From First Principles

A fast tour through four wild science stories. AI tools and mRNA were used to design a personalized cancer vaccine for a dog. An all-female clonal fish challenges expectations about asexual reproduction. New brain scans link ketamine’s rapid antidepressant effects to region-specific receptor changes. Microscopic plankton may have rebounded into new species within a few thousand years after the dinosaur-killing impact.

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is a deep dive into one of the strangest science stories of the year: a dish of human neurons allegedly learning to play Doom. We go back to the original 2022 DishBrain paper out of Cortical Labs, unpack how biological neurons can be read and written with multi-electrode arrays, and then compare the peer-reviewed Pong result to the much newer Doom claim. The result is a story that is both genuinely impressive and, in places, probably overhyped.SummaryWetware engineering — replacing artificial neurons with real biological neurons plus electronics, and why some people think this could become a new computing paradigm.How DishBrain worked — human stem-cell-derived cortical neurons grown on a multi-electrode array, trained through sensory encoding and a “minimize surprise” feedback loop.Where the Doom story gets messy — the newer system appears to include a reinforcement-learning layer in the loop, raising the key question: are the neurons actually doing the learning?The big idea underneath the hype — even if Doom is overstated, the broader platform is still a remarkable step toward programmable biocomputing.Support the showDonate: FFPod.com/donateFollow: @FFPod on X / Instagram / TikTok / Facebook

A revived 5,000-year-old microbe resists modern antibiotics and may hide new drug leads. A speculative theory links solar storms to triggered earthquakes by altering Earth’s electric fields. Researchers find shared genetic pathways shaping personality traits in golden retrievers and humans. A major AI figure departs to build world-model systems, sparking a high-stakes fight over the future direction of AI.

A deep dive into a synthetic‑biology breakthrough that uses light and the cell cycle to evolve proteins that toggle rather than stay always on. They explain coupling oscillators to select for dynamic behavior, engineering color‑multiplexed light sensitivity, and creating a single‑protein logic gate that performs time‑sensitive AND operations. Future directions for programmable cellular software are discussed.

A deep dive into NASA’s DART mission and why a gentle nudge, not destruction, is the practical path for planetary defense. They unpack how a tiny 11 μm/s change was measured and why ejecta amplified the impact’s effect. The conversation covers precision navigation, binary asteroids as natural laboratories, and what this breakthrough means for humanity’s ability to alter cosmic threats.

They test whether super‑tough microbes can survive the violent shock of being blasted off a planet, tackling a longtime objection to rock‑to‑rock transfer of life. They explore a radical nasal vaccine idea that trains the lung itself to resist many pathogens, not one specific bug. Quick rundown hits AI for materials, Neanderthal DNA puzzles, embryo mechanics, and war‑game AIs given nuclear codes.

A deep-sky mystery about a Perseus Cluster object that could be a nearly pure dark matter halo and a testbed for missing-satellites, cusp–core debates, and fuzzy dark matter. A biomedical thread traces how exercise-linked liver enzyme GPLD1 may repair the blood–brain barrier and how an oral TNAP inhibitor mimics the protective effect in mice. Plus quick rundowns on Rubin alerts, AI magnet discovery, Easter Island climate, and the Boba–Kiki effect.

Two-way lucid dreaming experiments show researchers can cue and even receive signals from dreamers to bias dream content. A precision hydrogen measurement appears to settle the decade-long proton radius discrepancy in favor of the smaller value. A new ALS-in-a-dish motor neuron model predicts patient survival and reveals a promising multi-drug rescue that could improve drug translation.

They unpack why ice is slippery, from classic theories to nanoscale viscous surface films that change how we think about skating and glaciers. They explore choking under pressure with neuroscience studies showing reward signals can derail motor control. They examine climate threats to winter sports, limits of artificial snow, and snow farming. A rapid rundown hits AI physics claims, cat vocalizations, immune epigenetics, odd exoplanets, and curling stone lore.

A deep-dive into a solved 50-year plant chemistry mystery and the single enzyme that builds complex alkaloids. A quantum sensing breakthrough using entangled atomic clouds to beat standard noise limits. A new ALFA-K approach that maps local fitness landscapes to predict how aneuploid cancers might evolve under therapy.