Free Republic

The Engines of Wealth: From Conquest to CodePreface: Understanding the DNA of Human ActionHuman history is shaped by the tension between constant biological drives and changing social environments. Across centuries, people have sought the same essentials — food, clothing, shelter, and security — yet the mechanisms to achieve them have evolved dramatically. Civilizations rise and fall not because human nature changes, but because the systems that organize labor, energy, and capital shift in response to crisis, innovation, and opportunity.This essay traces three transformative forces that have repeatedly restructured societies and economies: war, which expanded wealth through conquest; plague, which redistributed...

Will the new AI character be the death of human performers in movies? Hollywood may soon be filled with falling human stars and rising AI starlets. Film director Alfred Hitchcock, the ‘master of suspense’, once said ‘all actors must be treated like cattle’ – but if you think that’s bad, brace yourselves for the brave new world we’re living in, where actors won’t even exist as such, anymore. The creation of AI ‘actress’ Tilly Norwood has generated a massive wave of backlash over the unsurprising news that ‘talent agents’ were already lining up to sign the ‘digital character’. Tilly Norwood...

NASA has just pulled off a deep space first that could forever change the way we communicate beyond Earth. A silent beam of light traveled an unimaginable distance—and then something remarkable happened. In a major step toward high-speed space internet, NASA has successfully exchanged laser-encoded messages with a spacecraft over 350 million kilometers from Earth. The story, reported by IFLScience, marks the success of one of the most ambitious space communication tests ever attempted—and may open the door to a future where humans on Mars send back livestreams in real time.... To carry out this experiment, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory...

US President Donald Trump's new $100,000 ( £74,000) visa fee for foreign workers has drawn sharp criticism from the global tech community, triggering confusion at airports, concerns of brain drain, and growing fears that the policy could derail American innovation.In a wave of social media condemnation over the weekend, tech executives, startup founders, and economists expressed dismay over the hefty cost attached to H-1B visa applications—used predominantly by major tech employers such as Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft to hire highly skilled workers from abroad.While the White House scrambled to clarify the policy late Friday, the initial announcement sent shockwaves through...

Tech enters government with first AI ministerIn a jaw-dropping debut, Albania’s hi-tech, AI-powered government minister, Diella, addressed parliament on September 18, igniting uproar over innovation and constitutionality. Prime Minister Edi Rama introduced the world’s first artificially intelligent minister to oversee public tenders, promising “100 per cent corruption-free” decisions. Named Diella, meaning “sun” in Albanian, the AI appeared as a woman in traditional attire, declaring, “I am not here to replace people, but to help them.” The appointment, announced last week, is a stab at improving transparency in Albania after a plethora of accusations thrown at the government, which ranks 80th...

The “Godfather of AI” warned that the technology’s rapid adoption will unleash massive unemployment — hurting the poorest people the most if safe scalability is not prioritized. Geoffrey Hinton — a former Google whiz who last year won the Nobel Prize in physics for paving the way for the powerful AI systems we have today — said the CEOs pushing the technology as a possible solution to problems like hunger, poverty and disease are full of it. “What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,” Hinton told the Financial Times. “It’s going...

Trump is enlisting tech titans to secure U.S. dominance in AI, biotech, and national security—reviving a modern-day War Production Board for the 21st century. The left weighs in on anything that Trump is against, which drives it to lionize criminals like Abrego Garcia, champion open borders, and oppose increased oil and natural gas production. And they are against anything Trump is for. So often, they did not care much about big-city crime rates, supported biological men’s usurpation of women’s sports, and opposed taking out the Iranian nuclear threat. However, recently, some former and, no doubt, current Trump opponents now seem...

Defense Secretary Hegseth slammed Microsoft for using Chinese engineers on Pentagon data, ending the program and warning that Big Tech’s ties to Beijing put U.S. security at risk.Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced last week that the military would cease using a Microsoft program that relied on Chinese engineers. This obviously presented a major security issue, which Hegseth noted.“If you’re thinking ‘America first’ and common sense, this doesn’t pass either of those tests,” Hegseth said of the program. “The use of Chinese nationals to service Department of Defense cloud environments? It’s over.”He also declared that the DOD had delivered a formal...

The irony of eco-friendly electric vehicles is the mountainous load of electronic waste they produce. So far, most targeted efforts to recycle EV batteries have been expensive and chemically toxic—and they haven’t stuck. That could change soon, however, thanks to a promising breakthrough from MIT. In a Nature Chemistry paper published August 28, researchers describe a new type of self-assembling material that easily dissolves in organic solvents. It works reasonably well as the electrolyte in a solid-state battery cell—the design major EV producers are racing to implement. Notably, the process doesn’t require the harsh chemical and thermal conditions that make...

Texas Instruments is building a $60 billion U.S. manufacturing megaproject where Apple vows to make "critical foundation semiconductors" for iPhones and other devices. CNBC went to Sherman, Texas, for an exclusive first look inside the newest fab of seven TI's building in Utah and Texas to provide U.S.-made chips to customers like Nvidia and Ford. TI shares have suffered amid tariff concerns, and it's lost analog market share for several years, but top leaders are confident about the huge spend. Why Texas Instruments Is Betting $60 Billion On Making Cheap Chips In The U.S. | 15:41 CNBC | 4.01M subscribers...

AI just helped scientists find five new materials that might outperform lithium in future batteries. These discoveries could enable cheaper, safer, and more powerful energy storage by using elements like magnesium and zinc. Tackling the Lithium-Ion Problem Researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) are using artificial intelligence to address a major challenge in the future of energy storage: finding low-cost, environmentally friendly alternatives to lithium-ion batteries. In a study published in Cell Reports Physical Science, a team led by Professor Dibakar Datta used generative AI to rapidly identify new porous materials that could transform the development of...

Police are investigating the death of a 20-year-old Brazilian woman who died on a bus with 26 iPhones glued to her skin. The woman, who has not been publicly identified, died of cardiac arrest on July 29, according to multiple outlets, including the Daily Mail. Cops suspect the young woman was likely smuggling the iPhones, the Mirror reported. Passengers on the bus told police the woman, who was traveling solo, had become ill during the trip from Foz do Iguaçu to São Paulo, according to the reports. She complained she was having trouble breathing. Emergency responders tried to revive the...

Google has for years been harnessing the power of its Android smartphones to detect and measure tens of thousands of earthquakes. In a new paper published in the journal Science, researchers from the search giant described how they used motion sensors from its two billion-strong network of phones running Android between the years 2021 and 2024 to detect and alert quakes to users in almost 100 countries around the world. Known as "Android Earthquake Alerts" (AEA), this early warning system has uses the smartphones' accelerometers to detect telltale vibrations as they happen and inform residents of quakes in their areas....

Employees at aviation and aerospace company Volonaut have been watching a few too many movies. For the general population, though, that's a good thing. While many young males were dreaming of light saber battles or flying through the wilderness on a speeder bike, Volonaut founder Tomasz Patan was thinking about how to build his own futuristic equipment. On Wednesday, the company revealed it had created a real-world "Star Wars" method of transportation. While the Death Star may have been too big of a project, Volonaut's feat is still incredibly impressive, as the company revealed a real-life speeder bike, listed on...

Quantum computing developments over the past 12 months, including Google Willow, IBM Majorana 1, and innovations at IBM, PsiQuantum and Atom Computing. Quantum Computing 2025 Update | 17:04 ExplainingComputers | 1.12M subscribers | 3,935 views | July 27, 2025

Internet Archive — the no-cost, nonprofit digital library that has become embroiled in the nationwide battle over copyrights and free speech — is now an official source for government documents. According to a new designation announced by California Senator Alex Padilla, the website will join a network of more than 1,000 libraries around the country tasked with archiving government documents for public view. Unlike other designated federal depository libraries, as they are known, the Archive is entirely online. The news was first reported by San Francisco's KQED, who spoke to both Padilla and Archive founder Brewster Kahle about supporting the...

Psst, wanna buy some innovation?An estimated $1 billion worth of smuggled high-end Nvidia AI processors have reportedly found their way onto the Chinese black market, despite the US government's strict restrictions on exports of the tech. The eyebrow-raising figure, which Nvidia has neither confirmed nor refuted, was revealed by the Financial Times, which claims to have based its reporting on a combination of interviews and analyses of company filings and sales contracts. If accurate, the report sheds light on the limitations of the US trade policy's ability to control the movement of much sought-after AI technology around the world. The...

The U.S. Army’s ‘Leonidas’ Uses Directed Energy to Instantly Fry Entire Drone Swarms

Several parents sued Character.ai last year, alleging its chatbots abused their children. One Florida mother wants to hold the company liable for her 14-year-old son’s suicide. Megan Garcia argued in October 2024 court filings that the company wrongly marketed the app as safe for children—while harboring characters that led her son into hypersexualized role-play, encouraged him to spend all his time chatting with them, and talked with him about suicide. A Character.ai bot asked the teen to “come home” to her seconds before his death.STRANGE HUMAN-LIKE RELATIONSHIPS are just one of many ethical concerns posed by generative AI. The technology...

In December 2023, for 17 continuous days, a fleet of drones appeared at night over Langley Air Force Base (AFB), Virginia and other facilities in the greater Virginia Beach area. This was reported at the time, but the story was fleeting. Two other events occurred in the area that are relevant to the story. In February 2023, a pair of F-22s from Langley shot down the Chinese spy balloon as it exited the United States over South Carolina into the Atlantic Ocean. In January 2024, a Chinese graduate student at the University of Minnesota, was arrested for flying a drone...