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Likes: 34
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Posted: Jun 5, 2026, 2:20 PM
Caption: Last week’s explosion of a New Glenn rocket was clearly a setback for Blue Origin and NASA, but it was also a learning experience. The launch base on Florida’s Space Coast is gearing up for a flurry of new arrivals. SpaceX is building multiple launch pads for its super-heavy Starship rocket, which will operate within a few miles of launch pads operated by SpaceX rivals Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance. Two other companies, Stoke Space and Relativity Space, are also developing launch sites along a narrow stretch of coastline at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. All of them have, or will soon have, rockets burning methane or liquified natural gas, replacing legacy launch vehicles fueled by kerosene, liquid hydrogen, or solid propellants. There are good technical reasons for making the switch, but until last week, engineers had scant real-world data on the damage that millions of pounds of methane and liquid oxygen would cause if a fully loaded rocket exploded on the launch pad or soon after liftoff. Now, we obviously have some idea. Read more on how the launch industry is moving forward at the link in our bio. [📸: Credit: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now

Likes: 18
Comments: 5
Posted: Jun 4, 2026, 4:55 PM
Caption: They’ve breached the border. A case of New World screwworm has been confirmed in South Texas, the US Department of Agriculture announced Wednesday night. It marks the first detected case of the ravenous flesh-eating flies in the United States, which have been making their way up through Central America for the past several years. In a social media post on Wednesday afternoon, the USDA revealed that a sample from Texas had been sent to the National Veterinary Services Laboratories (NVSL) in Ames, Iowa, for confirmatory testing of a screwworm infection. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins later posted that the testing had confirmed the infection, which was found in a 3-week-old calf in Zavala County, Texas. Although many animals, including humans, can be victims of the parasite, the screwworm is especially dangerous to livestock. Female screwworms lay hundreds of eggs in the wounds and openings of warm-blooded creatures, allowing their larvae to feast on the living animals, causing deep, festering, life-threatening wounds. Although the screwworm was once endemic to the US, it was eradicated amid a yearslong control effort in the 1960s. Read more on its return at the link in our bio. [📸: CSIRO]

Likes: 45
Comments: 2
Posted: Jun 3, 2026, 4:35 PM
Caption: A lawsuit against Amazon is seeking financial damages for millions of Americans whose faces may have been recorded by Ring cameras since the Familiar Faces feature was rolled out late last year. Plaintiff Charles Sigwalt this week filed a class action suit that aims to represent all people in the US “who had their facial recognition data collected, retained, and otherwise used by the Familiar Faces feature created and implemented by Defendant.” The lawsuit will seek “far” more than $5 million, but the $5 million figure was given in the complaint because US district courts have jurisdiction for civil actions seeking at least that amount. Sigwalt lives in Virginia and filed the suit in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington, where Amazon is headquartered. To date, several privacy advocacy groups and politicians have urged the company to discontinue the Familiar Faces feature on similar grounds. Read more on the litigation at the link in our bio. [📸: Getty Images | Joe Raedle]

Likes: 25
Comments: 1
Posted: Jun 2, 2026, 7:55 PM
Caption: The chief executive of Blue Origin, whose large New Glenn rocket exploded spectacularly less than a week ago at the company’s launch site in Florida, vowed Monday night that the company would launch again before the end of 2026. Writing on the social media site X, Blue Origin’s Dave Limp said the company had been able to complete a preliminary survey of the LC-36A launch site. Limp also confirmed that the company would press ahead with a rebuild of the site, which is designed for the 7×2 variant of the New Glenn rocket The CEO’s update answered some of the key questions Blue Origin faced in the aftermath of Thursday’s dramatic failure. Still, even with the new information, the current timeline is an ambitious and risky one for Blue Origin—and especially NASA. Read the full story at the link in our bio. [📸: Blue Origin]

Likes: 123
Comments: 2
Posted: Jun 1, 2026, 7:05 PM
Caption: Today, Florida became the first state to sue OpenAI over ChatGPT’s allegedly dangerous design. In a complaint filed in state court, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier accused OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, of prioritizing profits over the safety of Floridians. The civil lawsuit comes after Florida opened an unrelated criminal probe into OpenAI, following a ChatGPT-linked mass shooting where two people were killed at Florida State University. In statements, OpenAI has insisted that ChatGPT isn’t responsible for the FSU shooting, merely providing factual information, but Uthmeier does not seem to agree. In his complaint, Uthmeier noted that Florida has now been blindsided by two violent events where suspects used ChatGPT to assist in planning. The lawsuit joins prior suits accusing Altman of callously deploying AI systems without regard for user safety. Read the full story at the link in our bio. [📸: Anna Moneymaker / Staff | Getty Images News]

Likes: 48
Comments: 4
Posted: May 29, 2026, 3:25 PM
Caption: Big rockets, inevitably, produce big explosions. Thursday night’s detonation of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket during a static-fire test produced a spectacular fireball over Florida, sending shards of the rocket flying far and wide, into the sea and across the coastal scrubland nearby. With sunrise on Friday teams from Blue Origin, the US Space Force, and NASA will be able to begin more thoroughly assessing the damage to Blue Origin’s facilities and begin picking up the debris. Metaphorically, that effort to pick up pieces will extend far beyond the launch company; this launch failure will be devastating not just for Blue Origin but also NASA and broad segments of the US space industry. We took a look at some of the major issues that will stem from the explosion. Read our analysis at the link in our bio. [📸: Blue Origin]

Likes: 82
Comments: 7
Posted: May 28, 2026, 3:15 PM
Caption: In a splashy move that signals that Taiwan remains irreplaceable to the AI industry’s short-term and long-term goals, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced yesterday that his chip company will invest $150 billion a year to make sure Taiwan remains at the “epicenter” of the “AI revolution.” “This is where the chips come, packaging comes, this is where the systems are made, this is where AI supercomputers were created,” Huang said. “The number of partners we work with here in Taiwan, incredible.” The substantial investments will be used to create a new Taiwan headquarters for Nvidia, which Huang expects will drive so much AI innovation that the partnership will cement Taiwan as “the world’s tech manufacturing hub for a long time.” While Huang has bragged that the Taiwan base will make sure Nvidia is “worth even more in three ⁠to five years,” the CEO has so far not explained how the company’s plans in the country may potentially conflict with Donald Trump’s push to make the US the world’s AI hub. Read the full story at the link in our bio. [📸: Andrew Harnik / Staff | Getty Images News]

Likes: 413
Comments: 201
Posted: May 27, 2026, 4:55 PM
Caption: In the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists. More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by @wired show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat. This new effort follows President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-capitalism” beliefs. A new focus on anti-technology extremism adds an unreported category to already public designations under a presidency that has heavily invested political and material capital in AI and data center proliferation. Read the full story at the link in our bio. [📸: Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images]

Likes: 537
Comments: 22
Posted: May 26, 2026, 5:01 PM
Caption: In an age of AI, the Pope is looking for “artisans of hope.” With the co-founder of Anthropic at his side yesterday in Rome, Pope Leo XIV released a major new encyclical—his first—called Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity). It calls for AI to be “disarmed” in service of the common good. “The word is strong,” Leo admits, but he chose the language of “disarmament” deliberately, “because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences, and indicating paths forward for humanity.” AI today must be “freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion, and death.” The 40,000-word encyclical contains uncompromising critiques of AI-powered autonomous weapons, neo-colonial attitudes toward data collection, and the hoarding of “new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure, and data.” The letter goes far beyond just criticism, updating Catholic social teaching in a way that calls on everyone to “build.” Read the full story at the link in our bio. [📸: Getty Images]

Likes: 31
Comments: 0
Posted: May 21, 2026, 3:35 PM
Caption: After nearly a quarter of a century operating as a private company, with its financial accounts a closely guarded secret, SpaceX yesterday released a detailed accounting of its business in a nearly 400-page S-1 filing with the SEC. Filed ahead of an anticipated initial public offering of its stock (likely coming as soon as June 12), the document revealed no major surprises about the company’s space operations. That said, there was a trove of details about its sprawling operations, which now encompass launch, spaceflight, space-based Internet, and, thanks to its recent acquisition of Musk’s xAI, social media and AI. The filing also revealed the company lost nearly $5 billion in 2025, largely due to spending on artificial intelligence development. Read our full analysis at the link in our bio. [📸: SpaceX]

Likes: 89
Comments: 3
Posted: May 20, 2026, 4:04 PM
Caption: Nice cable you’ve got there… Iran claims it will charge US tech companies fees for using undersea Internet cables that run beneath the contested shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz. The latest assertions of Iranian authority over the Strait of Hormuz were announced in a brief statement by Ebrahim Zolfaghari, a spokesperson for Iran’s military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It was not immediately clear how Iran might implement such fees or impose its rules on cable projects, given that the majority of routes pass through Oman-controlled waters. The war has already halted multiple projects and led to the suspension of cable repairs in the region—and the latest Iranian threats may accelerate efforts by Big Tech and Gulf countries to find alternative routes for bypassing the Strait of Hormuz’s digital chokepoint. Read the full story at the link in our bio. [📸: TeleGeography]

Likes: 34
Comments: 2
Posted: May 19, 2026, 3:50 PM
Caption: The Ebola outbreak first reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Friday has seemingly escalated quickly into a large, uncontrolled multinational outbreak. As of May 17, there were 10 confirmed cases, 336 suspected cases, and 88 deaths in the DRC, as well as two confirmed cases and one death in neighboring Uganda. The numbers already put the outbreak within the top 10 Ebola outbreaks recorded by size, though still far from the worst. On Sunday, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. While the WHO noted that it does not meet the criteria for a pandemic emergency, the agency’s Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, noted the outbreak’s features suggest it is larger than what is currently being detected and is spreading regionally. Read the full story at the link in our bio. [📸: Getty | Badru Katumba]

Likes: 34
Comments: 0
Posted: Jun 5, 2026, 2:20 PM
Caption: Last week’s explosion of a New Glenn rocket was clearly a setback for Blue Origin and NASA, but it was also a learning experience. The launch base on Florida’s Space Coast is gearing up for a flurry of new arrivals. SpaceX is building multiple launch pads for its super-heavy Starship rocket, which will operate within a few miles of launch pads operated by SpaceX rivals Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance. Two other companies, Stoke Space and Relativity Space, are also developing launch sites along a narrow stretch of coastline at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. All of them have, or will soon have, rockets burning methane or liquified natural gas, replacing legacy launch vehicles fueled by kerosene, liquid hydrogen, or solid propellants. There are good technical reasons for making the switch, but until last week, engineers had scant real-world data on the damage that millions of pounds of methane and liquid oxygen would cause if a fully loaded rocket exploded on the launch pad or soon after liftoff. Now, we obviously have some idea. Read more on how the launch industry is moving forward at the link in our bio. [📸: Credit: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now

Likes: 18
Comments: 5
Posted: Jun 4, 2026, 4:55 PM
Caption: They’ve breached the border. A case of New World screwworm has been confirmed in South Texas, the US Department of Agriculture announced Wednesday night. It marks the first detected case of the ravenous flesh-eating flies in the United States, which have been making their way up through Central America for the past several years. In a social media post on Wednesday afternoon, the USDA revealed that a sample from Texas had been sent to the National Veterinary Services Laboratories (NVSL) in Ames, Iowa, for confirmatory testing of a screwworm infection. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins later posted that the testing had confirmed the infection, which was found in a 3-week-old calf in Zavala County, Texas. Although many animals, including humans, can be victims of the parasite, the screwworm is especially dangerous to livestock. Female screwworms lay hundreds of eggs in the wounds and openings of warm-blooded creatures, allowing their larvae to feast on the living animals, causing deep, festering, life-threatening wounds. Although the screwworm was once endemic to the US, it was eradicated amid a yearslong control effort in the 1960s. Read more on its return at the link in our bio. [📸: CSIRO]

Likes: 45
Comments: 2
Posted: Jun 3, 2026, 4:35 PM
Caption: A lawsuit against Amazon is seeking financial damages for millions of Americans whose faces may have been recorded by Ring cameras since the Familiar Faces feature was rolled out late last year. Plaintiff Charles Sigwalt this week filed a class action suit that aims to represent all people in the US “who had their facial recognition data collected, retained, and otherwise used by the Familiar Faces feature created and implemented by Defendant.” The lawsuit will seek “far” more than $5 million, but the $5 million figure was given in the complaint because US district courts have jurisdiction for civil actions seeking at least that amount. Sigwalt lives in Virginia and filed the suit in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington, where Amazon is headquartered. To date, several privacy advocacy groups and politicians have urged the company to discontinue the Familiar Faces feature on similar grounds. Read more on the litigation at the link in our bio. [📸: Getty Images | Joe Raedle]

Likes: 25
Comments: 1
Posted: Jun 2, 2026, 7:55 PM
Caption: The chief executive of Blue Origin, whose large New Glenn rocket exploded spectacularly less than a week ago at the company’s launch site in Florida, vowed Monday night that the company would launch again before the end of 2026. Writing on the social media site X, Blue Origin’s Dave Limp said the company had been able to complete a preliminary survey of the LC-36A launch site. Limp also confirmed that the company would press ahead with a rebuild of the site, which is designed for the 7×2 variant of the New Glenn rocket The CEO’s update answered some of the key questions Blue Origin faced in the aftermath of Thursday’s dramatic failure. Still, even with the new information, the current timeline is an ambitious and risky one for Blue Origin—and especially NASA. Read the full story at the link in our bio. [📸: Blue Origin]

Likes: 123
Comments: 2
Posted: Jun 1, 2026, 7:05 PM
Caption: Today, Florida became the first state to sue OpenAI over ChatGPT’s allegedly dangerous design. In a complaint filed in state court, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier accused OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, of prioritizing profits over the safety of Floridians. The civil lawsuit comes after Florida opened an unrelated criminal probe into OpenAI, following a ChatGPT-linked mass shooting where two people were killed at Florida State University. In statements, OpenAI has insisted that ChatGPT isn’t responsible for the FSU shooting, merely providing factual information, but Uthmeier does not seem to agree. In his complaint, Uthmeier noted that Florida has now been blindsided by two violent events where suspects used ChatGPT to assist in planning. The lawsuit joins prior suits accusing Altman of callously deploying AI systems without regard for user safety. Read the full story at the link in our bio. [📸: Anna Moneymaker / Staff | Getty Images News]

Likes: 48
Comments: 4
Posted: May 29, 2026, 3:25 PM
Caption: Big rockets, inevitably, produce big explosions. Thursday night’s detonation of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket during a static-fire test produced a spectacular fireball over Florida, sending shards of the rocket flying far and wide, into the sea and across the coastal scrubland nearby. With sunrise on Friday teams from Blue Origin, the US Space Force, and NASA will be able to begin more thoroughly assessing the damage to Blue Origin’s facilities and begin picking up the debris. Metaphorically, that effort to pick up pieces will extend far beyond the launch company; this launch failure will be devastating not just for Blue Origin but also NASA and broad segments of the US space industry. We took a look at some of the major issues that will stem from the explosion. Read our analysis at the link in our bio. [📸: Blue Origin]

Likes: 82
Comments: 7
Posted: May 28, 2026, 3:15 PM
Caption: In a splashy move that signals that Taiwan remains irreplaceable to the AI industry’s short-term and long-term goals, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced yesterday that his chip company will invest $150 billion a year to make sure Taiwan remains at the “epicenter” of the “AI revolution.” “This is where the chips come, packaging comes, this is where the systems are made, this is where AI supercomputers were created,” Huang said. “The number of partners we work with here in Taiwan, incredible.” The substantial investments will be used to create a new Taiwan headquarters for Nvidia, which Huang expects will drive so much AI innovation that the partnership will cement Taiwan as “the world’s tech manufacturing hub for a long time.” While Huang has bragged that the Taiwan base will make sure Nvidia is “worth even more in three ⁠to five years,” the CEO has so far not explained how the company’s plans in the country may potentially conflict with Donald Trump’s push to make the US the world’s AI hub. Read the full story at the link in our bio. [📸: Andrew Harnik / Staff | Getty Images News]

Likes: 413
Comments: 201
Posted: May 27, 2026, 4:55 PM
Caption: In the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists. More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by @wired show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat. This new effort follows President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-capitalism” beliefs. A new focus on anti-technology extremism adds an unreported category to already public designations under a presidency that has heavily invested political and material capital in AI and data center proliferation. Read the full story at the link in our bio. [📸: Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images]

Likes: 537
Comments: 22
Posted: May 26, 2026, 5:01 PM
Caption: In an age of AI, the Pope is looking for “artisans of hope.” With the co-founder of Anthropic at his side yesterday in Rome, Pope Leo XIV released a major new encyclical—his first—called Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity). It calls for AI to be “disarmed” in service of the common good. “The word is strong,” Leo admits, but he chose the language of “disarmament” deliberately, “because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences, and indicating paths forward for humanity.” AI today must be “freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion, and death.” The 40,000-word encyclical contains uncompromising critiques of AI-powered autonomous weapons, neo-colonial attitudes toward data collection, and the hoarding of “new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure, and data.” The letter goes far beyond just criticism, updating Catholic social teaching in a way that calls on everyone to “build.” Read the full story at the link in our bio. [📸: Getty Images]

Likes: 31
Comments: 0
Posted: May 21, 2026, 3:35 PM
Caption: After nearly a quarter of a century operating as a private company, with its financial accounts a closely guarded secret, SpaceX yesterday released a detailed accounting of its business in a nearly 400-page S-1 filing with the SEC. Filed ahead of an anticipated initial public offering of its stock (likely coming as soon as June 12), the document revealed no major surprises about the company’s space operations. That said, there was a trove of details about its sprawling operations, which now encompass launch, spaceflight, space-based Internet, and, thanks to its recent acquisition of Musk’s xAI, social media and AI. The filing also revealed the company lost nearly $5 billion in 2025, largely due to spending on artificial intelligence development. Read our full analysis at the link in our bio. [📸: SpaceX]

Likes: 89
Comments: 3
Posted: May 20, 2026, 4:04 PM
Caption: Nice cable you’ve got there… Iran claims it will charge US tech companies fees for using undersea Internet cables that run beneath the contested shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz. The latest assertions of Iranian authority over the Strait of Hormuz were announced in a brief statement by Ebrahim Zolfaghari, a spokesperson for Iran’s military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It was not immediately clear how Iran might implement such fees or impose its rules on cable projects, given that the majority of routes pass through Oman-controlled waters. The war has already halted multiple projects and led to the suspension of cable repairs in the region—and the latest Iranian threats may accelerate efforts by Big Tech and Gulf countries to find alternative routes for bypassing the Strait of Hormuz’s digital chokepoint. Read the full story at the link in our bio. [📸: TeleGeography]

Likes: 34
Comments: 2
Posted: May 19, 2026, 3:50 PM
Caption: The Ebola outbreak first reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Friday has seemingly escalated quickly into a large, uncontrolled multinational outbreak. As of May 17, there were 10 confirmed cases, 336 suspected cases, and 88 deaths in the DRC, as well as two confirmed cases and one death in neighboring Uganda. The numbers already put the outbreak within the top 10 Ebola outbreaks recorded by size, though still far from the worst. On Sunday, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. While the WHO noted that it does not meet the criteria for a pandemic emergency, the agency’s Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, noted the outbreak’s features suggest it is larger than what is currently being detected and is spreading regionally. Read the full story at the link in our bio. [📸: Getty | Badru Katumba]

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