Investigators believe a cyberattack this week on dozens of municipal water systems in Minnesota was probably the work of Iranian hackers, according to U.S. and state officials and others familiar with the matter, a potential act of aggression that comes at a precarious moment in the U.S. war against Iran.

Officials cautioned that they had not definitively determined who was responsible for the attack and that the preliminary assessment could change as the authorities collected more technical data.

They also warned that the hackers could be attempting to pose as Iran-based in an effort to ratchet up tensions between the two countries, though former intelligence officials said such a scenario was unlikely.

Local officials reported that the well and treatment plant in at least one city was temporarily offline on Monday, while other cities in the state had to use manual workarounds to cope with attempted attacks on automated operations.

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New: Investigators believe a cyberattack this week on dozens of municipal water systems in Minnesota was probably the work of Iranian hackers, a potential act of aggression that comes at a precarious moment in the U.S. war against Iran. https://t.co/Huut3WBM34

— Dustin Volz (@dnvolz) July 30, 2026

“Biological War” is a heavily researched book about contagious and potentially civilization-ending pathogens. Though banned by international treaty, these germs have been weaponized and hoarded by countries that include Russia, North Korea and Syria.

By “weaponized” I don’t mean merely that they’ve been placed at the business end of ballistic missiles. I mean that these pathogens have been genetically engineered, in diabolical ways, to trick first responders and be all but untreatable. Even a small accidental spill, like wine sloshing out of glass, like Covid slipping out of a lab, could be the last mistake our species makes.

Jacobsen has interviewed everyone, from former high-ranking members of the military, the C.I.A., FEMA and NATO to former secretaries of defense, counterterrorism experts, epidemiologists and Sam [expletive] Altman. That so many were willing to talk to her, and have their names affixed to this book, indicates the esteem in which she is held, especially after the publication of “Nuclear War: A Scenario” (2024), a best seller that stirred new interest in nuclear policy, technology and risks worldwide.

The reason “Biological War,” like Jacobsen’s previous book, is so consuming is that she packs a lot of dense and particulate information into a ticking-clock scenario: into a story. It’s more pulverizing than a Kathryn Bigelow movie. Some of the chapter headings are phrases like “Day Two” or “Day Three.” Not to ruin your mood, but “Day Six” is about as far as civilization gets. A later chapter is titled “The Last Day of American Democracy.”

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New, likely terrifying look into reality of biological warfare, book by @AnnieJacobsen just arrived. All her books are must-reads… Nuclear War, Area 51, Surprise Kill Vanish, Operation Paperclip, etc pic.twitter.com/qLmZNPoEu4

— Luke Fischer (@lukefischer) July 28, 2026

A new resource has been launched to “help churches of all denominations use AI thoughtfully, faithfully, and well” amid the “silent adoption” of AI in church life.

The AI Guidelines for Christian Ministry has been produced by the AI Christian Partnership (AICP), a not-for-profit organisation made up of Christian groups, theologians, technologists, and academics.

The guidelines have been created to avoid AI “gradually seeping into church life without proper discussion”, and to support churchpeople to understand the long-term impact on congregations, AICP said. “Although aimed at church ministers, leaders, and volunteers, they contain principles, ethics, and practical tips that all Christians can apply and use.”

Its founder, Chris Goswami, said: “AI can be a great asset for ministry, or it can leave us with a fast-food version of ministry. As with social media, it may only be much later, with hindsight, that we understand the impact of AI — therefore, we encourage churches with foresight to give serious consideration to this now.”

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A new resource has been launched to “help churches of all denominations use AI thoughtfully, faithfully, and well” amid the “silent adoption” of #AI in church life 💻https://t.co/xsPcd5RdrY

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) July 28, 2026

There are important policy interventions on the table, especially regarding young people’s exposure to AI in pedagogical contexts and at formative times in their life. Strong stances from the major mainstream institutions of American life would also be wonderful. But I suspect there is little point in waiting around for either D.C. or Harvard to lead the way.

We need schools, families, fraternal organizations, reading groups, secret societies, oratories, shared houses of civility — a thousand cells as diffuse and decentralized as all those compounding micro-engagements by which the image of a boot stomping on a human face forever is now being replaced with that of a human face slack-jawed and dribbling on itself. These cells of resistance will be different from one another. They may involve a semi-annual meeting, and they may involve the whole of life. They can be organized around reading Boethius or reciting limericks, sharing meals or shooting guns. Some will correspond only by letter. Some will employ Claude to manage their mailing lists. What all will have in common is: an insistence that we, and only we, will decide how we live; an explicit prohibition on new technologies in the spaces and activities where they gently and slowly degrade us; and a pledge to hold each other to the path we have jointly chosen.

This, I think, is where Magnifica Humanitas will prove most inspired and invaluable in the years to come. Regardless of whether the powers that be heed the pope’s injunctions and warnings, that striking opening image will be available to all the faithful, and to every person of goodwill. If you find yourself in a ruin, staring at the crumbling remnants of a wall and the world it protected, what do you do? You assemble your people, you stake out a section, and you start to build.

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On forming cells of resistance: pic.twitter.com/90kSAIU9sS

— The New Atlantis (@tnajournal) June 3, 2026

Artificial Intelligence poses a double challenge to the human mind. Not only will the most advanced models soon be able to think better than people, but AI has consequences for humanity which are so uncertain, so potentially vast and are approaching at such a rapid pace that even the best brains flinch. An example is Elon Musk.

In our long interview with him this week, featured in The Insider and our Business section, the engineer and entrepreneur sets out two paradoxes and one contradiction. The first paradox is that one of the world’s most power-hungry tycoons is enthusiastically helping create a technology that he says will render him—and all other human beings—powerless after as little as five years. The second is that the world’s richest man says he is preparing for a world of infinite abundance, where money, including his $750bn fortune, no longer matters. And the contradiction is that, despite these stated beliefs, Mr Musk continues to act as if they were not true.

Mr Musk is divisive. His political views, disseminated to his 240m followers on X, strike many as plain-speaking and strike many more, including The Economist, as plainly bigoted. By his own admission, his attempt to use DOGE to scythe through the federal bureaucracy went wrong.

But he is also one of a handful of men who are pioneering AI and who thereby have an outsize influence on its trajectory. When he speaks, he reflects the debates they are having. His data centres in space could power AI’s future. For all his political polemics, he has a record of being right about technology in fields such as electric cars, rockets and satellite communications that confounded other engineers and entrepreneurs. For those reasons, his claims about AI repay examination. Unfortunately, such an exercise only underlines how ill-prepared the world is for a technology that may soon throw everything up in the air.

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AI is charging ahead. Not even its creators—including @elonmusk—know how to keep up https://t.co/8UwsIS9FQY pic.twitter.com/TndVl6q8ir

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) July 23, 2026

The United States may only have nine to 12 months to protect its critical infrastructure from AI-powered attacks. Currently, two American companies, Anthropic (for which I consult) and OpenAI, have publicly demonstrated AI models advanced enough to detect flaws in software far beyond the human capacity to find, and they are restricting the use of these models to defensive cybersecurity work.

But the United States’ adversaries, and the criminals in their orbit, will soon wield the same offensive tools. China, in particular, is already racing to build and acquire these AI capabilities and may be closer to developing its own Mythos than many U.S. policymakers hope. Advanced AI will sharpen an instrument that Beijing already prizes: the credible threat to deter a fight over Taiwan before it begins by disrupting the island’s critical infrastructure and that of any nation that seeks to defend it….

The United States has a window to bolster its critical infrastructure’s defenses, but that window is short, and those defenses are weak to begin with. In a campaign called Volt Typhoon, Chinese state-linked hackers already demonstrated how deeply they can burrow into U.S. critical infrastructure, including organizations in the water, power, and transportation sectors. Now is the time to put policy options on the table that were previously considered out of bounds: taking dramatic steps to preempt would-be attacks, making once-in-a-generation investments in cyberdefense, and helping U.S. AI labs protect themselves against the most advanced threats.

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“As firms use Mythos to hunt and fix flaws in their products, a more urgent question looms: how to defend the United States and its allies from AI-powered cyberwarfare,” writes Michael Sulmeyer.https://t.co/uskGVY48uZ

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) July 22, 2026

Without fail, David Liu of the Broad Institute gets at least 20 messages every week from desperate parents. Their child, they’ll explain, has an ultrarare and devastating disorder caused by a mutant gene. Can he help them develop a gene therapy?

Dr. Liu, a gene-editing researcher, answers honestly: Although the science is there — researchers can edit and silence the genes that cause disease relatively easily — the system for developing treatments for rare diseases is just not economically feasible. It typically takes years and hundreds of millions of dollars.

The catchphrase, said Dr. Wendy Chung of Boston Children’s Hospital, is “too rare to care.”

Now, Dr. Liu, Dr. Chung and their colleagues at the Broad Institute, Boston Children’s and the Jackson Laboratory are hoping to change that mentality. On Tuesday, they announced the start of a new nonprofit, the Center for Therapeutic Genetics, to develop gene therapy treatments that can be used and reused in disease after disease.

Treatments developed by the center would be viewed more like routine procedures than drugs. In each case, all that would be changed are the instructions to a gene editor. There would be no need to start anew for every patient.

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‘Too Rare to Care’? A New Center for Rare Diseases Hopes to Change That https://t.co/ahZC0LpW1d

— Global Health Observ (@GlobalPHObserv) July 21, 2026

On a clear afternoon this month, high above the Mojave Desert, an A.I.-powered drone launched a missile in a test that could reshape modern warfare.

Since the dawn of the jet age, the U.S. military has used the isolation over this stretch of sand to push secret, experimental aircraft to their aerodynamic and technological limits. It’s doing the same today: fine-tuning machines capable of engaging in aerial combat with barely any human intervention. These drones’ flight is controlled not by a pilot, not by human remote control, but entirely by onboard software. It’s a historic advancement in drone technology that aims to incorporate artificial intelligence into everyday war-fighting.

Today’s conflicts are increasingly defined by unmanned weapons, delivering destruction over battlefields in Ukraine, Iran and Sudan. But in almost all these cases, there is a human operator sitting somewhere, steering each robot toward its target.

The two types of next-generation drones being tested over Southern California today, built for the Air Force by Anduril and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, can fly entirely on their own. They make hundreds of split-second decisions to maneuver, evade and attack enemy targets, based upon countless hours of flight data and computer processing. A human is involved at just a few key moments in their flight: to program the drone’s mission, to start and stop it and to decide whether or not it should launch a weapon. Late last year, the companies’ drones flew for the first time. Anduril fired its first missile two weeks ago, and General Atomics says it is not far behind.

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A.I. Drones Are Coming. We Are Not Ready. https://t.co/Mi1VD9f8ep

— Avner Gidron (@AvnerGidron) July 20, 2026

The questions that define civilizations don’t always announce themselves cleanly. They can arrive wrapped in the language of progress—faster, smarter, more efficient—until one day we realize that what has arrived isn’t what we wanted.

In the case of artificial intelligence, choices made in boardrooms and research labs will have far-reaching consequences. We need to understand that clearly, before the changes become irreversible. Even more, to make serious decisions about our future, we need to state the moral definitions of what it means to be human and the limits on AI’s influence on the social order.

AI development is outpacing ethical deliberation, and people are already being harmed. We’ve seen teens counseled toward suicide, a proliferation of child sex-abuse material and communities strained by sprawling data centers. And that’s only what’s come to light. This technology is permeating our lives in ways beyond our awareness. The risks of AI superintelligence run from economic upheaval to the concentration of power in the hands of whatever corporation or government wins the AI technology race.

At the same time, we have to see clearly the good of AI. 

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We need a Christian vision for the future of AI. The development of the technology is beginning to outpace ethical deliberation, writes @revwalterkimhttps://t.co/mFl7oPAl8C

— Wall Street Journal Opinion (@WSJopinion) July 10, 2026

A pediatrician recently asked one of Emily Harrison’s children a logical question during pre-exam paperwork: Do you have a smartphone?

Doctors often ask children practical questions, such as whether they’re getting enough sleep, have seen changes in their appetites or have started playing sports. These days, they may ask about anxiety or depression.

A smartphone question makes sense after years of research into how these devices, and social media programs, affect mental and physical health. The question is why are church leaders not discussing these issues in sermons and education programs, said Harrison, author of the Dear Christian Parent online newsletter. 

“This is a safety issue, yet we’re hesitant to say it’s a safety issue,” she said, reached by Zoom.

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Mental health professionals and parents say they're worried about children spending too much time on devices. What we know about potential harm and how to start making changes.https://t.co/LvDFwuypix pic.twitter.com/YzF5BmmbwC

— WMUR TV (@WMUR9) July 8, 2026

Wendell Gilliard spent the hottest days of his childhood summers praying for a cool breeze.

Gilliard, a state lawmaker who represents parts of the peninsula and West Ashley in the S.C. House of Representatives, grew up in Charleston’s low-income housing before it had air conditioning. His family would cool off by purchasing a large block of ice and setting it in the middle of a room surrounded by fans and open windows.

“ That was our air conditioning,” Gilliard recalled. “Mom would always say, ‘ You need to stay still and pray for a cool breeze.’   Then, when everybody stayed still in that one room, you would notice the curtain would pick up from the breeze, and everything changed.”

Charleston Housing Authority properties now have air conditioning, but many households across the state still don’t. As South Carolina enters the dog days of summer, heat-vulnerable residents — who are predominantly elderly, those with chronic illnesses and the “homebound,” per the S.C. Department of Public Health — face life-threatening risks.

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July through mid-August are historically the hottest time of year in South Carolina. For some households, the dog days of summer can be deadly — a risk that's growing with each passing year. https://t.co/DTeNvoEZck

— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) July 9, 2026

Someday real soon, most of us — starting with young adults — will carry an always-on AI. This agent will help us navigate our journeys, answer our questions, tutor and teach us new skills, remember people we have met before, remind us of what we once knew before, offer advice and recommendations, do simple errands, and remember everything we say and do. Before long, it will know us better than we know ourselves. It will be our exoself.

While we will use more than one agent, we’ll primarily favor just one that knows us best. Always-on means this agent is listening, watching, tracking, present during all our waking hours, and maybe even while we sleep. We will allow this intimate access to our inner life because it gives us superpowers: knowledge, judgment, decisiveness, confidence, and most important, speed. We will feel productive, creative, smart, capable, and on top of it when it is on. When it is off, we will feel amputated.

This entity is clearly not our self. But at the same time, this always-on AI will be so close to us, understanding us so well and so deeply — better than almost any human could — that it will not be an other, or an outsider either. It can model us too well to be an other. It will be an exoself: something in between our self and an other self. Neither us, but also not outside of us. A new category.

It won’t feel strange, because we don’t feel strange wearing eyeglasses all day, or hearing aids, or carrying a computer in our pockets. Machines like this have been moving closer to us since they were invented. Smart machines started out as room-sized apparatus, then moved nearer as appliances alongside a desk, then onto the desktop in front of us, then onto our laps, then into our pockets — and soon, they will sit on our skin, perhaps on our heads. We already see prototypes of smart glasses, where the exoself can perch, whispering into our ears and illuminating our eyes.

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I write about the controversial idea of an "exoself" as if it were inevitable: https://t.co/nds5pW2b0r

— Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) July 7, 2026

As you read this sentence, circuits in your brain are adjusting your posture, controlling your breathing, and transforming lines and curves on the screen into recognizable words. Most of this processing is invisible to you. But some of what takes place in your brain you do have access to—an image that pops into your head, or a deliberate plan you make about where to go shopping. Neuroscientists and philosophers sometimes refer to the latter type of brain activity as “consciously accessible,” to distinguish it from all the other processing that goes on unconsciously. This activity has special properties: we can describe it, control it, and use it for deliberate reasoning, in contrast to all the automatic processing that goes on without our awareness.

In a new paper, we present evidence that a similar distinction has emerged in modern language models like Claude. We find that Claude has developed a small collection of internal neural patterns that, compared to all its other internal processing, play a special role.

We call the collection of these patterns the J-space—named after the technique we used to find them, involving a mathematical concept called the Jacobian. Each J-space pattern is linked to a particular word. But when one of these patterns lights up, it doesn’t mean the model is saying that word—just that the word is on its mind. If you’ve heard of language models having a “scratchpad” or “chain of thought”—text they write to themselves while reasoning—the J-space is something different. It operates silently, in the model’s internal neural activations, allowing the model to think about a concept without writing it down. Notably, the J-space wasn’t designed or programmed by us, but instead emerged on its own during Claude’s training process.

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Wow! Unexpected results from Anthropic's experiments in exposing the inner thoughts of Claude. They call its unconscious a J-space. The short video they made is good place to start. https://t.co/07cr8aJlxr

— Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) July 8, 2026

The U.S. labor force participation rate has quietly returned to levels last seen in the 1970s (outside the recent pandemic). It increasingly seems to signal a structural shift in how society works, with a shrinking share of adults participating directly in the production of goods and services. The consequences extend well beyond slower economic growth.

Some implications:

• A growing share of U.S. society has no direct stake in labor markets.
  • As fewer adults work or seek work, a larger fraction of voters experience the economy mostly as consumers, retirees, or rentiers, not as workers.
  • That changes political incentives around wages, immigration, AI, taxation, and redistribution.
• The economy becomes increasingly dependent on a shrinking core.…

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Many researchers are now convinced that humanlike AI, or artificial general intelligence (AGI), will require more than mastering language and images. It will require AIs that can reason about space, causality, and the consequences of actions—especially if they are to control humanoid robots, operate factories, and explore other planets.

Few people have argued for this need more forcefully than AI pioneer Yann LeCun. “I joke that the smartest systems we have today are not as smart as a house cat,” he says. A cat can’t code like an LLM, but it can survive by its wits. The notion that simply scaling an LLM will get to AGI is “complete nonsense,” he says. “It’s like saying you’re going to get into orbit by scaling airplanes. There’s a very powerful delusion circulating in Silicon Valley that this is the case.”

LeCun left a top job at Meta to co-found one of a growing number of labs and startups developing “world models”—systems that build representations of how the world works—and agents that operate within them to learn or plan. Ultimately, these researchers hope that more closely mimicking how the human mind learns will give AI stunning new powers.

The gaps between humans and LLMs are not merely quantitative. In a 2024 study, LLMs that were trained on sequences of directions from New York City taxi rides could generate new routes reliably, suggesting they had turned those directions into an accurate map of the city. But when researchers looked under the hood to examine their internal representations, they found not a clean city grid, but an incoherent mess of tangled streets. LLMs “are so alien and so unhumanlike,” says Brenden Lake, a cognitive scientist at Princeton University.

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Words vs. worlds: As building bigger and better chatbots gets harder, AI researchers turn to systems that learn to simulate the worldhttps://t.co/DC8Q7QNoWp via @SilverJacket pic.twitter.com/OoMXTX5ZAD

— Ash Paul (@pash22) June 26, 2026

For decades, the tech industry has relied on the ability of semiconductor companies to wring more power out of computer chips, making the smartphones that fit in a hand today more capable than the computers that filled entire rooms 40 years ago.

While some experts worry that era of increased miniaturization is ending, IBM is saying not so fast.

The big tech company on Thursday released details of its next advance in chip manufacturing technology, which it says could keep that innovation going for another 10 years.

Using a novel approach to making smaller transistors that act as tiny switches in microprocessors and other chips, IBM said, the new production process can squeeze nearly twice as many transistors on a fingernail-size chip as the last technology it introduced in 2021. That will offer 50 percent greater computing performance and 70 percent better energy efficiency, the company said.

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$IBM unveiled a 0.7nm “nanostack” 3D transistor design which it calls the first sub-1nm chip technology.

IBM says it could fit 100B transistors on a fingernail-sized chip, reach production within ~5 years and deliver up to 70% better efficiency versus 2nm. pic.twitter.com/psH3RxKGmC

— Shay Boloor (@StockSavvyShay) June 25, 2026

Yet this backlash is itself dangerous. AI promises to change the world for the better, much as electricity or the steam engine did. Not long ago, the era-defining problem for the rich world was stagnant economic growth and the populism it unleashed. Now it has a technology that could power a surge in productivity and incomes, help find cures for untreatable diseases and improve everything from education to green tech.

All this could be lost if countries starve the technology of computing power or regulate it into uselessness. Look at mRNA vaccines research, which has been held back after a backlash during the covid-19 pandemic.

Scenarios in which some countries give in to popular rage but others forge ahead are also worrying. If America succumbs, it could cede the global ai frontier, and the attendant cyber and military capabilities, to authoritarian China. Europe and Canada are more risk-averse than America. If they choked off AI while the rest of the world kept pushing forward, their losses could be unrecoverable. More than two centuries after the Industrial Revolution, few countries have managed to catch up with the first movers.

So the stakes are high. Can governments do anything about it? Grand proclamations about the shape of a “social contract” for a post-AI world are good fodder for blog posts but offer little help today. Besides, the unknowns are still large enough to make the exercise almost futile.

Better to be incremental. 

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Persuading voters that their interests are being served by AI’s disruption has become as important as making models better. The failure to do so would destroy vast opportunities for humanity https://t.co/5S9EGzPIHg

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) June 25, 2026

The news is full of how an ignominious peace deal with Iran exemplifies a decline in American power. That conclusion could hardly be more wrong. On June 12th the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to block foreigners from Fable and Mythos, its latest and most capable frontier AI models. In an instant, everyone learned that the American government can decide who may use the world’s most important technology. You don’t get much more powerful than that.

The administration was responding to a supposed jailbreak for Fable, meaning a prompt that circumvents defences against uses such as hacking computers or making bioweapons. The chances are that it wanted Anthropic to switch off the models for everyone, and that targeting foreigners was a means to an end. Sure enough, that is what Anthropic did, while claiming that the concern about its model was overblown. The legal basis of the order remains unclear, and the ban seems unlikely to last.

What matters, though, is the demonstration that global access to the best AI may come down to a decision in the Oval Office. The administration showed in March that it is prepared to trample on the frontier AI companies, when it designated Anthropic a “supply-chain risk”. Now it has shown that it is prepared to trample on users, too.

America must decide how to wield this vast new power. The rest of the world must decide what to do about it. Even as it plans for an unreliable America in everything from defence to trade, it now has to cope with a new way of being captive to the world’s biggest economy.

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Even as the world plans for an unreliable America in everything from defence to trade, it now has to cope with America’s dominance in AI https://t.co/xrMSKZAFWb

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) June 18, 2026

Is it ethical to alter the genetic makeup of children? Should we create children with three parents? What about creating sperm from female stem cells to the end of creating a child with two biological mothers? Is it ethical to incubate a growing baby in an artificial womb? Could a womb like that end the perceived need for abortion?  

These questions might seem like science fiction, and indeed they were when Aldous Huxley, an agnostic, published his dystopian novel Brave New World nearly one hundred years ago. Huxley wove a fictitious world in which progeny were designed and grown in laboratories, children were raised by the state rather than in families, promiscuity was encouraged and monogamy considered grotesque, and the government endorsed self-medication with a “harmless” drug that kept its users in a placated state. 

Yet these are the questions up for debate in today’s public square, as evidenced by a recent debate hosted by The Free Press: “Is Designing Babies Unethical—Or a Moral Imperative?”  

All things considered, one has to wonder if Huxley wasn’t more a prophet than a novelist.  

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https://t.co/vb0gflsCQ0 The elimination of suffering will not produce joy. If we seek to be truly free, we must acknowledge our responsibilities to one another. We will flourish to the extent that we all can flourish.

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) June 14, 2026

“It’s going to be an absolute nightmare,” says an executive at a big American tech company. He is talking about an emerging problem for businesses that use artificial intelligence. AI agents—bots that can read, interpret and act—use masses of processing power and have started to run up huge bills. As they proliferate, the problem will grow. Big companies, the executive points out, typically use hundreds of software programs. If each of those offer agents (as they probably will), AI costs could easily spiral out of control.

Budget management is a new worry for AI adopters. Not long ago employees were encouraged to binge on the technology, as bosses and investors saw spending as a sign of innovation. Burning through vast numbers of tokens—the chunks of text that models process, which are often used as a unit of pricing—became a badge of honour; techies dubbed it “tokenmaxxing”. Companies showed off staff’s AI use on internal leaderboards. Meta’s display awarded top users titles like “Token Legend”.

Such incentives partly explain the boom in AI spending. Another contributing factor is a change in the way enterprises use the technology. Token-heavy applications, such as reasoning models and agents, are growing more popular. In some cases agents build their own agents, sending costs higher still. Ramp, a corporate-credit-card provider, analyses its clients’ transaction data to shed light on how they use AI. It reckons their overall spending has risen 13-fold in the past year. In April Uber said that it had already spent its annual AI budget in four months. Other firms are experiencing similar problems. One reportedly spent $500m on AI tokens in a month. Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, has described mounting customer costs as “a huge issue”.

For now, the problem is concentrated. The top spenders tend to be tech firms….

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Burning through vast numbers of tokens—the chunks of text that models process, which are often used as a unit of pricing—was once a badge of honour. Now budget management is a worry for AI adopters https://t.co/TZsf1H2BHC

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) June 16, 2026

The idea that dementia prevention may hinge on what people do in their mid-30s to their 60s is rapidly reshaping the field. Scientists increasingly believe the disease is driven not only by changes in the aging brain, but also by years of metabolic stress, inflammation and vascular damage accumulating across the body.

Many researchers now think the biological process that leads to dementia begins 15 to 20 years before the first memory problems emerge. By the time symptoms become noticeable, the disease likely will already be well established.

Neuroscientists now see midlife as a critical window when the brain becomes especially vulnerable to aging — but also more responsive to intervention. The implications are profound: The ordinary habits of middle age may matter far more than scientists once realized, and cognitive decline may not be inevitable.

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If you want to remain mentally sharp once you're in your 70s, 80s and beyond, there are steps you can take when you're much younger. Read @arianaeunjung to understand what scientists are now learning about the midlife brain, here: https://t.co/L0JnwnYGYl

— Juliet Eilperin (@eilperin) June 12, 2026

After years of false dawns, many of the world’s leading tech companies are now betting that quantum computers will start to outperform their conventional counterparts by 2030 – with a potentially huge impact on fields ranging from cryptocurrencies and financial services to drug discovery.

“It sounds really futuristic and I fully understand that,” says Gerald Mullally, CEO of Oxford Quantum Circuits, pointing to his company’s client base as a vote of faith in the technology’s potential. “Essentially it’s a bet that these companies are making that ‘this is going to happen, it’s going to matter and so the sooner we engage with it, the more practice we get.’”

But some scientists worry that the sheer power of the technology could endanger privacy and national security while others still doubt that useful machines can be made at all.

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Financial Times: The quantum computing revolution is closer than you think – Companies are betting on big implications for pharmaceuticals, financial services and crypto. But sceptics worry about hype https://t.co/bNSUlFlyss

— Aaron M. Renn 🇺🇸 (@aaron_renn) June 12, 2026

Mr. Bezos said he was spending a significant amount of time working on the company, which is based in San Francisco.

Dr. Bajaj is a trained scientist with significant experience in industry. After studying as a physicist and a chemist, he worked closely with the Google co-founder Sergey Brin at Google’s X, a research effort inside the tech giant often called “the Moonshot Factory.” Google X created ambitious projects that have since become their own companies under the umbrella of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, including the drone delivery service Wing and the self-driving car company Waymo.

In 2015, Dr. Bajaj helped found Verily, a research lab that focuses on the life sciences. Like Waymo and Wing, Verily is operated by Alphabet.

He later co-founded and served as chief executive of Foresite Labs, an effort to create A.I. and data science start-ups. He left that job to focus on Prometheus.

Mr. Bezos and Dr. Bajaj declined to reveal many details about how the company aims to build its new A.I. tools.

Read it all.

Jeff Bezos Wants to Build an "Artificial General Engineer"

As co chief executive of the start up Prometheus, the Amazon founder is using A.I. to improve how devices ranging from computers to jet engines are made.

This is how the acceleration escapes the screen and enters atoms. pic.twitter.com/ldKfFIi3Ib

— Dr Singularity (@Dr_Singularity) June 12, 2026

The documentary The Story of Everything was released by Fathom Entertainment at the end of April. It is the latest contribution from a group of scientists who have raised several serious challenges to the prevailing culture and ideology of scientific materialism, which has dominated the public discourse for 175 years.

The release of the film follows the publication of two books that press the challenges to scientific materialism to their logical breaking point. The first is The Return of the God Hypothesis (HarperOne, 2021) by Stephen C. Meyer; the second is God, the Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies (Palomar) (Books, 14 November 2025). Both are global bestsellers.

The film includes contributions from many of the world’s leading scientists who do not accept the pre-eminence of scientific materialism — or, at least, who have grave doubts about it. Among them are Professor John Lennox, Dr Stephen Meyer, Dr David Berlinski, Professor Douglas Axe, and Professor James Tour. This is no band of lightweight chancers: they are serious scientists, experts in the natural sciences, mathematics, and the history of science and philosophy.

Over the past few years, they have patiently and politely argued their case with increasing confidence as the compelling nature of their argument has begun to cut through. Dr Meyer has been interviewed by Joe Rogan on his podcast at length, and has appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored, in which Mr Morgan declared himself a theist on the same basis as Dr Meyer.

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"For too long, scientific materialists have been allowed to obscure what has been obvious to many of us."

Arguments that challenge a materialist world-view are gaining a hearing beyond academia, writes Simon Miller #science #Metaphysics https://t.co/EFRTei68Dm

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) June 8, 2026

Nineteen-year-old Olivia’s profile picture shows a demure and innocent-looking young woman with long blonde hair styled in beachy waves. She’s wearing a short, cleavage-exposing nightdress and her biography says she’s “deeply caring, supportive and attentive” and “sleeps on the floor… until you call her. Then silence. Obedience”.

While Olivia may appear to be an online dater looking for love, she isn’t real – not in the conventional sense of the term. This prospective love match is actually one of a growing trend of “AI girlfriends”: realistic-looking artificial intelligence “bots” created by “companion apps” – services that are being advertised on online games played by children and on platforms they watch, such as YouTube.

New research has revealed that one in five boys aged 12-16 is either in or knows of a boy their age who is in a romantic relationship with an AI companion. A report carried out by men’s organisation Male Allies UK and published last month spoke with more than 1,000 boys aged 12-16 in focus groups in 37 schools – public and state, grammar and comprehensive, and across a range of Ofsted ratings – up and down the country. Peer-to-peer focus groups were set up where boys could speak freely, with the aim of diving into their behaviour and attitudes, and it was the boys who wanted to talk about AI technologies. The findings make stark reading: eight in 10 boys (85 per cent) have had a conversation with a chatbot, with 43 per cent saying they talk to bots so they can ask questions without feeling embarrassed. More than a quarter (26 per cent) say they like the attention and connection over real-life equivalents, and (36 per cent) admitted that they prefer speaking to AI chatbots rather than to their family and friends at times.

Read it all (subscription).

🦔One in five boys aged 12 to 16 is in or knows someone in a romantic relationship with an AI chatbot, according to a Male Allies UK study of over 1,000 boys across 37 UK schools. 85% have talked to chatbots and 26% prefer the attention to human connections.
The top companion…

— Hedgie (@HedgieMarkets) June 8, 2026

The new encyclical comes as the culmination of various articles during recent weeks about AI’s implications for religion. Here’s a sampling of materials to consider alongside Leo’s magnum opus. 

Ross Douthat, author of the 2025 classic “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,” wrote in his May 10 New York Times column that A.I., with its virtual “machine God,” poses the most fundamental questions about our human identity, consciousness, will, and reason. He sees three possible responses.

For many, A.I. is “a win for atheism and a blow against religious ideas of soul and spirit,” with our minds seen as “just computers.” Others think religion is enhanced when the mystery of our personal consciousness becomes more profound and humanity more exceptional. A third attitude is simply becoming more uncertain about everything. 

A March 26 report from the University of Chicago and Northwestern University suggests AI and robotics may be a factor in the 21st-century decline in religious affiliation. These scholars observe that “historically, people have deferred to supernatural agents and religious professionals to solve instrumental problems beyond the scope of human ability” that now “may seem more solvable” through technology. 

Then this unsettling phenomenon. As Religion Unplugged reported on May 21, a Barna Group poll found that 30% of adults, and 34% of practicing Christians, agree “strongly” or “somewhat” that “spiritual advice from artificial intelligence is just as trustworthy as advice from a pastor,” a confidence that reaches 44% with the “Millennial” generation. Naturally, clergy members are far more skeptical. 

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C.S. Lewis predicted AI in That Hideous Strength. N.I.C.E., that’s AI. Fans know what I’m talking about.

AI’s problem is not going to be its inability to do anything, but that it ruins everything. It creates a cultural problem. It sterilizes everything and makes nothing… pic.twitter.com/AIelvWRgdf

— Jeremy Wayne Tate (@JeremyTate41) February 16, 2026

A new style of architecture is rising in the sprawling suburbs of the Sonoran Desert: windowless data centers that hum 24 hours a day and guzzle as much electricity as a midsize city.

As Microsoft and other tech giants expand their footprints in one of the nation’s largest data-center markets, a high-stakes battle is unfolding over how to pay for the massive power-grid upgrades needed to drive the AI revolution. 

Arizona Public Service, the state’s largest utility, sits at the center of the firestorm. APS is proposing a 45% electricity-rate increase for “extra-large energy users,” primarily data centers, and a roughly 14.5% increase for residential customers.

Nearly everyone is unhappy.

Consumer advocates warn the plan would shift the financial risks of the AI build-out to households already struggling with high summer electricity bills and temperatures that often hit triple digits. If the AI boom fizzles or the energy consumption of data centers wanes, they worry residents could be left paying off the infrastructure upgrades years from now.

Read it all.

Phoenix Is a Data-Center Mecca—and Test Case for How to Pay for AI’s Power Needs
State’s largest utility is proposing a 45% electricity-rate increase for data centers and a 14.5% hike for households. No one is happy.https://t.co/m1xMQtoJsq

— Giovanni Staunovo🛢 (@staunovo) June 4, 2026

We have a vaccine that prevents shingles. We have a vaccine that markedly lowers the risk of dementia. We have a vaccine that might even slow aging itself.

Conveniently, these three vaccines are actually just one: the shingles vaccine.

In 2006, the FDA approved the vaccine Zostavax for adults aged 60 and older. For people previously infected with varicella-zoster virus, which causes chickenpox, the infection actually doesn’t end. The sneaky virus lies dormant in nerve tissue and can subsequently spring to life to cause shingles. Zostavax, and its more effective replacement, Shingrix, train your immune system to fight varicella-zoster in case it emerges from hiding to attempt a bodily coup.  

That’s a good thing because you really, really don’t want shingles. About 1 in 3 Americans will get it at some point. Its signature symptoms are a bubbly, blistering rash that traces the infected nerve, coupled with debilitating pain that’s been the subject of many painful-to-read Reddit posts. Sufferers use words and phrases such as “unrelenting,” “white hot,” and “I wish I could rip my arm out!”

So if you’ve had chickenpox in the past, it’s definitely worth your while to get vaccinated. The CDC actually recommends the shot for all adults aged 50 and older and all adults aged 19 and older who have weakened immune systems – because oftentimes you can be infected with varicella-zoster virus even if you’ve never developed chickenpox.

Read it all.

"We have a vaccine that prevents shingles, a vaccine that markedly lowers the risk of dementia, and a vaccine that might even slow aging itself. Conveniently, these three vaccines are actually just one: the shingles vaccine. But fewer than half of eligible Americans have received…

— James Pethokoukis ⏩️⤴️ (@JimPethokoukis) June 2, 2026

Bullets and bombs killed nearly three-quarters of a million people in wars between 2021 and 2024. Many more died from the indirect effects of conflict, such as hunger and disease. Combat deaths in the past four years have been the highest since the end of the cold war. And for what purpose? Not even the leaders who started recent wars can be pleased with the results. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has become a humiliating quagmire for Vladimir Putin. President Donald Trump’s war on Iran has gone badly awry. These two wars of choice exemplify two new battlefield truths. Technology has made it harder for any army to advance on the ground. It has also made it easier for weaker powers, when attacked by stronger ones, to cause havoc.

In a valedictory essay this week, The Economist’s defence editor reflects on how war has changed over the past decade and how it might evolve in the future. The first big shift is that soldiers are more exposed on the battlefield. Sensors and satellites can see them; small, cheap drones can kill them. Armies have to work harder than before to hide, move and survive. Ukraine’s expanding front-line “kill zone”, where soldiers move in small groups and ground robots evacuate casualties and deliver supplies, embodies this shift.

Technology quickly spreads. Israeli soldiers in Lebanon now face the same kind of drones that were pioneered in Ukraine. Iranian missiles are far more accurate than the Iraqi Scuds fired during the first Gulf war. Were China to attempt to invade Taiwan, its landing forces would be met with a blizzard of drones. Air superiority is now harder to achieve and buys soldiers less protection than before, thanks to the new drone-saturated layer of airspace.

Some experts draw the lesson that manoeuvre—attacking an enemy’s soft spots through shock and rapid movement—is no longer possible. But war is a Darwinian environment, driving constant adaptation, and the battlefield is never frozen for long….

Read it all.

In future wars involving long-range drones and missiles, Western civilians will not enjoy the sanctuary they have come to take for granted. The laws and technology of armed conflict have changed https://t.co/MaIcvygB4S

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) May 28, 2026

here’s an expression that artificial intelligence developers in California use to refer to their work: “Building God.” In fact, one of them, Avital Balwit, the chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, just did so in a May 22 essay for The Free Press. The use of the phrase, she wrote, is intended as a form of sardonic humor, acknowledging the awesome power and potential consequences of AI.

But is it a joke, really? The timing of Balwit’s piece was serendipitous, for only three days after it was published, Pope Leo XIV made headlines around the world for writing about artificial intelligence. On Monday, he issued his first encyclical—a major papal declaration on contemporary issues that is intended to guide the Catholic Church—titled Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.

AI, Leo writes, isn’t the first time people have tried to build something godlike. Indeed, he opens his encyclical with the biblical story from Genesis of the Tower of Babel, which was a human attempt to reach “to the heavens.” What was the builders’ motivation? By their own account, “so that we may make a name for ourselves.”

Lest you think his encyclical is a broadside against modern science and human ingenuity, the pope contrasts the tower with another biblical construction operation, the Wall of Jerusalem from the book of Nehemiah, which sought to serve and protect the people of God, who were vulnerable to their enemies. The difference was not in the engineering prowess each project required. It was in their goals. The tower, with its morally dubious purpose, is a cautionary tale of hubris leading to ruin. The wall, by contrast, is a story of promise leading to human flourishing.

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For all the panic surrounding AI, Pope Leo offers a coherent philosophy for how individuals, leaders, and societies should actually live with it, writes Arthur Brooks. https://t.co/ngHpllpYEV

— The Free Press (@TheFP) May 28, 2026