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Ukraine has used AI-powered “terminator” drones to kill Russian soldiers without human oversight for the first time, a senior military general has claimed. Alexander Kokhanovskyy, a senior figure in Ukraine’s defence industry, said that AI-controlled drones were used on the frontline in a one-off test. It has not yet been implemented more widely after the test took place two years ago, he told the New Scientist. The quadcopter drones are programmed to fly towards the front line and then engage an AI model - named “terminator mode” - which searches for and intercepts targets. “We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” Mr Kokhanovskyy told the magazine.
Researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) collaborated with Google to recycle “old” Pixel smartphones and give them a second life as a low-cost data center.
The numbers are hard to ignore. More than 2.4 billion workers are exposed to excessive heat globally, and according to the WHO and WMO, worker productivity drops by 2 to 3 percent for every degree above 20°C. In 2023 alone, high temperatures contributed to an estimated 28,000 workplace injuries in the United States. Yet very little of this conversation gets directed at the people who feel it most: those working outdoors, in the sun, in gear that was never designed to help them stay cool. That’s what makes Teron°, a cooling workwear concept by German design graduate Jorin Frenzel, feel so refreshingly grounded. Frenzel, who completed his Bachelor of Arts in Product Design at Hochschule Hannover in early 2025, didn’t reach for a tech-heavy solution. No battery packs, no wearable air conditioning units, no app to pair it with. He went back to basics: evaporation.
No Battery, No Tech: A Grad Just Solved Outdoor Worker Heat Stress
We might believe we are in control of what we choose to eat, but our senses are constantly manipulating what we buy and how much we consume. Here’s how to turn them to your advantage.
Seven ways to trick yourself into eating better
It’s 2031 and the US and China are about to tear Europe into pieces. The US ploughed vast sums into datacentres and the EU did not. China built robots and Europe did not. American companies “restructured” their workflows around AI and fired people, while EU workers went on long lunch breaks and handed over administrative tasks to the AI model Claude. Now the chickens are coming home to roost. Europe’s economy is a shambles because it does not have its own AI. Populism is surging, the euro is wobbling, cyber-attacks are shredding EU businesses.
A viral doomsday scenario aims to shake Europe out of its AI complacency
BREAKING: Iran says it will close Strait of Hormuz after alleged ceasefire breaches Tehran has claimed it will close the Strait of Hormuz to vessel traffic, citing alleged violations of a truce agreement by the US and Israel. Iran’s top joint military command, Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, said the closure was the “first step” in response to what it described as breaches of commitments and warned that further measures would be taken if “aggression” continued.
A Russian MP has demanded that Vladimir Putin deliver a plan to end the war in Ukraine as he berated the Kremlin’s “ineffective leadership”. In a lengthy tirade, Vyacheslav Markhayev listed corruption scandals, oligarchy, losses of the “most active and reproductively capable segment of the population” and Ukrainian drone strikes among the ills plaguing wartime Russia. In March, Ilya Remeslo, formerly a staunch Kremlin loyalist, turned against Putin, branding the Russian president “a war criminal and a thief”, and calling for him to be put on trial.
Russian MP warns Putin: We’re on the brink of social collapse
At the same time, most Americans live in single-family homes, and one of the biggest reasons only about 9 percent of them have solar panels is the price tag. The United States has eye-watering rooftop solar costs compared with those in the rest of the world. A standard 7-kilowatt rooftop solar system that costs $28,000 to install in the United States would cost only $4,000 in Australia or $10,000 in Germany, according to the research and advocacy group Permit Power.
The Tiny Solar Panel That Could Change America
To say the least, it’s perilous to build a product, invest in a company, or even just try to leverage AI for productivity gains in an environment in which the government might at any time take a wrecking ball to your plans. America and its tech companies have many factors in their favor when it comes to leading the way in AI development. As of now, the White House is not one of them.
This Is How America Loses the AI Race
Tehran had already pledged 10 years ago in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action not to seek nuclear weapons. No one should trust the Iranians, but before Trump unilaterally canceled the agreement in his first term, the JCPOA seemed to be working. More to the point, at the time Trump chose to go to war, Iran was nowhere near getting a bomb, and certainly not within weeks of a weapon, as Trump asserted.
Trump Parties While America Surrenders
When Mythos first entered limited release, there was widespread debate whether its power came from the model or the harness. With Mythos demonstrating that it was possible, the open-source community scrambled to build harnesses that could steer other AI models towards similar capabilities. They largely succeeded. For example, a Prague company was able to replicate Anthropic’s few verifiable cybersecurity capabilities with a much smaller and cheaper model – and a more sophisticated harness. Last week, a group showed that multiple cheaper models harnessed in concert matches Fable’s performance.
Yesterday, the regime’s state media reported that a toll was to be charged on the Strait of Hormuz, later rebranding it an “environmental tax” (a nod to Greta Thunberg, maybe). The demand came at the eleventh-hour – classic Iranian tactics – and was reportedly waved through by a desperate US. In truth, Washington has been desperate for some time. Yesterday, we learnt that during the war, the US sordidly approved a secret deal between the jihadi states of Qatar and Iran which saw billions of dollars paid to Tehran in exchange for free passage for Qatari ships through Hormuz.
JD Vance has just confirmed our worst fears about Trump’s Iran deal
US intelligence agencies have recently assessed that Iran can effectively shut down access to the Strait of Hormuz at will from now on, meaning the country’s regime has acquired a powerful new ability to hurt the global economy as a result of the war, according to three sources familiar with the findings.
“We have now handed Iran de facto control over the strait – a weapon more powerful than any nuke,” one of the sources familiar with the US intelligence assessments told CNN, emphasizing how the war has fundamentally altered Tehran’s thinking about leveraging similar tactics in the future.
US intel assesses Iran can shut down the Strait of Hormuz at will from now on
And the suggestion that this is about catering to the political needs of the Iranians certainly doesn’t sound like the US is negotiating from a position of strength and imposing its will. Then there was Trump on Wednesday at the G7, where he said, remarkably, that the agreement he made was necessary to avert a “worldwide depression.” “The alternative would be a worldwide depression,” he said. “You know, the stupid people want to have a worldwide depression. And they’re stupid people.” Trump added: “You can only go so far. You drive somebody into the ground, a lot of bad things happen. Number one, the strait would never open, because they don’t like floating billion-dollar ships up and down the strait when there are rockets flying over them and mines all over the place. The strait … wouldn’t be open for a long time.”
On Iran, Trump is committing the cardinal sin from the ‘Art of the Deal’
There’s a joke in the beaver science community “that if you’ve got a problem, there’s a beaver for that,” Fairfax said. It’s an oversimplification, she acknowledged, but beavers “really do provide a staggering number of ecosystem services.” So far, the London initiative has been a success. By the beavers’ second winter at the site, there was no flooding in the target area for the first time in a decade, McCormack said. The beavers’ work has also created a mosaic of different habitats, encouraging other animals to flock to the site, including birds, butterflies, bats and even freshwater shrimp and fish.
If you pay for ChatGPT or Claude and you genuinely lean on it by spending your day coding, running agents or even churning through long research sessions, then you're getting one of the best deals in tech right now. And yet, you're also the reason the deal won't last. At least that's the uncomfortable takeaway from a new analysis by research firm SemiAnalysis, which bought every paid tier from OpenAI and Anthropic and deliberately ran them into the ground. The team pushed each plan with long, agent-style coding tasks until it hit the weekly usage cap, then worked out what all those tokens would have cost at standard pay-as-you-go API rates. The gap between what you pay and what you get turned out to be enormous.
‘The math doesn’t work’: Why your $200 AI subscription is secretly worth thousands | Tom’s Guide
ASML has pushed back on Lutnick's suggestion, explaining that none of these tools — which are the size of a school bus, are manufactured in limited quantities, and require constant upkeep from ASML employees — are in China, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
US Tells ASML It’s Concerned China May Have Top Chip Tool
The good news: The Strait of Hormuz is open again, after Iran and the United States signed a memorandum of understanding this week. The bad news: It may be too late. Oil hasn’t been coming out of the Middle East for nearly four months. All told, the world lost 1.15 billion barrels of oil supply during the war, according to analytics firm Kpler. That has left the oil market in a precarious state, and it’s rapidly approaching a breaking point. The International Energy Administration’s strategic petroleum reserves are at their lowest levels since 1990. The American emergency reserve is at a 43-year low. And commercial inventories have hit operational stress levels. “You want to see bedlam?” President Donald Trump said at the G7 in Versailles Wednesday. “We run out of reserves in about four weeks.” Trump is right. But reopening the strait this week may not get oil out of the Persian Gulf fast enough to prevent crude inventories from effectively running to empty. Oil prices may have to go higher again.
More than 1 billion barrels of oil have gone missing
Iran sought to assert control over the Strait of Hormuz by saying that ships need its permission and mandatory insurance in order to cross, even as the US said that 20 ships had quietly sailed through overnight via a route along Oman's coast.
Iran Floats ‘Insurance Fees’ and Asserts Control Over Hormuz
The survey on which you report (Only one in 10 Europeans now see US as an ally, survey suggests, 10 June) is wonderfully in line with the view of US citizens themselves, given the recent poll finding that only 2% of them trust the US government “just about always”, and only 15% trust it “most of the time” – a shrivelled fraction of the 73% who in 1958 said they trusted it always or most of the time, according to the Pew Research Center. We can rest easy knowing that Europeans and Americans (never mind their governments) remain natural allies with plenty to agree about. Never make the mistake of conflating the people of a country or civilisation with those who govern it. This goes for Washington, Brussels, London, Moscow, Beijing, Kinshasa, you name it.
At last, something Europeans and Americans can agree upon | Trump administration | The Guardian
The deal not only puts off the question of the disposal of Iran’s near bomb-grade uranium to future negotiations — negotiations in which the Trump administration has already given up its military leverage — but also, most amazingly, it clearly leaves open the possibility that Iran will be able to charge a toll in the future to any ships that want to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Just read the cease-fire agreement: Upon the signing of this memorandum of understanding, “the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days only …” Editors’ Picks Pushing Forward, Onstage and Off At Art Basel, a Nervy, Make-or-Break Mood The Glitchy, Gloppy Look of Now After billions of dollars of bombs dropped on Iran, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner won from Tehran 60 days of toll-free passage through Hormuz.
Opinion | Trump Put His Own Interests Above All in the Iran Deal - The New York Times
The secret sauce is Longsys's recently unveiled custom SPU and iSA configuration that offers the ability to compress data in real time, a feat that the company says allows it to fit as much as twice the amount of data in storage drives of up to 128GB, leveraging a caching layer that reduces DRAM requirements considerably. The approach involves offloading experts not in active use to a large, fast storage buffer that the AI chip can then reintroduce them from if needed.
A Taiwanese company called Skymizer has unveiled a PCIe AI accelerator that challenges both AMD and Nvidia using surprisingly old technology. The HTX301 card can run language models with up to 700 billion parameters on a single device while consuming only 240 watts of power. The card achieves this feat using older 28-nanometer chips and standard LPDDR4 and LPDDR5 memory instead of expensive HBM or GDDR solutions.