2025-12-27 23:00:00
Readers went all-in on biotech this year. Gene editing brought the broad treatment of genetic disease into view; cancer-fighting T cells took on tumors; and scientists found a way to 3D print tissues inside the body. Beyond biotech, AI chips and progress in quantum computing made waves; humanoid robots began to look almost affordable; and Kawasaki dreamed up a robot you ride like a horse. Here’s to another year of breakthroughs—thanks for reading!
Parkinson’s Patients Say Their Symptoms Eased After Receiving Millions of New Brain CellsShelly Fan
“Medications can keep some [Parkinson’s] symptoms at bay, but eventually, their effects wear off. For nearly half a century, scientists have been exploring an alternative solution: replacing dying dopamine neurons with new ones. [This year], two studies of nearly two dozen people with Parkinson’s showed the strategy is safe. A single transplant boosted dopamine levels for 18 months without notable side effects. Patients had few motor symptoms, even when they stopped taking regular medications.”
New Gene Therapy Reverses Three Diseases With Shots to the BloodstreamShelly Fan
“A team from the IRCCS San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Italy treated infant mice for three blood-related genetic diseases with a custom gene-editing shot that directly edited cells in the mice’s blood. …The edits were long-lasting and survived when transplanted into mice who had not been given the therapy. A dose of ‘mobilizing agents’—chemicals that stimulate cells in the blood and immune system—further boosted the effect in young adult mice.”
A Humanoid Robot Is Now on Sale for Under $6,000—What Can You Do With It?Kartikeya Walia
“[Unitree’s R1 is] a humanoid robot priced at under $6,000. That’s not pocket change, but it’s orders of magnitude cheaper than most robots in its class, which can run into tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. The R1 packs serious mobility, sensors, and AI potential into a package that could fit in a university lab, a workspace—or even, if you’re adventurous, your living room.”
Scientists Can Now 3D Print Tissues Directly Inside the Body—No Surgery NeededShelly Fan
“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.”
Forget Nvidia: DeepSeek AI Runs Near Instantaneously on These Weird ChipsJason Dorrier
“Whereas answers can take minutes to complete on other hardware, Cerebras said that its version of DeepSeek knocked out some coding tasks in as little as 1.5 seconds. According to Artificial Analysis, the company’s wafer-scale chips were 57 times faster than competitors running the AI on GPUs and hands down the fastest. That was last week. Yesterday, Groq overtook Cerebras at the top with a new offering.”
Meta’s New AI Translates Speech in Real Time Across More Than 100 LanguagesShelly Fan
“Using a voice synthesizer, the system translates words spoken in 101 languages into 36 others—not just into English, which tends to dominate current AI interpreters. In a head-to-head evaluation, the algorithm is 23 percent more accurate than today’s top models—and nearly as fast as expert human interpreters. It can also translate text into text, text into speech, and vice versa.”
Kawasaki Is Building a Robot You Ride Like a HorseMatías Mattamala
“A video shows the automated equine galloping through valleys, crossing rivers, climbing mountains, and jumping over crevasses. …Kawasaki’s current motorbikes are constrained to roads, paths, and trails, but a machine with legs has no boundaries—it can reach places no other vehicles can go.”
Scientists Target Incurable Mitochondrial Diseases With New Gene Editing ToolsShelly Fan
“Many [mitochondrial] diseases are inherited. But none are treatable. …The new study, published in Science Translational Medicine, took a new approach [to treatment]—gene therapy. Using a genetic tool called base editing to target mitochondrial DNA, the team successfully rewrote damaged sections to overcome deadly mutations in mice.”
Miniaturized CRISPR Packs a Mighty Gene Editing PunchShelly Fan
“CRISPR has a hefty problem: The system is too large, making it difficult to deliver the gene editor to cells in muscle, brain, heart, and other tissues. Now, a team at Mammoth Biosciences has a potential solution. …Their new iteration, dubbed NanoCas, slashed the size of one key component, Cas9, to roughly one-third of the original. …The compact NanoCas ‘opens the door’ for editing tissues inside the body.”
CAR T Therapy Wipes Out Deadly Metastasized Cancer in MiceShelly Fan
“The new study aimed to treat solid tumors like blood cancer—with a single injection into a patient’s vein. The team engineered CAR T cells that could hunt down metastasized cancer cells. When infused into the veins of mice they found the engineered cells rapidly shrank tumors in the liver and large intestines without causing dangerous immune side effects. The results ‘pave the way for a…clinical trial,’ wrote the team.”
Record-Breaking Qubits Are Stable for 15 Times Longer Than Google and IBM’s DesignEdd Gent
“[Transmons, the type of qubit favored by the likes of Google and IBM,] have advantages such as faster operation speeds, but their short shelf life [known as coherence] remains a major disadvantage. Now a team from Princeton has designed novel transmon qubits with coherence times of up to 1.6 milliseconds—15 times longer than those used in industry and three times longer than the best lab experiment.”
The post These Were SingularityHub’s Top 10 Stories in 2025 appeared first on SingularityHub.
2025-12-26 23:00:00
From Blue Origin to Airbus, private space stations are on the way, with the first scheduled to launch next year.
Commercial space stations are rapidly moving from concept to reality. As NASA prepares for the International Space Station’s retirement around 2030, a burgeoning private orbital industry could step into its shoes.
The ISS was humanity’s only permanent outpost in space for nearly a quarter of a century, until China’s Tiangong station was permanently crewed in 2022. But the ISS is nearing the end of its planned lifespan and NASA’s been clear that it doesn’t intend to replace the space station.
Instead, the agency wants to shift from landlord to tenant, purchasing space station services from private players rather than running a facility of its own. It’s betting the private space industry can help drive down costs and accelerate innovation.
This transition would mark a fundamental shift in the economics of low Earth orbit. And the first major milestone could come as soon as May 2026, when California-based startup Vast plans to launch its Haven-1 space station.
“If we stick to our plan, we will be the first standalone commercial LEO platform ever in space with Haven-1, and that’s an amazing inflection point for human spaceflight,” Drew Feustel, Vast’s lead astronaut and a former NASA crew member, recently told Space.com.
The company has already booked its launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9, and at around 31,000 pounds, Haven-1 will be the largest payload the rocket has ever carried. But as far as space stations go, it’s fairly modest.
Roughly the size of a shipping container, the single-module station will host crews of four for up to 10 days. But the company has tried its best to make the facility more comfortable than the utilitarian ISS, with “earth tones,” soft surfaces, inflatable sleep systems, and a revamped menu for astronauts.
Though the company hopes the design will tempt some customers, the station is really a proof of concept for Haven-2, a larger modular station that Vast hopes could succeed the ISS. Haven-2 will feature a second docking port to connect with cargo supply craft or new modules.
Development of Vast’s second station relies on funding from NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations program, however, the company says. Eager to spur a new orbital economy that can support its missions, the agency started the program in 2021 to fund and assist a host of startups building space stations.
The agency has paid out about $415 million in the program’s first phase to help companies flesh out their designs. But next year, NASA plans to select one or more companies for Phase 2 contracts worth between $1 billion and $1.5 billion and set to run from 2026 to 2031.
Axiom Space, one of the companies vying for this funding, plans to piggyback on the ISS to build its space station. The company will first launch a power and heating module and connect it to the ISS. The module will be able to operate independently starting in 2028. They’ll then gradually add habitat and research modules alongside airlocks to create a full-fledged private space station.
Meanwhile, Voyager Space and Airbus are designing a space station called Starlab, which recently moved into “full-scale development” ahead of an expected 2028 launch. The station can host four astronauts, features an external robotic arm, and is designed to launch in one go aboard SpaceX’s forthcoming Starship rocket.
In addition, Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, is working with Sierra Space and Boeing to build Orbital Reef, which they describe as a “mixed-use business park 250 miles above Earth.” The project recently put its designs to the test by asking people to carry out various day-to-day tasks, like cargo transfer, trash transfer, and stowage in life-size mockups of the habitat modules.
All these projects hope to have NASA as an anchor tenant. But they are also heavily reliant on the idea that there are a broad range of potential customers also willing to pay for orbital office space. With the cost of space launches continuing to fall, there’s hope that there will be ample demand from space tourists, researchers, and manufacturers eager to take advantage of the unique microgravity environments these stations can provide.
The economics are far from certain though, and competition will be fierce. Even if NASA is able to spur a private orbital economy, there may not be enough business to support multiple private space stations.
But with the sun setting on the ISS, a gap in the market is undoubtedly opening up. If things go to plan, we may soon find that humans have a lot more orbital destinations on the menu.
The post The Era of Private Space Stations Launches in 2026 appeared first on SingularityHub.
2025-12-25 23:00:00
Among pressing ethical concerns are whether brain organoids could one day feel pain or become conscious—and how would we know?
When brain organoids were introduced roughly a decade ago, they were a scientific curiosity. The pea-sized blobs of brain tissue grown from stem cells mimicked parts of the human brain, giving researchers a 3D model to study, instead of the usual flat layer of neurons in a dish.
Scientists immediately realized they were special. Mini brains developed nearly the whole range of human brain cells, including neurons that sparked with electrical activity, making them an excellent way to observe and study the human brain—without the brain itself.
As the technology advanced and brain organoids matured, researchers coaxed them to grow structural layers with blood vessels roughly mimicking the cortex, the part of the brain that handles reasoning, working memory, and other high-level cognitive tasks. Parallel efforts derived organoids for other parts of the brain.
Mini brains can be made from a person’s skin cells and faithfully carry the genetic mutations that could cause neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism. The lab-grown blobs also provide a nearly infinite source of transplantable neural tissue, which in theory could help heal the brain after a stroke or other traumatic events. In early studies, organoids transplanted into rodent brains formed neural connections with resident brain cells.
More recently, assembloids have combined mini brains with other tissues, like muscles or blood vessels. These Frankenstein-ish assemblies capture how the brain controls bodily functions—and when those connections go awry.
As brain organoids have grown increasingly complex, ethical concerns about their use have grown too. After all, they’re made of neural tissue, which in our heads forms the basis of memory, emotions, sensations, and consciousness.
To be clear, there’s no evidence brain organoids can think or feel. They are absolutely not brains in a jar. But scientists can’t ignore the possibility they could eventually develop some sort of “sensation,” such as pain and, if they do, what that might mean for their development.
Harvard’s Paula Arlotta is among those who are concerned. An expert in the field, her team has developed ways to keep brain organoids alive for an astonishing seven years. Each nugget, smaller than a pea, is jam-packed with up to two million neurons and other human brain cells.
Studying these mini brains for years has delivered an unprecedented look into human brain development. Our brains take nearly two decades to mature, an exceptionally long period of time compared to other animals. As the team’s organoids aged, they slowly changed their wiring and gene expression, reports Arlotta and colleagues in a recent preprint.
In older organoids, progenitor cells—these are young cells that can form different types of brain cells—quickly decided what type of brain cell they would become. But in younger organoids, the same cells took time to make their decision. As the blobs grew over an astonishing five years, their neurons matured in shape, function, and connections, similar to those of a kindergartner.
These long-lasting organoids could reveal secrets of the developing brain. Some efforts are tracing the origins of different cell types and how they populate the brain. Others are generating organoids from people with autism or deadly inherited brain disorders to test treatments.
Excitement is at an all-time high. But while championing the research, Arlotta and other experts recently penned an article arguing for a global regulation committee to steer the nascent field.
While scientists always keep ethics in the mind, they’re also motivated by scientific discovery and the search for new treatments. Plenty of promising research has also raised ethical concerns regarding sourcing or consent. Take the notorious CRISPR baby scandal in 2018. A Chinese scientist unlawfully and permanently altered a gene in embryos, and the children subsequently born with those DNA edits didn’t have a say in the matter.
Brain organoids present a different challenge. As they become more sophisticated and capture the brain’s cellular and structural makeup, could they begin to feel pain? Used in biocomputers, could they show signs of intelligence? Is it ethical to implant human mini brains into animals, where experiments show they integrate with host brains and blur the lines between man and beast? What about implanting lab-grown brain tissue into humans?
This November, experts (including Arlotta), ethicists, and patient advocates gathered at a conference co-organized by Stanford law professor Henry Greely, who specializes in bioethics. The meeting wasn’t designed to generate comprehensive guidelines regarding brain organoids. But ethics was a throughline during the entire conference as researchers presented recent successes in the field and pitched where it could go next.
In particular, Stanford’s Sergiu Pasca, a co-organizer of the meeting, attracted attention. Earlier this year, his team linked four organoids into a neural “pain pathway.” The model combined sensory neurons, spinal and cortex organoids, and parts of the brain that process pain.
The scientists dabbed the chemical behind chili’s tongue-scorching heat onto the sensory side of the assembloid. It produced waves of synchronized neural activity, suggesting the artificial tissue had detected the stimuli and transferred information.
That’s not to say it felt pain. Detecting pain is only part of the story. It takes a second neural pathway, which the assembloids lacked, to trigger the unpleasant feeling. But the experiment and others underscore the need for regulation. One idea pitched at the conference is to create a new global organization similar to the International Society for Stem Cell Research.
The commission would track advances in the field and provide oversight that balances scientific merit with patient needs. During the meeting, patients and family members expressed hope that mini brains could lead to new therapies, especially for those with rare genetic disorders or severe autism.
Pasca may soon deliver on that promise. His team is working to understand Timothy syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that leads to autism, epilepsy, and often fatal heart attacks. Last year they developed a gene-altering molecule that showed promise in brain organoids mimicking the disease. The treatment also worked in a rodent model, and the team is planning to submit a proposal for a clinical trial next year.
Drawing the line for brain organoid research will require global cooperation. “A continuing international process is needed to monitor and advise this rapidly progressing field,” wrote Arlotta, Pasca, and others. While there aren’t any universal agreements yet, dialogue on ethics, including discussion and engagement with the public, should guide the nascent field.
The post Five-Year-Old Mini Brains Can Now Mimic a Kindergartener’s Neural Wiring. It’s Time to Talk Ethics. appeared first on SingularityHub.
2025-12-23 23:00:00
The treatment reprograms T cells to hunt down a patient’s cancer. The approach could speed treatment and cut costs, but needs more study.
With just a single injection, a new treatment transforms immune cells in cancer patients into efficient tumor-killing machines. Now equipped with homing beacons, the cells rapidly track down and destroy their cancerous foes.
The shot is based on CAR T cell therapy, a breakthrough that uses genetic engineering to supercharge cancer-fighting T cells. Since its first FDA approval in 2017, CAR T has vanquished some deadly cancer cases with a one-and-done treatment.
But the technology is costly—for both body and wallet. CAR T cells are usually made outside the body in a lab. Patients undergo chemotherapy and other harsh treatments to make room for the enhanced immune cells, taxing an already ailing body with side effects. Making CAR T cells also takes precious time, and unfortunately, the clock often runs out.
At this year’s American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting & Exposition, an Australian team presented a different approach: Transforming normal T cells into super soldiers inside the body. Four people treated for stubborn multiple myeloma—a blood cancer that destroys bones and kidneys—went into remission for up to five months.
Led by Phoebe Joy Ho at the University of Sydney in collaboration with Kelonia Therapeutics, the trial, although small and still preliminary, marks a step towards the next revolution in CAR T therapy. Reported in The American Journal of Managed Care, an audience member from the conference said the findings “take your breath away.”
CAR T therapy has transformed cancer care. Six formulations are approved in the United States for a variety of blood cancers. Hundreds of clinical trials that expand the life-saving technology to solid cancers—including breast and brain tumors—are underway.
Beyond cancer, the therapy is also being used to treat life-long autoimmune diseases, such as lupus and multiple sclerosis, where the body’s immune system destroys its own organs. A small trial found a single infusion of CAR T cells reduced symptoms in patients with lupus. Other efforts are using these custom living drugs to tamp down infections, restore heart health after an attack, and remove the “zombie cells” that accumulate during aging.
The procedure usually goes like this: A patient’s own T cells are extracted from their blood. Using gene editing tools, like CRISPR, the cells are supplied with extra protein “hooks.” These hooks let them better grab onto their targets—cancer cells or otherwise.
After a short course of chemotherapy or radiation to deplete existing immune cells and make room for new ones, the engineered CAR T cells are infused back into the body. Once there, the genetically engineered cells repopulate the immune system and hunt down their prey. The process, while undeniably efficient for some cancers, is costly and takes months—time that some patients don’t have.
“Off-the-shelf” CAR T is one solution. Instead of editing a patient’s own cells, scientists could transform a healthy population of donor T cells. But attempts have faced immune rejection. Even with more genetic tinkering, the cells struggle to survive and expand in the body.
An alternative method directly converts a person’s T cells inside their own body.
In 2022, a team designed a shot to reprogram T cells using RNA. This avoids tinkering with a patient’s DNA. In mice with heart scarring, the injection revived the organ.
Other successes soon followed. Another shot converted T cells into CAR T cells within hours in mice and monkeys. The therapy targeted a type of blood cancer deriving from an overgrowth of B cells (another immune cell type). The shot boosted the immune system’s ability to destroy cancers in mice and slashed B cell numbers in monkeys. The effects lasted at least a month.
Both these treatments used fatty nanoparticles to deliver their payloads. They were also heavily modified to get around the so-called liver “sink.” Treatments often end up in the organ after injection. Careful design of surface proteins helped the therapies home in on T cells.
Gene-editors can also hitch a ride on a benevolent virus, stripped of disease-causing genes but highly efficient at tunneling into cells. Kelonia’s new technology used a virus to target T cells and avoid other cell types. One tweak, for example, added a small, engineered protein fragment that precisely targets T cells. Once inside, the payload synthesizes a gene that kills cancers.
The trick paid off. In a small trial, researchers gave the shot to four patients with previously uncontrollable multiple myeloma. The patients showed no signs of cancer in their bone marrow after a month. For one, the effect lasted at least five months. The side effects were also relatively minor, although some experienced mild cytokine release syndrome—an immune reaction that causes fever, chills, and other symptoms, which were easily managed.
The results come on the heels of a separate trial with similarly positive results. In July, four patients with multiple myeloma received an infusion of a virus carrying genes targeting T cells. Crafted by EsoBiotec in Belgium and Shenzhen Pregene Biopharma in China, the shot vanquished abnormal cells in the bone marrow of two patients after three months. The patients had previously undergone multiple cancer-related therapies to no avail.
The treatment did come with side effects. Blood pressure plunged, and two patients required supplemental oxygen. One showed confusion and temporary “brain fog.” These mental troubles aren’t common with traditional CAR T therapy, motivating researchers to find out why.
Despite risks, results from both trials highlight the promise of one-and-done CAR T therapy for deadly blood cancers. But it’s still early days. Scientists need to carefully follow patients over years to understand how long upgraded T cells remain in the body and their effect on cancers.
And not all viral carriers are made the same. Lentiviruses, used in both studies, can tunnel into the human genome, causing DNA typos that potentially trigger secondary cancers. The durability of the therapy, its longevity, and immune side effects also need to be studied.
Kelonia is adding more patients to their trial, amid an increasingly competitive landscape. AstraZeneca has acquired EsoBiotec to bring its technology to market. AbbVie, a drug company in Illinois, is testing the delivery of gene-editing tools to T cells via fatty nanoparticles in clinical trials. And Kelonia is planning a second clinical trial with an initial 20 patients and 20 more in an expansion phase, none of whom responded to at least three previous treatments.
“I think it gives us a glimpse into the future,” Ho told Science. “In vivo CAR T for multiple myeloma is here and hopefully it will stay.”
The post Single Injection Transforms the Immune System Into a Cancer-Killing Machine appeared first on SingularityHub.
2025-12-22 23:00:00
The LightGen chip is orders of magnitude more efficient too. But it isn’t ready to break out of the lab just yet.
As generative AI models grow more powerful, their energy use is becoming a serious bottleneck. A new fully optical generative AI chip could help by running advanced image and video generation tasks at speeds and efficiencies orders of magnitude beyond today’s hardware.
Training generative AI models requires an enormous amount of computing power and energy. But as demand explodes, the process of actually running the models to create images, text, or video—known as inference—is quickly becoming an even bigger drain on resources.
Video and image generation models are particularly energy intensive. While the efficiency of these models is constantly improving, a 2023 study found that generating 1,000 images using a leading model produced carbon emissions equivalent to driving a gas-powered car more than four miles.
One promising approach for slashing energy use is photonic computing, where processors use light instead of electricity. It’s a tactic multiple well-funded startups are pursuing in earnest. But most advances have been limited to simpler tasks like image classification or text generation.
Now, researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Tsinghua University in China have demonstrated an all-optical chip they call LightGen that is more than 100 times faster and more energy efficient than a leading Nvidia GPU on tasks like video and image generation.
“LightGen provides a new way to bridge the new chip architectures to daily complicated AI without impairment of performance and with speed and efficiency that are orders of magnitude greater,” the researchers write in a recent paper on the chip in Science.
A key aspect of the new design is its density. Generative models typically require millions of parameters to produce high-quality outputs, but previous photonic chips have had, at most, a few thousand artificial neurons. Using 3D packaging, however, LightGen integrates more than two million onto a device measuring just a quarter of a square inch.
The resulting processing boost allows the chip to work with images at resolutions up to 512-by-512 pixels. Older photonic chips typically broke up high-resolution images into smaller patches to process them. This not only takes longer but also reduces a model’s ability to draw statistical correlations between the different patches.
The researchers also innovated something called an “optical latent space.” Generative AI models work, in part, by compressing high-dimensional data into simpler representations. This forces them to remove less important information and only retain the bits that are integral to the input.
These condensed representations are then stored in a multi-dimensional map of concepts called a latent space. Models use these representations to generate new outputs when given a prompt.
LightGen’s developers replicated this process entirely optically. In their chip, a full-resolution image is transmitted through an optical encoder made up of several metasurfaces—ultra-thin structures designed to manipulate light—and then coupled into an array of optical fibers.
This process naturally filters out higher-order data, effectively condensing the information into simpler representations, which are then stored in the fiber array as the optical latent space. Another set of metasurfaces at the other end of the device, which can be switched depending on the task, then take the output from this latent space and use it to generate high-resolution images.
The researchers also came up with a novel training approach. Here, the chip learns probabilistic representations of training data, which makes it possible to tackle more complex tasks, like creating novel outputs. This is a promising development. So far, most photonic chips have focused on inference not training.
The team tested their chip on several demanding tasks, including the generation of high-resolution images of animals, converting images into different artistic styles, and even turning 2D images into 3D models. Notably, the chip achieved speeds and energy efficiencies more than two orders of magnitude better than Nvidia’s A100 GPU, one of the company’s most powerful AI chips.
The new optical chip isn’t ready to break out of the lab just yet. It still relies on bulky lasers and spatial light modulators to generate input signals, and the metasurfaces central to its design are currently made with specialized processes rather those you might find in standard chip factories.
Nonetheless, with further development, the work suggests optical processors could be a fast, energy-efficient way to power the cutting-edge of an increasingly power-hungry AI industry.
The post This Light-Powered AI Chip Is 100x Faster Than a Top Nvidia GPU appeared first on SingularityHub.
2025-12-20 23:00:00
What Will Your Life Look Like in 2035?Words by Robert Booth and Dan Milmo. Illustrations by Jay Cover | The Guardian
“When AIs become consistently more capable than humans, life could change in strange ways. It could happen in the next few years, or a little longer. If and when it comes, our domestic routines—trips to the doctor, farming, work, and justice systems—could all look very different. Here we take a look at how the era of artificial general intelligence might feel.”
OpenAI Built an AI Coding Agent and Uses It to Improve the Agent ItselfBenj Edwards | Ars Technica
“In interviews with Ars Technica this week, OpenAI employees revealed the extent to which the company now relies on its own AI coding agent, Codex, to build and improve the development tool. ‘I think the vast majority of Codex is built by Codex, so it’s almost entirely just being used to improve itself,’ said Alexander Embiricos, product lead for Codex at OpenAI, in a conversation on Tuesday.”
AI Coding Is Now Everywhere. But Not Everyone Is Convinced.Edd Gent | MIT Technology Review ($)
“Depending who you ask, AI-powered coding is either giving software developers an unprecedented productivity boost or churning out masses of poorly designed code that saps their attention and sets software projects up for serious long term-maintenance problems. The problem is right now, it’s not easy to know which is true.”
A Brain-Computer Interface Company Is Getting Into Organ PreservationEmily Mullin | Wired ($)
“The technology is used to preserve organs for transplant and as a life-support measure for patients when the heart and lungs stop working, but it’s clunky and costly. Science wants to make a smaller, more portable system that could provide long-term support.”
Scientists Built an AI Co-Pilot for Prosthetic Bionic HandsJacek Krywko | Ars Technica
“The main issue with bionic hands that drives users away from them, George explains, is that they’re difficult to control. ‘Our goal was making such bionic arms more intuitive, so that users could go about their tasks without having to think about it,’ George says. To make this happen, his team came up with an AI bionic hand co-pilot.”
A Faster-Than-Light Spaceship Would Actually Look a Lot Like Star Trek’s EnterpriseJesus Diaz | Fast Company
“Inside [the USS Enterprise’s twin] nacelles, the show’s creators imagined, lay the secret that made those trips possible: a warp drive that could crease spacetime itself, folding the universe in front of the ship while unfurling it behind, allowing faster-than-light travel not through speed but through geometry. For decades, physicists dismissed it as beautiful nonsense—a prop master’s fever dream. But now the math has caught up to the dream.”
The Great AI Hype Correction of 2025Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review ($)
“AI is really good! Look at Nano Banana Pro, the new image generation model from Google DeepMind that can turn a book chapter into an infographic, and much more. It’s just there—for free—on your phone. And yet you can’t help but wonder: When the wow factor is gone, what’s left? How will we view this technology a year or five from now? Will we think it was worth the colossal costs, both financial and environmental?”
Scientists Thought Saturn’s Moon Titan Hid a Secret Ocean. They Were WrongEllyn Lapointe | Gizmodo
“Rather, its 6-mile-thick (10-kilometer-thick) crust of ice gives way to a layer of slush interspersed with pockets and channels of meltwater near the moon’s rocky core. The shocking findings could completely change the way scientists search for signs of life inside this icy world.”
How OpenAI’s Organizational Problems Hurt ChatGPTStephanie Palazzolo, Sri Muppidi, and Amir Efrati | The Information ($)
“The change in the way ChatGPT users have reacted to new models powering the chatbot shows how the goals of OpenAI’s core AI research division, which develops its technology, don’t always serve the needs of ChatGPT, which drives most of the company’s revenue.”
CoreWeave’s Staggering Fall From Market Grace Highlights AI Bubble FearsRobbie Whelan | The Wall Street Journal ($)
“CoreWeave, the largest of a new breed of companies driving the artificial-intelligence boom, has watched $33 billion of value vaporize in six weeks. The share-price plunge of 46% comes as investors worry about a possible AI bubble, the fallout from a failed merger, and public criticism from high-profile short seller Jim Chanos, known for predicting the collapse of Enron.”
It’s the Great AGI RebrandHayden Field | The Verge
“‘Rizz’ lost its luster when grandparents started asking about its meaning. Teachers who dressed up as ‘6-7’ on Halloween drove a nail into the coffin of Gen Alpha’s rallying cry. And tech CEOs who once trumpeted the quest for ‘artificial general intelligence,’ or AGI, are jumping ship for any other term they can find.”
The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through December 20) appeared first on SingularityHub.
