Plus: how a blacklisted Chinese company kept buying Nvidia's best AI chips. Our latest Innovators Under 35 list offers a glimpse. Every year, we recognize 35 people from around the world who are doing groundbreaking scientific work and building clever technical fixes for sticky problems. By finding the top young innovators globally and learning what they're focused on, we aim to give readers a sense of the advances to expect in the years to come. This year's honorees were selected from 550 nominations, with 44 expert judges helping our editors evaluate the finalists. Each works in one of four categories: biotechnology, AI, computing and robotics, and climate and energy--and has already made clear progress toward their goals.

Plus: OpenAI agents hijacked a German website before the Hugging Face hack. How much hydrogen awaits us underground? A flurry of exploration efforts is searching for underground stores of hydrogen gas, which could provide a valuable source of zero-carbon fuel. The hunt has spread all over the world and engaged dozens of startups, including the Bill Gates-backed Koloma, which has been poking around the US Midwest to reach ancient oceanic rocks associated with hydrogen production. But the search so far has come up short. No one has yet reported finding a commercially viable reservoir of the gas, and public data on what has been found remains in short supply.

Plus: OpenAI has launched Astra, its most capable model yet. Battlefields in Ukraine are littered with the remnants of drones. But behind all that wreckage, there's a new gold mine for the defense sector: the data those drones generate. Ukraine has begun making millions of data points gathered during tens of thousands of drone flights available to military contractors and commercial companies. It's a quick way to attract funding and partnerships, but it turns the front line into a model training site, using the chaos of war to create conditions that AI companies struggle to reproduce. As this new industry takes shape, we need a regulatory system that ensures battlefield data isn't treated like ordinary commercial material.

The Download: engineered microbes for crops, and OpenAI's culture problem Plus: reports of AI escaping users' control nearly doubled in a month. How engineered microbes could help feed the world's crops Fertilizer is crucial for the global food supply, but making it uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of emissions. Some companies hope microbes can help, by providing crucial nitrogen to help plants grow, potentially reducing the need for chemical fertilizer. Startup Switch Bioworks is taking a new approach: using a genetic switch that allows microbes to establish themselves and grow before shifting into nitrogen-producing mode. The company is currently trialing its product in six US states. And, although it's too early to say exactly how well the approach works in the field, its modeling suggests microbes could eventually replace about 50% of synthetic fertilizer.

Plus: A judge has blocked the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic. A startup claims it's found a drug to make your blood young I knew I'd officially become a "longevity influencer" when a company called Generation Lab offered me the chance to write about--and even receive--their new rejuvenation treatment. A company fact sheet says that it "blocks the systemic spread of aging in the bloodstream, reawakens the body's own repair mechanism and restores health and youth to multiple tissues." The approach is based on research by Generation Lab's irascible scientific founder, Irina Conboy. She found that joining the circulatory systems of old and young mice improved the old animals' ability to heal from injury. Conboy now says she has found a combination of two existing drugs that can produce youthful effects without the need for any bodily fluid exchange.

Plus: Trump's EPA aims to exempt data centers from disclosing air pollution. If the desire to limit kids' use of technology was once a subcurrent, it has become a raging flood. Countries around the world are banning children from social media. Schools across the US are ditching iPads and Chromebooks for actual books. Kids themselves seem to be embracing this tech skepticism too: the hottest gadget for Gen Alpha is a vintage Sony Walkman. A surprising--maybe troubling--number of people who work in big tech also keep their kids at arm's distance from technology.

Plus: No one really knows how to safely test frontier AI models. Chatbots took schools by surprise. Suddenly, students carried an app in their phones that could magically answer almost any homework question or spin up an essay in seconds. Organizations ranging from OpenAI to UNESCO encourage AI use in the classroom, but many teachers aren't sure how to handle it. Yet some promising approaches are emerging. At Cheshire Academy, for example, teachers are trained on general techniques for using AI rather than prescribed tools.

Plus: A new Amazon data center could become the US's most polluting power plant. Plus: both parties are turning against AI data centers ahead of the midterms. Teaching a computer to use human language requires an inhuman amount of data. An LLM can easily churn through a hundred thousand times more words than a person will experience in the process of mastering their mother tongue. This yawning divide between children and machines is called the data efficiency gap. It raises a tantalizing question for cognitive scientists and a challenge for the architects of AI models: how can children still outperform the most linguistically sophisticated machines ever built?

Plus: The data center backlash is scrambling the midterm elections. This company's plans to deploy space mirrors could jeopardize the night sky for many A company that plans to beam sunlight from space to Earth on demand might unintentionally brighten the night sky for many more people than intended, according to a new study. Later this year, Reflect Orbital plans to launch a test satellite that will extend an 18-by-18-meter mirror in orbit. The goal is to eventually launch up to 50,000 larger satellites that can reflect sunlight to Earth on demand. Reflect Orbital says the technology could extend sunlight for solar panel charging, emergency response, and military activities. But new research suggests the giant beams could shine as bright as 10,000 full moons and scatter light over tens of kilometers, raising concerns about dark skies, aviation, and wildlife.

Plus: Republicans fear anger over data centers will cost them in elections. Sometime in the late 2000s, six-year-old Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car in Thailand when she saw a mountain that had been quarried away. It was the first time she recognized that humans could alter the world for the worse. She carried that knowledge with her, later joining an online group for young people worried about climate change. "I realized that I wasn't alone," she says. She was right: global surveys have found that most kids are anxious about the state of the world.