MIT Technology Review's Engineering issue lands with three concrete anchors: a subsea road tunnel, a $400 million ASML chipmaking machine, and a geoengineering project that replicates volcanic cooling mechanisms to deliberately lower Earth's temperature. These are not concept pieces. They are projects built, or being built, by specific teams solving specific physical constraints.
Elsewhere: Stripe has committed $500 million to a nonprofit targeting respiratory viruses, with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Bill Gates as backers. The goal is elimination of the common cold and flu using modern biotechnology. Anthropic's Mythos model separately made news for identifying vulnerabilities in classified US government systems before being suspended, cutting NSA access to Anthropic tools. China's LineShine supercomputer in Shenzhen dethroned California's El Capitan, ending a nine-year absence from the top of the rankings, though Reuters notes the benchmark is not optimized for AI workloads.
The asteroid 2024 YR4 story, now available as a narrated podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, is the one to read in full. It tracks the global scientist network that assessed, planned around, and ultimately dismissed the highest-impact-probability asteroid ever recorded, under real-time deadline pressure. The process, not just the outcome, is what makes it worth your time.
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