05 Sci-Tech
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PHALABORWA, South Africa — Two enormous sandlike dunes at an old chemical processing plant in South Africa are at the center of an exploratory U.S.-backed project to extract highly sought-after rare earth elements from industrial mining waste.
The Phalaborwa Rare Earths Project has U.S. support through a $50 million equity investment by the government’s International Development Finance Corporation and is part of accelerated U.S. efforts to reduce reliance on economic rival China for the minerals crucial for making electronic devices, robotics, defense systems, electric vehicles and other high-tech products.
Countries have identified dozens of minerals, including copper, cobalt, lithium and nickel, as critical because they are essential for new technologies. The 17 rare earth elements are a subset of them.
President Donald Trump has made expanding U.S. access to critical minerals, including rare earth elements, a central policy to counter China. The Trump administration said this year it will deploy nearly $12 billion to create its own strategic reserve.
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On Monday, at 4:53 P.M. local time, a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck off the northeastern shores of Japan’s largest island, Honshu, where the Pacific tectonic plate plunges beneath the North American plate at the deep-sea Japan Trench. Immediately, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) sent out a tsunami warning alert. Although small tsunami waves did soon reach various sections of the coast, no reports of injuries, deaths, or significant damage to homes or infrastructure were reported.
The danger, however, has not necessarily passed. Following the temblor, a JMA spokesperson told the media and those along the affected shoreline that “the likelihood of a new, huge earthquake occurring is relatively higher than during normal times.” Specifically, there is an elevated risk of a “megaquake”—one of magnitude 8.0 or greater—in the coming days.
The odds of an imminent megaquake are very low—around one in 100. “This 1 percent probability is still low in absolute terms, but it’s 10 times higher than normal, which is significant from a risk management perspective,” says Amilcar Carrera-Cevallos, an independent earthquake scientist.
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Big data, artificial intelligence and advanced pricing algorithms make it easier than ever for companies to fine-tune prices for individual products to closely reflect their unique value and cost. The conventional wisdom is straightforward: better data, better algorithms and sharper segmentation should produce better profits. But new research suggests that the most profitable answer isn’t always more fine-grained pricing across a product line. In fact, it is fewer, better-chosen price points.
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Key Takeaways
- The National Association for Gun Rights advocates for nationwide Constitutional Carry, citing data from the safest states without permit requirements.
- Recent data shows that crime decreased in Florida and Ohio after adopting Constitutional Carry laws, contradicting opponents’ claims.
- The safest states include Maine, New Hampshire, and North Dakota, all of which permit lawful carry without a permit.
- Strict gun control states like California and New York report higher death rates compared to Constitutional Carry states.
- Twenty-nine states now support the principle of carrying firearms without government permission, aligning with Second Amendment rights.
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The capabilities of leading AI models continue to accelerate, and the largest AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are hurtling toward IPOs later this year. Yet resentment toward AI continues to simmer, and in some cases has boiled over, especially in the United States, where local governments are beginning to embrace restrictions or outright bans on new data center development.
It’s a lot to keep track of, but the 2026 edition of the AI Index from Stanford University’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence center pulls it off. The report, which comes in at over 400 pages, includes dozens of data points and graphs that approach the topic from multiple angles, from benchmark scores to investment and public perception.
As in prior years (see our coverage from 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025), we’ve read the report and identified the trends that encapsulate the state of AI in 2026.
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Internet users have found humor in the idea behind the tool, joking about automating their coworkers before themselves. However, Colleague Skill’s virality has sparked a lot of debate about workers’ dignity and individuality in the age of AI.
After seeing Colleague Skill on social media, Amber Li, 27, a tech worker in Shanghai, used it to recreate a former coworker as a personal experiment. Within minutes, the tool created a file detailing how that person did their job. “It is surprisingly good,” Li says. “It even captures the person’s little quirks, like how they react and their punctuation habits.” With this skill, Li can use an AI agent as a new “coworker” that helps debug her code and replies instantly. It felt uncanny and uncomfortable, Li says.
Even so, replacing coworkers with agents could become a norm. Since OpenClaw became a national craze, bosses in China have been pushing tech workers to experiment with agents.
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If you have ever stared at thousands of lines of integration test logs wondering which of the sixteen log files actually contains your bug, you are not alone — and Google now has data to prove it.
A team of Google researchers introduced Auto-Diagnose, an LLM-powered tool that automatically reads the failure logs from a broken integration test, finds the root cause, and posts a concise diagnosis directly into the code review where the failure showed up. On a manual evaluation of 71 real-world failures spanning 39 distinct teams, the tool correctly identified the root cause 90.14% of the time. It has run on 52,635 distinct failing tests across 224,782 executions on 91,130 code changes authored by 22,962 distinct developers, with a ‘Not helpful’ rate of just 5.8% on the feedback received.
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On an AstroTurf lawn in Berkeley, California, one recent Friday, content creators used to making videos about romance novels, climate change and tech tips got advice on covering a more theoretical topic: How to spread the message that rogue artificial intelligence could wipe out humankind.
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- Trump plans to ease access to psychedelics like psilocybin, ibogaine The Washington Post
- Trump Loosens Restrictions on Psychedelic Drugs The New York Times
- Trump signs order to speed up review of psychedelic drugs for mental health treatment NBC News
- Trump announces reforms to accelerate access to psychedelic drug treatments The Guardian
- President Trump orders faster review of psychedelic drugs for mental health treatment 10tv.com
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Using JWST data, an international team has, for the first time, successfully mapped the climates of two rocky exoplanets with masses similar to Earth’s. These two planets, TRAPPIST-1b and TRAPPIST-1c, belong to the iconic TRAPPIST-1 planetary system, discovered ten years ago.
The TRAPPIST-1 system, located about 40 light-years away, contains seven rocky planets orbiting a small, cool red dwarf star known as TRAPPIST-1
The two planets are likely devoid of atmospheres, as the temperature difference between day and night exceeds 500°C. TRAPPIST‑1b has a very hot dayside (about 490 K) but no detectable glow from its nightside, suggesting it’s a dark, airless world. TRAPPIST‑1c is cooler (about 369 K) with a similarly cold nightside, which could mean it either has a thin, oxygen‑rich atmosphere or a shiny, airless surface.
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Diego Arguedas Ortiz, BBC
From before their babies are born, men undergo serious hormonal changes that can powerfully influence their behaviour – with consequences for their child’s…
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Quantum computers might eventually be able to handle some AI applications that currently require huge amounts of conventional computing power. Such a development would be a major boost to machine learning and similar artificial intelligence algorithms.
Quantum computers hold the promise of eventually being able to complete certain calculations that are impossible for conventional computers. For years, researchers have been debating whether these advantages over conventional computers extend to tasks that involve lots of data, and the algorithms that learn from them – in other words, the machine learning that underlies many AI programs.
Now, Hsin-Yuan Huang at the quantum computing firm Oratomic and his colleagues argue that the answer ought to be “yes”. Their mathematical work aims to lay the foundations for a future where quantum computers offer a broad boost to AI.
“Machine learning is really utilised everywhere in science and technology and also everyday life. In a world where we can build this [quantum computing] architecture, I feel like it can be applied whenever there’s massive datasets available,” he says.
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“The half-life of humanity is currently around 35 years,” said Nobel laureate in physics David Gross as he concluded an evening lecture at the German Physical Society’s conference in Erlangen in March. Put another way, the physicist believes that in a little more than three decades, there is a 50 percent chance that our species will be extinct.
The alarming statement followed Gross’s estimation that the risk of a nuclear war was increasing from 1 percent per year to about 2 percent annually. After the lecture, the audience was visibly pensive. The current world situation and the award-winning speaker’s warnings hung over attendees like a dark cloud.
“I’m still hoping game theory will come to the rescue,” another physicist later told me at the conference. The rules of logic—provided everyone follows them—would prohibit a nuclear first strike, this reasoning goes.