Microrobot swarms developed in South Korea achieve tasks like transporting objects and unclogging tubes using magnetic fields. Inspired by ants, these robots promise medical applications but need further autonomy advancements.

Scientists in South Korea have developed swarms of tiny magnetic robots that work together like ants to achieve Herculean feats, including traversing and picking up objects many times their size.

According to a study published on December 18 in the journal Device by Cell Press, the robots operate under a rotating magnetic field, enabling them to tackle complex challenges that would be difficult for single robots to manage. Potential applications include providing minimally invasive treatments for clogged arteries and precisely maneuvering biological samples in demanding environments.

High Adaptability and Performance in Tests

“The high adaptability of microrobot swarms to their surroundings and high autonomy level in swarm control were surprising,” says author Jeong Jae Wie of the Department of Organic and Nano Engineering at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea.

I’ve been on a rolling rant lately about the age of Democrats in top leadership. I’m not the only one concerned about the gerontocracy. Charlie Sykes comments on the disappearance of Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas), 81, who seems to have vanished from Congress in July.

“Since early September, my health challenges have progressed making frequent travel to Washington both difficult and unpredictable,” Granger said in a statement to Axios this week. She’s now in an assisted living facility. Her son told reporters she’s having “dementia issues.”

Sykes writes:

Once again, the moral questions of America’s political gerontocracy reveal themselves. This is an especially sensitive subject, because so many of us have loved ones—parents, grandparents, siblings—who are in cognitive decline. They deserve our consideration, compassion, and honesty. That’s also true for members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and presidents. But the stakes there are much higher, and in those cases, sometimes compassion means being truthful about when it’s time to move on.

Sykes mentions Joe Biden’s decline. And Senator Dianne Feinstein and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who both died in office.

“For much of this year, our politics has been dominated by octogenarians, including Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Grassley (who, at the age of 91, is actually a nonagenarian),” Sykes muses. “But Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection at the age of 80 was the strongest case against the gerontocracy.”

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Pharmaceutical corporations claim high prices are the cost of innovation, but the reality is far more complicated — and troubling. In 2030, the patents of some of the world’s best-selling drugs will expire, an event called the 'patent cliff', and companies are doubling down on tactics such as 'evergreening' patents and pay-for-delay deals to keep prices high and competition out.

In this video, Neelam Tailor uncovers the shocking strategies big pharma use to game the system, explaining how these moves protect profits but hurt patients

Last week, on the last of its “12 Days of OpenAI,” OpenAI unveiled the o3 model for further testing and, eventually, public release. In doing so, the company upended the narrative that leading labs had hit a plateau in AI development. o3 achieved what many thought impossible: scoring 87.5 percent on the ARC-AGI benchmark, which is designed to test genuine intelligence (human performance is benchmarked at 85 percent). To appreciate the magnitude of this leap, consider that it took four years for AI models to progress from zero percent in 2020 to five percent earlier in 2024. Then, in a matter of months, o3 shattered all previous limitations.

This isn't just another AI milestone to add to a growing list. The ARC-AGI benchmark was specifically designed to test what many consider the essence of general intelligence: the ability to recognize patterns in novel situations and adapt knowledge to unfamiliar challenges. Previous language models, despite their impressive capabilities, struggled on some tasks like solving certain math problems—including ones that humans find very easy. o3 fundamentally breaks this barrier, demonstrating an ability to synthesize new programs and approaches on the fly—a crucial stepping stone toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).

The implications are profound and urgent. We are witnessing not just incremental progress but a fundamental shift in AI capabilities. The question is no longer whether we will achieve AGI, but when—and more importantly, how we will manage its arrival. This reality demands an immediate recalibration of policy discussions. We can no longer afford to treat AGI as a speculative possibility that may or may not arrive at some undefined point in the future. The time has come to treat AGI as an inevitability and focus the Hill’s regulatory energy on ensuring its development benefits humanity as a whole.

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Every third Thursday evening, an episcopal church in upstate New York transforms into an Afghan takeaway restaurant. It’s a “very foodie congregation”, says the Rev Marcella Gillis. The church does not charge the fledgling catering company overseen by Saida Faqirzada, a refugee from Kabul, for use of its gleaming commercial kitchen.

That decision, unsurprisingly, reminds Gillis of a familiar biblical parable. Several bystanders pass by a distressed person who has been mugged, who beaten up, robbed and left for dead. They say, “I’m not allowed to help them. I shouldn’t help them. Someone else will help them.” So they walk past.
a woman wearing a mask accepting a plate of food

“The person who eventually stops is a Samaritan, someone from Samaria, who in the context of the story would have been an outsider, sort of an untouchable. And they’re the one who stops. Gets them clothes. Gets them housed. Gets help for them.”

Welcome to Stone Ridge, where a group of modern-day good Samaritans have adopted two families of Afghan refugees who arrived in this country, like so many immigrants before them, with little more than hope.
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Imagine Obamacare is dead and millions of Americans have lost health coverage.

Abortion is illegal nationwide, pills to end pregnancies are off the market, and doctors wait until the mother’s death is imminent before attempting lifesaving care.

Domestic abusers freely carry guns and government attempts to stop untraceable homemade semiautomatic rifles have been quashed, rendering gun licenses and background checks useless.

Environmental regulations founder as climate change worsens.

With the sidelining of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Wall Street has returned to its greediest days, making bets that threaten economic stability and preying on consumers with predatory loans and hidden fees.

Officials are barred from even asking social media platforms to stem disinformation or calls to violence.

Police, unrestrained by federal immigration law, round up, detain, and deport suspected immigrants.

Washington can no longer fulfill treaty obligations as states erect barriers along US borders, causing international chaos.

And organizing a protest against any of the above may result in you being sued successfully, making free speech an expensive proposition.

These are not mere hypotheticals. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals—transformed by appointees of former President Donald Trump—has issued decisions greenlighting every one of these eventualities. While some were put on ice by the Supreme Court, others remain in effect in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, the three states the circuit covers. In those states, women have no right to end pregnancies that threaten their health, the enforcement powers of dozens of federal agencies are in doubt, and protest organizers are vulnerable to legal retribution. Other 5th Circuit decisions, from a ruling hamstringing the SEC and similar agencies to one legalizing bump stocks—the device that enabled a lone shooter in Las Vegas to kill 60 people and injure more than 500 in just 10 minutes—are now the law of the land. This is neither the outer bounds of what this radical court will do, nor the end of its impact on all Americans. It is the beginning.

The US Supreme Court oversees 13 judicial circuits, each with an appeals court that hears federal cases arising within its jurisdiction. Every term, the high court agrees to review only a small number of appeals from the circuits, which leaves those appeals courts with final say on most matters. The 5th Circuit has been a right-leaning enclave for decades, filled with judges from the Republican strongholds it oversees. But after Trump placed six new judges on the 17-member court, the relatively staid conservatism of Reagan and Bush jurists gave way to the slash-and-burn tactics of the MAGA movement. On their watch, the court’s decisions, substantive and procedural, have defied judicial precedents and norms while conforming to a familiar far-right agenda of neutering Democratic policies, gutting abortion rights, and undermining the authority of federal agencies.

“There is a new breed of Republican-­appointed judge,” says Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown Law professor who has followed the 5th Circuit closely. “Much like the divide between Trump Republicans and Bush Republicans politically, there’s a divide between Trump Republicans and Bush Republicans judicially. And what the 5th Circuit has, more so than any other court in the country, is a critical mass of Trump judges.”

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The Washington Post sounds an alarm about the erosion of press freedom. They outline all the cases that are pending and the collapse of the ABC case, all of which sounds pretty bad when you see it all together. They seem to be serious.

It is hardly unusual for a president to clash with the press. Richard M. Nixon kept journalists on his enemies list, while his vice president, Spiro Agnew, dubbed them “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Bill Clinton griped about coverage of his White House sex scandal, and Barack Obama’s administration brought a record number of prosecutions against journalists’ sources for leaking government information.

But legal experts say Trump has taken attacks on the press to an entirely new level, softening the ground for an erosion of robust press freedom.

“The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country,” Trump posted on Truth Social in September in an attack on NBC News.

Experts in polarization said that Trump’s posture toward the press has eroded trust in the Fourth Estate. From the Oval Office, he can do even more.

“My concern is what he does when he has the power of the U.S. government in his hands,” said Liliana Hall Mason, a political science professor at the University of Maryland. “It looks to me like all the guardrails have been removed, and we are in for a presidency unlike any we’ve experienced before.””

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Some friends and stilletto-sharp thinkers lately are busy discussing the meaning and implications of Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification.” ICYMI, Macquarie Dictionary declared it the word of the year, defined as: “The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

As Doctorow explained a couple of years back:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Dave Roberts (a.k.a. Dr. Volts) spoke with Doctorow a couple of weeks ago on how enshittification is impacting the right to repair, monopoly power, and the clean energy economy:

I spent a career in consulting work for national and international clients whose products you likely own and use. I’d bet money I’ve been on the inside of more factories than 99 percent of you where they make everything from clothes to paper to tires to plastic to biotech medicines to the white-powder Ms on your M&M’S®. Nevertheless, I am a bad capitalist. I don’t object to capitalism, per se. I just object to the enshittified version that, as Matt Taibbi once wrote, behaves today like “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Now that oligarch-branded capitalism has a stranglehold on our freedoms. It is strangling values like fairness and privacy like an infant in a crib, and enshittifying your experience of being an American.

IYKYK: The South lost the Civil War but won Reconstruction, neutered the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments across the South, and maintained a rigid system of Jim Crow oppression for the next 100 years.

IYKYK: Each July 4th, we celebrate America’s war to overthrow rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry and to create on these shores democratic self-rule … plus a little slavery to appease the South’s economic royalty.

Like the Civil War, the American Revolution now seems to have failed. Is there any doubt?

Former bartender, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, doesn’t think so. Her Instagram followers asked about American oligarchy, and one oligarch in particular from the South (Africa).

AOC: “Oh, I don’t think we’re witnessing the START of an oligarchy. I think we are fully here.”

And yes he should

I’ve been hoping he would do this since the day he got elected:

President Biden is considering commuting the sentences of most, if not all, of the 40 men on the federal government’s death row, people familiar with the matter said, a move that would frustrate President-elect Donald Trump’s ability to resume the rapid pace of executions that marked his first term.

A broad coalition of religious and civil-rights groups has been pressing Biden to take the step, and the effort gained momentum earlier this month after Pope Francis, in his weekly address, prayed for the commutation of America’s condemned inmates. If their death sentences were commuted, the prisoners, all convicted of murder, would serve life without parole. Biden, a devout Catholic, spoke with Francis on Thursday and is scheduled to meet with him at the Vatican next month, the White House said.

A decision from the president could come by Christmas, some of the people said. A principal question is whether the president should issue a blanket commutation of all the condemned men, or whether death sentences should remain for the most heinous convicts, these people said.

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