Next Era

• The Facility for Outreach and Community Engagement (FORCE) hosted events to train the next generation of planetary scientists in public engagement skills. • Visitors toured the facility, met the research team, and explored equipment used to simulate planetary interiors, while interns presented their research at a poster session. • The events aimed to explain complex science in accessible ways, enabling better understanding of how planets form and evolve.

• Microsoft has ended the "blank-check" era of AI coding by assigning specific AI token budgets to every division and implementing GPT-5.6 Sol as the default in Copilot. • The strategic shift focuses on maximizing "impact per token" rather than simply reducing overall usage to ensure AI efficiency. • While the move justifies further investment in coding agents, Microsoft notes that merged pull requests are only a proxy for productivity.

• The European Union has launched the Scaleup Europe Fund with a target of €5 billion to support the growth of the region's leading technology companies. • The fund specifically targets high-growth "scaleups" operating in critical frontier sectors, including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology, and clean tech. • This initiative aims to provide the necessary capital for European firms to compete on a global scale and prevent promising tech leaders from relocating or failing due to funding gaps.

• The European Commission has launched a call for tenders to establish up to seven AI Gigafactories across the European Union to expand computing capacity. • Eighteen member states, including Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, have signed a joint procurement agreement with the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). • This initiative is designed to strengthen the bloc's technological sovereignty and reduce dependence on external AI infrastructure.

• The European Commission has launched a call for the establishment of seven "gigafactories" designed to train and develop next-generation AI technologies. • This initiative aims to create "sovereign" AI infrastructure, reducing the European Union's digital dependency on foreign technology providers. • The project is strategically timed to ensure that these high-capacity computing facilities become fully operational by mid-2028.

Such technology solves problem of longer, thinner, energy-saving wings not fitting in airports around the worldAirbus has said it will test folding wings for the next generation of its bestselling planes, as the world’s largest planemaker races to work out the shape of future commercial aircraft by the end of the decade.Longer, thinner wings made of light but strong composite materials offer the promise of energy savings but present a problem for manufacturers because they will not fit in airports around the world, many of which are already at or near full capacity. Continue reading...

• Researchers have discovered that AI is now being utilized to power every stage of cyberattacks, from identifying security vulnerabilities to generating commands and executing intrusions. • The findings indicate that these operations are increasingly automated, often requiring minimal human oversight to carry out complex cyber operations. • Both U.S. and Chinese AI models have been identified as tools used in these attacks, highlighting a global risk across different technological ecosystems.