your science briefing for 04.02.2025

The man who inspired SpaceX takes on Musk's plans to colonize Mars, we may finally know why there's more matter than antimatter, a peek inside LLMs, and more...

SpaceX started after our Edgelord-in-Chief Elon Musk met Robert Zubrin, became enamored with his vision of eventually settling Mars as a backup home for humanity, and rushed out to buy an ICBM that used to be made in my hometown in Ukraine to start building his own rockets based on this design. Settling space is a noble goal in general, despite a lot of naysayers going so overboard they wrongheadedly claim we will never be able to leave the planet again. But that doesn’t mean Musk knows what he’s doing. In fact, his plan and timelines are ridiculous according to, believe it or not, his original inspiration for SpaceX, Zubrin himself… (UnHeard)

If you were to hold up pieces of matter and antimatter side by side without exploding into a flash of light and gamma rays, you’d notice no difference. The objects wouldn’t just look and feel identical, they’d react the same way to being dropped or hit. One is just made with negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons, the other will positively charged positrons and negatively charged antiprotons. (Yeah, sorry for the lack of a cool name, I know, it should really have one.) So why are we made from the first arrangement and not the second? Turns out there is a small difference in how matter and antimatter decay that could provide an explanation… (Nature)

Look, it’s hard to argue that students are being distracted by their devices in class all over the world. So, at least seven countries banned phones in class. The results? Very mixed. Test scores didn’t rise, some kids are happy not to have the distractions when trying to learn, others are upset about blanket bans and want at least some say on the matter, and others still find a way to goof off with the class issued laptops or tablets since they’re just not engaged in the first place. In short, just banning phones isn’t the easy fix to falling test scores many adults seem to think it is… (The Independent)

Infectious diseases are the greatest killer of humanity throughout history. More than a billion people are known to have died from tuberculosis since its official discovery and naming in 1882, and it still kills 1.2 million people per year. Smallpox ravaged us for the last 3,000 years until vaccines drove it into effective extinction, and in the last century of its existence it still managed to kill up to half a billion. We just went through a global pandemic of a brand new disease which left a death toll of more than 20 million. And a little over million still die of HIV or AIDS complications every year. So, obviously, RFK Jr. is dismantling the government offices intended to track, study, and help combat all these infectious diseases because he’s basically a Plague Chaos Demon in the flesh, spreading the gifts of Nurgle to humanity… (Fortune)

One of the most popular and most erroneous claims about AI is that even computer science experts don’t know how it works. They do. The issue is that the scale of some models and the mathematical patterns of billions of recalculations make it difficult to analyze the inner workings of the model, and can reveal new insights into higher level math. Enter the new AI scanner which shows us exactly what’s happening under the hood of LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude in real time. And yes, it’s very messy, uses a lot of approximations, and constantly veers off track unless you box it in with careful, well thought out prompts on the user’s end… (PC Gamer)