September 23, 2026

04b Theory and Analysis

NASA’s Artemis 2 moonshot was just the ‘opening act’ for America’s return to the moon, space agency chief says– www.space.com

pgnewser April 15, 2026 0

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The head of NASA said the agency’s historic Artemis 2 moon mission, which sent the first astronauts around the moon in over 50 years, is only the beginning of a new lunar “relay race” that will ultimately lead to a crewed landing and moon base in the years ahead.

The U.S. space agency chief Jared Isaacman laid out what NASA is trying to make happen after the Artemis 2 mission, which concluded with a safe splashdown on Friday (April 10), in a livestreamed speech and discussion today (April 14) addressing attendees at the 2026 Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

“It was the opening act in America’s return to the moon, and it was a success,” Isaacman said in the speech, paraphrasing the crew’s previous comments that the moon mission is part of a relay race. The mission will be “remembered as the moment people started to believe again, to believe that America can still take on the near-impossible and deliver extraordinary outcomes,” Isaacman added.

Video. Humanoid robots box and perform at Hong Kong AI and robotics fair– www.euronews.com

pgnewser April 15, 2026 0

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Hong Kong hosted the AI and robotics fair where humanoid robots boxed and played music as part of InnoEX 2026 and the Hong Kong Electronics Fair (Spring Edition), which ran from 13 to 16 April 2026 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.

The innovation-and-technology showcase reflects a broader trend of robots expanding into service and public functions. Unitree unveiled four models with advanced capabilities, including navigation assistance and support in emergencies, with some able to operate fire hoses in hazardous settings.

At the exhibition, robots also performed martial arts style routines and mimicked musical instruments, highlighting their versatility across sectors. Developers say these systems are designed for security, rescue and customer service as well as entertainment.

According to organisers, the fair brought together companies and researchers from across Asia, reflecting strong investment in the sector. Firms including AgiBot, EngineAI, UBTECH and Unitree showcased advanced robots, alongside start-ups and international participants, underlining Hong Kong’s role as a regional hub.

What Trump Can Learn From Reagan About The Strait Of Hormuz– thefederalist.com

pgnewser April 15, 2026 0

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As the United States Navy enforces a full blockade of Iranian ports and conducts minesweeping operations in the Strait of Hormuz, the lessons of 1987 and 1988 are once again proving their worth. I know, because I participated in the Pentagon basement war games that shaped Operation Praying Mantis in 1988, which became America’s largest Navy surface engagement since World War II.

In March 1987, as Iran attacked shipping in the Persian Gulf during the Tanker War, Kuwait sought U.S. protection for its oil tankers. President Ronald Reagan ordered them reflagged under Operation Earnest Will.

Before the first convoy sailed, two-week-long war games tested responses to Iranian provocations. I served on the Green team as a young Reagan appointee, modeling a robust, military-centric reaction. The Blue team pursued a restrained, “proportional response” approach favored by the foreign policy “Blob.”

The outcomes were clear: The Green team’s decisive posture resulted in roughly 50 American dead, wounded, or captured. The Blue team’s tentative path allowed Iran to control escalation, producing some 1,500 American casualties.

Sperm whales may make their own vowel sounds, similar to human language– www.scientificamerican.com

pgnewser April 15, 2026 0

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Sperm whales’ click-based communication system has patterns that echo how human languages use vowels, according to a new study published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

“On the surface, [these vocalizations] sound like this alien, ocean intelligence that has nothing to do with us,” says lead author Gašper Beguš, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, who works with Project CETI, a nonprofit that is dedicated to studying sperm whale communication. “But when you actually look at it closely, you realize, ‘Oh, we’re way more similar.’”

Sperm whales flap “phonic lips” (a structure akin to human vocal cords) in their nose to create clicking sounds. They combine these clicks into rhythmic series called codas, which can vary from whale clan to whale clan. In the past, scientists trying to make sense of their communication have tended to focus on the rhythm of these patterns, almost as if deciphering morse code.

After the Attack on Sam Altman’s Home, Will AI CEOs Go On the Offensive? – Mother Jones– www.motherjones.com

pgnewser April 14, 2026 1

Blurb:

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, takes his seat before a meeting of the White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence Education in the East Room of the White House, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025, in Washington.Alex Brandon/AP

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.

Sam Altman suggested that an investigative story describing him as someone “unconstrained by truth” with a “sociopathic lack of concern” for consequences caused an early Friday attack on his San Francisco home.

Illegals Killed 13,000 Americans, That’s 64% of All Murder Cases – 660,000 Illegals with Criminal Records– gellerreport.com

pgnewser April 14, 2026 0

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The Department of Homeland Security knows of at least 660,000 illegal immigrants in the U.S. with criminal records, including 13,000 convicted killers, nearly 16,000 sex assault convicts and 56,000 involved with dangerous drugs.

Illegal immigrants killed 13,000 Americans in 2024.

The total number of murder cases in the US in 2024 was 20,162.

That’s 64% of all murder cases.

And the Democrats want to abolish ICE.

And all in the name of the Democrats’ desire to win the election

15,000 killers, 20,000 sexual assault convicts, 60,000 robbers among illegal immigrants at large

Thousands of other migrants have been charged but not yet convicted of those and other crimes.

They are part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “non-detained docket,” a list of more than 7 million illegal immigrants that ICE is supposed to be monitoring as they are awaiting final deportation decisions or, in some cases, are fugitives who are refusing to go. (Washington Times)

You Can Soon Buy a $4,370 Humanoid Robot on AliExpress– www.wired.com

pgnewser April 14, 2026 0

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Listing consumer electronics on the internet’s large ecommerce marketplaces is a key step in “democratizing” the products, allowing them to be purchased by anyone with just a click. It has happened to cars (in the United States, you can buy a Hyundai on Amazon), and now it’s happening to humanoid robots.

The Chinese manufacturer Unitree Robotics, among the most active robot-makers in the field, is preparing to bring its most affordable model, the Unitree R1, to international markets through Alibaba Group’s marketplace. According to reports in The South China Morning Post, the rollout will initially cover North America, Japan, Singapore, and Europe. There’s no exact on-sale date for the robots yet, but the Post report says it will show up as soon as this week.

This is not the first time Unitree has used AliExpress as a global storefront. The company’s G1 model, the more powerful and more expensive predecessor to the R1, is already listed at just under $19,000.

Universe is expanding faster than expected: Scientists struggle to explain cosmic acceleration |– timesofindia.indiatimes.com

pgnewser April 14, 2026 0

Universe is expanding faster than expected: Scientists struggle to explain cosmic acceleration |– timesofindia.indiatimes.com
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Not only is the Universe expanding, but its expansion is actually happening at a speed higher than was thought possible until recently. For many years now, physicists have been trying to establish the speed of galaxy movement through the Hubble constant. But the different measurement results have posed a dilemma for modern physics, and it seems like there is an inconsistency somewhere within our universe. The problem that lies before physicists is commonly known as the “Hubble tension” problem, and, despite recent discoveries and more detailed observations, it still lacks explanation.

Europe Is Getting Poorer, and Some Think Its Poverty Spikes Could Spark Revolution– www.cbn.com

pgnewser April 14, 2026 0

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FRANKFURT, Germany – One of the major reasons for the creation of the European Union was to make Europeans wealthier. Along the way, however, something went seriously wrong.

Europeans are becoming poorer compared to Americans, who are becoming richer.

One in five Germans now faces the risk of imminent poverty in what has long been one of the world’s wealthiest nations.

In France, the poverty rate has hit a 30-year high.

Why the U.S. is blockading the Strait of Hormuz and NATO doesn’t want in – National– globalnews.ca

pgnewser April 14, 2026 0

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The United States military issued a warning Monday that it will be enforcing a blockade of Iranian ports on the Gulf of Oman — east of the Strait of Hormuz — as ceasefire negotiations with Iran broke down over the weekend, U.S. Central Command said in a notice to seafarers.

The notice said the blockade would begin at 10 a.m. eastern, following a proclamation from U.S. President Donald Trump. The Gulf of Oman is a strategic body of water in the Arabian Sea, which lies just east of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has been blocking to most international shipping traffic for weeks.

“The blockade will be enforced impartially against vessels of all nations entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas, including all Iranian ports on the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman,” the U.S. military notice said.

A Deep Neural Network Approach for Random Networks with Sparse Nodal Attributes and Complex Nodal Heterogeneity– arxiv.org

pgnewser April 14, 2026 1

A Deep Neural Network Approach for Random Networks with Sparse Nodal Attributes and Complex Nodal Heterogeneity– arxiv.org
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arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Why opinion on AI is so divided– www.technologyreview.com

pgnewser April 14, 2026 0

Why opinion on AI is so divided– www.technologyreview.com
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In an industry that doesn’t stand still, Stanford’s AI Index, an annual roundup of key results and trends, is a chance to take a breath. (It’s a marathon, not a sprint, after all.)

This year’s report, which dropped today, is full of striking stats. A lot of the value comes from having numbers to back up gut feelings you might already have, such as the sense that the US is gunning harder for AI than everyone else: It hosts 5,427 data centers (and counting). That’s more than 10 times as many as any other country.

There’s also a reminder that the hardware supply chain the AI industry relies on has some major choke points. Here’s perhaps the most remarkable fact: “A single company, TSMC, fabricates almost every leading AI chip, making the global AI hardware supply chain dependent on one foundry in Taiwan.” One foundry! That’s just wild.

Scientists Push to Grow ‘Brainless’ Human Clones for Wealthy Elites– slaynews.com

pgnewser April 13, 2026 0

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A chilling new report is raising fresh alarm over how far elite-backed science may be willing to go, revealing that some researchers are openly discussing the possibility of growing “brainless” human body clones for future use by wealthy individuals who are aging or dying.

The idea sounds like dystopian fiction.

However, according to a new investigation, a billionaire-backed startup has been tied to discussions about creating non-sentient replacement bodies, human clones without functioning brains, that could one day serve as vessels for brain transplants.

AI Will Be Met With Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It– www.thealgorithmicbridge.com

pgnewser April 13, 2026 0

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The first thing you learn about a loom is that it’s easy to break.

The shuttle runs along a track that warps with humidity. The heddles hang from cords that fray. The reed is a row of thin metal strips, bent by hand, that bend back just as easily. The warp beam cracks if you over-tighten it. The treadles loosen at the joints. The breast beam, the cloth roller, the ratchet and pawl, the lease sticks, the castle; the whole contraption is wood and string held together by tension. It’s a piece of ingenuity and craftsmanship, but one as delicate as the clothes it manifests out of wild plant fibers. It is, also, the foundational tool of an entire industry, textiles, that has kept its relevance to our days of heavy machinery, factories, energy facilities, and datacenters.

Milgram’s electric shock experiment: The test that exposed dark side of human obedience to authority |– timesofindia.indiatimes.com

pgnewser April 13, 2026 0

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Stanley Milgram’s 1961–62 Yale University experiment tested obedience, where participants believed they delivered painful electric shocks to others under authority.

In the early 1960s, a deceptively simple question took shape inside a laboratory at Yale University: how far would an ordinary person go if instructed by an authority figure to harm someone else? The answer, offered by psychologist Stanley Milgram, would become one of the most cited, and most contested, findings in modern psychology.Milgram’s obedience experiments, conducted between 1961 and 1962, did not begin as abstract inquiry. They were shaped by the aftermath of the Holocaust and, more specifically, by the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who defended his role in organising the logistics of the mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps, a central part of the Nazi programme of systematic mass murder, by claiming he had been “just following orders.” In his 1974 book Obedience to Authority, Stanley Milgram framed the question directly: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”

AI Is Exposing The Limits Of Economics– thefederalist.com

pgnewser April 7, 2026 1

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There is a particular pleasure in watching a scholar dismantle the monument he has spent a career admiring. Tyler Cowen named his blog after the Marginal Revolution; he has spent decades explicating, celebrating, and applying marginalist thinking to every aspect of modern life. In Cowen’s compact and astringent book, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution, he turns to survey the edifice and finds it, if not crumbling, then visibly retreating from the frontier where the real intellectual work gets done. The result is one of the more honest performances in recent economic writing: a love letter that doubles as an elegy, delivered without sentimentality.

The book’s method is itself something of a marginalist exercise. Rather than mounting a frontal assault on large questions about the future of economics, Cowen begins at the margin, with the history of a single idea, the doctrine that value is determined not by the total utility of a good but by the utility of an additional unit of it. Many readers arrive at this book knowing that definition. Cowen’s first service is to show how much that belief has concealed. Marginalism is not one thing but several: There is intuitive marginalism, tautological marginalism, engineering marginalism, and social marginalism. The further one presses into the concept, the more it ramifies. Even the ideas we think we understand resist the grip that holds them.

Final Thought – Shifting Tones

pgnewser April 2, 2026 0

Originally published March 27, 2026 for our weekly Issue of Mindful Intelligence Advisor.  Subscribe to get weekly issues. By Paul Gordon…

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The U.S. Military Risks Letting Contractors Define How It Sees the Battlefield– warontherocks.com

pgnewser March 31, 2026 0

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In the 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove, an emergency war plan called “Plan R” allows an unhinged U.S. Air Force commander, Jack Ripper, to launch a nuclear strike without presidential authorization. Once the president, the joint chiefs, and the Soviet ambassador convene in the war room, the bombers are already airborne. Only Ripper knows the three-letter prefix needed to recall them, until his aide, Lionel Mandrake, reconstructs it from Ripper’s notes. Although nearly all planes are turned back, one damaged B-52 cannot receive the recall message and successfully drops its bomb, triggering the Soviets’ secret doomsday machine and bringing about global destruction.

The film’s lesson is not only about nuclear weapons, but also about what happens when critical systems are not governed effectively.

How hacked surveillance cameras are fueling assassinations in Iran– www.scientificamerican.com

pgnewser March 26, 2026 0

Blurb:

Since a joint U.S.-Israeli airstrike killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28, scores of Iranian senior officials have also been killed. According to the Associated Press, two anonymous sources—an intelligence official and a person briefed on the operation—said that hacked Iranian surveillance cameras helped plan the initial attack.

Camera hacking has become a recurring feature of modern warfare. Hamas hacked Israeli cameras before the October 7, 2023, attack; Russia has hacked them in Ukraine, and Iran has hacked them in Israel. But the cameras in question are not exotic spy technology. They’re often unremarkable, much like millions of other devices around the world.

The Dems Are Now Legislative Terrorists. What Should the GOP Do Now?– townhall.com

pgnewser March 26, 2026 0

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The biggest argument against democracy is five minutes with the average voter. The Democratic Party might be making that argument stronger. I’ve never seen a party push to eliminate elections and voting the way Democrats have in this fight over Department of Homeland Security funding.

Yes, this stubbornness over funding a key agency that’s been shut down since Presidents’ Day weekend is more about anti-Trump hysteria, but it also reflects the Democrats’ long-term goal of defunding ICE. Republicans understand this — that’s why they funded the agency through 2029 during the first reconciliation.

With TSA agents quitting due to lack of paychecks, the Democrats believe hurting regular people to get their way will work. We’re dealing with legislative terrorists. I was hesitant about ending the filibuster, but I am now leaning entirely toward it because Democrats want unrealistic concessions, and shutting down DHS over deportation disputes isn’t a valid argument.