World, US, Culture, Market, and Sci-Tech News Aggregation from MSM and Independent News
Modern electronics power everything from smartphones to satellites, but they all share a major limitation. Heat. Once temperatures climb above roughly 200 degrees Celsius, most devices begin to break down. For decades, this thermal barrier has been one of the toughest challenges in engineering.
Researchers at the University of Southern California now believe they have found a way past that limit.
The Wall Street Journal, which famously floats trial balloons for corporate behemoths, is carrying water for the poor AI companies who are so, so disliked:
OpenAI this week published a populist wish list of policy proposals that zero in on worries like job replacement and wealth concentration, floating such ideas as a four-day workweek and an AI-invested public-wealth fund distributed to citizens.
Those proposals come as its rival Anthropic has been signing partnerships and building tools for such sectors as consulting and software, where share prices have been whacked by investor worries that they will be replaced by AI. Anthropic’s efforts have helped push back up shares of tech companies including LegalZoom.com LZ 3.84%increase; green up pointing triangle.
Anthropic and OpenAI are each pursuing ventures to help private equity, a big owner of companies in sectors ripe for disruption, with AI transformation. (Those efforts could also yield lucrative new business customers.)
We evolved for a linear world. If you walk for an hour, you cover a certain distance. Walk for two hours and you cover double that distance. This intuition served us well on the savannah. But it catastrophically fails when confronting AI and the core exponential trends at its heart.
From the time I began work on AI in 2010 to now, the amount of training data that goes into frontier AI models has grown by a staggering 1 trillion times—from roughly 10¹⁴ flops (floating-point operations‚ the core unit of computation) for early systems to over 10²⁶ flops for today’s largest models. This is an explosion. Everything else in AI follows from this fact.
NASA’s Artemis 2 astronauts are capturing the future of human spaceflight on their iPhones.
Fifty-eightyears ago, NASA’s Apollo 8 astronauts photographed the famous Earthrise image. This image of our “pale blue dot,” as famed astronomer Carl Sagan referred to Earth several decades later, forever changed humanity’s relationship with both space and Earth. Today, astronauts are seeing Earth from space through a new lens: the iPhone.
The U.S. federal government has just given Bill Gates’s new company the green light to begin construction of a nuclear reactor, marking a major shift in America’s energy landscape.
Gates’s new nuclear reactor project is the first to win government approval in nearly a decade.
The move is raising fresh questions about the growing alliance between Big Tech, government regulators, and the future of America’s energy grid.
There is a particular pleasure in watching a scholar dismantle the monument he has spent a career admiring. Tyler Cowen named his blog after the Marginal Revolution; he has spent decades explicating, celebrating, and applying marginalist thinking to every aspect of modern life. In Cowen’s compact and astringent book, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution, he turns to survey the edifice and finds it, if not crumbling, then visibly retreating from the frontier where the real intellectual work gets done. The result is one of the more honest performances in recent economic writing: a love letter that doubles as an elegy, delivered without sentimentality.
The book’s method is itself something of a marginalist exercise. Rather than mounting a frontal assault on large questions about the future of economics, Cowen begins at the margin, with the history of a single idea, the doctrine that value is determined not by the total utility of a good but by the utility of an additional unit of it. Many readers arrive at this book knowing that definition. Cowen’s first service is to show how much that belief has concealed. Marginalism is not one thing but several: There is intuitive marginalism, tautological marginalism, engineering marginalism, and social marginalism. The further one presses into the concept, the more it ramifies. Even the ideas we think we understand resist the grip that holds them.
Judge Dismisses Elon Musk Antitrust Lawsuit Let’s Data Science
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In the 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove, an emergency war plan called “Plan R” allows an unhinged U.S. Air Force commander, Jack Ripper, to launch a nuclear strike without presidential authorization. Once the president, the joint chiefs, and the Soviet ambassador convene in the war room, the bombers are already airborne. Only Ripper knows the three-letter prefix needed to recall them, until his aide, Lionel Mandrake, reconstructs it from Ripper’s notes. Although nearly all planes are turned back, one damaged B-52 cannot receive the recall message and successfully drops its bomb, triggering the Soviets’ secret doomsday machine and bringing about global destruction.
The film’s lesson is not only about nuclear weapons, but also about what happens when critical systems are not governed effectively.
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both Democrats, have proposed pausing new data center construction until federal safeguards for workers, consumers, and the environment are in place. Given how far Congress is from passing comprehensive AI legislation, the proposal could stall new projects for years. It reflects deep concern about AI’s economic and social impact—but rests on an ASAP sense of urgency that outpaces the best current evidence on how quickly those effects are materializing.
What do we know right now about the job impacts of the emerging AI revolution, given the rising level of concern in Washington? Some recent analysis for consideration on Capitol Hill:
A New Mexico jury has ordered Mark Zuckerberg’s company Meta to pay $375 million in civil damages after finding the tech giant violated state law by failing to protect children from predators on its platforms.
The verdict, delivered after a civil trial in Santa Fe, marks a significant legal setback for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
Since a joint U.S.-Israeli airstrike killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28, scores of Iranian senior officials have also been killed. According to the Associated Press, two anonymous sources—an intelligence official and a person briefed on the operation—said that hacked Iranian surveillance cameras helped plan the initial attack.
Camera hacking has become a recurring feature of modern warfare. Hamas hacked Israeli cameras before the October 7, 2023, attack; Russia has hacked them in Ukraine, and Iran has hacked them in Israel. But the cameras in question are not exotic spy technology. They’re often unremarkable, much like millions of other devices around the world.
The Russian public is pushing back against the planned ban of a popular app created by two Russians, with even pro-Kremlin voices fearing it could backfire. In a rare public opposition to blocking Telegram, the country’s most popular messaging channel, Vladimir Putin has been warned that the proposed ban could have negative consequences at home and on the battlefield.
But authorities have increasingly portrayed Telegram as contributing to terrorism and criminal activity, restricting the app and targeting its founder. Similar grounds have already been used to restrict other messaging apps, including the February block on WhatsApp.
From April 1, Telegram should be blocked completely too. Instead, the Kremlin is steering users towards its new state-backed messaging app, MAX, which is feared to be used for surveillance. The “national messenger” is similar in functionality to Telegram, but it’s also integrated with Russia‘s government services portal and can serve as a digital ID.
A California jury found Alphabet’s Google and Meta liable for $3m in damages in a landmark social media addiction lawsuit that accused the companies of being legally responsible for the addictive design of their platforms.
The decision was handed down by a Los Angeles-based jury on Wednesday after more than 40 hours of deliberation across nine days, and more than a month after jurors heard opening statements in the trial.
Berlin plans to use Ukraine’s experience to develop an advisory tool, Lieutenant General Christian Freuding has said
The German military is developing an artificial intelligence system to speed up battlefield decision-making by analyzing combat data, Lieutenant General Christian Freuding has said, adding that it will draw on Ukraine’s experience of fighting Russia.
The remarks by Freuding, the commander of the German land forces, come as the country is undertaking a major military buildup. Chancellor Friedrich Merz is seeking to make the German military “the strongest conventional army in Europe.” German officials have set 2029 as the deadline for the armed forces to be “war-ready,” citing the supposed Russian threat. Moscow has dismissed claims that it harbors hostile intentions as “nonsense” aimed at justifying increased military spending.
“I think it’s important that we get something up and running quickly,” Freuding told Reuters on Wednesday. He had previously overseen German arms supplies to Kiev before taking up his current position in October 2025. An advocate of close military cooperation between Berlin and Kiev, Freuding previously unveiled plans for the Ukrainian military to help train German troops for a possible conflict with Russia.
US Indictment Says China’s Fentanyl Suppliers Engineered Addiction Through Cartels. Their Websites Are Still Online Todayville
from news.google.com
Viral TikTok AI reality show: Why it’s dividing audiences online Firstpost
from news.google.com
Tom Howarth, Sci Foc
Long-term cryosleep and reawakening may no longer be completely in the realm of science fiction thanks to the results of a new <a…
from www.realclearscience.com
Could being a “morning person” improve your health … on the moon? Scientists have identified what appears to be a “cavity” of reduced cosmic radiation near Earth’s moon. The finding could help lower astronauts’ exposure to harmful radiation on future lunar missions by timing some surface operations for local morning hours.
The discovery, based on data from China‘s Chang’e-4 lunar lander, suggests Earth’s magnetic field may affect distances in space farther than scientists previously expected. According to the researchers, the finding challenges the long-held assumption that galactic cosmic rays are roughly uniform throughout the space between Earth and the moon outside our planet’s protective magnetic field.
Astronomers have reportedly narrowed the search for extraterrestrial life to a focused list of 45 rocky exoplanets. Out of more than 6,000 confirmed worlds, these planets were selected based on their potential to host life according to the study published in ScienceDaily. Using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, a team led by Lisa Kaltenegger at Cornell University’s Carl Sagan Institute built a catalogue of planets with rocky surfaces and possible habitability. The group also identified 24 planets within stricter criteria, assuming habitability may end sooner than broader models suggest. The selection aims to make observation campaigns more efficient, since telescope time and resources are limited. This refined list provides a practical guide for prioritising which exoplanets to study first.
A landmark jury verdict holding Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google liable for harming a young user with products designed to be addictive threatens to put the social networking companies in the same category as Big Tobacco and opioid makers — a potential crack in their shield from legal responsibility for what happens on their platforms.
While the $6 million in damages a jury in Los Angeles awarded to the 20-year-old plaintiff — which the companies vowed to appeal — will barely register on their balance sheets, the impact of the verdict will likely be more damaging and harder to quantify. The loss, in the first of thousands of product-liability lawsuits against Meta, Google and other social networks, is the kind of black eye that often leads to an increase in government regulations.
The Coming Drone-War Inflection in Ukraine IEEE Spectrum
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