What’s up in
Technology
Technology
Australia may build a $40 billion AI data center powered by gas, and its electricity demand is the part raising alarms
Australia's proposed AI data center could use more electricity than Darwin, raising fresh questions about gas and future demand.
NASA will pay $590 million to three companies to send construction materials to the Moon, a key step toward making a future lunar base feel less distant
Engineers developed sand dampers that could replace oil and protect buildings and bridges more cheaply and sustainably when vibrations or earthquakes hit
Young creators built DragonBot, a low-cost robot programmed to pick only one type of seasonal fruit, a very farm-smart idea that could save labor without relying on expensive machines
Spain created aircraft landing gear capable of storing energy like a battery, a strange idea that could turn the force of every landing into usable electricity
An agricultural town in Australia has jobs, factories, and a desire to grow, but it lacks the most basic necessity: Housing for its employees, and now it wants to solve this problem with 3D-printed homes
The following response from a chatbot may seem gratuitous and effortless, but the UN has just revealed its hidden side: Data centers, water, land, and electricity on a scale that spans entire countries
Texas engineers created a jacket capable of extracting up to 900 milliliters of drinking water per day directly from the air, an invention that sounds like science fiction for surviving a drier future
Homes that can be built in just one week, without cement and with the promise of saving energy: the system trying to prove that building fast does not have to mean building worse
- Barcelona wants to turn a random street into a climate laboratory by 2027 using asphalt made from olive pits and pine waste, which could reduce CO2 emissions from the top layer by up to 75%
- A student from Nuevo Laredo noticed something that we all see but that almost no one pays attention to: the water dripping from the air conditioner. She turned it into HidroAC+, a system for growing plants in a city where temperatures can exceed 104 °F for months on end
- The idea—which sounds strange but might make sense—is to use sunlight, black metal, and the “coffee stain” effect to desalinate water without producing any liquid waste
- Perhaps the greatest breakthrough for the future of AI isn’t a smarter chatbot, but one capable of thinking with fewer chips, less heat, and much less electricity
- It seemed impossible to detect such fine arteries on a moving X-ray until a new training method enabled an AI to go from almost never getting it right to getting it right in most cases
- The history of cities has always seemed to be driven by money, technology, and institutions, but a new study suggests there may be something more fundamental and powerful: the simple act of bringing people closer together changes the entire network
- A man with severe paralysis caused by ALS used a brain implant at home for more than 3,800 hours and was able to convert his attempts to speak into text, computer-generated information, and a voice similar to his own
- Could an AI model read a whole stack of documents in one go without slowing to a crawl? That is the claim now drawing attention around SubQ, a new large language model from the Miami startup Subquadratic
- The United States has 624,167 bridges, of which more than 220,000 are in need of repair, but a new generation of quantum sensors could detect hidden damage before it becomes visible from the road
- A Russian university has just unveiled a tractor attachment that injects cooled exhaust gases directly into the soil—a highly unusual idea that promises to benefit crops but requires extensive testing under real-world conditions
- MIT’s new method promises to speed up the search for alloys for rockets, chips, and clean energy by analyzing invisible “neighborhoods” between atoms
- They hid the number zero from an artificial intelligence system in the hope that it would discover it on its own; what happened teaches us an important lesson about the future of AI
- Scientists at MIT have created a robot with an “elephant’s memory” that promises to tell you where you left your keys last night—and it does so in a matter of seconds
- NASA is developing and testing an artificial intelligence system that identifies 93% of the signs of a flash flood and could provide crucial time to respond
- SpaceX’s valuation keeps rocketing, raising eyebrows about how high a private company can fly before gravity bites
- A chip material only three atoms thick was hit with plasma, and a tiny chemical trick changed what happened next
- Germany is literally zapping crops with lasers to ditch pesticides, and early tests say the crazy plan just might pay off
- They warn that China might be building strange new structures deep in the desert to reinforce its nuclear deterrence, and what draws attention is that the shapes seem deliberate enough to indicate preparation, not just construction
- A Chinese company completes the first lift of a stadium’s steel structure aiming to become the world’s first “garden,” and its about 139,000 tons show the true weight of an icon
- A key propeller tweak helped a drone design approach about 435 mph (700 km/h), pushing consumer-looking hardware into near-jet territory
- A 2026 building method promises a full house in five days, skipping bricks and conventional dry construction with a system designed for speed
- A U.S. city will bore through rock beneath a creek to build a massive sewage tunnel, with the route running up to about 118 feet (36 meters) underground in a historic infrastructure push
- Underground acoustic signals can expose hidden tunnels beneath U.S. roads and railways, turning vibrations into a new kind of subsurface X-ray
- China just put $226 million into an undersea data center near Shanghai, and the detail that matters is that ocean cooling and clean power are being used to cut land and water use as AI demand explodes
- Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft: “We overestimate what AI will do in two years and underestimate what it will do in ten”
- Australia positions a barge with 256-foot legs to install ocean intakes connected to tunnels under the seabed, feeding a desalination plant that will deliver about 39.6 million gallons a day