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Inside Firefly’s new Texas facility built to help power NASA’s moon base

CEDAR PARK, Texas (KXAN) — Lunar landers are making a new home in Central Texas.

On Tuesday, Firefly Aerospace celebrated the completion of a new clean room facility at its Cedar Park spacecraft campus, an expansion company leaders say will help support a growing number of lunar missions and future spacecraft production.

“What it really lets us able to do is that you can kind of have spacecraft flowing through the production line really smoothly,” said Ray Allensworth, vice president of spacecraft at Firefly Aerospace.

Tesla Builds First Cybercab Using In-House Battery Materials

Tesla’s push to bring its battery supply chain under one roof just hit a major milestone on the factory floor. The first production Cybercab powered by cathode battery materials produced entirely in-house has officially rolled off the assembly line at Gigafactory Texas.

The milestone was confirmed by Tesla’s official Robotaxi account on X, which posted: “First Cybercab made using our in-house cathode material – from the first cathode plant in the Americas.”

The breakthrough represents the culmination of a multi-year effort to master dry-cathode 4,680 battery manufacturing. Not only does Tesla’s dry cathode process cut battery costs, but producing the raw active electrode powder domestically takes vertical integration to an entirely new level.

Experimental cancer vaccine makes its own oxygen and gives T cells a boost

When it comes to priorities in life, oxygen tops the list. Humans can go weeks without food and days without water. Take away the ability to breathe, however, and the clock starts ticking within minutes as the brain begins shutting down. But the life-giving gas does even more heavy lifting than you might think.

The immune system, which battles cancer with the help of specialized fighters, such as T cells, relies on oxygen to mount its attack.

Now, Bouvé College of Health Sciences professor and director of the pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences graduate program Stephen Hatfield and his colleagues are enlisting oxygen in the cancer fight with a new vaccine designed to give T cells a powerful edge.

Can an AI feel pain? It can at least act like it does

“Can the new cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) models feel pain? They at least behave as if they do, according to a recent study. By peering inside 25 AI models whose internal workings are publicly available, researchers found a pattern of activity specifically associated with the concept of pain. What’s more, when given the opportunity, some AIs switched off the pattern as a form of ‘pain relief.’”

Study reignites debate over what, if anything, machines can feel.

The World is Transformed by Asking Questions

Back in 2013, I wrote that the moment we stop having questions is the moment we become stupid robots.

Thirteen years later, machines hand out answers faster than we can read them. Which makes me wonder whether I was describing the robots, or us.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: answers have always been cheap. Politics, religion, and philosophy have given them away for millennia, and each came with an expiry date.

So what actually moves the world forward? And what happens to a civilization that outsources its thinking to #AI and quietly forgets how to doubt?

In the piece, I also proposed a Turing Test for #ArtificialIntelligence years before ChatGPT existed, and I think it holds up even better now. It’s not the one you’d expect.

Voltaire, Nietzsche, Einstein, Mark Twain, and a certain Greek sage all show up to argue the case for #CriticalThinking over comfortable certainty.

Fair warning: it won’t give you answers.

Continue reading “The World is Transformed by Asking Questions” | >

A blueprint for keeping humans in control of AI

Even as Overman began enlisting AI for his research, he grew wary of where the technology was headed. “This isn’t only about the apocalyptic potential of what could happen; I’m also thinking a lot about the future of human flourishing,” Overman says. He fears that misaligned AI could overstep its bounds—not necessarily maliciously—and inflict subtle yet real harms on people.

“To prevent that, we need to get this right,” Overman says.

“We must set up the proper interactions and training and incentives for these AI agents and models. It’s critical to think about shaping all of that now, so that these tools help make life better for us, not worse.”

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