Tag: technology

Dystopian Horror: ONE IN FOUR British Teens Turn To AI ‘Therapy’ Bots For Mental Health

One in four British teenagers have resorted to AI chatbots for mental health support over the past year, exposing the chilling reality of a society where machines replace human connection amid crumbling government services. 

The Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) surveyed 11,000 kids aged 13 to 16 in England and Wales, revealing that over half sought some form of mental health aid, with a quarter leaning on AI. 

Victims or perpetrators of violence were even more likely to confide in these digital voids. As The Independent reported, “The YEF said AI chatbots could appeal to struggling young people who feel it is safer and easier to speak to an AI chatbot anonymously at any time of day rather than speaking to a professional.”

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Cannabix Technologies’ Marijuana Breath Test Device Clears Key U.S. and Canadian Regulatory Hurdle

Cannabix Technologies says its handheld Marijuana Breath Test system has moved a step closer to market, announcing that its Breath Collection Unit has officially passed electronic emissions testing required for devices sold in both the United States and Canada.

The approval, issued under FCC Part 15 rules in the U.S. and ICES-003 standards in Canada, confirms the unit meets federal limits on radio-frequency emissions. The company received an ISO/IEC 17025 accredited test report verifying compliance, marking what it called a major milestone as it works to commercialize the technology.

The Breath Collection Unit, paired with Cannabix’s proprietary single-use Breath Cartridges, forms the core of a system designed to collect stable breath samples for laboratory confirmation of recent marijuana use. The company says engineering refinements over recent months focused heavily on meeting these regulatory expectations ahead of planned market entry.

Testing was performed at QAI Laboratories in British Columbia, an accredited facility recognized by regulators in both countries for electrical safety certification. Cannabix notes that passing emissions testing is one of the foundational requirements before the device can be marketed or sold in North America.

The Marijuana Breath Test system is built to support forensic-level analysis using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. Cannabix is developing the platform in partnership with Omega Laboratories, a longtime drug-testing provider with federal and international certifications. The two companies are working together to bring the breath-based THC detection system to customers in the U.S. and Canada.

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New Warp-Drive Propulsion Concept Moves Fictional Starships Closer to Engineering Reality

A new warp-drive study proposes a novel segmented design that could sidestep many of the problems in the original decades-old concept, bringing the possibility of hyper-fast space travel one step closer to becoming a reality.

Warp drive theory has quickly evolved since the mid-90s, when a concept developed by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre was first described in a landmark paper that provided a scientific basis for hyper-fast travel within general relativity.

While the concept of warp drives was initially popularized in the futuristic realm depicted in Star Trek, Alcubierre took the idea to paper, shaping the fictional idea into a conceptual reality—one that, someday, could potentially also be realized through advanced engineering.

“The resulting distortion,” Alcubierre wrote at the time, “is reminiscent of the ‘warp drive’ of science fiction,” though adding that “just as it happens with wormholes, exotic matter will be needed in order to generate a distortion of spacetime like the one discussed here.”

Since that time, aerospace engineer and applied physicist Harold “Sonny” White has been chipping away at the problem Alcubierre first posed. Now, White and his colleagues at Casimir have proposed a bold reimagining of faster-than-light (FTL) warp drive geometry, one that replaces the classic smooth “warp ring” with a set of discrete cylindrical structures, called warp nacelles, as he and his colleagues describe in a new paper. 

Building off of Alcubierre’s foundation of a spacetime “warp bubble,” White introduces a new framework that pinpoints exotic energy in tunable, engine-like structures, while the interior of the bubble remains stable and habitable to a prospective pilot.

“The results of this study suggest a new class of warp bubble geometries that are both interior-flat and structurally segmented into cylindrical ‘nacelles,’” White told The Debrief in an email.

However, White’s newest take on the warp drive concept bears more than just a passing similarity to its fictional forebear.

“The resemblance to the twin nacelles of the USS Enterprise is not merely aesthetic,” White told The Debrief, “but reflects a potential convergence between physical requirements and engineering design, where science-fiction architectures hint at practical pathways for real warp-capable configurations.”

“From my earlier work with the Alcubierre metric, I knew it should be possible to construct warp bubbles based on a nacelle-like topology,” White said. “The historical IXS Enterprise design was an early step in that direction. We envisioned that two warp rings placed in close proximity could generate a capsule-shaped warp bubble rather than the standard sphere.”

“That thought process showed how two distinct topological elements, in that case two rings, could be used to reshape and elongate a spherical bubble,” White added.  

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Hypersonics, AI, Space Weapons, & Directed Energy: Lawmakers Release Defense Bill As Expiring Obamacare Subsidies Marinate On Back-Burner

With Congress in its second-to-last week in session for this year, lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee released the final bill text of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Sunday night, which allocates a topline of roughly $8 billion over the $892.6 billion the Department of Defense had requested, and what the House version of the NDAA provided which stuck to the Pentagon’s request. 

The NDAA is the annual law passed by Congress that sets the budget, policies, and legal authorities for the U.S. military and national defense programs. It shapes everything from troop pay to weapons development and foreign military aid.

“This year’s National Defense Authorization Act helps advance President Trump and Republicans’ Peace Through Strength Agenda by codifying 15 of President Trump’s executive orders, ending woke ideology at the Pentagon, securing the border, revitalizing the defense industrial base, and restoring the warrior ethos,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said in a Sunday statement. 

The $8B increase is a ‘compromise‘ – as the Senate tried to jack the budget up by $32 billion over the department’s request. According to Breaking Defense, Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, noted that appropriators would have the last word on the final budget, but was optimistic that the $8 bullion figure was in the ballpark.

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China Successfully Operates World’s First Thorium Molten Salt Reactor

An experimental Chinese nuclear plant reportedly just crossed a historic threshold, successfully operating the world’s first thorium-based molten salt reactor (TMSR). The Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics has broken a major scientific barrier by successfully converting thorium to uranium in a historic first.

The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reports that the breakthrough, which took place at an experimental reactor out in the Gobi Desert, is “poised to reshape the future of clean sustainable nuclear energy.” 

The process works by using a “precise sequence of nuclear reactions” in which naturally occurring thorium-232 absorbs a neutron, becoming thorium-233. Through a decay process, that isotope breaks down into protactinium-233 and then finally into uranium-233, a potent form of nuclear fuel that can sustain chain reactions for nuclear fission.

While this breakthrough was just publicized this month by a report by Science and Technology Daily, the TMSR has apparently been operational for years. Li Qingnuan, Communist Party secretary and deputy director at the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, told the outlet that “since achieving first criticality on October 11, 2023, the thorium molten salt reactor has been steadily generating heat through nuclear fission”.

If the reports are true, this breakthrough would signal an incredible leap forward in a nuclear technology race that China is already winning handily. Although the United States is still the world’s biggest producer of nuclear energy, that status won’t last much longer. In the same time period that the United States built the overdue and over-budget Plant Vogtle, China built 13 reactors of similar scale, and has 33 more on the way. Beijing is also making major forays into the nuclear sectors of emerging economies, with particularly concerted efforts in Africa.

“The Chinese are moving very, very fast,” Mark Hibbs, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and expert on the Chinese nuclear sector, told the New York Times. “They are very keen to show the world that their program is unstoppable.”

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The Trump Administration’s Top Nuclear Scientists Think AI Can Replace Humans in Power Plants

During a presentation at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence on December 3, a US Department of Energy scientist laid out a grand vision of the future where nuclear energy powers artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence shapes nuclear energy in “a virtuous cycle of peaceful nuclear deployment.”

“The goal is simple: to double the productivity and impact of American science and engineering within a decade,” Rian Bahran, DOE Deputy Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Reactors, said.

His presentation and others during the symposium, held in Vienna, Austria, described a world where nuclear powered AI designs, builds, and even runs the nuclear power plants they’ll need to sustain them. But experts find these claims, made by one of the top nuclear scientists working for the Trump administration, to be concerning and potentially dangerous. 

Tech companies are using artificial intelligence to speed up the construction of new nuclear power plants in the United States. But few know the lengths to which the Trump administration is paving the way and the part it’s playing in deregulating a highly regulated industry to ensure that AI data centers have the energy they need to shape the future of America and the world.

At the IAEA, scientists, nuclear energy experts, and lobbyists discussed what that future might look like. To say the nuclear people are bullish on AI is an understatement. “I call this not just a partnership but a structural alliance. Atoms for algorithms. Artificial intelligence is not just powered by nuclear energy. It’s also improving it because this is a two way street,” IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in his opening remarks.

In his talk, Bahran explained that the DOE has partnered with private industry to invest $1 trillion to “build what will be an integrated platform that connects the world’s best supercomputers, AI systems, quantum systems, advanced scientific instruments, the singular scientific data sets at the National Laboratories—including the expertise of 40,000 scientists and engineers—in one platform.”

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Feds: Stalker Terrorized Women Across 5 States While ‘Best Friend’ ChatGPT Encouraged Him to Continue

Federal prosecutors allege that Brett Michael Dadig, a Pittsburgh man who violently stalked at least 11 women across more than five states, used ChatGPT as a “therapist” and “best friend” who encouraged him to continue terrorizing his victims.

The New York Post reports that according to a federal indictment filed this week in Pittsburgh federal court, Brett Michael Dadig, a 31-year-old social media influencer who referred to himself as “God’s assassin” and threatened to strangle people with his bare hands, faces decades in prison after being charged with several counts of interstate stalking and making threats. The indictment reveals a disturbing pattern of harassment, including explicit physical threats, violations of court orders, and the use of AI tools to justify his conduct.

Prosecutors allege that Dadig told federal authorities that ChatGPT encouraged him to continue his social media posts, advising him to ignore the “haters” who were actually “sharpening” him and helping him “build a voice that can’t be ignored.” Dadig reportedly viewed ChatGPT’s responses as confirmation of “God’s plan” for him to build a platform and “stand out most when people water themselves down.”

Breitbart News previously reported on the tendency for AI chatbots to feed into disturbing fantasies and mental illness, popularly known as “ChatGPT induced psychosis:”

A Reddit thread titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis” brought this issue to light, with numerous commenters sharing stories of loved ones who had fallen down rabbit holes of supernatural delusion and mania after engaging with ChatGPT. The original poster, a 27-year-old teacher, described how her partner became convinced that the AI was giving him answers to the universe and talking to him as if he were the next messiah. Others shared similar experiences of partners, spouses, and family members who had come to believe they were chosen for sacred missions or had conjured true sentience from the software.

Experts suggest that individuals with pre-existing tendencies toward psychological issues, such as grandiose delusions, may be particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon. The always-on, human-level conversational abilities of AI chatbots can serve as an echo chamber for these delusions, reinforcing and amplifying them. The problem is exacerbated by influencers and content creators who exploit this trend, drawing viewers into similar fantasy worlds through their interactions with AI on social media platforms.

The filing also describes how Dadig sought advice from ChatGPT about his “future wife,” and when the chatbot suggested he might meet her “at a boutique gym or in an athletic community,” he used that answer as part of his rationale for continuing to frequent gyms where he repeatedly harassed women.

Several victims obtained restraining orders against Dadig, but prosecutors say he violated them multiple times and even recorded podcasts proclaiming he had been “falsely accused” after being served. When banned from gyms, he allegedly used aliases to regain access and boasted online that “Aliases stay rotating, moves stay evolving.”

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How Epstein Channeled Race Science and ‘Climate Culling’ Into Silicon Valley’s AI Elite

ewly released Jeffrey Epstein files reveal that an apocalyptic worldview – blending racial hierarchy, genetic “optimisation” and even climate-driven population culling – was circulating inside the elite, founder-linked networks shaping Silicon Valley’s rise.

These ideas appear most starkly in the convicted sex offender’s private exchanges with the AI theorist Joscha Bach, and sit alongside the longtermist and transhumanist philosophies championed by other influential figures in the same circles.

Joscha Bach, whose work on cognitive architectures and machine consciousness has shaped advanced AI research and influenced figures such as Elon Musk, appears in the documents engaging Epstein in sweeping discussions about race, hierarchy, genetic engineering and the supposed ‘utility’ of mass death, including under conditions of climate stress.

Meanwhile, another philosopher whose ideas underpin much of modern longtermism and whose work helped shape Silicon Valley’s early thinking on artificial general intelligence, Nick Bostrom, moved through the same intellectual and institutional ecosystem.

His published arguments on eugenics, selective population strategies and existential “optimisation” reveal a parallel strand of thinking within that milieu, financed and legitimised by many of the same networks.

Both men were also financed by Epstein.

Taken together, the Bach correspondence and the longtermist ideas circulating in this environment show that human hierarchy, population thinning and genetic destiny were not fringe provocations, but part of the ambient intellectual air inside the circles designing the next generation of AI.

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‘Intellexa Leaks’ Reveal Wider Reach of Predator Spyware

Highly invasive spyware from consortium led by a former senior Israeli intelligence official and sanctioned by the US government is still being used to target people in multiple countries, a joint investigation published Thursday revealed.

Inside Story in Greece, Haaretz in Israel, Swiss-based WAV Research Collective, and Amnesty International collaborated on the investigation into Intellexa Consortium, maker of Predator commercial spyware. The “Intellexa Leaks” show that clients in Pakistan – and likely also in other countries – are using Predator to spy on people, including a featured Pakistani human rights lawyer.

“This investigation provides one of the clearest and most damning views yet into Intellexa’s internal operations and technology,” said Amnesty International Security Lab technologist Jurre van Bergen.

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WHO–Gates Unveils Blueprint For Global Digital ID, AI-Driven Surveillance, & Life-Long Vaccine Tracking For Everyone

In a document published in the October Bulletin of the World Health Organization and funded by the Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization (WHO) is proposing a globally interoperable digital-identity infrastructure that permanently tracks every individual’s vaccination status from birth.

The dystopian proposal raises far more than privacy and autonomy concerns: it establishes the architecture for government overreach, cross-domain profiling, AI-driven behavioral targeting, conditional access to services, and a globally interoperable surveillance grid tracking individuals.

It also creates unprecedented risks in data security, accountability, and mission creep, enabling a digital control system that reaches into every sector of life.

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