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Tech News
SpaceX announced plans to construct a 125,000-acre launch facility in Louisiana, its largest to date, with construction starting next year. Named Starbase Louisiana, the site aims to support thousands of annual Starship missions to orbit, the Moon and Mars, with the first launch targeted for 2029. The project is expected to directly create over 3,000 jobs and generate more than 8,100 additional indirect jobs in the region.
Amazon announced it will close AWS Mechanical Turk, its 21-year-old crowdsourced task platform, effective September 30, 2026. The service once connected over 500,000 workers to small paid digital tasks like data labeling and transcription, work Jeff Bezos called 'artificial artificial intelligence.' Amazon said the closure follows an internal review of its programs and tools.
Following up on his earlier SELF executable format that stores a program as a SQLite database, the author released self-httpd, a proof-of-concept web server whose code, website, routes, and visitor logs all live in a single SQLite file. The program reads its own instructions and writes new state, such as button-press logs, back into that same file transactionally, eliminating the need for separate folders like /var, /tmp, or /home.
Chris Malone, who led OpenAI's data center strategy after joining from Meta and Google in March 2024, has left the company. OpenAI confirmed it recently restructured its infrastructure organization, shifting oversight so that Malone no longer reported to President Greg Brockman but instead to VP Sachin Katti before his exit. The company says several other executives, including Uday Ruddarraju, Brent Mayo and Spas Lazarov, remain in charge of its data center efforts.
Singer Dolly Parton has died at age 80, remembered for her philanthropic contributions to science alongside her music career. She provided early funding for Moderna's vaccine research and publicly received her own COVID-19 vaccination to counter public hesitancy, while her Imagination Library program continues distributing over three million books monthly to children worldwide.
A Nature.com page titled 'The best-managed industrial waste in history' was published, but the site returned only a browser-compatibility notice instead of the actual article content. No substantive details about the waste management case being discussed were available for review.
A study of more than 70,000 people published in Nature Medicine found that those who received the current Shingrix shingles vaccine, rather than an older formulation, had a reduced risk of heart disease and heart failure. Researchers compared recipients of the two vaccine types rather than vaccinated versus unvaccinated people, a design meant to avoid the bias seen in earlier studies where healthier people were more likely to get vaccinated.
Nature.com published a compilation summarizing five notable developments in nuclear-power research, though the underlying content was inaccessible due to browser compatibility restrictions. The page redirected visitors to a stripped-down, styleless version of the site rather than displaying the actual research summaries.
Scientists led by Wu and colleagues determined eight structural snapshots of UDP-glucose ceramide glucosyltransferase (UGCG), the enzyme that initiates production of nearly all glycosphingolipids in cells. The structures, published in Nature, expose a previously unknown catalytic mechanism and show how existing drugs bind and inhibit the enzyme. They also uncovered a regulatory 'brake' element unique to primate versions of UGCG.
New reactor designs, including smaller modular units, are being developed to make nuclear fission a more flexible and reliable source of carbon-free electricity. This shift comes after decades in which nuclear power failed to deliver on early promises of cheap, abundant energy following its transition from wartime use to civilian power generation.
Researchers and policymakers are advancing new approaches to nuclear waste disposal, including deep geological repositories and advanced reprocessing techniques, as governments seek durable solutions for spent fuel that has accumulated for decades. The effort comes amid renewed global interest in nuclear power as a low-carbon energy source.
Nature Futures ran a science-fiction interview piece imagining Sam Morten, a war veteran, and Eli, a distinct personality sharing his body, as they navigate a court case seeking legal recognition for Eli as a separate entity. The narrative unfolds over coffee and ice cream, contrasting Sam's guarded demeanor with Eli's childlike openness, while touching on the strain the situation placed on Sam's marriage.