Alternately, frog vent the bug hole?

I mean, who’s to say that the plot of STEINS;GATE isn’t real and SERN CERN isn’t about to unravel the fabric of reality with time travel paradoxes?

The technique is not novel (a decade ago IBM even made a stop-motion film with carbon monoxide molecules to demonstrate it, and more than twenty years before that showed off “IBM In Atoms” as a proof of concept) but it’s an interesting application. The real question in terms of application is, can this technique open the door to higher temperature superconductors?

I’m about 99% certain that the image in the article is some AI-generated nightmare fuel. There’s a link to the actual paper at the bottom of the article, and it has this figure showing a few example organoids, which are ~10mm across and look a bit like white mushrooms.

The ethical dilemma posed by a brain in a petri dish is an interesting hypothetical, but probably not one worth worrying about at this point. There’s less brain tissue here than in the average lab mouse, with no sensory inputs and little differentiation relative to a real human brain. The neurons in the organoids are probably able to do as neurons do individually, but they lack the structure or infrastructure required for them to have basic awareness, let alone consciousness.

Organoids like these can be useful for in-vivo study of brain tissue without the ethical troubles of rooting around in somebody’s head now, but that’s about it. We’re a very long way from growing a brain-in-a-jar and hooking it up to The Matrix.

SpaceX’s Starship launch was much-memed-upon but it honestly went as well or better than could be expected given the development approach the company takes. That said, it’s clear that the test cadence is being rushed at Elon’s behest (launching without a proper pad deluge system, for instance) and they’ve reached a size of rocket that having something go wrong in flight could cause serious damage, and isn’t just an opportunity to deploy funny acronyms and giggle.

That said, SpaceX is one of the few things he’s doing that isn’t a total clusterfuck, and that’s got a lot to do with the much more competent people he has running the company under his nominal leadership. Gwynne Shotwell has been very well-regarded and tends to do a good job of insulating the rest of the company from Elmo’s dumbest whims.