Monthly Archives: June 2026

Sex and Canadian physics (the Epstein files come to Canada) + Noam Chomsky and his Epstein connection (long read)

Leave a reply

I’m starting this with the revelation (covered extensively on various sites) that Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics’ founding member (Lee Smolin) had ties to Jeffrey Epstein (convicted sex offender and very wealthy man). It was the second part of this posting, the Noam Chomsky portion that proved a bit of a challenge for me. Chomsky’s ideas helped me to see the world differently. I never studies his work formally or met the man. Most recently, I posted this announcement “CHOM5KY vs CHOMSKY, a VR (virtual reality) conversation about AI, opens in Montreal (Canada) from Sept 6 – Oct. 1, 2023,” see my August 14, 2023 posting. There’s also a rather old (1992) National Film Board of Canada documentary about his work.”Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media.” It seems I’m not the only Canadian taken with Chomsky’s work.

Onto the stories.

Wisdom from our elders

“Be careful who you’re friends with” was a piece of advice my parents reiterated occasionally and in various forms throughout my childhood. That piece of advice came back to me in light of how many people had contact with Epstein and oftentimes, far more contact than they had admitted to prior to the document release.

Epstein had an extraordinary circle of contacts. Lee Smolin (Wikipedia entry), physicist and founding member of Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) was one in Epstein’s collection of scientists among other international luminaries such as the previously mentioned, Noam Chomsky.

A February 12, 2026 article by Zach Dubinsky, Aloysius Wong, and Jordan Pearson (with files from Naël Shiab and Andrew Ryan) for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) news online website details Smolin’s current predicament, Note: Links have been removed,

A highly regarded theoretical physicist is stepping away from the Ontario institute he helped found, after his ties to the late American sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were revealed in recently released files.

Lee Smolin, an American Canadian professor of physics and philosophy, has “agreed to pause his working relationship” with the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont., according to an email on Thursday [February 12, 2026] from Perimeter’s executive director, Marcela Carena. 

Smolin was a founding faculty member of the independent research centre, which is known around the world for pioneering work in quantum theory and got much of its initial funding from BlackBerry co-founder Mike Lazaridis. 

Smolin was working at the Perimeter Institute part time and also has academic appointments at the University of Waterloo and University of Toronto. 

His correspondence with Epstein was part of more than three million new pages of files released by the U.S. Department of Justice on Jan. 30 [2026]. 

Nothing CBC News has seen suggests Smolin did anything illegal or participated in any of Epstein’s illicit activities, and appearing in the files is not an indication in itself of any wrongdoing. However, questions have emerged after the documents revealed his relationship with the financier continued for years after Epstein’s conviction for sex offences. 

The files show that Smolin continued to correspond with Epstein, and the two made repeated efforts to talk by phone and meet up, until at least 2013 [emphases mine] — five years after the latter pleaded guilty in Florida to state charges of soliciting prostitution from a minor and another criminal count. The paper trail appears to contradict Smolin’s own account of his relationship with Epstein.

…

Files appear to belie Smolin’s account

On Thursday [February 12, 2026] afternoon, in response to questions from CBC News, Perimeter Institute executive director Marcela Carena said in an email, “At Perimeter’s request, Prof. Smolin has agreed to pause his working relationship with us as we undertake a careful review of the situation, and we will address this matter accordingly.”

Smolin is one of many accomplished scientists who received research grants from Epstein over the years. He told the Globe and Mail in November 2025 that the funding ran from around 1999 to 2001, five years before Epstein was first criminally charged.

He also reportedly told the Globe he could not recall the exact date of their last communication, but mentioned crossing paths with him at a TED conference in 2003. 

Previously, Smolin told the Verge in 2019 that he had “not seen Mr. Epstein since a scientific conference in 2007, and I’ve had no contact with him since 2008″ — the year Epstein pleaded guilty to two sex crimes [emphasis mine]. Earlier this week, he told the Waterloo Record, “My entire relationship with Epstein preceded my moving to Canada and beginning my position with pi [Perimeter Institute] in 2001.” 

The latest Epstein files appear to contradict these timelines, however, with emails found by CBC News suggesting that contact between Epstein and Smolin lasted until at least 2013. 

Smolin calls Epstein a friend in messages

…

Smolin wrote a message in Epstein’s 50th birthday book that included a photo of himself and another with his colleagues, as well as some diagrams he has said were part of his research at the time. The book became a hot topic last year when it was revealed that it appeared to include a suggestive message from Donald Trump.

Smolin is not the only academic to get caught up in the Epstein scandals.

Epstein & academics

Joi Ito\s story is fascinating as one of the earliest in the world of academe to be tainted by his association with Jeffrey Epstein. Ito, then director of MIT’s (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Media Lab issued an apology for his association with Epstein.From Ito’s August 15, 2019 posting on https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/my-apology-regarding-jeffrey-epstein/.

I’m sure that most, if not all of you, have seen recent news stories about Jeffrey Epstein, and I owe it to you to address my prior affiliation with him.

I met Epstein in 2013 at a conference through a trusted business friend and, in my fundraising efforts for MIT Media Lab, I invited him to the Lab and visited several of his residences. I want you to know that in all of my interactions with Epstein, I was never involved in, never heard him talk about, and never saw any evidence of the horrific acts that he was accused of.

That said, I take full responsibility for my error in judgment. I am deeply sorry to the survivors, to the Media Lab, and to the MIT community for bringing such a person into our network.

Regrettably, over the years, the Lab has received money through some of the foundations that he controlled. I knew about these gifts and these funds were received with my permission. I also allowed him to invest in several of my funds which invest in tech startup companies outside of MIT.

I vow to raise an amount equivalent to the donations the Media Lab received from Epstein and will direct those funds to non-profits that focus on supporting survivors of trafficking. I will also return the money that Epstein has invested in my investment funds.

Again, I apologize to you, my friends and colleagues, and most importantly to the survivors.

If you have questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to me directly.

– Joi

In September 2019, Ito resigned from his position as director of MIT’s Media Lab. By the way, Mr. Ito is doing just fine. These days he’s the president of Chiba Institute of Technology. You can find out more about Ito and about the Epstein entanglement (which proved to be quite extensive) in Ito’s Wikipedia entry.

Money makes the academic world go around

Alan Blinder’s February 16, 2026 article for the New York Times “Epstein’s Ties With Academics Show the Seedy Side of College Fund-Raising”

Their buildings can be architectural wonders. The discoveries made in their laboratories can be spellbinding and lifesaving.

But America’s colleges and universities are chronically searching for money, a reality that brought academic leaders and researchers into both Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit and his inbox. The schools had the prestige to lend him legitimacy. Mr. Epstein had the money to bankroll projects.

It worked well for some, until it didn’t.

Mr. Epstein, who in 2019 died by suicide in the jail where he was being held on sex trafficking charges, gave money, or simply dangled the prospect of it, before people on a range of campuses, including Harvard, M.I.T., Stanford, Bard College and Columbia.

…

Many academics whose names appear within the Epstein files say they turned to him only because of his money and the possibility that it could underwrite college budgets and research efforts — even if their exchanges came after Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a minor.

…

Mr. Epstein’s motives for connecting with college professors and presidents were not always clear [emphasis mine]. He gathered celebrities and power brokers into his network; a Harvard professor who benefited from the Epstein largess once noted that the financier also collected scientists [emphasis mine].

Mr. Epstein rarely followed through with the multimillion-dollar contributions [emphasis mine] he suggested were on offer, but he drew people in and appeared attentive to academia’s unending quest to pay its bills. Private philanthropy has long been an essential part of higher education’s business model, and some college presidents say they spend at least a quarter of their time fund-raising.

Much of the money that is collected goes toward endowments. Although the most recent federal data shows American colleges and universities collectively have more than $927 billion across their endowments, many of those funds have severe restrictions, limiting how they may be used and leaving academia more financially squeezed than the headline figure suggests. That is one reason researchers jockey ferociously for grant money and other gifts.

But reliance on private money, industry officials say, leaves schools vulnerable to soliciting or accepting contributions from sources that might be unsavory.

…

Mr. Botstein [Leon Botstein, president, Bard College] said in 2023 that Mr. Epstein “enjoyed humiliating and dangling prospects” and had “absolutely strung me along.” Others have wondered whether he luxuriated in conversations with some of the world’s brightest minds. Many also believe that Mr. Epstein sought to leverage academia’s reputation to clean up his own. [emphases mine]

For example, a Harvard professor, whose program received millions from Mr. Epstein, greenlit proposals made by the financier’s publicist to feature Mr. Epstein on a university website. In a report Harvard issued in 2020, the university said the requests “appeared to be part of a larger effort to rehabilitate” Mr. Epstein’s image. (The university also noted that Mr. Epstein’s foundation’s website overstated its gifts to Harvard by tens of millions of dollars.)

,,,

Crime, complicity, and guilt (Epstein and Chomsky)

It was shock and disillusionment (for me and, I imagine, others) that Noam Chomsky had become associated with Jeffrey Epstein in any fashion whatsoever. In a February 11, 2026 article by the Associated Press and found on the US broadcast network’s NBC news site, Valeria Chomsky (wife) responds to the outcry, Note:A link has been removed,

Noam Chomsky’s wife is acknowledging “serious errors in judgment” in the wake of new revelations about the couple’s ties to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Valeria Chomsky also says she and her husband never witnessed any inappropriate behavior.

“Noam and I recognize the gravity of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and the profound suffering of his victims,” Valeria Chomsky wrote in a statement she shared this week with The Associated Press. “Nothing in this statement is intended to minimize that suffering, and we express our unrestricted solidarity with the victims.”

The friendship between Epstein and Noam Chomsky, the influential activist and pioneering linguist, has been known for several years. But the latest release of documents by the Justice Department show a more extensive relationship than previously reported on and includes a memo suggesting that Chomsky was advising Epstein on how to rehabilitate his public image.

Admirers of Chomsky, a longtime critic of the U.S. political and media establishment, have expressed revulsion. Vijay Prashad, who has written books on Cuba and the Middle East with Chomsky, released a letter last week saying he was “disgusted by Epstein’s pedophilia, and so by Noam’s friendship with him.”

In her public statement, Valeria Chomsky notes that she was speaking for herself and for her husband, who is 97 and “confronting significant health challenges” since he suffered a stroke in 2023. She writes that they were naive and uninformed, and cites Noam Chomsky’s “overly trusting nature” as a reason for their “serious errors in judgment.”

According to Valeria Chomsky, the two first met Epstein in 2015, and were unaware at the time of his 2008 jail term for soliciting prostitution from an underage girl. By 2015, the accusations against Epstein had been the subject of hundreds of news articles, many of which detailed allegations that he had paid dozens of underage girls for sex.

“When we were introduced to Epstein, he presented himself as a philanthropist supporting science and a financial expert,” she wrote. “By presenting himself this way, Epstein gained Noam’s attention, and they began corresponding. Unknowingly, we opened a door to a Trojan horse.”

Valeria Chomsky goes on to recall that “Epstein began to encircle Noam, sending gifts and creating opportunities for interesting discussions in areas Noam has been working on extensively. We regret that we did not perceive this as a strategy to ensnare us and to try to undermine the causes Noam stands for.”

…

Valeria Chomsky’s portrayal of the relationship her now ailing husband had with Epstein allows the reader to sympathize and, perhaps, empathize with Noam Chomsky. It’s hard no to. Who hasn’t make an error in judgment? Trusted the wrong person? Parental advice to the contrary.

One last note about Valeria Chomsky’s response, it looks to me as if she’s putting most of the blame on onto her husband. (You can read the full text of Valeria Chomksy’s February 7, 2026 apology here in this PDF on starscholar.org. It’s subtle and consistent throughout. In her version, Noam Chomsky is the one actively emailing with Epstein; all she does is go to lunch and attend some events with them.)

In any event, the problem is that Jeffrey Epstein was a convicted sex offender by the time Noam Chomsky met him and it stretches credulity a little bit that they were wholly unaware but one can give them the benefit of the doubt. To give some idea of why it’s a little hard to believe, here’s more from Noam Chomsky’s Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,

Avram Noam Chomsky[a] (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism [emphasis mine]. Sometimes called “the father of modern linguistics”,[b] Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) [emphasis mine]. Among the most cited living authors, Chomsky has written more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics [emphasis mine]. In addition to his work in linguistics, since the 1960s, Chomsky has been an influential voice on the American left as a consistent critic [emphasis mine] of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, and corporate influence on political institutions and the media [emphasis mine].

…

Did Chomsky and his wife miss reading about Joi Ito, a colleague at MIT? Possibly, I too sometimes miss the obvious. It’s what comes later that is disturbing.

Jonathan de Noche / reddit.com wrote a February 14, 2026 article for filmsforaction.org that explores and dissects the situation, “The Patriarch in Winter: Grief, Complicity, and the Unraveling of Noam Chomsky’s Final Years.” First, de Noche illustrates Chomsky’s philosophy,

In Pirates and Emperors, Noam Chomsky retells the story from St. Augustine’s City of God in which a pirate, captured by Alexander the Great, is asked how he dares to molest the sea. “How dare you molest the whole world?” the pirate replies. “Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an Emperor.”

For nearly half a century, that parable anchored one of Chomsky’s central moral arguments: that the crimes of the powerful often mirror, in moral structure, the crimes of the marginal, but are vastly greater in scale, and that prestige, scale, and institutional cover render the former invisible while the latter are prosecuted with theatrical outrage. The argument applies to state terrorism, imperial war, capitalist exploitation and ecocide.

Chomsky has insisted, repeatedly, that most people in the Global North are participants in these systems—that our friendships, professional alliances, tax payments, consumption patterns, acceptance and admiration for wealthy elites and celebrities make us complicit in violence that dwarfs, in scope, the intimate horror of any individual predator.

This means that Chomsky’s logic of complicity applies not only to the powerful but also to the householder—the ordinary participant in a materialistic society, who is not immune to the lure of status, comfort, and access. That is the deeper vulnerability of someone like Chomsky: not lack of moral backbone, but the very ordinariness of his attachments. His life was not that of a renunciant monk but of a householder embedded in the “dusty life” of family, wife, children, academic prestige, investments, middle‑class comfort, social and other entanglements, which made him susceptible to the very gifts Epstein could offer— especially, as we will see, when he married a socially ambitious much younger woman at 85.

The recent release of millions of pages of Epstein documents by the U.S. Department of Justice has exposed a relationship between Chomsky and Jeffrey Epstein far more intimate, sustained, and materially entangled than anyone had previously acknowledged.

The revelations are damning. But if we accept Chomsky’s own argument about the diffuse complicity that sustains imperial violence, capitalist exploitation, and environmental destruction—if we accept that most of us maintain cordial relationships with people embedded in systems that kill and cause suffering on a vastly larger scale—then the great moral outrage clustering around one elderly intellectual’s friendship with a charming predatory financier begins to look less like a principled reckoning and more like the phenomenon he spent his life describing: selective indignation that focuses on the sexualized crimes of the elite, while the more legitimized structural, legal, and economic crimes they commit or enable remains largely invisible.

…

The intensity of outrage directed at Epstein’s sexual predation operates within a familiar pattern: the crimes that are socially and politically sanctioned—imperial war, neoliberal dispossession, financialized exploitation, ecocide—are treated as nearly inevitable, while the crimes that are intimate and sexualized are treated as scandalous betrayals. The result is a pattern Chomsky himself described in Pirates and Emperors: the “putrid” press treatment of predators like Epstein becomes the scandal, while the far larger systems of killing and exploitation they sit within remain largely unchallenged as structures of everyday life.

That does not excuse Chomsky’s behavior. It complicates the terms of judgment. And it makes the story that follows—of grief, aging, mortality, manipulation, and a second wife who reshaped every dimension of Chomsky’s late life—all the more important to tell clearly.

…

de Noche’s February 14, 2026 article lays the foundation for a story that takes a few twists and turns,

…

For six decades, the facts of Chomsky’s private life were, by the standards of an upper middle class professor, monotonously virtuous. He wore simple clothes, lived modestly, gave away book royalties, answered anybody’s e-mails, gave countless interviews, talks, and Q&As, and shared every dimension of his existence with Carol Chomsky, his partner since childhood and his wife since 1949. He was a workaholic who had to be reminded to eat. His authority derived not only from revolutionary linguistics and relentless political dissent but from a perceived incorruptibility—an intellectual life organized around the exposure of power’s lies, not the enjoyment of its comforts.

Carol died of cancer on December 19, 2008. She was 78; Noam was 80. Those close to the couple noted an immediate change. Norman Finkelstein, a longtime friend, stopped spending time with Chomsky after Carol’s death, saying “things felt different.” The filmmaker Michel Gondry captured a moment in which the mere mention of Carol’s name caused Chomsky to visibly unravel on camera. Researchers on late‑life spousal bereavement describe what happened to him in clinical terms: identity disruption, social withdrawal, heightened vulnerability to outside influence—especially when the survivor lacks strong alternative support networks.

…

Stray thought: Was Carol perhaps important to Chomsky’s intellectual work in a way that de Noche’s article doesn’t suggest? Some partnerships are more than the sum parts of the two people; the difference after the marriage to Valeria is striking. That said, trying to analyze people’s relationships can be complex and my stray thought is meant to be additive rather than a contradiction of de Noche’s perspective on the first and second marriages.

Now for Valeria’s entrance and the twist, from de Noche’s February 14, 2026 article,

…

Five years after Carol’s death, at 85, Chomsky married Valeria Wasserman, a 50-year-old Brazilian woman (35 years his junior). Where Carol had been the household’s practical anchor—fixing cars, managing schedules, pulling Noam away from conversations he was too generous to end—Valeria was socially ambitious, enthusiastic about elite company, and drawn to the world of status, luxury, and access that Chomsky’s politics had long held in contempt.

It’s reasonable to infer that providing and indulging in this lifestyle was something that Chomsky knew was the “price” that had to be paid in exchange for what was a kind of social and emotional luxury as a very elderly man nearing death—a younger partner to love, an “unexpected, wondrous gift that fell into my arms,” as he called her, who offered not just companionship that would lift him from his grief, but visibility, status, and a life far more expansive than the modest routine he had long inhabited.

In interviews from this period he put it bluntly: “life without love is a pretty empty affair,” and by then “love” meant precisely this late‑life marriage, i.e. romantic love. That conviction was a major motive behind the choices that followed.

There is even a phallic joke from Epstein—“At your age, if anything sticks up, be proud,” to which Chomsky replies, “Ouch,” and Epstein answers, “Good, it still has feelings as well”—explicitly about Chomsky’s penis. In the context of a man in his late 80s with a much younger wife, and a relationship with Epstein built around travel, luxury, and stimulation, it is hard not to hear this as part of a pattern in which Epstein offers not only money and access but a teasing reassurance of virility and appeal, the kind of compensatory “luxury” that helps sustain a late‑life relationship shaped by structural sexual asymmetry.

In this arrangement, all three parties—Chomsky, Valeria, and Epstein—were adding value to gain value from the others: Chomsky offered prestige, financial support and intellectual heft, Valeria offered the company, intimacy, and social‑life presence of a younger woman, and Epstein offered money, charm, luxury, and elite connection. Each in turn was willing to give up something they otherwise might have guarded: for Chomsky, the more modest, relatively self‑contained life he had long inhabited; for Valeria, the possibility of a younger, lower‑status partner; for Epstein, the time and resources required to sustain a relationship that lent his image a veneer of intellectual legitimacy.

Over time, this arrangement reshaped the household’s emotional and financial landscape. The resulting change was striking and rapid. The emails released in January 2026 make clear that it was Valeria, far more than Noam, who drove the deepening relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. She described Epstein as “our best friend. I mean ‘the’ one.” She wrote to him: “You are a hero, Jeffrey!!!” She was the one who forwarded private family correspondence to Epstein, who primarily solicited his advice on financial and legal matters, and who treated him as a personal consigliere on questions ranging from trust restructuring to social connections.

The luxury gifts flowed through Valeria’s orbit: cashmere sweaters, Carnegie Deli hampers, private car services, stays in Epstein’s Manhattan and Paris apartments, expensive hotels, lunches at his New Mexico ranch. In a 2016 email, Chomsky himself wrote that “Valeria is always eager about New York” and that he was “genuinely fantasizing about the Caribbean island”. For a man who had spent his life in campus offices and far more modest homes, this was a different world entirely, and it was Valeria who had opened the door to it.

…

Another twist, from de Noche’s February 14, 2026 article,

…

The most consequential dimension of Valeria’s influence was financial. Chomsky and Carol had established trusts for their three children and grandchildren, structured on the assumption that Carol would outlive Noam. When that assumption proved wrong and Noam remarried, the family’s financial architecture became a source of escalating conflict.

Chomsky’s children noticed what they called a “dramatic and unexplainable” increase in his spending after the 2014 marriage. “This unexpected outflow is placing your financial future at risk,” they warned. They objected strenuously to Valeria and Noam’s plan to place Epstein’s personal accountant, Richard Kahn—who would later be named co‑executor of Epstein’s own estate and bequeathed $25 million in Epstein’s will—on the board of the Chomsky family trust. Kahn was not just a financial advisor; he was Epstein’s gatekeeper, and his placement on the trust’s board concentrated Epstein‑aligned control over the Chomsky estate.

In July 2017, the three children wrote a joint letter begging for a mediated meeting. Chomsky, now in his late eighties and emotionally dependent on Valeria, sided with his wife. He characterized his children as caring more about money than his quality of life, arguing that they didn’t need the money. The dispute was, he wrote, a “painful cloud that I never would have imagined would darken my late years.”

Valeria went further, dismissing the children’s warnings as “abusive and unacceptable” and accusing them of behaving “like Nazis”—a remark that, from the wife of a Jewish intellectual whose life’s work was shaped by the legacy of fascism, underscores how completely her own worldview had come to dominate the household.

Socially ambitious and financially savvy, Valeria had become the main conduit between the Chomsky family and Epstein’s financial and legal team, overseeing the restructuring of trusts and inheritance arrangements that increasingly favored her.

Throughout this rupture, Valeria and Noam forwarded private family correspondence to Epstein, who advised them at every turn. In one of his last known messages on the subject, Epstein wrote: “I wanted the release to acknowledge that they are aware that you’ve decided to leave your entire estate to Valeria.” By the time the dispute was resolved, the family trusts had been restructured to Valeria’s decisive advantage, and Chomsky’s children had been marginalized from the financial arrangements their mother had helped to build.

…

de Noche’s February 14, 2026 article documents still another twist, which takes place just before a turn,

Perhaps nothing reveals Valeria’s priorities more starkly than her attempt, in November 2016, to use Epstein as a conduit to Donald Trump. Days after Trump’s election, Epstein emailed Valeria with the message: “we called it.” She replied affirmatively, claiming she had predicted Trump’s rise before the primaries. Then she reminded Epstein that he had previously asked whom she would like Noam to speak with. “Here is a guy!” she wrote. “Can you arrange it? He could make good use of Noam’s advices.”

Nothing in the public record suggests Valeria ever asked Chomsky whether he actually wanted to meet Trump. Chomsky is a man who had spent decades arguing that “speaking truth to power makes no sense” because “the powerful already know the truth”. Valeria treated Epstein as a broker of access and visibility, regardless of whether any of it aligned with the politics her husband had spent a lifetime articulating. What mattered to her was the connection itself.

Now for the turn and this is where protestations of innocence become impossible to believe, from de Noche’s February 14, 2026 article,

…

On February 23, 2019—weeks after the Miami Herald published Julie Brown’s exposé documenting at least 36 allegations of Epstein’s sex trafficking of underage girls—Epstein wrote to Chomsky asking for advice on managing his “putrid” press coverage. When Chomsky replied he condemned “the horrible way in which you are being treated by the press and society” and advised Epstein to ignore the coverage, drawing an analogy to his own experience enduring “hysterical accusations.” He then added: “That’s particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder.”

While the ‘presumption of guilt’ perspective certainly described widespread tendencies within the MeToo movement, Chomsky failed to apply the ‘presumption of uncertainty’—the moral standard that the law tries to achieve when it balances the presumption of innocence against the natural human bias toward presumption of guilt.

The bias toward siding with the accused in a private communication between friends is, of course, very common. What percentage of people wouldn’t privately tell a friend under such fire things like “I’m sorry you’re going through this; it’s better if you do X (e.g. just ignore it)”? Especially if that friend charmed them with their personality and was treating them to dinners, travel, fancy hotels and elite access. Chomsky’s advice is morally troubling not because it is uniquely immoral but because it is a particularly visible instance of a reflex many of us share—and one that becomes a scandal only when the person on the receiving end is a world‑famous critic of power.

Here, Chomsky’s logic of complicity reasserts itself, and simple condemnation becomes insufficient.

…

This disparity shows that what they [corporate media outlets] object to is less his relationship with Epstein than his long‑standing political critique of state power, empire, and plutocracy, and that the Epstein episode is being weaponized to undermine his intellectual authority rather than to grapple honestly with the moral complexity of the case.

…

None of the above unambiguously erases Chomsky’s responsibility. But his late‑life choices cannot be understood without acknowledging the context of vulnerability in which they were made. To recap, he was widowed at 80 after a 60‑year marriage to his childhood companion, then remarried at 85 (nearing death) to a much younger woman who became his sole source of companionship, social life, and emotional support. Research on bereaved older adults consistently shows that such circumstances increase susceptibility to isolation, dependence, and the risk of undue influence.

Chomsky’s vulnerability was not only emotional and social but also material. He was not a renunciant monk who had renounced worldly comforts, but a householder whose life still depended on the very things Epstein could enhance—material comforts, access, and social stimulation, especially at death’s door. That made him more susceptible to manipulation and self‑indulgence, but it also makes his moral failure more recognizable, because it is the failure of the ordinary participant in a materialistic society, not the saint who falls from grace.

Valeria (exculpating herself) has invoked this framework, describing Epstein as a “Trojan horse” who “ensnared” them through flattery, intellectual access, and financial‑lifestyle incentives. In elder‑care law, undue‑influence doctrine treats as potentially exploitative any arrangement in which an older person—even one not fully incapacitated—is steered into decisions that primarily benefit a manipulative confidant. The installation of Epstein’s accountant on the family trust, the marginalization of Chomsky’s children, and the redirection of the entire estate to Valeria look, by that standard, less like a fair family arrangement than a pattern of targeted influence on a vulnerable elder.

But vulnerability is not necessarily exculpation. Commentaries and interviews from this period confirm that Chomsky remained linguistically and politically sharp well into his nineties—still publishing, still debating, still capable of correcting Epstein’s sloppy political reasoning in emails and of arguing in detail over estate arrangements with his children. His vulnerability was emotional and social—grief, loneliness, mortality salience, dependence on Valeria—not primarily cognitive. He seemed to have retained enough agency to recognize what Epstein was and to withdraw—but did not. …

So, there’s an expose of Epstein that Chomsky and his wife fail to read? How did they miss information about the 2008 conviction?

I recommend reading de Noche’s February 14, 2026 article in its entirety. His conclusion is a little different than mine. He suggests that Chomsky’s ‘lapse’ is a “… jarring, morally discordant coda … ,” not something that should lead to discounting his life’s work while still holding Chomsky accountable for his failings.

For me, this ‘episode’ casts a shadow on Noam Chomsky’s work and legacy but I do agree with de Noche that this moral failing doesn’t entirely negate his life’s work. Although, getting back to Carol, maybe she deserves a little more credit for Noam’s intellectual output than she has received.

Tell Me What Company You Keep, and I Will Tell You What You Are

“Tell Me What Company You Keep, and I Will Tell You What You Are” could be considered a corollary, the consequence as it were, to the hint in the warning “Be careful who you’re friends with.”

It appears that Lee Smolin, Noam Chomsky, and many, many others in the academic and scientific communities either didn’t know or forgot any words of wisdom regarding friends and the company you keep. Perhaps they didn’t care; Jessica Kutz’s February 24, 2026 The 19th article published on Salon.com offers some eye-opening quotes from scientists in the Epstein files, Note: Links have been removed,

In 2018, an elite group of academics and scientists planned to gather for an exclusive retreat at a luxury farm in the woods of Connecticut. The guests had been hand-picked by prominent New York literary agent John Brockman, who frequently hosted similar salons for luminaries in science, technology and media.

The problem? Brockman had included two women on the list, and his staunch supporter and biggest funder wanted them out.

“John, the old conferences did not care about diversity. I suggest you not either,” Jeffrey Epstein wrote in response to an email about the programming. “The women are all weak, and a distraction sorry.”

…

Take Roger Schank, an AI researcher and theorist who died in 2023. He suggested in one email that “intelligence comes about in part from real focus” and that it is rare for a woman to not be “first and foremost focused on what others are thinking and feeling about her.”

“Hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you or why you don’t own a kelly bag,” he wrote. To which Epstein responded: “It’s the tail of distribution , no really smart women – none.”

(Epstein’s emails and those of his correspondents often contained typos; The 19th is reproducing the text as it appears in the files released by the Justice Department.)

…

Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, who emailed with Epstein hundreds of times, made a joke in one email about how “half the IQ In world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population.”

The email was sent in 2017, more than a decade after Summers came under fire for a speech he gave at a conference for women and underrepresented groups in STEM, where he suggested that there weren’t as many women smart enough to be in these professions due to higher variability in men’s intelligence. During his time as president he was also scrutinized for the lack of women in tenured positions. The Guardian reported that under his reign the share of tenured positions offered to women fell from 36 percent to 13 percent.

In another exchange, Epstein and Jeremy Rubin, a bitcoin developer and MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] researcher, went back and forth over whether there are any games that women are actually better at than men. It would be “interesting to attempt to make an intellectually stimulating game where women outperform men,” Rubin wrote in 2016. “Unless women are inherently inferior to the maximally talented man at all tasks ;).”

…

If you have time, do read Jessica Kutz’s February 24, 2026 article in its entirety. Even if you are inclined to give these academics and scientists the benefit of any doubt regarding their knowledge about Epstein and his proclivities, it seems they were complicit with, if not downright embracing, his misogyny and sexism.

For anyone curious about the origin of “Tell Me What Company You Keep, and I Will Tell You What You Are (article link).” These are some of the proposed sources: “Miguel de Cervantes? Don Quixote? Sancho Panza? Euripides? Lord Chesterfield? Johann Wolfgang von Goethe? Joseph Hordern? Anonymous?” The article is pretty interesting.

It keeps coming: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) website featured this March 18, 2026 article by Sheena Goodyear “Science has an Epstein problem. Women in paleontology say it’s a symptom of a deeper misogyny; Male-dominated field of fossils and dinos is reckoning with ties to wealthy sex offender.” More recently, there’s technology pioneer, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, testifying in US Congress ( see June 10, 2026 article “Bill Gates testifies Epstein pressured him using knowledge of his affairs” by Nolan D. McCaskill.for Reuters.

Some June and July 2026 events and a call for editorials from the Canadian Science Policy Centre (CSPC)

Leave a reply

This is not exhaustive but here’s a list from a June 11, 2026 Canadian Science Policy Centre (CSPC) announcement (received via email) of upcoming events and more (i.e., a call for editorials),

…

CSPC Presents: National Conversation on Canada’s AI Strategy

Call for Editorials: Canada’s
New AI Strategy — AI for All

The launch of the federal government’s renewed National AI Strategy, AI for All, signals a bold ambition to position Canada as a global leader in artificial intelligence at a time of profound technological, economic, and geopolitical change. Built around six strategic pillars, the multi-billion-dollar initiative aims to strengthen and safeguard the impact of AI in all aspects of Canadians.

CSPC invites editorials in English and French that explore the opportunities, challenges, and implications of Canada’s new AI Strategy. We welcome thoughtful analyses of the strategy’s six pillars and their potential impact on industry, government, academia, and civil society.

Deadline: July 9th, 2026

Submit an Editorial

June 17 [2026]: Research Integrity in the Era of AI

Join us on June 17 [2026] from 11:00–12:30 PM EST for a panel that will explore whether AI can meaningfully strengthen research integrity or whether it accelerates existing vulnerabilities in the publishing system, and what this means for funders, institutions, and policymakers who rely on scholarly evidence. Panelists will explore how openness, governance, accountability, and policy frameworks must evolve to sustain trust in an AI-mediated research ecosystem.

Register (For Free)

June 22 [2026]: AI for All? Balancing Innovation, Sovereignty, and Trust

Join us on June 22, 2026, from 12:00–1:30 PM EST for a timely virtual panel, “AI for All? Balancing Innovation, Sovereignty, and Trust,” examining the implications of Canada’s newly launched National AI Strategy. As Canada embarks on an ambitious roadmap to strengthen AI infrastructure, accelerate adoption, and grow domestic innovation champions, important questions remain about implementation, accountability, safety, and public trust. Bringing together leaders from government, industry, academia, and civil society, this 90-minute discussion will explore how Canada can balance economic competitiveness and technological sovereignty with the need for robust safeguards, liability frameworks, and democratic values. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear diverse perspectives on one of Canada’s most important policy initiatives of the decade.

Register (For Free)

July 6 [2026]: Clean Power, Smart Sovereignty: Driving Canada’s competitive AI and quantum future

Join us on July 6 [2026] from 1:00–2:30 PM EST for a panel exploring a pivotal question for Canada: How can we lead in AI while sustainably powering the infrastructure that supports it? This panel will examine strategies for building sovereign, next-generation computing systems that leverage Canada’s clean energy advantage. Panellists will discuss how Canada can unlock competitiveness at the intersection of sovereignty, sustainability, and security, while ensuring that AI technologies scale without compromising the country’s leadership in responsible innovation.

Register (For Free)

July 21 [2026]: Canada’s AI Advantage: Why It Exists—and What It Will Take to Scale It

Join us on July 21, 2026 from 1:30–3:00 PM EST for an insightful virtual panel exploring how Canada can turn its world-class AI research and talent into meaningful economic and societal impact. Canada has earned a global reputation in artificial intelligence, but significant challenges remain in translating research excellence into widespread adoption and commercialization. Bringing together leaders from academia, national AI institutes, and industry, this discussion will examine how to better connect talent, research, and industry, accelerate AI adoption, strengthen innovation pipelines, and scale Canada’s impact in the global AI economy.

Register (For Free)

…

…

There you have it.

‘Brain-free’ robots that move in synchronization, powered entirely by air

Leave a reply

This brain-free robot reminds me of a (battery-powered) toy I loved,

A November 18, 2025 University of Oxford press release (a similar version is also on EurekAlert but published November 4, 2025) announces a new type of soft robot, Note: Links have been removed,

A team led by the University of Oxford has developed a new class of soft robots that operate without electronics, motors, or computers – using only air pressure. The study, published today (05 Nov) in Advanced Materials, shows that these ‘fluidic robots’ can generate complex, rhythmic movements and even automatically synchronise their actions.

Professor Antonio Forte (Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Lead of RADLab) said: “We are excited to see that brain-less machines can spontaneously generate complex behaviours, decentralising functional tasks to the peripheries and freeing up resources for more intelligent tasks.”

Overcoming a key challenge in soft robotics

Soft robots (made from flexible materials) are ideal for tasks like navigating uneven terrain or handling delicate objects. A major goal in soft robotics is to encode behaviour and decision-making directly into the robot’s physical structure, enabling more adaptive and responsive machines. This kind of automatic behaviour – emerging from body-environment interactions – is often difficult to replicate with traditional electronic circuits, which require complex sensing, programming and control systems.

To address this challenge, the researchers took inspiration from nature, where body parts often perform multiple roles and synchronised behaviour can emerge without central control. Their key innovation was to develop a small, modular component that uses air pressure to perform mechanical tasks – similar to how an electronic circuit uses electrical current. Depending on how it is set up, this single block can either:

  • Actuate (move or deform) in response to air pressure changes – functioning like a muscle.
  • Sense pressure changes or contact – similar to a touch sensor.
  • Switch air flow between ON/OFF states – like a valve or a logic gate.

Similar to LEGO pieces, multiple identical units (each one a few centimetres in size) can be connected to form different robots without changing the basic hardware design. In the study, the researchers constructed tabletop robots (roughly the size of a shoebox), that could hop, shake, or crawl.

In a particular configuration, the researchers found that each individual unit can automatically combine all three roles at once, enabling it to generate rhythmic movement entirely on its own once constant pressure is applied. When several of these responsive units are linked together, their movements began to synchronize naturally, without any computer control or programming.

These behaviours were used to make a shaker robot (able to sort beads into different containers by tilting a rotating platform) and a crawler robot (which could detect the edge of a table and automatically stop, preventing a fall). In each case, the coordinated movements were achieved entirely mechanically, with no external electronic control.

Lead author Dr Mostafa Mousa (Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford) said: “This spontaneous coordination requires no predetermined instructions but arises purely from the way the units are coupled to each other and upon their interaction with the environment.”

Laying the groundwork for embodied intelligence

Crucially, the synchronised behaviour is only seen when the robots are linked together and touching the ground. The researchers used a mathematical framework called the Kuramoto model, which describes how networks of oscillators can synchronize, to explain this behaviour.

This revealed that complex, coordinated motion can emerge in the robots purely from their physical design when they are mechanically coupled through the environment. In this case, the motion of each robotic leg subtly affects the others through the shared body and ground reaction forces. This creates a feedback loop where the forces transmitted via friction, compression, and rebound link the motions of the limbs together, leading to spontaneous coordination.

Dr Mousa said: “Just as fireflies can begin flashing in unison after watching one another, the robot’s air-powered limbs also fall into rhythm, but in this case through physical contact with the ground rather than visual cues. This emergent behaviour has previously been observed in nature, and this new study represents a major step forward towards programmable, self-intelligent robots.”

Although the soft robots developed are currently at tabletop scale, according to the researchers the design principles are scale-independent. In the near future, the researchers aim to investigate these dynamical systems to build energy-efficient untethered locomotors. This would be one step forward towards the large-scale deployment of these robots in extreme environments where energy is scarce and adaptability is needed.

Professor Forte added: “Encoding decision-making and behaviour directly into the robot’s physical structure could lead to adaptive, responsive machines that don’t need software to ‘think.’ It is a shift from ‘robots with brains’ to ‘robots that are their own brains.’ That makes them faster, more efficient, and potentially better at interacting with unpredictable environments.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Multifunctional Fluidic Units for Emergent, Responsive Robotic Behaviors by Mostafa Mousa, Alberto Comoretto, Johannes T.B. Overvelde, Antonio E. Forte. Advanced Materials DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202510298 First published: 06 November 2025

This paper is open access.

Clues to the origins of buckyballs (and other fullerenes) in space

Leave a reply

A buckyball, for anyone unfamiliar with the term, is made up of carbon atoms ordered in a shape that resembles a soccer ball and the full name is bckminsterfullerene (a type of fullerene).

This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Benjah-bmm27. This applies worldwide. In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so: Benjah-bmm27 grants anyone the right to use this work File:Buckminsterfullerene-perspective-3D-balls.png Uploaded: 9 April 2007 [downloaded from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene#/media/File:Buckminsterfullerene-perspective-3D-balls.png]

A November 3, 2025 University of Colorado at Boulder news release (also on EurekAlert) by Daniel Strain has written about buckyballs in space in a most engaging fashion, Note: Links have been removed,

Far from Earth, in the vast expanses of space between stars, exists a treasure trove of carbon. There, in what scientists call the “interstellar medium,” you can find a wide range of organic molecules—from honeycomblike polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) to spheres of carbon shaped like soccer balls.

Image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope of the so-called “Pillars of Creation,” a region in the Eagle Nebula where clouds of gas and dust are collapsing to form new stars. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton Koekemoer (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI) Courtesy: University of Colorado at Boulder

In a new study, an international team of researchers led by scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder have used experiments on Earth to recreate the chemistry deep in space. The group’s results may have uncovered key steps in the processes that shape these organic molecules over time.  

The findings could reveal information about the building blocks that once formed Earth’s solar system, said Jordy Bouwman, lead author of the study. Billions of years ago, similar clouds of matter have condensed to form the seeds of what would become our own sun and its planets.

“We’re all made of carbon, so it’s really important to know how carbon in the universe gets transformed on its way to being incorporated in a planetary system like our own solar system,” said Bouwman, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU Boulder. 

The research, published recently in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, sheds light on the formation of a class of molecules called fullerenes.

Fullerenes are made up of carbon atoms organized in the shape of a closed cage. The most famous example is buckminsterfullerene, or the buckyball, which gets its name from famed futurist Richard Buckminster Fuller. These molecules include 60 carbon atoms in the shape of a sphere and bear a striking resemblance to a FIFA regulation soccer ball.

Fullerenes, including buckyballs, float freely in the interstellar medium. But scientists have long struggled to explain where they come from and how they are formed. 

The new study suggests that radiation in space may help to transform PAHs into fullerenes.

“This gives us a hint that the buckyballs that we find in space may be connected to these large aromatic molecules that are also abundant,” Bouwman said.

Space chemistry, on Earth

The group simulated the chemistry in space by studying two small PAH molecules called anthracene and phenanthrene.

PAHs are made up of carbon atoms arranged in a series of hexagons, not unlike a honeycomb. They’re abundant on Earth where you can find them in smoke, soot and other charred materials.

“If you put your steak on the grill for too long, and it gets black, that contains PAHs,” Bouwman said. “They’re a nasty byproduct of combustion.”

First, the researchers bombarded the two PAHs with a beam of electrons. It’s similar to what happens when radiation in space interacts with molecules in the interstellar medium.

This bombardment transformed the PAHs into new, charged organic molecules. The researchers then fed the products into an ion trap apparatus at a scientific facility called the Free Electron Lasers for Infrared eXperiments (FELIX). This one-of-a-kind national research facility is located in Nijmegen in the Netherlands and includes several lasers that spread across a large basement room. Using those lasers, the researchers were able to precisely probe the structure of their new molecules.

They were surprised when they saw the results.

Making buckyballs

Bouwman explained that when the team hit anthracene and phenanthrene with electrons, the molecules lost one or two of their hydrogen atoms. 

In the process, they also radically changed their structures, like disassembling a Lego castle and building a new structure. Instead of just including hexagons, the resulting products now carried carbon atoms arranged in the shape of both hexagons and pentagons.

That radical reaction had never been seen before, Bouwman said. Whether these kinds of pentagon-bearing molecules are also common in space isn’t clear.

“That was a very surprising result—that just by kicking off a hydrogen atom or two, the entire molecule completely rearranged,” said Sandra Brünken, a co-author of the study, associate professor at Radboud University and group leader at FELIX.

The results were eye-opening, in part because those kinds of molecules are also really easy to fold up. (Just picture a soccer ball, which is made up of a mix of both hexagons and pentagons).

In other words, these pentagon-bearing molecules may be the missing link for converting common PAHs into buckyballs and other fullerenes.

Bouwman and Brünken hope that astrophysicists will take note. Scientists could use the team’s findings to see if similar pentagon-bearing molecules exist deep in space using tools like the James Webb Space Telescope—the most powerful telescope ever launched.

“You can take our results from the laboratory, and then use them as a fingerprint to look for the same signatures in space,” Brünken said.

CU Boulder co-authors of the new study include LASP graduate students Madison Patch and Rory McClish. Other co-authors include scientists at Radboud University; Leiden University in the Netherlands; Paris-East Créteil University in France; and the University of Maryland College Park. 

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Radical Isomerization upon Dissociative Electron Ionization of Anthracene and Phenanthrene by Madison M. Patch, Rory McClish, Sanjana Panchagnula, Daniël B. Rap, Shreyak Banhatti, Helgi R. Hrodmarsson, Sandra Brünken, Harold Linnartz, Alexander G. G. M. Tielens and Jordy Bouwman. Journal of the American Chemical Society (J. Am. Chem. Soc.) 2025, 147, 38, 34508–34516 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.5c08619 Published September 12, 2025 Copyright © 2025 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.

Nanoengineered, paint-like coating passively cools buildings and captures water directly from the air

Leave a reply

Not entirely a surprise that this research comes from Australia, given that country’s need for water. From a November 3, 2025 news item on Nanowerk. Note: A link has been removed,

Researchers at the University of Sydney and start-up Dewpoint Innovations have developed a nanoengineered polymer paint-like coating that can passively cool buildings and capture water directly from the air – all without energy input.

The invention could help tackle global water scarcity and help cool buildings, reducing the need for energy-intensive systems.

The research team led by Professor Chiara Neto created a porous polymer coating that reflects up to 97 percent of sunlight and radiates heat into the air, keeping surfaces up to six degrees cooler than the surrounding air even under direct sun. This process creates ideal conditions for atmospheric water vapour to condense into droplets on the cooler surface, the way steam condenses on your bathroom mirror.

Professor Neto from the University of Sydney Nano Institute and School of Chemistry said the findings could have far-reaching implications.

“This technology not only advances the science of cool roof coatings but also opens the door to sustainable, low-cost and decentralised sources of fresh water – a critical need in the face of climate change and growing water scarcity,” she said.

…

A November 3, 2025 University of Sydney press release (also on EurekAlert but published November 2, 2025), which originated the news item, delves further into the research, Note: Links have been removed,

In the six-month long outdoor study conducted on the roof of the Sydney Nanoscience Hub, dew could be collected over 32 percent of the year and so could provide a sustainable and predictable supply of water even in periods with no rain. Under optimum conditions, the coatings can harvest up to 390 mL of water per square metre each day – enough for a 12-square-metre surface to supply the daily drinking needs of one person.

The study, published in Advanced Functional Materials, shows that passive cooling and atmospheric water capture can be integrated into a paint-like material for large-scale use.

Larger collection areas mean the paint could be versatile in industry: water for animals, for horticulture of high-value plants, for use in cooling by misting, or for use in hydrogen production. (About nine litres of water per kilogram of hydrogen is needed in electrolysis.)

Cooling the city, drop by drop

Unlike traditional white paints, the porous coatings, made of polyvinylidene fluoride-co-hexafluoropropene, or PVDF-HFP, do not rely on ultraviolet-reflective pigments such as titanium dioxide.

“Our design achieves high reflectivity through its internal porous structure, delivering durability without the environmental drawbacks of pigment-based coatings,” said Dr Ming Chiu, the study’s lead author and Chief Technology Officer of Dewpoint Innovations.

“By removing UV-absorbing materials, we overcome the traditional limit in solar reflectivity while avoiding glare through diffuse reflection. This balance between performance and visual comfort makes it easier to integrate and is more appealing for real-world applications.”

Over the six-month outdoor trial, the team recorded cooling and water collection data minute-by-minute, confirming robust performance with no degradation under harsh Australian sun. Similar technologies have been shown to quickly deteriorate.

Beyond water harvesting, these coatings could help reduce urban heat island effects, lower energy needs for air-conditioning and provide climate-resilient water sources in regions facing growing heat and water stress.

Professor Neto, also a member of the University of Sydney Net Zero Institute, said the research also challenges the assumption that dew collection only works in humid climates.

“While humid conditions are ideal, dew can form even in arid and semi-arid regions where night-time humidity rises. It’s not about replacing rainfall but supplementing it – providing water where and when other sources become limited.”

From lab to rooftop

To bring the discovery from the lab to rooftops, Dewpoint Innovations is now developing a water-based paint formulation that can be applied using ordinary rollers or sprayers.

“At Dewpoint, we’re proud to partner with the University of Sydney to bring this breakthrough in passive atmospheric water harvesting to life through advanced paint-based coatings,” said Perzaan Mehta, CEO of Dewpoint Innovations.

“It’s a scalable, energy-free solution that transforms rooftops and remote infrastructure into reliable sources of clean water, helping address an urgent challenge of our time.”

With more than two million Australian homes already collecting rainwater, Professor Neto said dew-collecting roofs could complement existing systems.

“Imagine roofs that not only stay cooler but also make their own fresh water – that’s the promise of this technology,” she said.

The Neto group’s innovation was licensed from the University of Sydney in 2022 to start-up company Dewpoint Innovations. Its commercial translation represents a significant step toward scalable, environmentally friendly solutions for water harvesting and passive cooling, with potential applications in the built environment, agriculture, remote communities, and urban infrastructure.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Passively Cooled Paint-Like Coatings for Atmospheric Water Capture by Ming Chiu, Emile Theau, Angus Harrison, Johanna M. Terpstra, Riccardo Parin, C. Martijn de Sterke, Tristram J. Alexander, Chiara Neto. Advanced Functional Materials Online Version of Record before inclusion in an issue DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.202519108 First published: 30 October 2025

This paper is behind a paywall.

Dewpoint Innovations can be found here.

A wearable tail and the 2026 Canada-Wide Science Fair

Leave a reply

One more post about the 2026 Canada-Wide Science Fair (my last one was a June 1, 2026 piece highlighting the top prizes) as this work from two high school students fascinates me.

The video shows the announcement of the students’ award and their interview on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) Calgary Eyeopener news show, Note: This segment runs about 7 mins.,

For those who might like to read about the project, a June 2, 2026 article by Kelsea Arnett for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) news online website describes the device (wearable tail) intended to assist people with balance problems,

Allen Guo-Lu and Luotong Shi aren’t your typical Grade 12 students.

While most are either busily preparing for final exams or revelling in the fact that their high school careers are almost over, Guo-Lu and Shi have spent their senior year developing wearable technology to help people battling Parkinson’s disease avoid serious falls.

“It’s our last year in Grade 12, so we were like, ‘Why don’t we try to kind of give back to the community?'” Shi told CBC Radio’s Calgary Eyeopener.

“This was one of the ways that we thought of doing it.”

The technology — a wearable battery-powered tail equipped with built-in sensors — can detect when the wearer may be unstable and act as a counterweight to help them regain their balance, Shi said.

“It essentially works kind of like the idea of a spine where there is several pieces that you can attach and the tubes act as tendons,” Shi said.

In April, [2026] the Western Canada High School students won the University of Calgary Chancellor and Senate Award at the Calgary Youth Science Fair. The project was also a finalist at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Edmonton last week.

There are at least 120,000 people living with Parkinson’s in Canada, and that number is expected to exceed 150,000 by 2034, according to Ko Currie with Parkinson Canada.

…

Tremors and gait features like slowness, difficulty with balance or rigidity are some of the more recognizable symptoms of the disease, Currie said, adding falls are a significant concern.

“It’s one of the most disabling features of Parkinson’s, because they can lead to really serious injuries and sometimes even hospitalizations,” said Currie, who is the organization’s director of research programs and partnerships. 

…

Why a tail?

Guo-Lu said the project was inspired by his volunteer work in seniors’ homes and witnessing Parkinson’s patients struggling with balance. 

He said the tail design comes from witnessing how cats and other mammals use their tails to balance and correct themselves.

Guo-Lu said in testing the belt with several patients, they were able to see how the tail responded to various individual gaits and stages of progression of the disease.

“Learning about those factors and testing really helped us get a good design for the tail,” Guo-Lu said.

He added they can also change the weight of the tail depending on how much support a patient needs and what is most comfortable for them, although the ideal range was between 400 and 1,200 grams. 

Users can also tailor the tail’s sensitivity to their body with an app the pair built.

Project’s benefits go beyond Parkinson’s

But the benefits of the tail extend beyond just patients with Parkinson’s, Shi said.

“This tail, because it addresses balance specifically, it honestly should benefit all people who have asymmetric gait,” she said.

…

Guo plans to study neuroscience at the University of Calgary and Shi plans to study electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo.

Living liquid metal composites for next generation bioelectronics

Leave a reply

An October 30, 2025 Nanowerk Spotlight article by Michael Berger highlights a ‘living’ approach to electronics,

…

Liquid metals are unusual substances. They flow like water yet conduct electricity almost as well as solid copper. This combination makes them appealing for flexible electronics, soft robotics, and wearable devices.

Their weakness lies in the oxide film that instantly forms when the metal meets air or water. The thin oxide stabilizes droplets but prevents them from fusing, interrupting electrical flow. Previous attempts to control this oxide used agitation, chemical etching, or complex coatings. Each method added cost or created new problems such as brittleness or instability. A stable, self-repairing conductor that worked without those steps remained out of reach.

[…] new research offers a biological route forward. [A] team created a living liquid metal composite by embedding bacterial endospores within a gallium and indium alloy. The spores come from Bacillus subtilis, a microbe known for surviving heat, dryness, and chemical stress. In the dormant spore state, the cells are metabolically inactive and remarkably durable. When exposed to nutrients, they germinate and return to life. Within the metal, these spores act as both structural and electrical agents. They modify the oxide layer and, once active, move electrons directly into the metallic network.

Conceptual illustrations of the living liquid metal composite embedded with electrogenic bacterial endospores. a) Circuit conductivity: i) Liquid metal droplets with native oxide layers, exhibiting low conductivity. ii) Endospore-mediated oxide rupture between droplets, enabling conductive bridging, and high conductivity. b) Biological functionality: i) Dormant endospores embedded in liquid metal, supporting long-term preservation, and stable conductivity. ii) Germination of endospores, reactivating metabolic activity and extracellular electron transfer (EET). c) Self-healing behavior enabled by the intrinsic fluidity and oxide dynamics of liquid metal. d) Enhanced patternability on paper substrates due to improved wettability and interfacial compatibility provided by endospores. [downloaded from https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adfm.202521818]

Berger’s October 30, 2025 article provides more detail about the advantages of this particular approach,

The mechanism depends on how the spores interact with the metal surface. Each spore carries a rough outer shell covered with chemical groups that bond strongly to metal oxides. These include amino, carboxyl, phosphate, and hydroxyl groups. When mixed with the gallium–indium alloy, the spores attach to the oxide skin and disturb its uniformity. This weakens the barrier and allows neighboring droplets to merge, restoring electrical continuity without external pressure or heating. Spectroscopic analysis confirms reduced oxygen signals and greater exposure of gallium, evidence of thinner oxide layers and stronger metal connectivity.

This microscopic change produces significant electrical improvements. The composite conducts at about 1.1×10⁴ siemens per centimeter even without sintering. After a week of air exposure, it retains over 90 percent of that conductivity, while pure liquid metal loses much more. When the spores are activated with a nutrient solution containing amino acids and sugars, the conductivity increases to about 5.1×10⁶ siemens per centimeter. The gain comes from both mechanical disruption of the oxide and electron transfer by the living cells. Imaging shows that the spores germinate and spread within the metallic matrix, confirming that biological activity enhances performance.

Electrochemical tests reinforce this finding. Cyclic voltammetry shows that oxidized metal without spores produces unstable current profiles that weaken over time. With spores, the current remains steady, showing stable charge transfer. Impedance measurements reveal higher resistance while the spores are dormant, followed by a marked drop after germination, consistent with active electron movement through the living network.

Mechanical performance also improves. Liquid metals already heal by flowing into cracks, but the composite heals faster. After being cut, it recovers more than 90 percent of its conductivity within about 30 seconds, while the unmodified alloy needs about 90 seconds. During 500 bending cycles at 10 percent strain, the composite retains over 90 percent of its conductivity, while the pure alloy loses nearly half. Microscopy shows continuous bridges forming across cracks and suggests that the spores reinforce the oxide layer and spread stress more evenly.

…

Binghamton University issued a November 5, 2025 news release by Chris Kocher that highlights the researcher and his hopes for the material, Note: Links have been removed,

Electronics have been transforming from rigid, lifeless systems into adaptive, living platforms capable of seamlessly interacting with biological environments. Researchers at Binghamton University are pioneering “living metal” composites embedded with bacterial endospores, paving the way for dynamic communication and integration between electronic and biological systems.

In a paper recently published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials (opens in a new window), Professor Seokheun “Sean” Choi, Maryam Rezaie, PhD ’25, and Yang “Lexi” Gao, PhD ’26, share their potentially groundbreaking study on liquid living metal composites that could redefine the future of bioelectronics.

Choi — a faculty member in the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering — is developing innovative technologies to bridge the gap between electronic and biological systems.

Most of Choi’s previous bioelectronic projects employed conductive polymer materials, as liquid metals pose challenges for integration. Their hydrophobic properties hinder adhesion to electronic substrates, and exposure to air or water leads to the formation of an oxide layer that restricts electron flow and disrupts communication between electronic and biological systems.

However, he said, polymers have their own difficulties: “I was not satisfied with the interface — it was not seamless — and although the polymers are conductive, it’s not as much as metal. Also, most bioelectronics will be deployed in very harsh environments, so they are subject to mechanical damage. They must have a self-healing property.”

He believes that electrogenic bacteria — cells which generate small amounts of power — are the key. By combining liquid metal with dormant endospores for the bacteriaBacillus subtilis, which Choi has used to develop biobatteries, the composite material overcomes many of the limitations from liquid metal alone.

“When we combine the spores with the liquid metal droplets, there is a huge attractive force, because the spores have chemical functional groups on their surface that interact with the liquid metal oxide layers. This strong force ruptures the oxide layers so the metal can be conductive.”

The spores can stay inactive under harsh conditions and germinate when the environment is more favorable. The composite also is easily absorbed into device substrates such as paper while keeping the best properties of metal. It even exhibits enhanced electrical conductivity when the spores germinate.

Most importantly, though, the composite shows the self-healing abilities that researchers want to see. When a break in the material happens, the composite autonomously fills the gap— an important breakthrough when a circuit is damaged and can’t easily be replaced.

Before any commercial applications, more experimentation is needed to better control the activation of the endospores and to evaluate the liquid living metal composites for long-term stability in a variety of environments.

In the future, such materials could enable wearable or implantable devices to interface safely and directly with human tissue.

“Biological systems use molecules and ions for metabolism or signaling, while electronics exclusively depend on the electrons, so that will create communication errors,” he said. “Electrogenic bacteria use molecules and ions but also generate electrons. The question is how we can seamlessly integrate this electrogenic bacteria into a living electrode to bridge these two systems.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Living Liquid Metal Composites Embedded with Electrogenic Endospores for Next-Generation Bioelectronics by Maryam Rezaie, Yang Gao, Seokheun Choi. Advanced Functional Materials First published: 24 October 2025 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.202521818

This paper is open access.

Lignin nanoparticles for herbicide delivery systems (an agriculture story)

Leave a reply

This explanation of how this research relates to food security is direct from the paper’s introduction and helped me, Note: Links have been removed,

The constantly growing world population has caused nations to struggle with food shortages, while farmers face crop turbulence with weed competition. (1) Weeds have developed resistance to herbicides, chemical compounds used to protect plants against them, for the last 60 years. Also, herbicides can be easily driven through leaching, drifting, or running off into the water and accidentally harming off-target plant species, animals, and humans. This highlights the need for new techniques to be developed and implemented. (2,3) Over time, the use of nano-enabled agriculture has demonstrated efficiency in delivery of herbicides (nanoherbicide) by increasing herbicidal activity and decreasing environmental impact. (4) Nanoherbicides can be derived from diverse materials (organic, inorganic, or hybrid), with organic nanomaterials being highlighted for their eco-friendly properties and effectiveness that may minimize risks to nontarget organisms and ecosystems. (5,6)

Lignin is a sustainable, natural, and organic macromolecule derived from agricultural waste. It comprises a complex phenolic structure in plant cell walls, formed by benzene units in aromatic regions and hydroxyl, carboxyl, carbonyl, and ether functional groups in aliphatic parts. This arrangement allows the formation of diverse structures (e.g., capsules, triangular, and spherical), with spherical lignin nanoparticles (SLNPs) being well known for their smooth surfaces. (7,8) SLNPs are usually prepared using the antisolvent precipitation method, where aggregation forms nanoparticles with hollows attributed to π–π interactions in the benzene rings and shells formed by hydrogen bonding among carboxylic–phenolic groups in water and forming hydrophobic core/hydrophilic shell structures. (9) Recently, lignin has been explored to design nanodevices in the agricultural sector. (10) For instance, lignin-based nanoparticles can be stored for extended periods, (7) possess UV-blocking properties that may prevent active ingredients from degradation, (11) promote controlled release of active ingredients, (5,10) and lignin-composited nanocapsules have been studied as nanoherbicides. (12)

…

This illustrative image is part of the abstract,

Courtesy: ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. 2025, 13, 37, 15460-15477

Hopefully that made this description more understandable. From the paper’s abstract,

Recent advances in nanoscience have reduced herbicide usage while maintaining crop yields, and sustainable materials, such as lignin, have emerged as promising nanocarriers for herbicide delivery. Spherical lignin nanoparticles (SLNPs) with atrazine (SLNPs_ATZ) were designed, characterized, and applied to nontarget and target plants in this work. SLNPs_ATZ displayed spherical shapes with sizes near 178 nm by dynamic light scattering (DLS), and 136 nm by nanoparticle tracking analysis (NTA), with a 74.2% loading efficiency and a 43.26% release percentage after 168 h. Chemical computational modeling revealed lower gap energies between atrazine and lignin, indicating strong carrier/bioactive interactions. Hydroponic experiments were conducted with butterhead lettuce with sublethal doses of atrazine (30 μg/L) for 28 days, and lettuce treated with SLNPs and SLNPs_ATZ showed no significant changes in root length/shoot area compared to the control. Lipid peroxidation and catalase (biochemical tests) showed significant differences between lettuce treated with atrazine and all other treatments. Gene expression of catalase-1 (CAT1) and GST6 genes indicated a possible stress tolerance in lettuce by SLNPs. Moreover, PER51 gene results indicated damage from SLNPs_ATZ and ATZ. Based on the weed control assessment, seeds/seedlings showed possible germination/development interference by SLNPs_ATZ. These findings highlight lignin as a sustainable molecule for developing nanocarriers with potential effects on gene expression and improved weed control.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Sustainable Lignin Nanoparticles for Herbicide Delivery Systems: Preparation, Characterization, and Effects on Target and Nontarget Plants (or PDF) by Pedro H. C. de Lima, Maria C. Shiroma Buri, Rafaela S. Mendonça, Gabriel M. Favara, Érica R. Biscalchim, Mariana M. L. H. Forini, Luiz A. F. Cavalcante, Renato Grillo. ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering (ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng.) 2025, 13, 37, 15460–15477 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/acssuschemeng.5c05651 Published September 11, 2025 Copyright © 2025 The Authors. Published by American Chemical Society. This publication is licensed under CC-BY 4.0 .

This paper is open access.

One step closer to robots you can wear like clothing with automatic weaving of “fabric muscle”

Leave a reply

An October 29, 2025 National Research Council of Science & Technology (Korea) press release (also on EurekAlert) research that would make commercialization of wearable robots possible, Note: A link has been removed,

The commercialization of clothing-type wearable robots has taken a significant step forward with the development of equipment that can continuously and automatically weave ultra-thin shape memory alloy coil yarn—thinner than a human hair—into lightweight and flexible “fabric muscle” suitable for large-scale production.

The Advanced Robotics Research Center at the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM, President Seog-Hyeon Ryu), under the National Research Council of Science & Technology (NST, Chairman Young-Shik Kim), led by Principal Researcher Cheol Hoon Park, has developed an automated weaving system that enables the continuous mass production of fabric muscle, a lightweight yet powerful artificial muscle actuator.

The newly developed system uses shape memory alloy (SMA) wire with a diameter of 25 μm [micrometers or microns]—about one-fourth the thickness of a human hair—processed into coil-shaped yarn, enabling the continuous weaving of fabric muscles. This fabric, weighing only 10 g, can lift 10–15 kg, making it an ideal core actuator for clothing-type wearable robots. The SMA coil yarn previously developed by KIMM used a metallic core wire, which resulted in low elongation and made automatic weaving difficult. To overcome this limitation, the KIMM research team replaced the metal core with natural fiber, redesigned the structure and fabrication process of the fabric muscle, and improved the weaving machine’s design, thereby achieving stable and continuous mass production.

Conventional wearable robots designed to assist multiple joints—such as the elbow, shoulder, and waist—relied on heavy, noisy motor or pneumatic actuators, making them bulky, expensive, and uncomfortable for long-term use. As a result, most could provide only limited support to specific joints. Active assistance for the shoulder has been particularly challenging due to its complex range of motion. In contrast, KIMM’s fabric muscle actuators are lightweight and flexible, allowing them to naturally conform to and actively assist multiple complex joints simultaneously. Using this technology, the research team developed the world’s first clothing-type wearable robot, weighing less than 2 kg, that simultaneously assists the elbow, shoulder, and waist, reducing muscle effort by more than 40% during repetitive physical tasks.

Furthermore, the team created an ultra-lightweight shoulder-assist robot weighing just 840 g, which patients with muscle weakness can comfortably wear and carry in daily life. In clinical trials conducted at Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH) on patients with muscular weakness, including those with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, the wearable shoulder-assist robot improved shoulder movement range by more than 57%.

With the ability to continuously produce high-quality, uniform fabric muscle through the automated weaving system, the research team has laid the foundation for the commercialization of clothing-type wearable robots.

This breakthrough is expected to reduce workers’ physical strain, improve patients’ quality of life, and accelerate the widespread adoption of wearable robots, thereby enhancing industrial competitiveness. In particular, the shoulder-assist robot, designed to support rehabilitation and daily activities of patients with muscle weakness, is expected to reduce caregiver burden while improving patient independence, quality of life, and self-esteem, and overall well-being.

“Our development of continuous mass-production technology for fabric muscle—the key component of clothing-type wearable robots—will significantly improve quality of life in fields such as healthcare, logistics, and construction,” said Dr. Cheol Hoon Park, Principal Researcher at KIMM’s Advanced Robotics Research Center. “We will continue to build on KIMM’s extensive wearable robotics technologies to accelerate commercialization and lead the global wearable robotics market.”

This research, which won the KIMM Best Research Award 2024, was supported by KIMM’s ACE program, the Core Robot Technology Development Program of the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources (MOTIR), and the Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH) Lee Kun-hee Child Cancer and Rare Disease Project. The findings were published online in the October 2025 issue of TNSRE (IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering), a leading international journal in the field of rehabilitation engineering.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Soft Exosuit Based on Fabric Muscle to Assist Shoulder Joint Movements in Patients With Neuromuscular Diseases by Seong Jun Park; Sungbae Jo; Hyung-Ik Shin; Eunsu Lee; Jung Hyun Kim; Hyunmok Jung. IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, vol. 33, pp. 3866-3877, 2025, Date of Publication: 24 September 2025 DOI: 10.1109/TNSRE.2025.3613709

This paper is open access.

Mushroom computer chips act as fungal memristors for brain-like computing?

Leave a reply
Caption: Fungal memristors could be ideal interfaces for high-frequency bioelectronics, researchers say. Photo provided by John LaRocco.

An October 26, 2025 news item (rewritten slightly) on ScienceDaily announces research into ‘fungal computers’ from Ohio State University (OSU),

Fungal networks could one day replace the tiny metal components that process and store computer data, according to new research.

Mushrooms are known for their toughness and unusual biological properties, qualities that make them attractive for bioelectronics. This emerging field blends biology and technology to design innovative, sustainable materials for future computing systems.

Turning Mushrooms Into Living Memory Devices

Researchers at The Ohio State University recently discovered that edible fungi, such as shiitake mushrooms, can be cultivated and guided to function as organic memristors. These components act like memory cells that retain information about previous electrical states.

…

…

An October 24, 2025 Ohio State University (OSU) news release (also on EurekAlert) by Tatyana Woodall, which originated the news item (Note: ScienceDaily has made mostly minor editorial changes), provides further context and detail, Note: Links have been removed,

“Being able to develop microchips that mimic actual neural activity means you don’t need a lot of power for standby or when the machine isn’t being used,” said John LaRocco, lead author of the study and a research scientist in psychiatry at Ohio State’s College of Medicine. “That’s something that can be a huge potential computational and economic advantage.”

Fungal electronics aren’t a new concept, but they have become ideal candidates for developing sustainable computing systems, said LaRocco. This is because they minimize electrical waste by being biodegradable and cheaper to fabricate than conventional memristors and semiconductors, which often require costly rare-earth minerals and high amounts of energy from data centers. 

“Mycelium as a computing substrate has been explored before in less intuitive setups, but our work tries to push one of these memristive systems to its limits,” he said. 

The study was recently published in the journal PLOS One.

To explore the new memristors’ capabilities, researchers cultured samples of shiitake and button mushrooms. Once mature, they were dehydrated to ensure long-term viability, connected to special electronic circuits, and then electrocuted at various voltages and frequencies. 

“We would connect electrical wires and probes at different points on the mushrooms because distinct parts of it have different electrical properties,” said LaRocco. “Depending on the voltage and connectivity, we were seeing different performances.”

After two months, the team discovered that when used as RAM – the computer memory that stores data – their mushroom memristor was able to switch between electrical states at up to 5,850 signals per second, with about 90% accuracy. However, performance dropped as the frequency of the electrical voltages increased, but much like an actual brain, it could be fixed by connecting more mushrooms to the circuit.  

Overall, their research details how surprisingly easy it is to program and preserve mushrooms to behave in unexpected and useful ways, said Qudsia Tahmina, co-author of the study and an associate professor in electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State. Moreover, it’s an example of how technology can advance when it relies on the natural world. 

“Society has become increasingly aware of the need to protect our environment and ensure that we preserve it for future generations,” said Tahmina.“So that could be one of the driving factors behind new bio-friendly ideas like these.”

Building on the flexibility mushrooms offer also suggests there are possibilities for scaling up fungal computing, said Tahmina. For instance, larger mushroom systems may be useful in edge computing and aerospace exploration; smaller ones in enhancing the performance of autonomous systems and wearable devices. 

Organic memristors are still in early development, but future work could optimize the production process by improving cultivation techniques and miniaturizing the devices, as viable fungal memristors would need to be far smaller than what researchers achieved in this work. 

“Everything you’d need to start exploring fungi and computing could be as small as a compost heap and some homemade electronics, or as big as a culturing factory with pre-made templates,” said LaRocco. “All of them are viable with the resources we have in front of us now.” 

Other Ohio State co-authors include Ruben Petreaca, John Simonis and Justin Hill. This study was supported by the Honda Research Institute.

…

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Sustainable memristors from shiitake mycelium for high-frequency bioelectronics by John LaRocco, Qudsia Tahmina, Ruben Petreaca, John Simonis, Justin Hill. PLOS [Public Library of Science] One Published: October 10, 2025 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0328965

This paper is open access.