Jared Kaplan, the chief scientist and co-owner of the $180bn (£135bn) US startup Anthropic, said a choice was looming about how much autonomy the systems should be given to evolve.

The move could trigger a beneficial “intelligence explosion” – or be the moment humans end up losing control.

In an interview about the intensely competitive race to reach artificial general intelligence (AGI) – sometimes called superintelligence – Kaplan urged international governments and society to engage in what he called “the biggest decision”.

Anthropic is part of a pack of frontier AI companies including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, xAI, Meta and Chinese rivals led by DeepSeek, racing for AI dominance. Its widely used AI assistant, Claude, has become particularly popular among business customers.

Kaplan said that while efforts to align the rapidly advancing technology to human interests had to date been successful, freeing it to recursively self-improve “is in some ways the ultimate risk, because it’s kind of like letting AI kind of go”. The decision could come between 2027 and 2030, he said.

Read it all.

AI systems will be capable of doing “most white-collar work” in two to three years: Anthropic’s chief scientist https://t.co/CciDRlxTDH

— Lisa Abramowicz (@lisaabramowicz1) December 3, 2025

Scientists have identified five major “epochs” of human brain development in one of the most comprehensive studies to date of how neural wiring changes from infancy to old age.

The study, based on the brain scans of nearly 4,000 people aged under one to 90, mapped neural connections and how they evolve during our lives. This revealed five broad phases, split up by four pivotal “turning points” in which brain organisation moves on to a different trajectory, at around the ages of nine, 32, 66 and 83 years.

“Looking back, many of us feel our lives have been characterised by different phases. It turns out that brains also go through these eras,” said Prof Duncan Astle, a researcher in neuroinformatics at Cambridge University and senior author of the study.

“Understanding that the brain’s structural journey is not a question of steady progression, but rather one of a few major turning points, will help us identify when and how its wiring is vulnerable to disruption.”

Read it all.

Brain has five ‘eras’, scientists say – with adult mode not starting until early 30s | Hannah Devlin, The Guardian

Study suggests human brain development has four pivotal ‘turning points’ at around the ages of nine, 32, 66 and 83

Scientists have identified five major “epochs”… pic.twitter.com/X7i5Uxxc7H

— Owen Gregorian (@OwenGregorian) November 25, 2025

The lack of progress from governments at the COP30 climate talks in Brazil has left vulnerable communities at risk, Christian observers attending the summit have warned. As the talks came to a close on Friday, they called for renewed efforts, outside the formal UN process, to accelerate the phase-out of fossil fuels.

Climate campaigners have criticised wealthy countries for failing to deliver adequate financial support to help vulnerable countries with comparatively low emissions to adapt to climate change, and to fund the energy transition away from fossil fuels.

With low levels of finance on the table, Saudi Arabia and other fossil-fuel producing countries were able to block agreement on a road map (supported by dozens of countries, including the UK) to move away from coal, oil, and gas. A plan to produce a road map was eventually proposed informally by the Brazilian COP President, André Corrêa do Lago, and will be picked up at a separate conference to be hosted next year by Colombia and the Netherlands.

Patricia Mungcal, of the National Council of Churches in the Philippines, said that a concrete plan to move away from fossil fuels would have been COP30’s “gift to humankind”. She praised the countries which had fought for its inclusion, including the Colombian delegates who had delayed the final plenary for more than two hours in protest.

Read it all.

The lack of progress from governments at the COP30 climate talks in Brazil has left vulnerable communities at risk, Christian observers attending the summit have warned#climatechange #cop30 #brazil https://t.co/kFw3KxfioX

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) November 24, 2025

About half of American jobs could be replaced by artificial intelligence, according to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute.

The American consultancy’s analysis found that robots and AI agents could automate more than half of US work hours, both mental and cognitive, using technology that is available today, if companies redesigned how they did things.

Most of the roles at risk — about 40 per cent — involve the kinds of drafting, processing information and routine reasoning that AI agents can do. Hiring is slowing in some such jobs, such as among paralegals, administrative and office support workers and programmers, the research found.

Similarly, dangerous, physical jobs, in warehouses or operating machines, are most likely to be replaced by robots, McKinsey said.

Conversely, a third of US jobs would be difficult to replace with AI because they have uniquely human attributes, such as nursing, the analysis found. Some 70 per cent of the tasks performed by carers and other healthcare workers require the kind of physical presence, empathy, care and dexterity that machines cannot replicate.

Read it all (subscription).

AI could, in theory, automate 57% of US work hours. Yet most human skills remain relevant.

The future of work is not human or machine – but a partnership between people, agents, and robots.

Read our latest research on skill partnerships in the age of AI: https://t.co/h1K56uPqPo pic.twitter.com/wjROZzTQ1q

— McKinsey Global Institute (@McKinsey_MGI) November 25, 2025

Chinese financial institutions have lent more than $200 billion to the United States over the past 25 years — more than they have advanced to any other country — as part of a vast global spending spree to take control of Western companies working on sensitive technologies, according to new research released Tuesday.

China discloses very little about the operations of its state-owned banks and asset managers.

But AidData, a research lab at William & Mary University in Williamsburg, Virginia, reported what it called an “unexpected and counterintuitive” finding: Between 2000 and 2023, Chinese financial institutions backed 2,500 projects — including gas pipelines and airport terminals — in almost every U.S. state.

Read it all.

Chinese lenders have extended more than $200 billion to the U.S. over the past 25 years as part of a vast global spending spree to take control of Western companies working on sensitive technologies, according to new research. https://t.co/b6eB9c2Oix

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) November 18, 2025

In a major step toward improving cancer treatment, researchers at Northwestern University have redesigned the molecular structure of a widely used chemotherapy drug, making it far more soluble, potent, and less toxic to the body.

The scientists built a new form of the drug using spherical nucleic acids (SNAs), a type of nanostructure that embeds the drug directly into DNA strands coating tiny spheres. This re-engineering turned a weak, poorly dissolving chemotherapy drug into a highly targeted cancer-fighting agent that spares healthy tissue.

Read it all.

Nanotech makes cancer drug 20,000x stronger, without side effects – https://t.co/tHaZHRo9In

— Ken Gusler (@kgusler) November 6, 2025

The financing package stitched together for Meta’s humongous Hyperion data center campus in Louisiana made Alphaville curious about just how much energy the new AI infrastructure will consume if it all comes online.

After all, massive new projects are being announced almost every week, in what even KKR’s digital infrastructure lead called a “bragawatts” phenomenon in MainFT on Monday.

The latest example is OpenAI on Thursday revealing plans for a 1+ gigawatt data centre hub in Michigan. Together with previously announced “Stargate” projects this brings the total to over 8 gigawatts — close to the 10 target it floated earlier this year. This will cost over $450 billion over the next three years, according to the company that spends more on marketing and employee stock options than it makes in revenue.

So how many data center projects have now been started or announced? Which ones will actually happen and which ones are fantasy? As Barclays noted last week, tracking “what is real vs. speculative is a full-time job”, but the bank has forced some poor sell-side plebs to at least tally all the announcements and collect some rudimentary details.

So what is the total so far? With OpenAI’s Michigan project they now total 46 gigawatts of computing power. Apologies for the virtual shouting, but this seems a bit mad.

These centers will cost $2.5 trillion to build, according to Barclays, to service an industry that still doesn’t turn a profit. But the maddest bit arguably is how much energy they will require once completed. Using Barclays’ 1.2 “Power Use Effectiveness” ratio, all these data centres — if they are all completed — would need 55.2 gigawatts of electricity to function at full capacity.

If we also use Barclays’ rule of thumb that 1 gigawatt can power over 800,000 American homes, it means that these data centres will consume as much energy as 44.2 million households — almost three times California’s entire housing stock.

Read it all.

Hyperscalers announced new data centres with 46GW of computing power

>Cost: $2.5tn to build
>Require 55GW to 65GW of base load electricity

That's more than the total installed capacity of Poland or Sweden, 6 times New Zealand or Singapore, 50% of UKhttps://t.co/7j43C7QUwV pic.twitter.com/LrEfaKvpEk

— Assaad Razzouk (@AssaadRazzouk) November 4, 2025

The church is medieval (the earliest parts are 900 years old) but is not a place that rests on its historic laurels. It wants to welcome people and “express the love of God”.  

According to Roger Goodden, who is in charge of the fabric of the church, St Andrew’s  “is simply wishing to link with and be a friend to the rest of the community and to spread the gospel.”  

Oakington is a village in South Cambridgeshire, with a population of just 1,400 and St Andrew’s aims to share the presence of God with the rural community. As part of this call, the church hosts a summer garden party, a harvest and other concerts organised by the community, and performances from visiting choirs. 

If you’re going to do these things, you need a good heating system, not just a missional heart. “The better the facilities, the more welcoming we are as a church”, says Roger.  

Formerly, the church was heated by electric panels on the back of the pews. These dated back to the 1990s and had become notoriously unreliable.  

“The whole system was subject to breakdowns,” says Roger, “and whole sections of pews could lose their heating….” 

Read it all.

#NewProfilePic pic.twitter.com/J0U6bUmCEX

— St Andrew’s Church, Oakington (@StAndrewsOaky) January 28, 2021

Anthropic says its most advanced systems may be learning not just to reason, but to reflect internally on how they reason. These introspective capabilities could make the models safer — or, possibly, just better at pretending to be safe. The models are able to answer questions about their internal states with surprising accuracy.

“We’re starting to see increasing signatures or instances of models exhibiting sort of cognitive functions that, historically, we think of as things that are very human,” Anthropic researcher Jack Lindsey, who studies models’ “brains,” says. “Or at least involve some kind of sophisticated intelligence,” Lindsey tells Axios. 

Read it all.

New Anthropic research: Signs of introspection in LLMs.

Can language models recognize their own internal thoughts? Or do they just make up plausible answers when asked about them? We found evidence for genuine—though limited—introspective capabilities in Claude. pic.twitter.com/4FCfkG9WVT

— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) October 29, 2025

Across India’s sprawling landscapes, Christian organizations are stepping up with urgency and creativity to confront the mounting challenges posed by climate change. 

Their work spans everything from solar-powered schools and rural farming projects to national climate declarations and interfaith advocacy, positioning faith-based groups at the forefront of India’s green revolution.

India’s Catholic institutions have become unlikely climate champions. In the western provinces, Jesuit Father Frazer Mascarenhas coordinates the Ecology Platform for the Jesuit West Zone: “About 60 institutions have achieved zero electricity bills for quite some time and demonstrated that it is a viable project to save the only home we have — the fragile Earth,” Mascarenhas explained in a recent interview. 

Vinayalaya, a Jesuit-run center in Mumbai, is now fully powered by solar energy. The project aims to solarize all 110 Jesuit schools, seminaries and residences in four provinces by 2027.

Read it all.

Across India’s sprawling landscapes, Christian organizations are stepping up with urgency and creativity to confront the mounting challenges posed by climate change https://t.co/mbDQGY1BiE

— Religion Unplugged (@ReligionMag) October 31, 2025

The artwork featured detailed Nasa images of the planet and at an approximate scale of 1:1million, each centimetre of the internally-lit sculpture representing 10km (6.2 miles) of the surface of the planet.

The piece is on show until 2 November, with tickets to it also offering free entry to the cathedral.

One boy who spoke to the BBC while with his family said: “I didn’t expect it to be that big.”

Read it all.

Visitors take in cathedral's 'big' Mars sculpture https://t.co/u80pd8FDro

— BBC Cornwall (@BBCCornwall) October 28, 2025

The nation’s largest employers have a new message for office workers: help not wanted.

Amazon.com said this week that it would cut 14,000 corporate jobs, with plans to eliminate as much as 10% of its white-collar workforce eventually. United Parcel Service said Tuesday that it had reduced its management workforce by about 14,000 positions over the past 22 months, days after the retailer Target said it would cut 1,800 corporate roles.

Earlier in October, white-collar workers from companies including Rivian Automotive, Molson Coors, Booz Allen Hamilton and General Motors received pink slips—or learned that they would come soon. Added up, tens of thousands of newly laid off white-collar workers in America are entering a stagnant job market with seemingly no place for them.

At 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Kelly Williamson woke up to an alarming text from her employer, Amazon’s Whole Foods Market, urging her to check her email.

“Review asap and stay home from work today,” the message said. Williamson’s role on the asset-protection team was being eliminated. The badge and laptop for the 55-year-old from Austin, Texas, were deactivated. She was given 90 days to look for another job at the company. She said her personal belongings are being mailed to her.

Read it all.

Tens of Thousands of White-Collar Jobs Are Disappearing as #AI Starts to Bite#RiseoftheRobotshttps://t.co/xvlekZBJIq via @WSJ

— Martin Ford (@MFordFuture) October 29, 2025

When I decided to live without artificial intelligence for 48 hours, I figured it would affect some parts of my routine. I knew I wouldn’t be able to watch Netflix-recommended documentaries or read marketing emails written by bots, for instance. That I could deal with.

What I didn’t expect was that my attempt to avoid all interactions with A.I. and machine learning would affect nearly every part of my life — what I ate, what I wore, how I got around.

I undertook this experiment with the goal of seeing firsthand just how prevalent A.I. is in our everyday lives. Most people are aware that it peppers our social media feeds with targeted ads and powers the chatbots on airline reservation sites. I wanted to identify all the A.I. hiding in plain sight, and to find out what life would be like without it. I would spend two days as the No A.I. Guy.

“Good luck with that!” said Jeff Wilser, the host of the podcast “AI-Curious.” “I used to say that if you want to avoid A.I., you should go be a goat herder in the mountains. Now I can’t even say that, because goat herders probably use it, too, wittingly or not. For starters, they check the weather, and nowadays almost every weather prediction is made with A.I.

Read it all.

48 Hours Without A.I. https://t.co/cgBiUKr75a via @NYTimes

— bill rice (@ricebilldc) October 28, 2025

…as retirement moves online there will be costs that society must reckon with. Older folks’ devices, unlike those of teenagers, are usually connected to credit cards. Door-to-door conmen, who have long preyed on the elderly, can now go iPad-to-iPad. Governments rightly strive to protect children from online predators. They must recognise that there is another, fast-growing vulnerable group to look after.

A second cost is misinformation. Pensioners are twice as likely as under-25s to use news apps or websites. Older people also appear to be more susceptible than others to online hoaxes (which artificial intelligence promises to make still more convincing). As older generations shift from spending their time in front of Fox or the BBC to spending it on YouTube or TikTok, they are entering a Wild West of information. And when the elderly are misled it is everyone’s problem, because they are the most likely to vote.

Screen time has a mixed impact on loneliness. Screens are companions for the isolated. But they can also be a substitute for real life. E-commerce removes the hassle of the weekly shopping trip—but also the social interactions that come with it. Consumers are free to make such choices. But for the infirm, the siren song of the sofa is especially strong. Balancing the pros and cons of screen use is easier for teenagers, whose time online is curbed by teachers during the day and parents in the evening. Older folk lack these informal mediators.

Read it all.

As retirement moves online there will be costs that society must reckon with. At least old people’s rocketing screen time should make for a measured debate on digital matters https://t.co/o5cC9O4Yoq

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) October 24, 2025

Editor’s note: Today, we’re announcing research that shows — for the first time in history — that a quantum computer can successfully run a verifiable algorithm on hardware, surpassing even the fastest classical supercomputers (13,000x faster). It can compute the structure of a molecule, and paves a path towards real-world applications. Today’s advance builds on decades of work, and six years of major breakthroughs. Back in 2019, we demonstrated that a quantum computer could solve a problem that would take the fastest classical supercomputer thousands of years. Then, late last year (2024), our new Willow quantum chip showed how to dramatically suppress errors, solving a major issue that challenged scientists for nearly 30 years. Today’s breakthrough moves us much closer to quantum computers that can drive major discoveries in areas like medicine and materials science.

Imagine you’re trying to find a lost ship at the bottom of the ocean. Sonar technology might give you a blurry shape and tell you, “There’s a shipwreck down there.” But what if you could not only find the ship but also read the nameplate on its hull?

That’s the kind of unprecedented precision we’ve just achieved with our Willow quantum chip. Today, we’re announcing a major algorithmic breakthrough that marks a significant step towards a first real-world application. Just published in Nature, we have demonstrated the first-ever verifiable quantum advantage running the out-of-order time correlator (OTOC) algorithm, which we call Quantum Echoes.

Read it all.

"Google claims ‘quantum advantage’ again — but researchers are sceptical" by Elizabeth Gibney of @Nature https://t.co/mD54zWFEKE
Original @Google article, "Observation of constructive interference at the edge of quantum ergodicity," is at https://t.co/tY8MiIq4Sn @JointQuICS pic.twitter.com/nh26Z4QWzA

— Charles W. Clark (@g8ge) October 23, 2025

Josh Batson no longer has time for social media.

The AI researcher’s only comparable dopamine hit these days is on Anthropic’s Slack workplace-messaging channels, where he explores chatter about colleagues’ theories and experiments on large language models and architecture.

Batson is among a group of core artificial-intelligence researchers and executives who are facing a relentless grind, racing to keep pace with a seemingly endless cycle of disruption in pursuit of systems with superhuman intelligence.

Inside Silicon Valley’s biggest AI labs, top researchers and executives are regularly working 80 to 100 hours a week. Several top researchers compared the circumstances to war.

“We’re basically trying to speedrun 20 years of scientific progress in two years,” said Batson, a research scientist at Anthropic. Extraordinary advances in AI systems are happening “every few months,” he said. “It’s the most interesting scientific question in the world right now.”

Read it all.

Take an early look at the front page of today's Wall Street Journal https://t.co/5Z4hcbTVXK pic.twitter.com/NrLMRqJWUU

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) October 23, 2025

A group of prominent figures, including artificial intelligence and technology experts, has called for an end to efforts to create ‘superintelligence’ — a form of AI that would surpass humans on essentially all cognitive tasks. 

Over 850 people, including tech leaders like Virgin Group founder Richard Branson and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, signed a statement published Wednesday calling for a pause in the development of superintelligence. 

The list of signatories was notably topped by prominent AI pioneers, including the computer scientists Yoshua Bengio and Geoff Hinton, who are widely considered “godfathers” of modern AI. Leading AI researchers like UC Berkeley’s Stuart Russell also signed on. 

Superintelligence has become a buzzword in the AI world, as companies from Elon Musk’s xAI to Sam Altman’s OpenAI compete to release more advanced large language models. Meta notably has gone so far as to name its LLM division the ‘Meta Superintelligence Labs.’ 

But signatories of the recent statement warn that the prospect of superintelligence has “raised concerns, ranging from human economic obsolescence and disempowerment, losses of freedom, civil liberties, dignity, and control, to national security risks and even potential human extinction.”

Read it all.

Over 800 public figures, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Virgin's Richard Branson urge AI ‘superintelligence’ ban https://t.co/7jo9ITuOjx

— CNBC (@CNBC) October 22, 2025

Over the past two decades, no company has done more to shape the American workplace than Amazon. In its ascent to become the nation’s second-largest employer, it has hired hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers, built an army of contract drivers and pioneered using technology to hire, monitor and manage employees.

Now, interviews and a cache of internal strategy documents viewed by The New York Times reveal that Amazon executives believe the company is on the cusp of its next big workplace shift: replacing more than half a million jobs with robots.

Amazon’s U.S. work force has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million. But Amazon’s automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers.

Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. work force in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn’t need to hire.

Read it all.

Amazon, the second largest employer in the U.S., aims to replace more than half a million jobs with robots, internal documents show. https://t.co/jzxzhcMmfo

— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 21, 2025

The Church of England has called for a national conversation on artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on the world of work. . 

A new edition of the Crucible journal, released this month, explored how automation and algorithms reshape jobs and identity.  

It follows a motion passed by the Church’s General Synod in February 2024, which acknowledged the effects of AI and the ‘fourth industrial revolution’. 

Read it all.

Renewed call for national conversation on AI and the Future of Work https://t.co/7607ZNflnM via @Anglican Ink © 2025

— George Conger (@GeorgeConger8) October 10, 2025

From cars and computer chips to tanks and fighter jets, China’s new export restrictions represent a sweeping effort to control global commerce and have set off a renewed trade fight that pits Beijing against not only the United States but also Europe.

The new regulations, which take effect in stages on Nov. 8 and Dec. 1, apply to the entire world, sharply escalating China’s sway over critical manufacturing at a time of increased international fractures over trade. The restrictions led President Trump on Friday to threaten to impose new 100 percent tariffs on Chinese imports starting Nov. 1.

The rules go far beyond China’s limits since April on the export of rare earth metals, which are mined and processed mainly in China, as well as magnets made from those metals. In a series of announcements on Thursday, China extended its restrictions to worldwide shipments of electric motors, computer chips and other devices that have become central to modern life and are now manufactured mainly in China.

The regulations prohibit exports from China to any country of materials or components for use in military equipment. Among the items banned are the small yet powerful electric motors in missiles and fighter jets and the materials for crucial range finders in tanks and artillery that are used to zero in on distant targets.

Read it all.

China’s New Export Curbs May Level a Heavy Blow Worldwide https://t.co/CX91lkUldK "The new rules apply to any shipments across national borders…European automakers, in particular, face a daunting task of seeking Chinese export licenses to move car parts within Europe"

— David Mulroney (@David_Mulroney) October 13, 2025

Ari Emanuel, the Hollywood talent agent and sports tycoon, has raised almost $3bn from investors for a new events venture in a bet that artificial intelligence will shrink the working week and give people more free time. 

The world could be “down to four-day work weeks” in the coming years, he told the Financial Times. This could go “down to three with AI” as more people use the technology to expedite everyday tasks, he said. “There’s going to be more free time.” 

MARI, Emanuel’s new company, will house the Madrid and Miami tennis Opens, as well as the Frieze art fairs, which Emanuel bought out of Endeavor, the sports and entertainment group he co-founded. The company announced on Wednesday that it had also agreed to acquire Barrett-Jackson, the collector car auction company, from Endeavor.

Read it all.

Ari Emanuel bets AI will boost leisure time with three-day working week https://t.co/tkaSMs2V7c

— Financial Times (@FT) October 8, 2025

Hard plastic made from bamboo is as strong and durable as conventional plastics for uses such as household appliances and car interiors, but is also recyclable and biodegrades easily in soil.

Plastics derived from biological matter, or bioplastics, are increasingly popular, but they still only make up around half a per cent of the more than 400 million tonnes of plastics produced each year. This is, in part, because bioplastics lack the mechanical strength of many oil-based plastics and also can’t be easily used in common manufacturing processes.

Now, Dawei Zhao at Shenyang University of Chemical Technology in China and his colleagues have developed a way to produce plastic from cellulose derived from bamboo, which can replicate or surpass the properties of many widely used plastics.

Read it all.

Hard plastic made from bamboo is as strong and durable as conventional plastics for uses such as household appliances and car interiors, but also recyclable and biodegrades easily in soil. https://t.co/POqQscIGEe

— New Scientist (@newscientist) October 7, 2025

Yaroslav Pavlivskiy waved his hands as he sprang from his car, pleading for mercy with the operator of a Russian drone circling overhead as he drove home from a market in the southern city of Kherson.

The operator flicked a switch to release a grenade, which exploded and tore into the legs of the 69-year-old pensioner. A passerby used a belt as a tourniquet to stop him from losing too much blood, saving his life.

In the hospital the next day, the doctor showed Pavlivskiy a Russian video of the incident, which was set to techno music and carried a caption: “A drone operator spotted another ‘civilian.’ After reconnaissance, the target was eliminated.”

Russian drone operators have turned daily life in Kherson into a terrifying gauntlet. A year ago, from the other side of the Dnipro River, they began sending drones, in addition to using bombs and artillery, to take potshots at civilians.

Now the attacks have intensified to such an extent that Ukrainian authorities, civilians and human-rights groups say it has become a systematic effort to keep people off the city’s streets under threat of execution from the skies.

Read it all.

“There will be no more mercy.”

“No one deserves pity. Spare me your whining.”

Those are captions to videos of Russian drone operators attacking civilians in Kherson city and oblast.

Living in Kherson means risking execution from the sky.https://t.co/Otunmnekn8 (read free)

— Jane Lytvynenko (@JaneLytv) October 9, 2025

The Internet has Google. Now biology has MetaGraph. Detailed today in Nature¹, the search engine can quickly sift through the staggering volumes of biological data housed in public repositories.

“It’s a huge achievement,” says Rayan Chikhi, a biocomputing researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. “They set a new standard” for analysing raw biological data — including DNA, RNA and protein sequences — from databases that can contain millions of billions of DNA letters, amounting to ‘petabases’ of information, more entries than all the webpages in Google’s vast index.

Although MetaGraph is tagged as ‘Google for DNA’, Chikhi likens the tool to a search engine for YouTube, because the tasks are more computationally demanding. In the same way that YouTube searches can retrieve every video that features, say, red balloons even when those key words don’t appear in the title, tags or description, MetaGraph can uncover genetic patterns hidden deep within expansive sequencing data sets without needing those patterns to be explicitly annotated in advance.

“It enables things that cannot be done in any other way,” Chikhi says

Read it all.

Metagraph: the new search engine that can quickly sift through the staggering volumes of biological data housed in public repositorieshttps://t.co/Q4qtiAq8AF

— nature (@Nature) October 8, 2025

Here’s a test for infants: Show them a glass of water on a desk. Hide it behind a wooden board. Now move the board toward the glass. If the board keeps going past the glass, as if it weren’t there, are they surprised? Many 6-month-olds are, and by a year, almost all children have an intuitive notion of an object’s permanence, learned through observation. Now some artificial intelligence models do too.

Researchers have developed an AI system that learns about the world via videos and demonstrates a notion of “surprise” when presented with information that goes against the knowledge it has gleaned.

The model, created by Meta and called Video Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA), does not make any assumptions about the physics of the world contained in the videos. Nonetheless, it can begin to make sense of how the world works.

“Their claims are, a priori, very plausible, and the results are super interesting,” says Micha Heilbron(opens a new tab), a cognitive scientist at the University of Amsterdam who studies how brains and artificial systems make sense of the world.

Read it all.

An AI model called V-JEPA is capable of “intuiting” the physical properties of the real world, gaining a sense of object permanence, the constancy of shape and color, and the effects of gravity. @anilananth reports: https://t.co/jRa1k9RES0

— Quanta Magazine (@QuantaMagazine) October 3, 2025

Meta will use conversations people have with its chatbots to personalize advertising and content across its platforms, in a sign of how tech companies plan to make money from artificial intelligence.

The owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp on Wednesday said it would use the content of chats with its Meta AI to create advertising recommendations across its suite of apps.

“People will already expect that their Meta AI interactions are being used for these personalization purposes,” said Christy Harris, privacy and data policy manager at Meta….

Big Tech groups and AI labs have invested billions of dollars in developing and running popular chatbots, but have only recently started to indicate how they will monetise the technology.

Read it all.

Meta to mine AI interactions to help target advertising https://t.co/xtjXT3Hh8X

— FT Technology News (@fttechnews) October 1, 2025

Nearly every student clutches a phone in one hand as they traverse the University of Central Florida campus, even while walking in groups. Laptops and tablets are lunchtime companions, and earbuds and headphones are routine accessories. While waiting for class to start, many students sit in silence, drawn into their devices.

It is a familiar and exasperating scene for Seán Killingsworth, 22, a former U.C.F. student. “What is this life I’m signing up for?” he asked himself during his sophomore year. “It was just like, I’m talking to a bunch of zombies.”

Mr. Killingsworth craved a space where he could chat with his peers without feeling as though he was intruding. When he was in high school, he ran into similar conundrums, so he would organize phone-free hangouts with friends.

Why not in college too?

In 2023, he helped bring the idea of no-phone social time to two different Florida campuses — U.C.F. and Rollins College. He called it the Reconnect Movement: During meetings, everyone was required to hand over their phone and socialize without devices, a concept that has become a big draw for like-minded students. Reconnect has now spread to six schools in four states. And in September it broadened its reach beyond students, hosting a phone-free event in New York — soon to be followed by Orlando and Tampa — that anyone could attend.

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Can College Students Stand to Ditch Their Phones for an Hour or So? https://t.co/i64o5O5tUJ

— Rajiv Prabhakar (@rajivprab) October 1, 2025

Data centers are proliferating in Virginia and a blind man in Baltimore is suddenly contending with sharply higher power bills.

The Maryland city is well over an hour’s drive from the northern Virginia region known as Data Center Alley. But Kevin Stanley, a 57-year-old who survives on disability payments, says his energy bills are about 80% higher than they were about three years ago. “They’re going up and up,” he said. “You wonder, ‘What is your breaking point?’”

It’s an increasingly dramatic ripple effect of the AI boom as energy-hungry data centers send power costs to records in much of the US, pulling everyday households into paying for the digital economy.

The power needs of the massive complexes are rapidly driving up electricity bills — piling onto the rising prices for food, housing and other essentials already straining consumers. That’s starting to have economic and political reverberations across the country as utilities and local officials wrestle over how to divvy up the costs. Yet those same facilities are a linchpin of US leadership in the global AI race.

A Bloomberg News analysis of wholesale electricity prices for tens of thousands of locations across the country reveals the effects of the AI boom on the power market with unprecedented granularity. The locations and prices were tracked and aggregated monthly by Grid Status, an energy data analytics platform. Bloomberg analyzed this data in relation to data center locations, from DC Byte, and found that electricity now costs as much as 267% more for a single month than it did five years ago in areas located near significant data center activity.

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AI data centers are sending US power bills soaring, Bloomberg analysis shows
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Wholesale prices more than doubled since 2020 in some markets, but those increases arent equal

Of the nodes where prices rose, over 70% are within 50 miles of significant data center activity pic.twitter.com/CwhudAlEcU

— Stephen Stapczynski (@SStapczynski) September 30, 2025

New research has identified 17 overlapping factors that affect your risk of stroke, dementia and late-life depression, suggesting that a number of lifestyle changes could simultaneously lower the risk of all three.

Though they may appear unrelated, people who have dementia or depression or who experience a stroke also often end up having one or both of the other conditions, said Dr. Sanjula Singh, a principal investigator at the Brain Care Labs at Massachusetts General Hospital and the lead author of the study. That’s because they may share underlying damage to small blood vessels in the brain, experts said.

Some of the risk factors common to the three brain diseases, including high blood pressure and diabetes, appear to cause this kind of damage. Research suggests that at least 60 percent of strokes, 40 percent of dementia cases and 35 percent of late-life depression cases could be prevented or slowed by controlling risk factors.

“Those are striking numbers,” said Dr. Stephanie Collier, director of education in the division of geriatric psychiatry at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts. “If you can really optimize the lifestyle pieces or the modifiable pieces, then you’re at such a higher likelihood of living life without disability.”

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🧠 60% of stroke, 40% of dementia, and 35% of late-life depression cases are potentially preventable.

These are the most powerful protective and harmful lifestyle factors according to a new analysis. pic.twitter.com/wtjtHPYJUX

— Brandon Luu, MD (@BrandonLuuMD) April 29, 2025

A declaration that “Christian truth and values” belong at the heart of public life in the UK has been launched in the hope that it will attract 100,000 signatures and trigger a debate in Parliament.

The 2025 Westminster Declaration, launched last week, argues for the importance of heterosexual marriage and the “complementarity of men and women”. It also offers warnings about “cancel culture” and artificial intelligence (AI) unchecked by moral reflection.

“By ignoring Britain’s Christian heritage we have endangered human life, weakened society, and created a fragmented nation uncoupled from its formative traditions, and without a unifying vision for its future,” the declaration says.

On marriage, which it defines as being between a man a woman, the declaration calls for a rejection of “ideologies which weaken family ties by falsely claiming that other types of relationship are of equivalent value to marriage”.

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A declaration that “Christian truth and values” belong at the heart of public life in the UK has been launched in the hope that it will attract 100,000 signatures and trigger a debate in Parliament #westminsterdeclaration #christianityinpubliclife https://t.co/8QrsPis7f2

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) September 29, 2025