I've been editing this article about "brain mapping" and... connectomics, and I'm just stunned by how quickly the cost estimates to map, say, a mouse brain have plummeted in just the last couple years. It actually seems feasible that we could map the entire human brain -- all 86 billion neurons, and their connections -- in this lifetime. In the 1970s, Sydney Brenner started mapping all the connections between neurons in C. elegans. His team sliced the worm into thin pieces, took photos using an electron microscope, and manually traced and reconstructed each synapse for 302 neurons total. This project took more than a decade of work, and it cost about $16,500 to reconstruct each neuron. Scaling this up to a human brain boggles the mind. Electron microscopy remained the norm in connectomics for decades, because it was the only option available to see synapses at a resolution high enough to be able to trace their paths. Each electron microscope costs several hundreds of thousands of dollars, though, and you need lots of them to map even a mouse brain in a reasonable timeframe. In 2023, the Wellcome Trust released a report estimating how long, and how expensive, it would be to map the mouse connectome (~70M neurons). They estimated that imaging alone would cost $200-300M, and that proofreading (or ensuring that traces between neurons are correct) would cost $7-21 BILLION. (A human can only manually trace about 1 mm of neuron per hour.) Also, the images would occupy about 500 petabytes of data, and getting those data would require 20 electron microscopes running in parallel for about 5 years, continuously. They estimated the whole project would take about 17 years of work. This is, understandably, insane. But now it seems like there's an actual path toward mapping the full mouse brain in about five years for ~$100M dollars. There have been three major breakthroughs in the last year or so: 1/ Expansion microscopy, first developed in 2015, showed that it's possible to "enlarge" the brain by about 5x using a swellable polymer. But an improved method increases this number to >20x expansion, meaning we can now expand brains and image neurons much more easily using cheap light microscopes, rather than expensive electron ones. 2/ E11 Bio (a nonprofit research org) developed protein barcodes that get delivered into brain tissue; each neuron gets a unique combination of barcodes. These cells are then stained with colorful antibodies, which stick to a matching protein barcode, causing each neuron to light up in a distinct color. This makes tracing neurons so much easier. 3/ Google Research released PATHFINDER this May, an AI-based neuron tracing tool that can proofread about 67,200 cubic microns of brain tissue per hour, with very high accuracy. It works on electron micrographs, but something similar could be presumably be developed for the E11 / colorful tag approach. This is an extremely exciting time for neuroscience. (C. elegans connectome below.)show more

E11 Bio is excited to unveil PRISM technology for... mapping brain wiring with simple light microscopes. Today, brain mapping in humans and other mammals is bottlenecked by accurate neuron tracing. PRISM uses molecular ID codes and AI to help neurons trace themselves. We discovered a new cell barcoding approach exceeding comparable methods by more than 750x. This is the heart of PRISM. We integrated this capability with microscopy and AI image analysis to automatically trace neurons at high resolution and annotate them with molecular features. This is a key advance towards economically viable brain mapping - 95% of costs stem from neuron tracing. It is also an important step towards democratizing neuron tracing for everyday neuroscience. Solving these problems is critical for curing brain disorders, building safer and human-like AI, and even simulating brain function. In our first pilot study, we acquired a unique dataset in mouse hippocampus. Barcodes improved the accuracy of tracing genetically labelled neurons by 8x – with a clear path to 100x or more. They also permit tracing across spatial gaps – essential for mitigating tissue section loss in whole-brain scaling. Using molecular annotation, we uncover an intriguing feature of synaptic organization, demonstrating how PRISM can be used for systematic discovery 🧵show more

🚨 SCIENTISTS JUST BUILT AN ARTIFICIAL RETINA THAT RESTORES... VISION AND ADDS INFRARED SIGHT. Researchers at Yonsei University in South Korea have developed a flexible, three-layer implant that bypasses dead photoreceptors and directly stimulates healthy retinal ganglion cells. The device not only helps restore vision in cases of retinal degeneration (like retinitis pigmentosa) but also gives the eye the ability to detect near-infrared light that humans normally cannot see. The key innovation is a soft 3D array of liquid metal micropillars (gallium-indium alloy) that gently conform to the curved retina without causing damage or inflammation a major improvement over rigid electrodes used in earlier implants. Why this matters: • Retinal diseases destroy light-sensing cells, but the neurons deeper in the eye often remain healthy and capable of sending signals to the brain • The implant uses an ultrathin filter + phototransistor array to convert near-infrared light into electrical signals the ganglion cells can understand • In mouse tests, blind animals regained visual responses, while healthy mice gained infrared sensitivity on top of their normal vision • The liquid metal electrodes are soft and biocompatible, dramatically reducing the risk of scarring or tissue damage The deeper implication: This isn’t just about restoring lost vision it’s about augmenting human sight. If it reaches human trials and proves safe long-term, people with partial vision loss could keep their remaining natural sight while gaining an entirely new sensory channel (infrared). The biggest open question is how the human brain would interpret this new stream of information whether it would feel like a new color, an overlay, or something else entirely. We’re moving from “fixing blindness” to “expanding what it means to see.” How do you think gaining the ability to see infrared light would change daily life or human perception? Follow for more frontier neurotechnology and bionic vision breakthroughs.show more

🚨 SCIENTISTS ARE USING AI TO MAP A HIDDEN... “CLEANING SYSTEM” INSIDE THE HUMAN BRAIN AND IT COULD CHANGE HOW WE UNDERSTAND SLEEP, AGING, AND NEURODEGENERATIVE DISEASE. It’s called the glymphatic system a vast network of fluid channels that flushes toxic waste from the brain while you sleep. For years it was almost impossible to observe in detail. Now AI-powered imaging is revealing it like a living galaxy of microscopic rivers and pathways inside neural tissue. Why this matters: Your brain produces toxic proteins constantly. The glymphatic system is one of its primary waste-clearance mechanisms clearing the very proteins linked to Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other neurodegenerative diseases. But here’s the unsettling part: This cleaning system becomes dramatically less efficient with age, poor sleep, stress, and brain injury. Sleep may not just “rest” your mind it may literally wash your brain. The deeper implication is staggering: The brain isn’t just a computer. It’s a dynamic, living network that constantly rebuilds and cleanses itself in real time. The more we map it, the more it looks like an entire universe of connected energy flows inside our skulls. What if some neurological diseases begin when the brain can no longer properly “wash” itself at night? Follow for more frontier neuroscience and future technology.show more

Americans handed over about 253 billion dollars in credit... card interest and fees in a single year, and for millions the debt never actually shrinks. Total household debt in the United States just hit a record of about 18.8 trillion dollars. Credit cards are only a slice of that, but they are the cruelest slice, because the interest rate almost never drops below 20 percent. Here is what that does. If you carry a balance of 5,000 dollars and pay only the minimum, it can take more than 15 years to clear, and cost you more than 6,000 dollars in interest alone. You end up paying for the same purchase twice. The amount Americans pay each year just in card interest is now more than triple what it was in 2021. This is not an accident of the market. High rates and low minimum payments are built to keep you paying, slowly, for as long as possible.show more

"Explosion in Kharkiv" or something along those lines is... the most frequent post I make. I've probably made a thousand of them by now, if not more. Air raid alerts are so frequent here that I usually don't even post about them. They can last for days, and the citizens of Kharkiv are forced to disregard them. Or we can have twelve of them in a day, and we will also be forced to disregard them. I often see online how central or western Ukraine complains about the alerts, and oh, how much I would give to have an actual solid warning about an attack like them. But "explosions in Kharkiv" always arrive unexpectedly. How surreal it is that we are forced to live like this. How horrific it is that thousands of bombs, missiles, and drones fall on a major city in Europe daily, and all the major press and political figures just pretend it doesn't happen. Because if they admit that it happens and they just watch it year after year, then what kind of people are they? Do they care at all?show more

HTML Artifacts are a big part of how I... work with agents now. Artifacts can be more than just static files. When combined with agents, they can take action or help you take action. This unlocks all kinds of interesting ways to work with agents. This is clearly the future. Check out this writing and scheduler artifact I built in a few minutes. It uses a bit of HTML and JS. All the data is in markdown (Obsidian vaults), so the agent can access and modify it at any time. No DB needed. No sophisticated functionalities. The agent decides all that for me based on the skills, context, and memory it has access to. The best part about this simple stack is that all the important information stays with me. This has allowed me to build a recursive self-improving system and automations that can better tap into coding agents like Codex or Claude Code. I could have paid or built an entire app for scheduling posts, and there are so many of them out there. But I don't need to. I've realized a simple artifact does the job. And the simplicity of it is actually an advantage. Very little maintenance for very high returns on personalization, time, and efficiency. The other benefit of this is that I can add features as I please. That level of personalization feels magical, and we should all be pursuing more of it. All of this just keeps compounding. Of course, this example is just about writing. But I have similar artifacts for research, design, experimentation, evaluation, and so much more. And no, I didn't actually publish the post example I shared in the clip. It was just for demonstration purposes. I actually spend more time than this when writing together with agents. Lastly, having built my own agent orchestrator tool has made me realize that simplifying the tool stack is a superpower. If you are curious about how all this works, I will do a live session next week:show more

So, my opinion on what the Antarctic (Antarctica) Anomaly... is that it's a type of frequency technology. It must be way more powerful than HAARP, as many have claimed it to be, because we would see these anomalies at other HAARP sites, and we don't, not like this. With that said, and I'm very much trying to avoid letting what I want it to be not play a part here, I think it is a technology that is being used either off the coast of Antarctica itself or Bouvet Island. A third possibility is an area just to the northwest of the island that looks odd. It's possible it is a sonar scan from a ship, but why in that remote location? It looks like an antenna set up or rows of something that is out of place. I also believe that the weather events and fires that have taken place in Africa could possibly have been because of this. Each time we saw the anomaly, it was followed by a destructive weather event in Africa. A weird connection to that is we have been told and warned of a very busy 2024 Atlantic hurricane season. This is in part because of the above-average Atlantic ocean temperatures, which is the fuel to Hurricanes. With all this info, it's possible to see how the Anomaly could be a frequency tech that can manipulate or create weather, And or WARM up the Ocean temps to purposely enhance the Hurricane season and Storm growth. Keep in mind that many of our hurricanes and many of the biggest hurricanes have come from the west coast of Africa and form over the Cape Verde islands before heading towards the Caribbean and the United States. This is all of course speculation, and I'm learning many new things every day, so this idea may morph over time as we learn more. In the end, it is very hard to ignore all these findings. #antarctica #anonaly #AntarcticaAnomaly #BouvetIslandshow more

Scientists are baffled by this. The Bacterial Flagellum is... composed of 20-30 unique parts. Combined, they total over 30,000 parts that make this little motor run. It can hit rotation speeds of up to 100,000 RPM, then stop & reverse direction in a quarter of a turn. It can propel a bacteria up to 20 lengths per second, which when scaled up is about equal to 225mph in a car. But this motor only works when all those parts are perfectly engineered and working together. Take away just one of those 30 pieces, and it stops functioning. That means it can't evolve gradually. None of the pieces do anything outside the system, and the system only works with all the pieces. Bacteria require this motor to move - without it, they would quickly die. How can anyone see something like and still deny that Life is Divinely Designed?show more

An interesting issue with Tesla Robotaxi where it took... us to a Starbucks, but the Google data had the incorrect location. At drop off we were 0.2 miles from the Starbucks, so we had a short walk. Is there a way the Tesla AI team could add functionality in the app so riders can update map info to correct errors or inaccuracies on the underlying map data and then this propagates to the fleet? Being able to do this with a pin drop on the map instead of having to use an address might make this very easy and user friendly! Or, as a bigger ask, would it be possible for the car to be able to use visual images on its own to look for a Starbucks sign and on the fly, get us closer and update the map data on its own?show more

Big news! Today we are announcing that Shopify is... acquiring the Threads team. There are a million feelings and thoughts from this journey, but nothing more than gratitude to all of our users and customers for building with us, my colleagues (both current and former) for making all of this possible, our investors, especially Mike Vernal, Elad Gil, Avichal - Electric ϟ Capital, and Jessica Verrilli for their unwavering support and guidance, and all of our friends and family who put up with the late nights, canceled plans, and the general roller coaster that is startup life. To our customers and users who have been asking, here’s how we got here: The past several months have been some of the most interesting and intense of my life. It all started with the rise of Instagram Threads, which presented us with the opportunity to sell our domains. Around the same time, a handful of companies approached us, wondering if we would be open to an acquisition. When this happened in the past, we would politely decline. However, this time, things were different. We weren't that excited about the time it would take to invest in a rebrand, and with mind-warping technological advances now being a commodity, we were excited about joining a place where we could tinker at scale. Each company we chatted with was incredible. However, what ultimately led us to choose Shopify over others was their culture; two distinct things in particular: 1) Craft-obsessed. Their obsession with not just building the right thing, but also building it the right way is inspiring. Sacrifice shows priority, and hearing stories about some of the hard decisions they made to ensure that what they ship is robust, scalable, and trustworthy, even at the cost of short-term metric gains, really proved that their obsession with craft was much more than a feel-good slogan. Their discussions and decisions have me truly believing they're going to be around for 100 years. 2) For entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs. Just about every product and engineering leader I met was an ex-founder who grinded for years to turn nothing into something. They all still had that air of resilience, obsession with the details at every part of the stack, and a compelling vision of the future for whatever they were working on. Threads leadership is also made up of ex-founders, so the entrepreneurial focus at Shopify made it clear that it would be the best environment for us to grow and thrive. Very excited for this next chapter with the team and grateful for all of the support we’ve received over the years from those who believed in us. As always, thanks for (th) reading.show more

AN ANTHROPIC LEAD ENGINEER ACCIDENTALLY LEAKED HIS PERSONAL OBSIDIAN.... INSIDE - NOT CODE OR PROMPTS, BUT A DIAGRAM OF HIS OWN BRAIN, ORGANIZED AS A NEURAL NETWORK 8,893 nodes. 4,729 connections. A $10/month app opens Obsidian. 21 inputs, ReLU on every layer. The first hidden layer has 26 neurons, followed by 33, then 24, and so on all the way to the output. Thousands of connections flash in real time this isn’t a conceptual diagram from a blog, but a living brain that powers decision-making within the company. 9,000 documents, each with its own semantic space, all interconnected it earns about $2m a year for sorting Markdown files into the right folders. The company that builds the world’s best AI maintains its internal knowledge base in the same app that a freshman uses for class notes three years of discipline and a single open Obsidian tab you’re reading this on a device where, tonight, you can open that same Obsidian and start building your own vaultshow more

This is not what we Ukrainians would want to... see from our windows in winter. It would be better if the voices and laughter of children making snowmen or playing snowballs echoed from the courtyards of residential areas. One could step out onto the balcony and watch that very scene while sipping a warm tea or coffee, rather than the sights we see now. You cannot distract yourself from thoughts of the war for long; it continues, and everything around us tries to remind us of that. Over the years, the brain tries to pretend it has adapted to everything happening around it - to what the ears hear and the eyes see, to the various situations that occur here every day. But sanity is always on guard, and an inner voice says without words: this is not a normal life for a human being; if only everything could return to the way it was before. But is it even possible to return to the life we had, carrying such an experience on our shoulders? … Now, in the "points of warmth," you can see beds. You might ask: are these for overnight stays? The beds are intended for people who need assistance in the event of an emergency or for medical reasons, as well as for temporary rest if a person is in need of it… but people are still forced to return to their apartments.show more

💜 One Last Update! 💜 Last week when we... were in Minnesota for Clark’s 6-month follow-up for his clinical trial, of all the tests they ran, the one we were both most anxious and most eager to see results from was his brain MRI. For children with untreated Sanfilippo Type A, it’s typical to see 2–5% loss of brain volume each year, along with enlargement of the ventricles (the fluid-filled spaces in the brain). This is one of the most heartbreaking parts of the disease — watching the brain slowly lose tissue and function over time. We were so nervous that Clark’s MRI might show some loss compared to his baseline scan 6 months ago. But the results came back and… ✨ ZERO change. ✨ His brain volume and ventricle size were completely stable — no loss at all. This is such an incredible sign that the treatment may be doing exactly what it’s meant to: clearing the toxic waste from his brain cells and protecting his brain from further damage. If feel that it is SO important for us to share these results as they come because people need to be FULLY aware that these treatments that are out there WORK. These children with Sanfilippo do not need to regress and they DEFINITELY do not have to have their lives cut short. We just need the FDA to say yes. We are so close to a reality where Sanfilippo syndrome is as manageable as a disease like diabetes. P.S. Enjoy this video of our little sunshine having the best time singing!show more

While I have premium I definitely want to do... a long post breaking down the main scene from this show that I obsess with. There's so much that I feel could be learned from it. Not just for expansion animators either. There's honestly a LOT that can be learned from how this show directed its expansion scenes that can be applied to even safe for work animations. Obviously yes, the expansion alone is really good. What makes it so good though is just the fact that there's things you pick up on that you likely don't even realize until you re-watch. I'm using this scene as an example as it's not AS good I would say, but it still has a lot going for it. One thing I've always loved from it that I want to use in my own animations someday is that the expansion sort of comes in waves as opposed to one consistent growth. In a way, it makes it feel more natural while also selling how tight the top is getting. It could have been accompanied by showing the knot getting tighter or smaller with each growth. It's a small part of the animation but just that one thing already adds another layer to appreciate. It's not like most expansion scenes where there's very little outside of just "growing" on its own. There's a bunch of little things that subtly improve it without being obnoxious. The first expansion scene has WAY more that I want to talk about honestly. Far more than this one has. It will probably be a really long post now that I think about it...show more

What I love the most about the rare videos... of Prince William and Catherine's Private moments is the Comfortable intimacy and affection between them😍 You can feel, the friendship, the mutual adoration and the playfulness of a long time relationship solidly anchored there, between them. What I find fascinating with them, is that even with Will Warr's camera lens, inviting us, it still feels very much like they are in their private bubble and we are outsiders intruding in🤭 Indeed, we see them laugh and whisper at each other but we still do not know what they are laughing about nor what they are talking about. There is still a mystique very much in place despite the cameras and that is an Art; The Art of showing without revealing🔥 We are there but we are neither William nor Catherine; so all we have are glimpses without seeing the whole picture. And it is that Mystique that is the essence of why this couple continues to captivate the hearts and the imagination even after 23 years. Indeed, I find it quite fascinating that despite them adopting a more modern Approach to "Royaling" and allowing a camera lens to give the world rare glimpses into their marriage; we still know as little about Prince William and Catherine's married life that we did about Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip's 73 years of Marriage🔥 It is truly the Art of privacy in the public eye, and one thing we can appreciate in that balance is how down to earth this couple is. In fact, Everything they love to do as a couple and a family is outdoor in Nature: Taking walks in the countryside, enjoy a rainy cold swim, trekking, going to the beach and getting filthy with Mud; or have a picnic, roasting marshmallow around a bonfire... What is so beautiful about their Marriage and love story is that nothing they enjoy doing as a family, necessitate that they be Millionaires or Royals🔥 All it necessitate is two people who truly love and adore each other, building a solid marriage and family life and simply enjoying their happy lives, privately❤️ In that, W&C have proven that even high profile Royals can enjoy a lasting and fulfilling happy marriage through time, challenges and tribulations, if only, they marry for Love and commit to each other for the long run☕️ #PrinceandPrincessofWales 📹Blairsun❤️show more

The Australian government does not deserve our trust, or... our respect. Today, Minister Penny Wong sat back in her chair grappling for words, desperately looking for the right lie to tell. It is worse than dishonest - it is an absolute lack of care. Penny Wong came to this country when she was 8 years old. She came to a country that afforded her the ability to become who she is, and she is now doing her part to destroy it. Back in the 70’s, when she came, Australia was a fair-minded place and a great place to be. Yet here she is... Here in Australia. Undermining our country and lying to our faces. Because she can’t tell the truth. Because if she did, it would destroy any semblance of care for Australia tied to her old party’s Labor brand. It would say the quiet part out loud. The truth. The truth that the Albanese government is more interested in the fortunes of the ISIS brides, women who chose to leave this country to go and fight against our people, than those of us that can’t find or afford a place to live here at home. I am tired of being told how to think by people that completely lack morals and couldn’t care less. People that are elected and paid to operate in the national interest but always put their twisted ethics and back pockets ahead of our nation and our people. I don’t know when Labor stopped caring about Australian workers or worse, when they started hating Australia, but they have and they do. The absolute lack of opposition, the lack of authentic choice has pushed us into a place where these absolute traitors to the interests of the people who pay them - goes entirely unchecked. We are careening out of control, unchecked migration, an energy grid that is just about to collapse, no industry to speak of, and no good reason to start or maintain a business in this place. It happened fast, but those of us who pay our taxes and take risks to make Australia a better place, are being undermined and white-anted by our politicians. The people we are forced to trust, and must pretend to respect, because they have the force of law on their side. Not because they are any good at their jobs. Not because they have earned our affection. No. Simply because they are in charge and there is little to nothing that can be done about it. It is becoming apparent that the two party system has outlived its useful life. Too much corruption, too many words too carefully chosen in a pantomime between to political forces that don’t really want to change anything. They just want to have their go, to have their turn to jam their grubby hands into the till. Surely with this major and catastrophic failure by the so-called Honourable Minister Senator Wong, the people will be able to see through the veil and into the absolute and irresponsible lack of care at the heart of this deceitful Labor government. They lie about everything, and they can, because they don’t have an opposition worthy of the title. I am growing more confident by the day that the only solution to our woes is a new political force, a fresh, Australia first force, that will act in the national interest and put all these corrupt and useless used-car salesmen red and blue in the dustbin of history. It can’t come soon enough. Time is short. I just want Australia back.show more

$IREN "we haven't disclosed the specific amount of GPUs"... 1. 🤮 reminds me of $NBIS 2. Setting a terrible precedent here for future deals 3. Making it purposely difficult, to not let analysts properly value your 2027 revenue 4. Increasing the polarized view on IREN by the market However: "approximately 60MW of air-cooled Blackwells" 1. You typically don't talk about gross capacity in a deployment like this 2. If it would be gross capacity, the GPU hour rate at IT level would be crazy high (at PUE 1.2, $680m / 50 = 13.6m/MW) 3. At 60MW IT load, and ~14kW draw at DGX server level, we can get to ~4,286 DGX systems with 8 GPUs per. 4. Based on this we can conclude that 60MW of IT load can run approximately 34k DGX B300. 5. 34k DGX B300 at $680m/yr, would represent a GPU hour price of $2.28 Now this is the problem with not disclosing your GPU quantity. You purposely make your business model look bad, because by approach, you get to a GPU hour price that would imply a payback period of 4 years, where only the last year of the contract is 100% margin. But of course, we can also take "the glass is half full" approach. IREN has ordered 50K B300s from Dell. They have 2 purchase orders for this, 1 between Dell Canada and IE CA Leasing Ltd for 4 phases, and 1 between Dell USA and IE US Hardware 1 Inc (amended from IE US Hardware 4 Inc on April 27, 2026). The order for Canada is divided in 4 phases, and are going to Mackenzie for 80MW of gross capacity, which happens to be 4 buildings of 20MW. The order for Childress is divided in 2 phases, and are going to DC35 and DC36, (as depicted in the earnings presentation) and those are 50MW gross. The purchase price of the order for Childress was $1.2B, and for Canada it was $2.3B If we go with 50,000 B300s for a total of $3.5B then $1.2 would represent 34.285% of the 50,000 GPUs, or 17,140 B300s rounded down. For this calculation I will consider that $IREN will deploy 17,140 GPUs in 50MW gross capacity in DC35 and DC36 of block 3 in Childress.. That would imply at 1.2 PUE, IREN can run 17,140 B300s in 41.67MW IT load. Now by that ratio, they can run 24,680 GPUs in 60MW IT load — a massive difference with 34k units through the Nvidia DGX reference calculation. If common sense is applied, you can still get to 2 completely different outcomes, that show a difference of more than 9k GPUs. The GPU hour rate at 24.68k GPUs would be $3.145 per B300, as MASSIVE difference from the earlier calculated $2.28. Sure, the DGX system may be a factor here. And I'm sure that the reality is somewhere in the middle. But I personally hate this as an investor, to be unable to calculate profitability on unit economic basis. After all, contracts are signed on a $/GPU hour basis. Why hide this from your investors? Not being able to calculate payback periods, unable to calculate ROIC. And most importantly, we cannot properly assess the $NVDA deal on a contract basis. I really hope the payback period of this contract is not 4 years. I want the glass to be half full, but by starting to censor the purchases, IREN is taking a step in the wrong direction. Not a fan of this.show more

The Circle 🐜 Nobody told the ant about the... circle. That, as far as anyone can tell, is the whole problem. A researcher named Kostowski – this was in the early 1970s, at a laboratory in Warsaw that smelled permanently of formaldehyde and institutional coffee – discovered quite by accident that if you draw a continuous line around an ant using a felt-tip pen, the ant will not cross it. It will walk right up to the line, pause with what appears to be genuine philosophical unease, and turn back. It will do this indefinitely. For hours. Sometimes for days. The ant is not stupid. Let’s be clear about that. The creature you are looking at in this photograph – this tiny, improbable machine of chitin and chemical signals, this six-legged marvel that can carry fifty times its own body weight and navigate by polarized light – has a brain roughly the size of a pinhead, and yet that brain contains approximately 250,000 neurons dedicated entirely to making sense of the world. It has survived as a species for 130 million years. It watched the dinosaurs arrive, flourish, and disappear, and then went back to work. And yet here it is. Trapped by a drawing. The reason is chemistry, not cognition. Ants navigate by pheromones – volatile chemical compounds that their legs read like a blind man reads braille. When they encounter the solvent in a felt-tip pen, something in their nervous system fires an alarm. The signal says: boundary. The signal says: edge of the known world. And the ant, loyal to its chemistry in the way that all of us are loyal to ours, obeys. This is the part that stays with you if you think about it too long. The ant’s prison has no walls. No bars. No lock. It is made entirely of information – a chemical whisper laid down by a felt-tip marker – and the ant cannot see past it, because it has no framework for doing so. The circle is not a circle to the ant. The circle is simply: where the world ends. I find myself thinking about this more than is probably healthy. We are, most of us, walking around inside our own circles. They were drawn for us gradually, by parents and teachers and early disappointments, by the limits of what we saw done and the boundaries of what we were told was possible. We bump up against them occasionally – in those moments when a job offer from another city seems too frightening, or a new idea feels somehow presumptuous – and we turn back. Not because anything is stopping us. Because the world, as far as we can tell, simply ends there. The ant in the photograph is walking the inner edge of its circle with a kind of purposeful calm that is almost admirable. It has not given up. It is still looking. It is still moving. It simply cannot conceive of a direction that leads out. Kostowski, for what it’s worth, eventually just picked the ant up and moved it. Sometimes that’s what it takes. Gandalv / Gandalvshow more

Looking for the perfect holiday gift for your baby?... How about a “face book?” I’ve written often about how much infants love the faces of their loved ones. Indeed, we’re biologically driven from birth to distinguish - and study - the faces that matter most. That’s because, as infants, the faces of our primary caregivers teach us lessons about everything from our safety to how language works. The brain has specific structures that help us to detect and distinguish between specific faces, including the fusiform face area, a part of the visual system specialized for this very task. I’ll have more to say about holiday gift giving soon (spoiler alert: for little ones, developmentally, less is more) but really love the idea of a baby friendly (soft) photo album - which offers not only a glimpse of their favorite sight, but a chance to see significant faces that they may or may not encounter each day (such as grandparents and other extended family). There are tons of them on the market. Look for something safe and soft.. and stock it only with duplicate photos you’ll be ok with sustaining the kind of wear and tear that babies are so skilled at providing. This lovely video was shared to IG by thesabrinatan.show more