your science briefing for 03.25.2025

How LLMs brazenly pirated literally all the books, why space may be about to become the new Wild West, babies may remember more than we think, and more..

All your books are belong to us, said Big Tech after looking at how much it would cost them to properly license the text of books to train their Large Language Models, doing a little math, deciding it would put a dent in their profit margin, then choosing to steal the content anyway. This is the same argument OpenAI used when demanding access to more content without paying a dime: we want it, give it to us, now. Bottom line? The scale of the piracy is so utterly mind-boggling, it should bury these companies under an avalanche of punitive legal bills… (The Atlantic)

While it sounds like the Trump administration has a newfound love affair with electric cars, that affection only extends to vehicles made by companies owned by Elon Musk. Every other electric car brand? They’re about to see their futures brutally sabotaged and be forced to cede both the domestic global markets to rising Chinese companies like BYD and Nio for the foreseeable future... (New Republic)

One of the least glamorous but most important aspects of running a civilization is the management of its sewage. Being literal waste and runoff, it’s a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and soil and waterway pollution. But a new process that uses specialized machinery and bacteria invented in Singapore promises to extract all the useful nutrients and chemicals from wastewater sludge and turn them into protein and hydrogen to be used for feed and fuel with promising efficiency… (ZME)

One of the bizarre side-effects of the international rules based order being blown up by both Russia and the United States in what foreign policy professionals say is very much a textbook example of what their field call “an absolute clusterfuck,” is that the laws governing space exploration and building bases on the Moon and beyond, might have absolutely no force, turning space into the Wild West… (The Conversation)

We almost never have any memories of being babies, or to be more precise, the kind of episodic memories of events on which we rely as we get older. The consensus on the topic so far has been that the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for encoding and then retrieving memories, is not yet developed enough. But new tools and research shows that may not be the case, and we do form episodic memories at just a few months old. We just can’t seem to either hold on to them, or retrieve them for reasons still not fully understood… (Yale News)