Life Not As We Know It

Well, let’s see. Laat week much of the U.S. and parts of Europe were under a crippling heat dome. The U.S. celebrated its 250^th birthday. And there’s something called the World Cup going on, for those of you who care about such things. But, I mean, really, the news of the week? SpudCell.

It may not look like much, but SpudCell is close to synthetic life. Credit: Orion Venero, Adamala Lab

OK, maybe you missed that one. If you are not a fan of science, or of synthetic biology in particular, news about it might not have shown up in your feeds, or perhaps you thought it was another ploy by the Potato Association of America to get you to buy even more potatoes. SpudCell is something truly new: “the world’s first synthetic cell with a complete life cycle, built entirely from non-living chemical components.”

Take a minute to take that description in.

“SpudCell performs the behaviors often used to tell the living from the inert — it feeds, grows, replicates its genome, divides and undergoes selection — yet it is far simpler than any natural cell and was assembled, part by part, by hand,” the project researchers wrote in a statement.

It was designed and built by researchers at the University of Minnesota, announced last week along with a preprint of their paper. The team was led by Professor Kate Adamala, and the name is either due to its supposed resemblance to a potato or it’s a play on “Sputnik.”

“This is likely the most exciting project I've ever worked on,” said Professor Adamala. “We’ve replicated in chemistry what only used to be possible in biology: the complete set of behaviors of a cell. It proves that the most fundamental functions of life, like growth and replication, do not need a mysterious magical spark.”

Scientists have been working for decades on stripping away genetic material from living cells to try to find the minimum necessary for life, but Professor Adamala and her team went the other way, gradually building up genetic material until it started behaving in ways we’d expect cells to.

The impressive thing is that the team engineered everything SpudCell does. As The Economist put it: “Everything the resulting cells do, they do because of molecules that Dr Adamala’s team put there. That leaves no room for mysteries.” That’s not true when researchers start with living cells.

Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist at Stanford University, told Carl Zimmer of The New York Times, “It’s a cell that was built, not born. It’s constructed, but it does what cells do.”

SpudCell is very basic. The human genome has about 3 million kilobase pairs (kbp); SpudCell has 90. And, instead of a single chromosome, SpudCell’s genome is split across seven separate DNA plasmids, while allows researchers to program various cell functions independently.

Whether SpudCell qualifies it as “life” is murky. Professor Adamala cautioned: “Life is not binary. That’s why I’m hesitant to call this ‘alive.’ There’s no clear line, as much as we would love it to be.”

For example, SpudCell doesn’t make its own ribosomes, using ones from e coli bacteria instead, which means it can only replicate for 5-10 generations before things degrade. It also needs some help feeding, with nutrient-carrying liposomes having to be added regularly. But, still; not bad for 90 kbp.

Other scientists are pretty impressed. “Kate Adamala’s team designed and built a nonliving synthetic cell that is much closer to being ‘alive’ than anything else produced by the bottom-up synthetic cell field,” said John Glass, who leads synthetic cell research at the J. Craig Venter Institute. ”It is dazzling that she has put these things all together.”  

“This is a stunning scientific achievement,” says Roseanna Zia, a computational cell biologist at the University of Missouri.

Prof Tom Ellis, at Imperial College London, told The Guardian the work was probably the field’s “biggest breakthrough in recent times,” further explaining: “Making a synthetic cell helps us understand the exact minimum requirements for life and how life might have emerged from chemistry. It’s also useful as it provides a fully understood system for testing biological circuits and computer models of cellular life.”

Professor Adamala admits that in some ways SpudCell is “as dumb as it gets,” and likens it to the Wright brothers’ first airplane, noting that researchers who start with real cells are “like an engineer that’s given a full Dreamliner without all the plans.” Dr. Endy also used the Wright brothers analogy, telling Mr. Zimmer: “The Wright flyer flying for 12 seconds doesn’t get you a 737. This is just the beginning.”

Professor Adamala, along with Professor Endy and two other researchers, have founded Biotic, a public-benefit nonprofit research organization to further the research. They hope to create a shared technical infrastructure for synthetic cell engineering, with a mission “to responsibly enable and steward foundational advances in bioengineering.”

To help other scientists use SpudCells in their research, the Biotic site includes detailed protocols for building SpudCells. It notes: “While our motivation for this research is to make biology a general purpose technology, usable freely by all, we are currently operating in the sandbox environment.” 

Early days.

Professor Adamala says:

This work is just the beginning. We are showing it’s possible to engineer the basic functions of the cell. To fully realize the promise of this technology – to make it robust and practical – we need combined international effort. The role of Biotic is to focus engineering efforts and make them compatible with a shared chassis. SpudCell is that chassis, and with Biotic setting the protocols for collaboration, we are eager to start applying this technology to serious challenges.

“This work demands our attention, not for what has been produced but for where it leads,” Dr. David A. Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University, told K.R. Callaway of NYT, adding: “It is creative, disruptive and provocative in revealing what might be possible in the not-so-distant future.”

“Creative, disruptive, and provocative” -- music to my ears.

The University of Minnesota announcement makes clear the hope for synthetic biology in general, and SpudCell in particular:

Cells built from scratch could perform molecular transformations industrial chemistry cannot. That could first transform molecular medicine, building precise therapeutic molecules including drugs incorporating amino acids evolution never used. We could see materials that are grown, rather than synthesized, and manufacturing approaches that operate at biological temperatures, not industrial ones. Underneath it is a truly engineerable platform, which SpudCell provides for the first time.

OK, maybe the researchers didn’t “create life,” but the Wright brothers crashed many times before they succeeded. I love this idea of building from the bottom, and I’m rooting for SpurCell to grow up.

Thorin, We Hardly Knew Ye

Humans – that is to say, homo sapiens – have been fascinated by the Neanderthals since they were first identified in 1856. For many years, they were thought to be the original cave dwellers, leading a brutish, animal-like existence sometime in the distant past. Over the years, and especially with the advent of DNA as a tool, we’ve learned that were quite possibly were as intelligent as modern humans, they used tools, they buried their dead, and they even practiced dentistry,  Not only that, they not only overlapped with modern humans but also interbred with us; we have an estimated 1-4% of their DNA even today.

 

You're not likely to run into a Neanderthal, but wouldn't it be cool? Credit: Microsoft Designer

And yet the mysteries continue.

A new paper in Nature sheds some new light on the genetic data from Neanderthals, using the DNA from 27 individuals across ten sites and dating back some 50,000 years. Although the species apparently died out within 10,000 years from then – a blink of the eye in the evolutionary timescale -- these individuals seemed to be healthy and well-connected to other Neanderthal populations.

It had long been speculated that humans essentially drove Neanderthals to extinction, outcompeting them and forcing their populations to small enough sizes that they became inbred and unsustainable. This research does not support that thesis.

“Until now, we only had four high-quality Neanderthal genomes and a limited number of lower-quality ones, so most questions about the regional diversity of Neanderthals have been difficult to address,” said lead author Alba Bossoms Mesa, a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “By generating genetic data from multiple individuals from the region of present-day Belgium and France, we can now examine late Neanderthal populations in much greater detail.”

Neandertal skeletal elements from the Spy 1 and 2 skeletons (Lohest Collection, 1886) from Spy Cave in Belgium. © P. Semal, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, CC-BY 4.0

UCLA computational geneticist Benjamin Peter, who is one of the paper’s corresponding authors. added: “In other, earlier Neanderthal populations, close relatives were interbreeding, leading to unhealthy levels of genetic diversity similar to what we see today in some endangered species. But this population in Belgium and France does not seem to be dying out, even though we know that they will die out in the end.”

That’s not even the most surprising finding. Professor Peter says: “I think the most interesting finding we made is that these Neanderthals are genetically relatively healthy, with no strong signs that there was inbreeding depression. It’s also interesting that we didn’t find evidence that they have ancestry from anatomically modern humans, even though we know that at least they must have overlapped in time.”  

It gets even more interesting. Dr. Blossoms Mesa notes: “Our results add to a striking asymmetry. We repeatedly find Neandertal ancestry in early modern humans, but so far, we have not found clear evidence of recent modern human ancestry in late Neandertals."

Perhaps modern human men didn’t find Neanderthal women attractive (or vice-versa), perhaps Neanderthals were too formidable for humans to approach, or perhaps homo sapiens-Neanderthal babies didn’t survive. I like to think that homo sapiens women found the Neanderthal tough guy image irresistible, while Neanderthal women found our men to be, well, kind of wimpy. Or perhaps homo sapiens women were more likely to wander alone, where they might meet a Neanderthal man. We’ll never know.

Or perhaps we may yet gain more insight. Co-author Marie Soressi, Professor of Hominin Diversity Archaeology at Leiden University, says: “We are only beginning to uncover the diversity and complexity of Neanderthal populations. As more genomes become available from sites across Europe and beyond, we can move from studying isolated individuals to reconstructing entire communities, their relationships, and the social networks that connected them.”

"This study highlights the power of ancient DNA to reveal variation within Neandertals on a much finer scale than was previously possible," says co-author Janet Kelso, a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. "Rather than viewing late Neandertals as a single declining population, we are beginning to recognise a more complex picture of regional diversity, connectivity, and population history."

Illustrating that complex picture, I can’t help thinking about a finding from a couple years ago, the so-called Thorin (no, not the dwarf from “the Hobbit”). He was a Neanderthal who was part of a unique lineage that existed in Europe for some 50,000 years. 

“Until now, the story has been that at the time of the extinction there was just one Neanderthal population that was genetically homogeneous, but now we know that there were at least two populations present at that time,” said first author and population geneticist Tharsika Vimala of the University of Copenhagen.

That’s not the most surprising thing. The real surprise, as co-first author and discoverer of Thorin Ludovic Slimak of the Center for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse, France, told LiveScience: "The population of Thorin had spent 50 millennia without exchanging a single gene with the classical Neanderthal populations."

He further noted: “50,000 years of divergences is what separates the tiny dog of your grandma from a wolf.” It’s a long time to be genetically isolated. 

Speaking to IFLScience, senior author of the study Martin Sikora of the University of Copenhagen alternatively puts it like this: “The divergence between Thorin and the other Late Neanderthals is comparable to all modern humans out-of-Africa. As we all know the wide phenotypic diversity of modern humans, I would expect similar diversity among Neanderthal populations.” 

This was not like the Aboriginals in Australia being separated for other humans for tens of thousands of years due to geographical isolation. There were plenty of other Neanderthals around Thorin’s people. They apparently just chose not to mingle, or weren’t curious enough to find other humans.

Professor Slimak expressed his surprise: “We thus have 50 millennia during which two Neanderthal populations, living about ten days' walk from each other, coexisted while completely ignoring each other. This would be unimaginable for a Sapiens and reveals that Neanderthals must have biologically conceived our world very differently from us Sapiens.”

Keep in mind, that around this time, not only were there homo sapiens and Neanderthals, but also Denisovans, homo luzonensis, and homo floresiensis, although not all of them lived in exactly the same places or at exactly the same times. Still, think of the swap meets, not to mention the dating options.

Humans didn’t drive all of the great apes (e.g., orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos) to extinction, nor all “intelligent” species (e.g., dolphins or octopuses), so it is an evolutionary mystery why it happened with other types of humans. Maybe they got a sense of what we were going to do to the world and wanted no part of it.

Low Resource Computing to the Fore

Now, this is the kind of thing we should hope for from DARPA: last week it issued an RFI focused on low resource computing (LRC), seeing as the “Department of War (DoW) typically operates in environments with limited power, communication, or physical space, where mission completion depends on the ability to sustain critical computation and adapt at the edge.” DARPA is firm about looking for breakthrough technologies only: “DARPA is interested in disruptive concepts at the material, component, runtime, and authoring levels that represent significant advances beyond current practice for fielding robust, ultra-efficient systems,” further emphasizing: “Approaches resulting in incremental improvement and description of existing capabilities or prior work without a clear vision for advancing the field are not of interest.”

You can see why DARPA is interested in low resource computing. Credit: Microsoft Designer

I love it. I mean, I don’t know what kind of responses DARPA is likely to get, but I love breaking the paradigms that govern most of our computing lives. We worship at the altar of Moore’s law and brag about the computing power of our laptops and smartphones, but AI is driving us back into the era of “bigger is better,” with lots of computing power needed to train and operate them. Your devices may be powerful, but without the cloud to help them, they’re more like expensive paperweights.

Most of us, of course, don’t operate under the kinds of constraints DARPA is worried about, but all of us stand to benefit from any advances its LRC initiative brings. We’ve been operating under basically the same conceptual computer model since the 1940’s, just with better chips, so it is time for a fundamental rethinking.

As DARPA says:

Decades later, the apex of the commercial computing industry follows this same resource-heavy trajectory. Modern data centers, built around advanced graphics processing unit (GPU) clusters to drive artificial intelligence, demand staggering, gigawatt-scale power requirements that necessitate massive, dedicated infrastructure.

While commercial enterprise focuses heavily on scaling upward to exascale capabilities, this trend leaves significant, overlooked potential at the lower end of the computing spectrum. There remains substantial room for improvement and innovation by revisiting architectures through a lens of strict resource scarcity. By optimizing systems for extreme efficiency rather than scale, it is possible to develop highly resilient computing platforms that do not rely on massive infrastructure.

DARPA is looking for responses that address at least one of the physical resources constraints: low power, low memory, low reliability, or low technological level, and may also address one or more logical resource constraints in addition: low trust, low privilege, self-hosting, or low complexity of user experience.

As Colton Jones described the RFI in Defense Blog:

The Pentagon’s most ambitious research arm wants to build computers that can think in the dark, operate on almost no power, and keep working even when their own hardware is failing, and it is now asking the technology world to help figure out how.

Sure, why not?

I can’t help thinking of the work Leidy Klotz and colleagues have done, as described in his book Subtract. Basically, they argue that our design bias is always to add, never to subtract, and that bias causes us to overlook many opportunities. The proponents of frugal innovation would understand. The RFI suggests that it’s time to strip computing down to its essentials, and see if we can rebuild differently.

My first thought, right or wrong, in seeing the RFI was fungal computing, which I wrote about a couple years ago. People like Andrew Adamatzy, Professor of Unconventional Computing at the University of the West of England, or Robert Shepherd, leader of the Organics Robotics Lab at Cornell have been on this track for years.

Professor Adamatzy is also the Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Unconventional Computing, which publishes research on varied topics like chemical computing, biomolecular computing cellular automata, or logics of unconventional computing. Professor Shepherd is more focused “on using organic chemistry of soft material composites for new capabilities in robots,” but has used fungal computing to guide them. Neither may be the kind of person who will start the next Apple or the next Microsoft, but both seem like the kind of people who see the future differently.

Exactly the kind of people DARPA is hoping to hear from (although, of course, Professor Adamatzy is English, and neither may be interested in helping DARPA or the Defense Department).

If you think that fungi would be an odd choice to power computing, well, you must not have been paying enough attention to them lately. Their networks are everywhere and transmit startling amounts of data, as a recent paper illustrated. As the paper’s lead author, Dr. Toby Kiers, told Alan Burdick of The New York Times: “Are fungi capitalists? No. They’ve developed a system that is much more sophisticated than the economic system humans use.”

Silicon, you’ve been a good friend and ally for many decades, but perhaps it is time we revisited some old friends.

I’ll give another example of out-there technology the DARPA RFI made me think of: 3D printing of batteries, as Christopher Mims recently profiled in The Wall Street Journal. Batteries have long been a pain point for all of our devices, from watches to smartphones to laptops to electric cars, but some innovators don’t think they have to be. Mr. Mims writes:

There’s a revolution in battery technology hiding in plain sight: The 3-D printing of batteries has the potential to put energy storage inside any device. This will enable lightweight and long-lasting consumer gadgets, long-range military drones and even nanoscale robots.

 He goes on to posit:

The promise of battery-tech 3-D printing (aka additive manufacturing) is simple: What if batteries could fill any available space, even structural elements of our gadgets, rather than always taking a rigid shape like a pouch or cylinder?

What if, indeed. What we think batteries are and have to be, may not be. How many other components of our existing computing platforms is that true of?

Responses to the DARPA RFI are due July 17 (which doesn’t seem like very long), and DARPA will hold an in-person, invitation-only workshop in August. I don’t know what kind of responses DARPA will get or who will be attending the workshop, but if I were a venture capitalist looking for the Next Big Thing, I’d sure be paying attention.

Everyone to Your Balcony!

By now, most of us know about solar energy. Most of us live in states that have at least some solar energy production, in varying degrees, and a little under 10% of homeowners have installed their own solar panels. Still, though, many communities don’t want solar farms, and installing residential solar panels is expensive and requires permits and expert installation.

Fortunately, balcony solar is coming.

Talk about DIY - hello, balcony solar. Credit: Microsoft Designer

It seems like people have never thought about electricity as much as we have lately. Prices are skyrocketing, with no end in sight, especially with the plethora of energy-thirsty data centers being built. President Trump has steadfastly criticized, and tried to halt, most kinds of alternative energy that might help mitigate cost increases.

Despite the President’s opposition to alternative energy, last month solar overtook coal for electricity production for the first time, although that’s as much about coal’s portion dropping as solar’s rising – and both lag nuclear and, especially, natural gas. The U.S. solar industry is still growing, adding 7.8 gigawatts direct current in Q1 2026, but at declining rates, in part due to the expiration of the 30% tax credit for residential clean energy.

Balcony solar doesn’t need solar farms. Balcony solar doesn’t need big, expensive rooftop panels. Done right, balcony solar doesn’t need regulatory approval or expert installation. Just plug it in on your balcony or deck, and – voila! -- you’re generating your own electricity.

Sounds too good to be true? Tell that to the over one million homes in Germany already using them, at a cost of as low as $200. The U.S., units can be had for as little as $400.

Now, don’t get overly excited. They won’t power your whole house, only supplying an estimated 10-25% of your electricity. They’re not a backup generator. Unlike many rooftop panels, they don’t typically feed into the electric grid (which then gives you a credit on your bill); they instead just reduce the amount of electricity you draw from the grid. Proponents claim they pay off in just a few years, the time depending largely on how expensive electricity is in your area.

Currently, though, they’re not legal in most states, as laws and regulations generally don’t distinguish them from larger units. Plug-In Solar says there are 30 states with such legislation in 2026: 5 have passed, 5 have failed, 11 have stalled, and the rest are in other stages. Utah was the first state to pass enabling legislation, in 2025, with Colorado, Maryland, Maine, and Virginia joining it this year, while Georgia, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming have rejected them.

State of balcony solar legislation. Credit: Plug-In Solar USA

Things are not quite as simple as proponents maintain, according to Casey Crownhart, writing in MIT Technology Review. Joseph Bablo, manager of principal engineering, energy, and industrial automation at UL Solutions told him there are three main concerns: overloading the house’s electrical circuit, potential for an outlet’s ground fault circuit interruption (GFIC) to fail if current is going back in, and the risk of power continuing to run if the plug is disconnected.

UL Solutions is working on a framework to address those, which would likely include a special outlet that an electrician would have to install. “I know they want to say ‘No electrician, no permits’—we’re not there,” according to Mr. Bablo.

Tell that to all those Germans.

Raymond Ward, the Utah (Republican) state representative whose bill allowing them passed in Utah, made the point: “You look over there and say, ​‘Well, that’s working,’ So what is it that stops us from having it here?” Note, though: even the Utah law still requires compliance with the National Electrical Code and a product safety standard from Underwriters Laboratories, neither of which is currently available.

So there is still work to be done. In Germany it took “relentless individuals” to make the necessary changes, according to Christian Ofenheusle, the founder of EmpowerSource, a Berlin-based company that promotes balcony solar. We’re going to need some of those too.

Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, a media company focused on climate change, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times in praise of balcony solar: The Tiny Solar Panel That Could Change America. He recognizes that they won’t replace the current grid and that there “are still some technical questions to resolve,” but I like his vision: “It will be bought off-the-shelf like a consumer product, not sold by a team, like a swimming pool; it can be installed by just about anyone, with no special training; and it requires minimal approval.”

His vision goes further than just the direct impacts:

But if I can dream for a second, I hope balcony solar’s charisma and low cost help us imagine the energy-abundant future we are so close to achieving. Americans and our government have a tendency to treat the current energy system, and the current set of technologies that enliven it, as finished and fixed. In reality, they are always changing. 

Plug-in solar demonstrates one version of the coming changes: With its small size, it makes balcony and backyard power production possible. But it’s only one messenger of many from that new world. As batteries continue to develop, larger and larger amounts of energy will be stored at ever-smaller sizes and scales, and that will enable innovations and technologies we cannot yet imagine — technologies that will change our world as much as the sextant, the bicycle or the jet engine. 

That’s a vision we should all buy into.

Indeed, balcony solar is already inspiring people to take other actions to help fulfill that kind of vision. "They are a gateway to other measures such as larger photovoltaic systems or the purchase of an electric car or a heat pump," says Christoph Kost, head of energy systems analysis at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, a German research organization. 

As Mr. Meyer says: “Balcony solar is a small way that apartment- and condo-dwelling Americans can take ownership of their energy choices and cut down their pollution on the margins.”

Balcony solar won’t solve all of our issues with electricity, but it can help mitigate rising costs and perhaps, just perhaps, point us in the new directions Mr. Meyer is hoping for.

Oceans, Away

It probably didn’t show up on your calendar, but today is World Ocean Day. It’s a day meant to catalyze “collective action for a healthy ocean and a stable climate,” and has been around since 2002 (although the U.N. didn’t officially recognize it until 2008). Its website claims a network of over 2,000 organizations, in 180 countries.

I wish we had more to celebrate.

You'd think that with World Ocean Day that we'd treat them better. Credit: Microsoft Designer

Many have recognized the irony of humans calling our planet “Earth,” when, in fact, 71% of its surface is covered with water. Even more amazing, oceans account for 99% of the biosphere. We come from the ocean, and still owe much of our existence to it.

Unfortunately, these are not good times for oceans, and we’re to blame. The most recent World Ocean Assessment from the U.N. highlights:

• “The ocean matters to everyone, everywhere;
• The ocean is under intensifying stress;
• Climate change is transforming conditions;
• Biodiversity is declining across nearly every marine habitat;
• Pollution is widespread and increasing;
• Ocean food systems are threatened.”

The report concludes: “The coming decade is decisive: without rapid, coordinated global action, ocean health will continue to decline, threatening climate stability, biodiversity resilience, food security, livelihoods and the wellbeing of billions.”

I think about this in light of last month’s announcement by the National Science Foundation that it was “descoping” the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Major Facility, beginning next week. That’s a $368 million deep-ocean observation system “that delivers real-time data from more than 900 instruments to address critical science questions regarding the world's oceans.” Some 900 instruments will be removed, in both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

OOI map. Credit: NSF/OOI

Michael England, a spokesman for the National Science Foundation, told Eric Niiler of The New York Times that the decision “aligns with N.S.F.’s wider strategy to have a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies as well as a deliberate approach to smart life cycle management within its portfolio of research infrastructure.”

In other words, we (the Trump Administration) didn’t invent it, and it relates to climate change, so we don’t want it.

Craig McLean, who was the acting chief scientist at the NOAA during the first Trump term, told Mr. Niiler: “This reflects the further lack of understanding that the current administration has of scientific value and scientific merit. By dismantling such a system, we push the United States back yet again into a rear seat in global scientific leadership.”

Scientists are aghast. Sabrina Speich, an expert in global ocean monitoring at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris and chair of the ocean expert panel of the Global Climate Observing System, told The Guardian: “Ocean heat content is the most robust indicator of climate change we have – not just of what is happening in the ocean, but of the entire climate system. Lose them, and you lose your ability to track not just ocean warming but the climate system as a whole – they are a proxy for variables that become unavailable the moment the observations stop.”  

John P Abraham, professor of engineering at the University of St Thomas, called the move “penny-wise, pound foolish,” adding: “The US government wants to save less than a billion in sensors, which are the eyes and ears of the ocean. We have hundreds of billions in climate costs per year. The cost of the observation system is a fraction of the climate costs from hurricanes and storms that hit the US.”

“Walking away from a $368-million investment in a state-of-the-art system, a feat of engineering already paid for by the American people, is absolutely myopic,” Chris Robbins, the associate director of scientific initiatives for Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit group, complained to Mr. Niiler.

Democrats in Congress vow to fight the cuts, but lack the votes to do anything. The E.U. said it was stepping up its ocean monitoring efforts, independent of the U.S.’s action, with its OceanEye initiative, but that will be a long term process and won’t immediately offset the U.S. cuts.

Meanwhile, a new study has found that a “cold blob” in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation may suggest big changes ahead: “a further weakening of Atlantic heat transport in future climate change could lead to serious impacts on climate and weather conditions in Europe and other parts of the world.”

Sure doesn’t seem like a great time to lose our ocean monitoring abilities.

Even worse are the Trump Administration’s gung-ho attitude towards deep sea mining. It is well known that the ocean’s floor has lots of valuable minerals, and some mining companies are delirious at the prospect of strip mining them. The NOAA has starting mapping some 30,000 square nautical miles off American Samoa, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is investigating several other offshore areas, both with the intent of allowing deep sea mining.

The U.S. may even issue permits for seabeds not owned by the U.S., or any country.

“No one has done commercial-scale deep-sea mining,” said Becca Loomis, a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, ““This would be brand new, and they’re kind of forging ahead. Rushing ahead with this industry is really scary for the ocean, the ocean ecosystem, for people who rely on fisheries.” 

A new review of existing studies found how relatively little we understand about the impacts of such mining, but what little we do know suggest there are large and longstanding impacts on biodiversity.

Just this week, a Greenpeace study found thriving new-to-us ecosystems in the Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge “We barely understand how these communities function, which environmental factors influence their distribution, or how sensitive they are to human disturbances. Likewise, our discovery of several sponge species that are potentially new to science highlights how little is known about Arctic ecosystems, said Dr Julio A. Diaz, deep-sea researchers, Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University.

“The deep sea mining industry has not yet started to tear up the seabed, and we therefore have the opportunity to stop an environmental disaster before it happens.” said Dr. Sandra Schöttner, Chief Scientist, Greenpeace International.

One can imagine how little the Trump Administration – whose mantra is “drill, baby, drill” – cares about such impacts.

I’m thrilled that there is such a thing as World Ocean Day, but it’s hard to celebrate it in the midst of all that is happening to degrade and disrupt our oceans. I’m quite certain that the oceans will be around long after humans will be, but it’s unfathomable about how much damage we’ll do to them while we are.

DuckDuckGo Goes Where No AI Can Go

It’s getting so you can’t avoid AI. If your 401k doesn’t have some AI-related stocks, forget about your investment returns. You can’t open a website without some AI chatbot trying to help you. If you use a Microsoft product, it really, really wants you to have CoPilot assist you. If you work, AI is either coming for your job, or your bosses are looking at how AI can assist you in that job. Google, long the king of search, thinks it has seen the future of search and that future is AI.

Credit: DuckDuckGo

Very exciting times, right? Golden opportunities ahead for sure. Well, not everyone is thrilled. The Wall Street Journal recently chronicled “The American Rebellion Against AI,” citing such examples about college commencement speakers getting booed when they mention AI, polls showing respondents’ concerns about AI, anger at the boom of data centers and the spillover effect on consumer utility bills, even Sam Altman’s house getting firebombed.

AI may be inevitable, but that doesn’t mean people have to be happy about it, and it doesn’t mean that everyone is going along with it. DuckDuckGo is trying to help.

DuckDuckGo, in case you aren’t familiar, is a search engine that focuses on privacy. Its website brags: “We’re about data protection, not data collection,” and adding: “Search, browse, and use AI privately, keeping your information to yourself and away from hackers, scammers, and privacy-invasive companies.”  Its AI features are optional.

If you’ve never used DuckDuckGo, join the club. Let’s put it this way: reaching Bing’s levels of search is aspirational. But that may be changing, thanks to AI, or, rather, to AI backlash.

When Google made its May 19 I/O announcement about how it was further incorporating AI into its search, DuckDuckGo benefited.  The company claimed on Bluesky that visits to its “No AI” search page have tripled since Google’s announcement (“and still rising”).  TechCrunch reports “U.S. app installs were also up 18.1% week-over-week, with U.S. iOS app installs peaking at 69.9% week-over-week growth.”  Users can use the DuckDuckGo browser or download extensions for Chrome or Firefox.

“People aren’t just complaining about Google’s AI search overhaul, they’re leaving,” the company’s official X account tweeted. “Momentum is growing. It’s time to Fire Google.”

DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg told tech journalist Paul Thurrott:

Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out. As a result, their results are getting worse, not better. We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want. That’s why we’re seeing a spike in people coming to DuckDuckGo this week, it’s as simple as that. Not only do we respect user choice, but also user privacy. Everything you do in DuckDuckGo is private, we don’t collect search histories or chats and nothing is used for AI training.

Mr. Thurrott notes: “Usage on iPhone and iPad was highest, with an average growth of 33 percent and peak growth of 69.9 percent on May 25.”

It’s not that DuckDuckGo is against AI per se. It offers Duck.ai, Search Assist, and an AI image filter. It just wants you to be in control. DuckDuckGo chief communications and policy officer Kamyl Bazbaz told Mr. Thurrott: “One of the most popular search features we’ve launched in years is a filter that removes AI images from image results. The other most popular feature? Search Assist, which uses AI to anonymously generate answers to search queries at the top of the search page. People just want a choice.” She noted that Google has such a monopoly that it can force AI on its users without fear of them leaving.

The flood of users to DuckDuckGo suggests that might not be true…yet.

The problem is that AI is coming at us too fast. It is evolving much faster than we can get used to it; we’re thinking up use cases for AI models that were valid several months ago, but now are woefully out of date. The future is coming at us too fast, and many of us don’t like it.

Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai recently admitted to The New York Times:

A.I. is viewed as the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. It’s progressing at an extraordinary pace, and humans aren’t evolved to process that much change. People, rightfully so, are anxious about the future that this technology will bring. I understand; it feels natural with such a profound technological shift. 

We tiptoed into the internet, then gradually embraced it, making lots of mistakes along the way (remember Pets.com?). We thought it would democratize information, failing to anticipate that a few tech giants would control most of the traffic or that our information was the thing that became the commodity.

We rushed into smartphones even faster, loving their ubiquity and power but, again, failing to recognize the impact that ubiquity would have on us, especially our kids.

So forgive us if many think the AI gold rush isn’t for our benefit.

Dylan Patel, CEO of AI-infrastructure consulting firm SemiAnalysis, recently said on a podcast: “People hate AI. AI is less popular than [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. AI is less popular than politicians.” Those are pretty low bars.

A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that only 21% think they can trust AI aways or almost always, and only a third are at all excited about AI. Eighty percent are concerned about AI, and the levels of concern do not vary as much by generation as one might expect.

Still, 51% of respondents have used AI to research topics, up from 37% a year ago. About a quarter have used it for school or work, to write something, to analyze data, or to create an image. Ready or not, we’re starting to use it, and companies like Google think we’re going to use it, like it or not.

Credit: WSJ

I like the DuckDuckGo attitude; it should be our choice. Most of us will eventually get round to using AI, but that time doesn’t have to be now. Can we just take some time to get used to it?

Then again, why is DuckDuckGo’s attitude towards privacy so unique, and why do so few of us value privacy enough to use it? I don’t like what those say about the tech industry, or about us.  

So kudos to DuckDuckGo for its AI (and privacy) stand, and I hope that the result of the AI backlash isn’t so much slower evolution as it is smarter adoption.

Meat Computers of the World, Unite!

Until a couple of days ago I hadn’t heard of the phrase “meat computer.”  Apparently this has been around for some time, and, as Lora Kelley discusses in The New York Times, the tech elites are increasingly using it, either as a way to humanize AI or as a way to disparage what humans can do relative to AI (e.g., Elon Musk posted last summer, “We are all dumb meat computers compared to digital superintelligence.”).  

When it comes to how AI is used, we meat puppets better stick together. Credit: Microsoft Designer

Raphaël Millière, an associate professor at the University of Oxford, told Ms. Kelley that the metaphor aims to “move the public perception on how humanlike and intelligent frontier models are.”

Well, Pope Leo isn’t buying it.

Today he issued his first encyclical, “Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” It’s some 200 pages long, so forgive me if I’m having to rely on summaries, but he raises issues that I hope our politicians and business leaders will pay appropriate attention to.

Encyclicals are, it appears, one of the highest forms of teaching that a pope can give, and it is rare for a pope to deliver one himself, so this is something he takes very seriously. As he should.

AI, he asserts, is the new industrial revolution, and he calls for us to “disarm” it: “Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of 'armed' competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. Disarming does not mean renouncing technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity."

“Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed, freed from the logic that turned it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death,” he said. “It must be at the service of all, and of the common good.”

The pope makes it clear that he is not against technology per se – “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity” – but the question is how it is used and what the impact on people will be. "For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible," he said.

He is particularly concerned about control over AI, and the wealth that comes from it, should not be concentrated among an elite few:

AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data. Small but highly influential groups can shape information and consumption patterns, influence democratic processes and steer economic dynamics to their own advantage, undermining social justice and solidarity among peoples.

And, he notes: “A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity. This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace,”

Marx and Engels would recognize this, although perhaps not the “meat computer” metaphor.

The pope indirectly but firmly disavows the meat computer metaphor:

Building for the common good means accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected…We must avoid the misconception of equating this type of ‘intelligence’ with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing.

The pope posits our choice with a biblical reference to Babel or Jerusalem: “The primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence.”

His choice is clear:

We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.

The Pope was joined at the presentation by Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic. Mr. Olah said: “Today is just the beginning — the start of a long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from the inside, cannot.” He added: “We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend.”

“Leo sees the challenge of AI as a choice about its design, and about who gets to make those choices,” Vincent Miller, a professor of theology at the University of Dayton, Ohio, told The Wall Street Journal.

Not surprisingly, the pope directly addresses the use of AI in warfare. “Moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation, for it involves conscience, personal responsibility and the recognition of the other as a person,” he writes. “Therefore, it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems.”

He is also concerned about its use in politics, and its potential impacts on children. And he calls our data “the new rare earths of power,” warning:

Here lies one of the most urgent moral challenges of our time: to ensure that shared knowledge becomes a true common good rather than an instrument of dominance. This requires restoring to individuals not only the data that describes them, but also the ability to decide how it is used, by whom and for whose benefit.

There goes your data Credit: Microsoft Designer

The Pope warns: “Robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility are required,” We’re going to need more than “hopes and prayers” to make those happen.

In light of recent verbal exchanges, I can hardly wait to see how President Trump responds. Indeed, Anna Rowlands, a British theologian who was among the encyclical’s presenters, said: “I think the danger for an American audience is funneling everything solely down to some kind of drama between Trump and Leo.” She went on to add, though: “Certainly, there would be questions that can be asked for the U.S. when you read that section on power, but there are questions for other global leaders, as well, and also for the tech industry itself.”

It’s bigger than Trump, bigger than the U.S., bigger than tech.

The Pope doesn’t have all the answers and probably doesn’t even raise all the right questions. But he’s thrown down the gauntlet with some very specific concerns, and it’s up to all of us meat computers to pick it up and take action.