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Silicon Valley bets big on ‘environments’ to train AI agents

For years, Big Tech CEOs have touted visions of AI agents that can autonomously use software applications to complete tasks for people. But take today’s consumer AI agents out for a spin, whether it’s OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent or Perplexity’s Comet, and you’ll quickly realize how limited the technology still is. Making AI agents more robust may take a new set of techniques that the industry is still discovering. One of those techniques is carefully simulating workspaces where agents can be trained

Hackers left empty-handed after massive NPM supply-chain attack

The largest supply-chain compromise in the history of the NPM ecosystem has impacted roughly 10% of all cloud environments, but the attacker made little profit off it. The attack occurred earlier this week after maintainer Josh Junon (qix) fell for a password reset phishing lure and compromised multiple highly popular NPM packages, among them chalk and degub-js, that cumulatively have more than 2.6 billion weekly downloads. After gaining access to Junon’s account, the attackers pushed maliciou

Here’s Apple Vision Pro’s new Jupiter Environment

Apple revealed a new Environment for Apple Vision Pro, Jupiter, during WWDC25. With today’s release of the visionOS 26 Release Candidate, we finally have our first look at it. One of Apple Vision Pro‘s most compelling features is Environments, which are expansive, photorealistic, 3D scenes of beautiful locations around the world, or even outside of it. Alongside visionOS 26, releasing on September 15th, is a new Jupiter Environment. Here is how Apple describes it: This is the view from Amalthe

The green steel firms looking to revive US steelmaking

The green steel firms looking to revive US steelmaking 57 minutes ago Share Save Chris Baraniuk Technology Reporter Share Save Boston Metal Making steel using electricity is less carbon intensive than traditional methods An activity centre for babies and toddlers, an Indian restaurant, an indoor golf centre – and a mini experimental steel plant. These businesses are among those that make up a small retail and industrial estate in the city of Woburn, Massachusetts. "People are dropping off the

SpaceX gets a green light to more than double its Florida launches

The world’s most-flown rocket may start flying even more. U.S. regulators have completed a key environmental review that paves the way for SpaceX to more than double the number of Falcon 9 launches from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. In addition to the annual launch increase from 50 launches to up to 120, the Federal Aviation Administration’s environmental review also approved a new on-site landing zone that could accommodate up to 34 booster landings per year. These boosters ar

Scientists Pinpoint Cause of Mysterious Electrical Surges on Satellites

In 1994, two Canadian TV satellites failed within mere hours of each other. The pair was in a geostationary orbit when a major solar storm hit, resulting in electrostatic discharges that disabled their control electronics. Anik E1 and E2 are just one example of the effects of electric charge buildup on satellites, known as spacecraft environment discharge. New findings show a direct correlation between a spacecraft’s electric discharge and peaks in the flux of electrons in space, identifying hu

What’s the Best Hair Straightener for You? It Depends (2025)

Compare Our Top 10 Hair Straighteners Other Straighteners We Tried Photograph: Kat Merck Paul Mitchell Neuro Style+ for $150: The latest in Paul Mitchell’s lineup of otherwise standout hair straighteners, this ceramic iron with Paul Mitchell’s new NeutraHeat temperature-regulating technology goes up to 450 degrees Fahrenheit and has dual voltage for travel. However, the body feels weirdly cheap and lightweight compared with older Paul Mitchell models, it took over a minute to heat up, and it

HBO launches new Harry Potter immersive environment on Apple Vision Pro

HBO Max has been a strong supporter of Apple Vision Pro from the start, offering a robust native app for visionOS with a Game of Thrones immersive environment. Today, HBO has announced an update to the visionOS app with an all-new environment: Hogwarts Great Hall. The Hogwarts Great Hall immersive environment will be familiar to Harry Potter fans, as it’s one of the most iconic rooms at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the series. The environment on Apple Vision Pro offers se

FieldAI raises $405M to build universal robot brains

FieldAI, an Irvine, California-based, has raised $405 million across multiple previously undisclosed rounds to develop what it calls “foundational embodied AI models” — essentially robot brains designed to help everything from humanoids to quadrupeds to self-driving cars adapt to new environments. The company announced the funding Wednesday; the most recent round raised $314 million in August and was co-led by Bezos Expedition, Prysm and Temasek. FieldAI’s other backers include Khosla Ventures,

The Mandarin Strikes In Hasbro’s Newest Marvel Legends Reveal

The Mandarin is one of Iron Man’s oldest foes, with a history in the comics as long as it is fraught. But while the character has been adapted multiple times over the course of the MCU—first more controversially with Ben Kingsley’s Trevor Slattery character in Iron Man 3, then as Tony Leung’s Xu Wenwu in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings—and earned himself a few action figures from Hasbro inspired by those appearances along the way, the toymaker has yet to bring a comics version of the v

Trump wants to clean up the space industry’s red tape: Here’s who wins

During a press conference in late 2024, President Donald Trump vowed to “slash massive numbers of job-killing regulations” in his second term and pledged to eliminate 10 old rules for every new one. Now, he’s bringing that deregulation drive to commercial space, ordering federal agencies to streamline launch licensing, fast-track spaceport development, and clear out the Federal Aviation Administration’s industry advisory board. “Inefficient permitting processes discourage investment and innova

Private Spaceflight Enters the Wild West as Trump Slashes Regulations

President Donald Trump is calling for an ease of regulations for commercial spaceflight and streamlining licensing for rocket launches and reentries. The move highly favors companies like SpaceX but could have negative repercussions on environmental habitats surrounding launchpads. On Wednesday, August 13, Trump signed an executive order intended to bolster the spaceflight industry and increase the overall commercial launch cadence. In it, Trump calls on Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who

Trump orders cull of regulations governing commercial rocket launches

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday directing government agencies to "eliminate or expedite" environmental reviews for commercial launch and reentry licenses. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), part of the Department of Transportation (DOT), grants licenses for commercial launch and reentry operations. The FAA is charged with ensuring launch and reentries don't endanger the public, comply with environmental laws, and comport with US national interests. The drive

Why Donald Trump’s environmental data purge is so much worse this time

is a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home , a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Now that we’re about halfway into the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, we can take stock of his administration’s destruction of online environmental resources. It’s wors

Environmentalist Lawsuit Halts Construction of Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’

Progress on Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” ground to a halt on Thursday, August 7, when a federal judge ordered a two-week ban on construction. The ruling follows a hearing in a lawsuit by environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians. The plaintiffs—Earthjustice, the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Everglades, and the Miccosukee—allege that hasty construction of the facility in the Everglades unlawfully moved forward without public input or an environmental impact st

Software Rot

Software rot is generally thought of as degradation of software due to a changing environment. For example, a program written a decade ago may no longer work with new versions of the libraries it depends on because some of them have changed without retaining backwards compatibility. This kind of thinking encourages a culture where software becomes obsolete unless it is constantly maintained. A better approach might be to talk about the reliability of the environment the software depends on. Wou

Best Vitamins and Supplements for Women in 2025

Nature Made makes some of the most affordable vitamins available. The Nature Made women's multivitamin includes 23 nutrients essential for women, including 100% of the recommended daily value of iron. Iron is one of the most common deficiencies in women, especially when pregnant or menstruating. With Nature Made, you get over the recommended value of vitamin C, D3 and E, as well as minerals zinc, copper and chromium. So if you are not deficient in those areas, you could get too much of them. Co

Genie 3: A new frontier for world models

Given a text prompt, Genie 3 can generate dynamic worlds that you can navigate in real time at 24 frames per second, retaining consistency for a few minutes at a resolution of 720p. Towards world simulation At Google DeepMind, we have been pioneering research in simulated environments for over a decade, from training agents to master real-time strategy games to developing simulated environments for open-ended learning and robotics. This work motivated our development of world models, which are

New Plague Linux malware stealthily maintains SSH access

A newly discovered Linux malware, which has evaded detection for over a year, allows attackers to gain persistent SSH access and bypass authentication on compromised systems. Nextron Systems security researchers, who identified the malware and dubbed it "Plague," describe it as a malicious Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) that uses layered obfuscation techniques and environment tampering to avoid detection by traditional security tools. This malware features anti-debugging capabilities to

How much pollution does AI create? Mistral breaks it down

What just happened? Mistral AI, a Paris-based venture focused on developing open-weight, open-source large language models, is now contributing to the AI discourse with a comprehensive lifecycle analysis of one of its models – guided by the same principles of openness that define its work. Mistral recently published an analysis of the environmental impact of one of its large language models. As chatbots and other AI-powered technologies become increasingly embedded in the global economy, Mistra

Bonkers NASA Mission Aims to Drop Six Helicopters Onto Mars From Space

Defense tech company AeroVironment and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have shown off a wild concept for deploying six helicopters above the surface of Mars to scout for water and possible human landing sites. The concept, dubbed "Skyfall," builds on NASA's extremely successful and revolutionary Ingenuity Mars helicopter, which became the first manmade object to achieve powered flight on another planet in 2021. It flew a whopping 72 times over three years, vastly exceeding expectations. AeroV

Mistral’s new “environmental audit” shows how much AI is hurting the planet

Despite concerns over the environmental impacts of AI models, it's surprisingly hard to find precise, reliable data on the CO 2 emissions and water use for many major large language models. French model-maker Mistral is seeking to fix that this week, releasing details from what it calls a first-of-its-kind environmental audit "to quantify the environmental impacts of our LLMs." The results, which are broadly in line with estimates from previous scholarly work, suggest the environmental harm of

The VTuber world is in crisis over ‘owed’ donations

is a reporter who covers the business, culture, and communities of video games, with a focus on marginalized gamers and the quirky, horny culture of video game communities. On July 21st, 6,669-year-old demon queen Ironmouse, posted an 11-minute video explaining that she is leaving her talent management agency, VShojo. Ironmouse is a VTuber, or “virtual YouTuber” — a type of a streamer who doesn’t typically show their human face, instead creating elaborate digital personas to create content. “I

Mistral reports on the environmental impact of LLMs

At Mistral AI, our mission is to bring artificial intelligence in everyone’s hands. For this purpose, we have consistently advocated for openness in AI, with a unique focus on empowering organizations that want to own their AI future. Today, as AI becomes increasingly integrated into every layer of our economy, it is crucial for developers, policymakers, enterprises, governments and citizens to better understand the environmental footprint of this transformative technology. At Mistral AI, we be

RIP Ozzy Osbourne, Music Legend and Master of the Macabre

Ozzy Osbourne, famed heavy metal singer, has died at the age of 76—just a few weeks after performing in Black Sabbath’s last official concert. He also enjoyed a robust solo career as well as fame that went beyond music. That included stints as a reality TV superstar thanks to MTV’s hit series The Osbournes, but also as a touchstone figure for fans who revered his notorious antics over the years as “the Prince of Darkness.” While many obituaries will go out today highlighting Osbourne’s many con

Show HN: Am-I-vibing, detect agentic coding environments

Detect agentic coding environments and AI assistant tools. This library allows CLI tools and Node apps to detect when they're being executed by AI agents. This enables them to adapt by, for example, providing different output formats or logs. Installation Install as library: npm install am-i-vibing Run as CLI tool: npx am-i-vibing import { detectAgenticEnvironment } from "am-i-vibing" ; const result = detectAgenticEnvironment ( ) ; console . log ( `Detected: ${ result . name } ( ${ result

Why It’s Taking LA So Long to Rebuild After the Wildfires

This story originally appeared on Vox and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In the wake of the record-breaking wildfires in Los Angeles in January—some of the most expensive and destructive blazes in history—one of the first things California governor Gavin Newsom did was to sign an executive order suspending environmental rules around rebuilding. The idea was that by waiving permitting regulations and reviews under the California Coastal Act and the California Environmental Quality A

EPA says it will eliminate its scientific research arm

The Environmental Protection Agency said on Friday that it would eliminate its scientific research arm and begin firing hundreds of chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists, after denying for months that it intended to do so. The move underscores how the Trump administration is forging ahead with efforts to slash the federal work force and dismantle federal agencies after the Supreme Court allowed these plans to proceed while legal challenges unfold. Government scientists have b