Lugh

In the 12 months to April 2025, 6,100 Irish people emigrated to America. But the figure for Americans emigrating to Ireland was a third higher, at 9,600. The fact that this number has suddenly jumped by 96% suggests it might not be a permanent trend, but while it lasts, it might be a significant one, especially for Ireland.

3 million Americans hold an Irish passport, and 10s of millions more are eligible for one. Add to that, Italian passports are easy to obtain for Americans with Italian ancestry. An Irish or Italian passport is an EU passport, meaning you can work, start a business, and reside freely anywhere in the EU as an EU citizen. Even after Brexit, Ireland and the UK allow each other's citizens to work and reside freely in each other's countries, too.

Might the centuries-long trend of European-American emigrant traffic be about to reverse, too?

96% jump in number of people coming from the US to live in Ireland

Each robotmart vehicle has 10 lockers, each with a capacity to carry 22Kg (50 pounds) from a local retailer to a customer for a flat fee of $3. The vehicles are Level 4 self-driving. That same level of self-driving has now allowed self-driving trucks to master highway driving. We've already got ports that are almost 100% automated, Europe's largest port, Rotterdam, being a prime example.

Almost all the functional pieces of a 100%-robot global logistics chain are here and working; every step from the factory of origin to the end customer. The last few areas where humans need to load/unload, or pack/unpack, will soon be mastered by robots, too.

Robomart unveils new delivery robot with $3 flat fee to challenge DoorDash, Uber Eats

Baidu Apollo launches 6th-gen robotaxi with 60% lower cost

According to Wikipedia, as of 2021, Waymo estimated its vehicle cost was around US $180,000.

Top of the list of fastest growing cities is Gwagwalada in Nigeria, a place I'd never heard of. It's in Nigeria's Federal Capital Territory, 45 kilometers southwest of Nigeria's capital city, Abuja, and its growth is related to that proximity.

China and Africa are becoming ever more closely bound. China is now the single largest financier of African infrastructure. China is almost every single African country's top trading partner. An estimated 1-2 million Chinese people have moved to Africa. Chinese technology is already shaping the African continent, with solar panels and smartphones leading imports. No doubt Chinese AI & Chinese robotics will be a big part of Africa's future, too.

10 fastest growing cities in the world (2025 population trends)

I read a lot of biographies. They're a genre of writing that relies heavily on people's former habit of letter writing. For many people from the 19th and 20th centuries, much of what we know about their lives comes from their preserved letters. Letter writing is now becoming extinct, and with it that literary tradition. If you can't even post a letter, surely it's the very end of it.

Yes, future biography writers will have social media posts and online writing to mine for material. There's vastly more of it than the preserved letters in the world's libraries. But there's an intimacy about letters that online writing rarely has.

Other countries will now be facing the decision Denmark has just made. If delivering letters is a permanent loss-making venture, when do you pull the plug?

Denmark to shutdown post office, end delivery of physical mails

It seems America and the rest of the world may look very different in the 2030s.

The rest of the world living in the future with EVs and cheap renewable energy. America in some strange steampunk version of the future, where energy is expensive, everyone still drives huge gasoline cars, and power stations still belch smoke from coal.

Cheap Chinese EVs that cost <$20k and run on cheap renewable electricity, frequently from home solar, will likely be rapidly becoming the global norm in the 2030s. I wonder if the fossil fuel industry has home solar in its sights, too? They have all the American politicians in their pockets that they need to ban it in the US.

Trump says U.S. will not approve solar or wind power projects

Trump administration halts work on an almost-finished wind farm

"These days, when entrepreneurs pitch at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a major Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, there’s a high chance their startups are running on Chinese models. “I’d say there’s an 80% chance they’re using a Chinese open-source model,” notes Martin Casado, a partner at a16z."

If the AI bubble is going to burst, you've got to wonder how many of today's AI stars like OpenAI will survive it. Are they already yesterday's people, and the future is leaner, cheaper, and built on free open-source AI? If 80% of new American start-ups are choosing Chinese open-source, you can bet that figure rises to near 100% for the rest of the world.

Silicon Valley thought they were soon going to get an AI unicorn, another world-conquering Google or Meta. Maybe, one day. For now, it looks like Chinese Open-Source AI may be the model about to spread all over the world.

China is quietly upstaging America with its open models

Numerous studies in the past two years show that CRISPR-based interventions can correct mutations and restore cellular and behavioral function in mouse models of brain diseases. Diseases caused by mutations in genes associated with brain functions - like alternating hemiplegia of childhood (AHC), Huntington’s disease, and Friedreich’s ataxia- have seen major improvements in mice that have had their brains gene edited.

This raises a fascinating possibility - what if this gene editing could go beyond correcting diseases? What if you could get an IQ boost of 20-30 points? For obvious reasons, this would be huge for people on a personal level, but it would also have political effects. What would society be like if everyone were 30 IQ points smarter?

Brain editing now ‘closer to reality’: the gene-altering tools tackling deadly disorders: Stunning results in mice herald gene-editing advances for neurological diseases.

I'd never heard of Graphene-Mediated Optical Stimulation before this. Basically, it takes advantage of graphene’s knack for turning light into tiny electrical nudges that neurons actually respond to. Since graphene is literally just a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, it’s very good at absorbing light and then spitting out these subtle signals that coax neurons into growing, branching, and wiring themselves together. In the lab, this sped up the way brain organoids formed sturdy little networks.

They hooked one of these graphene-stimulated organoids up to a robot. When the robot ran into an obstacle, it shot a signal over to the organoid, which fired back a neural response in under 50 milliseconds that told the robot to change course.

These brain organoids would be a natural candidate for interfacing with our brain, as they're made from the same thing. It's interesting to wonder if we could fuse robotics extensions with our brains this way?

New Graphene Technology Matures Brain Organoids Faster, May Unlock Neurodegenerative Insights