President Trump and Vice President Vance had an explosive exchange with Ukrainian President Zelensky in the White House that made clear the new administration no longer supports the war.
https://youtu.be/hZrYHvE8mcM?si=sQclJ-ThPu1kCcQg
A two-hour long conversation between Trump and Putin about ending the Ukraine War yielded almost nothing.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjevg23enggo
Ukrainian troops all but abandoned the salient of Russian territory they captured near Kursk thanks to a well-planned Russian attack.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/world/europe/kursk-russia-ukraine.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0q198zyppqo
https://youtu.be/GDPM70n4kqE?si=DC1YDOl9BufQKKLL
A private group chat between the U.S. Vice President, Secretary Defense, and several other top leaders discussing military strikes against Yemen was leaked to the press.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/25/us/signal-group-chat-text-annotations.html
The ceasefire declared in Gaza at the start of Trump’s term just ended as Israel resumed airstrikes, killing hundreds in a matter of days.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-ramps-risk-war-gaza-strip-hamas-palestinian-witkoff-trump-rcna197730
The number of Gazans killed by Israel since the October 7 attack reached 50,000. About half are innocent civilians.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/23/israeli-offensive-in-gaza-has-killed-50000-palestinians-since-october-2023
Thousands of Gazans protested against Hamas’ rule.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/25/middleeast/anti-hamas-protests-gaza-intl-latam/index.html
‘Kurdish PKK militants declare a ceasefire in 40-year insurgency in Turkey’
https://apnews.com/article/pkk-turkey-kurdish-militants-ceasefire-66bae6dd7d08c8144b683f92042fbfc9
Syria saw the worst violence since the end of its civil war as members of the Alawite minority group that are still loyal to Bashar al-Assad fought against troops from the new government.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrxkm2evnlo
https://apnews.com/article/syria-alawites-sectarian-killings-coast-assad-hts-610cdee1d5762d3ecb75c700fb7cf5f2
China has built several large barges that could be used to aid an amphibious invasion of Taiwan.
https://www.twz.com/sea/our-best-look-yet-at-chinas-new-invasion-barges
“The NOMARS program aims to challenge the traditional naval architecture model, designing a seaframe (the ship without mission systems) from the ground up with no provision, allowance, or expectation for humans on board,” DARPA says on its website. “By removing the human element from all ship design considerations, the program intends to demonstrate significant advantages, to include: size, cost, at-sea reliability, greater hydrodynamic efficiency, survivability to sea-state, and survivability to adversary actions through stealth considerations and tampering resistance.”
https://www.twz.com/sea/mysterious-naval-vessel-spotted-in-washington-state-is-a-new-darpa-drone-ship
President Trump’s threats to take over Greenland are backfiring.
https://www.pressenza.com/2025/03/comments-on-the-joint-statement-by-greenlands-party-leaders-in-response-to-trumps-rhetoric-on-the-annexation-of-greenland/
https://apnews.com/article/greenland-future-trump-arctic-independence-denmark-minerals-4711a83c4490de99638db32029b668c9
Could Canada become America’s 51st state? Alberta is the likeliest province to secede from Canada and join the U.S. If it did so, Canada might be left so weakened that the other provinces would be ultimately forced to leave as well.
Canadian provinces can be admitted to the U.S. as new states through a simple majority vote in Congress followed by Presidential approval. The entry of former provinces would coincide with periods when the U.S. government was controlled by a party aligned with their politics: Republicans would approve the entry of the conservative provinces (Alberta and Saskatchewan) while Democrats would approve all the rest.
Due to these timing issues, the ex-Canadian provinces would need to exist as independent countries for years before being allowed to join the U.S.
https://youtu.be/jSkgLNSLaYg?si=zJTg3Oq92bFusopK
‘Almost 7 Years Ago, Elon Musk Announced He’d Turn Tunnel Dirt Into ‘Bricks For Low-Cost Housing.’ Another One Of His Ideas That Fizzled Out?’
https://www.benzinga.com/news/25/03/44459874/almost-7-years-ago-elon-musk-announced-hed-turn-tunnel-dirt-into-bricks-for-low-cost-housing-another-one-of-his-ideas-that-fizzled-out
China’s electric car company, BYD, is close to surpassing Tesla.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd65d583qvzo
President Trump announced the creation of an American cryptocurrency reserve.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/3/3/trump-names-5-cryptocurrencies-for-national-reserve-sending-prices-soaring
https://reason.com/2025/03/05/trumps-unstrategic-crypto-reserve/
Freeman Dyson’s son, who is a very accomplished computer scientist, watched the Claude 3.7 Sonnet LLM create an accurate computer simulation of a piece of cloth waving in the breeze in only a few minutes. In 1986, the same task took him months and served as his masters thesis at MIT.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/im-outdone-in-minutes-computer-engineer-says-ai-has-surpassed-years-of-his-work-in-a-flash/articleshow/118596710.cms
“I think today’s systems, they’re very passive, but there’s still a lot of things they can’t do. But I think over the next five to 10 years, a lot of those capabilities will start coming to the fore and we’ll start moving towards what we call artificial general intelligence,” Hassabis said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/17/human-level-ai-will-be-here-in-5-to-10-years-deepmind-ceo-says.html
The unnatural movements of the new Atlas robot show what is possible when the constraints of biology and evolutionary path-dependence are removed and a humanoid body can be designed from scratch.
https://youtu.be/v8UaiRgqvlc?si=7jcYw13z4SG7RjO1&t=265
Atlas can do coordinated, acrobatic movements.
https://youtu.be/I44_zbEwz_w?si=emdExKwlJBl2cXX-
The G1, made by the Chinese company “Unitree,” is just as agile.
https://youtu.be/M2mAy3241Vo?si=bdVEKl6kAmAIqqcg
If you can build robots that look identical to humans (androids), then with the same level of technology you could make robots that looked like animals, such as birds. Androids don’t exist yet, but someday they will, at which point the risk that a bird or insect isn’t what it appears to be will become real. Some rocks, tree branches and nuts you see on the ground might even be fake someday.
I’ve long thought that, if aliens wanted to come here and remain undetected, they would disguise themselves as common animals and even as humans. If they have the technology to travel the stars, then they must also be able to build surveillance robots perfectly modeled after life forms they find here. Even if the robots were slightly imperfect, they wouldn’t arouse enough suspicion from us for us to guess their true nature (e.g. – “That’s guy’s kind of a weirdo. Must have a nervous tic.”)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_Aren%27t_Real
Science fiction has led us to expect the first AGI would be a revolutionary machine, built by a lone genius who was many years ahead of the next smartest researcher. In fact, it looks like the first AGI will be an incremental improvement over the machine that preceded it (looking back, historians will probably struggle to agree when exactly machines became “intelligent”), it will be built by a massive team of researchers–no one of whom will fully understand how it works–and that team will only be a few months ahead of their closest competitor.
‘”The days of us having a 12-month lead are probably gone, but I think we have a three- to six-month lead, and that is really valuable.”
Weil said OpenAI plans to fight to keep that narrowing edge over its competitors.’
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/deepseek-dims-shine-ai-stars-012535210.html
‘OpenAI calls DeepSeek ‘state-controlled,’ calls for bans on ‘PRC-produced’ models’
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/openai-calls-deepseek-state-controlled-calls-for-bans-on-prc-produced-models/
In a recent test, scientists struggled to tell the difference between science papers written by humans and by LLMs. In other words, machines are close to passing the Turing Test for scientific research.
https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist-first-publication/
“I can see $10-$15 a carat coming soon in lab diamonds’ future,” predicts Rapaport.
https://www.afr.com/life-and-luxury/arts-and-culture/diamonds-are-not-forever-as-lab-grown-rocks-tank-prices-20250218-p5ld1i
The first privately made lunar lander successfully touched down on the Moon.
https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2025/03/14/nasa-science-data-received-blue-ghost-captures-eclipse-from-moon/
Our understanding of physics is incomplete.
‘If dark energy is constant, scientists say our universe may continue to expand forever, growing ever colder, lonelier and still.
If dark energy ebbs with time, which now seems plausible, the universe could one day stop expanding and then eventually collapse on itself in what’s called the Big Crunch.’
https://apnews.com/article/dark-energy-desi-universe-cosmology-big-crunch-26563b383986692e1244af11dde77d42
Anthropologists have unveiled a new genetic history of the human race. The Khoisan people of southern Africa belong to very old, unique stock.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02117-1
A person’s genes affect the people around them, and there’s often am amplifying effect thanks to the fact that people with similar genetics tend to marry each other.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/03/dalton-conley-in-genes-environment-interaction.html
Intelligence may be even more heavily genetic than suspected.
‘In summary, although general cognitive ability has been thought to be an exception to the rule that environmental influence is nonshared, it is now clear that shared environmental influence on g has negligible long-term impact after children leave home and make their own way in the world.’
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qndj6_v1
‘DNA testing site 23andMe files for bankruptcy protection’
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9q4r9xy9wro
An Australian man survived 105 days with a metal, artificial heart.
https://www.sciencealert.com/world-first-man-leaves-hospital-with-life-saving-titanium-heart
Iguanas crossed the Pacific millions of years ago on “rafts” of floating vegetation.
https://apnews.com/article/iguana-fiji-raft-float-journey-travel-9732d828c28a8374a6873fbc1b3d4af2
The price of Ozempic is about to jump from $200 to $1,000 per month.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-ozempocalypse-is-nigh
A few simple body measurements provide a wealth of insights into health. Intelligent machines will someday size you up at first glance.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/23/waist-size-better-predictor-of-cancer-risk-in-men-than-bmi/
‘German spy agency concluded COVID virus likely leaked from lab, papers say’
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/german-spy-agency-concluded-covid-virus-likely-leaked-lab-papers-say-2025-03-12/