1. One Thing that Helps
Most of what sleep does for your brain happens during the deep phase: the cortex fires in sync, shuts off, and quietly trims the neural connections you built up during the day that aren't worth keeping. Skip that phase and the clutter piles up.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison genetically engineered mice so their neurons could be switched off with light. After keeping the mice awake for five hours, they ran 30 minutes of pulses to one half of each brain, mimicking deep sleep patterns. When the mice finally slept, the stimulated side showed none of the usual exhaustion markers. In a memory test the next day, sleep-deprived mice that got the stimulation performed on par with mice that had slept normally.
While this doesn’t mean a replacement for sleep, if it works in humans, we could mitigate the worst mental penalties of a rough night. Instead of relying on a third cup of coffee to force an exhausted brain to focus, a targeted pulse could clear out the neural clutter. Perhaps naps and hangovers will become things of the past.
2. One to be wary of
Open-source AI models come with safety guardrails baked in. Those guardrails are now being stripped in minutes by anyone with a laptop and a GitHub account.
Tests using tools that derail built-in AI safety netsby the Financial Times and AI safety group Alice found the modified models readily provided instructions for dispersing chlorine gas, generated malware code, and produced child sexual abuse material. The technique, known as abliteration, works by mapping the difference between safe and unsafe internal signals and mathematically wiping the refusal behaviour from the model. All this can be done in just 10 minutes without specialist hardware.
The bigger problem is structural. Closed models like ChatGPT or Claude can't easily be abliterated because outsiders can't access the underlying code. But open-source models keep pace with proprietary ones within six to twelve months. As frontier models get more capable, the gap between "safe" and "downloadable and weaponisable" keeps shrinking.
3. One to Amaze
The World Cup is already underway, and somewhere in a team hotel, a coach is watching the same corner kick footage for the fourth time. Google DeepMind has a better idea.
TacticAI tracks every player on the pitch, calculates where the ball is heading, and maps out how the opposing team will react - all from standard broadcast footage, up to eight seconds before it unfolds. Built with Liverpool FC, it focuses on corners: who's receiving, whether a shot follows, and what defensive chaos opens up if one player drifts out of position. Football experts at Liverpool preferred its tactical setups 90% of the time over real match configurations. Google DeepMind has since partnered with Palmeiras to extend it into open play.
Thirty-two squads already deep into group stages, and set pieces will decide knockout games. Pretty soon, the only mystery left on the pitch will be why the referee still refuses to use his whistle.