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Category: Technology

Musk’s SpaceX is building spy satellite network for U.S. intelligence agency, sources say

Musk’s SpaceX is building spy satellite network for U.S. intelligence agency, sources say

Reuters reports: SpaceX is building a network of hundreds of spy satellites under a classified contract with a U.S. intelligence agency, five sources familiar with the program said, demonstrating deepening ties between billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s space company and national security agencies. The network is being built by SpaceX’s Starshield business unit under a $1.8 billion contract signed in 2021 with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), an intelligence agency that manages spy satellites, the sources said. The plans show the…

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The obscene energy demands of AI

The obscene energy demands of AI

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: In 2016, Alex de Vries read somewhere that a single bitcoin transaction consumes as much energy as the average American household uses in a day. At the time, de Vries, who is Dutch, was working at a consulting firm. In his spare time, he wrote a blog, called Digiconomist, about the risks of investing in cryptocurrency. He found the energy-use figure disturbing. “I was, like, O.K., that’s a massive amount, and why is no one talking about…

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Elon Musk has a giant charity. Its money stays close to home

Elon Musk has a giant charity. Its money stays close to home

The New York Times reports: Before March 2021, Elon Musk’s charitable foundation had never announced any donations to Cameron County, an impoverished region at the southern tip of Texas that is home to his SpaceX launch site and local officials who help regulate it. Then, at 8:05 one morning that month, a SpaceX rocket blew up, showering the area with a rain of twisted metal. The Musk Foundation began giving at 9:27 a.m. local time. Am donating $20M to Cameron…

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The terrible costs of a phone-based childhood

The terrible costs of a phone-based childhood

Jonathan Haidt writes: Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent. The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same…

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Should either of these people have the power to end the world?

Should either of these people have the power to end the world?

W.J. Hennigan writes: Forty-five feet underground in a command center near Omaha, there’s an encrypted communications line that goes directly to the American president. To get to it, you need to pass through a guarded turnstile, two reinforced steel doors and a twisting hallway that leads to an ultra-secure room called The Battle Deck. It’s here, below the headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Command, or Stratcom, where military personnel stand by 24 hours a day awaiting a call the world…

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Landmark study links microplastics to serious health problems

Landmark study links microplastics to serious health problems

Nature reports: Plastics are just about everywhere — food packaging, tyres, clothes, water pipes. And they shed microscopic particles that end up in the environment and can be ingested or inhaled by people. Now the first data of their kind show a link between these microplastics and human health. A study of more than 200 people undergoing surgery found that nearly 60% had microplastics or even smaller nanoplastics in a main artery. Those who did were 4.5 times more likely…

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AI is consuming drinking water from the desert

AI is consuming drinking water from the desert

Karen Hao writes: One scorching day this past September, I made the dangerous decision to try to circumnavigate some data centers. The ones I chose sit between a regional airport and some farm fields in Goodyear, Arizona, half an hour’s drive west of downtown Phoenix. When my Uber pulled up beside the unmarked buildings, the temperature was 97 degrees Fahrenheit. The air crackled with a latent energy, and some kind of pulsating sound was emanating from the electric wires above…

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How to picture AI

How to picture AI

Jaron Lanier writes: A technology by itself is never enough. In order for it to be of use, it needs to be accompanied by other elements, such as popular understanding, good habits, and acceptance of shared responsibility for its consequences. Without that kind of societal halo, technologies tend to be used ineffectively or incompletely. A good example of this might be the mRNA vaccines created during the covid epidemic. They were an amazing medical achievement—and yet, because of widespread incomprehension,…

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Generative AI is challenging a 234-year-old law

Generative AI is challenging a 234-year-old law

Alex Reisner writes: It took Ralph Ellison seven years to write Invisible Man. It took J. D. Salinger about 10 to write The Catcher in the Rye. J. K. Rowling spent at least five years on the first Harry Potter book. Writing with the hope of publishing is always a leap of faith. Will you finish the project? Will it find an audience? Whether authors realize it or not, the gamble is justified to a great extent by copyright. Who…

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How a solar revolution in farming is depleting the world’s groundwater

How a solar revolution in farming is depleting the world’s groundwater

Fred Pearce writes: There is a solar-powered revolution going on in the fields of India. By 2026, more than 3 million farmers will be raising irrigation water from beneath their fields using solar-powered pumps. With effectively free water available in almost unlimited quantities to grow their crops, their lives could be transformed. Until the water runs out. The desert state of Rajasthan is the Indian pioneer and has more solar pumps than any other. Over the past decade, the government…

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Where do Amazon’s profits come from?

Where do Amazon’s profits come from?

Stacy Mitchell writes: If you read the recently unsealed materials from the federal antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, you’ll see why the company wanted to keep them under wraps. According to the unredacted notes from one meeting, Jeff Bezos directed his team to stuff more ads into search results, even if it meant accepting more ads internally categorized as irrelevant to what users were looking for. Other quoted documents reveal the company working to conceal a mysterious price-hiking algorithm, in part…

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A tech billionaire is quietly buying up land in Hawaii. No one knows why

A tech billionaire is quietly buying up land in Hawaii. No one knows why

Dara Kerr reports: A life-size bronze statue of a cowboy sits at the center of Waimea. The cowboy is riding a horse, lasso in hand, pursuing a wild bull. It’s a monument to Ikua Purdy, a hometown hero, who was the first Hawaiian to become a hall-of-fame rodeo roper. This statue is meant to represent the spirit of the place here on Hawaii’s Big Island, which is wholly different from the tourist-laden beaches of Waikiki. Waimea is primarily an agricultural…

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Russia’s war machine runs on Western parts

Russia’s war machine runs on Western parts

Amy Mackinnon reports: Shortly before noon on Aug. 19, 2023, a Russian cruise missile sliced past the golden onion domes and squat apartment blocks of the Chernihiv skyline in northern Ukraine. The Iskander-K missile slammed into its target: the city’s drama theater, which was hosting a meeting of drone manufacturers at the time of the attack. More than 140 people were injured and seven killed. The youngest, 6-year-old Sofia Golynska, had been playing in a nearby park. Fragments of the…

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Russian forces getting more access to Starlink satellite internet, threatening Ukraine’s military communications

Russian forces getting more access to Starlink satellite internet, threatening Ukraine’s military communications

RFE/RL reports: Russian troops in Ukraine increasingly have access to Starlink, the private satellite Internet network owned by Elon Musk that Ukraine’s military relies on heavily for battlefield communications. The findings from RFE/RL’s Russian Service corroborate earlier statements from Ukrainian military officials, underscoring how Kyiv’s ability to secure its command communications is potentially threatened. It comes as Ukrainian forces grapple with depleted weaponry and ammunition, and overall exhaustion, with Russian forces pressing localized offensives in several locations along the 1,200-kilometer…

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EU climate policy is dangerously reliant on untested carbon-capture technology

EU climate policy is dangerously reliant on untested carbon-capture technology

An editorial in Nature says: Last week, the European Commission published its long-awaited recommendations for climate targets for 2040. The commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union, is recommending that EU member states cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 90% by 2040, compared with 1990 levels. If countries agree, this would be an interim milestone, ahead of the European Climate Law, which sets out a legally binding target for net-zero emissions by 2050. A target cut of 90% is…

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Is the media prepared for an extinction-level event?

Is the media prepared for an extinction-level event?

Clare Malone writes: My first job in media was as an assistant at The American Prospect, a small political magazine in Washington, D.C., that offered a promising foothold in journalism. I helped with the print order, mailed checks to writers—after receiving lots of e-mails asking, politely, Where is my money?—and ran the intern program. This last responsibility allowed me a small joy: every couple of weeks, a respected journalist would come into the office for a brown-bag lunch in our…

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