‘When You Try To Kill It, It Doesn’t Die’: Jellyfish That Cracked Immortality

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‘When You Try To Kill It, It Doesn’t Die’: The Jellyfish That Cracked Secret of Immortality (Maria)

The author writes, “Immortality is generally considered the realm of the gods or science fiction, a fantasy that’s actively pursued by tech entrepreneurs in experiments. … But one ethereal, thimble-shaped jellyfish has already cracked the code. Associate Professor Maria Pia Miglietta, a marine biologist at A&M University in Texas, explains Turritopsis dohrnii has an incredible ability to cheat death.”

Trump Officials Offer Cities Tens of Millions for Memphis-Style Police Surges (Reader Jim)

The author writes, “The Trump administration is offering grants of tens of millions of dollars to cities across the US to create more Memphis-style enforcement surges — on the condition that they abandon progressive ideologies on policing. The US Department of Justice says it will announce up to four finalist cities that will split $300m in grant funding under a federal ‘Model Cities’ policing initiative (MCI) next month, setting the stage for some of the largest federal policing grants ever awarded to individual US cities. In exchange for the funding, cities are required to comply with federal immigration enforcement requests, enact conservative policies on anti-homelessness rules, and potentially repay millions of dollars in the event of a surge in violent crime or ‘civil unrest,’ according to a grant document.”

The Human-Origin Story Is Being Radically Revised (Sean)

From The Atlantic: “DNA analysis is only one of the techniques that scientists have been using to cast narrow shafts of light into the dark abyss that is the human past. Researchers from several disciplines have been collecting and reinterpreting ever smaller traces of our forebears to reimagine how they lived, what they made, and what family secrets they might still be hiding. … All year, scientists from different fields have been making revisions to the human-origin story. In January, one team announced that they’d found handheld wooden tools along an ancient lakeshore in present-day Greece — a refuge between glaciers where hominins of some kind butchered elephants about 430,000 years ago. These are surely not the first wooden tools ever to be made, but they are the most ancient that we’ve managed to find — and they were used during the Stone Age.”

If You Haven’t Recently Used Claude Code*, You Might Not Understand Where AI Is At (Gerry)

The author writes, “So, how big of a deal will AI really be? The future is hard to predict. But what should be easier to predict is the present: where AI is at now. Whether it’s Reddit, news stories, or academic papers, you can still find often-repeated opinions about how (LLM-based) AI can’t reason, should not be called intelligent, cannot flexibly adapt to changing circumstances, and can only regurgitate what it has seen in training and not solve novel problems. And fundamentally, current AI isn’t like what we know — and fear — from sci-fi: it can’t act in the world, it just provides you with information, like a more interactive version of Wikipedia or Google. And half of the time it doesn’t even work! Like others, I get the sense that such views are based on interactions with the chatbots of about a year ago, not very-current AI agents.”

This Former GOP Politician Wants to Take Politics Out of Climate Change (Laura)

From The New York Times: “Bill Frist, the former Republican Senate majority leader, racked up a slew of notable medical successes during his years as one of the country’s top heart and lung surgeons. He founded one of the country’s busiest transplant centers. One of his patients held the Guinness World Record for being the longest surviving single lung transplant recipient. And, in 1991, Mr. Frist performed lifesaving thoracic surgery on Gen. David Petraeus, then a lieutenant-colonel, when, during a training exercise, the military leader was accidentally shot in the chest. But now, Mr. Frist, 74, advocates for the health of the biggest, most famous patient of all: the Earth.”

Taylor Swift Silently Shuts Down Donald Trump (Bethany)

From Vanity Fair: “For years, Donald Trump and his team has been engaging in a particular form of digital provocation: using the biggest hits by major pop stars as background music for propaganda videos posted to TikTok and other social media platforms. From posts detailing ICE raids to those that boost the war in Iran, the strategy seems designed to provoke direct conflict with artists — who often oppose the president’s policies — in order to amplify their media impact. However, this tactic has just run up against the copyright empire of the most powerful singer on the planet: Taylor Swift, who has apparently managed to completely silence multiple posts from the White House and the Republican campaign that went up the past week.”

Koalas Are Getting a Vaccine to Help With Their STD Problem (Dana)

From Nautilus: “The fact that koalas are still on Earth is a bit of a miracle, given the severe population bottlenecks they experienced during the Pleistocene. Yet, as they’ve expanded to reoccupy portions of their former range, koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus) have encountered a new survival challenge — sexually transmitted disease — that’s caused their endangerment in several Australian states. … Chlamydia, thought to have spread in koalas at least in part from domestic livestock, causes blindness, infertility, and even premature death. Thankfully, a concerted program of vaccine development and administration to hundreds of wild koalas over the past decade reduced the incidence of chlamydia by three-quarters, giving them a significant reproductive boost. Each wild-caught koala was captured for a first vaccine, then recaptured a month later for a booster.”