The TLDR of the linked article is that there has been a surge in the use of imported Chinese peptide medicines in California, which are years, if ever, away from US FDA approval.
At first, the idea that some powerful Americans want to end the Dollar’s global role seems strange. That role gives America what the French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing called “exorbitant privilege” - the ability to borrow cheaply and in vast quantities on international markets. As people always need your currency, they’ll always lend you more money. When that borrowing funds your military and role as a superpower, it becomes more than a privilege; it’s an existential necessity.
Chinese nuclear fusion reactor pushes plasma past crucial limit: Breaking the plasma density limit brings researchers a step closer to viable fusion reactors.
"Senior ministers are considering whether it is appropriate for them to continue to use the platform, with Enterprise Minister Peter Burke saying the Government should make a “collective decision” about whether to stay on X."
Who knew the start of 2026 would be so busy? The United States fashioned the post-World War 2 international order, and now it can’t destroy it fast enough. Military plans for the US to invade European territory are now a reality. It’s hard to see NATO surviving that.
While life is improving in the developing world, in the developed world, it’s been the opposite story in the 21st century. Living standards have declined for most people, and in this new poll, 73% expect life to be harder for the next generation as they decline further. We seem stuck in an economic orthodoxy that has no way to fix this, and is so entrenched that not even voting can bring alternatives.
What do Greenland, Honduras, Venezuela & Nigeria have in common? One thing is that they are all locations identified by the ’Network State’ movement for partial (or, in the case of Greenland, complete) territorial takeover, so new corporate-run territories can be established that have the powers of sovereign nations in international law. Also, all places earmarked for takeover, annexation, or military action by the US. Coincidence?
Here we have another thing to add to the long list of reasons the world would be a better place if Meta didn’t exist. Not only is Meta in league with the scammers, they’ve become scammers themselves, too.
"It didn’t go unnoticed in Frankfurt that Visa and Mastercard suspended operations in Russia in March 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine……Thirteen of the 20 countries in the euro have no domestic card scheme. You use an international operator, or you pay in cash."
The current US administration’s plans were to send astronauts to Mars. That’s now been dropped, and the emphasis will now be to compete with China and try to build a base before them. Who starts a lunar base first matters. Although the Outer Space Treaty prohibits anyone from claiming lunar territory, whoever sets up a base can claim some sort of rights to the site and its vicinity.
2025 seems to be the year that the automation of employment by AI & robotics has gone mainstream. Soon, we will start to see it affect politics and elections. Approximately 5 million US citizens have driving jobs, and that isn’t including gig driving jobs for Uber, Lyft, etc A 7% pay cut in the space of one year is serious news. Multiply that out to millions of people, and it will soon be a political movement.
Some US politicians are launching an investigation. Good luck with that. They’re from the opposition Democratic Party, and the side that is in government is thoroughly in the pocket of Big Tech.
In most people’s sci-fi nightmares about robots trying to wipe out humanity, the robots tend to be big. But wouldn’t they be more deadly if they were tiny? 0.2-0.5 millimeters is bigger than bacteria or viruses, but it’s the size range of many single-cell protozoans.
An under-appreciated aspect of the switch to renewables & electrification is how it is getting all the innovation. Will you see major technological innovation advances like this for the dying paradigm of fossil fuels? No you won’t. Their death spiral has already started.
Doesn’t this miss the core problem? Social media is divisive, dishonest & addictive by design. Great that one country is protecting kids from it, but it doesn’t change Big Tech.
It’s depressing that bulls**t like this is still allowed to go unchallenged. When in the history of capitalism do companies, out of the goodness of their heart, find better paying jobs for workers they don’t need any more?
A paradox of the mid-2020s is that while Russia seems unable to advance much in conventional military terms in Ukraine, it’s making stunning advances against NATO countries when it comes to the cyber realm. Its capture of White House foreign policy is a tangible military victory as real as capturing land. Now it looks like it has more of NATO and the US that it can conquer uncontested.
As millions will lose driving jobs, understandably the focus is often on the negative economic impacts of self-driving vehicles. But they come with huge plusses, too. This article by neurosurgeon Jonathan Slotkin details those.
Bennu was the target of the OSIRIS-REx mission that returned samples of the asteroid to Earth. Now, research published in Nature has shown that those samples have all the chemical building blocks for RNA. This is significant, as it’s thought that before life settled onto DNA as its organizing mechanism, it first evolved through an RNA stage.
More good news about the demise of the fossil fuel age. EV trucks are cheaper to run, so economics is primarily driving this. Though the Chinese government has provided subsidies too. The expansion of heavy-duty charging stations across China is another driver.
The concept of Latent Collaboration in Multi-Agent Systems is something new among AI agents. Traditionally, coordination in multi-agent systems relies on explicit mechanisms—messages, protocols, or predefined teamwork instructions. But this research reveals that agents can achieve sophisticated collaboration without any of these. Instead, coordination emerges silently, embedded within their internal, or “latent,” representations—a hidden layer of intelligence that operates beneath the surface.
The countries committed to permanently ending fossil fuel use now far outnumber those against. Their problem? Their chief organising conference, the 30-year-old COP conferences, comes with vetoes from the petro-states. This year, 1,600 fossil industry lobbyists attended, and they managed to get any mention of fossil fuels scrubbed from the final agreement.
A headline from earlier this week was ’Google DeepMind Hires Former CTO of Boston Dynamics as the Company Pushes Deeper Into Robotics’. Google once owned Boston Dynamics and sold it as they didn’t think it had anything to sell. I bet they regret that now. Even its AI training data would have made it worth retaining. The things you don’t see when you take the short-term view.
A large chunk of international trade is in dollars. Even though the US as a country is only 13.4% of global trade, over 40% of all global trade is invoiced in dollars. International banking (countries’ foreign reserves, loans, & debt payments, etc) is even more dominated by the US dollar.
This year’s U.N. climate summit, COP30, has just ended in Brazil. There were 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists in attendance, a bigger delegation than any other country, other than host Brazil. They managed to strip talk of a permanent transition from fossil fuels from the final agreement.
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