Planetary (in)solvency🌍🌡️📉 manus🪄 goose-1🪿 add to calendar 📅 zeus GPU👑 hedra character-3 📹 agibot🦾 zuchongzhi-3🧮 AI-led worship✝️ #2025.10

Autonomous Networked Utility System

Welcome to this the 10th(!) weekly Memia newsletter of 2025 - scanning across emerging tech and the exponentially accelerating future. As always, thanks for being here!

(Sorry a bit late getting today’s newsletter out…so much to cover, so little time…⏳)

ℹ️PSA: Memia sends *very long emails*, best viewed online or in the Substack app.

🗞️Weekly roundup

The most clicked link in last week’s newsletter (3% of openers) was (again) Kea Aerospace’s Atmos stratospheric flight.

ICYMI

Strategy note from earlier this week:

This is a crazy graph, eh? The future is so unlike the past…

Statista

Also some speaking appearances coming up:

• Fri 21 March Panel discussion The Transformative Power of AI at the AI Health Innovation Hub event at Auckland City Hospital.

• Wed 26th March AUT Technology in Society Series event: AI for Aotearoa, in conversation with Vice-Chancellor Damon Salesa at AUT City Campus, Auckland:

• Thu 10th April Keynote at the Moananui Out Of The Blue Summit in Nelson:

  

(Reminder: reach out to get the most up-to-date AI keynote for your upcoming conference or in-house event).

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⏳ Zeitgeist

For a change, let’s start with what’s going on around the world outside tech (and the 🌊💩Flooded Zone). A whole raft of alternative narratives caught my attention this week, mostly sidelined out of mainstream media but likely more significant than anything happening in Washington DC:

• 🌍🌡️📉Planetary (in)solvency The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) released "Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature”, its fourth collaborative report with climate scientists. In this they warn that flawed economic assessments are masking severe climate risks to policymakers, and that without immediate action the global economy could face a catastrophic 50% GDP loss by 2100.

  

  IFoA

  (These are actuaries… not exactly prone to sensationalism…) The report provides a "Planetary Solvency Dashboard”… which quite clearly articulates the risk position the planet is now facing:

  

  IFoA

• Speaking of climate change…

  • 🌀Tropical Cyclone Alfred defied typical storm patterns, taking an unexpected westward turn in towards Australia's east coast. The storm moved slowly, hammering Brisbane and Queensland with heavy rain, flooding, and causing coastal erosion. The storm follows record warm sea temperatures in the Coral Sea.

    

    Tropical Cyclone Alfred defied forecasts shifting westward and heading straight towards Brisbane.

  • 💧Tibetan lakes surge climate change is driving lake growth on Tibet's northern plateau through increased precipitation and accelerated glacial melt, contrary to global trends of shrinking freshwater bodies. Tibetan Plateau lakes have expanded 42% since 1991:

    

    Satellite images of northern Tibetan Plateau in 1994 (left) and 2024 (right)

  • ☀️South America’s record-breaking 44°C heatwave a severe heatwave gripped South America in February, with a high-pressure system over the southern Atlantic Ocean driving temperatures to extreme levels, reaching a record 44°C in Rio de Janeiro. This map from NASA Earth Observatory shows air temperatures modelled at 2 meters above the ground on February 17th:

    

    NASA Earth Observatory

• 🐦Microplastics in bird lungs A new study from the University of Texas at Arlington has discovered alarming levels of microplastics in bird lungs (416 particles per gram of lung tissue), raising serious concerns about human exposure to airborne plastic pollution. We are breathing the same air, after all.

• ⚔️It’s a turbulent world…

  • Sudan files ICJ case against UAE over civil war support Sudan has filed a case against the UAE at the International Court of Justice, accusing the Gulf nation of arming the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group responsible for ethnic-based attacks in Darfur, classifiable as genocide. Now, amid the world's gravest displacement crisis in decades, the freezing of US aid is compounding the catastrophic famine in the region.

    

    Semafor

  • In South-East Asia, three headline stories courtesy of Erin Cook’s excellent Dari Mulut Ki Mulut newsletter:

    • ICC arrests Duterte Former Philippines strongman president Rodrigo Duterte has been taken into custody in Manila this week following an International Criminal Court arrest warrant, confirming days of speculation — is this a major shift in accountability for former leaders of countries signed up to ICC?

    • Violence continues in Thailand's Deep South with five people dead and dozens injured from bombs and shooting.

    • Myanmar’s junta pays lip service to election plans while strengthening alliance with Russia and Belarus and deepening plans for a Russia-backed nuclear plant near the capital Naypyidaw. Who knows what the Trump administration’s foreign policy will be towards the military dictatorship…

  • 🇨🇳🇮🇷🇷🇺China, Iran, and Russia conduct joint military drills the three countries launched their annual "Security Belt" military exercises in the Gulf of Oman on March 10th, amid chaotic US foreign policy

  • 🌋Guatemala's Fuego volcano erupts again the active Volcán de Fuego (Volcano of Fire) erupted, spewing lava, ash, and rocks. 1,000 people have been evacuated with 30,000 at risk — Guatemala City is only 35km away.

    

    Phys.org

• 😷Tuberculosis resurges in US a TB outbreak in Kansas has so far infected 147 people since January 2024, with 67 showing symptoms and 80 having latent infections. TB cases rose 15% in the US from 2022-2023, reversing decades of decline. Tuberculosis!!

• 💻European Central Bank system crash delays salaries across Europe a critical failure in the European Central Bank's payment system caused widespread disruptions on March 10, delaying salaries and welfare funds for thousands across Europe after backup systems failed to activate.

  Another reminder, should we need one of humanity’s critical dependency on technology for maintaining economic stability. (Imagine if an outage like this extended for weeks…?)

---

📈The week in AI

OK back onto my regular AI beat… a full-on week as usual…

🏭AI industry news

Enormous numbers continue to be thrown around by AI industry giants, flummoxing conventional investment logic:

• TSMC announced plans in the White House to invest an additional US$100 billion to expand its advanced semiconductor manufacturing operations in Arizona … but Stratechery’s Ben Thompson expects that Taiwan will maintain a 2-3 year lead in advanced processes despite the US expansion, taking its time to fulfil the commitment…

  

  Ben Thompson, Stratechery

  (In the same week, Trump announced he wanted to end the CHIPS Act… which largely funds much of TSMC’s investment…see below)

• Broadcom, the relatively low-profile AI hardware and software giant saw its shares surge following strong first-quarter results and *optimistic* AI revenue projections:

  ”For the current quarter Broadcom said it expected US$4.4bn in AI semiconductor revenue thanks to so-called hyperscalers continuing to invest in their custom AI chips - which can be used as an alternative to Nvidia’s market-leading graphics processing units”

• Ah yes, Nvidia. Brooke Masters in the FT: Is this dotcom bust 2.0?

  “The experience this year of Nvidia is instructive. The emergence of DeepSeek, the Chinese company that claimed it could run AI on less computing power, wiped $600bn off the chipmaker’s market capitalisation in January while dragging down utilities and other tech stocks. Nvidia’s share price then clawed back most of its losses as investors convinced themselves that cheap AI would lead to more rapid adoption and more spending. But that recovery hasn’t lasted either. Nvidia shares are down around 25 per cent from their 52 week highs. Is that the sound of escaping air or just the wind?“

  

  What goes up…

• Also Nvidia: RTX 5090 graphics cards are commanding black market prices of around US$5,000 in China due to unprecedented demand driven by DeepSeek's AI models... you get significantly more bang for your buck using a consumer graphics card:

• OpenAI signed a five-year, US$11.9 billion agreement with GPU-heavy cloud provider CoreWeave, receiving US$350 million in equity as part of the deal and crucially reducing the company’s dependency on Microsoft for cloud services. The agreement apparently gives OpenAI access to 250,000+ Nvidia GPUs. Techcrunch calls the deal:

  “a grandmaster-level chess move“

  (In 2024, Microsoft accounted for 62% of CoreWeave’s US$1.9 billion revenue)

• Also OpenAI: is reportedly planning to launch specialised AI "agents" with monthly subscription fees ranging from $2,000 to $20,000, according to The Information.

  • Commentary ranges from sheer incredulity at the price to “this is just Sam trying to shore up OpenAI’s valuation for the next round”. Given everything we’ve seen so far, a $20,000 closed-source AI agent this week rapidly becomes a cents-on-the-dollar open-source AI agent next week. I suspect this trend to open source will change.

• Apple has delayed some personalised AI-powered Siri improvements until 2026, pushing back features that were originally planned for 2025, indicating potential technical challenges in Apple's AI infrastructure development.

• Perplexity are partnering with Deutsche Telekom to launch an “AI Phone” featuring an app-free “copilot assistant” from Perplexity later this year.

  

  Deutsche Telekom

✅Does AI have your consent?

• Bluesky CEO Jay Graber announced at SXSW that the social network (now with over 32 million users) is developing a framework for user consent regarding AI data usage, emphasising "user choice" as a core principle, unlike X's mandatory approach.

  • The proposal is similar in intention to the use of robots.txt to warn away search engine crawlers… without actually stopping them.

• Licensing markets an FT editorial argues that ongoing copyright battles in AI require a market-based solution rather than government-imposed frameworks:

  “There is a better way forward: supporting licensing markets. Remunerated consent between creators and AI companies gives content makers control over their copyright (it is opt-in by design) and compensation for their work, which incentivises their efforts. It also gives AI models sustained access to high-quality data, free from legal wrangling. Many creative businesses, including this newspaper, have already struck individual content licensing deals with AI companies. Moving from ad hoc deals to a broader market for training licenses is the next step. Governments can help by supporting industry-led transparency standards for how training data is used alongside the development of software to process and track licenses.“

  (Personally I am extremely sceptical that this is a viable long-term direction of travel — in particular as human-generated content declines in volume and value relative to the machine-generated alternative… the cost to trade in the market exceeds the value of what is being traded.)

---

🆕 AI releases

• Google announced a new experimental “AI Mode” for AI-assisted search, alongside an upgraded Gemini 2.0 for AI Overviews, initially only for users in the US:

• 📅Also Google: Gmail's new Gemini AI feature adds events to Calendar automatically: Google Workspace customers can now use a new Gemini AI-powered feature in Gmail that automatically detects calendar-related content in emails and offers an "Add to calendar" button.

  
  OMG how long have we waited for this!?!?

  

  Google

• Alibaba continued the run of benchmark-breaking Chinese open-weights AI models, releasing Qwen QwQ-32B, a new 32 billion-parameter reasoning model that reportedly rivals DeepSeek-R1's performance despite the latter having 671 billion parameters.

  

  Following the announcement of QwQ-32B, Alibaba's shares surged 8%… despite its open-source strategy. Go figure…

• Microsoft OmniParser is a straightforward screen parsing tool designed for vision-based GUI agents, available open-source it enables AI agents to interact with GUIs through visual processing alone.

• Mistral AI OCR:

  “the world’s best document understanding API:

  • State-of-the-art understanding of complex documents

  • Natively multilingual and multimodal

  • Fastest in its category

  • Doc-as-prompt, structured output

  • Available for on-prem deployment“

  This has always been such a difficult and expensive problem to solve… think of how quickly and cheaply physical paper-based archives can now be digitised…

  

• 🪿Goose-1 a solo project to train a reasoning RNN model. I’m most intrigued to know where to find the 5.16-trillion-token “World-3.5” training set referenced here:

  

  @BlinkDL_AI

• 🪄Manus Splash of the week came from Chinese AI agent startup Manus (named after the latin phrase “mens et manus” - “Mind and hand”). Pitching itself as “The General AI Agent”, the smooth-running demo video, fronted by Manus founder Yichao 'Peak' Ji, spins a vision of a smart agent capable of multi-stage reasoning and complex computer use, reaching far beyond the standard San Francisco use case of “book me a table at a restaurant”. The video goes into depth with examples for:

  • Resumé screening

  • Real estate search

  • Stock analysis

  From the demos, the UX certainly feels clean and interaction with the agent feels more intuitive. And as with every AI startup, they claim some leading benchmark scores:

  

  Unfortunately I’m still on the waitlist…but initially I was seeing some (over-)enthusiastically positive responses in my feed:

  • 

    @EHuanglu

  • Andrew Wilkinson:

    

    @awilkinson

  • Ethan Mollick

    

    @EthanMollick

• Yes, about that “wrapper around Claude” comment: despite the “we’re mostly an open-source lab” spin of the intro video… 24 hours later, X user @jianxliao posted this:

  

  *Turns out* the underlying smarts are… Claude Sonnet!?!

  

  via Georg Zoeller

  Manus founder Peak responded with a reasonable tone to that thread:

  “We use Claude and different Qwen-finetunes. Back when we started building Manus, we only got Claude 3.5 Sonnet v1 (not long-CoT, aka reasoning tokens), so we need a lot of auxiliary models. Now Claude 3.7 looks really promising, we are testing internally, will post updates!“

  Hmmm.

  More sceptical commentary ensued, focused on the initial hype generated by the video which maybe leaves ones critical faculties behind (it worked, didn’t it? I’ve spent 30mins writing about it…):

  • Zvi as always: The Manus Marketing Madness

  • @TeorTaxes:

    

    @teortaxesTex

  • Georg Zoeller:

    “Those who understand transformers and the SOTA can look at all the fancy demos and videos and establish whether they are
    
    (1) moving SOTA primitives on the science side,
    (2) implement existing abilities into better UX / scaffolding / engineering.
    (3) or if there’s snakeoil at play.“

  Either way… a slick enough POC which will likely become more and more real — and undoubtably open-source — within a year. What should we call the open-source version I wonder…?

  

  @nikmcfly69

  In a class act, @Nikmcfly69 prompted Manus to create its own open-source version of itself and in 25 min, it built a complete AI agent system from scratch! Which is now available for download — and if you are so minded, you can contribute to the project…

  

  …which means… Oh no…another memecoin…

  

  (Well that spun out of control rapidly…)

• 📹Hedra Studio and Character-3:

  “A new generation of AI-native video creation. At its core is Character-3, the first omnimodal model in production, built to jointly reason across image, text, and audio for more intelligent video generation…. With Hedra Studio, you can: - Text-to-video and audio-to-video

  - Character and general-purpose image and video creation

  - Dynamic backgrounds, text-to-emotion, and top AI model integration“

  Demo reel:

• Luma Labs Dream Machine, new image and video AI models:

  

🥼 AI research

• Turing Awarded University of Massachusetts researcher Andrew Barto and former DeepMind research scientist Richard Sutton were jointly awarded this year’s Turing Award for their 1980s work developing reinforcement learning — the method to train AI systems to make optimised decisions through trial and error.

• Disinformation AI supply chain attack Russian disinformation networks are successfully manipulating Western AI chatbots to spread pro-Kremlin propaganda, according to research by NewsGuard and the American Sunlight Project:

  "Massive amounts of Russian propaganda—3,600,000 articles in 2024—are now incorporated in the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda,"

  All 10 major AI chatbots tested repeated Russian propaganda, creating widespread misinformation risks.

• AI designing a better carbon capture molecule? I won’t get overexcited by this particular claim… but an example of AI-accelerated scientific discovery being democratised very rapidly:

  

  @hla_michael

• Who peer-reviews the AI peer-reviewer? Australian health researcher Timothy Hugh Barker raises concerns about AI undermining academic peer review after receiving suspicious feedback on his manuscript:

  “the biggest red flag was the difference between the peer-reviewer’s feedback and the feedback of the associate editor of the journal I had submitted my manuscript to. Where the associate editor’s feedback was clear, instructive and helpful, the peer reviewer’s feedback was vague, confusing, and did nothing to improve my work.“

  On one hand… yes, a basic, badly-prompted vanilla LLM peer-review isn’t going to add as much value as a human expert in a field *today*. But on the other…? *IF* the claims from Dario Amodei and others that we are entering an “accelerated 21st century” of AI-driven scientific discovery are correct… wouldn’t we rather have the most powerful chain-of-thought reasoning models poring over our papers for hours and hours before and after submitting them for publication?

  • In fact, I can see very soon that AI peer reviews will quickly become the standard when publishing to Arxiv and the like.

• AI-powered lawyering AI Reasoning Models, Retrieval Augmented Generation, and the Future of Legal Practice

• ✝️AI-led worship? St. Paul's Lutheran church in Finland experimented with the first church service put together mostly by AI, which wrote the sermons and some of the songs, composed the music, created the visuals and animated avatars of the pastors:

  

  An AI-generated avatar of Petja Kopperoinen, on the screen, addresses the attendees of St. Paul's Lutheran church in Helsinki, Finland, Tuesday, March 4, 2025. Credit: AP Photo/Sergei Grits

  Mixed reviews, apparently. My favourite nugget, the pastor had to learn how to jailbreak an AI model:

  “AI tools generally seemed reluctant to compose religious content, he said. ChatGPT initially wouldn't write dialogue between Jesus and Satan and went along with it only after Kopperoinen assured it that he was a Lutheran pastor and there was nothing wrong with writing it.“

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🔮[Weak] signals

Going wider than AI… tech signals from near and far futures...

🔐Security

• Apple filed a legal challenge against a secret UK government order requiring the company to create a backdoor in its encrypted “Advanced Data Protection” (ADP) cloud storage, thus enabling law enforcement with a warrant to read users’ iPhone backups and other cloud data. ADP is currently designed so that even Apple itself can’t currently read the data.

  • The UK government stands behind the usual excuses:

    “protecting our citizens from the very worst crimes, such as child sex abuse and terrorism, at the same time as protecting people’s privacy.”

    (Privacy / Security vulnerabilities: pick one.)

  • The US is exerting pressure, Trump comparing the UK government’s demand to Chinese surveillance last week. (BUT: does the US have a similar backdoor arrangement with Apple and others that we’re not allowed to know about? It’s not exactly like the US government has a pristine record on citizen surveillance, right…?)

  • Apple remains staunch on the issue despite not being able to talk publicly about the details, its statement last month:

    “As we have said many times before, we have never built a back door or master key to any of our products or services and we never will.”

    Watch this one play out…

📱Consumer Tech

In consumer tech this week, a slew of product launches at Mobile World Congress 2025 in Barcelona. Pick of the bunch:

• 📱Nothing launched its new budget Phone 3a range, with pricing starting at US$379, including triple-camera systems with telephoto lenses, 3 years of Android updates and 6 years of security patches to ensure longevity. Quite the look:

  

  Nothing

• Xiaomi unveiled the first Wi-Fi earphones featuring Qualcomm's XPAN technology, the start of a shift from Bluetooth to Wi-Fi for high-bandwidth audio transmission and extended range?

  

• 👓Tecno showed off its AI Glass Series at MWC, a challenger to Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses. The device comes with and AR display and 50-megapixel smartphone-quality photography, plus a voice-activated AI assistant which can identify objects, plan activities, and translate 100+ languages.

  

  Tecno

🚗Transport

• On the water, not yet in the air Mentioned last week, Regent Craft released a video of a first successful sea trial of its full-size electric ground-effect seaglider with passengers aboard, marking a significant milestone for this revolutionary ocean transport technology. US$9 billion of orders await, apparently, if they can get it into the air.

• Self-driving speed record at 318km/h The Maserati MC20 Coupe shattered the world autonomous speed record on 23 February, reaching 318 km/h on a 4.kkm runway at the Kennedy Space Center, using an autonomous driving system developed by researchers at the Politecnico di Milano university:

• BYD has introduced a roof-mounted drone system called Lingyuan for its electric vehicles in a direct challenge to Tesla for innovative features. Because everyone needs a US$2,200, drone for aerial photography, right? (The skies are gonna get crowded soon…)

🦾Robotics

• Chinese robotics startup AgiBot unveiled GO-1, a generalist embodied foundation model for robotics. Cue obligatory kitchen bench butler demo:

🚀Space

• NASA's lunar Artemis programme is making significant progress with Gateway, the first permanent lunar-orbiting space station, aiming to launch the main HALO (Habitation and Logistics Outpost) and the Power and Propulsion Element aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket no later than December 2027.

  

  NASA, Alberto Bertolin, Bradley Reynolds

  Gateway is an international collaboration with modules being included from NASA, ESA, CSA, JAXA, and UAE. Here’s Gateway’s HALO in a cleanroom at Thales Alenia Space in Turin, Italy:

  

  Thales Alenia Space

  (All of this assumes that NASA’s budget’s don’t get a radical DOGE haircut…)

• Another Tech CEO heads for space Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been appointed as CEO of rocket startup Relativity Space, replacing co-founder Tim Ellis and joining fellow bros Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Schmidt now has a controlling stake in Relativity, best known for its 3D-printed rockets and its forthcoming Terran reusable launch hardware:

  

  @thetimellis

• HTS Magnetic space propulsion A second Aotearoa space startup using magnets for space propulsion in orbit (Zenno the other): Researchers at Robinson Research Institute, in collaboration with the Universities of Auckland and Canterbury, are developing high-temperature superconducting (HTS) electric propulsion thrusters to be used in GEO orbit. Apparently the HTS solution reduces magnet weight by 97%.

🔫Defence

• Here’s a signal to watch closely: Axon, the maker of Taser, is expanding into the “executive protection” market, developing "more covert" less-lethal weapons for CEOs and their security teams following increased safety concerns after UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson's fatal shooting.

  “Over the next year, you might start to hear more about certain CEOs being protected by Taser…” — Josh Isner, Axon Enterprise president

  • Also Josh Isner:

    “Think about how easy it is to equip a drone with something bad and fly it into something”

    Axon now also owns Dedrone - autonomous counter-drone technology selling to allcomers… (“Precision Drone Mitigation” below is quite the euphemism…)

    

  • Axon's market cap has grown sixfold to US$40 billion as it expands into new markets. A dark world.

  • (Scifi view: a step towards transhuman body modification as offensive / defensive weaponry miniaturises and swarms…. will future paranoid oligarchs resort to full-body carapaces, bionic exoskeletons and cyborg tasers inside their bones…??)

• Also this week, two more steps towards fully autonomous weapons platforms:

  • Combat drones The US Air Force officially designated two prototype combat drones as combat aircraft—the YFQ-42A by General Atomics and the YFQ-44A from Anduril. Still prototypes, but an explicit signal of where things are going… F-16s no more.

    

    Concepts of the uncrewed fighter aircraft YFQ-42A (bottom) and the YFQ-44A — US Air Force/General Atomics Aeronautical Systems/Anduril Industries

  • Crewless warship DARPA has launched the USX-1 Defiant, a 55-metre, 240-tonne autonomous warship designed without any accommodations for human crew... potentially enabling autonomous navigation, refueling, and mission execution for months.

    

    Defiant being towed for launch (Image: Serco via New Atlas — apparently the image has been “extended using generative AI tools”)

🧮Computing

• RISC-V or bust China is intensifying efforts to adopt RISC-V processor designs to reduce dependence on Western semiconductor technology, with a new national policy initiative drafted by eight government agencies expected to be released this month. RISC-V’s open-source architecture allows development without US licensing fees or restrictions — potentially reshaping global tech supply chains and semiconductor power dynamics downstream.

• Chinese quantum processor outperforms supercomputers by factor of 10¹⁵

  Chinese researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) have developed Zuchongzhi-3, a 105-qubit superconducting quantum processor that operates 10^15 times faster than the world's fastest supercomputer and one million times faster than Google's latest quantum processor:

  

  USTC

• 👑Zeus GPU Silicon Valley startup Bolt Graphics unveiled the Zeus GPU, claiming performance that vastly outpaces competitors across multiple workloads, claiming:

  • 10x rendering gains and 300x electromagnetic simulation improvements

  • Massive memory capacity (up to 2.25TB per card) enabling larger-scale AI workloads.

  • First GPU with integrated 800 GbE interfaces which could revolutionize data center connectivity.

    

    Bolt Graphics

Energy

• Zenobē has begun commercial operations at Europe's largest battery site in Blackhillock, Scotland, located between Inverness and Aberdeen. The plant alleviates electricity grid congestion from major offshore wind farms, including Viking (443 MW), Moray East (950 MW), and Beatrice (588 MW) and aims to prevent 2.6 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions and save electricity consumers £170 million (US$218 million) over the next 15 years.

  

  Zenobē via TechSpot

  

• Inverted perovskite Chinese researchers have achieved a breakthrough in perovskite solar technology with modules retaining 94% efficiency after 1,000 hours of continuous light exposure.

• Thermal mats Flint Engineering's "IsoMat" thermal transfer technology promises revolutionary energy efficiency through its flat aluminium sheets containing tiny heat pipe cavities: a potential 30% energy reduction in refrigeration could impact 20% of global energy consumption.

  

  Flint Engineering

💰Crypto

• The usual crazy times in crypto right now, this week the market quickly worked out that a “Federal Strategic Crypto Reserve” likely won’t be the bonanza it’s cracked up to be, utilising cryptocurrencies already seized through government forfeiture proceedings rather than making new purchases.

  

  BTC / USD 1 year - CoinMarketCap

  • Stablecoin explosion? Nonetheless, major banks and fintech companies are racing to launch their own stablecoins to compete in the U$210 billion market currently dominated by Tether (U$142 billion) and Circle (U$57 billion). Last week Bank of America signalled it was open to issuing its own coin, joining established payments providers such as Standard Chartered, PayPal, Revolut and Stripe.

    • (Meta’s Libra (Diem) digital currency initiative in 2019-2020 was around 7 years ahead of the play…)

  • Bitcoin network secures democracy? Meanwhile a fascinating story of crypto’s other uses: the Bitcoin blockchain has been utilised to secure and store election results for the Williamson County, Tennessee Republican Party Convention, in theory providing immutable, tamper-proof election result storage. (But how do you trust the results gathering process…!?! Turtles all the way down…)

    

    via Tracey Jones

🔬Materials

• Touchless smart fabric detects finger gestures to control devices Link

  European scientists have developed a "touchless", machine-washable smart fabric that detects finger gestures without requiring physical contact, using a magnetic ring and magnetoresistive sensors:

  

  Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

• Monolayer amorphous carbon (MAC), a revolutionary new carbon-based 2D (single-atom-thick) material, exhibiting 8X greater toughness than graphene while maintaining exceptional strength.

• Robotic spider webs Researchers at the University of Tartu's Institute of Technology have developed a groundbreaking robotics concept that allows machines to spin temporary embodiments from polymer solutions on demand, uncannily similar to how spiders create webs. Biomimetics will often win…think of the applications here…

🧬Biotech

Two “de-extinction” stories this week:

• 'Woolly mice' US startup Colossal Biosciences unveiled genetically engineered "woolly mice" as a step toward reviving extinct species like the woolly mammoth. The company said it had modified seven genes to give the mice body hair resembling the thickness, texture and colour of those found in mammoths, based on analysis of genetic data from 59 mammoth specimens. Next up: growing these animals in artificial wombs…

  

• Cryptobiosis A paper from 2023, a Siberian worm came back to life after being frozen for 46,000 years:

  

  Shatilovich A, Gade VR, Pippel M, Hoffmeyer TT, Tchesunov AV, Stevens L, et al. (2023) A novel nematode species from the Siberian permafrost shares adaptive mechanisms for cryptobiotic survival with C. elegans dauer larva. PLoS Genet 19(7): e1010798. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1010798

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🌊💩Flooded zone

Whipping through another week of Washington chaos…

• Chips Act RIP? President Trump called for the elimination of the Chips Act, the 2022 bipartisan law providing $52.7 billion in subsidies to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing. How will this impact major inward investments by TSMC, Intel, Samsung, and Micron I wonder?

• Trump pauses intelligence-sharing with Ukraine The US confirmed it has paused intelligence-sharing with Ukraine, alongside military aid. Simultaneously another round of talks is going on between the US and Ukraine in Saudi Arabia attempting to salvage a “deal” from the Oval Office meeting wreckage… who knows where this will end.

  • An EU summit last week endorsed a European Commission proposal for a new loan plan worth 150 billion euros (US$163 billion) was agreed which would be used to “buy European” defence systems.

• Tariffs / no tariffs

  • Record US trade deficit emerges ahead of Trump tariffs Link

    The US trade deficit hit a record high of $131 billion in January 2025, as imports surged 10% while exports grew only 1.2%

  • 4th March: Trump’s 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico and 10% from China went into effect on March 4th

  • 6th March: Trump pauses tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports until April 2nd

  • The markets are taking it all in their stride:

    

    Perplexity

  • Commentary:

  

  @EconomPic

  

  @frumza

• The Trump administration expanded its crackdown on pro-Palestinian activists, warning that green card holders involved in such activities could face deportation. This includes revoking visas and green cards of individuals deemed to support Hamas.

• Trump’s legislative agenda could take months to make it through Congress… until then we should expect 20 executive orders per day with no employees left in government to implement them?

The week in Musk: Elon’s having a bad week.

• In an interview, Musk said that his DOGE commitments are making it “harder to run his businesses”. You don’t say.

• Tesla stock has lost over 50% of its value since its record high in December

  

  Perplexity

  • Tesla sales plunged 49% in China and 72% in Australia, almost certainly directly linked to Musk’s far-right political engagement, but also ramping up competition.

    • Posted by Kia in Norway:

      

      @krasserstein.bsky.social

  • Tesla board members are bailing out their shares… who would buy it as a going concern now? Apple? At what firesale price if it enters bankruptcy proceedings?

• X has been experiencing outages all week - Musk blamed DDOS attacks from Ukraine without evidence

• SpaceX’s Starship exploded mid-air for second time this year:

  

  • …Although “Mechazilla” did catch the booster for the second time:

• In the same week that a Trump policy shift for the US$42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program could funnel billions to Starlink over fibre-optic infrastructure (what conflict of interest?!), a US$1.5bn Starlink deal with the Italian government looks increasingly in doubt following Musk’s European “diplomacy”. Cue:

  

  @swardley

Very unclear how is this all going to play out geopolitically… but personally I am optimising for resilience.

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💭Meme stream

Wow, quite a week. Here is some diversionary eclectica to wind down to…

🌙Firefly

Lunar landing, 2025 edition:

(Video: @DJSnM)

🌌Voyaging on

NASA is extending the operational life of the Voyager 1 and 2 deep-space probes by implementing power conservation measures to help them reach a half-century of service...already operating 47 years beyond expected lifespan.

By Tomruen - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64544828

♻️Wind turbine recycling

Apparently there are now 800,000 tons of wind turbine waste annually. What do you do with massive, super-strength wind turbine blades once they’ve passed their working life?

• Transform into a floating sauna?

  

  Reverlast

• Or into an eco-friendly surfboard?

  

  Draft Surf

🔤World's first typewriter

The world's first typewriter, the Malling Hansen Writing Ball, is heading to auction on March 22, 2025, in Köln, Germany: only 35 specimens remain worldwide with 30 already in museums. This was once the cutting edge keyboard in tech.

⌨️Weird keyboard layouts

Staying On the subject of keyboards, this Techspot article is a perennial favourite, illustrating many weird and wonderful alternatives to the Qwerty layout we know. A few examples:

Dvorak keyboard:

Colemak keyboard (reduces finger movement by over 50%, apparently…)

The Maltron “ergonomic” keyboard:

The Optimus Popularis “Any keyboard”:

And of course, don’t forget Google Japan’s Gboard:

📟The internet in 1994

Finally… loved this blast from the past: What the internet was like in 1994. I remember first using the Mozilla browser in Soho’s Cyberia cafe in late 1994 (maybe early 1995…) what an innocent world that was…

🙏🙏🙏 Thanks as always to everyone who takes the time to get in touch with links and feedback.

Namaste

Ben