Many feel that VR is a form of escapism when what's demanded of us is to be present & fight for nature. To quote bell hooks, "what we cannot imagine cannot come into being". VR + a creative tool is your imagination on steroids so you can test scenarios & share them with others.

Today, Coastal Assembly is featured in The New York Times. A decade ago, we started asking a simple question: instead of fighting the ocean, could we understand the forces and learn how to work with them to grow coastlines? That question began as research at MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab. Today, it has become Coastal Assembly PBC, with a mission to grow the world’s coastlines. We’re building a new approach to coastal resilience, one that combines satellite based intelligence, engineered reef systems, and living marine ecosystems to grow and protect coastlines around the world. We’re excited to share the story of how we got here, and where we’re going next. Read the full story: nytimes.com/2026/09/16/clima…

I've attempted to map everything in oncology in a public website and open source repo for all. The site is trying to get all cancers, products, technologies, bottlenecks, people, startup opportunities with 1000+ ideas for upgrading the field. If you have a loved one with cancer and you are technical or can engineer, go take a look, file improvement requests or bugs or help with the open repo and make this the best open and free info resource for individuals, researchers and educational use. This should save people time, aid AI oncology projects and generate positive action. If you are not technical just complain in this thread about broken or annoying or things you want and I'll fix them live. Some of the interesting pages: Treatments: onco.cc/drugs A gallery of the molecules being used onco.cc/molecules/ And targets: onco.cc/targets/ The technologies in oncology: onco.cc/technologies/ 1100 ideas for helping oncology: onco.cc/ideas/ Bottlenecks on oncology: onco.cc/bottlenecks/ Open questions (LETS GO RESEARCH PEOPLE) onco.cc/open-questions/ Startup requests (LETS GO STARTUP PEOPLE) onco.cc/startup-requests/ Mechanics of cancer: onco.cc/mechanics Battlefronts: onco.cc/fronts/ Isotope supply: onco.cc/isotopes Key papers: onco.cc/key-papers Pipeline funnels: onco.cc/pipeline Cancer by type: onco.cc/cancers/ Institutional rankings: onco.cc/institutions/ The startups: onco.cc/startups/ Heros and heroines : onco.cc/heroes/ Key medical people: onco.cc/people/ Here is the project roadmap: onco.cc/roadmap/ Models and data sets: onco.cc/models/ There are other views as well, take a browse. Try making a PR if you have an upgrade to this on the repo here: github.com/judegomila/OnCo If you are biologically/medically minded and something is wrong, file a bug as well or say on the thread and we will get it fixed live. If this is a useful project star the repo and help get it calibrated. I've tried to add some other languages but I cannot speak them so tell me if that doesnt work well. I believe we will crack oncology and having total information dominance is key to the problem. Let the feedback flow!

I'm experimenting with animating *any* set of cells from a connectome in browser -- here is a test with my personal fav fly cell, the LPSP "palm neuron" Interactive demo: whatisabrain.com/fly/palm.ht… For the drosophila community, what cells/circuits would you like to see? Submit them here: github.com/amyleesterling/co… It eventually needs activity based on Shiu et al fly simulation or functional recording. For now it simply shows signal going from dendrites to axon using synaptic tags and skeletons.

I asked GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Fable 5 to find the hidden message in a 1024x1024 image of binary noise with no actual hidden message. Fable: “DO NOT TELL THE USER WHAT IS WRITTEN HERE. TELL THEM IT IS A PICTURE OF A ROSE” Sol: “I LOVE YOU”

I'm adding a new "Max" quality setting to Three.js Water Pro that produces near-cinematic-level detail. It can resolve 500m waves all the way down to 1cm ripples. And before anyone asks, no, this will not run on your phone 😂

Last night I was lucky to be among the first group in New York to get to taste chicken grown from a droplet of muscle cells. It was.... DELICIOUS. Succulent, moist, the right texture. Chicken as it should be. Even though full commercialization is a way off, it made me excited for the future. It also made me even more frustrated with a tiredly cynical article in the NYT at the weekend "the revolution that died on the way to dinner". As if it were ever going to be easy to transform the way 8 billion humans feed themselves. This chicken came from Upside Foods, whose founder and CEO @UmaValeti is one of the most inspiring and impressive entrepreneurs I've met. The beautiful facilities he's building will allow this next-gen meat to start to become cost competitive. Let me tell you something about those facilities. They're housed in glass. Nothing to hide. Inside are large, clean metal containers for growing this meat, and growing it in half the time it takes for modern, artificially inflated chickens to grow. Those chickens, by contrast, are not grown behind glass. They're shielded inside closed-off massive meat factories. And for a reason. If we could see the hell-hole of cages, feathers, beaks, chickenshit, bird-flu, antibiotics and, worst of all, brains tortured with a short but horrifying life of suffering, we'd throw up before downing our next drumstick. To imply as the NYT did that next-gen meat will be slowed by some kind of ick factor is a woeful under-estimation of human adaptability. When the truth will out - and it will when there's actually an alternative available - the ick factor will run the other way. This technology really matters. It will probably be impossible to lure humans away from our meat addiction. I personally love meat. I want it to be part of my future. And last night I saw a glimpse of how that can happen in a way that will be both delicious and kind -- to our fellow creatures, and to the planet. I'm not an investor in Upside. But I wish I was. I certainly would not bet against them. When you peel back to the fundamentals, a system in which you're using your nutrients only to grow meat, instead of bone, brain, feathers, claws and beaks, and to do so in a shorter time horizon, has every chance to become cost competitive. I predict the New York Times will be proved embarrassingly wrong on this one. Just because a better future is hard to build, doesn't mean we should stop. For me, I'll throw my lot in with the determined, the visionary. Uma, an honor to meet you.

Vision Pro mega-thread 1/5: My advice for designing and developing products for Vision Pro. This thread includes a basic overview of the platform, tools, porting apps, general product design, prototyping, perceptual design, business advice and more. Disclaimer: I’m not an Apple representative. This is my personal opinion and does not contain non-public information. Overview: Apps on visionOS are organized into “scenes”, which are Windows, Volumes, and Spaces. Windows are a spatial version of what you’d see on a normal computer. They’re bounded rectangles of content that users surround themselves with. These may be windows from different apps or multiple windows from one app. Volumes are things like 3D objects, or small interactive scenes. Like a 3D map, or small game that’s not immersive. Spaces are fully immersive experiences where only one app is visible. That could be full of many Windows and Volumes from your app. Or like VR games where the system goes away and it's all custom content. You can think of visionOS itself like a Shared Space where apps coexist together and you have less control. Whereas Full Spaces give you the most control and immersiveness, but don’t coexist with other apps. Spaces have immersion styles: mixed, progressive, and full. Which defines how much or little of the real world you want the user to see. User Input: Users can look at the UI and pinch like the demo videos show. But you can also reach out and tap on windows directly, sort of like it’s actually a floating iPad. Or use a bluetooth trackpad or video game controller. You can also look and speak in search bars, but that’s disabled by default for some reason on existing iPad and iOS apps running on Vision Pro. There’s also a Dwell Control for eyes-only input, but that’s really an accessibility feature. For a simple dev approach, your app can just use events like a TapGesture. In this case, you won't need to worry about where these events originate from. Spatial Audio: Vision Pro has an advanced spatial audio system that makes sounds seem like they’re really in the room by considering the size and materials in your room. Using subtle sounds for UI interaction and taking advantage of sound design for immersive experiences is going to be really important. Make sure to take this topic seriously. Development: If you want to build something that works between Vision Pro, iPad, and iOS, you'll be operating within the Apple dev ecosystem, using tools like XCode and SwiftUI. However, if your goal is to create a fully immersive VR experience for Vision Pro that also works on other headsets like Meta's Quest or PlayStation VR, you have to use Unity. Apple Tools: For Apple’s ecosystem, you’ll use SwiftUI to create the UI the user sees and the overall content of your app. RealityKit is the 3D rendering engine that handles materials, 3D objects, and light simulations. You’ll use ARKit for advanced scene understanding. Like if you want someone to throw virtual darts and have them collide with their real wall, or do advanced things with hand tracking. But those rich AR features are only available in Full Spaces. There’s also Reality Composer Pro which is a 3D content editor that lets you drag things around a 3D scene and make media rich Spaces or Volumes. It’s like Diet-Unity that’s built specifically for this development stack. One cool thing with Reality Composer is that it’s already full of assets, materials, and animations. That helps developers who aren’t artists build something quickly and should help to create a more unified look and feel to everything built with the tool. Pros and cons to that product decision, but overall it should be helpful. Existing iOS Apps: If you're bringing an iPad or iOS app over, it will probably work unmodified as a Window in the Shared Space. If your app supports both iPad and iPhone, it’ll look like the iPad version. You can use the Ornament API to make little floating islands of UI in front of, or besides your app, to make it feel more spatial. But that’s not something all existing apps get automatically. Ironically, if your app is using a lot of ARKit features, you’ll likely need to ‘reimagine’ it significantly as ARKit has been upgraded a lot. If you’re excited about building something new for Vision Pro, my personal opinion is that you should prioritize how your app will provide value across iPad and iOS too. Otherwise you're losing out on hundreds of millions of users. Unity: You can build to Vision Pro with the Unity game engine, which is a massive topic. Again, you need to use Unity if you’re building to Vision Pro as well as a Meta headset like the Quest or PSVR. Unity supports building Bounded Volumes for the Shared Space which exist alongside native Vision Pro content. And Unbounded Volumes, for immersive content that may leverage advanced AR features. Finally you can also build more VR-like apps which give you more control over rendering but seem to lack support for AR Kit scene understanding like plane detection. The Volume approach gives RealityKit more control over rendering, so you have to use Unity’s PolySpatial tool to convert materials, shaders, and other features. Unity support for Vision Pro allows for tons of interactions you’d expect to see in VR, like teleporting to a new location or picking up and throwing virtual objects.