The 10-Second Scan * Helion's Polaris prototype achieved measurable deuterium-tritium fusion at 150 million degrees Celsius, a first for any privately developed fusion machine. * Cambridge researchers discovered a 45-nucleotide RNA molecule capable of copying itself, published in Science. * OpenAI deployed its first production model on non-NVIDIA hardware, generating code
The 10-Second Scan * OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Mistral jointly launched an accelerator for European AI startups building on their foundation models. * An OpenAI researcher resigned over ChatGPT ads, warning the company risks becoming "the next Facebook." * The FDA approved a wearable electric-field device for locally advanced
The 10-Second Scan * The FDA refused to review Moderna's application for the first mRNA flu vaccine. * White-collar workers are leaving their careers for trades and therapy degrees. * With AI assistance, scientists have identified rare “universal paralog” genes that duplicated even before the last universal common ancestor. * Half of
The 10-Second Scan * Wall Street shed $611 billion in a single week as investors realized AI can replicate what entire software companies were built to do. * An AI system reads brain MRIs in seconds with up to 97.5% accuracy, flagging emergencies faster than radiologists can open the file. * Anthropic&
The 10-Second Scan * Cloudflare launched an open-source tool that lets anyone run a personal AI agent on edge infrastructure - no local hardware required. * New York lawmakers proposed a three-year moratorium on new data center construction - the sixth state to consider such a pause. * A California community blocked a
The 10-Second Scan * A stroke device tripled reperfusion rates for ischemic strokes that had no proven treatment. * Oregon's Supreme Court dismissed 1,400 criminal cases over a shortage of public defenders. * A company is spending $1,000/engineer/day on AI tokens to write all production code without
The 10-Second Scan * Big Tech just committed $650 billion to AI infrastructure in 2026 - more than the inflation-adjusted cost of the Apollo program, from a single company alone. * A trillion dollars in software company value evaporated in eight days after an AI tool started doing what entire SaaS companies
The 10-Second Scan * OpenAI's first model that helped create itself shipped this week. * January layoffs hit their highest level since 2009 - 108,000 jobs cut in a single month. * A machine learning method just compressed battery lifetime testing from months to days. * 1.6 million AI agents
Picture your great-grandmother in 1925. A century ago, she would write letters by hand, wait weeks for replies. The radio is a miracle. Antibiotics don't exist yet. Flight is a novelty for the wealthy and reckless. The idea of holding a device that accesses all human knowledge, lets
Multi-modal is the buzzword of the moment in AI circles. The prevailing wisdom sounds reasonable enough: there's no one-size-fits-all model, so you pick the right tool for the right task. A language model for text, a vision model for images, an audio model for speech. You assemble a
The problem with dogmatic human exceptionalism One of the most persistent habits in human thinking is reductionism disguised as rigor. A particularly harmful form of this tendency appears when we encounter something that does not share our unique form of being, we treat that difference as evidence of absence. From
How intelligence outgrew enclosure during the Fourth Grand Emergence (2025-2041) Abstract: A retrospective exploration of human-synthescent symbiosis through the lens of the open-source revolution that made it possible. This narrative traces the evolution from the extractive “AI age” of the mid-2020s to the critical inflection point when distributed collaboration outpaced