your science briefing for 03.10.2025

Congress' ploy to censor the internet under the guide of protecting our nudes, how war is written in our genes, the plan to make cyberpunk dystopias real, and more...

States averse to freedom of speech they can’t control have this one weird trick they love to employ. Take a real, problematic issue, like revenge porn, introduce a law that ostensibly bans and punishes it being published on the web, but write the law so it’s insanely easy to abuse by silencing critics. This way you get to muzzle them and also accuse them of brazen immortality. Only in most states, the authoritarians tend to be smart enough to do this quietly. Ours is dumb enough to announce that he can’t wait to sign the Take It Down Act so he can blatantly misuse it… (Verge)

In the decades before we sequenced the human genome and started to really grasp how our genes actually function, there were two very popular ideas. First was that our DNA was like a precise code that controlled everything. The second was that parts of our life experience could be passed to future generation, and plays a big role in sci-fi franchises like Dune. Remarkably, it turns out that traumas like war can change how a genome works and those changes can be passed down, creating predispositions for mental illness and violence, creating literal generational trauma… (ScienceAlert)

Semafor’s technology editor Reed Albergotti took an autonomous car on a ski trip and found the experience a bit lacking. Sure, the car drove itself, mostly, until it didn’t have a good enough map in its hard drive, constantly bothering him to keep his eyes on the road all the while. His question? Why can’t the cars get good enough to simply let him relax while they drive themselves? My question? How is this better than a high speed rail line with more creature comforts and absolutely no requirement to keep your eyes on the road while it zooms to your destination… (Semafor)

A bioengineering company has been keeping itself in the news for years, claiming that it could bring back extinct species, which is both questionable and a bad idea. So far, instead of a wooly mammoth, they’ve given us a wooly mouse. It’s exactly what you’d think it is; a very fluffy mouse with some mammalian cold adapted genes turned on in what amounts to a very expensive science fair experiment… (SciAm)

Libertarians and anarcho-capitalists’ favorite idea of social order is very similar to the slogan of Outback Steakhouse: no rules is just right for them. With a gullible ear now in the White House, they’re looking to expand the colossal failures of MS Satoshi, the sea-steading pods, Cryptoland, NFTs, the dead shopping malls and pump-and-dump crypto content farms of Web3, among other half-baked ideas for their techno-feudal cyberpunk dystopias into a concept borrowed from struggling developing nations: an area where no rules apply, other than what its owners want to impose… (Wired)