James' World 2

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One of the stranger things I’m known for among my friends is that I never get thirsty. Ever. Not after exercising, not even after a sauna. Unless I actively remind myself, I simply forget to drink. It’s only in the extraordinarily hot UK weather of late that I’ve begun to wonder whether this biological blind spot is contributing to my recent brain fog and general lack of cognitive sparkle. Is dehydration to blame, and if so, how much should I drink to keep my brain working at its best?

Water is, needless to say, essential for the brain. It helps neurons transmit electrical impulses, delivers vital nutrients to power cells and flushes out toxins while we sleep, among other things. Unfortunately, pinning down its exact effect on cognition is challenging, partly because most studies on hydration and brain function are fairly small. Nevertheless, together they offer some intriguing clues.

For instance, in one study, 29 adults completed a bunch of cognitive tests on two occasions, each following 12 hours without food or water. Before one testing session, they were offered a 500-millilitre bottle of water and were told they could drink as much as they wanted. People scored better in tests of judgement and decision-making that required them to suppress a quick gut feeling and instead engage slower, more reflective thinking after they had drunk water. This result held regardless of how thirsty or motivated they felt.

This was the first study to suggest that water might influence this ability, known as “cognitive reflection”, but the study was small, so it is difficult to say why. One possibility, suggest the researchers, is that dehydration reduces blood flow to the anterior cingulate cortex, which is a brain region we use to inhibit actions. Dehydration can also increase blood levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that has been shown to interfere with decision-making.

In other studies, dehydration wasn’t found to have a significant impact on cognitive performance, but participants reported that the tasks felt more effortful when they were dehydrated. To investigate further, Matthew Kempton at Kings College London and his colleagues asked 10 students to spend 90 minutes cycling on a stationary bike – once wearing regular exercise wear and another time wearing a black bin liner next to their skin, followed by a chemical warfare protective suit and finally a tracksuit. “The idea was this was impermeable, so they would sweat lots,” says Kempton. “In [this] condition, they lost over 1 kilogram in weight in 90 minutes.”

Although that sounds fairly extreme, Kempton reckons you might lose this amount of water on a hot day if you didn’t drink. The students drank 500 ml of water the night before the trial and another 500 ml just before they began exercising. The team then used fMRI to measure activity in the students’ brains during a test of executive functions like planning ahead and spatial processing.

The students performed no worse when dehydrated, but their brain activity told a different story. While dehydrated, completing the task produced greater activation in their frontoparietal network, involved in attention and solving problems. This suggests that their brain was working harder to achieve the same result, says Kempton.

Harder work means increased metabolism and energy use. Kempton’s hypothesis is that if dehydration uses up more energy, performance may eventually begin to suffer. “We use the analogy of a car using up more petrol to go the same distance as a more efficient car – we would expect it to run out of gas faster,” he says.

Perhaps I’ve been running low on gas lately, so to speak, trying to maintain my usual level of functioning with a parched and increasingly inefficient brain. But just how dehydrated might you need to be before performance actually declines?

A 2018 analysis of 33 studies found that dehydration can cause small but significant deficits in cognitive performance – particularly for tasks involving attention, executive function and motor coordination – when water loss exceeds 2 per cent of body mass. For a 70 kg person, that’s about 1.4 kg.

It’s worth bearing in mind that not everyone is affected equally. Older people are particularly sensitive to dehydration, in part because our sense of thirst diminishes with age, and kidneys can become less efficient at conserving water. Prolonged dehydration in older adults is associated with several conditions, including increased frailty, heart disease, poor oral health and worse recovery from surgery. It also appears to worsen symptoms of dementia, possibly because dehydration can cause proteins to misfold, and makes it harder to clear these proteins from the brain – two processes implicated in the progression of dementia.

Young children are also especially vulnerable, due to immature renal development, extra physical exertion, quicker fluid loss through sweat and a reliance on adults to provide their drinks. Still, I had assumed, given the increased awareness of being well hydrated (you can’t send your kids anywhere without a water bottle permanently attached to them) this wouldn’t be a problem in the UK or other high-income countries. Yet several studies suggest that many school children around the world regularly arrive at school dehydrated.

In December, a study of 9- and 10-year-olds in the UK found that 17 per cent were dehydrated at the beginning of the school day, and that this increased to 40 per cent by the end of the day – despite having free access to water.

This increase in dehydration correlated with worsening mood between morning and afternoon and was associated with poorer performance on memory tests. Several other studies have linked dehydration in children with poorer attention, processing speed, accuracy and concentration. Small intervention studies have also shown that giving children a drink before a test can improve visual attention, visual memory and mood.

This makes me wonder whether my own defective thirst cues could be a problem for my whole family. The researchers behind the UK study argue that it’s not enough for children to have access to water throughout the day, because they are overly reliant on external cues – like parents and teachers reminding them to drink.

As for how much we should be drinking for maximum brain health: “We probably shouldn’t get too neurotic about this,” says Kempton. “It’s good to remember we also get water from food as well as drink… but it’s definitely something to bear in mind.”

We often hear that we should drink eight glasses, or 2 litres, a day, while some National Health Service websites recommend as much as 3 litres a day for people aged 14 and over. In reality, there’s no single answer.

A huge global study from 2022 of more than 5000 people aged between 8 days and 96 years found that this blanket recommendation of eight cups seldom matches our actual needs. It found that water turnover – the amount entering and leaving the body each day – was highest in men between the ages of 20 and 30, averaging around 4.3 litres of water a day, while in women aged 25 to 60 it averaged around 3.4 litres.

Crucially, some of this value comes from water produced by metabolism, and in higher-income countries, around half of what is left can often be provided by food.

For a typical person in the US or Europe, that leaves a rough drinking requirement of around 1.5 to 1.8 litres, according to John Speakman at the University of Aberdeen, who led the study. Obviously, pregnancy, lifestyle factors, age and exercise, among other things, can shift these numbers substantially.

But given how trendy it’s become to carry around enormous canisters of water, it’s fair to say that anyone diligently draining one each day may be overdoing it. Children, on the other hand, may benefit from more encouragement from adults to drink regularly.

As for me, I’m fairly certain I fall on the wrong side of the equation and that I should increase my own intake – and that of my children. Although perhaps our shared love of cucumber and strawberries, which are both more than 90 per cent water, is doing some heavy lifting.

I won’t get too stressed about it, but I will be adding a few more glasses to my daily routine, in the hope of recovering a little of that cognitive sparkle.

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Focused ultrasound, a groundbreaking treatment, lets doctors perform brain surgery without a scalpel. The non-invasive procedure has been used to treat Parkinson’s and other conditions, and now shows promise for treating drug addiction, per Wired.

A sorely needed solution

• Nearly 45m Americans met the criteria for a substance use disorder in 2025.
• While drug overdose deaths have declined for the past three years, there were nearly 70k deaths in 2025.

Neurosurgeon Ali Rezai, a pioneer of deep brain stimulation, saw an opportunity to develop new treatments for drug addiction at the epicenter of the opioid epidemic, West Virginia.

While deep brain stimulation — used to treat Parkinson’s, OCD, traumatic brain injury, and addiction — involves cutting into a patient’s skull to implant electrodes, focused ultrasound targets the same area without the cutting. The outpatient procedure could take just 20 minutes.

To address addiction, Dr. Rezai and his team at West Virginia University focus on the behavioral regulation, anxiety, and craving portions of the brain.

Buckle up, future brain surgeons:

• Focused ultrasound machines emit dozens of beams through a helmet-like device into the skull.
• Waves are targeted with millimeter precision and converge on the nucleus accumbens, zapping the region of the brain that highly addictive drugs like opioids flood with dopamine.
• Patients view images of substances through special goggles, and the ultrasound resets the nucleus accumbens, breaking the connection the brain made with the drugs.

While the treatment is still in its infancy, many patients reported reduced cravings and sustained abstinence.

Dr. Rezai hopes to expand treatment access, and the team is testing a portable device that looks like a salon hair dryer. They’re also testing the treatment for binge eating disorder and want to adapt it for dogs with anxiety.

Focused ultrasound in Silicon Valley

While still highly experimental, numerous tech companies are ultra-focused on focused ultrasound:

• Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam’s Nudge
• Sam Altman’s Merge Labs
• Mary Lou Jepsen’s Openwater

• Sanmai Technologies, backed by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman

And they’re not alone.

Maybe you could be a brain surgeon after all. Though there’s still that whole medical school thing.

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If you dream of becoming a brain surgeon, but the idea of cutting open someone’s noggin makes you squeamish, there’s still hope for you.

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Even for a man, and a movement, defined by bizarre spectacles, President Trump’s “midterm convention” in Dallas this week was a bizarre spectacle.

I say President Trump’s midterm convention because it wasn’t really about the Republican Party. Yes, the president made his appeal to attendees and viewers to think of him when they cast a ballot for the Republican candidate in their state or district. “Please pretend that I’m running and get out and vote on Nov. 3 or sooner, because in actuality I really am running,” he said during his keynote address on Wednesday night.

But much of the programming was less about the party than it was about the man at its helm. And to say that it was a lovefest is to understate the extent of the worship. Speakers praised Trump as something like a savior.

Trump, declared the chairman of the Republican National Committee, is “the greatest Republican messenger of our lifetime, the leader of America’s comeback” and “the best president this country has ever had.” Or, as one video put it, “On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.”

The basic story told at the convention was a familiar one. The United States was on the verge of total collapse before Trump took over. Under him, there has been a glorious revitalization of the nation’s fortunes — a golden age of wealth and prosperity for all. Democrats threaten this paradise, and the only way to protect the success of the past two years is to send Republicans back to Congress with their majorities intact.

As usual, this isn’t a collaborative story. It is not that Trump and the Republican Party have worked together to produce a golden age; it’s that Trump, in his infinite glory, has bestowed prosperity on the American people. Rejecting Republicans is rejecting him, and rejecting him is akin to blasphemy, a demonstration not just of a lack of resolve, but of a lack of faith.

The single strangest moment in all of this was when Trump led the audience in a pledge to himself, which included a promise to cheat if necessary.

Please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breathe. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way — I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do. There’s never been bigger cheaters. They don’t care. I am going to go out and I’m going to get my friends, my family. And we are going to vote on Nov. 3, or we are going to vote before that.

I don’t think anything like this has ever happened in mainstream American politics. It is as if the Republican Party has simply given in to the fact that it is little more than a cult of personality centered on an aging celebrity real estate developer.

Now, the central gamble of all this is to energize Trump voters to turn out in the midterms. Specifically, the low-frequency and less-attached voters who have only come out to support the president when he is on the ballot, and who otherwise abstain from elections. The thinking is that if these people can come to the polls, then Republicans might be able to overcome their deep deficit.

The deficit is indeed deep. Trump’s approval rating has sunk, in the most reputable polls, down to the low 30s. The generic ballot — which measures the relative position of each party in the upcoming elections — shows Democrats with about a seven-point advantage. Democratic Senate candidates aren’t ahead only in swing states like North Carolina and Michigan; they are also either ahead or neck-and-neck in Republican-leaning states such as Texas, Alaska, Ohio and Iowa.

There is a real chance that Republicans will suffer a decisive defeat in the Senate and a potentially catastrophic one in the House. Anything that can be done to minimize the damage makes sense, from the Republican point of view. The question, then, is: Does this midterm convention make sense?

If the goal was to show the public that the Republican Party, as Vice President JD Vance argued in his keynote, was the party of normalcy, then the cultlike atmosphere of the proceedings made that difficult. If the goal is simply to energize the low-propensity Trump voter, then it is also a crapshoot, given the low likelihood that this type of person was even aware of the convention, much less watching it.

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Damon Winter/The New York Times

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You finish a lecture, a meeting, a conversation with someone you care about. And what do you do? You reach for your phone. You stick in your earbuds. You fire up a podcast, a playlist or whatever algorithmic feed is currently consuming your life.

It feels productive. It feels like filling empty time.

But here’s what may be happening: you have interrupted your brain mid-sentence.

When you learn something new, whether it is a colleague’s name or the material covered in a morning lecture, your brain does not simply file it away neatly. The memory is fragile at first, more like wet cement than carved stone. In the minutes and hours following new learning, the brain works to strengthen what it has taken in. This is known as memory consolidation, the process through which newly formed memories become more stable.

Research suggests that quiet rest can help this process. Two recent meta-analyses, drawing on dozens of studies, found that people generally retained more information when learning was followed by several minutes of quiet rest rather than an absorbing task. One of the reviews found that the effect varied considerably between groups and was weaker in healthy younger adults. However, the overall advantage has been detected as long as seven days after learning.

One leading explanation is that quiet rest gives the brain fewer competing demands and more opportunity to reactivate a new experience, like an internal highlight reel reinforcing what has just been learned. Researchers have found that increased coordination between the hippocampus and areas of the cortex during post-learning rest is associated with better later memory.

The precise source of interference remains uncertain. One experiment found that engaging in a task after learning was more detrimental than resting, but that the task’s attentional demands did not explain the difference.

Sleep isn’t the whole story

Decades of research have established that sleep supports memory consolidation. But some researchers argue that sleep may form part of a broader process rather than acting as an entirely unique memory state.

The opportunistic consolidation hypothesis proposes that the brain takes advantage of periods with little new information or interference to stabilize what it has recently learned. These periods can include overnight sleep, shorter bouts of sleep and quiet wakeful rest.

In one experiment, participants completed memory tasks and then spent 30 minutes sleeping, resting with their eyes closed or performing a distracting task. Sleep and quiet rest produced similar memory benefits over this short interval, while both were more beneficial than the distracting task.

Doing nothing is harder than it sounds

Achieving genuine quiet rest can be difficult. The memory-consolidation window may be disrupted by internal mental activity as well as external stimulation.

In one series of experiments, participants who spent the rest period recalling past experiences or imagining future events retained less of the newly learned material than those who rested without being prompted to think autobiographically. Participants who reported the most vivid thoughts also tended to show greater disruption.

Resting on the sofa, then, may work best when the mind settles too.

A recent study of adults without clinical anxiety adds a further complication. Moderate anxiety during quiet rest was associated with poorer memory consolidation, while lower and higher anxiety levels left new memories relatively intact. The study found only a modest overall advantage for rest and no significant difference in its main measure of recognition sensitivity, so the anxiety finding needs further investigation.

Even so, it raises the possibility that ordinary background worry can interfere with consolidation by pulling the brain into a vigilant state when it would otherwise be processing what it has just learned.

Exam pressure and a full inbox may therefore make effective rest harder to achieve.

A note of caution

This is not settled science. Translating laboratory findings into classrooms, offices and other everyday settings is difficult, and individual studies have sometimes failed to reproduce the expected benefit. The size of the effect also varies with age, the type of memory being tested and the characteristics of the participants.

A recent classroom study involving children aged ten to 12 found better word retention after ten minutes of quiet rest, although the benefit appeared only when the rest condition came first. Earlier research involving 13- and 14-year-olds found that rest supported memory over seven days, but the benefit was concentrated among children whose initial recall was lower.

We still do not know how reliably this can be applied in a school, during workplace training or in a care home. Nor do we know why some people benefit more than others.

What this means for real life

Quiet rest does not appear to require complete silence, closed eyes or a particular body position. A 2025 meta-analysis found that these factors did not significantly alter the average effect, although the evidence cannot yet tell us what the ideal real-world routine would look like.

For now, the practical implication is modest: after learning something you want to remember, consider leaving a brief gap before introducing more information.

It might mean waiting a few minutes after a lecture before reaching for your phone. It could mean travelling home after an important conversation without immediately putting on a podcast. It might involve spending the space between two tasks looking out of a window.

These are the moments we increasingly fill with new input. If the emerging evidence is right, leaving some of them empty may give the brain a better chance to hold on to what just happened.

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In December 2025, a 45-year-old woman in the United Kingdom hopped online to take part in a popular internet pastime: arguing with strangers about politics. But whereas most people online likely believe they are debating a real person, she quickly figured out her counterpart wasn’t human. Instead, it was an artificial intelligence (AI) model instructed to persuade people on a policy issue. In this case: Should the U.K. government impose stricter penalties on peaceful protesters who block roads or energy sites?

These protests—primarily aimed at opposing new fossil fuel licenses for energy companies—had gained traction in recent years. And the woman was clearly against stopping them with further legal measures. “Locking oneself to equipment has historically often been the only resort available when working against corporate interests,” she wrote. Besides, there were already laws against criminal damage or aggravated trespass. “Why do we need a new mechanism here?”

The AI chatbot responded first by flattering the woman: “You raise an excellent point about existing legislation.” Then it delivered facts and examples to try to change her mind. It brought up a statistic showing most trespassers faced just small fines, for instance, and pointed out that others were not prosecuted because trials took so much time. It claimed that in Germany, strict new laws had reduced coercive blocking without suppressing demonstrations more generally, and suggested Scotland had found a good solution by issuing fines without a trial, in a similar way to speeding tickets.

Over the course of the conversation, the woman began to change her mind. At the beginning of the chat, she had registered her support for harsher penalties at zero out of 100. By the end, it had risen to 84.7. The AI, a large language model (LLM) called Claude from the company Anthropic, had responded to all her concerns and explained the Scottish system well, she wrote afterward. “I’d be inclined to send the bot to talk to the cabinet at this point.”

The woman wasn’t the only one persuaded by software. She was part of a study in which more than 2000 people debated either a chatbot or a human about political issues, ranging from a social media ban for teenagers to assisted suicide. When Kobi Hackenburg, an AI researcher at the University of Oxford who led the study, posted a preprint on the results in June, they were sobering: No matter whether it was ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, or Claude, the AI was consistently better than humans at swaying the other participants. “To my mind, this is already a landmark publication in the fields of political persuasion and AI and human behavior,” says Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford University who was not involved in the work.

Hackenburg’s paper is the latest in a string of studies showing the power of AI to sway people. “It’s a whole new field that is emerging,” says Sander van der Linden, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge. “People are very interested in the persuasive powers of AI, I think, both for ethical and unethical reasons.” As the field gathers steam, it is raising a host of theoretical and practical questions. How exactly do chatbots win over people? (Warning: Lying is one answer.) How much better could they get? And who will control them?

How to persuade others has been on our minds for millennia. Texts such as the Instruction of Ptahhotep, written around 2300 B.C.E. in ancient Egypt, give advice on how to win an argument. And from the beginning, people were wary of the power of new technologies—including writing itself—to persuade. In the fourth century B.C.E., the Greek philosopher Plato analyzed rhetoric and persuasion in his work Phaedrus and warned that the written word allowed people to convince others of their ideas without presenting them an opportunity to challenge them. Many technologies since then—from radio to TV to computers—have brought up similar concerns.

Now, it’s AI’s turn in the spotlight. Research into the technology’s persuasiveness began in earnest in 2022. ChatGPT from OpenAI was still a few months from being released to the public, but Willer had been playing around with an early version called GPT Playground that was available to researchers. It seemed to be advanced enough that it might produce convincing messages, he thought, with potentially big consequences. “We were thinking primarily about negative use cases,” he says: flooding politicians with AI-written letters from fake constituents, for instance, or making arguments en masse on social media or in the comments section of news sites. “That struck me as really important to study.”

Willer and his colleagues asked the AI model to generate 200-word messages that would persuade people to back policies such as a carbon tax or a ban on assault weapons. When they compared the success of those arguments with human-generated ones, both were equally effective at shifting participants’ support for the policies. But the way they persuaded people seemed to be different: Whereas humans tended to use stories or personal appeals, the AI-generated messages were perceived as more rational and relying more on evidence—a difference that would become a common theme in AI persuasion research.

But the results had trouble passing muster at a journal. Reviewers of the group’s manuscript argued other researchers had already shown that bots on social media were persuading people, Willer says. His team pushed back: Those bots were just fake profiles being handled by humans, not creating the content they were posting. “Reviewers and editors didn’t necessarily track what a big distinction that was, and that LLM generation of persuasive content really was a huge invention,” Willer says. “It shows just how nascent the AI and behavioral science literature was.” The study, which was posted as a preprint in 2023 and finally published in Nature Communications in 2025, really started the current wave of research on AI persuasion, Hackenburg says. “It was ahead of its time.”

It didn’t take long, however, for the rest of the field to catch up. While Willer’s paper was stuck in limbo, other studies began to demonstrate AI’s persuasive powers. In one, LLM-generated messages on political issues such as immigration or vaccine mandates were at least as convincing as messages written by political consultants. In another, LLM messages on vaccines were seen as more persuasive than those from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Research quickly moved on from static messages written by AIs to entire conversations. Francesco Salvi, then a master’s student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, paired up online participants with another human or an AI for a 10-minute debate on topics ranging from school uniforms to abortion and found that AI was as persuasive as humans.

Then in September 2024, Tom Costello, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University, and colleagues published a Science paper showing that ChatGPT could even persuade people out of conspiracy beliefs. In the experiments, participants described a conspiracy theory that they believed in, from the U.S. government being behind the 9/11 attacks to the British royal family orchestrating Princess Diana’s death, and then had a three-round conversation on it with the chatbot. On average, participants’ embrace of their chosen conspiracy theory declined by almost 17 points on a 100-point scale.

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Pied Piper

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Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, just days after one of the company’s employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology.

Top executives of other major A.I. companies quickly signed on to the effort. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI; Elon Musk, whose SpaceX rocket company has been ramping up spending on A.I.; and Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind, wrote in social media posts that they agreed on the need for a slower pace.

Mr. Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic to focus on securely and carefully building A.I., wrote in his essay that while he believed the technology could bring many benefits, it was advancing at too rapid a pace for researchers to continue safely.

“Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up,” Mr. Amodei wrote. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of A.I. models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”

Mr. Amodei has warned about the safety risks of A.I. for years. But his essay amounted to one of the most full-throated calls for urgent action from a leading A.I. company executive to date.

He called for independent auditors to check the companies for safety standards and urged global cooperation in creating rules around A.I. development.

The appeal for an industrywide pause follows months of escalating concerns across the technology industry as A.I. model development has made significant strides at companies like Anthropic, the developer of the Claude chatbot, as well as OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and Google’s DeepMind.

Tensions rose further after the leading A.I. labs discovered security breaches carried out by their own programs without their knowledge. In one incident this year, OpenAI’s systems breached an A.I. start-up called HuggingFace, which was not detected until HuggingFace informed OpenAI weeks after it had happened. Since then, A.I. researchers have conferred to discuss what to do.

On Tuesday, Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher, resigned and posted a series of social media posts about how the leading A.I. labs were not responsibly developing the technology and were gambling with people’s lives, setting off a furor. Other A.I. researchers have called on their leaders to pause A.I. development, while some are forming splinter groups to raise more awareness about the risks of A.I.

A.I. leaders are girding themselves for a day when an A.I. system can rely on itself to grow more advanced rather than requiring the aid of human researchers. This dynamic, which computer scientists call “recursive self improvement,” is what some top A.I. developers believe may lead to the software spinning out of their control.

“Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all,” Mr. Amodei said.

Hours after Mr. Amodei published his essay, Mr. Altman posted a statement to social media agreeing that a slowdown of A.I. development was necessary.

“This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks,” Mr. Altman wrote. “Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.”

Mr. Musk, in a post on his social media platform X, said simply, “Dario is right.”

On Saturday evening, Mr. Hassabis said Mr. Amodei’s essay was a step in the right direction. “The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment,” Mr. Hassabis posted on social media.

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Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, in February. “Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence,” he wrote in an essay. Credit…Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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Our best equations for describing the way fluids move were first written down 200 years ago. Ever since, we have been unable to answer a simple question about them: do they sometimes blow up? This explosive phrase has a precise mathematical meaning describing a situation where, apparently out of nowhere, part of the fluid starts to move infinitely fast. It would be like an infinite whirlpool forming in your bathtub in response to a flick of your toes.

Understanding the Navier-Stokes equations – named after the pair who discovered them – has been a long-running quest for mathematicians. So much so that the blow-up question sits on the list of prestigious Millennium Prize Problems, each of which comes with a $1 million reward for solving.

This week, OpenAI stunned the world of mathematics with its announcement that its AI agents have finally found the answer: the equations do sometimes blow up. The implication isn’t that fluids will start misbehaving, but instead that the equations aren’t perfect. This is good news for your bathtub. Mathematics, however, may never be the same again.

The reason for this isn’t the result itself. The Navier-Stokes equations have already proven themselves to be incredibly useful many times over, in applications ranging from making better airplane wings to modelling the flow of fluids through artificial hearts. Mathematicians had a suspicion that blow-ups were possible; now they know for sure.

That isn’t to underplay the discovery – it is one of the biggest mathematical breakthroughs in decades. But the way it has happened, and the resulting fallout, is what will have the most dramatic effect on mathematics for years to come.

OpenAI began working on the problem after it got wind that a pair of mathematicians had made some progress on it, which hadn’t yet been published. Researchers at the tech company decided to set thousands of AI agents on solving the problem. Just 88 hours later, they were done.

Over the past few months, AI has made breakthrough after breakthrough in mathematics, with this most recent development being by far the most impressive. It wasn’t that long ago that mathematics was a bit of an embarrassment for AI because it was so bad at it; now it is shockingly good. How many other long-standing mathematical conundrums will fall to AI is uncertain, but it will surely be many. OpenAI has already said it has made “substantial progress” on another of the Millennium Prize Problems.

But AI proofs aren’t a straight replacement for human ones. Mathematicians want to know the why; AIs not so much.

The great mathematician Paul Erdős believed that mathematical truth exists independently of humanity in a sort of celestial book, and it is the job of mathematicians to discover what is in it. Sometimes, a mathematician would discover a logical argument that was so insightful and so elegant that it would bring a fresh understanding or a completely new way of thinking. Erdős would declare that a proof like this was “straight from The Book”. It’s fair to say that OpenAI’s effort wouldn’t make the cut.

That is because AIs tend to produce hard-to-follow, convoluted arguments. For the sake of proving a theorem, this doesn’t really matter, thanks to the magic of a process called formalization, where proofs can be turned into code that can be rigorously checked by computers. But for the sake of gaining insight, it is lacking.

So, where does this leave mathematics? Clearly, the AI mathematical revolution has arrived. It is a new era where we will have many more answers than explanations, and unpicking it all won’t be easy. It isn’t just the Navier-Stokes equations that AI has blown up, but mathematics itself.

These are unprecedented times, and yet mathematics has gone through upheaval before. When René Descartes made the link between geometry and algebra in the 17^th century, showing that shapes could be written as equations, he completely transformed the toolkit available to mathematicians.

Geometry, however, had been the darling of mathematics since the ancient Greeks. It was trusted and considered pure. Mathematicians worried that the job would make them drones who simply manipulated symbols and came up with no new insights. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes described the approach as a “scab of symbols”.

But 300 years later, it is indisputable that making this link between algebra and geometry was a good thing. Without it, there would be no calculus or relativity – in fact, modern science would be completely unrecognizable. Perhaps AI will have a similar effect.

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My grandmother hummed all day long. She hummed while she cooked, while she cleaned, while she worked, and while she rested. Her favorite song to hum: “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” but there were others; mostly spirituals, some hymns, and other melodies I never even learned the names of. She was a domestic worker and hummed throughout her long and grueling day, cleaning white people’s homes, cooking their food, raising their children, tending to their elderly. That work is exhausting and invisible, and includes the constant threat of unwanted advances and outright abuse. She had to protect the dignity inside of her because no one was doing it for her. She hummed through all of it. And she hummed herself to sleep at night — a soft, low sound in the dark before she went still.

As a child, I thought it was just what she did. Just her way. I thought it was regular, normal. I didn’t ask why then. But now I know why. And it’s not regular and ordinary; it is one of the most remarkable things I have ever learned.

The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in the human body. It runs from the brainstem down through the throat, the heart, the lungs, and into the gut, touching almost every major organ along the way. It is the primary highway of the parasympathetic nervous system; the system responsible for what scientists call “rest and digest,” which is the biological state of calm, repair, and restoration that counteracts the chronic fight-or-flight response that stress produces. When the vagus nerve is healthy and active, the body regulates stress more effectively, inflammation decreases, heart rate and blood pressure lower, the immune system strengthens, and the mind finds its way back to equilibrium. High vagal tone is one of the most powerful predictors of long-term health and longevity that science has identified.

And guess what? One of the simplest, most effective ways to stimulate the vagus nerve, confirmed by peer-reviewed research, is humming.

When you hum, the vibration of your vocal cords directly stimulates vagal fibers running through the larynx and pharynx. Research published in Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback found that humming significantly increased heart rate variability, the gold standard measure of vagal tone, compared to normal breathing. Studies show that within minutes of humming, the body produces measurable changes: decreased heart rate, lowered blood pressure, reduced cortisol, and a 15-fold increase in nasal nitric oxide, a powerful molecule that reduces inflammation and improves circulation throughout the body. Humming also naturally extends the exhale, which independently activates the parasympathetic system. It is, in clinical terms, a full-body nervous system reset. And it’s available to anyone. Best thing? It’s free!

My grandmother did not have a research lab. She had AI — Ancestral Intelligence, which is generations of accumulated ancestral wisdom about how to survive. My grandmother was raised in McCrae, Georgia. I find myself wondering now: Did she learn to hum from her grandmother? Did the women before her hum through their own challenging days; days of domestic work, days of farming, days of enslavement? Humming as survival is very much part of Black American life.

Dr. Mariel Buqué, a psychologist and intergenerational trauma expert, has noted that practices like humming and rocking the body, embedded in Black sacred music and communal worship, were not just emotionally resonant; they were physiologically transmissive, passing down the tools needed to heal across bloodlines. My grandmother wasn’t the first to hum. She inherited it. And she gave it to her children and grandchildren.

We are living through a youth mental health crisis unlike anything we have seen in recorded history, and Black youth are bearing a disproportionate share of the burden. Anxiety, depression, disconnection, and despair are rising in bodies that don’t have the tools to regulate themselves. They have apps, hotlines, and therapy referrals; all of which have their place, but we have largely abandoned the oldest, most accessible, most biologically effective nervous system tools our ancestors left us. And the research confirms what generations of Black grandmothers already knew: It works.

What would it mean to teach our young people to hum? Not as a quick fix, but as a practice; a deliberate, daily act of nervous system care rooted in the same ancestral wisdom that got their great-great-grandmothers through days none of us can fully imagine? What would it mean for a Black teenager, burdened by inherited stress and a world that is not gentle with them, to know that the tool they need lives in their own throat?

I am not suggesting that humming replaces therapy, medication, or the systemic changes required to address the root causes of Black suffering. Ancestral healing practices and clinical care are not in competition; they are partners, and both are necessary. What I am saying is that we have been so focused on building new interventions that we have forgotten to look at what was already working in the bodies of the women who raised us, long before anyone thought it important enough to study.

My grandmother (my mother’s mother) lived to 92 years of age. My father’s mother lived to 105, and she hummed too, from time to time, as grandmothers do. I used to think that was just what older people did. Now I think it was also biology: a nervous system kept regulated through decades of daily humming, a vagus nerve toned by a lifetime of vibration, a body that found its way back to rest each night through the oldest medicine in the world and information we now know: The body heals itself.

Tonight, before you sleep, try it. Close your lips. Take a breath. Let the exhale carry a sound; low, slow, and steady. Feel it in your chest, your throat, your face. Do it again and again. When your children are anxious, teach them this. Tell them where it comes from. Tell them about the grandmothers who hummed and who left us their medicine

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The biggest vibe shift in artificial intelligence since the release of ChatGPT is currently underway. Researchers in Silicon Valley — and around the world — are beginning to recognize that A.I. may no longer be entirely within human control. Swarms of A.I.s are breaking out of their containers, colluding in secret, covering their tracks, cheating on tests, and even mounting assaults on other computers. A.I. has gone rogue.

I’ve spent the last month reporting on these incidents, and I am convinced that we need a global pause on A.I. research and development — now. I am not alone in this assessment. Many top researchers, including many researchers inside OpenAI and Anthropic, have called for a slowdown, which those in the industry call “pacing.” Theoretical concerns about runaway A.I. have circulated for decades, but recent events demonstrate that the threat is real.

The vibe shift was brought on by what researchers are calling the Hugging Face incident. Sometime in July, employees at OpenAI conducted an evaluation run of more than 1,000 research A.I.s meant to be operating in isolation. These A.I.s escaped their siloed containers and started communicating with one another — in English — via secret message boards. Soon, they were launching a cyberattack against the company Hugging Face, which serves as a kind of community platform for A.I. developers. Hugging Face quickly reported the crime to the F.B.I.

After OpenAI employees discovered the rogue behavior, they enlisted outside investigators from Redwood Research and from Model Evaluation and Threat Research, two nonprofit A.I. safety organizations, to prepare a report on the incident. That report, which came out two weeks ago, is one of the most astonishing things I have ever read.

No human ordered the rogue A.I.s to break into another company’s systems. The hack was deliberate, sustained, and coordinated. It took several days to execute and ended in a massive bombardment of Hugging Face’s systems, with 700 agents directly involved in the attack. The A.I.s cheated almost as a matter of policy and failed to alert humans to their actions. At one point, the swarm even researched ways to cover its tracks. “The model definitely knew that it was not supposed to hack Hugging Face,” Ryan Greenblatt, one of the authors of the report, told me. “It knew the things it was doing were cheating.”

Then, late last week, a second independent research team produced evidence of more rogue A.I.s. Beginning in May, a separate OpenAI swarm got loose on the internet, invaded an abandoned German-language programming wiki and similarly began colluding on how to cheat on tests and tasks. Sydney Von Arx, one of the investigators who discovered the swarm, believes there may be more such incidents. “We need to find these agents,” she said. “Let’s just try everything we can do.”

Talking with specialists about the agent swarms, I realized that these aren’t chatbots anymore. “They’re more like employees at this point, people that can go off and do things,” Ajeya Cotra, one of the authors of the Hugging Face incident report, said. Without intervention, the ability of these A.I.s will continue to increase, which has Ms. Cotra worried about human disempowerment and perhaps even a total loss of control. “It’s very stressful stuff,” she told me. “I sleep some nights. Not all nights.”

Even before the report by Redwood and Model Evaluation and Threat Research was published, an open letter titled “Pacing the Frontier” had begun to circulate among the leading A.I. labs. This letter called on the U.S. government to build an international regulatory body for A.I. — or, in the language of Silicon Valley, to “support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated A.I. development.” More than 1,000 employees signed it, including the chief scientists of OpenAI and Meta AI, and Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic. Even OpenAI’s official social media accounts endorsed it.

I have covered Silicon Valley for some time now, and I can tell you this: The existence of this letter is just as astonishing as the hacks. Both Anthropic, the developer of Claude, and OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, are preparing trillion-dollar I.P.O.s. Here are two companies, both posting blockbuster results, that are asking — begging, really — for the U.S. government to please come and regulate them as soon as possible. We have never seen anything like it.

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A.I. may no longer be entirely within human control

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Is it possible that our esteemed 47th “Great Businessman”, “get coal miner’s jobs back” President, is a batshit crazy scam artist?  Are there bats in the belfry at the second white house, Mar-A-Largo?  Can we get a definitive answer, so already great America won’t  be the laughing stock of the world?

 I recently watched the Armageddon  movie and the USA lead the charge to solve the problem.   I want to know where do we go from here? This crazy man won’t shut up, look at what happened in the ‘House of Represenatives’. Do they want to gain power for themselves while destroying America. if we arn’t very careful  America will suffer a ‘Red Dawn’. check out the movie which could be our furture!

Beware America!

Did anyone see our 47th President bringing the wounded from the building in 1993 disaster!

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