05 Sci-Tech

China Opens World’s First Wind-Powered Underwater Data Center– www.wired.com

pgnewser June 11, 2026 0

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China has become the first country in the world to operate an underwater data center, or UDC, powered by wind. Located off the coast of Shanghai, the complex represents a significant advance in the country’s strategy to secure energy supplies in the face of the accelerated growth of artificial intelligence, reduce dependence on fossil fuels, and reduce the environmental impact of its technology infrastructure.

The initiative is the result of a collaboration between private company HiCloud Technology and state-owned China Communications Construction, which involved an investment of 1.6 billion yuan, equivalent to about $236 million.

With an initial capacity of 24 megawatts, the facility is submerged at a depth of 10 meters in the Lin-gang Special Zone, within the China Pilot Free Trade Zone in Shanghai. This location allows seawater to be used as a natural cooling system, reducing the proportion of energy used to cool the infrastructure to less than 10 percent.

Report of gene-edited human embryos sparks worries about the technology’s future uses– www.scientificamerican.com

pgnewser June 11, 2026 0

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A preprint describing genetically edited human embryos is raising concerns among scientists that the U.S. is becoming more accepting of using gene editing to enhance embryos.

“The cat’s out of the bag,” says Alexis Komor, deputy director of the Sanford Stem Cell Innovation Center at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the new finding.

A team of researchers, led by senior author and Columbia University cell biology researcher Dieter Egli, used base editing—a form of gene editing that involves small cuts to a single strand of DNA—to edit two genomic sites in human zygotes, or embryos at the single-cell stage, that correspond to PCSK9, a gene that regulates cholesterol, and HBG1 and HBG2, two genes that are responsible for the fetal form of the oxygen-carrying protein hemoglobin. The genes were chosen because they were well-studied, not for potential therapeutic purposes, the investigators wrote in the preprint. The experiment was first reported by the New York Times.

New device may make computers 1,000 times faster without overheating while reducing data center power consumption |– timesofindia.indiatimes.com

pgnewser June 10, 2026 0

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Inside a modern data centre, performance is already constrained less by raw transistor capability and more by heat removal. Server racks packed tightly together push thermal systems to their limit, and operators often throttle workloads not because chips can’t compute faster, but because cooling systems can’t keep up. Against that backdrop, the claim that processors can become 1,000 times faster through a light-driven switching device sounds like it belongs to a different category of computing altogether.What makes this result interesting is not just speed, but the mechanism: information switching triggered by light pulses rather than sustained electrical current, with experimental cycle times measured in picoseconds rather than nanoseconds.

According to the research published in Science, ‘Picosecond ultralow-power switching device based on an antiferromagnet’, a non-volatile switching element that can change state in about 40 picoseconds, which is roughly 40 trillionths of a second. For context, conventional semiconductor logic typically operates in the sub-nanosecond range, and even high-end CPU clock cycles are orders of magnitude slower once pipeline and memory effects are accounted for.That difference is not incremental. It shifts the conversation from “how do we shrink transistors further” to “how do we switch information using physics that isn’t bottlenecked by charge movement through silicon channels.”The device, demonstrated under lab conditions, uses ultrafast optical pulses routed through a photodetector (a uni-traveling-carrier photodiode), which then triggers a change in electron spin states within a magnetic material stack. That switching event is what encodes information.

The AI boomerang effect: more data suggests employers are reversing AI layoffs– www.techspot.com

pgnewser June 10, 2026 0

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Connecting the dots: Generative AI has been blamed for hundreds of thousands of layoffs over the past year, but evidence that companies moved too quickly to automate white-collar jobs is steadily mounting. Multiple recent studies suggest that many employers are refilling recently eliminated positions after overestimating AI’s productivity gains and cost savings.

In some studies, roughly a third of companies that attempted to replace workers with AI have either rehired some of them or expressed regret over the decision. The figures add to a growing body of evidence that the true cost of implementing generative AI is catching businesses off guard.

A late 2025 report from Forrester Research predicted that roughly half of AI-attributed layoffs would be quietly reversed. However, the so-called AI boomerang effect may not benefit all workers equally.

Graph from our story: 99% of executives expect AI to trigger layoffs within two years, survey finds. Source: Mercer.

While firms might quietly rehire experienced employees, those seeking entry-level jobs may still be out of luck. Forrester also predicted that most companies will use the opportunity to pivot to cheaper offshore labor.

Meanwhile, Gartner published research in February predicting that half of the businesses that eliminated customer service positions will rename and refill them by 2027. The forecast accompanied a separate October 2025 survey of 321 customer service and support leaders, which found that only 20% had actually reduced headcount while pivoting to AI – suggesting automation has largely augmented workers rather than replaced them.

Why Some Analysts Favor Auditing AI Before Washington Gets It Wrong   | American Enterprise Institute– www.aei.org

pgnewser June 10, 2026 0

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The buzziest bit of the new artificial-intelligence bill from Reps. Jay Obernolte, a California Republican, and Lori Trahan, a Massachusetts Democrat, is probably the section that would let Washington preempt state rules on AI development for three years. For me, the more interesting part is its bet on auditing as a middle path between Silicon Valley self-regulation and an FDA-style premarket approval regime for frontier models.

Earlier this year, several dozen AI policy folks signed onto a proposal, “Frontier AI Auditing: Toward Rigorous Third-Party Assessment of Safety and Security Practices at Leading AI Companies” that “outlines a vision for frontier AI auditing, which we define as rigorous third-party verification of frontier AI developers’ safety and security claims, and evaluation of their systems and practices against relevant standards, based on deep, secure access to non-public information.”

What does that mean? For starters, an audit is not a permission slip. Rather than making a company clear a government gate before shipping, as the FDA does with drugs, an independent reviewer with access to the confidential innards of an AI company would check the latest model against a set standard. Think of it as how an accountant signs off on a public company’s books. Private firms do the examining while a public body stays in the background. Maybe it sets the rules, accredits the examiners, and holds the enforcement hammer.

Blind to irony, UN holds climate summit in nation crippled by green mandates– www.washingtonexaminer.com

pgnewser June 9, 2026 0

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This week, United Nations climate negotiators will gather in Bonn, Germany, to tell the rest of the world how to save the planet.

The irony is staggering. Germany is the poster child of failed green paternalism. It shut down its nuclear plants, bet everything on renewables, and ended up burning more coal and buying gas from Russia. Germany has no idea how to save the planet — it cannot even save itself.

That’s because Germany and other big-government climate warriors assumed the only force capable of protecting the environment was mandates, all while the market was quietly working.

EXCLUSIVE: GOP Rep Wants To Give America’s Power Plants, Data Centers An Anti-Drone Upgrade– dailycaller.com

pgnewser June 9, 2026 0

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One congressman is moving to protect the soft underbelly of America’s critical infrastructure with a new bill.

Republican Tennessee Rep. Matt Van Epps unveiled a House version of Sen. Tom Cotton’s Critical Infrastructure Airspace Defense Act Tuesday, which aims to shield hospitals, power plants, water treatment sites, and dams from potential drone attacks. The bill would make grants available to private companies to purchase government-approved anti-drone technologies, and could even extend to data centers.

“The bill gives the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of Energy and others, the ability to determine which critical infrastructure facilities need these authorities,” Van Epps told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “This could include anything from critical water systems to power plants and potentially even data centers.”

Republican leading AI effort has ambitious timeline for getting his bill through the House– www.politico.com

pgnewser June 9, 2026 0

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Rep. Jay Obernolte has an aggressive timeline for getting his new bipartisan Artificial Intelligence proposal taken up in the House — and a path for getting a congressional hearing on a major part of the plan.

In an interview Monday night, the California Republican said he hoped to turn the draft framework he unveiled last Thursday into multiple bills, with the first expected to be introduced in the coming weeks. Each bill would be considered by its committee of jurisdiction.

“One of the challenges that we have is that the bill crosses so many different policy committee jurisdictions,” he said. “So I think we’ve got to divide it up into different titles that are in the jurisdiction of various policy committees and hear those individually.”

The UK Is Betting on a Billion-Dollar AI Supercomputer to Kick Its Addiction to US Tech– www.wired.com

pgnewser June 9, 2026 0

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The UK government has laid out a $1.47 billion plan to shake its dependence on foreign-made artificial intelligence hardware.

Under the measures, announced Monday, the UK will spend more than $1 billion on a national AI supercomputer. It will be stocked with $530 million worth of hardware, including $200 million that will go toward specialist inference chips for processing AI tasks. Priority will be given to up-and-coming British firms in the procurement process; the government pointed to Olix and Fractile, two UK startups developing new styles of inference chip, as potential beneficiaries. British researchers and startups are expected to be able to use the supercomputer starting in 2030.

Anthropic’s Philosopher Amanda Askell Says A.I. May Replace Her Job– observer.com

pgnewser June 9, 2026 0

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As A.I. systems become more agentic and take on more autonomy in daily life, they will increasingly interact with one another rather than with humans, according to Amanda Askell, Anthropic’s resident philosopher. “Human input is going to be rarer and rarer. That’s the thing that we need to prepare models for,” Askell said at the Bloomberg Tech Summit in San Francisco last week. Askell’s non-technical role reflects a growing trend among leading A.I. labs to incorporate humanities expertise. But she also sees a future in which A.I. may be able to do her job better than she can. “What [A.I. models] are good at is these deeply human skills,” she said. “Eventually, Claude is going to be a much better philosopher than I am, and probably be much better at every aspect of my job than I am.”

OpenAI and Anthropic Sign Letter to Prevent AI-Developed Biological Weapons– www.wired.com

pgnewser June 5, 2026 0

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The CEOs of several major artificial intelligence companies are urging members of Congress to adopt new laws that would make it harder for bad actors to develop biological weapons using their technology.

Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and Microsoft AI’s Mustafa Suleyman are among the signatories on a public letter calling for laws requiring companies that sell synthetic DNA and RNA to screen customers and orders to prevent the misuse of genetic material.

Organized by the nonpartisan Institute for Progress and the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, the letter acknowledges that given the pace of AI development, “there is a real possibility that the knowledge barriers which have historically prevented bad actors from obtaining biological weapons will meaningfully erode.”

Demand Is Booming for New No Tech, Repairable Tractor– www.404media.co

pgnewser June 5, 2026 0

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The secondary market for decades old, low-tech John Deere tractors has been booming for years as farmers have sought reliable tractors that they can actually fix without having to deal with John Deere’s repair monopoly. A Canadian company has seen that demand and came up with a radical thought: What if they made a new, repairable, “no-tech” tractor to solve what has become a gigantic pain point for farmers?

Alberta’s Ursa Ag says that it has been inundated with demand after announcing its tractor, which costs roughly half as much as a Deere and has the benefit of not being a repair nightmare. We have for years covered the frustration that farmers have felt as they have been locked out of their Deere tractors with digital rights management systems that prevent them from fixing their machinery, tractors that won’t run because of minor sensor failures, and crops that literally die on the vine as they wait for an “authorized” repair person to fix tractors during critical harvesting periods.

Scientists discover a quantum effect that could eliminate batteries– www.sciencedaily.com

pgnewser June 4, 2026 1

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Scientists have uncovered a new way to control an unusual quantum phenomenon that could one day help power electronic devices without batteries.

An international research team led by Professor Dongchen Qi from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) School of Chemistry and Physics and Professor Xiao Renshaw Wang from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore investigated the physics behind the nonlinear Hall effect (NLHE), a quantum phenomenon with significant potential for future energy-harvesting technologies.

Unlike the classical Hall effect, the NLHE can convert alternating electrical signals directly into direct current. This means energy from wireless transmissions or other ambient sources could potentially be transformed into usable electricity without relying on conventional diodes or other bulky electronic components.

“The NLHE is a sophisticated quantum phenomenon in condensed matter physics where a voltage is generated perpendicular to an applied alternating current, even in the absence of a magnetic field,” Professor Qi said.

“This effect allows us to convert alternating signals straight into direct current, which is what’s needed to power electronic devices. In principle, it means sensors or chips that could operate without batteries, drawing energy from their environment.”

White House reclassifies federal epidemiologists and other scientists from civil servants to “at-will” hires– www.scientificamerican.com

pgnewser June 4, 2026 0

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The White House on Wednesday moved to strip civil service protections from about 8,000 federal workers, including many working at public health agencies.

The executive order effectively transforms these positions—which include “epidemiologist”, “health scientist” and “toxicologist” jobs—into “at-will” positions—meaning they can be readily fired without cause. The job category, initially called Schedule F and now called Schedule Policy/Career, strips these federal workers of protections meant to prevent political interference.

According to the order, “policy-influencing positions” must be transferred to the new status, thereby “ensuring that such employees can be removed for misconduct or poor performance is essential to protecting democratic self-government by an elected President.” The move reflects President Donald Trump’s long-standing complaint of a “deep state” of federal workers resistant to his policies, and he has for years called for the schedule change in order to fire civil servants he views as impediments to his policies.