your science briefing 03.31.2025

The hypersonic dreams of wealthy travelers, a 400 million year old botanical mystery, looking for aliens in AI, and more...

While bored billionaires dream of suborbital rockets shortening long haul flights to a much more manageable commute, a plan that looks amazing in CGI renders but will absolutely not work in real life, mere multi-millionaires are salivating over the idea of hypersonic passenger planes. Basically, imagine the Concorde but instead of flying between continents at twice the speed of sound, screaming through the air at Mach five or six. Believe it or not, if we can get the right materials and engine design, this would actually be a very practical idea… (Robb Report)

At this point, the phrase “an epidemic of misinformation” is about as overused as “in these uncertain times” and “divisive political rhetoric.” But why are so many obvious, low quality propaganda comapaigns and conspiracy theories taking over everything from news to sports and pop culture podcasts? Do we not care about what’s true or not anymore? According to some philosophers interested in how we define fact and fiction, no, we really don’t. And we never did in the first place… (Big Think)

About 400 million years ago, mysterious plants covered the Earth. They looked like large succulents, growing up to eight meters tall, disappearing from the fossil record over the course of 50 million years. And for more than a century and a half, scientists have been trying to figure out what they were with no luck. Were they plants? No, the fossils we have don’t match those of plants. Are they fungi? This was the consensus for a while, but that also appears wrong. Are they a hybrid like a lichen? Evidence still begs to differ. In short, they’re a botanical mystery… (ScienceAlert)

Schools are starting to push back against out of control smartphone use by students in the classroom, and hard. Despite moral panics about how technology is ruining our kids’ minds being based in profitable sensationalism rather than science, there are a number of good reasons to limit phone usage to remove distractions and encourage self-control and delayed gratification. Kids seem to like phone free time too. But their parents are another, very disconcerting story… (Futurism)

Avi Loeb, the Ivy League version of the Ancient Aliens guy, got tired of not being in the news for a while, so he decided that he once again found proof of an alien civilization. What is it this time? Generative AI. You know, the thing that we built. And know how it works. Because we built it after figuring out the required math about 40 years ago and then building enough computing capacity to run that math at scale. Essentially, Loeb is hijacking Singularitarian mythology and very clumsily adding in aliens because that is kind of his thing these days… (Popular Mechanics)