Precession slid every zodiac sign a full month off the real sky. There's a 13th constellation — Ophiuchus — your horoscope app quietly deleted.
Watch a pro guess his sign wrong 8x in a row 👇
The Han group at UCSB and Brandeis, with computational support from Ken Houk's group at UCLA, published a fascinating molecular solar thermal (MOST) energy storage paper in Science in February 2026. Lead author is Han Nguyen.
They report a pyrimidone derivative that photoisomerizes to a strained Dewar form, stores 1.6 MJ/kg, holds the charged state stable for long periods at room temperature, and releases the stored energy as heat when triggered with an acid catalyst. They demonstrate it by boiling about 0.5 mL of water. The Dryad supplementary data is public.
Disclaimer: I'm a physicist, not a synthetic chemist, and I'm posting here because the press cycle around this paper is doing some things that bother me, and the press coverage (not the paper or the authors' credentials) reminds me of the free Casimir Battery hype I wrote about here and Sabine made a video about here.
I'd like the real chemists in the room to tell me where my reading is right and where it's off.
The hype as written. Here is how ScienceDaily framed it this week: "Scientists 'bottle the sun' with a liquid battery that stores solar energy." The header image, per the caption, is AI-generated.
The body promises that "researchers have invented a powerful new solar-storage molecule that traps sunlight like a rechargeable battery and releases it later as heat." It compares the 1.6 MJ/kg figure favorably to lithium-ion at 0.9 MJ/kg and suggests "rooftop collectors that capture sunlight by day" feeding "tanks that release heat at night." The TechXplore writeup runs the same beats. None of the popular coverage I've found mentions the excitation wavelength, the acid catalyst requirement, the difference between thermal and electrical energy storage, or the fact that the demonstration boiled half a milliliter, which is roughly a teaspoon. The Reddit perpetual-motion crowd has not yet declared the second law dead, but the press cycle is doing its best to invite them.
So here are the three places the popular framing seems wrong to me. I want it checked by real chemistry experts....
But the 300 nm absorption is UV-C, not sunlight. The paper specifies excitation at 300 nm. The atmosphere blocks essentially everything below 290 nm and most of what sits between 290 and 315 nm. At sea level the AM1.5 solar irradiance at 300 nm is a tiny fraction of the total spectrum.
"Bottled sunlight" requires a UV lamp in practice, not actual sunlight. Han Nguyen's interviews acknowledge this implicitly. The honest framing seems to be "molecular thermal energy storage that can be charged by short-wavelength light sources, with sensitizer-coupled or red-shifted derivatives as future work." Am I reading this right? Is the absorption window a generational problem for the whole pyrimidone method?
The lithium-ion comparison. Every popular writeup quotes 1.6 MJ/kg against the ~0.9 MJ/kg of commercial Li-ion and lets the reader infer that this molecule outperforms a battery. It doesn't. Right?
The Han molecule releases heat. A Li-ion cell releases electrical work. If you want to convert the stored heat back into electricity, you pay a "Carnot tax" of 60 to 70% depending on the working temperature. The fair comparison is against phase-change thermal storage media: paraffin wax at around 0.2 MJ/kg, hydrated salts at around 0.3 MJ/kg, molten salt thermal storage at NREL at around 0.4 to 0.5 MJ/kg.
On that comparison the Han molecule is genuinely impressive, rmany times the best phase-change media. But it isn't beating a battery. Is this a fair criticism, or is there a thermodynamic context where the lithium-ion comparison is reasonable that I'm missing?
Also the release mechanism is acid-catalyzed, not thermal or mechanical. The press materials gloss this as "a small amount of heat or a catalyst," which understates dificulty. For a heating system, an acid trigger is a hard problem. You need a way to mix the catalyst with the charged molecule on demand and then separate them again so the system can recharge. Is there an obvious path to a non-acid trigger that I'm not seeing?
Even with those three things, the paper does something cool the MJ/kg result is a big density jump on the best prior works, and the demonstrated heat relaese rate is faster than most prior systems got.
The DNA-inspiration framing in the press cycle is partly press-officer language we all know about.... but the photochemistry being exploited is legit. An independent commentary by Wegner and colleagues in Chem calls the work "(R)evolutionary" without obvious shilling...
This looks like a genuine advance on the MOST architecture and an honest record-density result, with practical-deployment caveats that the popular coverage isn't surfacing and "rooftop collector heating your house overnight" is not reporting it that way. It's not free energy. And it's definitely not replacing lithium-ion packs anytime soon. Right now it looks more like an extremely interesting laboratory heat-storage system than Tesla Power Wall level consumer technology.
The question I genuinely can't answer myself, and would like the chemists here to weigh in on: is 1.6 MJ/kg approaching the storage ceiling for this class of molecule, or is there a clear path seriously big MJ/kg with a different method?
I've talked with Lee Cronin at Glasgow about chemistry that does work without electronics and Michael Levin at Tuftsand Nick Lane at UCL about bioenergetics, so this paper sits squarely in territory I'm trying to learn.
I’m an experimental physicist at UCSD, and a story has been circulating for nearly a week that I think deserves a careful physics-community read.
Casimir, Inc. — founded by Harold “Sonny” White (formerly of NASA Eagleworks, of EmDrive and reduced-energy Alcubierre fame) — announced a $12M oversubscribed seed round to commercialize “MicroSparc,” a 5mm × 5mm chip that allegedly produces 1.5V at 25μA of continuous electrical power by harvesting the quantum vacuum via engineered Casimir cavities and quantum-tunneling micropillars.
The accompanying theoretical paper is real: White, “Emergent Quantization from a Dynamic Vacuum,” Physical Review Research, March 9, 2026 (DOI: 10.1103/l8y7-r3rm).
It is peer-reviewed. It also does not claim what the press release claims.
Three things bother me about the public framing:
The paper is about the static Casimir effect. It does not contain peer-reviewed experimental verification of net energy extraction. The “ratchet” mechanism — electrons preferentially tunneling into the cavity and not back out — is a Maxwell’s demon argument. Landauer’s principle has been exorcising demons since 1961.
The measured output is in picoamps. The marketed output is in microamps. That is a factor of 10⁶ gap that the company press release does not address. Picoamp signals at the noise floor of precision electrometers are easy to misinterpret — I have built precision instruments and seen this kind of artifact firsthand.
Author’s track record. The EmDrive thrust signals he championed at Eagleworks were never independently replicated. Tajmar’s group at TU Dresden (2021) showed every reported thrust was thermal expansion artifact. That is not character assassination — it is the published experimental record.
I am not saying the Casimir effect or Sonny is fake. Lamoreaux measured the force to 5% accuracy in 1997. The vacuum is not empty. What I am saying is: the vacuum is the ground state, and “ground state” means there is nothing below it to pump from. Net continuous work extraction violates the second law.
Has anyone here read the PRR paper in detail? Is there something in the dynamic-vacuum framework I am missing, or is the gap between what the paper proves and what the press release claims as large as it looks to me?
In 1986, John White, Eileen Southgate, Nichol Thomson, and Sydney Brenner published The Structure of the Nervous System of the Nematode Caenorhabditis elegans [article here on pubmed]— the first complete connectome of any organism. 302 neurons. Roughly 7,000 synapses. Every connection, mapped. The paper was the founding document of modern connectomics, and it was supposed to make the worm's behavior a solved problem within a decade.
Forty years later, we still don't have a working simulation. The OpenWorm project has been running since 2011 — distributed, open-source, well-funded by the standards of the field, with the full connectome and a detailed biomechanical model of the worm's body — and it has not produced a digital C. elegans that crawls toward food the way the real animal does. The behavior won't come out of the wiring diagram. The wiring diagram is necessary and not sufficient, and after four decades of trying we should probably take that seriously.
This is the argument I've been turning over since recording a long conversation last week with Joscha Bach, the cognitive scientist who runs the California Institute for Machine Consciousness in San Francisco. Bach has been building cognitive architectures for twenty years...starting with his PhD at Osnabrück in 2006 produced MicroPsi — and his framing of the connectome problem is the cleanest I've heard. The reason the C. elegans simulation hasn't worked, on his account, is that we've been mapping the wrong layer of the brain. Neurons, he argues, may not be the computational units. They may be closer to the wires running between the computational units — the telegraph cables, not the telegraph offices. The actual computation may be happening inside each cell, in the cytoskeletal and biochemical machinery, and the connectome is essentially a circuit diagram for a system whose chips are somewhere we haven't looked.
If you find that too speculative, notice what it explains. It explains why the OpenWorm simulation produces movement that is qualitatively wrong despite getting the synaptic graph correct. It explains why Eve Marder's stomatogastric ganglion work at Brandeis — three decades of it — shows that the same 30-neuron circuit, with the same connectivity, can produce wildly different outputs depending on neuromodulatory state. The connectome is invariant. The behavior is not. Something below the connectome is doing the work.
The steelman of the standard view is real and I want to put it clearly. The connectome is unambiguously necessary information for understanding a nervous system. The Human Connectome Project, the MICrONS cubic-millimeter mouse cortex reconstruction released by the Allen Institute in 2024, and the full Drosophila connectome from the FlyWire consortium in 2024 are extraordinary achievements that almost certainly will pay off. The fact that we haven't yet simulated C. elegans may reflect engineering immaturity — incomplete dynamics, missing extrasynaptic signaling, unmodeled gap junctions — rather than the failure of the connectomic paradigm. Bach's "neurons are the wires" reframe is a strong empirical claim and the burden of proof sits on him, not on the consortia.
But here's where I disagree with the strong version of Bach's position. I'm not convinced the work inside the cell is doing the heavy lifting he wants it to do. Christof Koch and the Allen Institute team have been characterizing single-neuron computation for two decades, and the picture that's emerged is one of enrichment — neurons doing more than the integrate-and-fire caricature suggests — rather than replacement of the network-level story. Dendritic computation matters. Active conductances matter. But the leap from "neurons compute more than we thought" to "the connectome is the wrong layer" is large, and the evidence cited for the leap is mostly the absence of a working C. elegans model, which is also explainable by mundane modeling failure. I'd want to see at least one organism where we have the full connectome, full single-cell electrophysiology, full neuromodulatory state, and still can't reproduce behavior, before I conclude the chips are intracellular.
What I think the conversation actually moved the needle on is the falsifiability question. Bach was specific about what would change his mind: a clean simulation of C. elegans from the connectome alone, with biomechanically faithful behavior, would falsify the "neurons are the wires" hypothesis. That's a real empirical commitment, made on camera, and it's the move I respect most. The default position in this debate — on both sides — is usually one where no observation could resolve it. Bach named the observation.
The open question I'm left with isn't whether Bach is right. It's whether the C. elegans gap is forty years of bad modeling or forty years of looking at the wrong scale. Either answer has consequences. If it's bad modeling, the trillion-dollar Human Connectome bet eventually pays off. If it's the wrong scale, neuroscience has spent a generation building a beautifully detailed circuit diagram for a machine whose actual logic lives one level down — and we have to start over with tools that don't yet exist.
I spent ninety minutes pressing him on this. Full conversation, including the parts where I push back harder than I do here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bqdPHLIY8w
Joscha Bach on what consciousness actually is in mechanistic terms without retreating to woo, mysticism or hand-waving.
His core claim: the self is a pattern running on the brain, not the substrate itself. What you experience as "the world" is a model your brain generates, not the physical world outside. Phenomenology is a representational regime, not just an information-processing property.
We cover why simulating a connectome won't reproduce behavior (C. elegans, 302 neurons mapped since 1986, no working simulation), what's wrong with Penrose's quantum consciousness theory, why he thinks "you don't die because you were never really alive," and his operational definition of consciousness as self-organized second-order perception that increases global coherence.
90-minute conversation. Linked above.
What's your opinion? Is Joscha right?
Pulling out a specific argument from a Sam Harris conversation that I think is worth scrutinizing here:
Harris' claim: consciousness is uniquely immune to skeptical attack because every act of doubting is itself a conscious experience. We could be brains in vats, in a simulation, on an alien supercomputer — the seeming-to-be-happening IS consciousness. He calls it "the ground truth."
This is roughly Descartes' move with cogito, but Harris extends it: even the *illusion* of consciousness would itself be a conscious experience, so the regress closes immediately.
Two questions for the sub:
Is this just a restatement of the cogito, or does Harris add something? He seems to think he does — specifically by arguing that you don't need to defend "I think" to get the result, only "something seems to be happening."
Where does this leave illusionists like Frankish and Dennett, who argue consciousness itself is the illusion? Harris would presumably say: the illusion-of-consciousness is still consciousness, full stop. Does the illusionist have a reply?
Sharing a clip from the Sam Harris conversation. Sam articulates a distinction that I keep returning to:
— Consciousness can't be an illusion. Every act of doubting it is itself a conscious experience, so the regress closes immediately. He calls it "the ground truth."
— Free will is a different category entirely. Not illusory in the same Cartesian sense — incoherent. The concept doesn't survive any consistent metaphysical commitment about causality.
There's a thought-experiment Sam describes — a predictive machine that could disabuse a subject of even the FEELING of free will — that I think is the most interesting move he makes in the whole conversation. Brian pushes back with an infinite-regress objection.
Worth a watch if you missed it the first time around.