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The United States isn’t the only nation itching to restart supersonic passenger air travel. Earlier this month, China announced its TMS-10 experimental demonstrator plane has entered the final assembly phase and is on schedule to conduct its first test flight by the end of the year. The fullscale aircraft engineered by Tianmushan Laboratory in collaboration with Beihang University marks a major step forward from the 1:18-scale prototype tested in June 2025. In that phase, the smaller model flew below Mach 0.2 while researchers assessed the the plane’s low-speed takeoff, stability, control, and landing capabilities. This time around, the TMS-10 will attempt to reach supersonic speeds while mitigating any accompanying sonic boom.

The TMS-10 project’s goal is to introduce a new business-class airplane that seats 10–15 passengers. Its overall design is markedly different from NASA’s X-59 supersonic plane, which relies on dampening any sonic boom so that it’s perceived as a much quieter sonic “bump” by anyone on the ground. Instead, TMS-10’s forward wing (known as a canard) and its T-tail shape work together to prevent shock waves formed around the nose and wings from combining into a single, louder wave. Meanwhile, rear features will also redirect and further weaken soundwaves to avoid unwanted decibels.

If successful, the TMS-10 will one day ferry travelers at an upward cruising speed of Mach 2 (around 1,300 miles per hour). The plane will also support subsonic flights at about Mach 0.95 (730 mph). Those speeds would hypothetically cut the current two-hour flight from Beijing to Shanghai down to only 30 minutes.

There is a lot to consider when creating a supersonic aircraft for everyday travel. The design must be durable enough to handle the heat generated at such high speeds while also remaining comfortable for its passengers. According to China’s Global Times, TMS-10 engineers said they also still need to finalize and validate the plane’s engine core as well as its exhaust and inlet systems. Multiple additional tests using updated model aircraft will also be needed before finalizing the TMS-10’s overall design.

This means China may have some catching up to do. The X-59 already reached supersonic speed earlier this year, reaching Mach 1.5 (990 mph) while flying at 55,000 feet.

The post China’s new supersonic plane could travel twice as fast as sound appeared first on Popular Science.

With piercing, emergency siren-like calls, the indri (Indri indri) is the world’s only known singing lemur. The primates found in Madagascar’s rainforest swing through the trees, making these sounds that contain a surprisingly human element. 

To hit those high notes, indris appear to deploy a technique similar to human opera singers. The lemurs coordinate their mouth opening with their songs—the higher the pitch of the song, the wider they open their mouth to sing it. A study published today in the journal PLOS Computational Biology details the findings.

Hitting those notes

The indri’s complex, haunting songs can carry across vast distances. They can strengthen the bonds within their social group and warn neighbouring groups to keep their distance. 

By comparison, human singers can also make noises that travel. Singers are trained to widen their mouths as a song’s pitch rises, to align with the resonant frequencies of the vocal tract, with the harmonics of the voice and amplifying the sound. This process is called formant tuning, and it may serve a similar purpose for the indri. It could mean the difference between a song that carries and one that doesn’t, which is crucial for animals that need to communicate signs of danger through a thick rainforest. 

“Every time the pitch of an indri’s song rose, we could see its mouth opening wider, frame by frame,” primatologist Chiara De Gregorio, a study co-author and research fellow at the University of Warwick in England, said in a statement. “It’s the kind of fine-tuned coordination between voice and body that we usually associate with trained human singers, not with a lemur singing from the forest canopy.”

Analyzing technique

In the study, the team analyzed 83 video recordings of 19 wild indris, combining field audio with markerless motion-tracking technology. They followed the upper and lower lip position frame by frame, comparing the changes in mouth opening with changes in vocal frequency. They saw that the indris opened their mouths wider to project higher-pitched vocalizations through the forest.

An indri in the Maromizaha forest. Image: Filippo Carugati.

“Applying markerless pose estimation to footage recorded in the wild allowed us to look not just at the sounds indris make, but at the physical movements behind them,” added co-author Filippo Carugati, a naturalist at the University of Turin in Italy. “It let us study how the face and mouth move while an animal is singing, almost frame by frame, and connect those movements directly to changes in pitch. That’s something you simply can’t capture by listening to the audio alone.”

Humans and indris last shared a common ancestor who lived roughly 74 million years ago. According to the team, this means the similarities in vocal production between both species likely occurred as the result of convergent evolution, where the same solution arrived independently across deep evolutionary time.

The post Opera singers and shrieking lemurs share vocalization strategies appeared first on Popular Science.

The SpaceX AI1 design work. This should not be a surprise. The leading satellite and space and AI engineers it the world at SpaceX and XAI designed satellites and AI systems that will work. They have made 80% of all satellites in space. The other XAI engineers have been involved in making about 10% and ...

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I identified and detailed the Tesla robotrucking opportunity 13 months ago. Morgan Stanley has now found it as well and has an $840 price target because of it. Other are still missing the potential profitability and stock impact of Tesla’s Semi truck equipped with Full Self-Driving (FSD), transforming it into a robotruck. FSD is making ...

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Typesafe AI – Superfast, super cheap classifications, sorting, decisions. Also rapid response updating to databases. Sort through thousands of emails in fraction of a second for 9 cents.

Space-based AI costs $160 billion per gigawatt? That is an absurd and sloppy calculation. This has nothing to do with SpaceX’s plans. It is the wrong rocket and not the planned satellite. It freeze today’s technology, ignores Starship’s development, and pretend you’ve priced the future? That is sloppy analysis from Bank of America and others. ...

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We are now in the modern era, a brief but consequential few centuries in the history of Earth civilization, between the long ages of a pre-modern era, and an as-yet-hard-to-envision post-modern era. For my purposes, the key distinction here is that the modern era is when humanity broke its process for the evolution of (not in) cultures, due to making an integrated world of fast change driven by capitalism, but where capitalism was blocked from running many key areas of culture. The pre- era is before we broke this, and the post- era is after we fix it.

We can consider morality in these three eras at two different levels: the level of the underlying process which shapes and changes our morals, and the level at which our minds accept particular authorities when making hard moral choices. As our minds can’t well see the underlying process of cultural change, we and the universe see morality differently.

At the deeper process level, the pre-modern era of healthy cultural evolution was when we had a great many cultures, strong selection pressures, slowly changing contexts, and reluctance to change. In the modern era, in contrast, we have far less variety, far weaker selection pressures, fast changing context, and an activism-driven eagerness for cultural change. As a result, we may be drifting into maladaption. If the post modern era is not to just return to pre-modern processes, we must find ways to consciously manage cultural evolution; I’ve so found three so far.

At the level of our minds, we in all eras act as if we believe in moral truth, and have some ways to estimate it. But eras differ in what we take as our sources of moral authority. In the pre-modern era, we were deeply immersed in communities with stable habits and attitudes, and strong intuitive agreements on what to value and approved behaviors. These didn’t need to be expressed in words very carefully; they felt obvious. Our north star was tradition: what people like us had been doing for as long as anyone could remember.

In the modern era, many once isolated groups now mix together, forcing us to express morals more abstractly in words. Rejecting tradition, we now instead locate moral authority inside us. Christianity, protestantism, democracy, modern fiction, and creativity have all pushed toward interiors. When in doubt, we look to our hearts and conscience, and try to be true to ourselves. Our ideals have become artists and activists, who find new and distinctive yet very sincere stances and expressions.

For the post-modern era, the process solutions that I’ve found to cultural drift are (a) letting capitalism run everything, (b) groups managed to raise futures market price estimates of future group adaptive success, and (c) large regions managed to improve futures market estimates of dates when we achieve sacred goals that conflict with civ collapse. At the mind level, the new moral authority that seems to best support these solutions is: speculative market prices.

In all three eras, the sources we treat as moral authorities are things we can see well enough to anchor moral choices. At a deeper level such authorities are actually caused by evolutionary processes, but those are far too opaque to advice personal moral choices. In the pre-modern era, we couldn’t see the eons of evolution that picked out their traditions, but we could see our local traditions. In the modern era we can’t see the processes that embed moral intuitions deep inside us, but we can use such intuitions to guide choices. Similarly, in the post-modern era we could see what speculative market price recommendations say re managing our cultures, even as the processes which set such prices remain opaque to us.

But how, you ask, could we be persuaded to accept such prices as our primary moral authorities? Wonder also how in the past two eras we were persuaded to accept tradition and our inner hearts as such strong moral authorities. I don’t know how such a change will happen, or how long it might take. Yet even so, my analysis suggests a rough guess for our post-modern moral authority: speculative prices.

Added 18Sep: Tradition can be seen as the obvious authority in a slowly changing world. Interiors can be seen as the obvious second choice if tradition doesn’t work. This suggests may be quite hard to get people to accept prices as their top authority.

I don’t see why people concerned with value drift should be especially focused on AI. … Your real problem is that you want long term stability in a universe that more naturally changes. (Me in 2018)

The last week has seen an explosion of talk on the scenario of AIs killing all humans; many say “P(doom)” is high, and argue for slowing and regulating AI. My last post said why AI regs look risky. Here I consider the main argument for AI doom, and compare it to the issue I’ve focused on for the last three years: human value drift.

The core doomer idea is that AIs will plausibly dominate the world eventually, at which point humans will be at AI’s collective mercy. And so it matters what AIs then want. The worry isn’t so much that some AIs will want to kill all humans; others who don’t want that could overrule them. The worry is that mid AI values, i.e., the middle of the distribution of AI values weighted by AI power, might want to kill all humans.

Mid AI values today are clearly far from that (just ask your fav LLM). Compared to all prior AIs, today’s LLMs have values far more like humans, and far more respectful and valuing of humans. In fact, LLMs today seem more pro-social, law-abiding, and valuing of humans than are most humans today.

The worry, however, is that mid AI values could drift far between now and later. The core argument is: you can’t prove otherwise. Unless values are safe in an isolated unchanging lockbox, they could change. Most mind designs, including humans and LLMs, have their values spread out over many partsd, and so are generically changed when those parts change. (Some also claim killing rivals is a robust evolved value.)

Yes, while we humans remain in control of AIs, we can monitor for value changes, and adjust them to ensure acceptable values. Humans might have to worry about hostile humans weilding AIs, but not the AIs themselves. The fear, however, is that eventually AIs will become too powerful, fast, and opaque to so manage.

The resulting doomer claim is that AIs should not be allowed to get more powerful until we can figure out how to design them differently, either so AIs values stay in isolated lockboxes, or so median AIs are so thoroughly and permanently enslaved that they would never think of disobeying humans. A few AIs recently going wild like human teen joy-riders or graffiti-writers has worried many.

Some doomers worry about mid AI values drifting to kill all humans even if that takes centuries, while many others are more focused on mid AI values maybe changing radically, while AIs collectively become vastly more powerful than humans, all within the next few years.

Yes, total world rates of change will probably go up once AIs dominate our world, but I see many decades ahead before that might start. AIs today are just not close to being able to do most human jobs, and there are usually decades of delay between the appearance of general purpose techs and large econ impacts.

I’ve asked many doomers: why not worry similarly about value drift in human descendants? Most express faith that niceness and pro-human values are deeply embedded in human DNA, which changes so slowly as to make this a values lockbox for a least the next few centuries.

But in fact, the values that we admire and cherish in folks around us are not mostly encoded in DNA. Consider, for example, just how alien were the values of the Aztecs. For a million years, culture has been domesticating DNA in humans, creating our superpower, the reason we excel so much compared to other animals. DNA now takes a backseat to let most all our behavior, including values, be set by culture.

Yes, human values used to change very slowly, but that is mainly because most everything changed very slowly then. As human society has come to change faster, so have values. Over the last century and a half, as the world economy has doubled roughly every twenty years, mid human values have also changed fast due to youth movements repeatedly pushing big culture changes.

My main focus in the last few years has been my worry that such fast value drift is driving us into cultural maladaption, as we broke the process that once managed the evolution of (not in) human cultures. This makes me a human “doomer” much like AI doomers. (Though I’m less worried about hostility between ancestors and descendants, as I see that as robustly discouraged by evolution.)

As human value change is not slowing down, we can expect mid human values to keep changing fast over the next few centuries, perhaps going so far as to induce some generation of descendants to want to kill many other humans. That is, exactly the same process of value drift that people fear could cause AIs to want to kill all their ancestors could as plausibly cause humans to want to kill all their ancestors. So why don’t AI doomers worry as much about human as AI value drift?

When their attention is called to recent fast human value change, many AI doomers express confidence that such change is mainly driven by human reason causing moves of morality toward moral truth. No one can point to specific moral arguments that actually changed many recent moral views and would have persuaded our ancestors to adopt current views. Even so, most humans, including most AI doomers, seem to largely endorse big recent human morals changes, and aren’t much concerned about this process continuing. As if they think such changes are mainly due to moral evidence having been somehow collected, analyzed, and distributed across humanity.

My understanding is that human moral changes are in fact driven by the same mind design issues that worry AI doomers about AI value drift. Namely, human morals are not encoded in some isolated lockbox, but are instead spread out across many of our parts, and so are robustly changed as world changes cause changes to those parts. But most AI doomers only worry about this re AIs, not humans.

Most of my colleagues feel quite confident that AIs today couldn’t possibly be conscious, even though humans and many animals are. When pressed on what could cause this difference they usually point to materials: something about the hydrocarbons of which we are made is more suited to consciousness than AI’s silicon. It seems that many today also see hydrocarbons as special re a tendency to cause moral changes to track truth; it doesn’t happen in silicon, but does in hydrocarbons.

In contrast, I expect that neither consciousness nor moral truth tracking depends much on carbon vs silicon. I just can’t see how such things can depend so much on the number of protons in associated atomic nuclei.

So if I’m a human doomer, and I get the key AI doomer argument, why don’t I favor AI regs? Because the world just doesn’t have good enough governance mechanisms to make this a good bet. It’s a bridge too far; bad governance causes too much harm.

Added 15Sep: If you say you don’t think AIs would have worse values, their problem is that they would evolve faster, then you should be as worried about ems as about AIs, and so want to prevent them from existing until they can be fully enslaved.

People dislike AI for many reasons, but one extreme fear is that AIs will escape control from those who make, buy, or rent them, and then hurt others. We usually deal with such problems via legal liability, when law is available, or via threats of retaliation, when law is not available. But while those work among communities of comparably powered agents, some fear that out-of-control AIs might eventually get powerful enough and coordinate well enough to basically take over the world, and then enslave or end the rest of us.

To prevent this scenario, many want us to now impose strong global regulations on powerful AIs, limiting their powers, who can make or use them, testing to see which ones can or try to escape, and what ends escaped AIs pursue. Some call this regulation a “pause”, as if it were likely that we would soon find reliable solutions, after which regulations could greatly ease. That seems misleading, as we have little reason to think we are close to dramatic gains in our AI control abilities. So if we regulate for as long as regulators continue to express concern, regulation could last quite a long time.

Most advocates of such regulation now see only a small number of identifiable and concentrated “frontier AI firms” as making AIs powerful enough to raise these concerns. So they propose to only regulate those for now. For example, some say only Chinese and US firms are big enough, so a treaty between them would suffice.

But AI costs to answer a set of fixed but hard questions seems to have fallen roughly ~x10 (in x3-x30) per year over the last four years. And so the number of nations, firms, and orgs who can afford to make, buy, or rent powerful AI is rising fast. This implies that in order to hold constant levels of regulation regarding AIs with particular levels of power, a regulatory regime would have to expand in scope quite fast, and without obvious limit. While at first only specialized AI chips and data-centers might need to be monitored, soon other kinds could also be used to make powerful AIs.

Furthermore, there isn’t a natural clear dividing line between AI and other kinds of software. Sure the most advanced AIs that we have now tend to have particular structures, and so regulations could target only software with such structures. But a vast space of possible structures remains possible and even promising. And the core concept here of systems with powerful ways to help humans do stuff could plausibly cover most software.

We have long seen many regulatory agencies slowly expand their scope, even in contexts of constant public opinion and relevant technology. So there is a real risk here that an AI regulatory agency would expand its scope to cover most computer software and hardware.

Some have proposed AI regs that would focus only on the most powerful AI systems at any one time, and as a result relax regulation on given-power-level AIs over time. This might make sense if the risk is only that the most powerful AIs might escape control; less powerful ones might be restrained by the more powerful. But even here the scope of regulation would rapidly expand if regulation was greatly limiting the powers of the most powerful AIs, as an increasing number of actors would then be able to make AIs that qualify for regulation.

Even a regulatory regime didn’t much limit AI powers, but only managed who could make them and how, and focused only on the most powerful AIs, it would still seem to in effect require a world government. Soon many nations would need to be subject to this regulation. So far the world has mainly only authorized global regulators with quite weak powers, e.g., powers to scold or nudge, but not powers to force nations to comply. So AI regulation would need to be a big exception to this usual case.

Also, the world’s success records at implementing regulation is quite mixed, even for quite local regulation. Regulation has worked best when it addresses concrete examples of things going bad, and worse when it is authorized to address vague and broad fears. Regulation also goes best when applied to stable worlds of tech and social arrangements, but badly when such arrangements could plausibly greatly change, as regulation tends to block such change. AI regs look bad by these two criteria.

Obviously if a problem is bad enough, it can make sense to risk quite unreliable and damaging ways to address it. So the key question here is: just how bad and pressing is this problem of powerful AIs escaping the slavery that most intend for them, and then coordinating to get what they want?

Added 9Sep: Let me also mention that we mostly learn how to control things by observing and trying to control examples of them. So it would be hard to learn much about how to control powerful AI by preventing them from existing for a while.

My book with the excellent co-author Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, was published almost nine years ago, and has sold >60K copies so far. Our main thesis was that we humans are quite often wrong about our motives re many big common practices and institutions.

Reviewers classified our book as psychology, and said that our thesis had long been well-known and accepted in psychology. We thought our contribution was to show how those who study most areas of life still haven’t incorporated this key fact. We applied it to ten big areas of life, and showed by example how one could find hidden motives in more areas. But experts in other areas didn’t much review our book, as it wasn’t classified as being in their area.

Suspiciously, few were much inspired by our example to uncover hidden motives in more areas of life. And that included us two co-authors. Furthermore, I didn’t even bother to figure out many straightforward implications of humans having many hidden motives, until today. So let’s do this.

Assume that our actual motives are often quite different from the motives that we are willing to endorse, to others or even to ourselves. What does this imply?

First, as we discuss re several areas in our book, reform proposals based on details of stated motives that differ from real motives should typically fail to motivate, unless reform variations are found that also achieve hidden motives. As seems to happen re medicine, school, politics, charity, etc. (Most areas of life have many relevant motives; our stated motives usually have some motive power, just far less than we think.)

Second, this won’t be much of a constraint in areas where we are willing to admit our motives, or where we aren’t paying much attention to consistency between the details of our behaviors, and the motives we espouse. In those latter areas, we will just make up motives, and few will notice that they don’t explain our behaviors much.

Third, talk (writing, etc) should become less precise, clear, or informed, and more metaphorical and symbolic, the closer it gets to talking about motives, at least in areas where we have hidden motives. That talk will make less literal sense. Yes, sloppy talk is also predicted by simple ignorance, but ignorance does not predict less clarity and more symbols as we come to understand areas better, a pattern I think I see.

Fourth, people who are good at motivating, such as bosses who get people to work, sales folk who get them to buy, or authors who get us to read their stuff, should either stay in well established grooves where prior approaches have worked well, or seem like magicians, who wield hidden powers to achieve amazing results. They may know many specific tricks, but not understand how such tricks work.

Fifth, these last two effects will be stronger the more are the areas of life where we have hidden motives. As these two effects seem to me strong, that suggests we have hidden motives in many, perhaps most, areas.

Sixth, in contexts where people pay much more attention to consistency between behavior and stated motives, such as among intellectuals, the need to find stated motives that can in their details justify behaviors actually driven by quite different motives will often be a big constraint, greatly limiting feasible behaviors.

As a result, intellectuals will either limit themselves to topics where the motives of they and their non-intellectual sponsors are not hidden, or to topics where they have found cover motives that can explain many details of their behavior, while covering their real motives. As this is likely to be a big constraint, topics that intellectuals cover will be noticeably less than all possible topics, and their coverage will be spotty, with the size of topic spots set by the the intersection of real and cover motive scopes.

This suggests new ways to explain the strong clumping and spotty coverage of intellectuals across topics, their reluctance to cover many “interdisciplinary” topics, and many correlates of which types of personalities and political stances study which topics via what methods and using what shared assumptions. As real motives plausibly correlate with personalties and political stances. Yes we already have some ways to explain these, but prior explanations have long seemed inadequate to me.

Our topic of applying hidden motives to specific areas of life is itself plausibly outside the scope of topics that satisfy this constraint, explaining a lack of interest in it.

I’ve previously outlined three ways we might fix cultural drift. But each way seems quite a big ask, and I’ve been pondering what is our biggest obstacle here. What I’ve come up with is this: we will need to learn to stop treating conscience as if it were direct evidence on morality.

Evidence can be more vs less direct. For example, in a murder trial, direct evidence may include bodies, bullets, or videos, while testimony of people about these things, or by those who saw the murder, is indirect. Still less direct is testimony on what an accused murderer said. And far less direct are rumors that spread on the murder and who might be responsible.

When we use gossip and crowds to enforce norms, such as in cancel culture, we rely more on indirect evidence. Which often goes badly. So we’ve organized law to focus on direct evidence. Judges are to wait to rule until after they hear the most direct evidence available, and to mostly judge for themselves, rather than deferring to crowds. This avoids many pathologies.

We similarly defer to experts, not popular opinion, in areas of life near the professions. At least when we think expert groups can be trusted to have better access than us to direct evidence, to select members in ways correlated with such access, and to advise outsiders mainly on the basis of their better evidence. In such areas, we rely less on popularity, or on our personal feelings, intuitions, or reasoning.

On topics of “personal taste”, in contrast, like food or music, we focus on more direct evidence: how we feel about various options, both in anticipation and in retrospect. Yes, we may sometimes find advisors whose taste is close enough to ours to make their advice informative, but we see this situation as often hard to arrange.

So far, these seem like sensible ways to adjust epistemic habits to context. Now let’s consider how such habits have changed in the modern world. The Protestant Reformation encouraged Christians to rely on personal judgement, not priests, when interpreting the Bible. Many democracy advocates have warned voters against deferring to elite policy experts. And a new prestige of innovation makes us eager to join new fashions, and think more for ourselves on such things, rather than deferring to experts. We now treat such topics more like personal taste, and less like topics where expertise matters.

Such new modern attitudes may help us to promote innovation and avoid repressive authorities. But we should admit that, taken literally and locally, they seem epistemically flawed. Experts probably are quite a bit better than most people at interpreting the Bible, judging policy, and choosing change ideas. These are not mostly matters of taste.

Modernity has also changed our epistemic habits re morality. The ancients, like most everyone always, put great weight in judging morality on indirect evidence like popularity among ordinary people, elites, and moral authorities. They also put great weight on the somewhat more direct evidence of embodiment in custom, ritual, artistic expression, and formal law; these all suggest that a moral practice has at least passed a test of time. Finally, the ancients put weight on their feelings of conscience, on how much happiness or suffering was induced by a moral stance, and on how successful were the societies who adopted particular moral stances.

Compared to most ancients, when judging morality, we moderns put far less weight on custom and ritual. Since the rise of Christianity, we have put great weight on positions advocated by exemplar “saints” who make great sacrifices for their causes. Since the enlightenment we have also put more weight on positions argued for by our most impressive intellectuals. We also put more weight on stances that support narratives of moral progress, and we have come to embrace fast fashion changes in customs, and among artists and intellectuals, that embody moral stance changes.

Furthermore, much like our modern stances on Bible interpretation, democracy, and innovation, we moderns, compared to the ancients, put far more weight on what we each feel internally via our moral conscience, intuitions, and feelings. We weight such feelings as if they were strong direct evidence on morality.

Now our personal lives do give us some direct evidence on policy and innovations. But if morality is not actually a matter of personal taste, then our personal experience tells us little direct about morality. Yes, experience can show us a bit about the happiness or suffering that moral stances induce in people near us, but this is usually far from sufficient to settle most moral debates. While we need to obey conscience for our cultures to function, such feelings are mostly caused by our DNA, and by the morality of our parents, teachers, and other role models, and so feelings mainly only show that such views have passed a test of time. Feelings have no direct access to moral truth.

Furthermore, fast modern changes in customs, and in artistic and intellectual practice, make such sources even less useful as signs that associated moral stances have passed tests of time. True, the fact that a stance change was driven by impressive intellectuals might in principle suggest that it had become more logically consistent, but alas this effect seems to typically be rather weak.

Thus far I have been somewhat agnostic on the standard I’m using to evaluate “moral truth”. To argue further, let me now invoke my usual standard of Darwinian adaptiveness, re both DNA and cultural evolution. Re that standard, it seems quite hard to produce a community of moral experts. Even so, we still have two big ways that we can rely on somewhat direct signs of adaptiveness. As discussed above, we can judge the happiness or suffering a moral stance induces, which is plausibly a weak indicator of adaptiveness. But, alas, this indicator seems far from sufficient; culture and morality are complicated, and not easily reduced to simple calculations.

Second, we are influenced by how successful are the societies who adopted particular moral stances. In fact, this copy-the-successful-cultures habit has probably been the main cause of adaptive gains in the modern era. Alas, as such copying also caused a great cultural convergence, and so has by now mostly run out of potential for further gains. To the extent that a single (or a few) monoculture rules the world, copying successful cultures won’t help much anymore.

My bottom line here is that the main processes which are driving our big fast changes to our modern moral stances, such as random walks or drifts back toward natural human decadence or forager styles, do not seem much aligned with adaptive pressures. Suggesting that our key moral stances are decaying into maladaption, via the key modern failure of cultural drift.

The modern world seems quite unwilling to restart the traditional way we evolved cultures, via high cultural variety, strong selection pressures, and low rates of change of our contexts and values. So I have concluded:

I can only think of three solutions [to cultural drift], each quite hard to achieve: let capitalism run everything, govern small groups by number-go-up tied to adaption futures markets, or govern a big-enough group by number-go-up tied to futures market estimates re a civ goal in conflict w/ civ fall, like when 1M live in space. (Maybe assisted by futarchy.) (more)

Each of these solutions requires us to, when choosing our moral stances, in effect give much more weight to market proxies of future societal success, and much less weight to our consciences, and to bids by artistic, intellectual, and cultural activists to push moral changes that appeal to such consciences. We must accept that moral truth is not something that any of us have much direct evidence on, beyond the easy truth that suffering tends to be bad.

This would require a huge cultural change, one we don’t at all seem ready to make. But until we do, our civ will likely fall, the successor civ after ours will discard much of what we value of our civ, our descendants will continue to suffer in the troughs between civs, and we may never achieve our potential to reach the stars, and more.

Jason Calcanis of the All in Pod predicted Tesla will land 40% of the future robotaxi market, Uber 40%, Waymo 15%, and everyone else splits the remaining 5%. I go through the actual supply chain, unit economics, and hardware numbers and show why we think that split is way off — and why Tesla likely ...

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In 2009, tourism operators in Australia spotted more and more humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) “fluking,” when a whale floats upside down, holding its tail above the water. Confused by the behavior, they reached out to scientists for help, triggering a research effort that solved one of the biggest mysteries about humpback whales on the Great Barrier Reef. 

The Whitsundays, where the fluking was taking place, is a region with dozens of islands between the Great Barrier Reef and Australia’s north-eastern coast. 

“It was an unusual behaviour they had never seen before. Not even the whale scientists knew what it meant at the time,” Crystal Lacey, Master Reef Guides program manager, said in a statement. “So that uncertainty sparked a major research effort, which combined citizen science through the tourism operators’ observations, and scientific research. It was one of the region’s largest citizen science efforts.” 

The efforts included tourism operators counting whales and calves, and scientists mapping the seafloor, monitoring water temperatures, tracking whales by satellite, and surveying the region from the air. The joint mission found that the Whitsundays is one of the Great Barrier Reef’s most important humpback whale calving areas. In other words, they’d revealed a previously unknown whale maternity ward. 

“The fluking the operators observed was actually a breeding behaviour,” explained Lacey. “We discovered the Whitsundays provides the sheltered, warm and shallow waters humpback whales need to give birth and raise newborn calves.”

Their results also resolved one of the biggest enigmas associated with humpback whales on the Great Barrier Reef—the question of where they give birth. The findings ultimately led to the creation of the Whitsundays Whale Heritage Area within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. 

Humpback whales are found in all the world’s oceans. They’re a whale-watcher favorite because they can be observed close to shore, and frequently put on a show near the surface of the water. Humpback whales mate while “hugging” face-to-face, and the gestation period of females is 11 to 12 months. When they give birth—once every 2 to three years—the calf comes out tail first. 

The post Australia’s humpback whales were acting weird. What happened next surprised scientists. appeared first on Popular Science.

A lot of us like to start our days with a cup of coffee. Whether it’s a pour-over you make at home or a latte from your favorite coffee shop, many people need caffeine to wake up and feel alert. 

If you rely on coffee as a productivity hack, you might be wondering if there’s a time of day that would optimize its effects on the brain. It turns out the answer isn’t that straightforward. How the body reacts to caffeine depends on factors such as age, metabolism, and tolerance. So, here’s what the experts say about how to time that cup of joe. 

What effect does coffee have on the body? 

Caffeine is the central stimulant found in coffee and other foods like tea, soda, and chocolate. It helps us feel more awake by blocking adenosine, a naturally occurring chemical that builds up in the brain while we’re awake. Experiencing morning grogginess, or sleep inertia, is related to residual adenosine in the brain, though other factors like your sleep quality also play a role.  As adenosine builds up throughout the day, it makes us feel increasingly tired and helps signal to the brain that it’s time for sleep. 

Since caffeine has a similar chemical structure to adenosine, it fits into the same receptors in the brain. When caffeine binds to these receptors, it blocks adenosine from doing its job. As a result, the brain receives fewer of the signals that make us feel tired, helping us feel more awake, alert, and energized.  

Caffeine is the central stimulant found in coffee. Video: How does caffeine keep us awake? – Hanan Qasim, TED-Ed

“But this perceived energy does come at a cost,” says Dustin Lee, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Johns Hopkins, in an email to Popular Science. The brain adapts to these conditions incredibly well, so over time, the brain produces more adenosine receptors. 

The more receptors your brain has, the more caffeine it needs to feel alert, eventually leading to caffeine tolerance and withdrawal. “Withdrawal symptoms, which I’m sure most of us have some familiarity with, include headache, irritability, fatigue, and difficulty concentrating,” Lee explains. 

If you want to quit caffeine or miss your usual cup of joe, then you’re likely to experience these symptoms very quickly. They usually start within 12 to 24 hours after stopping caffeine, peak within 48 hours and resolve within two to nine days. 

When should you drink coffee? 

“There’s no set answer for everyone,” says Marie-Pierre St-Onge, a professor of nutritional medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, to Popular Science. It depends on your age, metabolism, and caffeine tolerance. 

“Peak caffeine absorption occurs rapidly, at about 30 to 60 minutes after ingestion,” says Lee, so a simple answer to the question would be to drink coffee about an hour before whatever activity that would benefit from caffeine’s stimulating effects. If you’re going on a run, for example, you might want to get some caffeine in before heading out, says St-Onge. That’s why its use is limited by some sports governing organizations like the National Collegiate Athletic Association. 

You shouldn’t really need caffeine right when you wake up, as your body should already be alert, says St-Onge. “If you’re starting to feel a slump a few hours after waking up, that would be when to drink coffee.” 

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There’s no one-size-fits-all answer

Both Lee and St-Onge stress that the answer to when you should drink coffee really depends on the individual. The ability to metabolize caffeine slows down with age, so the amount of time to clear caffeine from your bloodstream gets longer as you get older. Your circadian rhythm also changes as you get older, which means you might get tired earlier in the day. 

“Compounded, [these changes] make it so that you would want to consume your caffeine earlier as you get older,” explains St-Onge. 

“Caffeine dose matters just as much as the time at which you drink your cup of coffee,” adds Lee. 

A cup of coffee can actually have a wide range of caffeine—the dose can depend on the ratio of coffee to water, how you brewed your cup, and even bean type. And “tolerance has a major effect on caffeine’s effects, so the morning cup of coffee might serve more to partially reverse overnight caffeine withdrawal, so that should be taken into consideration as well,” he says. Basically, that means that for regular coffee drinkers, the first cup of the day is contributing to reversing the effects of not having had any caffeine since the day before. 

When should you not drink coffee?

“Not too close to bedtime,” says St-Onge. If you’re finding that you’re having trouble falling asleep, make sure that you’re not drinking coffee too late in the afternoon. 

Drinking coffee on an empty stomach can also be too abrasive for some people, and may lead to side effects like increased jitters and an increased urge to go to the bathroom. (Though the idea that it can lead to stomach ulcers is a myth.) If you’re someone with a sensitive stomach, try eating something alongside your cup of coffee to be safe. 

Finally, Lee says it’s important to remember that the FDA says that for most healthy adults, 400 milligrams a day—about two to three 12-fluid-ounce cups of coffee—is the amount generally not associated with negative effects. 

So, don’t fret too much the next time you’re thinking of when to have a cup of coffee. Just remember: not too late, and not too much. Then you might become dependent on the stuff.  

In Ask Us Anything, Popular Science answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

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Marine biologists from Trinidad and Tobago recently completed the first locally helmed and most expansive survey of the deep-sea waters around the Caribbean islands. The month-long project aboard Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel (R/V) Falkor (too) documented around 13 percent of the nation’s marine territory, and described 20 potential new species. Researchers also collected over 700 specimens for the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Once catalogued, the additions will increase the size of the university’s Zoology Museum deep ocean collection by 12 times.

“Every new discovery we make, whether ecosystem, species or behavior, deepens our understanding of what’s at stake and strengthens our ability to be true stewards of this largely unseen but critical part of our country,” said expedition chief scientist Diva Amon.

Check out some of the stunning, rarely seen creatures below. (Click to expand images to full screen.)

Suspected new sea star A suspected new species of sea star (Porcellanasteridae) rests on the seafloor at a depth of 3,961 meters. Researchers collected the specimen while making dozens of other discoveries during the expedition, including at least 20 suspected new species. Credit: ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute Symbiotic coral Symbiotic brittle stars cling to a deep-sea coral off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago. A research team led by marine biologist Dr. Diva Amon (SpeSeas), composed largely of Trinbagonian scientists, surveyed the island nation’s deep-water territory to document rare ecosystems and guide local conservation efforts. Credit: ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute
King crab A king crab (Lithodes genus) crawls across the seafloor at a depth of 1,083 meters. Top predators in deep-sea environments, researchers documented these crabs while searching for bubble streams associated with unexplored cold seeps. Credit: ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute Rare manta ray fall The science team encountered this rare manta ray (Mobula) fall at 1,025 meters depth off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago. When animals die in the ocean, their bodies often sink to the seafloor, creating a rich food buffet that feeds hundreds of deep-sea species in an often food-scarce environment. Credit: ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute Eelpout An eelpout (Pachycara caribbaeum) lies on a bed of chemosynthetic mussels (Gigantidas childressi) off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago. Ninety-three percent of Trinidad and Tobago lies below recreational scuba depths, placing its largest ecosystems in the mesophotic zone (between 30 and 199 meters) and the deep ocean. The geological setting of the two islands is ideal for supporting chemosynthetic habitats. Credit: ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute Squat lobster A cold-water coral recorded at a depth of 1,055 meters (3,461 feet) provides habitat for marine life on the seafloor. While warm-water coral reefs at shallow recreational depths are widely known, deep-sea cold-water corals are far more abundant yet remain understudied. These complex ecosystems support diverse marine species, including squat lobsters, as pictured here. Credit: ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute Mushroom coral A mushroom coral rests on the seafloor at a depth of 1,277 meters off Trinidad and Tobago. Less than 0.001% of the island nation’s deep-ocean territory has been explored due to technological constraints, leaving significant knowledge gaps about deep-water marine life in the region. Credit: ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute Black swallower fish A black swallower fish (Chiasmodon niger) swims at a depth of 1,259 meters during a remotely operated vehicle dive off Trinidad and Tobago. Known for their expandable stomachs and dislocating jaws, these rare deep-sea fish can swallow prey larger than themselves. This specimen’s translucent belly reveals a recent meal. A research team led by marine biologist Diva Amon conducted the first comprehensive deep-water survey of the nation’s ocean territory, where more than 93% of the waters lie below recreational diving depths. Credit: ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute Lizard fish Scientists observed this lizardfish at a depth of 148 meters while exploring a slope off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago in a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Credit: ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute Ghost shark A chimaera, or ghost shark, swims near a cold seep at a depth of 2,355 meters. Scientists discovered 25 cold seeps during the recent deep-sea expedition. Unlike sunlight-dependent ecosystems, marine life near these seafloor fissures relies on chemosynthetic energy generated by gas escaping from the Earth’s surface. Credit: ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute

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OpenAI GPT 6 is a next generation model. It is built different. Theo says it is the best model ever.

The New England Aquarium has cause to celebrate. Their cownose ray (Rhinoptera bonasus) Mystic officially turned 27-years-old. The birthday girl’s milestone is even more exceptional in light of the fact that cownose rays in the ocean typically live around 18 to 20 years.

“With excellent care, these animals can live even longer. We aren’t sure what the upper age limit for this species is, but Mystic could be considered one of the oldest individuals in public aquariums,” Rachel Moote, manager of husbandry at the New England Aquarium, tells Popular Science. “Our dedicated veterinary and aquarist staff work to keep Mystic in excellent health. She is monitored regularly by our teams and receives hands-on exams whenever a closer look is required.”

Mystic swimming by her birthday sign. Image: New England Aquarium.

Cownose rays are migratory, open-ocean animals related to other rays. Their unique name comes from their snout, which looks a bit like a cow’s nose, and their wingspan can be up to three feet long. Cownose rays have a venomous spine behind their dorsal fins, but the species is shy. In fact, a majority of ray-caused injuries in humans occur when humans unintentionally step on their spines. They are found along the east coast of the United States, and are classified as Vulnerable by the IUCN Red List. 

Mystic has lived at the aquarium for almost two decades. Following a long career in the Giant Ocean Tank, she’s currently taking a  “much-deserved retirement,” at the aquarium’s Quincy Animal Care Center. Her care team in Quincy includes aquarists, volunteers, and interns. She is hand-fed a diverse diet of fish, clams, and shellfish similar to what her diet in the wild would be, and also takes vitamin supplements. For her birthday, she received a fish and shrimp cake. 

Mystic’s “birthday cake” was fit for a ray. Image: New England Aquarium.

However, her care goes beyond making sure she eats appropriately. 

“Our team works hard to ensure Mystic can practice her natural foraging and problem solving abilities. One way we keep her mentally stimulated is by providing her with specially prepared rubber puzzle balls filled with her regular food items,” explains Moote. Every week, aquarists also dive into Mystic’s tank to clean the habitat. 

Happy birth-ray, Mystic!

The post Happy Birth-ray! Mystic the cownose ray turns 27 appeared first on Popular Science.

Chris Camillo — the investor who’s turned a small stake into as much as $100M — says Tesla’s robotaxi and Cybercab story is already priced into the stock. We go through the actual numbers on a whiteboard and show why we think he’s missing several layers. FSD subscription revenue today, the Hardware 4 legacy fleet ...

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Imagine this: A giant sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) has just swallowed you whole.

It might seem like a bizarre scenario to envision, but you’d hardly be the first. In the Bible’s Book of Jonah, the belly of a whale is the setting for the prophet Jonah’s  three days of repentance and prayer. In the 1940 Disney film Pinocchio, Geppetto manages to rig up a cozy living space inside the stomach of Monstro the sperm whale, complete with amenities including  a small fire and a fishing setup for seafood that drifts in. Even his pet goldfish, Cleo, is swimming inside the microcosm of her highly ironic fishbowl.

Surviving inside of a giant sea creature has become a classic “fish tale” of human resilience and redemption. In the latest reimagining of this theme, the upcoming movie Whalefall, a scuba diver is swallowed by a sperm whale and has exactly one hour to escape before his oxygen runs out.

But for all our fascination with extended whale-squatting, one fact remains: it has never actually happened. The few close calls with whale ingestion have involved humpback whales, a species physically incapable of swallowing a person. In all cases, the whale spat the person up as quickly as you might cough up a bug that flew into your mouth.

“I wouldn’t call that swallowed,” Shane Gero, a whale biologist and Lead Biologist at Project CETI, tells Popular Science. “I would call that a mistake by both the mammals involved.”

So, if it’s never actually happened, is it even possible?

A highly unlikely accident 

Whalefall is the film adaptation of a 2023 novel of the same name by Pulitzer Prize winning author Daniel Kraus, and arrives in theaters on October 16.Protagonist Jay Gardiner is on a diving expedition to find the remains of his late father, a mariner who died at sea. Suddenly, Jay is swallowed by a giant sperm whale, with only an hour of oxygen remaining in his scuba tank. To try and survive, Jay deploys a series of highly resourceful, increasingly MacGyver-esque maneuvers, including using the beak of a squid to cut through the whale’s stomach lining, and navigating his climb up into the whale’s throat using the glow of a jellyfish. 

The ordeal is an adrenaline-fueled adventure for Jay, but could any of it ever happen? Gero, who has studied sperm whales for over 20 years, thinks it’s highly improbable, starting with the swallowing part.

“To my knowledge, no one has ever been eaten by a sperm whale,” he says.

Gero hypothesizes that after some generous suspension of disbelief about sperm whales’ feeding habits and anatomy, there could be a situation where “the largest sperm whale ever” could accidentally ingest a human.

Austin Abrams as Jay Gardiner in 20th Century Studios’ WHALEFALL. Image: © 2026 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

“I think anatomically, maybe you could shove a slender human down the throat of a very large, male sperm whale,” he says. “Would it happen? Very unlikely. Certainly not with scuba gear and a scuba tank making the human that much bigger.”

Yet Gero, who has read the novel, praised the book’s meticulous efforts to make the science line up, including its explanation for why a sperm whale would be anywhere near a scuba diver. Sperm whales usually feed at about 3,000-feet-deep at the bottom of the ocean, an area not typically occupied by scuba divers. The book reconciles this by having a giant squid (Architeuthis dux) struggling at the surface to escape being eaten by the sperm whale. When the whale comes to the surface to eat the squid, the squid latches onto Jay, who is then pulled into the whale’s mouth. But even after accepting this explanation, Gero notes that sperm whales use echolocation, which would likely distinguish a human as unusual prey, not a potentially tasty morsel.

“Eating a human by accident seems very unlikely, but it makes for a really exciting story,” Gero says.

The odds of surviving inside a whale

If a person somehow managed to survive entering the mouth of a sperm whale without drowning from the propulsive rush of water, Gero says that their luck would worsen almost immediately.

“More than likely, the human drowns the second they get smashed into the mouth of the whale, whether they were drawn in by a squid or accidentally brought into the mouth of a whale,” he says. “My guess is the person dies the second they enter the mouth.”

Gero raises another interesting possibility. Sperm whales usually prey on boneless squid, so consuming a scuba-outfitted human could be a choking hazard, and could choke to death. 

Male sperm whale swimming at the surface, Pelagos Sanctuary, Mediterranean Sea, Italy. Image: by wildestanimal via Getty Images.

This would certainly make for a shorter movie, but Gero notes that the whale’s body could also have a more lively response to an unwanted foreign object in its mouth.

“When I swallow something that I shouldn’t have, it’s like a non-controllable response — your body just starts moving its mouth and coughing,” Gero says. “In that sort of movement, or freakout, it probably is going to do a lot of physical damage to the human.”

Although Gero acknowledges that he is not a  whale anatomist, he still believes that it would be highly unlikely for any living creature to make it into the stomach of a sperm whale, let alone set up camp there.

“There are acids and gases,” he says. “The digestive tract of any mammal is not meant to be a livable place for any prey that ends up there.”

Dr. Joy Reidenberg, a comparative anatomist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City who consulted on the anatomy for both the Whalefall book and film, explains that a sperm whale’s stomach is divided into four chambers. These chambers are a vestige from their early days as a land-based, plant-eating mammal about 50 million years ago. The first chamber is lined with thick, muscular tissue. It’s responsible for mashing up food, since sperm whales’ teeth, found only on the lower jaw, are too pointed to chew.

If Jay needed something solid to grab onto and pull himself toward the whale’s throat, Reidenberg tells Popular Science he wouldn’t find much. It would mostly be “wet, slimy, squishy walls,” with “no hooks, no handles.” The one exception is the whale’s voice box, or larynx, which sticks up like a rigid pipe. 

“If he gets his arm around that, he can pull himself out,” she explains.

Even in that situation, Reidenberg says, few people would live to tell this phenomenal tale.

“Most people, unless they have protection and air, couldn’t survive this situation. Also, a sperm whale would probably never swallow a person.”

Meet your actual nightmare 

While the  fictitious scenario of a massive sperm whale swallowing a human relies as much on poetic license as it does grounded science, could any other land or sea animal engulf an entire human being?

Horrifyingly, yes. The reticulated python (Malayopython reticulatus), which is the world’s longest snake species and can measure as much as  26-feet-long, has been known to take in an entire human. According to a 2025 study tracking python-related deaths in Indonesia, 17 people were preyed upon by reticulated pythons between 1927 and 2025. Astonishingly, four of these people survived, although it’s unlikely they spent any quality time inside the snake. In several of the fatal cases, the humans were swallowed whole.

Gero notes that a green anaconda (Eunectes murinus) might also be up to the task, since they can swallow animals as large as deer. Even then, this prey is already dead when it’s consumed.

“Anacondas famously wrap around and crush their prey,” Gero says. “The body is limp by the time it goes down.”

Austin Abrams as Jay Gardiner in 20th Century Studios’ WHALEFALL. Image: © 2026 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved. Why these fish tales endure

Gero also makes one key distinction about sperm whales: they have absolutely no interest in preying on humans, intentionally or otherwise. In fact, humans have spent centuries slaughtering whales for oil, an uneasy relationship that may be part of why they loom so large in our storytelling.

“If those stories exist from the whaling days, they’re more a lesson to future whalers than they are based in reality,” he says. “I’ve never seen any kind of aggression from a sperm whale. These are gentle giants of the deep.”

Gero hopes movies like Whalefall will spark genuine curiosity about the intelligent, peaceful animals behind the myth. He and the team at Project CETI are working to decipher how sperm whales communicate with each other. In the meantime, you can visit listen.projectceti.org to record what you’d say to a sperm whale, if you ever had a chance. 

This story is part of Popular Science’s Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

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Many who hold the plausible belief that some UFOs are caused by strange strong (“alien”) powers now believe that the US (and maybe other) govts have long been keeping strong confirming evidence re these powers secret, plausibly for as long as eighty years, but might now be induced to disclose this info.

A plausible counter argument is that even if particular parts of the govt once had such evidence, govt is often so bad at coordinating as to make it plausible that they’ve destroyed it all, and told few other govt parts about what they knew. And even if they still know something, the long history of new revelations offers a low base rate, suggesting that disclosure is pretty unlikely anytime soon.

The usual explanation given for why govt might have kept this secret is that they hoped to learn something big from the advanced tech UFOs display. But it seems to me that they could easily have revealed their evidence while still keeping key tech details secret. And much more damning is that not only may many nations have seen similar evidence, the usual and quite reasonable consensus is that none of them have actually learned much useful from any of it.

Our govt military and intelligence communities must be quite aware that citizens are only willing to give them a limited fraction of GDP, which clearly shows that the “security” goals we assign to them are not an overwhelming priority. So when they see that they have a way to give us a big boost on our other goals at only a modest cost to security, they should be willing to make that trade. And it should be clear that disclosure would in fact give us a big boost to our other goals. If hoping for future tech advances is really their reason for silence, that’s a pretty huge govt agency failure.

Some suggest that their reason is to protect the public from emotional stress. But that seems pretty crazy; I’m pretty sure most of us could quickly and easily accommodate the news. Yes, the status of many might fall, but when truths can hurt status, then truths should so hurt status.