Michael Johanson 🍊 🚀

SpaceX is only ~200 satellites away from having launched as many satellites as the rest of the world combined (despite giving the rest of the world a 61-year head start)

🚨 MATERIALS SCIENCE UPDATE Physicists just figured out how to flatten metals into sheets only a few atoms thick. Read that again. Not graphene. Actual metals like: • bismuth • tin • lead • gallium • indium Compressed into stable 2D atomic layers. That shouldn’t even want to exist. Normally, metals bond in every direction, which makes flattening them almost impossible at atomic scales. So researchers created ultra-thin van der Waals “anvils” to squeeze and stabilize the material into entirely new forms of matter. And the strangest part? The two-atom-thick bismuth film began showing electronic behavior not seen in normal bulk metals. We may be entering an era where matter itself becomes programmable at the atomic scale. Follow me for more future-shock physics and nanotechnology.

We’ve found a “third state” between life and death. Some cells refuse to accept death when the organism does. Instead, they adapt, reinvent themselves, and sometimes start over. Researchers have found that certain cells, taken from a recently deceased body and placed in the right conditions, can awaken into a surprising new existence. They self-organize into living, moving entities that behave in ways their original bodies never did. Scientists describe this neither as full life nor true death, but as a third state—something in between. In a landmark experiment, skin cells from deceased frog embryos were scattered into a dish. Within days, they gathered into multicellular clusters called xenobots. These tiny creations could crawl, self-repair, and—most astonishingly—reproduce by sweeping loose cells into piles that then became new xenobots. The phenomenon isn’t limited to frogs. Human lung cells, harvested postmortem, recently formed anthrobots—microscopic blobs that propel themselves through liquid and can even encourage healing in damaged neural tissue nearby. This remarkable plasticity reveals that even after the organism dies, many of its cells retain not only basic function but a kind of creative agency—the ability to change identity and build entirely new structures. The implications are profound. In the near future, patient-derived biobots could be engineered to deliver drugs directly to tumors, scrape plaque from arteries, or mend injured tissue, then harmlessly dissolve after weeks without triggering immune reactions. Death, it turns out, is not always final at the cellular level. Some of our cells may still have work left to do long after we’re gone. ["Biobots arise from the cells of dead organisms − pushing the boundaries of life, death and medicine." The Conversation, 2024]

Joe Walsh of the Eagles sounds like Adam Sandler doing a music skit on SNL. In other words, it’s terrible.