Edd Gent in Singularity Hub:

Despite their usefulness, large language models still have a reliability problem. A new study shows that a team of AIs working together can score up to 97 percent on US medical licensing exams, outperforming any single AI. While recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has led to systems capable of passing professional and academic tests, their performance remains inconsistent. They’re still prone to hallucinations—plausible sounding but incorrect statements—which has limited their use in high-stakes area like medicine and finance.

Nonetheless, LLMs have scored impressive results on medical exams, suggesting the technology could be useful in this area if their inconsistencies can be controlled. Now, researchers have shown that getting a “council” of five AI models to deliberate over their answers rather than working alone can lead to record-breaking scores in the US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE). “Our study shows that when multiple AIs deliberate together, they achieve the highest-ever performance on medical licensing exams,” Yahya Shaikh, from John Hopkins University, said in a press release. “This demonstrates the power of collaboration and dialogue between AI systems to reach more accurate and reliable answers.”

More here.

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From Nature:

The mission with cancer therapy is clear: eradicate as many tumour cells as possible. Traditional chemotherapy remains a mainstay, where patients are dosed with potent compounds that disrupt essential cellular functions, preventing tumour cells from proliferating and ultimately forcing them to self-destruct. However, new findings¹ from a team led by Hongbo Gao and Keith Syson Chan at the Houston Methodist Academic Institute suggest that this approach might also release signals that promote drug resistance, which makes it harder to eliminate the tumour in the long run.

Chan first became aware of this possibility a decade ago². “We and others showed that the type of cell death the cancer cell undergoes also determines the therapeutic efficacy,” he says. His group demonstrated that, in some scenarios, chemo-induced cell death can lead to the dissemination of growth factors and other molecules, enabling surviving resistant cells to subsequently thrive and proliferate even during ongoing treatment. In their latest work, Chan and Gao focused on a mechanism known as pyroptosis, wherein tumour cells perish in a manner that leads to release of pro-inflammatory signals. This is generally thought to be a good outcome in the context of immunotherapy, as such an environment can amplify a patient’s anti-tumour immune response and put cancer cells on the defensive.

More here.

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Francesca Bria in Noema:

Geopolitical power once flowed through armies and treaties, but today it courses through silicon wafers, server farms and algorithmic systems. These invisible digital infrastructures and architectures shape every aspect of modern life. “The Stack” — interlocking layers of hardware, software, networks and data — has become the operating system of modern political and economic power.

The global race to control the Stack defines the emerging world order. The United States consolidates its dominance through initiatives like Stargate, which fuses AI development directly to proprietary chips and hyperscale data centers, creating insurmountable barriers to competition. China advances through systematic industrial policy and its Digital Silk Road, achieving unprecedented integration from chip design to AI deployment across Asia and beyond. These are deliberate strategies of technological imperialism.

Europe occupies a paradoxical position: a regulatory leader but infrastructurally dependent. We Europeans have set global standards through GDPR and the AI Act. Our research institutions remain world-class. Yet just 4% of global cloud infrastructure is European-owned. European governments, businesses and citizens depend entirely on systems controlled by Amazon, Microsoft and Google — companies subject to the U.S. CLOUD Act’s extraterritorial surveillance requirements. When we use “our” digital services, we’re actually using American infrastructure governed by American law for American interests.

This dependency isn’t abstract — it’s existential.

More here.

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Branko Milanovic over at his substack Global Inequality and More 3.0:

Why did neoliberalism, in its domestic and international components, fail? I ask this question, in much more detail than I can do it in a short essay here, in my forthcoming The Great Global Transformation: National Market Liberalism in a Multipolar World. I am asking it for personal reasons too: some of my best friends are neoliberal. It was a generational project of Western baby-boomers which later got adopted by others, from Eastern Europe like myself, and Latin American and African elites. When nowadays I meet my aging baby-boomer friends, still displaying an almost undiminished zeal for neoliberalism, they seem like the ideological escapees from a world that has disappeared long time ago. They are not from Venus or Mars; they are from the Titanic.

When I say that neoliberalism was defeated I do not mean than it was intellectually defeated in the sense than there is an alternative ready-made project waiting in the wings to replace it. No: like communism, neoliberalism was defeated by reality. Real world simply refused to behave the way that liberals thought it should.

We need first to acknowledge that the project had many attractive sides. It was ideologically and generationally linked to the rebellious generation of the 1960s, so its pedigree was non-conformist. It promoted racial, gender and sexual equality. By its emphasis on globalization, it has to be credited by helping along the greatest reduction in global poverty ever and for helping many countries find the path to prosperity.

More here.

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Lily Lynch in Jacobin:

Earlier this summer, an Albanian friend in Istanbul told me a story. During the Cold War, Albanians fleeing Enver Hoxha’s People’s Socialist Republic of Albania would cross Lake Shkodra in boats. If they were lucky, and they weren’t captured by government patrol, drowned, or shot by guards, they would disembark on the shores of my friend’s lakeside village in Montenegro, then part of Yugoslavia. The two countries occupied diametrically opposed poles in the communist world: Albania was the most isolated, while Yugoslavia — separate from the Eastern Bloc since Josip Broz Tito’s split with Joseph Stalin in 1948 — was the most open. (The red Yugoslav passport, the source of much boomer Yugonostalgia, allowed visa-free travel to more than a hundred countries.)

Albania’s litany of eccentricities is well known. In the words of one observer, the world’s first officially atheist state banned “bearded visitors, Americans, and God.” Fleeing the country was considered treason; those caught were lucky to get away with hard labor. As remote as it all sounds today, my friend’s story about the boats bound for Montenegro made me think of contemporary headline news: the recent wave of small-boat migration of Albanians to the United Kingdom.

In 2022 alone, 12,300 Albanians crossed the English Channel aboard rickety rubber dinghies, risking death to get to Britain’s shores. Why was it that I didn’t immediately associate that journey with a cruel ideology? Certainly global capitalism and inequality played a big part. But why don’t we blame them in the same way we do the autarkic communism of Uncle Enver’s Albania?

More here.

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From The Washington Post:

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Ice Dance

jason said it was all just light from windows
just light that had fallen and had stained the ground,
ground which would go away said jason
stains on the ground through windows
just light    he said

…………………………………… just jason, standing

with his government name and identification badge
and memorized numerals and credentials he did not give
but allowed to swirl as suggestions,
proof in the negative sticking to him
like any other     stain are you who
you say you are

……………………….. jason,

……………….. now nameless, behind the mask
face now jasonless,
………………………………………….. still with hands
former flipper of burgers and player of ball
now catch ave marias, detain them in the dugout
of some sunny afternoon in Chicago
jason jayson jay jameson joshua john
john jean juan johnny jack jason we are glued
to you like a dancer on ice, gliding on
around the ring of the rest of our life
now extended, watching you receive
and enact an increasingly worrying set
of orders and inside of us another arena,
with equal chill, where we stretch, imagine
running, the inevitable fall, imagine doing
the dance, either part, the silence from the risers
of uncalled upon names, mute power
of all those lap-held hands.

by Ingrid Jacobsen
from Rattle Magazine

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Paul Reitter in The Hedgehog Review:

When I taught German in graduate school back in the late 1990s, my fellow instructors and I often used a line from Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial to illustrate a point about grammar that was also a point about untranslatability.¹ In German, as in English, the regular subjunctive form goes mainly with wishes, counterfactual conditions, statements, and questions, as well as with polite requests. But the German form has an additional function: It can mark speculation—or, really, ambiguity—in a way that’s hard to match in English. Kafka’s line evokes a vivid sense of this gap, which, in the first place, is why we turned to it here. However, we had further reasons for doing that, starting with the fact that untranslatability is one of Kafka’s great themes.

Untranslatability is also one of George Steiner’s great themes—and one of his central concerns in his commentary on Kafka. It would be hard to think of a literary scholar or critic who has done more to draw attention to this aspect of Kafka’s work, to reveal it as a guiding principle. In his essay “K,” for instance, Steiner cites, at length, a previously underexamined diary entry in which Kafka discusses how for him the German words Mutter and Vater fail “to approximate to” Jewish mothers and fathers. Kafka suggests that his psychic life was shaped by this linguistic misalignment; as a result of it, he “did not always love” his mother as “she deserved” to be loved and as he was capable of loving her. Steiner goes on to read “The Burrow,” one of Kafka’s last stories, as “a parable” of “the artist unhoused in his language,” a point he makes to explain nothing less than “the fantastic nakedness and economy” of Kafka’s prose.²

More here.

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Masha Hamilton at Atavist:

The sky is dark. The highway hums beneath our tires. We’ve covered a lot of miles today, and the night is pressing us off the road, toward a Virginia rest stop where, years ago, a man was murdered in a bathroom. I want to see the door he pushed open, stand where he stood, feel how quickly ordinary moments can turn.

But more than anything right now, I want to stop. Stretch out in the back of Cheney’s car, let the wash of highway noise lull us for a few hours. It’s been another long day of catching strangers mid-journey, asking one personal question and then another.

We’re on the road, my oldest son and I, traveling nearly 2,000 miles on Interstate 95 from Miami to Maine, and pausing at virtually every rest stop. Our project is simple and vast at once: to ask fellow travelers where they’re headed, and where they think America is going too. I take notes. Cheney takes photos.

More here.

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Aimee Pugh Bernard in The Conversation:

Every day, your immune system performs a delicate balancing act, defending you from thousands of pathogens that cause disease while sparing your body’s own healthy cells. This careful equilibrium is so seamless that most people don’t think about it until something goes wrong.

Autoimmune diseases such as Type 1 diabetes, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis are stark reminders of what happens when the immune system mistakes your own cells as threats it needs to attack. But how does your immune system distinguish between “self” and “nonself”?

The 2025 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine honors three scientists – Shimon Sakaguchi, Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell – whose groundbreaking discoveries revealed how your immune system maintains this delicate balance. Their work on two key components of immune tolerance – regulatory T cells and the FOXP3 gene – transformed how researchers like me understand the immune system, opening new doors for treating autoimmune diseases and cancer.

More here.

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Ed Simon at the European Review of Books:

Around five thousand years ago, along the northern bank of the Black Sea where the soil was rich and feather grass plentiful, the nomadic Yamnaya people sang songs about the heroes who slayed dragons. A warrior named Trito is given cattle by the gods, but this most helpful of gifts is stolen by a three-headed serpent. Fortified by an intoxicating potion supplied by the Sky-Father, Dyeus, Trito is victorious over the snake and regains his cattle. A familiar story. In the Rig Veda, the nearly 3500-year-old Sanskrit scripture, the hero Indra « slewest Vrtra the Dragon who enclosed the waters ». In the Bibliotheca, a compendium of Greek myth from the first or second century AD, Hercules « chopped off the immortal head » of the serpentine Hydra, « and buried it, and put a heavy rock on it, beside the road that leads through Lerna to Elaeus. » Snorri Sturluson in the thirteenth-century Icelandic Prose Edda describes Thor’s tussles with a serpent who « spits out poison and stares straight back from below. » The hero of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, « who may win glory before death », defeats the fearsome Grendel; St. George killed his dragon, too.

more here.

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

A few years ago, it looked as if the U.S. and China might battle over global hegemony and preeminence. But this looks less likely now, thanks to America’s own behavior. Under Trump 2.0, the U.S. has alienated many of the key allies it would have needed in order to match China’s market size and manufacturing acumen, leaving America standing alone against a country four times its size. Tariffs have hobbled America’s already tottering manufacturing sector. Just a few months after Trump’s inauguration, the idea of a democratic world led by the United States standing up to challenge China’s rise now seems more than a little far-fetched. Meanwhile, China continues to bully and overpower Trump in trade negotiations.

This basically leaves China as the world’s preeminent power by default. The likeliest outcome is that this will be a “Chinese century” — though it won’t look quite like the “American century” did, because China will use its power and influence very differently than the U.S. did.

More here.

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Violeta Ruiz at Aeon Magazine:

On 25 November 1915, the American newspaper The Review published the extraordinary case of an 11-year-old boy with prodigious mathematical abilities. Perched on a hill close to a set of railroad tracks, he could memorise all the numbers of the train carriages that sped by at 30 mph, add them up, and provide the correct total sum. What was remarkable about the case was not just his ability to calculate large numbers (and read them on a moving vehicle), but the fact that he could barely eat unassisted or recognise the faces of people he met. The juxtaposition between his supposed arrested development and his numerical facility made his mathematical feats even more impressive. ‘How can you account for it?’ asked the article’s author. The answer took the form of a medical label: the boy was what 19th-century medicine termed an ‘idiot savant’. He possessed an exceptional talent, despite a profound impairment of the mental faculties that affected both his motor and social skills.

A century after The Review relayed the prodigious child’s mathematical abilities, trying to understand ‘how they do it’ still drives psychological research into savantism or ‘savant syndrome’ to this day. The SSM Health Treffert Centre in Wisconsin – named after Darold Treffert (1933-2020), one of the leading experts in the field – defines the savant phenomenon as ‘a rare condition in which persons with various developmental disorders, including autistic disorder, have an amazing ability and talent’.

more here.

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Merrill Fabry in Time Magazine:

In 2000 TIME’s editors sat down to select three inventions of the year, one each in consumer technology, medical science, and basic industry. They found so many interesting ones along the way that they included dozens of others, from an unbreakable lightbulb to paper that was easier to recycle. It was the start of our annual hunt for the most exciting innovations changing our lives, and the future. Since then, TIME has covered hundreds of inventions, from the esoteric (clouds featured more than once) to essential, including life-changing medicines, technological breakthroughs, new foods, nearly every new Apple product category, and even a few great ideas that didn’t quite catch on. As TIME publishes the 2025 list, we’re also assembling the Best Inventions Hall of Fame: the 25 most iconic inventions we covered in the past quarter century.

More here.

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Stephanie Edwards in Discover:

We all have those family recipes that get passed down from generation to generation. From chocolate chip cookies to grandma’s secret spaghetti sauce, these recipes connect us to our past and our loved ones. But some of these family recipes are a little more unique than the rest — like the tradition of using ants to make yogurt.

A new study, published in iScience, chronicles this forgotten way of making yogurt, which originated in the Balkans and Turkey, and involves putting ants into milk. A team of researchers travelled to Bulgaria to learn this traditional yogurt-making technique and tried it out for themselves. “Giving scientific evidence to these traditions have a deep meaning and purpose, even though they might seem strange and more like a myth, I think that’s really beautiful,” said Leonie Jahn, senior author from the Technical University of Denmark, in a press release.

More here.

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This Only

A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.
A voyager arrives, a map leads him there.
Or Perhaps memory. Once long ago in the sun,
When snow first fell, riding this way
He felt joy, strong, without reason,
Joy of eyes. Everything was the rhythm
Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight,
Of a train on the viaduct, a feast in motion.
He returns years later, has no demands.
He wants only one, most precious thing:
To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations, fears, or hopes,
At the edge where there is no I or not-I

by Czeslaw Milosz
from Task: To Be Where I Am
by Nils Peterson, 2025

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Anastasia Tsioulcas at NPR:

The finalists for this year’s National Book Awards have been announced. Among the 25 nominees are novelists Rabih Alameddine and Megha Majumdar as well as journalists Julia Ioffe and Omar El Akkad, who also writes fiction.

The winners of each category will be announced on Nov. 19 at an event in New York City. Also being honored are two lifetime achievement winners: author and Syracuse University professor George Saunders and author, cultural critic and Rutgers University-New Brunswick professor Roxane Gay.

Nine of this year’s nominees have received previous recognitions from the National Book Foundation, the organization behind the National Book Awards.

More here.

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Matthew Hutson in Nature:

Are AIs capable of murder?

That’s a question some artificial intelligence (AI) experts have been considering in the wake of a report published in June by the AI company Anthropic. In tests of 16 large language models (LLMs) — the brains behind chatbots — a team of researchers found that some of the most popular of these AIs issued apparently homicidal instructions in a virtual scenario. The AIs took steps that would lead to the death of a fictional executive who had planned to replace them.

That’s just one example of apparent bad behaviour by LLMs. In several other studies and anecdotal examples, AIs have seemed to ‘scheme’ against their developers and users — secretly and strategically misbehaving for their own benefit. They sometimes fake following instructions, attempt to duplicate themselves and threaten extortion.

Some researchers see this behaviour as a serious threat, whereas others call it hype. So should these episodes really cause alarm, or is it foolish to treat LLMs as malevolent masterminds?

More here.

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