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5,000-Year-Old Bacteria, Solar Storms, Dogs, and Meta’s AI War (EP. 32)

5,000-Year-Old Bacteria, Solar Storms, Dogs, and Meta’s AI War (EP. 32)

From First Principles vor 6 Monaten

0:00

38:54

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna
Choudhary, this is our first standalone rundown
episode — a faster, looser format where we hit several
stories we didn’t have room to turn into full deep dives. This
week: bacteria revived from a Romanian ice cave after
5,000 years, a speculative but fascinating
theory linking solar storms to
earthquakes, new evidence that dogs and
humans share genetic roots for personality traits, and
the increasingly dramatic fight over the future of AI after
Yann LeCun leaves Meta to build a new
billion-dollar company focused on world models.

Summary

Ancient bacteria, modern resistance — a
microbe revived from a 5,000-year-old Romanian ice cave resists
modern antibiotics and may even contain compounds useful
against present-day superbugs.

Solar storms and earthquakes? — a Kyoto
University theoretical paper suggests space weather could
perturb electric fields in Earth’s crust enough to influence
faults already near critical stress.

Dogs and humans, genetically — a Cambridge /
Morris Animal Foundation study finds shared gene pathways that
map to personality-like traits in both golden retrievers and
humans.

The Meta AI split — Yann LeCun leaves Meta to
pursue AI systems that model the physical world, arguing that
simple scaling of LLMs may never reach real general
intelligence.

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Show Notes

Story 1 — Ancient bacteria in Romanian ice cave (Frontiers in
Microbiology)

Story 2 — Solar storms and earthquakes (Kyoto University /
International Journal of Plasma Environmental Science and
Technology)

Story 4 — Dog and human personality genes (PNAS)

Story 5 — Yann LeCun leaves Meta / world-model AI (Wired)