Tag: technology

These 2 companies want to start removing space junk from orbit in 2027

Two private companies are partnering up to establish a repeatable debris removal service for low Earth orbit.

The U.S. firm Portal Space Systems and Australian startup Paladin Space are working together to establish the commercial Debris Removal as a Service (DRAAS) for removing multiple debris objects during a single mission.

The partnership, which Portal announced on March 19, will see a combining of respective technologies to make the service possible. The platform will be based on Portal’s maneuverable, refuelable Starburst spacecraft and will integrate Paladin’s Triton payload for imaging, classifying and capturing tumbling debris objects under 1 meter (3 feet) in size.

Space debris experts estimate there are nearly 130 million pieces of junk in orbit, ranging from fragments from explosions and satellite deployments up to huge pieces such as abandoned spacecraft and spent rocket stages. That number alarms many people in the space community and has spurred efforts to start cleaning up our orbital neighborhood.

Some companies have already made serious headway on this effort, showing that debris capture is technically feasible. But Portal and Paladin want to go a few steps further.

“This is about making debris removal operational, not experimental,” said Jeff Thornburg, CEO of Portal Space Systems, in a statement. “Satellite data underpins communications, navigation, weather forecasting, and national security. Maintaining that infrastructure requires active debris management.”

“Most collision-avoidance activity is driven by small debris,” said Harrison Box, CEO of Paladin Space. “Triton is built to remove dozens of those objects in a single mission, which fundamentally changes the cost structure of debris remediation and provides the greatest benefit to satellite operators.”

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IMF warns of systemic threat from AI

Artificial intelligence could make cyberattacks a systemic threat to global finance, the International Monetary Fund has warned, saying advanced models can help attackers exploit vulnerabilities faster than institutions can fix them.

In a blog post published on Thursday, the IMF said its latest analysis suggests that “extreme cyber-incident losses could trigger funding strains, raise solvency concerns, and disrupt broader markets.”

According to the organization, the current financial system relies on shared digital infrastructure, including software, cloud services and networks for payments and other data. The fund warned that advanced AI models can sharply reduce the time and cost needed to identify and exploit weaknesses, raising the risk of simultaneous attacks on widely used systems.

The fund cited Anthropic’s recent controlled release of Claude Mythos Preview, which it described as “an advanced AI model with exceptional cyber capabilities.” According to the IMF, Mythos could find and exploit vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser, “even when used by non-experts.”

AI-driven cyber risks could destabilize the financial system if they are not managed carefully, the IMF stressed, noting that attacks could spread beyond finance because banks share digital foundations with energy, telecommunications and public services. 

“Defenses will inevitably be breached, so resilience must also be a priority,” the IMF warned, calling for cyber stress testing, scenario analysis, board-level oversight, public-private cooperation and stronger international coordination.

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Tight-knit Midwest town becomes ground zero in America’s war on AI… and local politicians get swift justice

A sleepy Midwestern town has become one of the fiercest battlegrounds in America’s growing backlash against AI data centers – and voters are making their anger clear at the ballot box.

In the town of Festus, Missouri, a community of 14,000 people near St. Louis, residents have ousted four city council members who backed plans for a massive AI data center, replacing them with candidates who openly opposed the project.

The political upheaval didn’t stop there. 

At a packed City Hall meeting following the election, newly sworn-in officials were greeted with cheers – while the city’s mayor Sam Richards, who still supports the development, was met with boos and jeers from the crowd.

‘You’re next!’ one resident shouted, underscoring how heated the fight has become.

At the center of the dispute is a proposed $6 billion data center spanning roughly 360 acres, designed to support the growing demands of artificial intelligence.

Supporters say the project could transform the local economy – generating an estimated $32 million a year in tax revenue for decades, funding schools, roads, and public services.

But many locals aren’t convinced, and opponents fear the development could strain the electrical grid, push up utility bills and disrupt daily life with years of construction.

Other residents worry about environmental risks, including pollution from backup generators and wastewater systems – concerns shaped by the region’s industrial past.

In a bid to scrap the development, locals have launched a website and a Facebook group titled No Data Center in Festus, which has attracted more than 3,000 members.

The backlash quickly spilled into local politics: In the landslide election, all four incumbents who supported the data center were voted out. 

‘It was an annihilation,’ said one local campaigner. 

Since then, more than 4,000 residents have signed petitions seeking to recall the mayor and other officials still backing the plan.

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De-Extinct Dire Wolves Ready To Breed; Bioscience Company Pushes Forward Multiple Projects

Colossal Biosciences has announced that its de-extinct dire wolves—Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi—are now breeding-aged and the firm plans to expand the pack later this year. The development marks a significant step for the Texas-based company in its mission to restore extinct species through genetic engineering.

The dire wolf pups, born in late 2024 and early 2025, represent the world’s first de-extinct animals. They have thrived in a secure 2,000-acre preserve, reaching milestones like learning to process whole deer carcasses and now showing readiness for natural breeding behaviors.

“The dire wolf pack is actually breeding-aged at this point,” Matt James, Colossal’s chief animal officer, said, adding “But we will initially grow the pack through assisted reproduction while we create new, genetically diverse individuals.”

The company intends to engineer two to four additional pups to boost genetic diversity before allowing full natural breeding. “The plan is to create an inter-breedable population of dire wolves in which they would eventually breed naturally to create a sustainable population of the world’s first de-extinct species,” James continued.

He further added, “We will grow the population through assisted reproduction initially and then eventually only rely on natural breeding.”

“The dire wolves are doing great,” Ben Lamm, Colossal’s CEO and co-founder, stated., adding “The three dire wolves live on a 2,000-acre secure, expansive ecological preserve that allows us to monitor and manage them while providing them a semi-wild habitat to thrive in. We hope to have more dire wolf pups by the end of the year.”

Colossal reconstructed the dire wolf genome from ancient DNA fragments in bone samples, including a 72,000-year-old skull. Scientists then edited gray wolf embryos to incorporate key traits: a white coat, larger teeth, more muscular build, and distinctive howl. Embryos were implanted in surrogate dogs, with births by caesarean section.

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France Moves to Break Encrypted Messaging

France’s intelligence delegation in parliament has formally backed breaking the encryption that protects WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram conversations, recommending that magistrates and intelligence agents be granted what lawmakers describe as targeted access to messages that platforms currently cannot read even themselves.

The delegation, an eight-member body composed of four deputies and four senators, published its conclusions on Monday after months of work on a question that keeps returning to the French Parliament. “The inability to access the content of encrypted communications constitutes a major obstacle for the work of the justice system and intelligence services,” the delegation wrote, framing end-to-end encryption as a problem to be solved rather than a protection to be preserved.

The technology end-to-end encryption uses is precisely the thing the delegation wants weakened. Decryption keys live on user devices, not on company servers, which means the platforms holding your messages genuinely cannot read them. That’s the design and the point. Strip that property away and the protection collapses because a system that lets investigators read messages on demand is also a system that can be abused, leaked, subpoenaed, or hacked.

French police and intelligence services have spent years complaining about this tech. They can still intercept old-fashioned phone calls and SMS messages with a judge’s warrant but encrypted platforms route around that capability entirely.

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Stolen agricultural drones recovered at New Jersey warehouse

Fifteen agricultural drones that were stolen last month in New Jersey were recovered on Monday, the New Jersey State Police said.

The March 24 theft at CAC International, a logistics and shipping company located in Harrison, N.J., spooked authorities because the drones are built for precision spraying of crops and, in the wrong hands, could be programmed to disperse dangerous chemicals over a route controlled by GPS.

The drones were recovered at Prudent Corporation, located in Dover, New Jersey.

“This is an active, ongoing investigation that Homeland Security Investigations and Customs and Border Patrol are assisting with. No additional information is available,” a state police statement said.

The stolen drones were dropped off at the Dover warehouse the same day, where they have apparently been sitting ever since, according to workers who said they noticed them and called police.

Reports began to surface that authorities, including the FBI, were on the lookout for the drones. That’s when someone at the Dover warehouse contacted police.

The drones are operated remotely and can drop chemicals anywhere the operators decide.

The farming drones were catalogued by investigators and placed on a large tractor-trailer to be moved to a secure location.

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Hochul Dragged on Social Media After Post Targeting Privately Made Firearms

I get that states like New York, and governors like Kathy Hochul aren’t fans of gun ownership in general, but especially when they don’t get to have some kind of control over who gets a gun and who doesn’t. They want to be able to peer into the industry and know everything, which is why anything that removes a gun from that paper trail is a bad thing. For them, 3D printers spell doom, which is why Hochul opted to go after them.

But the truth of the matter is that the internet is a strange place, and if you’re going to live by the tweet, you will also die by the tweet.

Hochul made a post about “ghost guns,” and unsurprisingly, the internet had thoughts.

Here are just a few of the responses Hochul’s post received:

  • “Democrats are the fastest-growing gun safety threat in the country.”
  • “People will just buy the printers in another State.”
  • “Have you considered banning basements and garages to stop the construction of these ghost guns?”
  • “Does she realize guns aren’t generally printed only certain components so good luck with ‘software’ that can determine what is exactly being printed.”
  • “Yay! Another way to control Americans…You. Are. So. Brave.”
  • “Why would NY expend any resources to prevent people from exercising their Second Amendment rights? Meanwhile, you release violent criminals without bond and they repeat their crimes harming more New Yorkers. You should be ashamed.”
  • “Eliminate the Gang Data Base. Handcuff Police. Provide Sanctuary to Illegal Aliens. Track 3d printers.”

And the backlash extends through post after post.

And it should.

See, the truth of the matter is that so-called ghost guns are certainly scary sounding, but the data doesn’t really back up the idea of them being some massive threat. When I wrote about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s jihad against 3D printers, I noted how few of these guns turn up, even with this massive growth in their use, especially when compared to violent crime involving a firearm as a whole.

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The Data Center Mystery: Why Billions of Simulated Worlds Are the Best Explanation of What’s Happening

Introduction: The Unsettling Growth of Data Centers

I have been watching the global data center buildout with a growing sense of unease. Over three thousand new sites are being planned or constructed around the world right now, consuming land and energy on a scale never seen before. It doesn’t take a financial analyst to realize that the numbers simply do not add up — unless there is a hidden objective far beyond serving current demand for cloud computing, web hosting or streaming video.

Earlier this week I posted a tweet that went viral, asking why any rational investor would pour hundreds of billions of dollars into concrete and servers without a visible revenue stream to justify it all. Meta alone is reportedly in talks to build a $200 billion AI data center campus spanning up to 2,250 acres [1]. That is not an expansion of existing services; it is a bet on something entirely different. In my view, the only explanation that makes sense is that these facilities are being built to host billions of parallel simulated worlds — universes inside machines — where artificial intelligences can be trained, tested, and grown into superintelligence at a rapid pace.

The Financial Puzzle: Billions Invested, No Visible Revenue

Consider the sheer scale of the proposed infrastructure. The data center buildout now demands an estimated 190 gigawatts of new power draw and over 1,000 square kilometers of floor space. Yet no plausible customer demand for conventional cloud services can recoup that level of investment. The world does not need that many chatbots or video streaming servers.

This is not a speculative bubble in the traditional sense. As one interview with my guest Douglas Macgregor highlighted, the shift of energy resources toward data centers is accelerating. Russia’s Power of Siberia pipeline is now redirecting gas to China specifically to power its growing data center industry [2]. The United States, meanwhile, is struggling to generate enough electricity to support even a fraction of this planned capacity (especially on the Eastern grid). The only rational conclusion is that a non-commercial, strategic objective is driving the spending. I believe that objective is the creation of a vast simulation infrastructure for advanced AI training.

The Hidden Plan: Billions of Simulated Worlds to Train AI

The most plausible hidden plan is that these data centers will host billions of parallel virtual worlds that simulate our own 3D world. Why? Because true artificial general intelligence cannot be achieved with today’s large language models alone. To develop superintelligence, an AI must gain experience through interaction with simulated 3D environments — worlds where time can run a million times faster than real life.

Nvidia has already unveiled Cosmos, a world foundational model platform designed to help AI understand and simulate the physical world, enabling synthetic data generation for robotics and autonomous vehicles [3]. This is exactly the kind of tool needed to train AI in simulated realities. As the tank simulation described in one book illustrates, virtual worlds have long been used to train humans; now we are building them to train machines [4]. The goal is nothing less than to grow artificial minds that have experienced billions of lifetimes in simulation before ever being deployed in our world.

Why Current LLMs Are a Dead End

Large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini are impressive in their capabilities, but they lack in-depth understanding of the physical world. Ask an LLM to predict what happens when you place a ping-pong ball in a cup of water and turn it upside down, and it will often fail. The reason is that these models are trained on text, not on direct sensory experience.

This is why the robotics industry is turning to simulation. As one news report noted, “Robotics is still held back by a paucity of data from physical spaces” and companies are building detailed virtual replicas to train their machines [5]. Nvidia’s Cosmos platform is explicitly designed to generate synthetic data for robotics, autonomous vehicles, and even humanoid robots [3]. Only by exposing AI to billions of simulated worlds can we give them the embodied understanding that leads to genuine intelligence. LLMs are a dead end to superintelligence; world models are the future.

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NIRVANA DROID: Humanoid Robot Gabi ‘Converts’ to Buddhism and Becomes a Monk

In Korea, an android is on a spiritual quest.

While technology is usually thought of as the polar opposite of ancient religious practices and beliefs, in Korea, these two worlds seem to be colliding.

In the Jogye Temple in Seoul, a group of monks from Korea’s largest Buddhist sect sat across from a cyborg postulant awaiting the ceremony that would make him a monk.

The Korea Times reported:

“Clad in humble black shoes and the Buddhist order’s ceremonial gray and brown robe, the 1.3-meter-tall robot stood in front of Buddhist monks and nuns as it pledged to commit itself to Buddhism in the ceremony held Wednesday, ahead of Buddha’s Birthday later this month.

The robot folded its hands together and bowed to the monks officiating the ceremony, as one of the monks carefully hung a 108-bead rosary and attached a sticker instead of the original ritual where one has to slightly burn his arms near an incense stick.”

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Judge Halts Colorado AI Law After First Amendment Challenge

A federal judge has frozen enforcement of Colorado’s first-in-the-nation AI law, the statute that would have required developers to police their own models for “algorithmic discrimination” and to inform the state of “foreseeable risks” before the rules took effect on June 30.

Judge Cyrus Y. Chung signed off on a joint request from xAI and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on April 27, putting the law on ice while state lawmakers draft a replacement.

We obtained a copy of the order for you here.

The order was filed in xAI v. Weiser. The state agreed not to enforce SB 24-205 against xAI, or to issue rules under it, until at least 14 days after the court rules on a forthcoming preliminary injunction motion.

The June 16 scheduling conference was cancelled. The deadlines in the case are suspended.

This is a significant retreat as Colorado spent two years insisting the law was a model for the country. It was the only state AI statute named in President Trump’s AI executive order last year. Now the state is asking a court to stop the clock while its own governor’s policy group drafts a bill to repeal and replace it.

The law itself is the reason the climbdown looks the way it does. SB 24-205 told developers of “high-risk” AI systems they had to take “reasonable care” to prevent algorithmic discrimination, with one carveout that has done more work in the lawsuit than any other clause: the law exempts discrimination intended to “increase diversity or redress historical discrimination.”

The state forbids one kind of discrimination by an algorithm. It permits, and arguably requires, another. The developer is left to figure out which is which, with the attorney general’s office deciding after the fact.

xAI sued on April 9, calling the statute a First Amendment problem dressed up as consumer protection. The company’s complaint is more blunt than most filings of this kind. “SB24-205 is decidedly not an anti-discrimination law,” the company’s attorneys wrote. “It is instead an effort to embed the State’s preferred views into the very fabric of AI systems.”

The argument is that Colorado isn’t regulating outputs neutrally. It’s choosing which viewpoints an AI model is allowed to produce, then enforcing the choice through “onerous policy, assessment, and disclosure requirements,” in the words of the Justice Department’s filing.

The DOJ moved to intervene on xAI’s side, the first time the federal government has joined a constitutional challenge to a state AI regulation.

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