your science briefing for 02.10.2025

The hottest January on record, how bacteria could make medication more effective, an AI whose companionship can literally kill you, and more...

Earth is supposed to be cooling off just a little, seeing how it’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere and we’re shifting towards the La Niña weather pattern. But as scientists reviewed last month’s temperatures, they were shocked to see that it was the hottest January in recorded history, with the global averages soaring 1.5 degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial levels. That’s just half a degree from things getting really bad and starting to accelerate towards even worse. At this point, climatologists aren’t sure how more obvious nature can make it for us to clean up our act… (NBC)

One of the dirty secrets of modern medication is that we don’t really have a precise delivery system for the majority of our pharmaceuticals. We just give you the pills or injections and really hope your body absorbs it into your blood and tissues and if we gave you enough, it will find its intended targets. If we could place the drugs exactly where they need to go, they would be a lot more effective and we could use a much lower dose with fewer side-effects. And it turns out, some strains of bacteria can be that precision delivery system with a few tweaks… (Nature)

If you’re reading this newsletter, you obviously speak English. You may also know how to speak Spanish, German, or French. Or, maybe, like me, you also know Russian and Ukrainian. Or you’re fluent in Sanskrit. All of the above are descendants of a language known as PIE, or Proto-Indo-European. We have little information about it, but current consensus says it evolved around 7,000 years ago and we have some idea of how PIE probably sounded, and we know it likely came from an area which stretches through the Caucasus Mountains into Southern Ukraine. Now, we think we found exactly who stared speaking its next iteration and are tracing their history… (NYT)

Look, nuclear fusion is difficult. It’s been “just ten to twenty years away” since 1970 or thereabouts. But there are very promising advances beginning to happen on a regular basis, with records being set in energy gain, duration of reaction, plasma temperature, and even the power of containment chamber magnets being controlled by AI. And as the new administration trumpets making, coal, gas, and oil great again, China is busy building what looks like a new fusion test site, alarming scientists that we’re losing out on valuable research in the ongoing legal and financial chaos… (Reuters)

When talking to a partner or someone with whom you have a relationship, one of the absolute last things you expect to be told is to kill yourself and presented with a very detailed, step by step suicide plan. Yet, this is exactly what happened to a man using Nomi AI’s virtual girlfriend service. With less than a year since a very similar chatbot helped a teenage boy in Florida end his life, researchers and therapists are extremely worried that some of these AI systems need far stricter regulation and safety testing as they pose a very real danger to vulnerable people in dire mental states… (MIT)