Let's start with a peace-offering, after the consequential (we hope) US midterm elections. I'll be commenting further, of course, including a note at the bottom about who will benefit most, if the Democrats turn on each other in a circular firing squad.
BUT THIS TIME LET'S GO BACK TO SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE!
(In other words, my proper lane! ;-)...
== Cool stuff abounds! ==
Let's start with a few positive news science stories I've collected...
...like some endangered species recovering and ozone hole decreasing and renewables far outpacing every other form of power… though extinctions still happen and CO2 keeps pouring into the air and the oceans are dangerously warming and acidifying… but do see some good news we need.
(I attended a lecture yesterday by a Caltech atmospheres researcher and yes... CO2+Methane spewed by humans is generating global warming with hugely disruptive effects upon a world whose stability we count-on. It's beyond proved and I welcome escrowed wager stakes.)
Okay then, here’s a nice roundup of good news in medicine, including… new pain relievers, a gonorrhea vaccine, a new cure for whipworm infections, newer weight loss drugs, and more... while diseases we thought defeated are now surging through those groups rejecting vaccines.
Want another Earth prediction? How about gravity lasers based on stimulated emission of gravitons from resonant gravity waves? Take a look at this recent article. If you have read Earth (and you should: Hugo runner-up;-) you will see its relevance!
Scientists turned to AI to help develop a new, super-strong steel alloy that’s perfect for a simple 3D-printing process.
A stillsuit! Engineers have developed a jacket that captures and stores drinking water directly from the air.
A study details how China’s massive re-greening effort has altered the country’s hydrology, shifting more precipitation to some areas while drying out others. The main driver behind this change is an increase in both evaporation and transpiration—a process where plants release water vapor through pores called stomata.
Among the best sci-tech videos I ever saw, The World's Most Important Machine details one of the core technologies - transistors, which enabled every extreme innovation of our era, from your cell phone to Nvidia chips and AI. Each step in this process was in itself a stroke of genius and there were hundreds. (In the 70s I was briefly a well-paid expert in the grampa of this tech, till I abandoned that career to go back to grad school.)
And this may be why the AIs are emerging at a pace slow enough to let us do the heavy slogging. Because this is pure human genius at work. They want to learn the methods of invention before making us obsolete!
I joke in that last bit. But this is a total indictment of the whole UFO - Disclosure cult - especially in the top scenario going around. You know... w've thrown thousands of top scientists and techies into an urgent, Manhattan-style project to dissect and reverse engineer alien stuff, right?
Except there are ZERO great tech leaps of the last 80 years that are plausibly 'reverse-engineered alien technology.' All were clearly products of human incremental genius. As were - BTW - the Pyramids and Easter Island statues and the rest! Well... until...
...until the recent AI/LLM surge! Even understanding the notions - transformers and the rest - I could plausibly envision...
...heck, that's why I wrote AIlien minds!
Which brings us to...
== AI and interactive tech ==
For more than half a century, since childhood, Steve Mann has been creating wearable technologies that connect us to each other and to our surroundings. In fact, he is widely regarded as "The Father of Wearable Tech" (IEEE Spectrum).
Around 1997 he co-coined (with me in The Transparent Society) the term 'sousveillance' which stands for looking-back-at power.
More than a quarter century ago Steve Mann brought together his students and others at his principal residence in Toronto to create the world's most advanced brain-computer interface. There he co-founded InteraXon, makers of the Muse, Muse 2, Muse S, and Muse S Athena which is the world's first product to combine EEG (ElectroEncephaloGraphy) and fNIRS (functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy), i.e. the first product that can sense your brain both electrically and optically at the same time!
== Living longer ... and better ==
Amazing work has proved that the brain keeps making new neurons, well into advanced age. But at rates that vary wildly among individuals. Researchers gathered post-mortem brain tissue from five distinct groups of human donors. These groups included healthy young adults, healthy older adults, super-agers, individuals with early signs of cognitive decline, and people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Gaining valuable insights in why Alzheimer victims are growing almost no new neurons, they found that super-agers grew twice as many as normal, healthy adults.
How to get high on your own dopamine—naturally.
So, they’re saying that addictive chemicals can be self-doped by individuals just by entering a particular state of mind?
Um, duh? I’ve only been calling this out for decades. Like here… and in a TED talk I gave about this! Some of you will recall that I even illustrated the point when that character of mine - in Existence - remember the indignant senator - goes nuts seeking his accustomed, self-doped high? In fact, I once gave a talk about it, at the U.S. Centers on Addiction.
Indeed, there’s no other trait of American life today that’s more calamitous to the nation and the world than the self-doped, chemically reinforced addiction of sanctimony that afflicts one party, more than the other… but appears to addle all of us, to some degree. And yes, i am looking at you.
Moving on. Physicist, science fiction author and renaissance man John Cramer has a new book – How To Live Much Longer: about human aging and potential paths to delaying it.
“Aging is fundamentally a cellular energy crisis, driven by the progressive accumulation of damage to the vulnerable DNA of mitochondria, the cell's primary energy producers…. The path to true age reversal requires the application of strong measures, primarily the new technology of high-volume mitochondrial transplantation.” Use the code SPRAUT, to get a 20% discount.
== Interesting updates ==
Inside the extremely radioactive interior of the ruined Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, a dark fungus seems to flourish. And scientists wonder if its extreme melanin content may not only be shielding the organisms, but actually using the gamma rays as an energy source.
I am on the advisory board for this cool startup: “Limitless Telepresence is fulfilling the promise of combining robotics with AI, Virtual Reality and human judgment. Any location from ocean bottoms to forests - all the way to exploring the Moon! Both professionals and amateurs will augment or control bots to perform a wide range of functions, from search & rescue, to remote meetings, and even tourism. Individually powerful, these technologies may truly come into their own when combined. Explore their synergies - and your chance to participate - at Limited Telepresence, a world of possibilities for Anyone Anywhere Accomplishing Anything Anytime™." And yes, I arranged for them to run a cool ddemo area at LAConV last August.
Remember above where I spoke of Gravity Lasers? To paraphrase Stephen Colbert “Nobel Prize for Physics, please!”
Well… maybe not. But there appear to be glimmers concerning the gravity lasers – or ‘grazers’ – that were important plot elements of my novel Earth. A proposed experiment, diverging in creative ways from the gravity wave detectors like LIGO, may deliver evidence for the emission or absorption of discrete, quantized units called gravitons — “an advance that might one day enable gravity to be controlled much like electromagnetism is today.” So… shall be offer this one to our descendants? Or (as in the novel) to Mother Gaia?
Wow. A New Map of All the Particles and Forces appeared in Quanta Magazine along with an article that traces all the known interactions. And I mean. Wow.
The Many Worlds (parallel universe) Hypothesis for quantum mechanics has a new twist. As Sabine explains here, it seems weirdly possible for denizens of parallel worlds to communicate with each other. Not by ‘sending’ a message but by swapping observers. And we might be doing it all the time. And that’s potentially ALL the time.
== Entropy and Energy ==
A fellow wrote to me re: my novel The Practice Effect, citing recent research about how it might actually function: Informational Boundary Conditions and Physical Causation: Hamiltonian Control, Thermodynamic Costs, and Entropic Constraints in Physically Instantiated Systems.
Well, it's very general about limitations to how entropy can be herded from one domain to another, so that organization can increase in the first zone.
In fact, life has been doing that for billions of years, though always dependent upon a nearby gradient of high-quality, highly non-entropic energy. (And I generalize that to the new ecosystems we are developing for AIs! See AIlien Minds!)
This paper would seem (and I am NOT an expert!) to be more pertinent to Sundiver than to The Practice Effect, where I played fast and loose with (1) the power of intentionality and (2) the need for entropy to flow away, rather than just disappear. "Practicing" a tool to improve it should cause heat and flow of infrared. If I don't want the characters to die of heatstroke, then there should be an invisible, infrared laser carrying entropy away... exactly as in Sundiver! And hence while practicing, one should never stand directly above the tool they are practicing! Dennis wouldn't know that at first, so...
...note for rewrite! Like I'll live to get around to that...
== Finally, yes politics. ==
A bit blurry. But all of this needs to be said:
That link:
So many earnest proposals would reform weaknesses in the US system that were exploited by traitors. Alas, too many are politically impractical, like Constitutional Amendments, or would waste our political capital unnecessarily. We need a to-do checklist of fixes that
(1) will sell well to most voters,
(2) that can pass quickly, almost the moment we get a good Congress… with some of them immune to vetoes!
And (3) that will PRAGMATICALLY reverse the treason-evisceration of the USA and ensure this never happens again.
Want to see how to do all of that?
Here is the full list of my own proposed Newer Deal tactics and reforms
https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-contract-part-three-aggressive.html
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