If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
Record high fusion plasma temperature achieved in US to boost path to commercial fusion (Prabhat Ranjan Mishra, Feb 14, 2026, Interesting Engineering)
Helion achieved plasma temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius (MºC). Both milestones mark significant breakthroughs in Helion’s vision to make commercially viable fusion energy a reality and are firsts for the private fusion industry.
Quantum computers will finally be useful: what’s behind the revolution (Davide Castelvecchi, 2/10/26, Nature)
The pace of progress in the field has picked up dramatically, especially in the past two years or so, along several fronts. Teams in academic laboratories, as well as companies ranging from small start-ups to large technology corporations, have drastically reduced the size of errors that notoriously fickle quantum devices tend to produce, by improving both the manufacturing of quantum devices and the techniques used to control them. Meanwhile, theorists better understand how to use quantum devices more efficiently.
“At this point, I am much more certain that quantum computation will be realized, and that the timeline is much shorter than people thought,” says Dorit Aharonov, a computer scientist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “We’ve entered a new era.”
Exercise can be as effective as medication for depression and anxiety – new study (Neil Munro, James Dimmock, Klaire Somoray, Samantha Teague, February 10, 2026, The Conversation)
We found exercising had a high impact on depression symptoms, and a medium impact on anxiety, compared to staying inactive.
The benefits were comparable to, and in some cases better than, more widely prescribed mental health treatments, including therapy and antidepressants.
‘What I see in clinic is never a set of labels’: are we in danger of overdiagnosing mental illness? (Gavin Francis, 10 Feb 2026, The Guardian)
Research tells us that the human brain hasn’t changed much in the past 300,000 years, and mental suffering has surely been with us for as long as we have experienced mental life. We are all vessels for thoughts, feelings and desires that wash through our minds, influencing our mental state. Some patterns of feeling are recognisable across the millennia, but the labels we use to make sense of the mind and of mental health are always changing – which means there’s always scope to change them for the better.
The subject is important, because according to modern psychiatric definitions, the 21st century is seeing an epidemic of mental illness. The line between health and ill-health of the mind has never been more blurred. A survey in 2019 found that two-thirds of young people in the UK felt they have had a mental disorder. We are broadening the criteria for what counts as illness at the same time as lowering the thresholds for diagnosis. This is not a bad thing if it helps us feel better, but evidence is gathering that as a society it may be making us feel worse.
We have developed a tendency to categorise mild to moderate mental and emotional distress as a necessarily clinical problem rather than an integral part of being human – a tendency that is new in our own culture, and not widely shared with others. Psychiatrists who work across different cultures point out that, in many non-western societies, low mood, anxiety and delusional states are seen more as spiritual, relational or religious problems – not psychiatric ones. By making sense of states of mind through terms that are embedded in community and tradition, they may even have more success at incorporating our crises of mind into the stories of our lives.
Pretend illness beats personal responsibility.
2 to 3 Cups of Coffee a Day May Reduce Dementia Risk. But Not if It’s Decaf. (Pam Belluck, Feb. 9, 2026, NY Times)
People who drank that amount for decades had lower chances of developing dementia than people who drank little or no caffeine, the researchers reported. They followed 131,821 participants for up to 43 years.
decaf is a tool of Satan.
From Secrets to Sensors: Why Open Source Data Must Drive Modern Intelligence (Renee Pruneau Novakoff, 2/05/26, The Cipher Brief)
The intelligence community has struggled with adopting the reality that to remain relevant, it must embrace publicly and commercially available data into its threat and warning process and use the powerful technologies that the commercial world is developing to sift through that data. There has been much work in this area across the intelligence community and some of it has been groundbreaking but the work has not been comprehensive, integrated, or fast. There are boutique enterprises that have developed their own high-tech way forward but when it comes to scaling such technology across the intelligence community or within the Defense Intelligence Enterprise, the hurdles are huge. Each intelligence agency claims its own security issues and erects fences against cross intelligence technology modernization. Even organizations like the Defense Innovation Unit or IN-Q-TEL focus on discreet requirements, not the wholesale cultural change needed to bring in the latest commercial technology that can support warning and security. Neither the Director of National Intelligence nor the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security have been able to lead the intelligence community to making this cultural and technology change a key priority. As the largest part of the intelligence community, the Defense Intelligence Enterprise needs to lead the way in developing a high tech, open source, data rich environment for its customer base. Military commanders need a real-time, complete, and high-quality battlespace picture to quickly make informed decisions, take direct actions, and assess the high volume of potential targets and threats.
The capabilities that are available for plugging into this warning and targeting picture are endless. For example:…
Giant 5-ton eVTOL just aced a tricky flight test (Abhimanyu Ghoshal, February 06, 2026, New Atlas)
Multinational aviation company AutoFlight says its Matrix aircraft is the first 5-ton eVTOL on the planet – and it’s just completed a public full-transition flight demo at the Kunshan Civil UAV Flight Test & Operation Base in China.
AI Translation Triumphs Over Human Translators in Korean Literary Contest (Park Jin-seong, 2026.02.02, Chosun Daily)
Recently, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism conducted a blind test involving 16 domestic English literature professors. The test compared an English version translated by a professional translator and one translated by ChatGPT for the Joseon-era poet Jang Yu’s poem “Be Cautious When Alone (Shindokjam),” which is set to be exported to English-speaking regions. Without revealing which translation was done by whom, the professors were shown the original Korean text and the two translations and asked which was better. The results showed that 12 professors chose the ChatGPT translation, two selected the human translation, and two declared “undecidable.”
A study hints positive thinking could strengthen vaccine immunity (Simon Makin, 1/30/26, Science News)
Increasing activity in a brain region that controls motivation and expectation, specifically the brain’s reward system, is linked with making more antibodies after receiving a vaccine. The finding suggests these boosts were related to the placebo effect, researchers report January 19 in Nature Medicine.
“Placebo is a self-help mechanism, and here we actually harness it,” says Talma Hendler, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University. “This suggests we could use the brain to help the body fight illness.”
Why People With a Great Sense of Humor Live Longer: If you want to live to 100, you should probably be in on the joke (Tanner Garrity, January 27, 2026, Inside Hook)
According to a 15-year follow-up of Norway’s Trøndelag Health Study, sense of humor is strongly connected to lower mortality rates. Humor decreases our risk of cardiovascular diseases, cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases. It enriches the brain, too — strikingly, the authors of the study described humor as a “health-protecting cognitive coping resource.”The research indicates that a life lived in good humor can help adult men reduce their risk of death from infection by 74%. Ultimately, humor isn’t just something that makes life worth living — it also functions as a valuable tool, which can help us deal with the inevitabilities of aging in a healthier, more resilient way.