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Dieser Podcast wird gerade aktualisiert – wir suchen nach neuen Episoden …

AI Cancer Vaccines, Strange Fish, Ketamine, and Ancient Life (EP. 34)

45 Minuten
Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is a fast-moving science rundown covering four remarkable stories from across AI, genetics, neuroscience, and paleontology. We dig into the story of a machine learning engineer who used AI tools to help design a personalized cancer vaccine for his dog, explore how an all-female fish species has survived far longer than evolutionary theory would predict, unpack new brain-scan evidence for how ketamine may rapidly relieve severe depression, and look at new research suggesting life rebounded shockingly fast after the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.





Summary





AI and personalized medicine — a striking case study in how AI tools may help accelerate highly customized treatments, starting with a rescue dog named Rosie.





Evolution gets weird — the Amazon molly fish appears to challenge the usual assumptions about why asexual reproduction should fail over long time scales.





Why ketamine works so fast — new PET imaging research points to brain-region-specific changes in AMPA receptors in treatment-resistant depression.





Life after catastrophe — microscopic plankton may have evolved into new species within just a few thousand years after the Chicxulub impact.





Support the showDonate: FFPod.com/donateFollow: @FFPod on X / Instagram / TikTok / Facebook





Show Notes


AI-designed dog cancer vaccine story


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mans-dog-riddled-tumors-dying-210500037.html?guccounter=1





Amazon molly / gene conversion paper


https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10180-9





Ketamine / AMPA receptor PET imaging paper


https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-026-03510-w





Post-asteroid plankton recovery paper


https://www.yokohama-cu.ac.jp/english/news/20260306takahashi.html

Can Human Neurons Really Play Doom? The Science Behind Wetware (EP. 33)

1 Stunde 13 Minuten
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.





Summary





Wetware 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

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

39 Minuten
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.





Support the showDonate: FFPod.com/donateFollow: @FFPod (X / Instagram / TikTok / Facebook)





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)

Optovolution: Teaching Proteins to Think Like Computers (EP. 31)

56 Minuten
Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is a deep dive into a new synthetic-biology breakthrough out of EPFL: OptoEvolution. The big idea is simple but powerful — traditional directed evolution is great at making proteins that are always “on,” but biology is full of proteins that need to switch states, respond to stimuli, and behave more like logic gates than static tools. This paper takes directed evolution and couples it to light and the cell cycle, creating a new way to evolve dynamic proteins that can toggle, compute, and respond with far more control.


Summary


Why directed evolution needed an upgrade — classic methods select for proteins with continuous function, not proteins that toggle between active and inactive states. OptoEvolution — using light as a control signal and the cell cycle as a built-in oscillator to evolve proteins that must turn on and off to survive. Color-multiplexed biology — engineering proteins to respond to different wavelengths of light, opening the door to finer control of gene expression. Single-protein logic gates — proof-of-concept AND-gate behavior inside a single protein, hinting at a future where biology can be programmed with much more software-like precision.


Support the show Donate: FFPod.com/donate Follow: @FFPod on X / Instagram / TikTok / Facebook





Show Notes


OptoEvolution / dynamic protein control (Cell)

Can We Stop an Asteroid? The Physics Behind NASA’s DART Mission (EP. 30)

54 Minuten
Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is a full deep dive on planetary defense. We break down NASA’s DART mission, why the goal was never to “blow up” an asteroid but to gently nudge it, and why the newest result is even bigger than the original headline: scientists can now directly detect that the Didymos–Dimorphos system changed not just locally, but in its heliocentric path around the Sun.


Summary


DART actually worked — not just by shortening Dimorphos’s local orbit around Didymos by 33 minutes, but by measurably changing the motion of the whole binary system around the Sun. Planetary defense is a measurement problem — the new result hinges on detecting a velocity shift of just 11 microns per second in an asteroid system moving tens of kilometers per second. Why ejecta matters — the impact transferred more momentum than the spacecraft carried in, thanks to debris blasting off the asteroid and boosting the total deflection. Why this matters for Earth — for the first time in our planet’s history, life on Earth may actually have the tools to alter its own cosmic fate.


Support the show Donate: FFPod.com/donate Follow: @FFPod on X / Instagram / TikTok / Facebook


Chapters


00:00 New single-story format 01:53 DART mission setup 18:26 Why the binary asteroid system matters 31:36 Measuring the heliocentric deflection 46:28 Planetary defense implications 53:37 Outro


Show Notes


DART heliocentric deflection result — Science Advances NASA DART mission overview ESA HERA mission
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Über diesen Podcast

From First Principles is a fast, funny, and rigorous breakdown of the biggest science stories of the week, hosted by Lester Nare and physicist Krishna Choudhary, PhD. We go past headlines into the actual mechanics: what happened, why it matters, and what everyone’s missing. Expect physics, space, AI, energy, biotech, and the occasional “wait… is that real?” story. If you’re curious, skeptical, and you like learning in public — you’re in the right place.
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From First Principles Podcast (FFP)
Urheberangabe
Krishna Choudhary and Lester Nare
Durchschnittliche Länge
Ø 1 Std. 32 Min.
Erscheinungsweise
Wöchentlich
Letzter Check
vor 5 Mon.
Zuerst veröffentlicht
vor 1 J.
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