The Download: inside the Vitalism movement, and why AI's "memory" is a privacy problem Meet the Vitalists: the hardcore longevity enthusiasts who believe death is "wrong" Last April, an excited crowd gathered at a compound in Berkeley, California, for a three-day event called the Vitalist Bay Summit. It was part of a longer, two-month residency that hosted various events to explore tools--from drug regulation to cryonics--that might be deployed in the fight against death. One of the main goals, though, was to spread the word of Vitalism, a somewhat radical movement established by Nathan Cheng and his colleague Adam Gries a few years ago. Consider it longevity for the most hardcore adherents--a sweeping mission to which nothing short of total devotion will do. Although interest in longevity has certainly taken off in recent years, not everyone in the broader longevity space shares Vitalists' commitment to actually making death obsolete. And the Vitalists feel that momentum is building, not just for the science of aging and the development of lifespan-extending therapies, but for the acceptance of their philosophy that .

Should private companies be able to dim the sun? Solar geoengineering aims to manipulate the climate by bouncing sunlight back into space. In theory, it could ease global warming. But as interest in the idea grows, so do concerns about potential consequences. A startup called Stardust Solutions recently raised a $60 million funding round, the largest known to date for a geoengineering startup. My colleague James Temple has a new story out about the company, and how its emergence is making some researchers nervous.

This paper develops the foundations of Quantum Granular Computing (QGC), extending classical granular computing including fuzzy, rough, and shadowed granules to the quantum regime. Quantum granules are modeled as effects on a finite dimensional Hilbert space, so granular memberships are given by Born probabilities. This operator theoretic viewpoint provides a common language for sharp (projective) and soft (nonprojective) granules and embeds granulation directly into the standard formalism of quantum information theory. We establish foundational results for effect based quantum granules, including normalization and monotonicity properties, the emergence of Boolean islands from commuting families, granular refinement under Luders updates, and the evolution of granules under quantum channels via the adjoint channel in the Heisenberg picture. We connect QGC with quantum detection and estimation theory by interpreting the effect operators realizing Helstrom minimum error measurement for binary state discrimination as Helstrom type decision granules, i.e., soft quantum counterparts of Bayes optimal decision regions. Building on these results, we introduce Quantum Granular Decision Systems (QGDS) with three reference architectures that specify how quantum granules can be defined, learned, and integrated with classical components while remaining compatible with near term quantum hardware. Case studies on qubit granulation, two qubit parity effects, and Helstrom style soft decisions illustrate how QGC reproduces fuzzy like graded memberships and smooth decision boundaries while exploiting noncommutativity, contextuality, and entanglement. The framework thus provides a unified and mathematically grounded basis for operator valued granules in quantum information processing, granular reasoning, and intelligent systems.

A current gap in the acoustic space is a large-scale, fine-grained dataset of species sounds that is easy to download and easy to use.

AMANDA PLATELL: Fergie's delusions have reached a new low. I can't believe Beatrice and Eugenie are egging her on. Wake up and see he's the master of the dark arts: MEGYN KELLY blows the lid on the REAL Mamdani... how are they missing this? 'Screaming' Sydney Sweeney'hates' that she was caught hiding in ex-fiancé's car: Now insiders spill truth about backseat rendezvous and lingering'frustrations' Karoline Leavitt warns'short of planes falling out of the sky' Democrats won't reopen government Donald Trump's adopted hometown is set to name its airport after the president Now he's dead, here's the full story of what happened that day... and the ghastly aftermath no one knows about Bella Thorne continues swimsuit season as she works sexy bikini for Los Cabo trip with her'love' Mark Emms Why Tuesday's races aren't as close as you think: White House analyst CRAIG KESHISHIAN reveals what the polls always miss She took my son... now I'm exposing the secrets she's hidden from the world Big Short star Michael Burry's $1BILLION bet against tech giants shakes markets: 'We've seen this movie before' The murder that haunts the Kennedys: Martha Moxley's loved ones reveal their truth in the FREE The Crime Desk newsletter... as accused cousin cleared in killing breaks cover Boy George's vile attack on lesbian banned by LA gym for confronting'transgender patron who stared at her while she was naked in locker room' Diddy's male prison protector unmasked: How disgraced mogul has repaid him... and turned to God for repentance US spy jet spotted patrolling cartel stronghold off Mexico's coast for hours The US Navy's P-8 Poseidon, an aircraft designed for anti-submarine warfare, surveillance, and reconnaissance, was spotted circling a drug-smuggling hub off Mexico's coast. On Tuesday, flight trackers recorded the jet performing multiple loops miles offshore from Tijuana, a city long plagued by violent organized crime and considered a major corridor for cartel operations. The P-8 took off from the Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington, flew through Oregon and through California .

Environment Animals Wildlife Spiders Beware, beachgoers: New spider discovered in California's sand dunes Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Just in time for Halloween, researchers have identified a new species of trapdoor spider. The newly discovered is about the size of a quarter, brown, and pretty chunky. It's the fourth known species of trapdoor spiders in California whose habitat is limited to sandy coastal dunes. Female trapdoor spiders are basically vampires .

A current gap in the acoustic space is a large-scale, fine-grained dataset of species sounds that is easy to download and easy to use.

How healthy am I? My immunome knows the score. Made up of 1.8 trillion cells and trillions more proteins, metabolites, mRNA, and other biomolecules, every person's immunome is different, and it is constantly changing. It's shaped by everything we have ever been exposed to physically and emotionally, and powerfully influences everything from our vulnerability to viruses and cancer to how well we age to whether we tolerate certain foods better than others. Yet as critical as the immunome is to each of us, it has remained largely beyond the reach of modern medicine. Now, thanks to a slew of new technologies, understanding this vital and mysterious system is within our grasp, paving the way for powerful new tools and tests to help us better assess, diagnose and treat diseases. On Monday, we published our 2025 edition of Climate Tech Companies to Watch .

LLM leaderboards often rely on single stochastic runs, but how many repetitions are required for reliable conclusions remains unclear. We re-evaluate eight state-of-the-art models on the AI4Math Benchmark with three independent runs per setting. Using mixed-effects logistic regression, domain-level marginal means, rank-instability analysis, and run-to-run reliability, we assessed the value of additional repetitions. Our findings shows that Single-run leaderboards are brittle: 10/12 slices (83\%) invert at least one pairwise rank relative to the three-run majority, despite a zero sign-flip rate for pairwise significance and moderate overall interclass correlation. Averaging runs yields modest SE shrinkage ($\sim$5\% from one to three) but large ranking gains; two runs remove $\sim$83\% of single-run inversions. We provide cost-aware guidance for practitioners: treat evaluation as an experiment, report uncertainty, and use $\geq 2$ repetitions under stochastic decoding. These practices improve robustness while remaining feasible for small teams and help align model comparisons with real-world reliability.

Abstract-- Numerous visual impairments can be detected in red-eye reflex images from young children. The so-called Bruckner test is traditionally performed by ophthalmologists in clinical settings. Thanks to the recent technological advances in smartphones and artificial intelligence, it is now possible to recreate the Bruckner test using a mobile device. In this paper, we present a first study conducted during the development of KidsVisionCheck, a free application that can perform vision screening with a mobile device using red-eye reflex images. The underlying model relies on deep neural networks trained on children's pupil images collected and labeled by an ophthalmologist. With an accuracy of 90% on unseen test data, our model provides highly reliable performance without the necessity of specialist equipment. Furthermore, we can identify the optimal conditions for data collection, which can in turn be used to provide immediate feedback to the users. In summary, this work marks a first step toward accessible pediatric vision screenings and early intervention for vision abnormalities worldwide.