Free Republic

Data centers have become the chic new enemy among activists. Critics claim the centers are using inordinate amounts of electricity and water to power artificial intelligence, inspiring protesters to take to the streets and Democratic lawmakers to head to Albany to stymie their development. However, some experts say the anti-data center push is more of a moral panic than an empirical one, often based on speculative and sometimes bunk projections. It seems that data centers are the boogeyman onto which larger fears about the impact of AI are being projected. “The estimates of future data-center development may be overestimated by...

There's a reason they call the lands surrounding the North Pacific the "Ring of Fire," and no, it's not because of a Johnny Cash song. No, the reason for that appellation is that the northern coasts of the lands on the Pacific are hotbeds of tectonic and volcanic activity. Nowhere are Americans more aware of this than in California, which has been hit by some pretty serious temblors in the past. Now, it looks like another big one may be on the way. Geologists are looking at the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults, and they are a tad worried...

Explanation: While cruising around Saturn, be on the lookout for picturesque arrangements of moons, rings, and shadows. One such striking sight occurred in 2005 and was captured by the then Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft. In the featured image, moons Mimas (left) and Tethys (right) are visible on either side of Saturn's thin rings, which are seen nearly edge-on. Across the top of Saturn are dark shadows of the wide rings, exhibiting their impressive complexity. The violet-light image brings up the texture of the backdrop: Saturn's clouds. Cassini orbited Saturn from 2004 until mid-2017, when the robotic spacecraft was directed to dive...

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool still needs some algae emancipation. Just days after the iconic Reflecting Pool reopened following President Trump’s $14 million renovation to seal the concrete bottom with an “American flag blue,” its familiar gnarly-looking green algae once again took over. “Versus previous administrations, the National Park Service is actually maintaining the beautifully completed Reflecting Pool,” a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told The Post. “The nanobubbler technology has successfully destroyed the algae bloom that has plagued every pool reopening since 1922, most infamously, the Obama pool reopening that resulted in massive algae clumps taking over...

My brain has been percolating on this for a bit, so apologies for not having all the background here. Tuesday morning, 0645, bad night's sleep, and my brain decided it wanted to tackle AI governance. Some thoughts I couldn't shake: Every time someone tries to incorporate Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics into AI governance, it fails. Asimov himself proved why — he didn't write them as a blueprint. He wrote them as a story engine for exploring how they break. Every single Robot story was about the edge cases, paradoxes, and unintended consequences of three seemingly simple rules. The Laws...

On June 27, the asteroid will approach at a distance of around 0.01715 astronomical units. It hasn't been this close since at least 1600 CE. Potentially hazardous asteroid 152637 (1997 NC1) seen by the Virtual Telescope Project, when it was around 10.5 million kilometers (6.5 million miles) from Earth. Image credit: Gianluca Masi/The Virtual Telescope Project Potentially hazardous asteroid 152637 (1997 NC1) is about to make its closest approach in over 400 years, in an event only seen once every decade. At these distances, and given the size of the asteroid, it should be possible to view using a small...

Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel and the rest of the tech lords are way sharper than Elizabeth Warren and Graham Platner and Scott Pelley and the woke NGO crowd. I know that experts agree that our liberal and Democratic friends are the sharpest knives in the drawer, because education and credentials. After all, how would they have got to be the ruling class without intelligence and cunning? But in the last week, we have all started to wonder. When the Democrats all sing in chorus about the evils of Elon Musk’s first trillion, as though he were...

Donald Trump has shocked the world by banning the use of the most advanced AI by foreigners, including Britons, over national security fears. The Trump administration has ordered that Anthropic's latest systems, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, be cut off from non-Americans, including those based in the US. The AI systems are theoretically capable of conducting large-scale hacking attacks and developing bioweapons. Anthropic said the only way to comply with the ban was to universally block access to its most advanced models, including for US citizens. Its popular Claude AI remains available. Tom Tugendhat, the former Conservative security minister, warned...

In the Middle East, intelligence services furiously hunt for fissile material in Iran. In Japan, residents still worry about radiation exposure from Fukushima Daiichi. In other places, stolen or missing radioactive sources have made the news. One solution: the cell phone.

Explanation: Venus and Jupiter may have caught your attention lately. The recent close conjunction of the two brightest planets in recent evening skies has been hard to miss. With Jupiter at the top, starting on May 30 and ending on June 8, their close approach was chronicled daily, left to right, in the featured panels from Maharashtra, India. Near the western horizon, the evening sky colors and exposures used for each panel depend on the local conditions near sunset. At their closest on June 9, the celestial pair appeared to be only about three times the width of a full...

While most news reports have focused trivially on Elon Musk’s status as the first trillionaire resulting from SpaceX’s successful initial public offering (IPO) last week, the real story of that IPO has to do with SpaceX itself and how that company’s extremely bright future is going to change human history. Let me run some numbers.

Explanation: In an interplanetary first, on July 19, 2013 Earth was photographed on the same day from two other worlds of the Solar System, innermost planet Mercury and ringed gas giant Saturn. Pictured on the left, Earth is the pale blue dot just below the rings of Saturn, as captured by the robotic Cassini spacecraft then orbiting the outermost gas giant. On that same day people across planet Earth snapped many of their own pictures of Saturn. On the right, the Earth-Moon system is seen against the dark background of space as captured by the sunward MESSENGER spacecraft, then in...

The uncertainty of science: In two somewhat self-righteous press releases today from two different academic organizations, scientists who have been for three decades touting the somewhat uncertain evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, thus requiring the ad hoc creation of something they label “dark energy” to explain it, insisted that their theory is still right despite publication of a paper last year that said their evidence was weak and unconvincing. The headlines of the first press release is especially insulting to the very concept of the scientific method: - Royal Astronomical Society: ‘Crisis averted’ as experts confirm...

A raging crowd of rowdy teenagers descended on picturesque Horny Corner beach in the tony Belmont Shore section of Long Beach at dusk Thursday, sparking a wild brawl that led to several teens being detained. The chaos unfolded as the sun began to set on the first night of summer break for students enrolled at many schools in the area, including nearby Woodrow Wilson High, which enrolls more than 3,300. Wild video captured at the scene shows throngs of teens clogging streets and the sand at two busy Southern California beaches, that of Horny Corner and nearby Rosie’s Dog Beach....

Explanation: To see Venus and Jupiter together this month, you won't need binoculars or even a telescope. Just look up after sunset and you'll find them emerging as the sky grows dark near the western horizon. In fact, on June 9 the two brightest planets were in close conjunction, separated on the sky by less than 2 degrees from our perspective. Since (brighter) inner planet Venus orbits the Sun faster than outer planet Jupiter, it catches up with and passes the outer planet along the ecliptic roughly every 13 months. But every three years or so their resulting conjunction can...

The Parker Solar Probe this past week successfully completed its 28th close fly-by of the Sun, zipping past its surface at a distance of only 3.8 million miles. During this solar encounter, which started June 3 and ends Saturday, June 13, Parker’s four scientific instrument packages gathered data from inside the Sun’s atmosphere, or corona. Parker will begin returning detailed spacecraft telemetry on June 14, with science data transmission set to run from Wednesday, June 17 to Tuesday, June 30. …Parker also equaled its record-setting speed of 430,000 mph — a mark that, like Parker’s distance to the Sun, was...

Explanation: Could the Little Mermaid turn into stardust instead of seafoam? It would seem so in this beautiful nebula. The featured image shows the Mermaid Nebula, also known as the Betta Fish Nebula, which is part of the G296.5+10.0 Supernova Remnant. The blue color visible here originates from doubly ionized oxygen (OIII), while the deep red is emitted by hydrogen gas. Estimated to be located a few thousand light-years away and about 10,000 years old, this nebula was formed when a massive star exploded as a supernova. It left behind a peculiar pulsar, a young radio-quiet neutron star that spins...

In January 2021, students at a high school across the street from the Colosseum came up with a bold plan. Angered by plans to extend remote learning to prevent the spread of Covid-19, the teenagers occupied their school, spending several nights camped out in the building in protest.When the demonstration ended, participants told Claudia Marino, a history and Latin teacher at the school, that they'd stumbled upon something significant. Marino and her colleagues investigated the tip, following the students' directions to a locked door in the basement."We found the key, entered, and we were in an old, disused boiler room,"...

The Hype About Aliens, UAPs, And ‘Disclosure’ Isn’t What It Appears To BeWhat if UAP sightings and alien abduction accounts aren’t evidence of extraterrestrial life, but of supernatural life?Do aliens walk among us? Has the government been covering up their existence for decades? In recent years the question of extraterrestrial life, and the fraught issue of government disclosure, has moved from science fiction to the news cycle. Aliens and UFOs — now called UAPs, or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena — aren’t just the subject of kooky podcasts and sci-fi films, but congressional hearings and White House document dumps.And now Steven Spielberg,...

Narrated in large part by 99 year old Lockheed retiree Harvey Kristen. Lockheed Aviation History:The Forgotten Early Burbank Years And Skunk Works | 1:33:56 DroneScapes | 506K subscribers | 38,862 views | June 1, 2026