Back in 1975, Jack H. Hetherington, a physics professor at Michigan State University, wrote a research paper on low–temperature physics for the respected scientific journal Physical Review Letters. Before sending it off, Hetherington asked a colleague to review the paper, just to make sure it covered the right bases. What happened next Hetherington explained in the 1982 book, More Random Walks in Science:

Before I submitted [the article], I asked a colleague to read it over and he said, ‘It’s a fine paper, but they’ll send it right back.’ He explained that that is because of the Editor’s rule that the word “we” should not be used in a paper with only a single author. Changing the paper to the impersonal seemed too difficult now, and it was all written and typed; therefore, after an evening’s thought, I simply asked the secretary to change the title page to include the name of the family cat, a Siamese called Chester, sired one summer by Willard (one of the few unfixed male Siamese cats in Aspen, Colorado). I added the initials F D in front of the name to stand for Felix Domesticus and thus created F D C Willard.

The editors eventually accepted the paper, “Two‑, Three‑, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3 He.” And the ruse lasted until, remembers Hetherington, “a visitor [came to the university and] asked to talk to me, and since I was unavailable asked to talk with Willard. Everyone laughed and soon the cat was out of the bag.” (Pun surely intended.) Apparently only the journal editors didn’t find humor in the joke.

Above, you can see F.D.C. Willard’s signature (a paw print) on the front page of the article. The website, TodayIFoundOut, has much more on this enchanting little story.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Related Content:

The Shortest-Known Paper Published in a Serious Math Journal: Two Succinct Sentences 

The Famous Schrodinger’s Cat Thought Experiment Gets Brought to Life in an Off-Kilter Animation

Insanely Cute Cat Commercials from Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki’s Legendary Animation Shop

Nick Cave Narrates an Animated Film about the Cat Piano, the Twisted 18th Century Musical Instrument Designed to Treat Mental Illness

Over the weekend, it became fashionable to use AI to replace the operating systems on smart TVs with vibe coded or AI reverse-engineered ones to make them less bloated. People have taken proprietary internet-of-things devices that were bricked and abandoned by their creators and used AI to hack them and install new software on them, giving functionality the original developers took away.  

In the last few days I have seen people hack smart picture frames to become AI-powered smart calendars, baby monitors to remove all ads, and bricked Lululemon mirrors to bring them back to life with new software. And dozens and dozens of TVs to install AI-written software that removes bloatware, ads, and simplifies the user interface. 

What we’re seeing is vibe coding, but instead of making something from scratch, people are using AI to take an existing piece of software and replicate its features, its functionality, or cloning it wholesale. In some cases, people are using AI to take a proprietary piece of hardware and install some version of open source software on it. All of this is some mix of “decompiling,” “reverse-engineering,” “hacking,” vibe coding, AI slop, and stealing. It is the plagiarism machine being used for plagiarism, but also it is random people using AI to take control back over devices whose proprietary software was used to arbitrarily lock away basic functionality, to add advertisements, surveillance, and bloat to devices that probably shouldn’t have them, or whose functionality was bricked altogether. 

“All I am hearing from software engineers is that software-as-a-service is dying as a business model,” Mike Nolan, who studies the politics of open source software, told 404 Media about the recent spate of AI-driven clones. “It’s becoming so easy to recreate the functionality that you want [with AI.]”

“The barrier for recreating this stuff is lower, so a lot of people are doing it for fun,” he added. “But there’s a lot of work associated with maintaining software so there may be a lot of instances where the software may not be reliable enough to use—I don’t know how many companies are going to be adopting these clones.”

In one example, a user named Gathin wrote in a post on X: “Vibe coded my parents’ TV this afternoon! It was showing a sponsored ad before you could even get to Netflix. Gave Claude Code the model number, it found the TV on wifi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages and wrote a new launcher.” That post has allegedly been viewed more than 6 million times. “Looks like an Apple TV now lol.”

It has been possible to do a lot of this for a long time using open source, human-coded repositories. There are many communities of people who have spent hundreds of hours bringing bricked internet-of-things hardware from the dead or finding vulnerabilities that allow one to modify or repair devices that have proprietary software on them. 

But over the weekend, a project called “Reverse Engineer Anything” became one of the most viral GitHub repositories in recent memory, with more than 342,000 stars as of the time I’m writing this. The project uses AI to deconstruct features in other pieces of software, and allows the user to replicate them: “See a feature in an app that you want in your own product? Ask your agent to investigate it with REA. It can inspect the app without its source code, explain how the feature works, show the evidence, and build a version for your project.”

What this promises is a way to easily clone and modify other people’s products; it is the same general principle that has in recent weeks allowed for the viral, AI-driven clones of Adobe’s Creative Cloud software, Microsoft Office and the “decompilation” of hundreds of different video games. This tactic is being used not just on software you run on your computer, but also to reverse-engineer and modify the embedded software on physical devices. 

A person who claims to make guitar pedals, for example, claimed on Hacker News that he used AI to clone the effects algorithms of three of his competitors using AI: “In the past 72 hours I have ONE-SHOT decompiled 3 of my main competitors products. Like, I could in theory just stick them in a box and resell them […] Basically, anyone with a Claude subscription can now rip off [sic] any best-in-class algorithm from any competitor.”

It is not necessarily the case that everyone will be writing and running their own software or that Adobe or Microsoft are screwed. But I’ve seen enough to say that the “decompiling” or “reverse-engineer anything” craze is going to have an actual real-world impact on software companies, coding communities, and open-source projects. 

One of the criticisms I heard last week after writing about video game “decompiling” communities being overrun with AI-powered decompilations, ports, and clones is that a lot of the AI decompilations are not actually “decompiling” anything — that the resulting source code usually isn’t the same as the original, and that the resulting software has weird bugs, is of low quality, or doesn’t fully work. 

But that’s one of the main problems here: AI-powered, cloned software often has bugs that the person using the AI doesn’t understand or know how to fix, and people are doing it anyway, using the software anyway, and unleashing it on the world and on these communities at a speed with which it cannot be vetted or moderated. Part of the reason that this will have an impact is specifically because, at least in the short term, a lot of this software will suck: The ability to cheaply and quickly clone software and modify features is going to have some sort of sloppifying impact on society whether you vibecode software or not. Unlike some of Silicon Valley’s wildest sickos, I do not expect most people to vibe code their own software or to hack their baby monitors, but like AI slop on social media or on menus, flyers, and billboards, you do not need to actually use AI or think that it’s good in order to be affected by this. 

Inevitably, poorly coded, barely-functional, insecure software is going to be installed on critical hardware, which will lead to devices and networks being hacked; reverse-engineering communities and open source projects are going to be overrun with people Kool-Aid manning in with “their” AI projects and code. 

All of this has been enabled by the agentification of AI, improving models, and the removal of guardrails. It is now possible to tell an AI to go do something, and to generally have it do that thing. This is leading to more people making more things and more AI agents acting in annoying and perhaps antisocial ways on the internet—we are likely to see an onslaught of semi-functional software and hardware slop, which will have knock-on effects for us all.

We are going to see hastily-created hardware startups using poorly cloned software that barely works, we are going to go to restaurants and be asked to order through a touch screen using cloned software with bizarre bugs. We are going to see people installing and using random code that they know nothing about on internet-connected physical hardware; and we are likely to see hackers try to infiltrate this process to include malware on some of that code. We are going to see smaller software and hardware companies killed by competitors who used AI to steal their products and undercut them. But what people use this for is likely to be a bit of a mixed bag; we are also likely going to see decompiled software used to remove manufacturer guardrails on products that never should have existed in the first place.

Scientists have discovered that an exotic particle that existed at the birth of the universe might solve one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology and help explain reality as we know it, according to a new study in Physical Review Letters.

Our modern universe is dominated by matter, but it also contains fleeting amounts of antimatter, which is like a bizarro version of matter made of particles with the same mass, but opposite electrical charges. For instance, matter contains positively-charged protons and negatively-charged electrons, whereas antimatter is made up of the inverse: negatively-charged antiprotons and positively-charged positrons. 

As a result of these opposite features, matter and antimatter particles annihilate each other when they meet. This mutual destruction is the source of a major cosmic mystery, given that equal amounts of matter and antimatter are predicted to have formed in the split-seconds following the Big Bang. Yet somehow, matter emerged as the far more dominant substance in the cosmos, an asymmetry that has yet to be explained.

Now, a pair of scientists have pinpointed an overlooked particle, known as the heaviest decoupled right-handed neutrino (RHN), as a solution to this problem—plus, they predict that their hypothesis could be experimentally tested in the future. 

“No one talks about this decoupled right-handed neutrino,” Rishav Roshan, a research fellow at the University of Southampton and a co-author of the study, told 404 Media. “We realized that this decoupled right-handed neutrino could alter the expansion of the universe and affect the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe.”

“This thing was present in the literature for a very long time, and for some reason people did not pay that much attention to this particular point,” he added.

This particle is the heaviest of a trio of hypothetical decoupled RHNs that existed briefly after the Big Bang, and are key to the “minimal seesaw model” that explains the origin of modern neutrinos, which are extremely lightweight particles that are abundant in the universe today.  

“The heaviest decoupled right-handed neutrino is a particle that exists in the minimal seesaw model but interacts very weakly with regular matter, making it nearly invisible to current experiments,” Roshan told 404 Media. For this reason, he noted that this particle has been “overlooked because many researchers focus on the lighter neutrinos” and view “the heavy states as irrelevant due to their minimal influence on observable physics.”

Roshan and co-author Sudipta Show, a postdoctoral researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, had a hunch that this exotic heavy particle could have played a role in the domination of matter in the early universe. In their new study, they included the particles in models of the primordial universe, which suggested that the particle could have slowly decayed, creating an imbalance in particles known as “leptons”—a class that includes different “flavors” such as electrons, muons, and neutrinos—that was then amplified into the larger matter-antimatter imbalance. 

“In the early universe, when this heavy neutrino was produced, the temperature of the universe was extremely high, much greater than the mass energy of this neutrino, and it behaved as radiation,” Roshan explained over email. “As the universe began to expand, its temperature slowly decreased.” 

“Once the temperature fell below the mass energy of the heavy neutrino, the particle became non-relativistic and started to behave like matter due to its extremely weak interactions, influencing the dynamics of the universe's expansion and affecting the creation of matter versus antimatter,” he continued.

Scientists have already pinpointed the process of uneven lepton and antilepton formation—known as leptogenesis—as a leading explanation for how matter dominated the universe. Roshan and Show now demonstrate that the heaviest decoupled RHN is key to this hypothesis and should be included in future models.

Moreover, the team noted that a new generation of observatories could potentially detect this process hidden in gravitational waves, which are ripples in spacetime. Current detectors, such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) can pick up gravitational waves made by cataclysmic events, such as mergers between black holes. But a spate of advanced detectors, due to come online in the 2030s and 2040s, are designed to tune into “primordial” waves from the split-seconds after the Big Bang, which may contain spectral signs of the heaviest decoupled RHN. 

“Future detectors like SKA, LISA, DECIGO, and ET could potentially observe these signatures. These instruments are being developed to detect gravitational waves, with some expected to come online within the next few years. If successful, they could pick up signals related to the heavy neutrino’s effects on the early universe,” Roshan wrote over email.

“Solving the matter-antimatter asymmetry question could transform our understanding of cosmic evolution and the fundamental laws of physics,” he added. “It may challenge or refine the Standard Model and influence theories of the universe's formation and structure. A new understanding of this asymmetry could also lead to insights about dark matter and the early moments of the universe, potentially reshaping our view of cosmic history.”

Lori Anderson, 57, was told she might have only two to five years left to live after her triple-negative breast cancer spread through her body. Her latest scan now shows no evidence of metastatic disease, the result of an experimental drug combination she received years before it became a formally approved treatment.

Anderson first discovered a lump in August 2021 and was diagnosed that month with stage 2b triple-negative breast cancer, according to KSHB 41 Kansas City. She began treatment at Saint Luke's Cancer Institute, undergoing chemotherapy, surgery, radiation and immunotherapy. Her cancer initially responded well, but it returned and spread. By the end of January 2023, Anderson said her triple-negative breast cancer had metastasized to her skin, and by June 2023 her treatment was no longer controlling the disease, the station reports.

Triple-negative breast cancer lacks the estrogen, progesterone and HER2 receptors that many other treatments target, making it notoriously difficult to fight. The subtype accounts for 10% to 15% of all breast cancer diagnoses in the United States, and patients diagnosed with distant metastatic disease face a five-year relative survival rate of roughly 12% to 13%, according to data cited by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Anderson said she feared not having time left with family and friends.

A Team Decision Years Ahead of FDA Approval

As the disease progressed, Anderson’s team at Saint Luke's Hospital Koontz Center for Advanced Breast Cancer, led by medical director Dr. Timothy Pluard, chose to combine pembrolizumab (Keytruda) with sacituzumab govitecan-hziy (Trodelvy). KSHB reported that published evidence establishing the combination’s safety and effectiveness in triple-negative breast cancer was lacking at the time, and that Anderson was among the early patients to receive it.

Pluard described Keytruda as an immunotherapy and Trodelvy as an antibody-drug conjugate, a treatment designed to deliver cancer-killing medication to cells expressing a particular target. He told KSHB that the team saw signs of a response within weeks. Anderson’s tumor markers had fallen significantly within four months and eventually became undetectable, the station reported.

The FDA approved the Trodelvy-Keytruda combination in June 2026 as a first-line treatment for adults with unresectable locally advanced or metastatic triple-negative breast cancer whose tumors have a PD-L1 combined positive score (CPS) of at least 10 on an FDA-authorized test. In the 443-patient Phase 3 ASCENT-04/KEYNOTE-D19 trial, median progression-free survival was 11.2 months with the combination and 7.8 months with chemotherapy plus Keytruda; overall-survival data were immature, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The results showed a 35% reduction in the risk of disease progression or death, as also reported by CURE. A separate exploratory post-hoc analysis of 443 patients, presented at the 2026 ASCO Annual Meeting, found a 33% reduction in the risk of a second disease progression or death compared with chemotherapy plus Keytruda, according to The ASCO Post. These trial findings describe group outcomes, not a prediction for an individual patient.

What Approval and Survival Statistics Can—and Cannot—Show

The FDA approval covers a specific first-line setting and patients whose tumors meet the PD-L1 CPS threshold. The National Cancer Institute says the FDA typically requires evidence from a large clinical trial before an anticancer drug can be used broadly in patient care. That general process does not establish whether Anderson received her earlier regimen through a clinical trial or another route, nor does it make her preapproval treatment standard care. For population context, National Cancer Institute SEER data report a five-year relative survival rate of 14.9% for distant HR-/HER2- female breast cancer. This is a group-level estimate, not an individual prognosis.

Blood Test Finds No Molecular Trace of Disease

To track Anderson's response at the molecular level, her care team used Signatera, a personalized tumor-informed circulating tumor DNA test that looks for cancer-associated DNA fragments in the bloodstream, which can help clinicians monitor treatment response or signs of recurrence in appropriate patients. The test is built to create a tumor-specific fingerprint capable of detecting residual cancer fragments down to one part per million, identifying recurrence an average of 10.5 months earlier than standard imaging, according to Natera. Medicare covers Signatera testing for patients across Stage II through Stage IV breast cancer, in both treatment and recurrence monitoring settings, the company notes.

Anderson's Signatera testing showed no detectable molecular evidence of disease. She had a PET scan this past September — her first since just before surgery — and said the report showed no evidence of metastatic disease. Even so, patients who have experienced metastatic breast cancer need continued monitoring, as the station's report makes clear.

A Decade-Old Kansas City Facility Built for Stage 4 Care

The Koontz Center, which opened in 2016, was established to focus on comprehensive care for patients with Stage 4 or metastatic breast cancer and marks its 10th anniversary this month. It remains the first facility in the United States dedicated exclusively to comprehensive care for metastatic breast cancer patients, according to Saint Luke's Health System. The center is named in connection with the Paul Koontz Endowed Chair of Breast Disease, honoring Dr. Paul G. Koontz Jr., a longtime Kansas City surgical oncologist, an endowed chair affiliated with the University of Missouri - Kansas City School of Medicine.

Saint Luke's Cancer Institute also operates a Center for Precision Oncology alongside the Koontz Center, offering whole genome sequencing and computational biology analysis for advanced cancer patients across a 450-mile radius around Kansas City, giving physicians the ability to identify specific tumor genomic alterations down to the DNA level. Nationally, an estimated 168,000 to 170,000 women were living with Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer in the United States between 2025 and 2026, according to Susan G. Komen — the population of patients who stand to benefit as treatments like Anderson's move from off-label experimentation to approved standard of care.

Anderson’s outcome is an individual response; clinical-trial and population statistics describe groups of patients and cannot predict what will happen to any one person.