Writer Fuel? Did a Supernova Kickstart Evolution in Africa? Radiation from an exploding star may have had a profound effect on the evolution of life on Earth, a new study suggests. About 2.5 million years ago, the viruses infecting fish in Africa"s Lake Tangan...

WRITER FUEL: Radiation from an exploding star may have had a profound effect on the evolution of life on Earth, a new study suggests.

www.limfic.com/2025/05/30/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #WritersofMastodon #StoryIdeas #Supernova #Africa #Evolution

Writer Fuel: New Study Sheds Light on Origin of Mars’ Red Color We may have been wrong about how Mars got its characteristic red hue, a new study reveals. The Red Planet owes its ruddy complexion to rusted iron minerals, dispersed across billions of years by winds...

WRITER FUEL: New research has revealed that Martian dust's red hue comes from reactions that occurred in wet — not dry — conditions, and it could have implications for the possibility of life on the planet.

www.limfic.com/2025/05/26/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Mars

WRITER FUEL: Can you forget your native language?

www.limfic.com/2025/05/24/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #WritersofMastodon #StoryIdeas #Language

WRITER FUEL: A robotics company has built an eerily lifelike humanoid robot which they claim is the “world’s first bipedal musculoskeletal android” — and the internet hates it.

www.limfic.com/2025/05/23/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #StoryIdeas #Robot #Robotics

Writer Fuel: AI-Designed Chips Perform Better, But We Don’t Understand Them Engineering researchers have demonstrated that artificial intelligence (AI) can design complex wireless chips in hours, a feat that would have taken humans weeks to complete. Not only did the chip des...

WRITER FUEL: AI-designed chips are so weird that 'humans cannot really understand them' - but they perform better than anything we've created.

www.limfic.com/2025/05/16/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #StoryIdeas #ArtificialIntelligence #ComputerChips

WRITER FUEL: World's glaciers are losing enough ice to fill 3 Olympic pools every second, terrifying new study finds.

www.limfic.com/2025/05/14/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #StoryIdeas #WereAllGonnaDie

WRITER FUEL: 'Perhaps it's only a matter of time': Intelligent life may be much more likely than first thought, new model suggests.

www.limfic.com/2025/05/11/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #StoryIdeas #Intelligence

WRITER FUEL: New Algorithm Could Help AI Read Thoughts in People With Aphasia Scientists have made new improvements to a "brain decoder" that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to convert thoughts into text. Their new converter algorithm can quickly train an existing decoder on ...

WRITER FUEL: An improvement to an existing AI-based brain decoder can translate a person's thoughts into text without hours of training.

www.limfic.com/2025/05/10/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel

WRITER FUEL: NASA's Curiosity rover photographed remnants of rippling waves in an ancient Martian lakebed, proving that the Red Planet had open water for longer in its history than previously thought.

www.limfic.com/2025/05/08/w...

#LimFic #Mars #WriterFuel

Writer Fuel: Some Older Generative AI Models Show Signs of Cognitive Decline People increasingly rely on artificial intelligence (AI) for medical diagnoses because of how quickly and efficiently these tools can spot anomalies and warning signs in medical histories, X-rays and ...

WRITER FUEL: Older AI models show signs of cognitive decline, study shows — but not everyone is entirely convinced.

www.limfic.com/2025/05/02/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #StoryIdeas #AI #ArtificialIntellgence #GenAI #CognitiveDecline

Writer Fuel: Is the Idea of “Aligning” AI With Human Values a Fallacy? In late 2022 large-language-model AI arrived in public, and within months they began misbehaving. Most famously, Microsoft's "Sydney" chatbot threatened to kill an Australian philosophy professor, unl...

WRITER FUEL: Is the idea of “aligning” AI with human values a fallacy?

www.limfic.com/2025/04/28/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #StoryIdeas #ArtificialIntelligence #LargeLanguageModels #GenerativeAI

Writer Fuel: Why AI-Created “Art Is, Ultimately, Empty 'I encountered the terror of never finding anything' The concepts of "sentience" and "agency" in machines are muddled, particularly given that it's difficult to measure what these concepts are. But ma...

WRITER FUEL: Looking at AI-generated art shows that machines may never truly understand the human mind, because there are states of mind that can never be automated.

www.limfic.com/2025/04/27/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #StoryIdeas #ArtificialIntelligende #GenerativeAI #LLM #Art #Soulless

Writer Fuel: Would a Fallout Shelter Really Protect You From a Nuclear Bomb? No other human-made catastrophes can wreak more destruction than a nuclear bomb. Luckily, bomb shelters and bunkers can protect us, right? The truth is that these structures' ability to shield people ...

WRITER FUEL: Would a fallout shelter really protect you in a nuclear blast? Live Science explores...

www.limfic.com/2025/04/26/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #WritersofMastodon #StoryIdeas #NuclearBlast #FalloutShelters

WRITER FUEL: Could we travel to parallel universes? Live Science considers the possibilities.

www.limfic.com/2025/04/24/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #WritersofMastodon #StoryIdeas #ParallelUniverse

Writer Fuel: Ocean Study Shows Climate Change is Accelerating Earth's oceans are getting warmer at an accelerating rate, researchers find — indicating that climate change is speeding up too. The scientists found that ocean warming has more than quadrupled over t...

WRITER FUEL: Ocean warming 4 times faster than in 1980s — and likely to accelerate in coming decades.

www.limfic.com/2025/04/22/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #WritersofMastodon #StoryIdeas #Ocean #ClimateChange

Writer Fuel: Scientists May Have an Explanation for Mars’ Giant Dust Storms Monstrous dust storms often ravage Mars, engulfing the Red Planet for months. Now, a new study suggests these global storms may be related to a peculiar energy imbalance recently discovered across the...

WRITER FUEL: Mars' southern hemisphere absorbs a lot of the sun's energy during the Red Planet's spring, and that may be causing Mars' dust storms, a new study suggests.

www.limfic.com/2025/04/13/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #StoryIdeas #Astronomy #Mars #DustStorms

WRITER FUEL: Humans don't have hollow bones like birds do, so how big would our wings have to be to lift us off the ground?

www.limfic.com/2025/04/12/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #WritersofMastodon #StoryIdeas #Wingfic #Angels #Flight #Wings #Humans

Writer Fuel: Should We Make AI Suffer to See If It’s Sentient? In the quest for a reliable way to detect any stirrings of a sentient "I" in artificial intelligence systems, researchers are turning to one area of experience — pain — that inarguably unites a vast s...

WRITER FUEL: Scientists propose making AI suffer to see if it's sentient. What could possibly go wrong?

www.limfic.com/2025/04/11/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #WritersofMastodon #StoryIdeas #ArtificialIntelligence #AI

Writer Fuel: AI Can Now Replicate Itself – How Worried Should We Be? Scientists say artificial intelligence (AI) has crossed a critical "red line" and has replicated itself. In a new study, researchers from China showed that two popular large language models (LLMs) cou...

WRITER FUEL: Scientists say AI has crossed a critical 'red line' after demonstrating how two popular large language models could clone themselves. How worried should we be?

www.limfic.com/2025/04/10/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #WritersofMastodon #StoryIdeas

WRITER FUEL: Nanotech chainmail sports 100 trillion chemical bonds per square centimeter — and could be the future of armor

www.limfic.com/2025/04/08/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #WritersofMastodon #StoryIdeas #Chainmail #Armor #Nanotech

Writer Fuel: New Solar Powered EV Can Go 40 Miles on Sunlight Alone Engineers have showcased a prototype electric vehicle (EV) that can drive for up to 40 miles (64 kilometers) per day using just solar power. The new solar-powered car, called the Aptera Launch Edition...

WRITER FUEL: New solar-powered EV can drive 40 miles daily using the power of the sun — and it's 50% more efficient than a Tesla.

www.limfic.com/2025/04/03/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #WritersofMastodon #StoryIdeas #EV #ElectricVehicle #SolarPowered #Solar

Writer Fuel: Planned Chinese Solar Array in Space Could Capture More Energy Than All Oil On Earth Chinese scientists have announced a plan to build an enormous, 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) wide solar power station in space that will beam continuous energy back to Earth via microwaves. The project, whic...

WRITER FUEL: China plans to build enormous solar array in space — and it could collect more energy in a year than 'all the oil on Earth'.

www.limfic.com/2025/04/02/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #WritersofMastodon #StoryIdeas

Writer Fuel: 2024 Breached 1.5 Degree Celsius Limit For the first time, global warming exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels in 2024, new data has shown. That makes 2024 the hottest year on record. Earth's av...

WRITER FUEL: Scientists have warned that the Paris Agreement to limit global warming will likely be breached as data reveals 2024 was the hottest year in human history.

www.limfic.com/2025/04/01/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #StoryIdeas #ClimateChange

WRITER FUEL: A collection of medieval crowns of Eastern European royalty hidden in cathedral wall since World War II were finally recovered.

www.limfic.com/2025/03/30/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #StoryIdeas #History #Royalty

WRITER FUEL: The grandfather paradox is just one of the thorny logical problems that arise with the concept of time travel. But one physicist says he has resolved them.

www.limfic.com/2025/03/28/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #StoryIdeas #TimeTravel #GrandfatherParadox

Writer Fuel: Why You Should Build a “Frog Sauna” Image credit: Anthony Waddle All over the world, frogs are being wiped out by the chytrid fungus. At least 500 species have declined, including as many as 90 species now presumed extinct. This catastr...

WRITER FUEL: Fungus is wiping out frogs. These tiny saunas could save them.

www.limfic.com/2025/03/27/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Biology #Fungus #Frogs #ClimateChange #Mitigation #FrogSauna

Writer Fuel: Can Blind People “See” In Their Dreams? Although blind people cannot see, they often still possess the brain regions that enable vision. Does this mean that blind people can dream in visual images? In some cases, they can. A 2014 study foun...

WRITER FUEL: Do blind people 'see' images in their dreams?

www.limfic.com/2025/03/26/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #WritersofMastodon #StoryIdeas

Writer Fuel: The State of Humanoid Robot Tech If you're worried about humanoid robots taking your job in 2025, rest easy. The few commercially available models are slow, ponderous and best suited to menial jobs that humans hate — think lifting a ...

WRITER FUEL: From a disembodied torso to a "friendly" robot with unnervingly human facial expressions, here are seven of the most advanced humanoid robots in the world.

www.limfic.com/2025/03/21/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #StoryIdeas #Robots #RoboticLabor

Writer Fuel: Why Do Some Planets Have Hundreds of Moons? On Earth, you can look up at night and see the Moon shining bright from hundreds of thousands of miles away. But if you went to Venus, that wouldn't be the case. Not every planet has a moon — so why d...

WRITER FUEL: Scientists still don't fully understand why some planets have hundreds of moons while others have none.

www.limfic.com/2025/03/20/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #StoryIdeas #Space #Satellites #Moons #Astronomy

WRITER FUEL: Near-unlimited EV range now a possibility thanks to surprising new technology — solar paint.

www.limfic.com/2025/03/19/w...

#LimFic #LiminalFiction #WriterFuel #Writers #Authors #StoryIdeas #ElectricVehicles #Solas #SolarPaint