Midjourney is building a full-body ultrasound scanner, a German court ruled Google owns its AI Overviews legally, and tanker oil spills have dropped 90% since the 1970s. Plus: why humans drift anticlockwise, the U-shaped toilet seat traced to a 1955 plumbing code, and Napoleon's bicorne hat authenticated 200 years late. [DVYio Newsletter](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/mYVbadFW) Tech [Diagram of a circular ultrasound scanner surrounding a human body with wave patterns and sensor rings, with a caption about sub-atomic femtometre range.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/G66CEZP8) [Midjourney is building a full-body ultrasound scanner that takes 60 seconds and fits in a spa](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/G66CEZP8) Midjourney (yes, the AI image generator) has quietly launched a medical division and is now building full-body scanners. The technology is called Ultrasonic CT: you stand on a platform that lowers you through a ring of underwater ultrasound sensors while the machine fires ultrasound waves through your body from multiple angles, then assembles the echoes into a 3D image. No radiation, no magnets, no lying in a tunnel for 45 minutes. They're claiming the whole thing takes 60 seconds. They want 50,000 machines worldwide within six years, running a billion scans a month. Their first location opens in San Francisco in late 2027, inside what they're calling a health spa, complete with hot tubs and saunas alongside 10 scanners. The framing is deliberately casual: a wellness visit, not a hospital appointment. Critics are noting ultrasound has genuine physical limits: it struggles with bone and air-filled tissue like lungs, and image quality depends heavily on how sound travels through different body parts. This is an extraordinarily ambitious scanner, but the first public version will not diagnose disease. [A miniature US Capitol building dissolves into scattered particles from the left side.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/8AyTBQ8D) [The US just banned noise infusion from Census data](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/8AyTBQ8D) Noise infusion adds tiny calibrated errors to published statistics, shifting individual numbers slightly while leaving the overall patterns intact. Think of it as blurring a photo just enough that you can see the street but not read the house numbers. The Commerce Department has now banned it, directing the agencies to prefer coarsening and use suppression only as a last resort. Coarsening rounds or groups data into broader buckets (an exact age becomes an age band). Suppression removes figures entirely when a population category is too small to publish safely. Suppression is the bigger problem. When a small community is too thinly represented, sufficiently small cells may be withheld. Those gaps fall hardest on rural areas and minority communities, which are exactly the places that depend on accurate counts for federal funding, congressional districts, and programme eligibility. The 2020 Census rollout of noise infusion did generate real complaints from researchers and local governments who found small-area estimates harder to use. But they are an argument for improving the privacy–utility balance, not necessarily for banning an entire class of techniques. Removing the tool entirely just shifts the cost onto the communities least able to absorb it. [A balance scale weighs a AI network icon against a person in front of a courthouse, beside a search results window.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/oVGS66pw) [If Google's AI says it, one German court says Google said it](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/oVGS66pw) Munich Regional Court I has ruled that Google bears direct liability for false claims made in its AI Overviews, rejecting the standard liability protections that have historically shielded search engines. The case was brought by two publishers whose names Google's AI had wrongly associated with fraud and shady business practices, claims that didn't appear in any of the linked sources the overview cited. Google's defence was essentially that users should fact-check AI results themselves. The court didn't buy it. Because AI Overviews synthesise and present conclusions rather than just pointing to third-party pages, the court treated them as Google's own statements, not as neutral pointers to content elsewhere. That's a meaningful distinction: a search result that says "here are ten pages about X" is different from one that says "X is a scammer", even if it links to sources. The wider implication is uncomfortable for any company deploying AI-generated summaries. If the ruling is upheld and other courts follow its reasoning, "the model said it, not us" stops being a viable defence the moment you choose to surface the output prominently as your own product. This Week I Learnt [Infographic showing babies learn new speech sounds from live people, not recordings, with live interaction linked to improved sound discrimination and recordings marked no improvement.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/Uo64G4kr) [Babies can learn foreign speech sounds from people — but not recordings](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/Uo64G4kr) [By the time you're reading this, your brain has already forgotten how to hear most of the world's sounds. Young infants can distinguish many speech contrasts that adults unfamiliar with those languages struggle to hear. That's every click consonant in Zulu, every tone in Mandarin, every rolled 'r' in Spanish. But somewhere between 6 and 12 months, the brain starts pruning. Sounds that don't appear regularly in the surrounding language fade from perception. Not vocabulary, not grammar, just the raw ability to hear certain distinctions at all. A native English speaker doesn't just struggle to produce Mandarin tones; they often genuinely can't hear them as different sounds. Patricia Kuhl and colleagues ran an experiment in 2003 to see whether that window could be reopened, even partially. They took 9-month-old American infants and exposed them to native Mandarin speakers across 12 lab sessions. By the end, those infants became better at distinguishing the two Mandarin sounds tested, a reversal of the usual decline. Then they ran the same experiment with a second group, same speakers, same material, but delivered via video or audio recording. Those infants showed no improvement at all. The exposure was identical in content. Kuhl's interpretation is that the infant brain has something like a social gate on learning. Live interaction, with its eye contact, turn-taking, and responsiveness, seems to signal to the brain that this input is worth encoding. Passive media doesn't trip that switch. The brain, apparently, knows the difference between a person and a screen. The result suggests that, at this age and for this kind of phonetic learning, live interaction may be more effective than passive exposure. A real speaker who engages directly with the child is doing something qualitatively different, not just quantitatively more.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/Uo64G4kr) Poll Which describes your relationship with side projects? Actively building one (or more) Lots of ideas but haven't built anything What's a side project? Last Week's Poll The Pokémon Go story: would knowing the data might be used for military drones change how you'd have played? Never would have scanned 33% Still would have scanned 7% Didn't play, doesn't apply 60% Science [Infographic showing a person walking anticlockwise around a circle, with notes that it is not handedness, not the room, not culture, and still a mystery.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/crL2zhsJ) [Why do humans naturally drift anticlockwise?](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/crL2zhsJ) [Put a person in an open space with no particular destination, and they'll probably drift left. Not always, not dramatically, but consistently enough that researchers across five experiments kept seeing the same thing. The physicist who noticed this, Iñaki Echeverría-Huarte at the University of Navarra, assumed it would have a quick explanation. Maybe the room layout was subtly nudging people. Five years later, after ruling out handedness, cultural background, age, and room geometry, his team published in Nature Communications with essentially the same answer they started with: we don't know. There's an older finding that right-handed people tend to turn left when they hit a wall, and left-handed people do the opposite. But this anticlockwise bias shows up regardless of which hand you write with. So it's not that. We genuinely don't know why. Which, for something as basic as which direction your feet carry you when you're not paying attention, is a strange gap to still have.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/crL2zhsJ) [Cartoon crowd in a wellness marketplace, with signs for peptide injections and “cure ageing”.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/v2ZPMZTh) [Peptides are all over TikTok. The clinical evidence, less so.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/v2ZPMZTh) Google searches for "peptides" went from 1.3 million a month in 2024 to around 8 million a month in 2026. That's a staggering jump for a category of compounds that, for the most part, aren't approved for human use. Peptides are short chains of amino acids (the same building blocks as proteins, just fewer of them). Some are legitimate medicines: GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are peptides, and so is insulin. But the ones flooding TikTok and gym forums, with names like BPC-157, TB-500, and MOTS-c, are a different matter. They come in vials labelled "for research use only" because they haven't cleared clinical trials. Calling it an "unregulated industry" is, if anything, being polite about it. The claims are broad: faster injury healing, muscle growth, sharper thinking, fewer wrinkles. Animal studies are promising enough to explain the excitement, but animal studies have a notoriously poor track record of translating to humans. The researchers quoted in the source are cautious: enthusiasm has run well ahead of the evidence. Part of what's driving this is a broader erosion of trust in mainstream medicine, particularly in the US. When people don't trust doctors, they look elsewhere, and wellness influencers are there with confident answers. That's not a new dynamic, but peptides are a particularly sharp example of it. [Colourful 3D sonar map of underwater wreckage, with a central sunken object and scattered debris on the seabed.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/QttBg2Po) [Sonar plus optical cameras let underwater robots see through their own sediment clouds](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/QttBg2Po) Underwater robots doing detailed work on the seafloor have a self-defeating problem: the moment they land or start digging, they kick up sediment clouds that blind their own cameras. The usual fix is to stop and wait for the water to clear, which is slow and wastes dive time. Sonar-MASt3R, developed by MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), pairs sonar with optical cameras to get around this. Sonar (sound-based ranging, the same basic principle as a bat's echolocation) works fine in murky water and gives the robot a rough 3D map of its surroundings. The robot uses that map to navigate closer to an object of interest, close enough for the optical camera to resolve centimetre-scale detail once it's in range. Neither sensor alone would be enough; sonar lacks resolution, and optical cameras are useless in a sediment cloud. Together, they cover each other's weaknesses. In tank tests with controlled visibility, the system mapped the environment and picked out fine detail even in the cloudiest water. Whether that holds up in open-ocean conditions, with unpredictable currents and more complex environments, is the next question. [Illustration of Isaac Newton reaching through a glowing blue portal to catch a falling red apple.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/Dq8NQUGs) [In a toy model of spacetime, quantum “magic” produces something resembling curvature](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/Dq8NQUGs) Gravity bends space-time. Einstein told us that in 1915. What he didn't explain is why space-time is bendable at all, rather than being a fixed, rigid backdrop. New theoretical research suggests the answer comes from a quantum property that physicists have, with unusual candour, named "magic." In quantum computing, magic has a precise meaning: it measures how quantum a system actually is. A system with no magic behaves predictably enough that a normal computer can simulate it. A system with lots of magic cannot be simulated classically, and that gap is where quantum computers get their advantage. The new work connects magic to holographic theories of gravity, where a flat quantum system on the boundary of a region is mathematically equivalent to curved space-time inside it. Earlier research suggested that quantum entanglement (the correlations between particles that Einstein called "spooky action at a distance") weaves the fabric of space-time together. But entanglement alone couldn't explain curvature. The researchers found that magic fills that gap: more magic in the boundary system corresponds to more curvature in the interior. Rough shorthand: entanglement builds the fabric, and magic crumples it. If it holds, it would mean gravity traces back to the same quantum property that engineers are already trying to harness in quantum computers. [Kayanoya Ginza shopfront in Tokyo with a facade of slender vertical wooden slats and glass doors at street level.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/fCuLohA3) [Warm wood interior of a Tokyo dashi shop with a central display counter, plant bed, and slatted mezzanine above.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/fCuLohA3) [Interior of a Tokyo dashi shop with wooden shelves, labelled ingredient trays, and a straw-textured back wall beneath Kengo Kuma-style timber detailing.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/fCuLohA3) [Warmly lit interior with curved wooden slats overhead, a grey semicircular bench, and a display counter in a Tokyo shop.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/fCuLohA3) [Warm wood-lined dashi shop interior with stone display counters, shelves of boxed products, and a copper checkout desk.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/fCuLohA3) [Close-up of a facade with rows of slender vertical wooden slats over a dark building wall.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/fCuLohA3) [Front of a Tokyo shop with a facade of narrow vertical wooden slats, warmly lit at night.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/fCuLohA3) [Kayanoya Ginza](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/fCuLohA3) [Tokyo, Japan](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/fCuLohA3) Data [Bar chart showing tanker oil spills dropping by more than 90% since the 1970s, from 117 in 1974 to 10 in 2024.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/i5Hsozdb) [Tanker oil spills dropped from weekly occurrences to near-zero](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/i5Hsozdb) [In the 1970s, oil tankers were spilling into the sea at a rate of one or two incidents every week. Around 70 to 100 spills a year, many of them large, dumping over 300,000 tonnes of oil annually into the ocean. By the last decade, no year had more than ten, with total volume under 10,000 tonnes. A drop of more than 90% on both counts. Stricter maritime regulations, double-hulled tanker designs, better crew training, and improved spill response all played a part. It's one of those cases where the combination of international pressure and engineering changes actually worked.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/i5Hsozdb) History [A weathered black felt bicorne hat with a small cockade sits on an embroidered velvet cushion.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/kC9PmvZM) [A forgotten Napoleon hat, authenticated 200 years later](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/kC9PmvZM) [A Napoleon hat that spent roughly 200 years in obscurity has been authenticated as genuinely his, and is now on display at the Musée Condé in Chantilly. The hat is a bicorne (the distinctive sideways-worn black felt hat you'd recognise from portraits of Napoleon) and is described by curators as exceptionally rare because it still has all its original fittings intact. More unusually, its provenance traces back to Napoleon's final exile on Saint Helena, the remote South Atlantic island where he spent his last years. It was one of four hats he brought with him. In his will, written shortly before his death in 1821, Napoleon left two of those hats to his son, the King of Rome. His son never received them, though. He died young in 1832, and the hats passed into the murky waters of imperial estate succession. This particular one eventually ended up forgotten, until recent authentication work brought it back to light. It'll be the centrepiece of an exhibition dedicated to the collections of Caroline Murat, Napoleon's sister and Queen of Naples from 1808 to 1815, running until 4 October.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/kC9PmvZM) [Stylised illustration of a scientist at a microscope, a DNA helix in the centre, and two figures lifting a gold Nobel medal.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/6whkjxCq) [Oswald Avery was nominated for the Nobel Prize 38 times and never won](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/6whkjxCq) Avery and co's (Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty) 1944 experiment was one of the most consequential in biology. Working at Rockefeller University, he and his colleagues showed that DNA (not protein, as most scientists assumed at the time) was the molecule that carried genetic information. That finding eventually led to Watson and Crick's double helix, the entire field of molecular biology, and everything downstream of it: genetic medicine, forensic DNA testing, CRISPR. He was nominated 38 times across more than two decades. He never won. The Nobel Committee's hesitation seems to have come from genuine scientific scepticism at the time. Many researchers weren't yet convinced that DNA alone could do what Avery claimed. The prize went elsewhere, year after year, and Avery died in 1955 without it. Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins won in 1962 for the structure of the very molecule Avery had identified as the carrier of heredity. His name is rarely in that story when it's told at a dinner party. Design [A black vinyl cutting lathe on a pedestal, with a record platter, cutting arm, and small red indicator light against a dark background.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/PyZdUT3m) [Teenage Engineering now makes a professional vinyl cutting lathe](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/PyZdUT3m) [Teenage Engineering's APC-2 weighs 140kg, sits on a granite base, and cuts vinyl in real time directly from a DAW. That's not a hobbyist setup. The specs are serious: wow and flutter below 0.01% WRMS (that's a measure of speed consistency, and that figure is tight), a stereo feedback cutting head with automated lift, and an integrated vacuum system that holds the disc down and hoovers up the swarf (the tiny ribbons of vinyl the cutting stylus produces) as it works. The whole machine runs off a single IEC power connector and can be controlled remotely over ethernet or Wi-Fi. It's only available through SUPERSENSE, a Vienna-based analogue media outfit, and Teenage Engineering say only a limited number have been built so far. Pricing isn't listed; you email them.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/PyZdUT3m) [A woman stands behind a large LEGO Sagrada Família model with tall beige spires on a table.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/GrMvcHxC) [LEGO's biggest set ever, the Sagrada Família, will soon be available for $800](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/GrMvcHxC) LEGO's new Sagrada Família set has 12,060 pieces, which makes it the largest LEGO set ever produced. The real-world basilica in Barcelona has been under construction since 1882, so there's a certain poetry in buying a version you can actually finish. It'll cost $800, which works out to roughly 6.6 cents per piece if that helps justify it to anyone sharing a bank account with you. Random [A public toilet with an open-front seat beneath a chrome flush valve in a grey stall.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/pDoFsAUx) [The gap in American public toilet seats is a plumbing code requirement](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/pDoFsAUx) The U-shaped gap on American public toilet seats traces back to a single line in a 1955 plumbing code. The American Standard National Plumbing Code required that "all seats of water closets provided for public use shall be of the open-front type." That rule was later absorbed into the Uniform Plumbing Code in 1973, and it's been the standard ever since. The logic is simple enough: the front of a toilet seat is where urine splashes land and where bowl water pools. A closed oval means toilet paper passes through that zone on its way to your body. The gap removes that contact point entirely. Home toilets are exempt because the rule only covers public facilities. When you're the one responsible for cleaning it, the hygiene case is weaker, so manufacturers default to the closed oval (which most people find more comfortable anyway). The U-shape is also largely an American quirk. Most other countries never put an open-front requirement into their plumbing codes, so the full oval never went anywhere. [Exploded mechanical watch diagram showing the dial, hands, gears, and movement components separated in layers.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/QBxRRiMc) [How a mechanical watch keeps time, every part explained](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/QBxRRiMc) Bartosz Ciechanowski makes interactive explainers, and this one on mechanical watches is one of his best. You can drag the movement in 3D and scrub through animations showing exactly what each part does and why it matters. The watch has no battery. Energy is stored in a coiled spring, released through a series of gears, and regulated by a tiny oscillating wheel that rocks back and forth roughly six times a second. That rhythm is what turns "stored energy" into "accurate time". Every tick is the mechanism catching and releasing. Worth an hour of your time if you've ever wondered what's actually happening inside. [Diagram titled “Proposed phylogeny of the Occlupanida” showing a taxonomy tree of different bread bag clip shapes, each drawn as a coloured clip and labelled with family names.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/nh3JYUmy) [Someone applied Linnaean taxonomy to bread bag clips](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/nh3JYUmy) Bread bag clips, formally known as Occlupanida (from the Latin occlu, to close, and pan, bread), have been given a full Linnaean classification: Kingdom Microsynthera, Phylum Plasticae, sitting alongside 45 rpm record adapters and plastic juice caps. The taxonomy was built without genetics, a fossil record, or any of the usual tools. The researchers (if we can call them that) took the same approach Linnaeus used in the 1700s: group things that look similar and draw complicated charts. Since most clips share so many structural features, they settled on the oral groove, the part that grips the bag, as the key distinguishing trait. Different tooth arrangements mean different species, different ecological niches, different geographic ranges. It is, technically, completely made up. It is also, technically, completely coherent. [Web](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/7XZEUFnY) · [Twitter](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/A2h4M9VG) · [LinkedIn](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/treKrhyS)