A cave in New Zealand has yielded fossils from a lost ecosystem that existed about 1 million years ago, including a possible flying ancestor of the kākāpō. The discovery reveals that volcanoes and climate upheaval were reshaping the country’s wildlife and driving extinctions long before humans arrived.
In 2012, I sat down with Dr. James Hughes, bioethicist, sociologist, and executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
Fourteen years later, the questions we wrestled with have only sharpened.
Why are transhumanist atheists so often drawn to Buddhism? Is optimism rational, or just a posture we adopt to keep moving? What does it mean to redesign the human being, and which democratic institutions are ready to respond when we do?
James does not flinch from any of it. He talks about his first book Citizen Cyborg, the then forthcoming Cyborg Buddha, moral enhancement, animal uplift, and what our actual chances are of surviving the technological singularity.
What struck me most was his refusal to retreat into easy camps.
Not a cheerleader, not a doomsayer. Someone who interrogates the world and engages it on its own terms.
The critical minerals that power lithium-ion batteries are in high demand and short supply, especially for the U.S., which must rely on importing resources such as nickel and cobalt to manufacture the technology.
Cornell researchers have now developed a more efficient and cost-effective way to recover almost the full life of these batteries after they are spent. By using an electrochemical solution to regenerate their electrodes, the recycled batteries can regain up to 95% of their original power and last longer when reused, the researchers demonstrated.
The process could also slash current recycling costs by 56% and would be more environmentally friendly than current methods.
Astronomers have reported the discovery of an unusual X-ray transient detected by the Einstein Probe that does not fit any known class of cosmic explosions. The paper presenting its multiwavelength analysis was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on June 13.
On March 5, 2024, a space telescope called the Einstein Probe—designed to scan the sky for sudden X-ray flashes—caught a brief, never-before-seen source called EP240305a. It produced two brief X-ray flares, one right after the other, separated by about 200 seconds of quiet.
Researchers quickly pointed several telescopes at this source to gather more data in X-rays, infrared, optical and radio wavelengths; the analysis of these multiwavelength data is presented in the new study.
In favorable climates, NVIDIA’s 45-degree liquid-cooling architecture can enable chiller-less operation with dry coolers, reducing facility cooling water consumption from roughly 2.6 million gallons per megawatt per year for conventional cooling-tower-based systems to near zero — up to a 100% reduction in water use.
The reason: traditional air-cooled data centers depend on large volumes of cooled air to remove heat from IT equipment, often requiring energy-intensive cooling infrastructure during hot weather. With NVIDIA’s 45-degree liquid cooling, heat is captured directly at the chip and transported through liquid loops operating at much higher temperatures, allowing outdoor dry coolers to reject heat efficiently for much of the year while significantly reducing mechanical cooling requirements and facility water consumption.
The data center ambient temperature is flexible — warm summer air is fine — because nothing in the server depends on cool air. The liquid does all the work — and the same liquid can be recirculated in a closed loop so no new water is consumed to cool the chips.
NVIDIA’s latest AI servers can run on coolant warmer than a hot tub — and that counterintuitive choice is one of the biggest efficiency leaps in data center history.
SpaceX continued preparing for Starship Flight 13 this week with an incredible series of Pad 2 deluge tests, ongoing work at the Gigabay, Launch Pad 1 refurbishment, LC-39A proof testing, SLC-37 construction, McGregor Raptor testing, and activity across Massey’s Test Site.
This week we take a closer look at the massive water deluge system that will support future high-cadence Starship operations, progress on Florida’s launch infrastructure, and the mysterious covered structure at McGregor that continues to spark speculation.
🚀 In this episode:
• Pad 2 conducts an unprecedented series of deluge tests • Gigabay construction reaches another milestone • Pad 1 launch mount refurbishment continues • LC-39A \.
Birds use a variety of navigational strategies, including the geomagnetic field, especially when other cues are not available, such as under overcast or nocturnal conditions. Magnetite particles in the beak, cryptochromes in the eye, cellular ion-channel alterations, and changes in the vestibular system have been proposed to explain magnetoreception, but the exact mechanisms remain debated. Here, we used physical, morphological, functional, and genomic assays to identify the presence of superparamagnetic macrophages in the liver. We found that after macrophage depletion, pigeons flying under overcast conditions lacked their usual orientation capabilities. Orientation was unimpaired in birds without macrophages when the sun was visible, suggesting that this was their primary cue.
A technology developed at the Technion enables ordinary users to create realistic video clips intuitively, without the need for massive computing resources. Called Time-to-Move (TTM), it offers unprecedented control over the movement of objects and characters in AI-generated videos using nothing more than mouse movements, eliminating the need for complex and expensive infrastructure or training on millions of videos.
Dr. Or Litany of the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science, who led the research together with faculty colleague Prof. Ron Kimmel and students Asaf Singer, Noam Rotstein and Amir Mann, presented the work at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026 conference, held in Brazil last month. ICLR is one of the world’s leading conferences in deep learning and AI.
“Our development,” Litany explains, “solves one of the main limitations of AI-based video generation: the difficulty of precisely controlling the movement of objects and characters over time. TTM does not require retraining and can be integrated as a plug-in into existing video models. Unlike previous approaches, which require model-specific adaptation and substantial computing resources, this technology operates with no additional computational cost. In doing so, it helps democratize AI video creation by expanding access beyond giant companies such as Google and Meta.”