The U.S. has sanctioned a startup and a venture capital firm from China connected to Linwei Ding, a Chinese national and former Google software engineer sentenced to prison last month for stealing Google’s AI-related trade secrets.
The startup, Shanghai Zhisuan Technology, is an AI company Ding ...
Two of the hardest problems in AI right now are creating models that understand the physical world—so called world models—and making sense of the internal workings of AI models—otherwise known as mechanistic interpretability.
Typically, these are treated as two separate problems: researchers working on world models are often not concerned with their internal workings, and interpretability researchers tend to focus on the language models that power most AI tools we currently use. But Sonia Joseph, the co-founder and CEO of a new startup, World Mechanics, argues that world models and interpretability are two sides of the same coin. Joseph joined the latest episode of AI Deep Dive to explain that connection, which could be key to making AI useful in the physical world, from medicine to manufacturing. (The full episode is available here.)
In the summer of 1518, people in Strasbourg couldn’t seem to stop dancing—some even danced themselves to death.
It all started with one woman, who stepped into the street and began moving uncontrollably. Soon, dozens of other residents followed suit, overcome with the inexplicable urge to hop, jerk, and sway. Within weeks, the outbreak had spread throughout the city, leaving officials, physicians, and religious leaders scrambling to figure out what was happening—and, more importantly, how to make it stop.
Five centuries later, the dancing plague of 1518 remains one of history’s strangest medical mysteries. Historical records confirm that a bizarre episode turned a medieval city into a very unwilling dance floor that summer, but exactly why it happened remains a matter of debate.
The dancing plague began on July 14, 1518, when a woman named Frau Troffea started dancing in Strasbourg, then part of the Holy Roman Empire and now a city in northeastern France. Though her husband begged her to stop, Troffea kept moving as day faded to night, while a crowd of onlookers gathered around to watch. Eventually, she collapsed and fell asleep, but when she awoke the next morning, she resumed her solitary jig.
Troffea’s uncontrollable dancing, known as choreomania, seemed to be contagious. Dozens of other people were soon gyrating in the streets of Strasbourg and, by late August, as many as 400 individuals had succumbed.
At the time, the leading theory was that St. Vitus, a fourth-century Sicilian martyr believed to punish sinners by making them dance, had cursed the afflicted. Then, once St. Vitus decided his victims had suffered enough, he would relieve them of the curse.
City leaders determined that the best course of action was to keep the dancers dancing, so they cleared the outdoor grain market, built a stage, and hired musicians. They didn’t explain their rationale in any known, surviving documents, so historians don’t know exactly why they did this. But John Waller, associate professor of the history of medicine at Michigan State University and the author of The Dancing Plague: The Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness, suspects they had two reasons: They believed dancing could help people purge physical impurities from their bodies, and they viewed it as a form of penance.
“If people were believed to have been cursed by God or a saint for some kind of immorality, well, dancing was associated with hedonism and that was fundamentally immoral,” he tells Popular Science. “A way of basically punishing oneself would be to dance to the point of exhaustion and pain and potentially even death. It would make sense with that potential framework.” In other words, from the leaders’ perspective, if dancing was their punishment, let them be punished.
Regardless of their motives, the authorities’ decision had “very, very clear consequences,” he says. It was a hot summer, and the dancers were likely under the full glare of the sun. They weren’t eating or drinking much, and they weren’t resting.
“This is certainly going to be extremely dangerous for a large number of people, particularly anybody with any kind of susceptibility to heart attack or stroke,” says Waller.
The historical records are murky on exactly how many people died—one writer claimed as many as 15 per day, at least for a time—but it was enough to make city leaders completely change course.
“They essentially banned dancing, except for some people in the privacy of their own homes, and then instituted a program of penance and prayer,” says Waller. “They clearly realized that what they’d been doing before was causing harm and I suspect they got the impression that it was making things worse.”
Eventually, the authorities transported the remaining dancers to a shrine dedicated to St. Vitus about 30 miles away, where religious leaders went to work praying and leaving offerings. As days and weeks passed, the dancers overcame their choreomania and returned to their normal lives—traumatized and tired, but otherwise fine.
The dancing plague of 1518 wasn’t the only such incident of its kind. Numerous other outbreaks of uncontrollable dancing occurred in western Europe between the late 1300s and mid-1500s—and Waller thinks it’s no coincidence that many were clustered along the Rhine River and its tributaries.
“Rivers are very good for, obviously, transporting trade goods, but they’re also very good for spreading ideas,” he says. “From the headwaters in Switzerland all the way down to where the Rhine flows into the North Sea, you’ve got this belief in a saint who curses with a dance.”
Now that we have the benefit of hindsight, what might explain the dancing plague of 1518 and others like it? One theory is that the dancers were sickened by ergot, a fungus that can contaminate grain. Another holds venomous spiders bit the afflicted. Demonic possession, epilepsy, typhus, and encephalitis—brain inflammation caused by an infection or autoimmune response—have also been put forward as possible explanations.
But after considering all the evidence, Waller thinks there’s only one plausible theory that truly makes sense. He suspects the dancers of Strasbourg were all victims of mass hysteria, also known as mass psychogenic illness, brought on by intense psychological distress.
The years leading up to 1518 were rough, particularly for the lower classes, with failed crops, bad weather, economic issues, social unrest, religious tensions, and illnesses like smallpox, leprosy, and syphilis taking a toll on peoples’ psyches. They were hungry, anxious, sad, scared, and worried that God had abandoned them.
Waller suspects the people living in Strasbourg simply reached their breaking point, then entered into a trance-like state that rendered them largely insensitive to their extreme fatigue and sore feet. They danced, Waller argues, rather than weeping, fighting, praying, or engaging in some other behavior because of their belief in St. Vitus and his dancing curse.
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Given the period-specific cultural and religious underpinnings, could something like the dancing plague of 1518 happen today?
Waller shares several modern examples of mass psychogenic illness that, although they don’t involve dancing, he finds to be similar in nature. More than 300 students in Blackburn, England, suffered from a mysterious fainting fit in 1956, for example, and hundreds of people succumbed to alternating fits of laughing and sobbing in East Africa in 1962. In 2007, students at a Catholic boarding school near Mexico City came down with a mysterious sickness that made walking difficult. A year later, 20 female students in Tanzania suffered a mass fainting episode during their final-year national examinations.
And although the dancing plague of 1518 took place more than 500 years ago, Waller says we can still learn plenty from it. For him, the most important takeaway is “the way in which our expression of severe distress can be culturally conditioned and channeled.”
When Waller initially started researching the dancing plague of 1518, it was such a “wild phenomenon” that his inclination was to think “as strange as the past can be, this was simply too strange to have actually happened,” he says. But as he dug deeper—and, more importantly, began to understand the context within which it arose—it started to make more and more sense.
In other words, he says, it reminds us that psychological distress is not expressed in a vacuum. The culture, beliefs, and circumstances around us can shape how our inner turmoil manifests—and, in some cases, how it spreads from one person to another.
In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, most surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.
The post The mysterious dancing plague that killed people in 1518 appeared first on Popular Science.
These days, raising a new venture fund can seem like an uphill battle. First-time managers are competing with much bigger funds that can lure founders with rich valuations—as well as track records that can wow limited partners.
But what if you had unfettered access to some sage advice from a seasoned investor and executive?
That’s the case for Ayesha Arora-Hughes, the daughter of Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora. Ayesha is raising her own VC fund, Permanent Partners Collective Fund I, according to a securities filing and people with knowledge of the matter—and she counts Nikesh as an adviser to the firm, one of the people said.
Apple sure takes its own sweet time. On Monday, the company sent out invitations to a product announcement happening next Wednesday, which the company’s marketing chief teased in a message on X: “Can’t wait to pro and tell next week.” That’s likely a reference to a new MacBook Pro from the company, which Bloomberg has reported will be Apple’s first touchscreen laptop.
Apparently pigs really do fly. For over a decade, Apple has treated touchscreen laptops like some kind of mutant offspring of computers and tablets, a category it had zero interest in. On a 2012 earnings call, Apple’s then-CEO Tim Cook had a memorable response to a question about the growing number of touchscreen Windows laptops coming on the market: “You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.”
“We’re not going to that party,” Cook added.
A number of things have changed since then. Touchscreens have become somewhat normalized as laptop features. About one in every five notebook computers sold has such capabilities, by one estimate. More recently, Cook handed off the Apple CEO baton to John Ternus, a longtime hardware engineering executive who is much more of a product guy than his predecessor.
Clearly, a new touchscreen laptop had to have been in the works long before Apple’s leadership transition. Still, it wouldn’t be a surprise to learn that Ternus’ rising stature within the company had something to do with it. Whoever was behind the decision, the first wave of products from the Ternus administration—the iPhone Duo foldable smartphone, HomeView smart display and now possibly a touchscreen MacBook—seems to be sending the message that Apple is ready to embrace categories it previously ignored. That’s a good thing.
Check out today's episode of TITV in which Akash Pasricha speaks to the CIO of Palo Alto Networks Meera Rajavel about the company’s AI agent security strategy.
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The Information's WTF Summit returns to Napa Valley, bringing together the women shaping tech, media and finance. Confirmed speakers include Whitney Wolfe Herd (Bumble), Anne Wojcicki (23andMe Research Institute), Kim Posnett (Goldman Sachs) and comedian & entrepreneur Whitney Cummings, with more to come. Expect candid conversations and a room built for meaningful exchange. Tickets are selling fast—reserve your spot now.
More detailsJessica Lessin, The Information's Founder & Editor-in-Chief, and Whitt Butler, EY Americas Vice Chair – Consulting, will lead an intimate executive discussion on the latest trends in AI. Request an invite.
More detailsThe Information's Dakin Campbell will host a panel discussion on the evolving landscape of public listings and exit opportunities during SF Tech Week, sponsored by NYSE.
More detailsOpenAI CEO Sam Altman last week told employees about three proposals the industry has discussed for how to safely develop AI, a stark framing that comes just as the Trump administration sets up its first system for policing “superintelligence” developers like OpenAI.
One path involved developing an international organization, similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency, that would enforce safety standards, a scenario Altman appeared to support, said two people with knowledge of the comments. Another option would involve merging all of the AI labs into a single body to develop new AI safely.
Prosecutors allege that the OpenAI employee accused of bugging OpenAI’s office had ties to the Saudi Arabian royal family, according to a Sunday filing from the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco.
The FBI arrested Saudi Arabian national Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, on October 9 after OpenAI ...
The Information is pleased to announce new reporters who will carry on the publication’s rich track record of reporting exclusive news on the most important people and companies in business. They’ll report on OpenAI, Google, Asia and finance.
Jemima McEvoy, OpenAI
Jemima McEvoy is changing roles to take on the OpenAI beat.
In just over a year at The Information writing for the Weekend section, Jemima has proven herself to be a resourceful, industrious and sharp-eyed reporter with a flair for colorful features and a knack for breaking news. Her run of illuminating stories includes profiles of Epstein-linked investor Masha Bucher, Midjourney founder David Holz and ultra-secretive investor Zach Frankel. An adept collaborator, she also co-authored great reads on OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife Anna, Sequoia’s leadership duo and Anthropic “first lady” Cami Clark—not to mention The Information’s inaugural 50 Most Influential People in Tech list. And she has helped deliver scoops on Valar Atomics and Shield AI and deconstructed trends such as the rise of padel.
Jemima joined The Information after five years at Forbes, where she made her bones writing about billionaires and their businesses. She has also interned for CBS News and was editor-in-chief of Washington Square News, the independent student newspaper at her alma mater, New York University.
Ryan Barwick, Google
Ryan Barwick is joining us to cover Google. Ryan comes to us from Axios, where he spent the past year-and-a-half delivering exclusives as a consumer-industry deal reporter for Axios Pro.
Ryan cut his reporting teeth covering advertising technology, giving him a deep understanding of the economic engine that has long powered Google’s core business. Before Axios, he was the senior reporter for Morning Brew’s advertising vertical, where he landed scoops on companies including Meta, Amazon and Twitter as well as Google, and covered the search giant’s battle with regulators. Prior to that, he wrote about the ad industry at Adweek, was a broadcast associate at CBS News and covered the intersection of policy and technology as a fellow at the Center for Public Integrity.
Claudia Chong, AI and Data Centers (Asia)
Claudia is covering the intensifying AI race from Singapore, where both Chinese and U.S. tech companies are staffing up. She also may report on topics including chip smuggling, crypto and anything else she digs up.
Claudia joins us from S-RM, a UK-based risk advisory firm where she specialized in APAC disputes, investigations, and corporate due diligence. Prior to that, she worked on ByteDance’s LLM training operations in Singapore and spent nearly six years as a correspondent at The Business Times, the premier business publication in Southeast Asia, covering venture capital, tech, and private wealth across the region.
Her journalistic work earned her a Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) Media Award for Excellence in 2024 for the investigation into Singapore’s largest money laundering scandal. Beyond training LLMs and conducting due diligence, her skills also extend to M&A, having conducted research that helped with the SPH’s acquisition of the Tech in Asia publication in 2024.
Alex Eichenstein, Tech Capital Markets
We’re excited to announce that Alex Eichenstein is joining the finance team, covering tech capital markets. Alex comes to us from The Deal, where she spent more than two and a half years covering healthcare deals. She regularly broke PE acquisition news while also writing deeper dives on major investing shifts, including how buyout firms’ struggles to find exits for practice rollups fueled a shift toward health tech investments.
We’re excited for Alex to help deepen our finance coverage in her new role, focusing on the fast-evolving debt and equity markets and deals redefining how tech companies fund themselves. Alex is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School and worked as a social media editor at Protocol prior to that.
Tattoos are pretty permanent decisions, and laser removal is often described as more painful than actually getting them in the first place. But what about a design that can only be seen when you want to see it? Engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder are working on a new type of tattoo ink to answer that question. Their dye is specifically concocted to physically alter depending on exposure to visible or ultraviolet (UV) light.
The team described their invention in a study published earlier this month in the journal Matter & Light, and they didn’t only demonstrate the capabilities in the lab on silicone and pig skin. One of its creators, Carson Bruns, has already tattooed himself with the ink.
“[It’s] almost a tradition,” the study co-author recently told Nature.
Bruns, a nanoscientist at UC Boulder, previously developed a now-commercialized tattoo product called “Magic Ink” that turns magenta depending on its exposure to UV light. To highlight its efficacy, Bruns gave himself “solar freckles” as a method to track his exposure to sunlight. In similar fashion, he recently completed a similar session on his leg using the disappearing ink.
The formula currently comes in three colors—yellow, blue, and magenta—and essentially relies on the same principles behind transition lenses and some textiles. Each dye is composed of tiny spheres of acrylic glass. These beads contain photochromes, which are chemical compounds engineered to absorb specific light wavelength photons. In this case, the photochomic dye’s spheres begin in their original color, but then flatten into transparency after absorbing corresponding light photons exposed to UV rays. The dye remains this way until it absorbs visible light photons, which destroys the chemical bond and allows the spheres to return to their original shape.
Aside from the lab tests, Bruns tattooed his own leg over about 12 months using various dye combinations, all of which responded as intended to UV and visible light exposure. The ink also remained effective for over two years—but the team’s intention is go beyond a nifty parlor trick. Future ink iterations may be particularly useful in medical procedures, such as temporary markings to help maintain accuracy during direct radiotherapy sessions. For now, however, the photochromic tattoo dyes remain for laboratory (and Bruns’) use only until further safety assessments are completed.
The post Scientist tattoos himself with disappearing ink appeared first on Popular Science.
Not far from the Black Sea, a child’s grave uncovered in present-day Bulgaria has provided archaeologists a somber look at Roman funerary practices. Flagged in the city of Stara Zagora during a site survey for a new apartment complex and parking garage project, the burial contained stunningly preserved gold earrings as well as a single, small coin known as an antoninianus. But while the currency’s age is traceable to within a year of its minting, the bronze piece may also represent a grieving family’s hopes for their child’s safe passage into the afterlife.
The Roman empire at its height included over 1.9 million square miles of territory, including much of central Europe and central Asia. Rome annexed the region of Thrace in 46 CE, and eventually renamed the city of Stara Zagora as Ulpia Augusta Traiana in honor of Emperor Trajan (98 to 117 CE). Augusta Traiana quickly grew into one of Thrace’s most prominent urban hubs, becoming so prosperous that Rome ultimately granted permission to build its own coin mint during the second and third centuries CE.
Over 1,750 years later, Augusta Traiana’s remnants exist underneath a city once again known as Stara Zagora. Ruins of the Roman empire are regularly unearthed through the town, including the recent discovery of a large cemetery used for nearly three centuries outside Augusta Traiana’s original walls. Among the 135 graves, researchers identified a child buried with a pair of gold earrings and one of Thrace’s bronze coins. Although details about the young individual’s death and identity remain unclear, the coin clearly dates to either 274 or 275 CE. Archaeologists assume the child likely died either around that time period, or soon after.
While researchers may never learn the precise circumstances of the burial, ancient Greek and Roman funerary beliefs suggest the coin served a specific purpose. It’s possible the child’s family intentionally placed the currency with the deceased as payment to Charon, the ferryman who brought souls to the afterlife. Knowing this, it may be that grieving relatives hoped to impart one final gift to their loved one.
The post Roman child’s grave contains coin to pay afterlife entry fee appeared first on Popular Science.
Elon Musk pledged on X to give one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America next year, and will do more such gifts in the future.
According to estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau, about 21.1% of the U.S. population is under 18 years old, which translates to about 73 million children. At ...
DeepSeek is working closely with Huawei Technologies to shape the design of future AI chips, two people familiar with the matter said, in a collaboration that could help China build frontier AI models without Nvidia’s technology.
The relationship goes beyond the kinds of conversations companies have with chip suppliers about their semiconductor road maps. Huawei engineers are incorporating DeepSeek’s requests and suggestions into design decisions, such as how models calculate and move data between processors, for chips that will come out next year and beyond, the people said. To do this work, the Huawei engineers have been stationed at DeepSeek’s offices for an extended period, one of the people said.
Japan launches a ground-breaking mission to the Mars moon Phobos today, and you can watch live.
The JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) MMX (Martian Moons eXploration) mission aims to collect samples from Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two moons, and deliver it back to Earth for analysis. If successful, the samples could help solve long-standing mysteries about Mars’ moons, including their origin.
In 1877, US astronomer Asaph Hall discovered Phobos and its smaller sibling, Deimos. The moons have arguably the most bad-ass names in our solar system: Phobos comes from the ancient Greek word φόβος (phobos), meaning “fear,” and Deimos originates with the ancient Greek word Δεῖμος, which translates to “dread.”
Despite increased attention on Mars in recent decades, astronomers don’t know exactly how the celestial bodies formed. Theories include asteroids or debris leftovers from way back when the solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago.
“The samples from MMX will bring forth paradigm-shifting science on the Mars system for generations to come, especially as NASA prepares to send the first humans to Mars,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator and Science Mission Directorate at NASA, said in a statement. While a JAXA mission, NASA worked with the agency to provide instruments and technologies to assist.
The MMX spacecraft launches on top of an H3 rocket at Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center today at 3:41 p.m. EDT (4:41 a.m. Japan Standard Time on October 20). You can watch it live on JAXA’s YouTube page. The mission will get to Phobos in August 2027 and spend at least 16 months surveying the surface before collecting samples. The samples will not return to Earth until at least 2031.
The post How to watch Japan’s mission to Mars appeared first on Popular Science.
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