Optometry welcomes Nicole Noel and Xiaoye Michael Wang - University of Waterloo

Alexandr Wang's wild X feed seemed to lack any rhyme or reason, but the 29-year-old said it helped serve a broader purpose. Alexandr Wang said he had trouble focusing during recent Meta meetings. On his mind: New memes to post about the company's popular new AI assistant. "I would just like think of a meme and I'd be like 'Oh God, I have to get this out,'" Wang said in a recent interview with podcaster David Senra, adding that his coworkers were "somewhat surprised" at the buzz his posts were generating. "It actually made an impact on growth," he said of the posts, "which is kind of hilarious. "Much has been said about Meta's chief AI officer and his chaotic X feed, which the 29-year-old has crammed with occasionally off-color yet invariably eccentric references to Muse, Meta's personal AI assistant that sent the company's stock soaring and redefined the market for AI tools. In his interview with Senra, though, Wang said that his often spur-of-the-moment posts served a broader goal — to make Meta "cool again. ""Despite having like these incredible pieces of cultural software like Instagram and Facebook, historically, Meta was not cool," he said.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.

Milky Way’s first microblazar candidate sits 12,000 light-years away, offering a rare ground-level lab for studying relativistic jetsA black hole 12,000 light-years away is firing a jet of plasma almost directly toward Earth. At that distance, no known or expected danger to Earth has been identified by the researchers or the institutions involved. What astronomers have actually found is rarer and more interesting than a threat. Researchers have identified IRAS 18293-0941 as a compelling candidate for the Milky Way’s first microblazar, a class of object that gives astrophysicists a close-up laboratory for studying some of the most violent physics in the galaxy. What Astronomers FoundThe discovery centers on a binary system whose black hole expels plasma jets at close to three-quarters the speed of light, pointed almost directly toward Earth. The system pairs a hot, massive star with a black hole that completes a full orbit roughly every 11.38 days. Material drawn from the companion star feeds the black hole, and some of that matter gets expelled outward as opposing jets traveling at approximately three-quarters the speed of light. Terminology matters here.

Forests that stood on Mozambique's coast thousands of years ago now lie beneath shallow seas, and they have become fish-filled "peat reefs" with marine life comparable to coral reefs, researchers report in Scientific Reports. A team from the Bazaruto Center for Scientific Studies (BCSS) Ocean Observatory, led by Mario Lebrato, documented the submerged peat in the Bazaruto Archipelago in the Western Indian Ocean. BCSS, founded in 2017, describes itself as Africa's first permanent ocean observatory. Working with universities and institutions in the U. K., U. S. and Canada, the team believes it has carried out the first ecological study of peat reefs anywhere in the tropics. Old forests, new seafloorRadiocarbon dating shows the peat formed between about 300 and 5,000 years ago, and chemical analysis indicates it came mostly from coastal land plants and trees. Some samples contain up to 40% organic carbon by dry weight. Lebrato said the coastline has very little natural hard seabed, mostly shifting sand. As rising seas expose the old peat layers, they create rare solid habitat where marine life can settle, hide and feed.