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Instant digital rewards may make hard thinking feel less worthwhile

Imagine opening a difficult book in a quiet room. The first page is dense. You read one paragraph, then reread it. Nothing “clicks” yet. Your brain is doing what learning often requires: spending effort before the reward arrives. Then your phone lights up. One thumb movement, and the situation changes completely. A joke, a message, a clip, a tiny social reward: all available instantly, all requiring almost no effort. The book has not become harder and, definitely, your intelligence has not disappeared. But the book now feels more expensive, because another activity nearby offers a much better bargain: reward now, effort almost zero.

That is the central idea of the paper “An Effort Recalibration Framework for Digital Media Use and Cognition” that just appeared in Nature Human Behavior. It argues that the most important effect of social media might be that repeated exposure to effortless digital rewards changes how we value effort itself. Over time, the authors suggest, digital media may recalibrate our internal sense of what effort is worth. Difficult work then begins to feel less attractive, not because we can no longer do it, but because our everyday decision system has learned to expect faster returns.

Cyborg Luddite Steve Mann: Technology That Masters Nature Isn’t Sustainable

14 years ago, Steve Mann told me that technology that masters nature is not sustainable.

At the time, that sounded like the poetic caution of a man the media had nicknamed “the cyborg Luddite.” Today it reads like a weather report.

Steve is the person the IEEE named the father of wearable computing. He built the EyeTap decades before Google Glass, invented HDR imaging now sitting in the phone in your pocket, and was called the world’s first cyborg. So when he argues for using less, for choosing which technologies to embrace and which to walk away from, he is not speaking from fear of the machine. He is speaking from a deeper intimacy with it than almost anyone alive.

His core move was to refuse the framing everyone else accepted.

Not more technology. Not less technology. Appropriate technology. Balanced with nature instead of replacing it.

And here is the line that has aged into something close to prophecy:

Continue reading “Cyborg Luddite Steve Mann: Technology That Masters Nature Isn’t Sustainable” | >

Two South Korean companies named Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix now manufacture roughly two-thirds of the memory chips inside almost every digital device on Earth — produced inside a country whose 1953 per-capita income was lower than Somalia’s or Haiti’s

Open any device built in the past five years, look inside its memory subsystem, and the chips you find were almost certainly fabricated in one of three South Korean industrial cities — Hwaseong, Pyeongtaek, or Icheon — by one of two companies whose combined market capitalisation now exceeds $700 billion. The historical improbability of this situation is not a matter of degree but of category. Korea in 1953 did not have a semiconductor industry, a precision manufacturing tradition, an advanced engineering workforce, or the kind of capital markets that could finance industrial development. It had a per-capita income lower than essentially every other country whose subsequent economic trajectory has been studied by development economists, a primarily agricultural economy substantially destroyed by three years of active warfare, and a small population (~20 million) whose adult literacy rate stood at approximately 20 percent. The proposition that, 72 years later, two companies headquartered in the same country would manufacture the memory chips inside Apple’s iPhones, Google’s Pixel devices, Microsoft’s data centres, Nvidia’s AI accelerators, Tesla’s autonomous-driving computers, and essentially every other major piece of digital hardware sold globally — would have been considered, by any reasonable observer in 1953, structurally impossible.

Rocket Lab to acquire Iridium

WASHINGTON — Rocket Lab is acquiring satellite telecommunications company Iridium for $8 billion as part of its effort to become an end-to-end space company.

The companies announced an agreement June 29 under which Rocket Lab will acquire Iridium for $54 a share in cash and stock, valuing Iridium at $8 billion. That is a 24% premium over the closing price of Iridium’s shares June 26. The deal is projected to close in mid-2027 pending regulatory and other approvals.

Iridium operates a constellation of 66 satellites, with 14 on-orbit spares, that provides phone and data services using L-band spectrum. That includes aviation tracking services from Aireon, which Iridium acquired in May for $367 million by purchasing the 61% stake it did not already own, as well as a recent push into positioning, navigation and timing, or PNT, services.

Dog-bone design helps 2D nanoribbon transistors stay fast and efficient as widths shrink

Transistors, small semiconductor-based switches that control the flow of electricity, are central components of all electronic devices, from computers to smartphones, wearables, sensors and smart appliances. Over the past decades, electronics engineers have been continuously working to boost the speed and performance of transistors while also reducing their size.

A promising approach for miniaturizing transistors entails the use of two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors, materials that are only one or a few atoms thick. Despite their potential, most high-performing 2D transistors have so far been demonstrated using relatively wide channels, and it has remained unclear whether their performance can be preserved when the channels are made much narrower.

Researchers at Stanford University recently developed new compact transistors based on narrow strips of monolayer 2D semiconducting materials known as nanoribbons. These transistors, introduced in a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, were found to perform remarkably well despite their small size, outperforming previously developed nanoribbon transistors based on the same 2D materials.

Scientists catch classical space-time crystals moving like Majorana quasiparticles

A research team from Hiroshima University, the University of Colorado, and other collaborators have demonstrated that space-time crystals—exotic structures that, under external drive, loop endlessly through both space and time—can be created using everyday liquid-crystal materials.

For the past decade, physicists have been fascinated by time crystals. Unlike normal crystals (such as salt or diamonds), which have repeating molecular patterns in space, time crystals have patterns that repeat at regular intervals in time. Previously, scientists believed these bizarre structures could exist only in highly complex, fragile quantum systems at near-absolute-zero temperatures, such as trapped ions or quantum simulators. However, in a collaborative study published in Nature Communications, researchers successfully created them in a classical, room-temperature liquid-crystal system.

To achieve this, the team took a liquid-crystal material—similar to the fluid used in smartphones and television screens—and doped it with ionic substances. They then applied a rhythmic, repeating electrical signal to the fluid. Using advanced computer models and optical microscopes, the researchers observed a surprising phenomenon known as period-doubling. Even though the electrical drive pumped energy into the fluid at a set internal rhythm, the liquid crystals spontaneously locked into a pattern that repeated only every two cycles of the electricity.

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