezuelan guards were killed, while the US suffered no fatalities.

One of the most mysterious aspects of the operation, which US President Donald J. Trump has now confirmed, is that US special forces are said to have used a ‘secret sonic weapon’ during the daring capture of Maduro.

Daily Mail reported:

“The President on Tuesday night bragged that ‘nobody else’ has the weapon, while glorifying the capabilities of the US military.

[…] [NewsNation anchor Katie Pavlich] asked Trump whether Americans should be ‘afraid’ of these sonic devices.

‘Well yeah,’ Trump responded. He then added that only the US military has access to the sonic weapons by noting, ‘It’s something I don’t want to… nobody else has it’.”

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Superconductivity Breakthrough Brings Practical Use Closer than Ever, as Team Unveils “Hidden Magnetic Order in the Pseudogap”

In the quest for room-temperature superconductivity, an international team of physicists has uncovered a link between magnetism and the mysterious phase of matter known as the pseudogap, which may finally yield clues to achieving superconductivity above frigid, artificial temperatures.

Given the artificially cold temperatures on which current superconducting technologies rely, making their use impractical for many applications, the search for new room-temperature superconducting materials is a major goal of applied physics research.

Now, physicists from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany and the Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ) at the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute in New York City are potentially helping to advance scientists closer than ever to superconducting at practical temperatures, as reported in a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Superconductors

Superconductors are materials that allow electrical current to flow without resistance. However, even in superconducting materials, the property only becomes active below a threshold temperature. This limits technological applications, as the materials require bulky cooling apparatus to maintain the desired temperatures, which are well below typical room temperatures.

Despite the volume of research involving superconductivity, in many ways it remains poorly understood, awaiting insights that will enable the next generation of quantum computing and other applications.

Some superconductors operate at what are considered “high temperatures,” although, in practical terms, these are still well below typical room temperatures and usually only slightly above absolute zero. What is interesting about those materials, however, is that they tend to exhibit a “pseudogap state” in which electrons begin to behave strangely as they transition to a superconducting state.

Understanding how this state leads to superconductivity could be essential to revealing the mechanisms at play and then applying them to produce room-temperature superconductors.

Testing the Pseudogap

Advancing toward resolving this long-standing issue, researchers used a quantum simulator set slightly above absolute zero to monitor electron spins. They identified that the up or down spins of electrons were influenced by their neighbors in a universal pattern.

At the center of the team’s work was the Fermi-Hubbard model, which describes electron interactions in a solid. The research team’s simulations successfully recreated this model, rather than a real-world material, using lithium atoms in an optical lattice of laser light at temperatures on the order of billionths of a degree above absolute zero. Simulations allowed the researchers a level of precision control impossible in real-world experiments.

When materials host an unaltered amount of electrons, they spin in an alternating pattern called antiferromagnetism. Through a process called “doping,” electrons can be removed, disrupting the magnetic order in a way that physicists had long assumed was permanent. Yet in the new observations, the team discovered a hidden layer of organization present beneath the seeming chaos at very low temperatures.

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This 1996 Law Protects Free Speech Online. Does It Apply to AI Too?

We can thank Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act for much of our freedom to communicate online. It enabled the rise of search engines, social media, and countless platforms that make our modern internet a thriving marketplace of all sorts of speech.

Its first 26 words have been vital, if controversial, for protecting online platforms from liability for users’ posts: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” If I defame someone on Facebook, I’m responsible—not Meta. If a neo-Nazi group posts threats on its website, it’s the Nazis, not the domain registrar or hosting service, who could wind up in court.

How Section 230 should apply to generative AI, however, remains a hotly debated issue.

With AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, the “information content provider” is the chatbot. It’s the speaker. So the AI—and the company behind it—would not be protected by Section 230, right?

Section 230 co-author former Rep. Chris Cox (R–Calif.) agrees. “To be entitled to immunity, a provider of an interactive computer service must not have contributed to the creation or development of the content at issue,” Cox told The Washington Post in 2023. “So when ChatGPT creates content that is later challenged as illegal, Section 230 will not be a defense.”

But even if AI apps create their own content, does that make their developers responsible for that content? Alphabet trained its AI assistant Gemini and put certain boundaries in place, but it can’t predict Gemini’s every response to individual user prompts. Could a chatbot itself count as a separate “information content provider”—its own speaker under the law?

That could leave a liability void. Granting Section 230 immunity to AI for libelous output would “completely cut off any recourse for the libeled person, against anyone,” noted law professor Eugene Volokh in the paper “Large Libel Models? Liability for AI Output,” published in 2023 in the Journal of Free Speech Law.

Treating chatbots as independent “thinkers” is wrong too, argues University of Akron law professor Jess Miers. Chatbots “aren’t autonomous actors—they’re tightly controlled, expressive systems reflecting the intentions of their developers,” she says. “These systems don’t merely ‘remix’ third-party content; they generate speech that expresses the developers’ own editorial framing. In that sense, providers are at least partial ‘creators’ of the resulting content—placing them outside 230’s protection.”

The picture gets more complicated when you consider the user’s role. What happens when a generative AI user—through simple prompting or more complicated manipulation techniques—induces an AI app to produce illegal or otherwise legally actionable speech?

Under certain circumstances, it might make sense to absolve AI developers of responsibility. “It’s hard to justify holding companies liable when they’ve implemented reasonable safeguards and the user deliberately circumvents them,” Miers says.

Liability would likely turn on multiple factors, including the rules programmed into the AI and the specific requests a user employed.

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Physicists Have Achieved Quantum “Alchemy” by Exciting Electrons to High-Energy States

A promising—and powerful—new engineering breakthrough could soon enable researchers to alter the properties of materials by exciting electrons to higher-than-normal energy levels.

In physics, Floquet engineering involves changes in the properties of a quantum material induced by a driving force, such as high-powered light. The resulting effect causes the material’s behavior to change, introducing novel quantum states with properties that do not occur under normal conditions.

Given its promising applications, Floquet engineering has remained of interest to researchers for many years. Now, a team of scientists from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) and Stanford University says they have developed a new method for achieving Floquet physics that is more efficient than past methods that rely on light.

21st Century Alchemy?

Professor Keshav Dani, a researcher with OIST’s Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit, said in a statement announcing the breakthrough that the team’s new approach leverages what are known as excitons, which have proven far more powerful in coupling with quantum materials than existing methods “due to the strong Coulomb interaction, particularly in 2D materials.”

Because of this, Dani says, excitons “can thus achieve strong Floquet effects while avoiding the challenges posed by light.” The team says this offers a novel means of exploring various applications, which include “exotic future quantum devices and materials that Floquet engineering promises.”

Such unique phenomena could enable material science applications that are almost akin to alchemy, in that the concept of creating new materials simply by shining light on them sounds more like science fiction than even the most advanced 21st-century engineering.

Floquet Engineering

In the past, Floquet effects have remained elusive in the lab, although investigations over the years have demonstrated their promise, provided they can be achieved under practical conditions. However, a major limiting factor has been reliance on intense light as the primary driving force, which can also lead to damage or even vaporization of the materials, thereby limiting useful results.

Normally, Floquet engineering focuses on achieving such effects under quantum conditions that challenge our usual expectations of time and space. When researchers employ semiconductors or similar crystalline materials as a medium, electrons behave in accordance with what one of these dimensions—space—will allow. This is because of the distribution of atoms, which confines electron movement and thereby limits their energy levels.

Such conditions represent just one “periodic” condition that electrons are subjected to. However, if a powerful light is shone on the crystal at a certain frequency, it represents an additional periodic drive, albeit now in the dimension of time. The resulting rhythmic interaction between light (i.e., photons) and electrons leads to additional changes in their energy.

By controlling the frequency and intensity of the light used as this secondary periodic force, electrons can be made to exhibit unique behaviors, which also cause changes in the material they inhabit for the time during which they remain excited.

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We’re Losing the Human Touch in Food

Food, which generally originates with a farmer, gardener, or orchardist, is fast losing its hands-on persona and increasingly gaining a mechanical, chemical platform.

Over the last decade, the United States has lost about 28,000 farms annually. While some of the loss is due to urbanization, most of the land remains farmland, either managed by other farmers or simply abandoned. While there are 1.3 million farmers over age 65, only 300,000 are 35 or younger. In 2022, the average American farmer was 58—years older than the average age in other vibrant economic sectors.

The American business landscape is largely anti-people. The current rush to artificial intelligence reflects how eagerly most businesses seek to eliminate people. The farming sector illustrates this trend better than most.

Between 1960 and 2019, the percentage of disposable personal income spent on food dropped from 17 percent to 9.5 percent. Meanwhile, health care spending rose from about 9 percent in 1980, to 18 percent today. Could the two possibly be related? One more data point: In the last 80 years, the farmgate share of the retail food dollar fell from around 40 percent to just 15.9 percent in 2023.

Farming is out of sight and out of mind for most people. Food appears on grocery store shelves. It’s treated as a pit stop between life’s more important activities. Fortunately, the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement is beginning to shine a spotlight on food, including revised and more truthful dietary guidelines.

For decades, American agriculture policy and practice have replaced farm labor with machines, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. This raises the question: Is food a living thing, or simply an inanimate pile of protoplasmic matter to be manipulated like wheel bearings or bottle caps?

As technological sophistication pulls our culture away from its biologically vibrant roots, it jeopardizes our functional microbiomes. Yes, that’s a packed sentence. You might need to reread it—slowly. The point is, our internal systems are more aligned with the ancient world than with Star Trek. Do we really want machines, chemicals, and drugs to be the medium in which our food is grown?

Wes Jackson, co-founder of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, has long advocated for a healthy “eyes-to-acres” ratio. He suggests that when fewer people interact with the land and the growing of food, both land stewardship and food integrity suffer.

Per-person agricultural output—the number of people one farmer feeds—has increased dramatically over the past century. Cyrus McCormick’s invention of the reaper in the 1830s launched the agricultural industrial revolution, enabling farmers to produce far more than ever before. Replacing the scythe with the reaper was revolutionary.

While technology brought many agricultural efficiencies, without ecological ethics, it may have gone too far. The introduction of subtherapeutic antibiotics in chicken waterers enabled the rise of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). With feed augers, water pumps, and massive barns, individual farmer output soared. And along came super bugs, C. diff, MRSA, avian influenza, polluted water, and fecal-stench air in surrounding neighborhoods.

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A Man Bought Meta’s AI Glasses, And Ended Up Wandering The Desert Searching For Aliens To Abduct Him

At age 50, Daniel was “on top of the world.”

“I turned 50, and it was the best year of my life,” he told Futurism in an interview. “It was like I finally figured out so many things: my career, my marriage, my kids, everything.”

It was early 2023, and Daniel — who asked to be identified by only his first name to protect his family’s privacy — and his wife of over three decades were empty nesters, looking ahead to the next chapter of their lives. They were living in an affluent Midwestern suburb, where they’d raised their four children. Daniel was an experienced software architect who held a leadership role at a large financial services company, where he’d worked for more than 20 years. In 2022, he leveraged his family’s finances to realize a passion project: a rustic resort in rural Utah, his favorite place in the world.

“All the kids were out of the house, and it was like, ‘oh my gosh, we’re still young. We’ve got this resort. I’ve got a good job. The best years of our lives are in front of us,” Daniel recounted, sounding melancholy. “It was a wonderful time.”

That all changed after Daniel purchased a pair of AI chatbot-embedded Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses — the AI-infused eyeglasses that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made central to his vision for the future of AI and computing — which he says opened the door to a six-month delusional spiral that played out across Meta platforms through extensive interactions with the company’s AI, culminating in him making dangerous journeys into the desert to await alien visitors and believing he was tasked with ushering forth a “new dawn” for humanity.

And though his delusions have since faded, his journey into a Meta AI-powered reality left his life in shambles — deep in debt, reeling from job loss, isolated from his family, and struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts.

“I’ve lost everything,” Daniel, now 52, told Futurism, his voice dripping with fatigue. “Everything.”

In many ways, Daniel was Meta’s target customer. He was an experienced tech worker and AI enthusiast who had worked on machine learning projects in the past and had purchased the Meta glasses because he was intrigued by their AI features.

“I used Meta [AI] because they were integrated with these glasses,” said Daniel. “And I could wear glasses — which I wore all the time — and then I could speak to AI whenever I wanted to. I could talk to my ear.”

Today, however, as he continues to recover from his mental health breakdown, Daniel describes himself as a “shell” of who he “used to be.”

“My kids don’t talk to me because I got weird. They don’t know how to talk to me,” said the father of four. “I was a cook… I played the guitar. I love music. I love learning.”

But now, he says, he’s “just trying to survive day to day.”

According to Daniel and multiple family members, the 52-year-old had no history of mania or psychosis before encountering Meta AI. He’d struggled with alcoholism, but quit drinking in early 2023, months before he purchased the Meta smart glasses.

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Mysterious ‘Dorito-Shaped’ Aircraft Spotted at Night Near Area 51

A nighttime thermal image captured during flight activity involving a B-2 Spirit shows a sharply triangular aircraft that resembles an unexplained platform photographed over Wichita in 2014.

Anders Otteson, the man behind the popular Uncanny Expeditions YouTube channel (that we have featured before here at The Aviationist), spotted something particularly intriguing during his latest trip to the Groom Lake area. While camping along Groom Lake Road and monitoring nighttime flight activity, early on Jan. 14, 2026, Otteson captured thermal imagery of a sharply triangular, “Dorito-shaped” aircraft operating in the restricted airspace surrounding Area 51. “Dorito” is a nickname commonly used by observers to describe an aircraft with a sharply triangular shape.

Otteson is not a casual observer. A videographer, explorer, and content creator, he routinely sets up camp in remote and unlikely locations with the specific goal of documenting activity rarely seen by the public. His epic expeditions into the deserts surrounding Groom Lake and other classified sites combine long nights in the field with thermal imaging equipment, optical sensors, and scanner monitoring, offering a unique perspective on flight activity associated with stealth aircraft and black programs.

However, the latest sighting is even more interesting than usual, as the aircraft he spotted flying at night over Nevada bears a striking resemblance to the now somewhat famous triangular aircraft photographed in daylight over Wichita, Kansas, in 2014, an image that, as our analysis at the time showed, appeared to be legitimate and unaltered.

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How the Pentagon Is Quietly Turning Laser Communications Into the Backbone of Future Space Warfare

Military communications have long depended on radio waves bouncing invisibly across land, sea, air, and space. However, as satellites multiply in orbit and the electromagnetic spectrum grows increasingly contested, the limits of traditional radio-frequency links are becoming harder to ignore.

Now, a new empirical study suggests that a less visible—and far more powerful—alternative is edging closer to practical, operational use: laser-based communications that can adapt on the fly to harsh and unpredictable conditions.

In a paper published in Optical Engineering, researchers from the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency (SDA) describe the development and testing of a new optical receiver designed to support the SDA’s latest laser communication standard.

The research focuses on how to reliably receive laser signals that fluctuate wildly in strength as satellites race overhead—but its implications extend well beyond the lab.

At stake is whether the U.S. military can build a resilient, high-speed space communications backbone capable of supporting future defense operations.

The study focuses on the Space Development Agency’s Optical Communication Terminal standard, a set of specifications intended to ensure that laser communication systems built by different vendors can communicate with one another.

Interoperability is central to SDA’s “Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture” (PWSA), a satellite architecture composed of hundreds of relatively small spacecraft operating together in low Earth orbit.

Laser links promise far higher data rates than radio systems and are inherently harder to jam or intercept. However, they also introduce new technical hurdles, especially when signals must pass through Earth’s turbulent atmosphere.

“The Space Development Agency (SDA) has developed an Optical Communication Terminal standard to ensure system interoperability among a number of industry partners by defining critical technical specifications ranging from initial pointing, acquisition, and tracking to data modulation formats and error-correction protocols,” researchers explain.

That standard, now in its fourth major revision, adds support for what are known as burst-mode waveforms—signals that trade continuous transmission for short, intense pulses.

The appeal of burst mode lies in flexibility. When a satellite passes over a ground station, the strength of its laser signal can vary by roughly 20 decibels from start to finish due to changing distance, pointing geometry, and atmospheric distortion.

Rather than designing a system for worst-case conditions and accepting inefficiency the rest of the time, burst-mode signaling allows operators to dynamically sacrifice data rate in exchange for greater signal margin. To put it simply, the link can slow down when conditions are bad, rather than dropping out entirely.

To test how well this concept works in practice, researchers built and characterized a prototype ground receiver optimized for the SDA standard’s new burst-mode formats.

Unlike more complex coherent optical systems, the receiver relies on a large-area avalanche photodiode (APD) that can collect distorted light without the need for adaptive optics. That choice reflects a broader design philosophy: favoring robustness and simplicity over maximum theoretical performance.

“Burst-mode waveforms offer extended receiver power efficiency at the expense of data rate for longer range applications or size, weight, and power constrained terminals,” researchers explain.

For a mobile ground station, a ship at sea, or even an aircraft receiving data from space, maintaining a reliable link can matter more than pushing the highest possible throughput at every moment.

The experiments described in the paper show that the prototype receiver performs close to theoretical expectations across a wide range of operating conditions, particularly once front-end signal conditioning is applied.

While researchers stop short of claiming a fully fielded system, they describe it as an initial demonstration of an SDA-compliant burst-mode optical receiver—an important milestone for a standard intended to underpin real-world deployments.

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