🖼️ Native vision-language design with early multimodal fusion trained on massive text-image-video data
🌍 Expanded multilingual coverage to 201 languages & dialects
🤖 Demonstrates visual agent workflows across mobile & desktop interfaces beyond passive chat
📊 First open-weight release: Qwen3.5-397B-A17B ultra-sparse MoE model
🔬 Large-scale reinforcement learning across multi-agent environments for real-world adaptability
China just unveiled a game-changing energy storage breakthrough: the world's first 560°C "Carnot battery" that stores electricity as ultra-high-temperature heat and cold.
SPIC's pilot system has completed seven full cycles at 1 MW/4 MWh, offering a promising alternative to lithium-ion batteries for long-duration storage.
NASA’s #Carruthers Geocorona Observatory has also achieved its target orbit, positioning the spacecraft to capture the first repeated observations of the ultraviolet glow from Earth’s outer atmosphere, the geocorona: https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/carruthers-geocorona-observatory/2026/01/12/nasas-carruthers-geocorona-observatory-reaches-target-orbit/ - the achievement was confirmed following its third and final orbital maneuver, a 2-minute thruster fire, on Jan. 8; the spacecraft has now entered its intended halo orbit around the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, a position of gravitational balance approximately 1 million miles from Earth.
😵💫 Targeted ultrasound can shape the brain's reward-seeking mechanisms
#ultrasound
Source: Sam Altman's Merge Labs, which seeks to read brain activity using ultrasound, is being spun out of LA-based nonprofit Forest Neurotech (Emily Mullin/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/sam-altman-brain-computer-interf…
I think the root of the “AI” evil is when AI researchers in the 1960s recognized that they outrageously underestimated the complexity of the human mind.
They became humiliated by their promises that AGI was just a few years away—and then went full goblin mode that’s lasting to this day.
Some of the OG researchers took it quite badly that they stalled and weren’t in the limelight anymore.
‣ Marvin Minsky (co-founder of MIT AI lab and arguably the most important early AI bro) went on to visit Epstein’s island multiple times.
‣ Karl Steinbuch, who came up with the German term for computer science ("Informatik")—who also was a literal Nazi (and likely war criminal) in World War II—later wrote articles in ultra-right magazines about things like “equal rights rob women of their children”.
‣ John McCarthy (inventor of Lisp, co-authored document that coined the term “Artificial Intelligence”) was a staunch Republican who years later claimed (in a serious article) that “thermostats have beliefs”.
[one moment, I am receiving more information]
‣ There’s a second Epstein Island AI pioneer? Who also was Chief Learning Officer at… Trump University? That would be Roger Schank (founded one of the first AI companies in the 1980s AI boom, it even had an IPO. Of course the 1980s AI bubble burst).
Obviously all of the above received all the awards in computer science and are very revered people.
WIRED: Sam Altman’s new brain venture, Merge Labs, will spin out of a nonprofit, Forest Neurotech https://www.wired.com/story/sam-altman-brain-computer-interface-merge-labs-spin-out-nonprofit-forest-neurotech/ Focus on usin…
A "Warning/Guarantee" on the album Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention (1985 Protest against governmental music censorship):
WARNING/GUARANTEE:
This album contains material which a truly free society would neither fear nor suppress.
In some socially retarded areas, religious fanatics and ultra-conservative political organizations violate your First Amendment Rights by attempting to censor rock & roll albums. We feel that this is un-Constitutional and un…