A 2024 report explains how E. coli senses chemical changes and adjusts its swimming, showing how a single cell can process information.
The Baffling Intelligence Of A Single Cell (2024)
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AI & Tooling
201 posts
Open Thread 455
Astral Codex Ten’s Open Thread 455 invites discussion and lists a meetup date change, a matching donation offer and an AI research residency.
Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [Pdf]
![Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [Pdf]](https://biodivert.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/terence-tao-math-2-0-pdf-featured.jpg)
A search-interest signal points to Terence Tao’s “Math 2.0” PDF, but the document’s contents and the reason for the attention are unverified.
The Lightbulb Computer
A September 2026 design project shows a projector-and-camera concept for shared, hands-free information displays, but no consumer product is ready.
Chernobyl Particles Reveal Unexpectedly Stable Nuclear Fuel After 40 Years
X-ray analysis of six Chernobyl hot particles found fuel structures largely intact, but researchers say the small sample cannot establish regional risks.
Pointing AI At Archives Found A Forgotten Meteorite, Lost Rhinos, And More
A software engineer used AI to screen historical records, surfacing a meteorite report, three rhino records and possible undocumented eruptions.
Top Forecasters On The Plague
Three forecasting sources estimate no more than a 1% chance of over 1,000 global plague deaths in 12 months after a Russian lab worker’s death.
Open Thread 454
Astral Codex Ten’s Open Thread 454 shares meetup, Fatima document, book review and AI safety updates, alongside a note about publishing delays.
Dust: Pretraining Transformers Without Backpropagation
Q Labs reports that Dust can pretrain transformers using activation perturbations, with results approaching backprop at high compute but important limits remaining.
Opus 5.5 Agents Discover Two Room-temperature Magnetic Semiconductor Candidates
Vals AI reports two predicted room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates, but experimental validation and key performance details remain outstanding.
