News Source
EXCERPT:
Learn how ancient DNA and archaeogenetics are reshaping what we know about family and revealing that kinship in early societies was often built through shared lives, not just shared genes.
04b Theory and Analysis
News Source
EXCERPT:
Listing consumer electronics on the internet’s large ecommerce marketplaces is a key step in “democratizing” the products, allowing them to be purchased by anyone with just a click. It has happened to cars (in the United States, you can buy a Hyundai on Amazon), and now it’s happening to humanoid robots.
The Chinese manufacturer Unitree Robotics, among the most active robot-makers in the field, is preparing to bring its most affordable model, the Unitree R1, to international markets through Alibaba Group’s marketplace. According to reports in The South China Morning Post, the rollout will initially cover North America, Japan, Singapore, and Europe. There’s no exact on-sale date for the robots yet, but the Post report says it will show up as soon as this week.
This is not the first time Unitree has used AliExpress as a global storefront. The company’s G1 model, the more powerful and more expensive predecessor to the R1, is already listed at just under $19,000.
Universe is expanding faster than expected: Scientists struggle to explain cosmic acceleration |– timesofindia.indiatimes.com
News Source
EXCERPT:
Not only is the Universe expanding, but its expansion is actually happening at a speed higher than was thought possible until recently. For many years now, physicists have been trying to establish the speed of galaxy movement through the Hubble constant. But the different measurement results have posed a dilemma for modern physics, and it seems like there is an inconsistency somewhere within our universe. The problem that lies before physicists is commonly known as the “Hubble tension” problem, and, despite recent discoveries and more detailed observations, it still lacks explanation.
News Source
EXCERPT:
FRANKFURT, Germany – One of the major reasons for the creation of the European Union was to make Europeans wealthier. Along the way, however, something went seriously wrong.
Europeans are becoming poorer compared to Americans, who are becoming richer.
One in five Germans now faces the risk of imminent poverty in what has long been one of the world’s wealthiest nations.
In France, the poverty rate has hit a 30-year high.
News Source
EXCERPT:
The United States military issued a warning Monday that it will be enforcing a blockade of Iranian ports on the Gulf of Oman — east of the Strait of Hormuz — as ceasefire negotiations with Iran broke down over the weekend, U.S. Central Command said in a notice to seafarers.
The notice said the blockade would begin at 10 a.m. eastern, following a proclamation from U.S. President Donald Trump. The Gulf of Oman is a strategic body of water in the Arabian Sea, which lies just east of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has been blocking to most international shipping traffic for weeks.
“The blockade will be enforced impartially against vessels of all nations entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas, including all Iranian ports on the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman,” the U.S. military notice said.
A Deep Neural Network Approach for Random Networks with Sparse Nodal Attributes and Complex Nodal Heterogeneity– arxiv.org
News Source
EXCERPT:
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Why opinion on AI is so divided– www.technologyreview.com
News Source
EXCERPT:
In an industry that doesn’t stand still, Stanford’s AI Index, an annual roundup of key results and trends, is a chance to take a breath. (It’s a marathon, not a sprint, after all.)
This year’s report, which dropped today, is full of striking stats. A lot of the value comes from having numbers to back up gut feelings you might already have, such as the sense that the US is gunning harder for AI than everyone else: It hosts 5,427 data centers (and counting). That’s more than 10 times as many as any other country.
There’s also a reminder that the hardware supply chain the AI industry relies on has some major choke points. Here’s perhaps the most remarkable fact: “A single company, TSMC, fabricates almost every leading AI chip, making the global AI hardware supply chain dependent on one foundry in Taiwan.” One foundry! That’s just wild.
Myanmar’s new President: Is this shift towards civilian-led democracy or mere hogwash? The Hans India
from news.google.com
A chilling new report is raising fresh alarm over how far elite-backed science may be willing to go, revealing that some researchers are openly discussing the possibility of growing “brainless” human body clones for future use by wealthy individuals who are aging or dying.
The idea sounds like dystopian fiction.
However, according to a new investigation, a billionaire-backed startup has been tied to discussions about creating non-sentient replacement bodies, human clones without functioning brains, that could one day serve as vessels for brain transplants.
The first thing you learn about a loom is that it’s easy to break.
The shuttle runs along a track that warps with humidity. The heddles hang from cords that fray. The reed is a row of thin metal strips, bent by hand, that bend back just as easily. The warp beam cracks if you over-tighten it. The treadles loosen at the joints. The breast beam, the cloth roller, the ratchet and pawl, the lease sticks, the castle; the whole contraption is wood and string held together by tension. It’s a piece of ingenuity and craftsmanship, but one as delicate as the clothes it manifests out of wild plant fibers. It is, also, the foundational tool of an entire industry, textiles, that has kept its relevance to our days of heavy machinery, factories, energy facilities, and datacenters.
Stanley Milgram’s 1961–62 Yale University experiment tested obedience, where participants believed they delivered painful electric shocks to others under authority.
In the early 1960s, a deceptively simple question took shape inside a laboratory at Yale University: how far would an ordinary person go if instructed by an authority figure to harm someone else? The answer, offered by psychologist Stanley Milgram, would become one of the most cited, and most contested, findings in modern psychology.Milgram’s obedience experiments, conducted between 1961 and 1962, did not begin as abstract inquiry. They were shaped by the aftermath of the Holocaust and, more specifically, by the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who defended his role in organising the logistics of the mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps, a central part of the Nazi programme of systematic mass murder, by claiming he had been “just following orders.” In his 1974 book Obedience to Authority, Stanley Milgram framed the question directly: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”
There is a particular pleasure in watching a scholar dismantle the monument he has spent a career admiring. Tyler Cowen named his blog after the Marginal Revolution; he has spent decades explicating, celebrating, and applying marginalist thinking to every aspect of modern life. In Cowen’s compact and astringent book, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution, he turns to survey the edifice and finds it, if not crumbling, then visibly retreating from the frontier where the real intellectual work gets done. The result is one of the more honest performances in recent economic writing: a love letter that doubles as an elegy, delivered without sentimentality.
The book’s method is itself something of a marginalist exercise. Rather than mounting a frontal assault on large questions about the future of economics, Cowen begins at the margin, with the history of a single idea, the doctrine that value is determined not by the total utility of a good but by the utility of an additional unit of it. Many readers arrive at this book knowing that definition. Cowen’s first service is to show how much that belief has concealed. Marginalism is not one thing but several: There is intuitive marginalism, tautological marginalism, engineering marginalism, and social marginalism. The further one presses into the concept, the more it ramifies. Even the ideas we think we understand resist the grip that holds them.
In the 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove, an emergency war plan called “Plan R” allows an unhinged U.S. Air Force commander, Jack Ripper, to launch a nuclear strike without presidential authorization. Once the president, the joint chiefs, and the Soviet ambassador convene in the war room, the bombers are already airborne. Only Ripper knows the three-letter prefix needed to recall them, until his aide, Lionel Mandrake, reconstructs it from Ripper’s notes. Although nearly all planes are turned back, one damaged B-52 cannot receive the recall message and successfully drops its bomb, triggering the Soviets’ secret doomsday machine and bringing about global destruction.
The film’s lesson is not only about nuclear weapons, but also about what happens when critical systems are not governed effectively.
Since a joint U.S.-Israeli airstrike killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28, scores of Iranian senior officials have also been killed. According to the Associated Press, two anonymous sources—an intelligence official and a person briefed on the operation—said that hacked Iranian surveillance cameras helped plan the initial attack.
Camera hacking has become a recurring feature of modern warfare. Hamas hacked Israeli cameras before the October 7, 2023, attack; Russia has hacked them in Ukraine, and Iran has hacked them in Israel. But the cameras in question are not exotic spy technology. They’re often unremarkable, much like millions of other devices around the world.
The biggest argument against democracy is five minutes with the average voter. The Democratic Party might be making that argument stronger. I’ve never seen a party push to eliminate elections and voting the way Democrats have in this fight over Department of Homeland Security funding.
Yes, this stubbornness over funding a key agency that’s been shut down since Presidents’ Day weekend is more about anti-Trump hysteria, but it also reflects the Democrats’ long-term goal of defunding ICE. Republicans understand this — that’s why they funded the agency through 2029 during the first reconciliation.
With TSA agents quitting due to lack of paychecks, the Democrats believe hurting regular people to get their way will work. We’re dealing with legislative terrorists. I was hesitant about ending the filibuster, but I am now leaning entirely toward it because Democrats want unrealistic concessions, and shutting down DHS over deportation disputes isn’t a valid argument.
DHS funding deal is falling apart.
Senate GOP offered to fund all of DHS, except ICE’s deportation wing (ERO).
Dems just countered and demanded additional concessions, they want major ICE reforms (unmasking, judicial warrants, etc).
GOP says why would we agree to reforms for…
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) March 25, 2026
Yesterday morning Republicans sent a simple three-page amendment to the Democrats that removed ERO language from the bipartisan DHS bill and added language to ensure employees receive backpay. All of the original reforms are still included in the bill. All of the other original…
— Ryan Wrasse (@RWrasse) March 25, 2026
After a yearslong legal battle, the Supreme Court vindicated a Colorado Christian baker hounded by a “Civil Rights Commission” for the sin of refusing to craft a custom cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding. A woman by the name of Kristen Clarke found that ruling “devastating.”
Clarke, who would go on to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under President Joe Biden, arguably grew to embody the weaponization of civil rights law against conservatives. Yet on Wednesday, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People hailed Clarke as a “civil rights giant” in announcing her new position as NAACP general counsel.
Berlin plans to use Ukraine’s experience to develop an advisory tool, Lieutenant General Christian Freuding has said
The German military is developing an artificial intelligence system to speed up battlefield decision-making by analyzing combat data, Lieutenant General Christian Freuding has said, adding that it will draw on Ukraine’s experience of fighting Russia.
The remarks by Freuding, the commander of the German land forces, come as the country is undertaking a major military buildup. Chancellor Friedrich Merz is seeking to make the German military “the strongest conventional army in Europe.” German officials have set 2029 as the deadline for the armed forces to be “war-ready,” citing the supposed Russian threat. Moscow has dismissed claims that it harbors hostile intentions as “nonsense” aimed at justifying increased military spending.
“I think it’s important that we get something up and running quickly,” Freuding told Reuters on Wednesday. He had previously overseen German arms supplies to Kiev before taking up his current position in October 2025. An advocate of close military cooperation between Berlin and Kiev, Freuding previously unveiled plans for the Ukrainian military to help train German troops for a possible conflict with Russia.
While the world fixates on the Strait of Hormuz, China is working to make the entire conversation obsolete.
Each flare up in US Iran tensions sends oil markets into overdrive, with prices swinging and supply fears dominating global narratives. But Beijing is not playing that game. It is building an alternative system designed to sidestep the very risks others are pricing in.
At the centre of this effort is State Grid Corporation of China, a sprawling network that already covers more than 80 percent of the country and powers over a billion people. Alongside China Southern Power Grid, it is constructing what increasingly looks like a long term energy power play. A nationwide supergrid meant to reduce reliance on imported oil and the fragile sea lanes that carry it. LIVE UPDATES
The blueprint is expansive. Ultra high voltage transmission lines are being rolled out at speed, linking inland regions rich in coal, wind and solar to the industrial coastline where demand is concentrated. The aim is to electrify more of the economy, move power efficiently across vast distances, and reduce exposure to external shocks.
With special thanks to Lieutenant Colonel (retired) Timothy Grimmett.
If wars were won by bombastic press conferences, the White House should already be planning another military parade in our capital’s streets. In America’s latest war of choice, President Trump’s styled Secretary of “War” is emerging as the head cheerleader for our misadventure in Iran. Mr. Hegseth has already mistakenly defined what constitutes victory — the destruction of various portions of the Iranian Navy and military production facilities. Unfortunately, his definition is flawed. Despite possessing some military experience as a junior officer, he has shown that he is completely out of his depth. For most intents and purposes, the war with Iran might have been lost before the first missile was launched.
Some of the lessons that Mr. Hegseth should have learned by now:
Operational excellence is not a guarantee of strategic success — The best military on the planet cannot win a war if the national strategic objectives selected by the National Command Authority are faulty. This fact was proven in both Afghanistan and Iraq, which like Iran, were wars of choice and not necessity. Does Mr. Hegseth grasp the gap between his definition of victory and that of his boss?
Mr. Trump has demanded “unconditional surrender” of Iran — That choice could cost many lives. America demanded unconditional surrender of both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The word “unconditional” suggests that there will be no negotiated settlement. The only means of achieving that objective in Germany and Japan was first a land invasion of the “Father Land” followed by the deployment of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Is this where we are heading?
Senate Majority Leader John Thune is determined to continue missing opportunities, but wants you to know that it’s not his fault. In the latest scene of this farce, last week Thune swore that he would bring the SAVE Act to the Senate floor for a vote (like he already promised to do at the end of February) … but, since he doesn’t have 60 votes, he would be “very, very surprised” if it passed.
The word “saboteur” comes to mind.
The Republicans could easily end the “zombie” filibuster — a piece of Senate paraphernalia of no nostalgic or traditional importance — by lowering cloture (the procedure to end debate and actually vote on a bill) from 60 to a simple 51 majority with Vice President Vance ready to break any ties.
But it’s even easier than that. Several weeks ago, in Human Events, Connie Hair (Rep. Louie Gohmert’s chief of staff for more than ten years) wrote concerning the Senate misheva over SAVE:
The Senate’s Standing Rules have been dissected ad nauseam since the House took S.1383, a bill already passed by the Senate, gutted its text, replaced it entirely with the SAVE America Act, and returned it as a privileged message. That procedural posture matters. There is no need to “nuke” the filibuster lowering the cloture threshold from 60 votes to 51 to call up the bill (emphasis mine). Under the Senate’s existing rules, the message can be called up for debate. After the two-speech rule is exhausted or there is no one left wishing to speak, the bill is voted up or down by simple majority.
In recent years, as AI has begun to enter military planning and operational design, a persistent unease has surfaced among practitioners. Even with improved tools, increased tempo, and unprecedented access to data, plans continue to falter on integration, coherence, and a shared sense of direction. Marco Lyons’ recent War on the Rocks article on the perceived decline of operational art gives voice to this unease in a way that is both timely and important.
We do not know enough about the specific wargame, its constraints, or its internal dynamics to adjudicate these conclusions directly. What Lyons’ account nevertheless captures with clarity is a set of recurring difficulties that many practitioners recognize: fragmented campaigns, sequential decision-making, and a widening gap between planning activity and operational coherence.
Drawing on our experience teaching operational art and experimenting with planning, we share this concern. Yet Lyons’ observations may also point to something deeper: a tension between different ways of thinking about operations.
Since February 28, Israel and the United States have pounded Iran with targeted air strikes, taking out one powerful Iranian official after another.
The death toll among top regime officials has so far been confirmed at nine, but Israel claims it has reached 11.
Both the United States and Israel have brandished the growing list of dead Iranian elites as evidence of their military success.
On Tuesday, after the Israeli army announced it had “eliminated” Iran’s security chief, Ali Larijani, Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar declared that his country had “already won” the war against the Islamic Republic.
With AI becoming increasingly present in everyday life, the race to build AI infrastructure is only speeding up. At the center of that race is the rapid creation of data centers, with new ones opening on a nearly weekly basis in America. But as more data centers begin to integrate AI infrastructure, the amount of electricity required to operate them is growing at an alarming rate. Data centers are now expected to account for roughly 40 percent of US power demand growth in 2026, and the gap between what we need and what we can build is widening fast.
On today’s episode of Explain to Shane, I am joined by Lynne Kiesling, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she leads the Electricity Technology, Regulation, and Market Design Working Group. Kiesling also directs the Institute for Regulatory Law and Economics at the Northwestern University Center on Law, Business, and Economics, and is a member of the US Department of Energy’s Electricity Advisory Committee. I am also joined by Steve DelBianco, president and CEO of NetChoice and a seasoned expert on internet governance. Their combined expertise on this issue can help us understand how we can power the AI revolution.
Training versions of AI models on classified data is expected to make them more accurate and effective in certain tasks, according to a US defense official who spoke on background with MIT Technology Review. The news comes as demand for more powerful models is high: The Pentagon has reached agreements with OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI to operate their models in classified settings and is implementing a new agenda to become an “an ‘AI-first’ warfighting force” as the conflict with Iran escalates. (The Pentagon did not comment on its AI training plans as of publication time.)
Training would be done in a secure data center that’s accredited to host classified government projects, and where a copy of an AI model is paired with classified data, according to two people familiar with how such operations work. Though the Department of Defense would remain the owner of the data, personnel from AI companies might in rare cases access the data if they have appropriate security clearance, the official said.
Nearly three weeks into a war against a crazed theocracy, the political and media focus has been, like a complaining child in the back seat of a car on a long trip, “When will it be over?”
This ridiculous impatience is a product of a Democrat opposition to Operation Epic Fury that will exploit every misstep, whether occurring out of strategy, operations, rhetoric, or unintended consequences. It is akin to getting a work assignment that the employer and employee both know will only reasonably produce results after weeks of long hours, at minimum, but nonetheless getting harangued by the boss every day: “You’re not done yet!?”
Now, the boss may be just an intolerable micro-manager, or he may be trying to get you to quit out of frustration. But it’s fairly certain, given the Democrat decades-long foreign policy record, that productive oversight of the conflict is not their goal.
Between the now ascendant neo-Marxist left and the “river-to-the-sea” crowd, the Democrat war objectives are clear: sabotage.
How the Supreme Court’s Tariff Ruling Could Save the Civil Service Washington Monthly
from news.google.com
Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15381
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47418722
Ali Larijani, the closest thing Iran’s Islamic Republic currently has (er, had) to a political leader, is believed dead following an Israeli airstrike Tuesday. And that’s just the start of today’s good news concerning Operation Epic Fury/Roaring Lion.
It seems like only yesterday [It was only yesterday, Steve —Editor] that we discussed how Iran’s regime losses — from the topmost echelons all the way down to Basij street-thug enforcers — make the country increasingly ripe for regime change.
Well, yesterday’s news of limited drone strikes on individual Basij thugs pales in comparison to today’s news from Mossad Commentary [unofficial]: “Overnight strikes reportedly killed ~300 Basij commanders and field officials, targeting key command, logistics, and operational centers across Tehran.”
Facilities hit include “vehicle repair units, Mohammad Rasoulollah Corps HQ, Imam Hadi command center, and Imam Ali battalions.” The result is that “the Basij’s capability to mobilize against protests and maintain internal control” is severely degraded.
It’s this big a deal:
🔴 COMMANDER OF THE BASIJ UNIT ELIMINATED
Yesterday, the IDF targeted & eliminated Gholamreza Soleimani, who operated as commander of the Basij unit for the past 6 years.
Under Soleimani, the Basij unit led the main repression operations in Iran, employing severe violence,… pic.twitter.com/aJ0dNtCFz0
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) March 17, 2026