From First Principles, the FFP Pod: Breaking down science news so it makes sense to curious people everywhere.
A weekly video podcast with Krishna Choudhary and Lester Nare. Watch, listen, or both.
Why Spin Qubits Will Win the Quantum Race (Part 2)
Part II of our quantum computing deep dive compares the leading hardware architectures, and asks whether silicon’s greatest advantage is not simply making good qubits, but making quantum computers that can actually scale.
- EP 54
How Quantum Computing Actually Works (Part 1)
Part I of our quantum computing deep dive traces the field from Bell and Feynman to Deutsch and Shor—and explains what quantum computers actually do differently from classical machines.
- EP 53
What Claude Actually Did to the Riemann Hypothesis
Claude takes a real run at the Riemann Hypothesis, forcing us to ask what agentic AI can now do in mathematics, before we open the summer transfer window for America’s scientists.
- EP 52
The Amazon’s Hidden Civilization (One Year Anniversary)
For FFP’s first anniversary, we uncover the densely populated precolonial Amazon, imagine what our civilization will leave behind, and build the first shelves of the From First Principles library.
- EP 51
The Tech Elon Has Been Waiting For
A graphene-based memory device works at 1,300°F, opening new possibilities for extreme-environment electronics, in-memory AI, planetary exploration, and data centers in space.
- EP 50
AI Breaks a 90-Year Math Problem, Life’s Alphabet in Space, and Science Funding
Asteroid samples reveal life’s molecular alphabet, Washington battles over who controls science funding, and AI produces a counterexample to a 90-year-old mathematics conjecture.
- EP 49
FIFA Data Scientists Explain Match Momentum
FIFA data scientists Juan Busso and Arron Ackerman explain how player tracking, pitch control, space creation, and threat are transformed into the World Cup’s Match Momentum visualization.
- DOD
- DOD 49%
- HHS
- HHS 25%
- DOE
- DOE 11%
- NASA
- NASA 6%
- NSF
- NSF 4%
- Other agencies
- 8 more 7%
Where $197 billion of federal science money goes
For thirty years Washington paid for most of American science. Then industry passed it, the Pentagon kept half of what remained, and the federal share of the economy fell to a third of its peak. Seventy years of AAAS data, told in five chapters.
- Nature
A digitally controlled silicon quantum processing unit
Imagine you want to build a super-powerful calculator that uses the weird rules of quantum physics to solve problems no regular computer can. The trouble is, the tiny quantum pieces — called qubits — are incredibly fragile and need to be kept colder than outer space. On top of that, you need wires and control signals going to every single qubit, and if you have thousands of them, the wiring becomes a nightmare. This team solved part of that puzzle by building their qubits out of silicon (the same stuff in your phone's chip), adding a tiny control computer that works at super-cold temperatures right next to the qubits, and using a special high-density cable to connect everything cleanly. They packed 54 tiny quantum dots onto a chip, arranged 18 of them into working qubits, and showed the qubits work about 10 times better than any previous silicon qubit of this type. They also ran basic error-correction experiments to prove the system is on track for real-world use.
- Nature
Over 20,000 precolonial earthworks in the Southwest Amazonia
Imagine flying a special laser scanner over the Amazon jungle that can 'see through' the treetops, like X-ray vision for the ground. When scientists did this, they found over 20,000 geometric shapes — ditches, mounds, and enclosures — built by ancient people long before Europeans arrived. These aren't small things: they're massive earthen structures, like monuments. This means the Amazon rainforest, which most people picture as empty wilderness, was actually home to millions of people who built cities and shaped the landscape. Think of it like discovering that a forest you thought was wild was actually someone's ancient garden on a continental scale.
- Scientific American
The 2026 World Cup's grass is an engineering problem
Imagine you're trying to play soccer in 16 different places across the United States, Canada, and Mexico — some in freezing cold, some blazing hot, some in stadiums with roofs that block sunlight. Half of those stadiums normally use fake grass. Now FIFA, the organization that runs the World Cup, wants every single pitch to feel and play exactly the same way, like a video game where every level has identical physics. To do that, they hired grass scientists — yes, that's a real job — who figured out how to grow special grass on thin mats with plastic underneath so it can be transported like a carpet, stitched with synthetic fibers so it doesn't rip when players sprint and tackle, and tested by literally shooting balls at it with a cannon to make sure it bounces right. Different grass species are used depending on whether a stadium is hot, cool, or dark. It's basically a giant, living, high-tech floor installation that has to survive the world's best athletes running on it.
- Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Remarks on the disproof of the unit distance conjecture
Imagine you scatter a bunch of dots on a piece of paper. The question is: how many pairs of those dots can be exactly 1 inch apart? The Erdős unit distance conjecture asked whether there's a specific mathematical formula that limits how often this can happen as you add more and more dots. Think of it like asking how many friendships can exist in a town where friends are defined as people who live exactly one mile apart — there's a suspected maximum, and Erdős guessed what that maximum should be. For decades, no one could prove or disprove his guess. Now, an AI apparently found a specific arrangement of dots (a 'counterexample') that breaks the expected limit, proving Erdős's conjecture was wrong. A team of elite mathematicians then checked and explained the AI's work in this paper.
- Nature Genetics
Non-Mendelian inheritance of DNA methylation patterns in mice
Imagine your DNA is like a huge book of instructions. Mendel's laws are the normal rules for how chapters of that book get passed from parents to children. But there's also a layer of sticky notes on top of the book—called epigenetic marks—that tell cells which chapters to read and which to ignore. This study found that most of the time (about 93%), these sticky notes follow the normal inheritance rules. But about 7% of the time, they do something unexpected: new patterns appear that neither parent had, or a mark from one parent somehow silences the same mark from the other parent (called paramutation), or males and females end up with completely different sticky notes even when they inherit the same DNA. Scientists discovered this by using a new ultra-precise DNA reading technology in mice, and it opens the door to understanding hidden layers of how traits—and possibly diseases—are passed down through generations.
- New England Journal of Medicine
Digital twin–guided ablation for ventricular tachycardia
Imagine your heart is a city, and ventricular tachycardia is like a traffic jam caused by a broken road — electrical signals get stuck going in circles instead of flowing properly, causing the heart to beat dangerously fast. Doctors can fix this by burning away the broken road using a procedure called ablation. The problem is, finding the exact broken road inside a beating heart is like navigating a city you've never visited before, while driving, in the dark. What these researchers did is take detailed MRI pictures of each patient's heart, build a 3D computer copy — a 'digital twin' — and then simulate where the electrical problem was happening inside that virtual heart. They tested their fix on the computer model first, figured out exactly where to go, and THEN performed the real procedure. What used to take three hours of exploratory surgery was done in about 30 minutes, because the doctors already had a GPS map before they started.
- Nature Neuroscience
Adversarial AI reveals mechanisms and treatments for disorders of consciousness
Imagine your brain is like a city with millions of roads and traffic systems. When you're awake and conscious, traffic flows in complex, coordinated patterns. In a coma, something has gone wrong — but we've never had a great way to figure out exactly which roads are broken or how to fix them. This study built a very smart AI that learned to tell the difference between 'awake brain' and 'coma brain' by studying hundreds of thousands of brainwave recordings. Then, like a detective, the AI was pitted against a simulated model of the brain to figure out: what changes in the brain's wiring would explain the difference? The AI figured out — on its own, without being told — that two key things go wrong in a coma: a specific circuit deep in the brain (called the basal ganglia indirect pathway) gets disrupted, and the brain's 'braking system' (inhibitory neurons) starts working too hard in the wrong places. The researchers then checked these predictions against real patient data, and both checked out. The AI also suggested that zapping a specific deep brain region with high-frequency electrical pulses might help wake people up — and early evidence from human patients supports this idea.
- Nature Astronomy
A complete set of canonical nucleobases in the carbonaceous asteroid (162173) Ryugu
Imagine DNA as a message written in a 4-letter alphabet. Those 'letters' are called nucleobases, and there are five of them: A, T, G, C, and U. Scientists collected tiny rock samples from an asteroid called Ryugu — a rock floating in space about 300 million kilometers from Earth — using a robotic spacecraft. When they looked very carefully at those rocks in a laboratory, they found ALL five of those biological 'letters' inside. Nobody put them there; they formed naturally in space through chemistry involving ice, water, and simple ingredients like ammonia. It's like finding all the pieces of an alphabet scattered across the cosmos, ready to be assembled into the language of life.
- USUnited StatesUnited States, net -20
- CNChinaChina, net +7
- CHSwitzerlandSwitzerland, net +5
- FRFranceFrance, net +3
- HKHong Kong SARHong Kong SAR, net +2
- GBUnited KingdomUnited Kingdom, net +1
The US has lost 20 more senior scientists than it has gained in the 2025–26 window.
A record of senior scientists changing institutions, each move confirmed against public sources before it is counted: who left the US, who arrived, and only the reasons they gave themselves.
250 Years of American Science
An interactive journey through 222 discoveries, inventions, and institutions that built American science, from Franklin's electrostatic experiments in 1747 to the frontiers of 2025.
Companion episodes
- EP 46
America 250: The Breakthroughs That Built American Science — Part 1
Part one of our America 250 special traces the inventions, institutions, and scientific breakthroughs — from Franklin to Sputnik — that helped build the United States into a global scientific power.
- EP 47
America 250: The Breakthroughs That Built American Science — Part 2
Part two of our America 250 special traces American science from Sputnik to the AI age, covering Apollo, ARPANET, CRISPR, LIGO, mRNA vaccines, JWST, transformers, and the future of science funding.
