Leaked audio from the Epstein files suggests ex-UK PM and ‘Board of Peace’ member Tony Blair was known for earning large sums of money for advisory work after leaving office.
Blair’s office told Al Jazeera the figures mentioned in the audio were ‘rubbish.’ pic.twitter.com/3MCcANYvbV
ELON MUSK: "It's harder to scale on ground than to scale in space. Solar panels can do 5 times more power in space. It's much cheaper to do there. My prediction is the cheapest place to put AI will be space in 36 months. Most economically compelling place to put AI will be space" pic.twitter.com/axpR4poIxH
ELON MUSK: "The known Epstein clients who are obviously extremely powerful politically & very wealthy. Bill Gates, Bill Clinton & Reid Hoffman. Why was Reid Hoffman so intent on destroying Trump?"
JOE ROGAN: "Because they are worried about the list coming out?"
The Rundown: Palantir’s Q4 was a blowout: $1.41B in revenue, up 70% year-over-year, with profits that crushed estimates. It also landed amid nationwide protests over the company’s surveillance work for ICE.
The details: Palantir’s U.S. commercial revenue jumped 137% year-over-year; U.S. government revenue rose 66%. Total contract bookings hit $4.3B.The Denver-based firm builds data integration and high-resolution surveillance platforms for government agencies and corporate clients.The company holds a $30M ICE contract for “ImmigrationOS,” designed to track migrants and prioritize deportations.Amnesty International warns that Palantir has failed to adequately vet these contracts and may be contributing to serious abuses against migrants.
Why it matters: CEO Alex Karp framed the performance as “an n of 1,” arguing that Palantir is now a categoryr ather than a company. Civil liberties groups and some former employees argue that the more successful Palantir becomes, the more normalized high-res state surveillance will be, from immigration to predictive policing.
A Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) can cause a specific, distressing phenomenon often described as the loss of the “mind’s eye,” medically known as
acquired aphantasia. This condition is defined by the inability to visualize imagery, recall memories in pictures, or mentally simulate scenes, objects, or faces.
Key Aspects of Loss of Mind’s Eye After TBI:
Mechanism: TBI can damage the occipital lobe and the neural circuits involved in visual processing, memory, and spatial mapping.
Symptoms: Beyond just losing the ability to “see” images in the mind, people with acquired aphantasia often experience difficulty with memory recall (visual memory loss) and in recognizing faces (prosopagnosia).
Acquired vs. Congenital: While aphantasia can be lifelong (congenital), it can also be acquired, meaning it develops later in life following an injury, illness, or stroke.
Relationship to Other Deficits:The loss of mental imagery is often accompanied by other visual processing issues, such as difficulties with spatial awareness, reading comprehension, and the ability to imagine or plan future actions.
Related Visual and Cognitive Issues: The loss of the “mind’s eye” is frequently part of a broader set of symptoms known as post-trauma vision syndrome (PTVS), which affects up to 90% of TBI patients. This includes:
Daily briefing: What people with no ‘mind’s eye’ can tell us about consciousness
How clearly you can picture mental images might influence your memory and creativity. Plus, cursive is making a comeback in schools and how to move the Global Plastics Treaty forward.
Some schools that dropped the requirement to teach cursive — handwriting characterized by flowing, connected letters — to embrace digital learningare re-introducing penmanship into the classroom. Whether cursive has benefits over print handwriting is up for debate — some studies suggest that learning cursive equips children with better syntax skills. But there are also other, cultural reasons for keeping handwriting alive. “I feel that the next generation should be able to write a love letter or a poem by hand, or at least the grocery list, because it’s part of being human, really,” says neuroscientist Audrey van der Meer.
The American Psychiatric Association has announced plans to update The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders (DSM) — the textbook that lists symptoms for all known mental conditions and aims to steer health professionals towards a correct diagnosis. The updates aim to address longstanding criticisms of the current edition, such as the lack of acknowledgement of sociocultural or environmental drivers of mental illness. The new version could also focus on dimensionality:the idea that the diagnosis of psychiatric conditions should not be fixed in discrete categories, but instead operate along scales of shared symptoms.
When asked to picture something in their minds, around 4% of people can only conjure a faint image, or might see nothing at all. This inability to form mental pictures is called aphantasia, a concept that was only formally described a decade ago. The discovery of aphantasia — alongside its opposite, hyperphantasia — has opened a new avenue for researchers to study how the conscious mind works, and how the strength of your ‘mind’s eye’ might influence your emotions, memory and creativity.
This new six-fingered robot overcomes the limits of the dexterity of the human hand. Its symmetrical design means it can approach different tasks without having to twist to find the right angle. The robot’s flexible fingers also enable it to juggle multiple objects at the same time and, if needed, it can simply leave its arm behind — perfect for dangerous or hard-to-reach places.
Most of you don’t understand what happened today with Trump’s trade deal with India.
This is a MAJOR geopolitical blow to China/Russia/Iran and the other players attempting to de-dollarize. BRICS has now suffered three MAJOR blows.
Venezuela losing control of their oil, Iran losing their immediate nuclear ambition and now this deal with India.
Trump is making it look too easy. No wars, no occupation, just calculated masterclass leadership. While the usual suspects were busy doom scrolling and pretending tariffs are some mysterious dark art, Trump was doing what he’s always done best: picking up the phone and bending the global chessboard without firing a single shot.India, 1.4 billion people. A cornerstone of BRICS. The same bloc we were told would rise up and replace America if we just kept apologizing long enough.Trump talks to Modi and suddenly India agrees to drop tariffs on American goods to zero,commit to buying over five hundred billion dollars of American energy, technology, agriculture and coal, and start moving away from Russian oil toward US oil.
A phenomenal feat previous presidents couldn’t fathom. Instead of sending pallets of cash overseas and calling it foreign policy, Trump used Leverage, Economics and Strategic Intelligence.Cutting off Russian oil revenue hits Moscow where it actually hurts and moves the needle toward ending the Ukraine war without turning American taxpayers into the world’s permanent ATM.
Funny how that works. And let’s not miss the funniest part. The US still lowers its tariff from twenty five percent to eighteen percent and walks away owning the deal. Modi publicly praises Trump and thanks him on behalf of 1.4 billion people. That level of gratitude and respect hasn’t been expressed since Reagan.
BRICS was supposed to be the future. Instead, Trump just turned one of its biggest players into a customer. America isn’t isolated. America is being chosen. No new wars. Real pressure applied. American products winning again. American energy back on top. Globalists furious. Cable news confused. This is what happens when the guy running the country actually understands negotiation instead of treating diplomacy like a group therapy session. Call him whatever names you want. The scoreboard doesn’t care.
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved a landmark eye drop that uses a combined dose of medication to restore age-related near-sightedness, without the need for surgery, for a longer duration than anything else on the market – and with less side effects.
Known as Yuvezzi, the eyedrops developed by Tenpoint Therapeutics treat presbyopia, a very common condition that affects us with age, making it more difficult to see text and other things up close. It’s now the only FDA-approved drop that combines two active ingredients – carbachol and brimonidine tartrate.
Presbyopia affects more than 100 million Americans and two billion people worldwide, with its onset generally beginning in our 40s. Mostly it’s managed with reading glasses, contact lenses or invasive surgery, but until recently there hasn’t been any sort of medication to help manage it.
Most recently, Vizz (aceclidine) was approved and met with a great deal of enthusiasm, giving people an alternative to the traditional hardware or surgery options. Yuvezzi, however, goes one step further, thanks to the two active ingredients. Carbachol makes your pupils smaller, which helps sharpen near vision, while brimonidine keeps those pupils small for longer, making the eyedrops more effective before another dose is required.
Its approval came after a 12-month safety study that found the drug had no serious side effects and was both safe and well tolerated. Eye redness was also reduced, compared to the drops that contain just carbachol, which will likely make it a more comfortable regular medication for some.
Yuvezzi is designed to be used daily, with a single drop in each eye. The drug works within 30 minutes, and can have a sustained effect for up to 10 hours.
“The FDA approval of Yuvezzi represents a significant milestone for the millions of people in the US living with presbyopia and its daily frustrations and challenges,” said Henric Bjarke, Chief Executive Officer of Tenpoint Therapeutics. “As the first FDA-approved dual-agent eye drop for presbyopia, Yuvezzi leverages the mechanisms of carbachol and brimonidine tartrate to deliver sharp near vision with favorable tolerability. People deserve treatments that not only work but also can fit conveniently into their daily lives, and Yuvezzi brings an innovative new option to the presbyopia category.”
While Vuity has been a game-changer for treating this common condition without glasses or surgery, it generally requires a “top-up” dose during the day after three-to-six hours. Yuvezzi is trying to position itself as a “one-and-done” treatment, offering convenience and efficacy – which, when paired with tolerability scores, sounds like a game-changer. Though we’ll have to wait a few more months to find out – it’s expected to be available later in the second quarter of 2026.
“The impact of presbyopia is often underestimated, and current solutions like glasses, contacts or surgery have fallen short in meeting the real-world needs of people who struggle with close-up tasks,” said John Hovanesian, M.D., FACS, of Harvard Eye Associates in Laguna Hills, California. “Yuvezzi introduces a novel approach by combining carbachol and brimonidine tartrate in a single daily eye drop that sharpens near vision and maintains tolerability throughout the day. Yuvezzi was intentionally designed to deliver both efficacy and tolerability, which represents an important step forward in delivering a complete, noninvasive option for people with presbyopia.”
We are talking about the rape of men women and children, about murder and cannibalism. President after president stands accused of involvement both personally and amongst their intimate circles. There has not been a scandal like this since Pompeii … pic.twitter.com/9QRbZUoigR
New research from Harvard’s Kempner Institute offers insights into the cerebellum’s important role in language processing
New research on the language-processing role of the cerebellum (highlighted at left), has potential implications for treating language disorders, as well as for building future artificial intelligence language models.Image: Adobe stock
The cerebellum is an area of the brain most frequently studied in coordinating the body’s movements, but researchers from the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence have now identified specific regions of the brain that could be key in language processing, an insight with potential implications for treating language disorders, as well as for building future artificial intelligence language models.
New research, published last week in Neuron, has identified specific language-processing regions in the cerebellum that closely mirror regions in the frontal and temporal lobes of the neocortex, the brain areas long understood as the specialized epicenter for processing language. The study was spearheaded by Kempner Institute Graduate Fellow Colton Casto and Ev Fedorenko, faculty member in Harvard’s Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology program and associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT.
“We’ve identified a specific region of the cerebellum that closely mirrors the neocortex, which fundamentally changes how we understand the neural architecture of language,” says Casto. “There is a region in the brain that is being ignored by language researchers that is potentially really important.”
“There is a region in the brain that is being ignored by language researchers that is potentially really important.”Colton Casto, Kempner Graduate Fellow
Some regions of the neocortex are so specialized for language that they are only used when processing language, and not, for example, when someone does a math problem or listens to non-verbal music. Now, Casto and his team have identified a region in the cerebellum that, like those selective regions of the neocortex, responds exclusively to language inputs and processing. The researchers identified several additional regions in the cerebellum that have “mixed selectivity,” meaning they are used in language processing as well as non-language tasks, such as visual perception and movement.
The discovery of a region in the cerebellum that so closely resembles the neocortical language system has potential applications for treating people with language disorders such as stroke patients with aphasia, a language impairment that doesn’t affect intelligence but hinders the ability to use and process language.
“Interventions for people with language disorders is a critical goal,” says Casto. “This research presents another area of the brain for researchers to target with interventions to improve language function.”
Beyond its potential to improve treatment of stroke patients and others with language disorders, this research also updates current scientific thinking about how the brain processes language, which could have important implications for building future large language models (LLMs), the artificial intelligence computer models that process and generate language.
“If we understand how this region of the cerebellum fits into the core language system, we might gain new insights into how language is optimally processed, insights that can hopefully be carried over to artificial systems” says Casto.
By studying the brain’s “clever design principles,” AI scientists might be able to better address some of the stubborn problems that plague LLM design and function, says Greta Tuckute, a Kempner research fellow and co-author of the study.
“Although current LLMs are incredibly powerful, they require vast amounts of data to train and still remain brittle in certain settings,” says Tuckute. “The human brain, on the other hand, processes language efficiently and robustly in the service of a wide range of goals. Mapping out its neural architecture for language and other cognitive capacities allows us to take inspiration from it.”
“The human brain… processes language efficiently and robustly in the service of a wide range of goals. Mapping out its neural architecture for language and other cognitive capacities allows us to take inspiration from it.”Greta Tuckute, Kempner Research Fellow
While it’s still too early to tell exactly how this research on the cerebellum’s role might affect the way engineers understand and build LLMs, it points to the promise of using insights about brain function and structure to advance the science of AI.
“It’s a ten-year bet, but I think these findings could have implications for building language models that are more neuro-inspired, and that are ultimately more efficient and effective,” says Casto.
Image source: Reve / The Rundown (CEO Alex Karp)
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