Interpol coordinated law enforcement from 21 countries and private cybersecurity firms including Team Cymru, Kaspersky, Group-IB, and Fortinet in Operation Serengeti III, running from June 29 to August 31. The effort led to 1,462 arrests, the dismantling of 10,909 malicious networks, and recovery of over $105 million in illicit funds, while identifying nearly 66,000 victims with estimated losses exceeding $385 million. Notable actions included fraud ring takedowns in Uganda, illegal crypto-mining seizures in Angola, and a phishing arrest in Nigeria tied to 2.1 million harvested email addresses.
bleepingcomputer.com
· 2026-10-22
Tomás Villalón Jr., an MIT-trained materials science engineer, cofounded Phoenix Tailings in 2019 after working at MIT spinoff Boston Metal on decarbonizing steelmaking. The company has developed a process to extract rare earth metals from mining waste rather than through conventional mining.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-10-20
A commentary published in Nature calls for governments to attach water-safeguard requirements directly to licences granted for critical-mineral extraction. The authors argue that mining approvals currently proceed with insufficient attention to water use and contamination risks in surrounding communities and ecosystems.
nature.com
· 2026-10-20
Katie Zacharia, who briefly served as White House press secretary before being fired, was named in a June 24 press release as joining the advisory board of NRED Intelligent Mining alongside former DHS secretary Kristi Noem. Zacharia now says the announcement was fake and never consented to it, with an associate claiming the release was issued without her approval even though discussions about her joining had occurred.
wired.com
· 2026-10-16
Giraffe Bio, a mining biotech startup, has raised a $6.4 million seed round led by Orion Industrial Ventures, with BHP Ventures, Twynam, Air Capital, and Baruch Future Ventures also participating. The company says its mine-specific chemical compounds, produced by engineered microbes in bioreactors, can help mining operations recover up to 5% more copper from heap leaches than conventional methods.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-13
Reddit user markpronkin bought a rusty, untested nine-GPU crypto mining rig found in a damp garage for about $35 (3,000 rubles) after the seller refused a pre-purchase test. The rig's nine Nvidia P106-100 cards, each with 6GB of GDDR5, provided 54GB of combined VRAM and worked on the first attempt, running Alibaba's 35-billion-parameter Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model in Ollama at over 30 tokens per second.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-12
Germany is set to finish a decades-long conversion of former lignite mines in Lusatia into Europe's largest artificial lake landscape, spanning 14,000 hectares. Lake Sedlitz, the final lake in the network, will open for swimming and boating later this month, following the flooding of pits that began with Lake Senftenberg in 1967. The region, located between Berlin and Dresden, previously had few natural lakes due to its permeable sand and gravel soil.
euronews.com
· 2026-10-09
Germany's Lusatian Lakeland, located between Berlin and Dresden across Brandenburg and Saxony, now comprises 23 artificial lakes covering roughly 14,000 hectares, created by flooding former open-cast lignite mines. The transformation began in 1967 with Lake Senftenberg, which was fully flooded by 1972 and opened to the public in 1973, and has continued for decades using groundwater and water diverted from rivers. Mining-rehabilitation company LMBV says five of the lakes are now linked into a connected waterway, with further integration planned.
timesofindia.indiatimes.com
· 2026-10-09
Asteroid-mining startup AstroForge has built an in-house AI system called Solo, using a transformer model to autonomously operate spacecraft without relying on large ground control teams. The company plans to test this system on its first autonomous mission in 2027, launching aboard Stoke Space's debut rocket in a NASA-backed flight that will collect solar data.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-22
Nvidia-backed space data center startup Starcloud says it will include Bitcoin mining ASICs on its Starcloud-2 satellite, set to launch later this year, according to CEO Philip Johnston. The company was originally founded to move AI data centers into orbit, leveraging constant solar power and space-based cooling, but is now adding crypto mining as a secondary use of that energy.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-22
Nvidia-backed startup Starcloud says it will fly dedicated Bitcoin mining hardware on its second satellite, Starcloud-2, targeting an early 2027 launch. CEO Philip Johnston argues that ASIC chips are far cheaper per kilowatt than GPUs, and that abundant orbital solar power could make space mining economically appealing, following the company's earlier Starcloud-1 test that put an Nvidia H100 GPU into orbit.
techspot.com
· 2026-09-22
FutureBit, maker of the Apollo ASIC miners, released HashFly, a browser-based proof of concept that simulates part of a fruit fly's neural connectome—recently mapped and shared by Google—to process simplified Bitcoin-style hashing tasks. The demo uses simulated photoreceptor and PPL101 neurons to check double-SHA-256 targets, with adjustable difficulty levels far below real Bitcoin mining complexity.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-20
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