Fwd: Skeptoid: AI Psychosis: Is It a Moral Panic?

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From: Skeptoid Companion Email <noreply@skeptoid.com>
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2026 at 13:22
Subject: Skeptoid: AI Psychosis: Is It a Moral Panic?
To: <zvagoman@gmail.com>

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Skeptoid #1060: AI PSYCHOSIS: IS IT A MORAL PANIC? In 2025, the New York Times published the story of Eugene Torres, a 42 year old accountant in Manhattan who used ChatGPT to discuss the theory that reality is actually a computer simulation. The chatbot said many people have the intuition that something about reality feels off, and asked if he’d ever had that feeling. by Ashley Hamer Pritchard Go to the full episode

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WONDER OF THE WEEK Near 100% efficient solar desalinization process Solar-tracking desalination system (CC BY 4.0/Light Sci Appl 10.1038/s41377-026-02315-4) Of the many dire effects of climate change, lack of potable water ranks near the top. Many countries already rely on converting ocean water into fresh water, but reverse osmosis and thermal distillation are both energy intensive and release brine that makes the water more salty, reduces oxygen levels, and thus harms sea life. The demand for water for both people and industry is going nowhere but up. Researchers from the University of Rochester have published a paper describing a new approach that's solar-thermal, uses less energy, doesn't generate brine (put a pin in that), and doesn't require pre-treating the water with chemicals. The novel technology is based on an SWBM (superwicking black metal) panel that has been treated with femtosecond laser pulses. The panel absorbs sunlight, heats up, wicks the water, evaporates it and removes the salt. It's highly hydrophilic (attractive to water) and can pull water uphill against gravity, allowing effective solar tracking. The evaporated water, now distilled, can be extracted from the panel and the remaining salts are directed to the passive (untreated) part of the panel. That makes it both self-cleaning and able to continuously desalinate the water. Now, just high-efficiency desalination would be wonderful enough, but let's get back to the part about not generating brine: Most of the salt in the sea is sodium salt, which is plain table salt. Know what other mineral is common in the ocean? Lithium. So this system could not only supply drinking water and salt for food and industry, but lithium for making batteries. And it does it all while cleaning itself. Lead researcher Chunlei Guo says, "The most important advance is that our system can desalinate real ocean water continuously using sunlight alone, without generating waste, with little to no maintenance and while recovering valuable minerals such as lithium. By using a superwicking, selfcleaning surface invented in my lab to move salts away from the evaporation region, we overcame the clogging bottleneck that has limited solar desalination until now. This is the first time we have achieved stable, lowmaintenance, highefficiency and nearly 100% salt-recovery performance with actual seawater." The team's next project is scaling up the technology and integrating it with solar cells. They've already found that the desalination process can cool the solar cells, yielding more electrical output while still producing fresh water. "This approach could lead to a synergistic water-energy system that operates sustainably," Guo told Physics World. Read more. Contributed by Craig Good.

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