Week In Review If there was a single thread running through this week’s energy news, it was manufacturing. Not reactor physics, not cell chemistry, not policy — the unglamorous question of how you actually build the thing, thousands of times, at a price someone will pay. Oak Ridge and Idaho
Week In Review Two items this week make the same argument from opposite ends of the industrial chain: the cheapest ore left on Earth is the stuff we have already dug up and thrown away. In West Virginia, a university team is pulling rare earth oxides out of the acid
Week In Review If there was a single organizing idea in this week’s aging research, it was that inflammation in old tissue is not a vague background hum but a set of specific, named circuits — and that several of them already have drugs pointed at them. The clearest example
Week In Review This was a week about plumbing — and plumbing, in the augmentation business, is where the interesting design decisions hide. Anthropic moved computer use, browser use, the Skills API, and the Files API to general availability, which means agents that operate software the way a person does are
Week In Review This was a week in which the most interesting claims were about systems rather than models. NVIDIA published a result showing that its AVO agent architecture completed every level of the ARC-AGI-3 public set while the same underlying model, run bare, cleared roughly a third of it
Week In Review If there was a single throughline in robotics this week, it was the sound of an industry building its supply chain. The most-watched event was financial: Unitree Robotics went public on Shanghai’s STAR Market, and its first-day surge made it, by its own account, the first
Week In Review Reusability stopped being an American monopoly this week. On the morning of August 19, LandSpace brought the first stage of its ZhuQue-3 rocket back to a concrete pad in Gansu Province and set it down on its legs, making the company the first commercial Chinese firm to
Week In Review The single most legible number of the week was a round one: the world crossed three terawatts of installed solar capacity. Solar crosses 3 TW threshold is the kind of milestone that is easy to file under “nice chart” and hard to internalize, because the intervals between
Week In Review The strongest thread running through this week’s work is a shift in what “recyclable” is supposed to mean. For most of the plastics era, recyclability has been a property discovered after the fact — a question of whether some existing material happens to survive a sorting line.
Week In Review If there was a single thread running through this week in aging research, it was measurement — not new interventions so much as better instruments for knowing what is actually happening inside an aging body. A USC-led team took five of the most widely used epigenetic clocks and
Week In Review The past week made the split personality of intelligence augmentation unusually vivid. On one side, Neuralink participants were shown driving powered wheelchairs by thought alone — the strongest demonstration yet that decoded motor-cortex signals can move a real body through real space, not just a cursor across a
Week In Review The past week made clear that the AI industry has finished the era in which capability alone was the story. Two of the biggest events had nothing to do with a new benchmark: Anthropic’s preliminary Q2 revenue of more than $11.5 billion with a positive