DIGITAL DUST Library

Two weeks after warning that AI could contribute to human extinction, Anthropic quietly opened a real biology lab to put its AI to work inventing medicine.

A small nonprofit wants to launch a probe toward Alpha Centauri within three years, funded almost entirely by public donations. It will arrive in about 80,000 years, and the team behind it already expects a faster, later spacecraft to beat it there. They're going anyway.

This year's Ig Nobel Prizes went to real, peer-reviewed research that looks like satire: a splash-free urinal inspired by dogs, mosquito mouths turned into 3D-printer nozzles, and 1,000 pairs of underwear buried across 25 countries to test soil health.

In China, opening a new credit card or phone plan increasingly comes with free AI tokens thrown in a sign of just how cheap running AI has become there, whether or not customers know what a token is.

A childhood memory of Total Recall's robot taxi driver, and the strange feeling of watching Tesla's real one show up in Austin thirty-six years later.