Science in telegram

“Feels like the uncanny valley just got crossed.”

Prompt: “Photorealistic interview with an 8-year-old child speaking sadly. The child knows they are AI-generated, feels sorrow about it, and answers the interviewer’s question — ‘What is it like to be an AI?’ — wisely yet child-like. Dark-blue background.”

Result: natural eye contact, micro-movements, believable pacing; emotion reads instantly.
Takeaway: the uncanny-valley threshold in Gen-Video has shifted.

Stack to try: Sora 2, Kling, Nano Banana, Krea, Artlist, Resolve.

#AI #GenerativeVideo #UncannyValley #PromptEngineering

Whether we expect a major nuclear war or not, here is a curious set of U.S. actions in deploying strategic weapons:


First, the White House has consistently withdrawn from long-standing arms reduction and limitation treaties. In 2002—from the ABM Treaty; in 2019—from the INF Treaty; in 2020—from the Open Skies Treaty. A potential U.S. refusal to maintain the moratorium on nuclear testing could thus be a logical next step in Washington’s dismantling of the global strategic stability system.
Second, the U.S. is accelerating the modernization of its strategic offensive weapons. Work is underway on the new Sentinel ICBM with a new nuclear warhead and a range of 13,000 km. Development continues on the Columbia-class strategic nuclear submarine to replace the Ohio-class. The new B-21 Raider heavy bomber is in progress. A nuclear-armed cruise missile is under development, and so on. Plans include reactivating 56 launchers on 14 Ohio-class submarines—note: full reactivation—with complete loading of Trident II ballistic missiles. Preparatory measures are in place to reconvert 30 B-52H strategic bombers back into nuclear weapon carriers.
Third, the Americans have begun implementing the “Golden Dome” program, which envisions both missile defense interception and pre-launch strikes against Russian and Chinese missiles.
Fourth, by the end of this year, the U.S. Army plans to adopt the new Dark Eagle intermediate-range missile system with hypersonic missiles capable of a 5,500 km range. Future deployment is foreseen in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Flight time from Germany—where this complex is planned for placement—to targets in central Russia would be about six to seven minutes.
Fifth, Washington regularly conducts exercises of its strategic offensive forces. The latest, Global Thunder 2025—which practiced, I emphasize, preemptive nuclear missile strikes on Russian territory—took place in October of this year.
Overall, this is a unified complex of measures, including potential U.S. plans for nuclear tests, which significantly heighten the military threat level to Russia.

🤖 “Hand-motion farms” are real — and they’re training robot hands.

In parts of India, workers strap a small camera to their forehead and spend hours doing simple, tactile tasks: folding towels, packing boxes, sorting everyday objects.
The POV videos go to U.S. labs, where neural networks study exactly how human fingers grip, pull, twist, and place—so robots can learn to copy the same motions.

Why this matters:
• Dexterity is the bottleneck. Vision models are great, but robots still struggle with cloth, cables, zipper pulls, and irregular objects. Human POV data captures the micro-moves that simulators miss.
• Imitation learning at scale. Hour after hour of clean, labeled hand maneuvers becomes training fuel for policies that generalize to new objects and tasks.
• Societal twist. It’s efficient—and a little dystopian: people meticulously teach the fine motor skills that may one day automate their own work.

Humans teaching their replacements, one folded towel at a time.

#AI #robots #imitationlearning #India #futureofwork

AI-powered parking never looked like this in my head.

A 35-kg Unitree G1 running BAAI’s THOR whole-body control just dragged a 1.4-ton car — ~40× its own weight. It’s a stunt, but it shows how fast balance, traction, and whole-body control are improving. Next stop: factory logistics, recovery, and precision vehicle positioning.

#Unitree #BAAI #THOR #Robotics #AI #Humanoids
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@science

🚀 Starcloud wants a 4-km, 5-GW GPU data center… in space

NVIDIA-backed startup Starcloud is about to put a data-center-class GPU in orbit: their Starcloud-1 satellite launches in November with an NVIDIA H100 onboard — roughly 100× more GPU compute than any prior space system. The 60-kg, fridge-sized sat is a first step toward orbital GPU clouds.

Why it matters: today, satellites downlink raw data to Earth for processing. With an H100 upstairs, AI runs where data is born — cutting response times from hours to minutes. That’s big for sensors like SAR, which can spit out ~10 GB/s; instead of shipping it all home, the model can filter, segment, and alert in orbit.

Power & cooling: sunlight is (nearly) constant in orbit and space is an “infinite heat sink” via radiators, so no water-hungry chillers. Starcloud’s roadmap sketches a ~5 GW orbital data center fed by solar + radiator panels about 4 km × 4 km. Future birds aim to integrate Blackwell GPUs for up to 10× more performance versus Hopper.

Biz timeline: Crusoe (the “energy-first” cloud) plans to deploy capacity on Starcloud’s platform from 2026–27. Starcloud projects ~10× lower energy cost than Earth data centers long-term. A white paper even models a 40 MW cluster with a ~$8.2M launch cost — if Starship-class launch prices fall to ~$30/kg (a big if).

CEO Philip Johnston’s bet: within 10 years, most new data centers get built in space. Gamers, rejoice — astronauts might finally run DOOM at ultra.

#Starcloud #H100 #Blackwell #OrbitalCompute #SpaceDatacenter #SAR #EdgeAI
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@science

Cyberpunk remote work, IRL.

Operators in the Philippines—paid about $250/month—are remotely piloting shelf-stocking robots in Japanese stores.
Today it’s teleoperation; tomorrow it’s training data. The real question: how fast until the robots learn enough to cut humans out of the loop?

#robots #teleoperation #retailtech #AI #futureofwork #science

🚀 The first color footage of a FUSION REACTOR in action!

Tokamak Energy has just released incredible high-speed video — shot at 16,000 frames per second — showing the birth of plasma inside their fusion reactor.

In the clip, you can see a mesmerizing bright pink glow at the plasma’s edge — that’s light emitted as the superheated gas interacts with the reactor walls. The core itself remains invisible, simply because it’s millions of degrees hot — far beyond what any camera can capture.

This is what the future of clean, limitless energy looks like — contained in a magnetic field.

🎥 Full video here: watch the fusion magic

#fusion #energy #tokamak #plasma #science

☀️ A massive explosion erupted last night on the far side of the Sun (IKI RAS).

The bright ejection you see in the footage is plasma being hurled away from the Sun — fortunately, in the opposite direction from Earth.

The dark circle and stripe in the frame aren’t mysterious objects — they mark the blind zones of the coronagraph’s optics, used to block direct sunlight and make solar activity visible.

Even though the blast happened on the far side, it shows just how restless our star remains — constantly storing and releasing titanic amounts of magnetic energy.

#Sun #Space #Astronomy #SolarFlare