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Mars Fungi Could Make Red Planet Regolith Fertile for Crops

You’re on the fourth human mission to Mars, and you’ve been tasked with establishing the first self-sustaining food crop on a Martian settlement. You’re nervous because you’re using a new type of fungi called beneficial fungi, which you’re told will help enhance Martian regolith, enabling it to be used for growing crops. You were privately told that doing this will not only get a high school named after you, but you will successfully feed future settlers without the need to bring food from Earth. But you really only care about having your name on a high school.

Where Are All The Alien Robots? The Chilling Idea Of Von Neumann Probes

As you know, I’m obsessed about the Fermi Paradox. Where are all the aliens? But an even stranger question is: where are all the robot aliens?

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Team: Fraser Cain — @fcain / frasercain@gmail.com.
Jason Harmer — @jasoncharmer.
Chad Weber — weber.chad@gmail.com.

Created by: Fraser Cain and Jason Harmer.
Edited by: Chad Weber.
Music: Left Spine Down — “X-Ray”
• Left Spine Down — Side Effect (new track 2…

If you’ve seen at least one other episode of the Guide to Space, you know I’m obsessed about the Fermi Paradox. This idea that the Universe is big and old, and should be teeming with life. And yet, we have no evidence that it exists out there.

We wonder, where are all the aliens?

Compute is the New Capital: How AI Tokens Became the Valley’s Most Powerful Currency

If you want to know what the tech world really values right now, just look at what it’s measuring. We used to obsess over lines of code, and then it was all about daily active users and engagement metrics.

But lately, I’ve been watching a pretty profound shift taking place. The industry isn’t just optimizing for headcount or dollars anymore; it’s optimizing for tokens. For the first time, cognitive output has a measurable unit cost, and this little backend metric is quietly becoming the foundational currency of the digital economy.

I just published a new piece diving into how this “token economy” is actually playing out on the ground. Right now, we’re in this wild phase where folks are flexing their token burn rates, and massive players are even trading raw compute power for startup equity.

But this brute-force volume game is just the beginning. We’re moving toward a really fascinating future where AI agents will dynamically negotiate with each other over global compute exchanges, and companies will start managing their processing power like a true financial asset. It’s an entirely new way of thinking about how we build and scale.

Treating AI as just another flat-fee software subscription probably isn’t going to cut it for much longer. The organizations that really thrive in the next decade will be the ones who figure out how to navigate this new intersection of intelligence, energy, and scale.

I put together a deep dive into how compute is becoming the new capital, and what this macroeconomic shift actually means for the rest of us. I’d love to hear your take on it—check out the full post below.


Scientists Built Synthetic Self-perpetuating Brain For Robots

Further Reading.

Self-powered analogue neuromorphic system for multimodal sensing, encoding and learning with diffusive and drift memristors.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s4446

Reservoir Computing: Foundations, Advances, and Challenges Toward Neuromorphic Intelligence.
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-2688/7/2/70

Embodying physical computing into.
soft robots.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s4146

Artificial Nervous Systems.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles

Brain Cells Master Doom: Cortical Labs’ Biological Computer Reaches Major AI Milestone

Silicon Scoop

Flowgrammer.ca -> https://flowgrammer.ca/
AI News and Resources -> https://flowgrammers.ca.
OpenClaw Toronto -> https://openclawto.com/

Cut Costs. Boost Output. Stay Ahead.
If smarter systems can learn faster with less energy, imagine what your business can do with the right automation. Flowgrammer helps you eliminate repetitive work, reduce operational drag, and scale without hiring headaches.
Book Your Free Automation Audit.
https://flowgrammer.ca/

Startup Investor Drinks Toronto — https://startupdrinksto.com/
Toronto’s Startup Community — https://torontostarts.com/

Silicon Scoop.
Silicon Scoop Podcast — https://torontostarts.com/silicon-scoop/
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bAzF0M
YouTube: • Silicon Scoop.

Startup Talk.

Bed Nucleus of Stria Terminalis Enkephalin Neurons Contribute to Depletion-Induced Salt Appetite

The overconsumption of sodium contributes to a wide range of detrimental health conditions. Thus, it is imperative to gain a better understanding of the neural mechanisms driving sodium appetite. Here, we combined neuroanatomic, transgenic, behavioral, and chemogenetic approaches to investigate the role of bed nucleus of stria terminalis (BNST) enkephalin neurons (BNSTENK) in sodium appetite in male and female pENK-Cre mice. Our results demonstrate that Gi-mediated signaling onto BNSTENK neurons regulates salt consumption following sodium depletion but does not impact upon taste preference when replete. Further, Gi-mediated signaling onto BNSTENK neurons had no effect on deprivation-induced food or water intake or anxiety-like behavior.

Some technologies use accelerated natural processes to capture carbon, but can they store it durably?

Natural geological processes have been regulating Earth’s climate for millions of years. Accelerated versions of these processes are now being promoted as technologies to draw down carbon from the atmosphere—and some are rapidly moving from concept to real-world deployments.

Two such technologies are known as enhanced weathering, which speeds up the chemical breakdown of certain rocks, and ocean alkalinity enhancement, which increases the ocean’s natural ability to remove carbon dioxide from the air.

Startups backed by tech companies including Google and Microsoft are already applying these technologies in field trials. Investment in the sector is rising rapidly, with large-scale trials underway and carbon credits beginning to appear on voluntary markets.

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