President Trump hosted a high-stakes conference aimed at securing a peace deal in Ukraine. So far, it has accomplished nothing.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-russia-ukraine-war-defend-american-troops-85704282576324a36567798e9cb741ec
In a likely slap in Trump’s face, Russia bombed a U.S.-owned factory in Ukraine.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/08/21/russia-largest-missile-attack-hits-us-factory-ukraine/
Ukraine used a small, unmanned aircraft carrier to deliver unmanned suicide drones to attack a Russian base in Crimea.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/uncrewed-boats-launch-fpv-drone-strike-on-key-russian-radars-located-on-crimeas-southern-tip
Cheap kamikaze drones are not perfect substitutes for artillery. Thanks to greater weight and velocity, artillery shells can punch through obstacles like nets, walls, and even thick concrete to reach their targets.
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2025/08/6/7525056/
Peter Zeihan discusses new kinds of military drones that will be fielded in the new future.
https://youtu.be/Qv3arzsorCc?si=rgNWfxQzo1b0uyej
Russia’s “meat wave” battlefield tactics might be better if armed robot dogs replaced the sacrificial human infantrymen.
https://youtu.be/oPCSFKiCLj8?si=aR1Ur6nekjBMtai1
’20 years after its landmark withdrawal from Gaza, Israel is mired there’
https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-settlements-disengagement-20th-anniversary-5db86a29bbbe2f41e5bb7059098fd450
An Israeli airstrike killed the prime minister of the rebel Yemeni Houthis along with several top government officials.
https://apnews.com/article/yemen-houthis-israeli-strike-494d91b05e04a5dbaeda0205ef349a39
‘India shot down six Pakistani military aircraft in May, air force chief says’
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/india-shot-down-six-pakistani-military-aircraft-may-air-force-chief-says-2025-08-09
After 28 years, Russia has restored its Soviet-era nuclear battlecruiser to service.
https://www.twz.com/sea/russias-upgraded-nuclear-battlecruiser-back-at-sea-after-nearly-three-decades
Vietnam has built up the islands it controls in the disputed South China Sea.
https://www.newsweek.com/satellite-images-vietnam-artificial-islands-south-china-sea-2118629
After long delays and enormous anticipation, OpenAI released GPT-5, and it was a disappointment. Yes, it’s better than the previous GPT-4 model, but only iteratively so, and it’s not the revolutionary leap many people were expecting.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/08/08/openais-latest-step-towards-advanced-artificial-intelligence
GPT-5’s silly mistakes show it’s nowhere close to being truly intelligent.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/08/gpt-5-fake-presidents-states/
The amount of money being spent on AI and its associated infrastructure (mostly data centers and electricity) is staggering, and might indicate the sector is in a bubble.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/will-data-centers-crash-the-economy
It’s a profound statement, especially when you consider it is the White House’s official stance:
“Artificial intelligence (AI) is a foundational technology that will define the future of economic growth, national security, and global competitiveness for decades to come.”
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/promoting-the-export-of-the-american-ai-technology-stack/
ChatGPT will be provided for free to the whole U.S. federal workforce.
https://openai.com/index/providing-chatgpt-to-the-entire-us-federal-workforce/
Microsoft has done an analysis that reveals which careers are most and least vulnerable to automation. The allegedly safe jobs mostly involve manual labor and pay little money. Even if machines don’t take all of our jobs, the ones that remain could be unsatisfying and worse than the jobs we used to have.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07935
Five years ago, Elon Musk predicted AI would overtake humans in five years.
‘Musk added that the invaluable experience of working with different types of AI at Tesla has given him the confidence to say “that we’re headed toward a situation where AI is vastly smarter than humans, and I think that time frame is less than five years from now. But that doesn’t mean that everything goes to hell in five years. It just means that things get unstable or weird.”’
Things have definitely gotten weird (perfect AI-generated deepfakes, chatbots describing themselves as Hitler, mass student use of AI to cheat on homework), but the rest of Musk’s prediction was too optimistic. Anyone who has used an LLM knows the latter are vastly smarter but also vastly dumber than humans.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland/elon-musk-warns-ai-could-overtake-humanity-5-years-165776
Computer-generated “baby standup comedians” show how advanced video generation and text synthesis have become.
https://youtu.be/tocUTvTW5UM?si=qf5DYqcoEMCrb9r2
Here’s a wholly synthetic scene from a fake Godzilla movie that looks 99% genuine.
https://youtu.be/CaXRUi3HhVQ?si=YvgbK_RDyyIqx6fS
Unitree has debuted an incredible new robot: the A2 Stellar Explorer.
https://youtu.be/ve9USu7zpLU?si=EUW5hI5-MGmwFSOK
A company called “Figure” has built a robot called “Helix” that can fold laundry about as well as an elderly person.
https://youtu.be/FFp4jveDFb0?si=vwojCwa-BsX20QD9
Future aircraft will have more sensors in them to monitor different systems and components, and better electronic brains that interpret those data. This will lead to better proactive maintenance as the aircraft detect problems earlier and have a better grasp of which of their components are the most worn.
Maintenance and repair could be further improved through use of small robots that could climb into narrow internal spaces of the aircraft for inspections and fixes.
While this kind of technology will only make sense for expensive aircraft, as time passes, it will become economical for it to be used on things like boats and cars. Working on cars myself, it’s struck me how useful a spider-sized robot that could crawl into a vehicle’s crevices and send back a live video feed and electricity readings would be.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/digital-twins-in-cockpits-will-help-planes-look-after-themselves/21809110
There are advantages to replacing space suits with single-person, mini-space ships.
https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/departments/coming-soon-shirtsleeve-evas/
Black holes could be used to produce energy more efficiently than any other method.
https://www.reddit.com/r/scifiwriting/comments/17ll8a5/using_black_holes_as_a_source_of_energy/
‘Twice a day – every day of the year – meteorologists around the world launch weather balloons at the same time from roughly 900 locations around the globe. Those balloons often reach heights of 20 miles above Earth — or twice as high as planes typically fly.
Sensors beam data back down to Earth every few seconds as winds carry the balloons up to 125 miles away. These sensors help collect critical temperature, humidity, wind and atmospheric pressure measurements. Without this information, accurate weather forecasts beyond a few hours would be almost impossible.’
https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/heres-why-meteorologists-launch-weather-balloons-every-day/877665
You can tell by the shapes of the clouds whether a cold front has overtaken a warm front, or vice versa.
https://www.internetgeography.net/national-5-geography/what-are-depressions/
Demand for fur-based clothing has sharply dropped worldwide as people have become more conscious of animal rights. In the future, biotechnology will let us synthesize and kind of animal product in labs, which will nearly eliminate demand for the real thing.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/421653/fur-farming-decline-animal-rights-mink-fixes
Here’s a fascinating interview with Lewis Bollard about animal welfare, the economics of industrial agriculture, and how future technologies could affect both.
https://youtu.be/kWcPg8t1kJ4?si=gcyPuCR7-k1Jy5qq
Here’s an interview with Noor Siddiqui about the future of reproductive rights and genetic technology. There’s a fascinating discussion near the end about the ethics and advantages of using artificial wombs to gestate humans.
https://youtu.be/Wzt02p14vZQ?si=FG16xM8DdV38NyOp
People with mutations to their LRP5 genes have denser, stronger bones than normal. I wonder if someday genetic engineering will make that mutation the standard for all humans.
https://youtube.com/shorts/S32IUzldLnQ?si=mJw0llKHLgbQ5z_5
Hair can actually keep you cooler.
‘Our results show that tightly curled hair provides the most effective protection for the scalp against solar radiation, while minimizing the need for sweat to offset heat gain.’
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2301760120
Lithium might slow or even reverse Alzheimer’s and dementia in humans. However, because lithium is a naturally occurring element that can’t be patented, there’s no pharmaceutical industry interest in investigating. This is called a “market failure,” and it’s where the government is supposed to step in for the public good by using taxpayer money to fund the medical studies.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02471-4