Science & Technology
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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
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
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
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
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
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: 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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





