Richard Gaitskell

Providence firefighters are assessing the safety of Brown University’s Barus and Holley building after reports of a “foreign odor." Details: wpri.com/news/local-new…

Starship’s Raptor engines ignite during hot-staging separation

SpaceX says they are working through the next steps following the off-nominal flight of Ship 39 with one of the Raptor Vacuum 3 engines not burning as planned following hot staging. The Raptor relight may not happen. Payload deployment demo is scheduled next. Watch live: youtube.com/watch?v=U4alF1…

SpaceX is actively hiring world-class engineers/physicists for SpaceXAI, even if you have zero prior experience in AI. Smart humans figure it out fast. Please send an email with ~3 bullet points demonstrating evidence of exceptional ability to ai_eng@spacex.com.

The Trump administration is playing games to prevent clean energy from reaching the grid and lower costs for consumers.

6,100 feet. 27,000 pounds. One new rope for the Ross Cage. SURF recently completed a full wire rope change on the Ross Cage. This system safely transports people, equipment, and materials nearly a mile below the surface.

Fewer than three minutes are remaining until the trans-lunar injection burn. This burn, lasting fewer than six minutes in duration, if successful, will put the crew of Artemis 2 on their free-return trajectory around the Moon. Watch live: youtube.com/watch?v=M8m9Yd…

Pretty astonishing. In Texas, between 10:00 am and 4:00 p.m., 80-90% of electricity comes from carbon free sources. And storage is already a significant contributor in the early morning and evening

Andy Weir showing some of the spreadsheets underlying the calculations in the book youtube.com/watch?v=lYHCTE… i mean, it's not quality scifi if it doesn't come with a supplementary whitepaper

Google Learn Your Way - new ways to present and tailor text book information for learning learnyourway.withgoogle.com

The entire robotics industry is about to compress a decade of progress into 18 months, and nobody’s pricing it in. The hardware has been ready for years. Boston Dynamics had Atlas doing backflips in 2018. The bottleneck was never motors or actuators. It was that every robot behavior had to be hand-coded. Pick up a box? That’s one program. Pick up a bottle? Different program. Move the box from shelf A to shelf B in a warehouse with slightly different lighting? Start over. Foundation models broke this completely. Before VLAs, teaching a robot one skill gave you exactly one skill. Zero compounding. Zero transfer. A robot trained to fold shirts couldn’t fold towels without starting from scratch. The labor intensity of data generation meant robotics datasets stayed narrow, robots overfit, and small variations like object weight or table height caused failures. Now a single Gemini Robotics model handles tasks it has never seen in training. Google’s On-Device model learns new behaviors with 50-100 demonstrations. Not 50,000. Fifty. That’s a 1000x reduction in the data requirement for new capabilities. The speed implications cascade through everything. First order: deployment timelines collapse. What took robotics teams 6-12 months of custom programming now takes days of fine-tuning. Second order: the addressable market explodes. Tasks that were never economical to automate suddenly are, because the integration cost dropped by orders of magnitude. Third order: the data flywheel accelerates. Every robot running Gemini Robotics feeds learning back into the foundation model. More deployments means faster improvement means more deployments. Physical Intelligence raised at $2.4B because investors finally understood this. Boston Dynamics partnered with Toyota Research Institute to bolt Large Behavior Models onto Atlas. Every humanoid company is scrambling to either build or license the intelligence layer they don’t have. The market is still valuing robotics companies on their hardware differentiation. But hardware is commoditizing. Boston Dynamics spent a decade perfecting locomotion, and now that’s table stakes. The value is migrating entirely to whoever owns the foundation model that generalizes across embodiments. Google trained Gemini on the largest multimodal corpus ever assembled. Then they added physical actions as an output modality. That’s not a robotics company bolting on AI. That’s an AI company whose models now output motor commands. The companies pricing this correctly are building around foundation model access, not around proprietary hardware. The companies pricing this wrong are still acting like the moat is in the mechanical engineering. AGI moving into the physical world isn’t a 10-year prediction. Gemini Robotics shipped in March. The 1.5 version with chain-of-thought reasoning shipped in September. They’re iterating on a 6-month release cycle while hardware companies iterate on 3-year cycles. The gap between software intelligence timelines and hardware development timelines is the entire trade.

New results from @lzdarkmatter will go out as a webinar and new paper tomorrow December 8, at 10 am US Mountain Time, 18h00 CET sanfordlab.org/lz-2025-result Please join us

LZ ⁦⁦@lzdarkmatter⁩ New Results coming up on Monday - webinar link sanfordlab.org/lz-2025-result Come join us by video 1 mile underground. Incredibly we will be at sea level in the Black Hills, South Dakota #darkmatter

Collaborators on the LZ (LUX-ZEPLIN) experiment @lzdarkmatter will present their latest results on Monday December 8, 2025, starting at 10 am Mountain Time. The webinar detailing the scientific results will be broadcast from a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility. @SanfordLab #DarkMatter Join live on Dec. 8 at this link: – sanfordlab.org/lz-2025-result The experiment will also release a paper preprint at the end of the webinar, posted at lz.lbl.gov, and then uploaded to arXiv. Please contact the LZ Spokesperson (Richard Gaitskell, Brown University) and LBL Press Office (Lauren Biron) for further details. @BrownUniversity

If VER wins, NOR has to come P3 to take title. If NOR P5 or better will automatically beat PIA. It does get a little crazy if VER P2, and if NOR P7 then I think VER and NOR draw in 2025 on total P1 and total P2 places and would need to look at total P3 - but the AI tables are all over the map so I can't get a reliable podium count. But in the above if PIA was P1 and NOR was P6 or worse then PIA would be champion whatever VER does (even coming P2) Permutations make your head hurt more than the high-speed right turns 12-14 at Qatar. #F1 #AbuDhabiGP #landonorris #MaxVerstappen #OscarPiastri

Formula 1 in Abu Dhabi #F1 #AbuDhabiGP - the permutations for the Drivers’ Championship outcome are complex - best shown in a matrix of finishing positions for #landonorris against #MaxVerstappen (-12 behind) and #OscarPiastri (-16 behind). In tables Red squares show Lando (current leader) losing on points. Orange squares equal points and outcome is decided on number of P1 (all currently even), P2 and possibly even P3 finishes.

#Antarctic ice loss 9,000 years ago was amplified by a cascading feedback between #IceMelt and ocean circulation, highlighting the potential for widespread, self-reinforcing ice-sheet retreat today. @NatureGeosci doi.org/g99rsj phys.org/news/2025-11-a…

"Humans aren’t very efficient movers—until you put us on a bicycle, when we become some of the most energy-efficient land travelers in the animal kingdom."

I still can't believe I got this engine shot on the very last V2 flight. I've been trying for this for a while. These are important milestones in our journey to Mars! I'll link the print in the reply if you want to have a piece of spaceflight history on your wall! :)

BREAKING NEWS The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2025 #NobelPrize in Physics to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.”