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Seagate Space/TNS

Space Florida to fund ocean-based space launch company, other secretive projects

Space Florida continues to hold things close to the vest with several ongoing projects as it tries to attract aerospace business to the state — but did reveal the company behind what they had dubbed “Project Manta” to be Seagate Space, for which the state agency will help fund an offshore launch platform.

The state’s aerospace finance ...Read more

David Guralnick/The Detroit News/TNS

Gotion wants Michigan township to pay the $23.7M it owes in incentives

DETROIT — Gotion Inc. has asked a federal judge to order the Michigan township where it was supposed to call home to repay the roughly $23.7 million it owes the state in taxpayer-funded incentives.

Green Township's actions opposing Gotion's planned battery parts plant made it all but impossible to move forward, the company argued, leaving ...Read more

Northeast Philadelphia Airport could soon run on 100% solar power

A large solar array is being planned to fully power Northeast Philadelphia Airport (PNE).

A bill that still needs approval by City Council would authorize a contractor to build a 1.5-megawatt solar farm. In return, the city would purchase the energy for the airport for 25 years at a set rate.

It would become the largest municipal on-site solar...Read more

Sascha Schuermann/Getty Images Europe/TNS

Catherine Thorbecke: What if AI retraining is just a comforting lie?

No one knows whether AI will trigger a white-collar jobpocalypse. The loudest warnings still come from people building and selling the technology, whose predictions often double as hype-mongering or cover for unrelated cost cutting with investor-friendly language. Think-tank and analyst forecasts are no less vertiginous.

The honest answer is ...Read more

Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times/TNS

Value of Huntington Beach defense tech startup balloons to $1.8 billion

LOS ANGELES — California defense tech startup Mach Industries said Tuesday it raised $300 million, nearly quadrupling the company's valuation to $1.8 billion within a year.

The Huntington Beach startup's soaring valuation underscores how defense tech funding is booming as armed conflicts such as the Iran war and the Russian-Ukrainian war ...Read more

Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images North America/TNS

Parmy Olson: Google's AI shift is causing a collective freak-out

When Google recently announced radical changes to its search tool that will overshadow the page of blue links we’ve been used to seeing for more than a decade, online advertisers had something of a collective freak-out. The Alphabet Inc.-owned company called it the biggest such shift in more than 25 years, and that the search bar would be “...Read more

Zafro/Zafro/TNS

Gadgets: Portable air conditioner

For whatever reason, you might need a portable air conditioner: your central system goes out, you need cooling in a space that is without AC, or you don’t want to cool the entire house and instead just cool the room where you sleep. If so, the Zafro 16,000 BTU portable air conditioner can be a practical solution.

My experience with AC units...Read more

Jim Rossman/Jim Rossman/TNS

Jim Rossman: Do smart TV apps become outdated?

This week’s topic comes from a 71-year-old reader and it concerns TV.

“Do TVs need replacing because their software becomes outdated?” and “We have an antenna and sometimes (one local channel) pixelates and becomes unwatchable. How would I get that same channel without an antenna? I need a remote with number buttons, and I don’t ...Read more

Saja Tawalbeh/Dreamstime/TNS

Political play or budget fix? Competition for NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab management comes at a fraught moment

LOS ANGELES — Weeks after Trump administration officials announced that management of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory would open to competitive bidding for the first time, questions remain as to why Caltech could lose control of the lab its researchers founded in 1936.

On one hand, observers note, high-profile delays and cost overruns on ...Read more

Dreamstime/Dreamstime/TNS

Transmission lines, the arteries of the power grid, need more room to breathe

They don’t look like much — two small boxes and a solar panel mounted on some utility poles around Pittsburgh. A small weather station and a sensor, constantly updating Duquesne Light on the conditions of its transmission lines.

The system is crunching the data into a physics equation that governs how transmission lines operate. The more ...Read more

Encord/Encord/TNS

Silicon Valley's humanoid robots are learning how to do your job -- in the kitchen

Fernando Flores can spend eight hours a day pouring the same cup of coffee.

He is not a barista. He's a robot puppeteer, trying to train humanoids.

He manipulates mechanical controllers to make nearby robot arms pick up a pot of coffee, pour it into a mug and put the pot back in the coffee maker. Flores checks for spills, then empties the mug ...Read more

Aiman Khair/Dreamstime/TNS

As students protest artificial intelligence, Pitt professor cautions: 'We cannot delay the AI adoption'

Mark Ma wants to know how the workforce really feels about artificial intelligence — so he’s tracking exactly that.

An associate professor of business administration at the University of Pittsburgh, Ma spent the past four years studying the motives behind return-to-office mandates after the pandemic. He became a go-to voice on the issue ...Read more

Workers prepare to burn imported plastic waste at a dump in East Java, Indonesia, in 2018. Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images

A lot of ‘recycled’ plastic is being burned overseas – and causing widespread pollution linked to health problems

Picture a pile of trash the size of Manhattan and taller than one and a half Empire State Buildings. That’s how much plastic waste the world is predicted to be generating every year by 2050 if nothing is done to change course.

It’s easy to think of recycling as the solution, but the vast majority of plastic waste now ends up in ...Read more

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images North America/TNS

Executive order sets voluntary cyber reviews for advanced AI

Developers of frontier artificial intelligence models will have the option to voluntarily submit new technologies for review by federal cybersecurity agencies under a new executive order that comes after President Donald Trump backed away from an expected order last month.

Trump issued the executive order on Tuesday morning in a private signing...Read more

Kevin Clark/The Seattle Times/TNS

Microsoft launches AI that works like an executive assistant

Microsoft Corp. launched new artificial intelligence software designed to function like an always-active executive assistant, the latest evolution of its workplace AI efforts.

While AI bots like ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Copilot are only visible to the user, the new tool, dubbed Scout, will appear on internal email and calendar systems as if it ...Read more

Chadd Cripe/Idaho Statesman/TNS

More Idaho farmers, ranchers can now get federal funds to help migrating wildlife

BOISE, Idaho — Federal officials on Tuesday announced an expansion to a program that uses Farm Bill funding to help farmers and ranchers preserve big-game migration corridors on private land. The announcement was made in Boise at a Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies conference.

The program, called Migratory Big Game: A ...Read more

A pilot program to distribute waste bags to hikers on Mount Elbert in Colorado successfully cut down the amount of human waste on the massive mountain.  Shari Edelson, CC BY-ND

How to poop outdoors in a way that won’t harm the environment and other hikers

If you’re one of the 63 million Americans who went hiking last year, chances are you’ve found yourself needing to go, with no toilet in sight.

Aside from personal inconvenience, why is this such a big deal?

Human fecal contamination is a public health concern in natural areas. Pathogens in human poop can remain active for ...Read more

Despite explosion, Blue Origin CEO says New Glenn will fly before end of year

Last week’s explosion of a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket on the pad at Cape Canaveral prompted dire predictions that the company might not be able to launch again until late 2027 at the earliest.

CEO Dave Limp, though, said that’s not the case.

“Now that we’ve had access to the pad and integration facility, we can share a bit of good ...Read more

How a deep-ocean desalination startup hopes to rewrite California's water future

LOS ANGELES — An elephant standing full weight on a smartphone. That’s the pressure 1,400 feet underwater that a startup hopes to use to push seawater through ultrafine filters and make drinking water off the coast of Malibu — without much of the controversy that surrounds desalination.

Desalination plants are notoriously large ...Read more

Ana Ramirez/The San Diego Union-Tribune/TNS

San Diego County launches 2 studies to measure toll of Tijuana River pollution

SAN DIEGO — San Diego County is moving forward with two major research efforts to document the health and economic impacts of the Tijuana River Valley pollution crisis, partnering with the University of California, San Diego on an air quality study while simultaneously launching a public survey to measure the crisis’s financial toll on South...Read more