5,000-Year-Old Bacteria, Solar Storms, Dogs, and Meta’s AI War (EP. 32)

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this is our first standalone rundown episode — a faster, looser format where we hit several stories we didn’t have room to turn into full deep dives. This week: bacteria revived from a Romanian ice cave after 5,000 years, a speculative but fascinating theory linking solar storms to earthquakes, new evidence that dogs and humans share genetic roots for personality traits, and the increasingly dramatic fight over the future of AI after Yann LeCun leaves Meta to build a new billion-dollar company focused on world models.

Summary

• Ancient bacteria, modern resistance — a microbe revived from a 5,000-year-old Romanian ice cave resists modern antibiotics and may even contain compounds useful against present-day superbugs.
• Solar storms and earthquakes? — a Kyoto University theoretical paper suggests space weather could perturb electric fields in Earth’s crust enough to influence faults already near critical stress.
• Dogs and humans, genetically — a Cambridge / Morris Animal Foundation study finds shared gene pathways that map to personality-like traits in both golden retrievers and humans.
• The Meta AI split — Yann LeCun leaves Meta to pursue AI systems that model the physical world, arguing that simple scaling of LLMs may never reach real general intelligence.

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Show Notes

• Story 1 — Ancient bacteria in Romanian ice cave (Frontiers in Microbiology)
• Story 2 — Solar storms and earthquakes (Kyoto University / International Journal of Plasma Environmental Science and Technology)
• Story 4 — Dog and human personality genes (PNAS)
• Story 5 — Yann LeCun leaves Meta / world-model AI (Wired)