A written protocol tells you what someone meant to do. It almost never tells you what they actually did. That’s why we’re building PRISM, a tool for video protocols. We’ll be running a hands-on PRISM workshop in SF for the AI Science Summit by @worldwide_studios. Come say hi!

Artificial hibernation uncovers distinct synaptic engram architecture for memory retention biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…

Our goals here are ambitious! Our hope is to make formal methods as pervasively useful of a tool for building software as sophisticated type systems are for us today. blog.janestreet.com/formal-m…

How do we go from AGI to Superintelligence? New report discusses four potential pathways: scaling, AI paradigm shifts, recursive improvement, and ASI emerging from large-scale multi- agent collectives. Importantly, it also looks at possible frictions and bottlenecks along these pathways. Instant classic! arxiv.org/abs/2606.12683

Together with UC Berkeley we are announcing the laser phase plate - a breakthrough in atomic resolution imaging. This is the brightest continuous wave laser in the world, 100 million times the intensity of the surface of the sun. Phase contrast plays an important role in microscopy, but it was thought close to impossible for electron microscopy, where it would require interfering with an electron beam. Holger Mueller and Robert Glaeser proposed exactly this using a standing wave laser. It has taken over 15 years to make this a reality. Biohub partnered with UC Berkeley and Mueller to support this work and to engineer and build the technology. Contrast has been the critical barrier to achieving atomic resolution imaging of the cell. In cryo-electron tomography, a cellular imaging technology that uses electron microscopy, the low contrast makes it impossible to resolve anything but the largest proteins within their cellular context. The laser phase plate removes that barrier. With advances in AI this breakthrough in contrast will start to open up a new frontier in structural biology, that will allow us to see the molecular machines of the cell, and how they assemble into far more complex and dynamic systems, and understand how they work.

Read the blog post. Most optimistic I’ve been about the alignment community and for advancing alignment research in a while.

Incubating a FRO on this...

AI-assisted formal proofs (in particular in Lean) are getting very good! A worry I have is that people will insufficiently update about how powerful this stuff can be, and thus fail to tackle sufficiently big projects. rand.org/pubs/research_repor…

A massive milestone for #Neuroscience! 🧠 The complete brain-and-cord connectome of the adult fruit fly is officially published in @Nature. Check out this incredible visual journey tracing how the CNS controls the body. 🪰 🔗 rdcu.be/fncjS @quorumetrix @as_bates #BANC #Neuroscience, #Connectome #Drosophila, #BrainMapping, #Neurobiology, #NatureJournal x.com/as_bates/status/206442…

“One goal of such an organization should be to make it possible for the world to take coordinated action, including slowing frontier development when needed, so societal resilience, safety, and alignment can keep pace.”

We're launching a $10 million RFP for R&D on one of the biggest barriers to alternative protein adoption: taste. 🧵

The AI CEO’s signed this letter, but so did biotech giants like: David Baker (Chemistry Nobel laureate) Drew Endy (Director for Bio-Strategies & Leadership, Hoover Institution, Stanford University) @kesvelt (Associate Professor, MIT Media Lab) Emily Leproust (CEO and Co-Founder, Twist Bioscience) Jason T. Gammack, (CEO, Ansa Biotechnologie) John Glass (Director, J. Craig Venter Institute) @hannu Rajaniemi (Co-Founder, Red Queen Bio) David A. Relman (Professor, Stanford University)

Pairing ASAP7y recordings with analysis of the EM connectome of 717 neuron types in the fly brain, we show how branching geometry acts as a physical determinant of neuronal calculations. In some cases, branches can even function like independent parallel circuits. 10/14

Directional elements: the preprints are out! Congratulations to our amazing team linked here: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… We screened for principles governing global brain dynamics by developing a set of new methods: 1) conformal immersion microscopy for recording high-speed/high-resolution neural activity across dorsal cortex; 2) unbiased computational screening of brain-spanning activity for fast directionally-propagating spatiotemporal elements; and 3) novel genetically-encoded voltage sensing integrated with designed spectrally-compatible opsins (derived from our channelrhodopsin structure work) for systematic causal testing. This unbiased screening/testing approach (which we show is applicable either to voltage or calcium imaging) allowed discovery and functional validation of a surprisingly well-defined set of directional elements that generalized across cell types and frequencies. The ability to work over long timescales at high speeds and with broad scope, anchored in optogenetic causal testing, unveiled rich spatiotemporal structure that was remarkably tractable. From the perspective of natural brain function, the directional elements were found to be behaviorally relevant and robust to diverse perturbations; however, we also found specific conditions allowing elemental incidence and boundaries to be selectively modulated, which may provide translational as well as basic-science insight... I'm so grateful to all our collaborators, and honored to work with all the outstanding students, postdocs, and staff who worked together to develop and apply this approach...

Hello world, meet 1,000× Expansion Microscopy. 1,000,000,000× expansion by volume! A gel that starts at a few centimeters will then expand to the volume of an Olympic swimming pool. biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… In our new bioRxiv preprint, work carried out between MIT and UMG, led by Helena Hu in collaboration with scientists from the labs of @eboyden3 Ed Boyden, Silvio Rizzoli, and myself, we present Thousandfold Expansion Microscopy. By enlarging biological specimens across multiple rounds of expansion, molecular-scale features, as small as the distances between adjacent amino acids, can be visualized with conventional optical microscopes. Democratizing super-resolution microscopy.

Anthropic now has a team dedicated to AI and the rule of law — and we've just opened our first role. @AnthropicAI has studied what AI means for the economy. This team asks a different question: what will it mean for executive power, for courts and elections — and for the public deliberation that constitutional democracy ultimately rests on? We're looking for someone with real depth in both AI and the law — a legal scholar, political scientist, or experienced government hand who can reason about frontier systems and the institutions they will affect. If that's you, or someone you know: job-boards.greenhouse.io/ant…

Building AI resilience is among the most important work of our generation. We have a lot to do to get it right. At the OpenAI Foundation, this is where we’re starting:

A meteor passing through the atmosphere just east of Boston caused a loud boom heard over multiple areas of Massachusetts around 2 p.m. on Saturday, according to Globe meteorologist Ken Mahan. trib.al/RtYIaHG

Well, I’ve finally posted the spiral galaxy formation model I’ve been working on for the past year. It feels to me like a huge breakthrough. These ideas have finally left the handwaving era! For new followers: I have been exploring the idea that our universe might have evolved, in the Darwinian sense; might be descended, with variation, from a long line of earlier universes. This has FASCINATING implications – one being that our universe develops like an evolved organism, with intelligence and technology as predictable steps in its development – and it also turns out to have enormous predictive and explanatory power. Which has led to a totally new, dramatically different picture of the early universe, as outlined in this post. Anyway, your thoughts are very welcome. Also, feel free to pass this on to anyone you think might find it interesting, or who might want to give feedback. More minds needed here! theeggandtherock.com/p/a-com…

We're searching for X-Lab-shaped bottlenecks around Quantum Interconnect and Integrated Photonics (the second NSF X-Lab topic area) -- and for leaders who want to build new organizations to solve them. essentialtechnology.blog/p/s…