Current State of Battlefield Robots in Ukraine War
August 19th, 2026Mostly Chinese-made components + 3D printing + Starlink…
Related: U.S. and Ukrainian Forces Went Head-to-Head in an Exercise. Ukraine’s Drones Won.
U.S. National Debt Hits $40 Trillion
August 19th, 2026Via: ZeroHedge:
It took the US 200 years to reach its first $1 trillion in debt. It took 95 days to add its last.
After several weeks of build up, today the Treasury announced that total public debt surpassed $40 trillion for the first time, after jumping by over $60 billion in one day, and has now surged by $1 trillion in just over three months, and by a third of the total in less than five years, as US lawmakers continue to ignore calls to contend with historically wide fiscal deficits.
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As buyers demand higher yields, that in turn drives up the Treasury’s borrowing needs. With two months left to go in the fiscal year, the government’s tally for interest costs so far for 2026 is $1.37 trillion – a 20% increase on the same period a year before. That in turn adds to the debt, potentially fueling further investor calls for higher rates, in a pattern known as a “doom loop.”
Comcast Offers to Turn Customers’ Wi-Fi Routers Into Motion Detectors
August 19th, 2026Via: Engadget:
Comcast has unveiled a new home security platform it’s calling Xfinity Shield. The company says this combines home, family and cybersecurity protection in a single app and it puts Wi-Fi at the center.
It’s offering a service called Wi-Fi Shield to Xfinity Internet users at no extra cost. This includes a few features, including one called Wi-Fi Motion. Comcast says that a typical Xfinity customer has 36 devices connected to Wi-Fi. This particular feature, which is opt-in, can detect movement inside the home by picking up on changes in the radio frequency signal between the Xfinity Gateway and a connected device. If the system detects any unexpected changes, you can receive immediate notification via the Xfinity app.
Comcast says Wi-Fi Motion, which uses Xfinity Gateway intelligence, “provides an added layer of awareness without recording video, capturing images or identifying individuals.” This kind of technology isn’t exactly new, but it’s interesting to see a notable internet provider integrate it into a home security platform.
“AI Native,” College Graduates, “Essentially Illiterate”
August 19th, 2026Via: Futurism:
There’s a silent epidemic building in colleges and universities throughout the United States — and as you might imagine, it has everything to do with AI.
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Over the past few years, a veritable tidal wave of op eds, studies, and think pieces have flooded the internet with horror stories about the decline in literacy rates, social skills, and critical thinking abilities of the country’s college students. While there’s a kernel of truth that these factors had already been slowly dwindling prior to the widespread adoption of AI, the tech only seems to be accelerating the drop-off in real-life abilities, particularly among young people for whom it can serve as a cognitive crutch.
The state of higher education has rapidly deteriorated over the past few years, as many of today’s college students regularly offload their coursework to AI assistants like ChatGPT — a shortcut, educators say, that’s even impacting their ability to participate in face-to-face discussions.
And though universities have many purposes beyond simply preparing students for the workplace, that is one major function that they do undoubtedly serve. The results could be rocky: as Cal State Chico ethics professor Troy Jollimore told the New Yorker in 2025, “massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate.”
Related: Silicon Valley Elite Brag About How Little Screen Time Their Children Are Allowed
Former Fauci Associate David Morens Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy
August 19th, 2026? BREAKING: Anthony Fauci’s former senior advisor David Morens just pled GUILTY to conspiracy to defraud the US
It’s time for Morens to expose EVERYTHING about Fauci, as he pushes to get a lighter sentence ?
Morens was one of the key figures in burying COVID records to avoid… pic.twitter.com/O0OjPUNnii
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) August 18, 2026
Via: The Hill:
Dr. David Morens, former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and once an associate to Dr. Anthony Fauci, pleaded guilty Thursday to a conspiracy to defraud the U.S. in relation to efforts to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the guilty plea Tuesday.
In April, the DOJ brought charges against Morens, 78, alleging conspiracy against the U.S., and he was indicted.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic had uncovered evidence in 2024 that Morens had used his personal email, outside the scope of FOIA requests, to discuss National Institutes of Health grants with the infectious disease group EcoHealth Alliance.
In communications released by the House committee, Morens wrote to EcoHealth President Peter Daszak, “I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”
In a 2021 email, Morens wrote, “i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe,” Morens wrote in a separate email. “Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”
He faces up to five years in prison for conspiracy.
Babies Born Under Sugar Rationing Grew Into Adults with Lower Cancer Risk
August 18th, 2026Via: The Conversation:
Could how much sugar you consumed before your second birthday shape your health decades later – even into your 70s?
A new study that my colleagues and I conducted suggests the answer could be yes. People who had less sugar exposure during the first few years of life were much less likely to develop several different cancers later in life, and they also showed signs of slower biological ageing. We also found that even in adulthood, they continued to consume less sugar and had healthier diets overall.
This is not an easy question to study in real life. Researchers obviously can’t run that experiment on real babies – split them into groups, feed one group sugar, then wait 70 years to see what happens.
Britain’s postwar sugar rationing offered a rare alternative. After the second world war, sugar remained rationed in Britain for several years. But in September 1953, rationing ended and people started eating a lot more sugar. Consumption nearly doubled. This meant that children born just a few months apart had very different levels of sugar exposure both in the womb and during early childhood.
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We found that people who experienced longer periods of sugar rationing during their first 1,000 days had a lower incidence of five types of cancer: breast, prostate, liver, rectal and lung cancer. The effect was strongest for liver cancer, where rates were around 69% lower, and weakest – though still substantial – for breast cancer, at 36% lower. Importantly, these differences only began to appear decades after sugar rationing had ended.
Related: “People are finally saying, ‘Oh, they really are trying to kill us.’”
“What if America Went Completely Dark?”
August 18th, 2026The New York Times Magazine… Preparing the terrain?
Via: New York Times Magazine:
Since 2021, the average wait time for a large power transformer — the kind you’d find at a major substation, capable of handling tens or hundreds of thousands of volts — has climbed from less than a year to 128 weeks, with some lead times growing as long as five years. “The transformer shortage is bad,” Ajey Pandey, an energy analyst and a former municipal resource planner, told ChinaTalk, a tech-focused media outlet. “It’s like hair-on-fire, biting-my-nails, losing-sleep levels of bad.”
Tim Holt, who oversees grid technologies for Siemens Energy, one of the world’s biggest transformer producers, says the acute phase of the shortage began during the coronavirus pandemic. Supply chains broke down, at least temporarily, and utilities reacted to longer delivery times by engaging in the industrial version of panic-buying toilet paper. “You see delivery times getting longer,” he told me. “And of course, then people say, Oh, now I have to make sure I secure my supply.” The war in Ukraine strained manufacturers even further; one of Siemens Energy’s vendors was bombed on the third day of the war.
New ChatGPT Feature Collects Every Keystroke You Make
August 18th, 2026Via: Futurism:
OpenAI has revealed a new feature for ChatGPT’s desktop app on macOS that basically tracks your clicks, keystrokes, and more — all so it can fine-tune its AI model, raising obvious privacy concerns.
The feature, called Computer History, lets ChatGPT “learn from everything you do on your computer,” said Ari Weinstein, an OpenAI product and engineering manager, on X. The company describes the tool as creating a timeline of your actions that an AI agent can use to learn how you work, finish tasks on your behalf that you started, and suggest skills and automations.
AI’s Off-Balance Sheet Liabilities Are $3 Trillion And Growing $1.2 Trillion Per Quarter
August 17th, 2026Via: ZeroHedge:
Each quarter, big tech companies disclose their massive capital expenditures on artificial-intelligence infrastructure, from data centers to chips. But those figures don’t come close to expressing the full extent of future spending to which Google parent Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Oracle and many others have committed. That is because a huge swath of their coming financial obligations aren’t reflected on their balance sheets.
Nine top tech companies had some $3 trillion of off-balance-sheet commitments mostly related to AI, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of footnotes in their most recent securities filings. Those obligations are growing faster than traditional “capex,” which totaled about $600 billion over the past year they reported, and were about triple what the companies owe under their outstanding leases and long-term borrowings.
Cause of Death of Los Alamos National Laboratory Employee Might be Murder
August 17th, 2026Via: Daily Mail:
Shocking new details have emerged concerning the mysterious disappearance and death of a New Mexico woman who worked at a secretive US nuclear lab.
Authorities have revealed that Melissa Casias, whose body was discovered on May 28, was shot in the head at or around the time of her death, but it remains unclear if this was murder or a suicide. Her body was found well after her death.
Casias, an administrative assistant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, vanished without a trace on June 26, 2025 after strangely walking out of her home without any identification, keys or way of contacting her.
Her skeletal remains were discovered 11 months later in Carson National Forest, propped up against a tree with a handgun near the body.
The official autopsy noted that Casias had been shot through the base of the skull, with the bullet exiting through the left side of her head. However, the Office of the Medical Investigator could not say if this wound was what killed the 53-year-old.
