Remarkable 22
A new combination of remarkable data from AI and the war, with some other notworthy stuff combined.
But even if the strait fully opens soon — on Saturday, Iran’s military said it would reimpose “strict” control over traffic — it will take weeks for substantial amounts of Persian Gulf oil and gas to reach buyers around the world. And it will be much longer before companies repair the damage that has been inflicted on one of the world’s most important energy-producing regions. It is likely to be a long time before a gallon of gasoline costs less than $3 a gallon, as it did before the United States and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28. Shortages of certain products like jet fuel and natural gas may also persist in some countries for weeks or longer. “We don’t expect oil prices — and therefore pump prices — to go back to prewar levels,” said Arjun Murti, a partner at Veriten, an energy research and investment firm based in Houston.
Reopening Strait of Hormuz Would Ease Oil Crisis but Only So Much
The stock market has decided this available information is not relevant. That is a problem for all of us. President Trump deeply cares about the stock market, and if the stock market had been selling off, there is a good chance that this war would have been over a while ago. More broadly, the markets are showing the single lesson that the past 40 years have taught them. It will always be saved. Markets are not properly pricing risk, because they really don’t have to. They have assumed that the U.S. government will not allow them to implode, and that assumption is putting the world economy at stake. What’s more, the new rescuer investors are counting on — artificial intelligence — is vulnerable to the exact risks markets are ignoring.
Why the Stock Market Makes No Sense Right Now
The era of the $20-a-month AI tax is officially over for my workflow. For the last few months, Claude Pro was my co-pilot (not the one from Microsoft) for debugging Python scripts, planning a vacation, and giving me ideas about improving my home lab. I decided to pull the plug on my subscription and migrate my entire development and writing stack to local LLMs through LM Studio. And suddenly the capacity errors vanished, the privacy fears disappeared, and my productivity stayed exactly where it should be.
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B Cloud power, local speed The real turning point in my transition to a local-first workflow was the release of Qwen3.6-35B-A3B. When you are used to the ‘it just works’ nature of Claude Pro, you’re naturally skeptical of open-source alternatives, but this model changed the math for me. It’s a Mixture-of-Experts model with 35 billion total parameters but activates only 3 billion at any given time. For my setup, that means I get elite-level reasoning without my MacBook Pro fans spinning up all the time. The standout feature for me is its Agentic Coding capability. Most small models can write a single function, but Qwen3.6 can actually think through a repository.
For the past 15 months, U.S. officials and many Western analysts have been fixated on Ukrainian weakness. Trump infamously insisted last year that Ukrainians had “no cards” to play. But their ability to adapt even without U.S. aid has been startling. Now a global leader in drone development and manufacturing, Ukraine is reportedly planning to produce up to 7 million military unmanned aerial vehicles in 2026.
Ukraine Has Finally Given Up on Trump
Eating more fruits and vegetables may come with an unexpected lung cancer risk due to pesticide residue on our foods, according to a new study. While consuming fruits and vegetables has long been considered part of a healthy diet, researchers at USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center found that Americans under 50 who don’t smoke but follow healthier diets could be at a higher risk of developing lung cancer, according to Science Daily..
Eating more fruits and vegetables could put you at risk for this cancer
For 152 million Americans, including nearly half of the nation’s children and teens, just breathing air in the places they live can be harmful. According to the American Lung Association’s latest State of the Air report, 44% of the U.S. population reside in areas with unhealthy levels of pollution, including 33 million who are younger than 18. Experts have warned for years that kids are particularly susceptible to the consequences of pollution exposure. Young people are deemed more vulnerable because they have developing lungs, relatively large air consumption needs compared with adults and spend more time outdoors.
In 2021, a disabled parrot named Bruce made headlines worldwide for creating his own prosthetic beak. He didn’t stop there: Scientists reported on Monday that Bruce has now become the alpha male of his group. And he did it by learning to joust.
How Bruce the Parrot Landed Atop the Pecking Order, Without a Beak - The New York Times
An AI-powered robot has beaten elite players at table tennis in a significant achievement for a machine faced with human athletes in a real-world competitive sport. Named Ace, the robotic system developed by Sony AI, won three out of five matches against elite players, but lost the two it played against professionals, clawing back only one game in the seven contests. The feat has been hailed as a milestone for robotics, a field that has long seen table tennis – and the lightning-fast reactions, perception and skill it demands – as one of the toughest tests of how far the technology has advanced. In the matches, played under official competition rules, Ace displayed a mastery of spin, handled difficult shots, such as balls catching on the net, and pulled off one rapid backspin shot that a professional had thought impossible.
AI-powered robot beats elite table tennis players | Science | The Guardian
Meanwhile, Iranian state-linked media mused publicly about what Tehran could attack next. The semi-official state news agency Tasnim claimed that “at least seven” undersea data cables serving Persian Gulf countries are clustered along a narrow seabed pathway in the Strait of Hormuz. As NATO has found in combating suspected Russian cable cutting in the Baltic Sea, such asymmetric warfare is costly and time consuming. Iran’s military is also signaling a possible conventional escalation if Tehran’s demands are not met, threatening specific targets in the neighboring gulf states that are still repairing damage from the last round of attacks… Targets listed included the Ruwais refinery in the United Arab Emirates and Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude oil processing plant.
Who will blink first as the Iran war hits the world economy?
Since the Iran war began in late February, the United States has burned through around 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles built for a war with China, close to the total number remaining in the U.S. stockpile. The military has fired off more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, roughly 10 times the number it currently buys each year. The Pentagon used more than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles in the war, at more than $4 million a pop, and more than 1,000 Precision Strike and ATACMS ground-based missiles, leaving inventories worrisomely low, according to internal Defense Department estimates and congressional officials. The Iran war has significantly drained much of the U.S. military’s global supply of munitions, and forced the Pentagon to rush bombs, missiles and other hardware to the Middle East from commands in Asia and Europe.
Iran War Has Drained U.S. Supplies of Critical, Costly Weapons
About half of Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles and its associated launch systems were still intact as of the start of the ceasefire in early April, three of the officials told CBS News. Roughly 60% of the naval arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is still in existence, the officials said, including fast-attack speed boats. On Wednesday, Iranian gunboats attacked several commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, shortly after President Trump announced he was unilaterally extending a ceasefire to allow more time for peace talks. Iranian air power has been significantly degraded but not erased, said the officials, who requested anonymity from CBS News because they were not authorized to discuss the matters publicly. About two-thirds of Iran’s air force is still believed to be operational, the officials said, after an intensive U.S. and Israeli campaign that struck thousands of targets, including storage and production facilities.
Iran’s military more capable than Trump administration is publicly acknowledging, sources say
Yet maritime experts are sceptical of just how effective the US “blockade” is proving. “In true legal and naval terms, it’s not really a blockade,” says Richard Meade, the editor-in-chief of shipping publication Lloyd’s List. “I’m being slightly sarcastic here but there is confusion over what is and isn’t happening, and there is trade being conducted under the guise of a double blockade.” The deployment of the US navy to the Strait of Hormuz has not made a difference to the number of ships passing through the crucial waterway, Lloyd’s List said. Some 75 vessels transited the strait last week, suggesting little change in activity compared with previous weeks. The final number for this week may even rise when more members of Iran’s “shadow” fleet are identified. As of Monday, at least 26 shadow fleet vessels had passed the blockade line, Lloyd’s List said, with three traceable ships also sailing to or from Iran.
Through midday on Wednesday, 10 shadow fleet tankers were heading into the Gulf to load up with oil, “suggesting they are not yet deterred by the US”, the publication said. Tehran is also bypassing the blockade by shipping oil from the eastern port of Chabahar in the Gulf of Oman, according to data company Windward.
Trump says he’s ’sealed Hormuz up tight’. But it’s a blockade in name only
Speaking exclusively to the Guardian, Birol said a key effect of the US-Israel war on Iran was that countries would lose trust in fossil fuels and demand for them would reduce. “Their perception of risk and reliability will change. Governments will review their energy strategies. There will be a significant boost to renewables and nuclear power and a further shift towards a more electrified future,” he said. “And this will cut into the main markets for oil.” Birol said there was no going back from the crisis: “The vase is broken, the damage is done – it will be very difficult to put the pieces back together. This will have permanent consequences for the global energy markets for years to come.”
Impacts on fertiliser, food, helium, software and other industries would continue even if the strait of Hormuz reopened. This crisis was “bigger than all the biggest crises combined, and therefore huge”, he said. “I still cannot understand that the world was so blind-sided, that the global economy can be held hostage to a 50km strait.”
‘The damage is done’: global oil crisis has changed fossil fuel industry for ever, IEA chief says
The 12 scientists who have died or gone missing all appeared to have ties to nuclear or space programs and, in some cases, classified projects. Rhian Lubin delves into the cases