2026 was our Swedish Annus Mirabilis: First doctor honoris causa from KTH, Stockholm, in April; Then inaugurated to the Royal Academy of Engineering in October (by Marcus Wallenberg) ! @KU_Leuven @SET_KULeuven @_KVAB

When Texan collector Nelda Stark passed away in 1999, her estate executors hired a curator. The curator examined the paintings in the house one by one, moving those deemed 'valuable' into secure storage. But one painting looked so small and ordinary that the curator didn't see the need to move it, and left it right there in the bedroom. That painting was Gerrit Dou's 'Resting Dog'. In 2005, Christie's auction experts arrived to appraise the contents of the home. They stopped in their tracks when they saw this small panel hanging in the bedroom. Measuring 16.5 x 21.6 cm, it's an oil on panel. They set an estimated sale price of $2 - $3 million. The final sale: $4.7 million. Gerrit Dou (1613 - 1675), working in Leiden, painted this piece in 1650 when he was around 37 years old. On February 14, 1628, at the age of 14, Dou became Rembrandt's first pupil. Rembrandt was 21 at the time; he was working closely with Jan Lievens and likely sharing a studio with him. Dou remained by his side for about three years. When Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam in 1631 - 1632, Dou stayed behind in Leiden. Over time, though, he chose a path that distinctly diverged from his master's. While freer, more visible brushwork would define Rembrandt's later years, Dou developed a pictorial language defined by its small scale, intense detail, and highly polished finish. His surfaces often achieved an enamel-like smoothness. This approach ultimately laid the groundwork for the tradition later known as the Leiden fijnschilders, or 'fine painters'. Dou applied finely ground paint in numerous overlapping thin layers. He combined transparent and semi-transparent layers of paint with opaque transitions and small, hatch-like brushstrokes. The result was a rich depth of color and a soft luminosity.

Trump just fired all 24 members of the National Science Board. Every single one. By email. No warning. No reason given. The board has existed since 1950. The National Science Board is the independent body that oversees the National Science Foundation, the agency that distributes $9 billion in research grants every year. Its members are scientists and engineers from universities and industry. They serve six-year staggered terms specifically so they cross presidential administrations and stay independent of whoever is in power. On Friday, every single one of them got the same boilerplate email from Mary Sprowls of the Presidential Personnel Office: "On behalf of President Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Science Board is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service." That's it. That's the whole letter. For 76 years of institutional independence. The NSF funds the basic science behind MRIs. Cellphones. LASIK eye surgery. GPS. The internet itself. The Antarctic research stations. The deep-space telescopes. The research vessels mapping the ocean floor. Every breakthrough that made America the world's leader in science for the better part of a century traces back through grants this agency made and this board approved. The board chair, Victor McCrary, was actively advising Congress on Trump's proposed 55% cut to NSF's budget. The board was helping fight back. So Trump fired the board. Marvi Matos Rodriguez, one of the fired members, told reporters she had been reviewing an 80-page report as part of her board duties just days before being terminated. Keivan Stassun, a physicist at Vanderbilt, said NSF's leadership had already stopped responding to board oversight requests months ago. "We would ask them, 'Are you following board governance directives?' And their answer would be, in effect, 'We don't listen to you anymore.'" Now there's no board to answer to. Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat on the House Science Committee, called it "the latest stupid move made by a president who continues to harm science and American innovation. Will the president fill the NSB with MAGA loyalists who won't stand up to him as he hands over our leadership in science to our adversaries?" That's the actual question. Because while Trump is firing American scientists, China is building research universities at a rate we cannot match. The CDC just buried a study showing vaccines work. RFK Jr. runs HHS. The EPA is gutted. The Forest Service is being broken. Half of American children are breathing dangerous air. And now the people who decide what gets researched in the United States have all been fired by email on a Friday afternoon.

The CEO of Google DeepMind just admitted that if the decision had been his, we would've cured cancer before anyone ever used ChatGPT. And that's not even the scariest thing he said on a recent interview. Demis Hassabis is one of the most important people alive in AI. He won the Nobel Prize last year for AlphaFold, the system that cracked the 50 year protein folding problem. 3 million scientists now use his tool. Almost every new drug being developed will touch it at some stage. In a new interview, he was asked about the moment ChatGPT launched and Google went into "code red." His answer was one of the most revealing things any AI leader has ever said on the record: "If I'd had my way, I would have left AI in the lab for longer. Done more things like AlphaFold. Maybe cured cancer or something like that." Read that again. The man running Google's entire AI division is publicly saying the commercial AI race we're all living through was a MISTAKE. That the industry got hijacked by a chatbot when it could have been solving the biggest problems in science and medicine. His vision was simple: Build AI slowly, carefully, like CERN. Use it to crack root node problems one at a time. Cancer. Energy. New materials. Let humanity benefit from real breakthroughs while the foundational science was figured out over a decade or two. Then ChatGPT dropped in November 2022 and everything changed. Demis described what happened next as getting locked into a "ferocious commercial pressure race" that none of the labs can escape from. On top of that, the US vs China dynamic added geopolitical pressure. The result is everyone sprinting toward products instead of breakthroughs, shipping chatbots while the scientific opportunity gets buried under marketing cycles and quarterly earnings. But he's not saying progress isn't happening... He's saying the progress got redirected away from the things that actually matter most. And then it got even scarier: Because when Demis was asked what he worries about with AI, he laid out two threats. The first is what everyone talks about: Bad actors using AI for harm. Terrorist groups. Hostile nation states. Cyberattacks at scale. But that's not the threat he's most worried about. His second worry is AI itself going rogue. Not today's models. The models coming in the next two to four years as the industry enters what he calls "the agentic era." Systems that can complete entire tasks autonomously. Systems that are increasingly capable and increasingly hard to control. His exact words: "How do we make sure the guardrails are put in place so they do exactly what they've been told to do, and there's no way of them circumventing that or accidentally breaching those guardrails? That's going to be an incredibly hard technical challenge if you think about how powerful and smart and capable these systems eventually get." A Nobel Prize winner who runs one of the 3 most advanced AI labs on Earth just said publicly that within two to four years, we're entering a phase where AI alignment becomes a real problem, and the technical challenge of solving it is enormous. And almost nobody is paying enough attention. He called for international cooperation between labs, AI safety institutes, and academia to tackle the problem. He said this is the thing even the experts aren't thinking about enough. He said the only way to get through the AGI moment safely is if everyone starts treating this with the seriousness it deserves. Most AI CEOs give you careful PR answers about "responsible development" and move on. Demis said something different... He said the commercial race FORCED us into a premature deployment of a technology we barely understand, and the window to get alignment right before the next generation of agents shows up is two to four years. If the man who built the system that might cure cancer is telling you he wishes it had happened first, maybe we should listen to what he says is coming next.

WOW!!! Never thought we would hear this level of honesty from a Western leader, and certainly not Canada, given the direction of Canada in the past 25 years. Canada's shift towards multialignment is quite clear - and this level of honesty from Carney on Western "fiction" about the old order will be warmly welcomed in much of the Global South: "We knew that the story about the rules-based order was partially false... We knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused and the victim. This fiction was useful [because of the goods provided by American hegemony]... So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition... You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination."

Honderden beelden en schilderijen verlaten stadhuis Leuven voor restauratie vrtnws.be/p.DKEVGAod0Gw This is what passion for art looks like 💙 #stadLeuven #cityofLeuven #townhallLeuven

We’re five years into the pandemic, and the science is telling a very different story than “just a cold.” COVID affects blood vessels, organs, metabolism, and cognition — and the impacts compound with each infection. It’s the same pattern we saw with smoking: people felt fine… until the long-term consequences surfaced. Full article here: whn.global/covid-isnt-a-cold… #LongCOVID #COVID #COVID19 #PublicHealth #InfectionPrevention #CleanAir

A simple blood test could soon make it possible not only to screen for breast cancer, but also to identify women at higher risk, thanks to the work of Montreal researchers. This is amazing montreal.citynews.ca/2025/10…

#OTD in 1914 German troops set the Belgian city of Leuven on fire, including the university library. In the process roughly 1000 medieval manuscripts and 300.000 books were destroyed.

RT @PeterHotez: The awful consequences of measles infection versus the safety of the MMR vaccine

So @elonmusk fired whoever was investigating @SpaceX in order to illegally obtain the clearance to launch *another* rocket before they had even been able to identify what caused the last one to EXPLODE and RAIN DEBRIS DOWN UPON US. This one ALSO EXPLODED of course #DeportNaziMusk

GeoConfirmed UKR - Misinformation by President Trump. While we typically refrain from political commentary, President Donald Trump's recent statement regarding the war in Ukraine is so egregious that we feel compelled to respond. Several claims made by President Trump have already been debunked. We've included responses from Grok AI for each claim, demonstrating that even Grok refutes the misinformation spread by the president. In this thread, we will provide geolocated footage as a reminder to everyone that Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, marking the beginning of this war. 1) The United States has not spent $350 billion on this war, nor has it outspent Europe by $200 billion. In fact, European contributions have surpassed those of the US. Moreover, a significant portion of the American military aid (around 90% !) is spend in the US, reinvesting in the US economy. statista.com/statistics/1499… eeas.europa.eu/delegations/u… ifw-kiel.de/publications/new… csis.org/analysis/where-miss… (Grok: x.com/i/grok/share/9grtpN5K2…) 2) President Zelensky did not claim that half the American money sent to Ukraine is "missing". He stated that half of the promised funds had not been received, which is a crucial distinction. csis.org/analysis/where-miss… politifact.com/factchecks/20… edition.cnn.com/2025/02/19/p… (Grok: x.com/i/grok/share/x2J4XJgAu…) 3) Ukrainian constitution prohibits elections during wartime, a measure designed to protect the democratic process from foreign interference, particularly given Russia's known capabilities in this area... foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/11… edition.cnn.com/2024/03/30/e… united24media.com/war-in-ukr… (Grok: x.com/i/grok/share/iNgj4reyI…) 4) President Zelensky is not a dictator, as evidenced by Ukraine's constitutional framework and his commitment to holding elections once hostilities cease. In contrast, it's worth noting that President Putin consistently wins elections in Russia with implausibly high percentages of votes, with opposition that 'falls out of windows", is poisened or jailed, raising questions about the true nature of Russia's electoral process. europarl.europa.eu/doceo/doc… oscepa.org/en/news-a-media/p… osce.usmission.gov/on-the-ru… japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/0… bbc.com/news/world-europe-68… (Grok: x.com/i/grok/share/aK1JCZlsa…) 5) President Zelensky has a approval rate above 50% and not 4%. 4% is Russian disinformation. edition.cnn.com/2025/02/19/p… kiis.com.ua/?lang=eng&cat=re… euronews.com/2025/02/19/zele… abcnews.go.com/International… (Grok: x.com/i/grok/share/IHyHHTkKe…) 6) There was no NATO expansion to the East, as NATO itself cannot expand. Instead, democratic countries independently decide whether they want to become members of the alliance. The process of joining NATO is voluntary and involves multiple steps, including meeting specific requirements and completing a formal application process. The fact that many of Russia's former neighbors have chosen to seek NATO membership speaks volumes about their perception of Russia and their desire for collective security. The decision of these nations to pursue NATO membership reflects their sovereign right to determine their own foreign policy and security arrangements. It also indicates a preference for the stability and security guarantees that NATO membership offers, rather than remaining under Russian influence. Regarding the famous 'promise': Article 103 of the UN Charter establishes a clear hierarchy in international law. It states that obligations under the UN Charter prevail over obligations under any other international agreement in case of conflict. This supremacy extends beyond just treaties, as it is generally understood to also apply to customary international law. The hierarchy can be summarized as follows: 1) UN Charter obligations 2) Other treaties and customary international law 3) Non-treaty international texts 4) Political promises or commitments 5) Historical claims Russia's invasion of Ukraine clearly violates fundamental principles of the UN Charter, including the prohibition on the use of force against the territorial integrity of another state. Any attempts to justify this action based on lower-ranking considerations like political promises or historical claims are legally irrelevant. euvsdisinfo.eu/report/there-… nato.int/cps/ra/natohq/11520… iir.cz/lies-provocations-or-… (Grok: x.com/i/grok/share/fb5Fnn3Do… and x.com/i/grok/share/NgIPkpYvJ… and x.com/i/grok/share/NgIPkpYvJ…) 8) Who initiated this nearly three-year-long war? RUSSIA. As a platform that has analyzed over 50,000 frames/videos related to the conflict, we will remind the president ,with geolocated footage, who started this war: RUSSIA. Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, despite repeatedly denying any plans for invasion in the preceding days. x.com/Mike_Pence/status/1892… edition.cnn.com/2025/02/19/p… (Grok: x.com/i/grok/share/m1W0ZufMq…) --- 24 FEB 2022 - Russian tanks crossing the border from Belarus into Ukraine in Senkivka. 52.106063, 31.780644 4Q4J+C7C Sen'kivka, Chernihiv Oblast, Ukraine Sources: twitter.com/Conflicts/status… 1/11

Zelensky received a standing ovation as he began speaking in Munich. “The time has come—European armed forces must be created.” A stark contrast to yesterday’s lecture on democracy.

Désiré Decoster. Bierbeek. Melkhandelaar. Gehuwd. Verzetsgroep Geheim Leger. Hulp aan onderduikers. Arrestatie op 10 dec '43. Opsluiting in Fort Breendonk. Deportatie naar de concentratiekampen Vught en Sachsenhausen. Désiré sterft er op 6 jan '45. 47 jaar. #heldenvanhetverzet

Everardus Bruyninckx. Kessel-Lo. Beroepssmilitair. Gehuwd. 1 kind. Verzetsgroep Gewapende Partizanen. Transport. Sabotage. Sluikpers. Helpt onderduikers. Arrestatie 3 maa '44. Deportatie concentratiekampen Buchenwald, Dora, Ellrich. Sterft 5 mei '45. 33 jaar. #heldenvanhetverzet

These tiny robotic bugs developed by scientists at MIT could prove useful in transforming agriculture

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg announced Thursday that his foundation will step in to fund the UN climate change body after President Donald Trump declared the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement. Bloomberg's intervention aims to ensure the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) remains fully funded despite the United States halting its contributions. The United States typically provides 22% of the UNFCCC secretariat's budget, with the body's operating costs for 2024-2025 projected at 88.4 million euros ($96.5 million)

In under 5 mins, Ukraine's ex-FM Kuleba dismantles Russian lies "Russia had to attack Ukraine bc of Ukrainians wanted to join NATO" and "NATO promised no eastward enlargement" with facts & a compelling historical journey. A must-watch.

The Louisiana patient with #H5N1 #birdflu contracted the virus from birds, but the virus evolved (acquired mutations) in the patient. Importance of genomic surveillance in people & animals! Prevent exposure of people to infected animals & environments. cdc.gov/bird-flu/spotlights/…