Ryan Taylor

hot take... i think the silver exterior is too dreary b/c the skies are always grey already

Sweden is promising Canada 10,000 manufacturing and research jobs if we buy Gripen jets instead of F-35s. Let's go with the Gripen.

New researsh shows ice is slippery because of electrical charges — not pressure and friction. For almost 200 years, the prevailing explanation for ice’s slipperiness was that friction or pressure from a skate, boot, or tire melted a microscopic film of water on the surface, creating a lubricating layer. A new study from Saarland University has overturned that long-standing idea. Instead, the true cause lies in the electric fields generated by molecular dipoles. When any object contacts ice, the partial charges in its own molecules interact with the highly ordered dipole arrangement of water molecules in the ice crystal. This electrostatic tug-of-war loosens the topmost layer of the ice lattice, transforming it into a thin, disordered, quasi-liquid film—without any need for heat or significant pressure. Remarkably, this self-lubrication mechanism works even at temperatures approaching absolute zero, where thermal energy is virtually absent and conventional pressure-melting or frictional heating theories completely break down. In those extreme conditions, ice remains slippery simply because its surface molecules are electrically vulnerable. The discovery fundamentally rewrites our understanding of one of nature’s most familiar phenomena. Beyond settling a centuries-old debate, it has immediate practical implications: from designing better winter tires and non-slip surfaces that actually work on ice, to engineering superior skis, ice skates, and even advanced nanomaterials that perform reliably in cryogenic environments. By revealing the dominant role of intermolecular electric forces, the research opens entirely new avenues for controlling friction and adhesion at the molecular scale—potentially transforming fields from winter sports equipment to aerospace and nanotechnology. ["Cold Self-Lubrication of Sliding Ice", Physical Review Letters, 2025]

Still keeping crawl at half-speed but it works with the costume on!

Noematrix Secures Alibaba-Led Funding to Accelerate Embodied AI Deployment Noematrix, the 2023-founded embodied intelligence firm, just announced a new funding round led by Alibaba Group with follow-on investments from existing shareholders, adding to their multiple hundred-million RMB Pre-A++ and Pre-A+++ rounds. The capital will be deployed to accelerate technical R&D, real-world application deployment, and ecosystem expansion. The core of their strategy is the Noematrix Brain 2.0, an integrated soft/hardware platform built on "generality" and "intelligence." Key platform upgrades include enhancing the physical world large model with Object Concept Learning and introducing a User Preference mechanism, allowing robots to understand and recall user habits, environments, and human relationships. To address data and model efficiency in commercial deployment, Noematrix has developed a no-ontology data collection plan, general end-to-end models, and a human-robot collaborative system aimed at establishing a full data-to-deployment closed loop. The company has already partnered with retail and home goods leaders to push for the bulk delivery of their integrated solutions. The company is backed by a powerhouse founding team. Co-founder Wang Shiquan holds a Ph.D. from Stanford (BDML/AI Labs) under bionics pioneers Mark Cutkosky and Oussama Khatib, and previously founded Flexiv Technology. Co-founder Lu Cewu, a special researcher at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and former Stanford AI post-doc, is recognized for his significant academic contributions, including the original AnyGrasp grasping algorithm, a Scientific Exploration Award, and an MIT TR35 honor.