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.

Plus: OpenAI has paused some model work over safety concerns. AI's recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all The AI industry's boldest promise right now is that AI will soon improve itself, with almost no need for human oversight. But a new study suggests it might take a while to get there. Researchers found that AI agents still can't conduct open-ended AI research--free-form investigations with no clear-cut answers that require the judgment and creativity needed to make genuine breakthroughs. The big question now is how crucial open-ended research is to recursive self-improvement--and whether AI systems can grind their way there without it, simply by improving on narrower tasks. Find out why the results may temper claims that recursive self-improvement is on the horizon .

The Download: how people really use AI, and Flock's design choices Plus: a child privacy trial starting today could change Meta forever. We still don't know how people are really using AI AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using their products. But they only release the data they want us to see, AI researchers say, and there's no independent source to corroborate it. A new research project called the AI Observatory aims to fill in the gap. Its analysis shows many more sensitive behaviors than are captured in reports from major AI companies, which focus more on work than on personal use. The researchers also found significant differences between models.

Plus: The US plans to force partners to pick sides in the AI race. What happens when a kid's robot best friend dies? When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him how to calm down when he was anxious or mad. Six years later, she mostly watches him play Minecraft and talks to him about his stuffed animals. Moxie is a robot--a 15-inch-tall device that looks a bit like a blue, legless astronaut. It belongs to a subset of robots designed to assist neurodivergent children by providing connection and helping kids practice social skills usually learned from therapists.

Plus: Ukrainian drones defeated US forces in a military exercise. The police-tech giant Flock is changing officers' access to its nationwide network of license plate readers. The move comes amid a backlash over mass surveillance and reports of officers using the technology to stalk and harass current or former romantic partners. To combat that, the company will require them to enter a criminal case number before searching its database and expand automated auditing of suspicious searches. But because Flock won't verify those case numbers, officers could still find ways around the safeguards. Here's what Flock is changing--and where loopholes remain .

Plus: China-linked hackers have hit Taiwan in an "unprecedented" AI attack How we picked 35 of the world's top young scientists and engineers On September 8, will reveal its 2026 list of Innovators Under 35, recognizing 35 young 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 in their work, we aim to give readers a sense of what advances to expect in the years to come. As a newsroom, we also use this exercise to help us spot rising talent and get to know some of the best early-career researchers in the fields that we cover. This year, we received 550 nominations. Find out how we whittled them down to 35 of the young innovators shaping the future of technology, and check out last year's list. How the "censorship-industrial complex" is changing the internet and US policy I first heard the term "censorship-industrial complex" on April 15, 2025.

Plus: Nvidia has secured $500 billion from Wall Street for AI infrastructure. Nine years after Google researchers introduced the transformer, this family of neural networks has become the engine inside every major large language model. But transformers are starting to show their age. As LLMs get bigger and better, transformers have become a bottleneck. Their dense attention mechanism becomes increasingly expensive as the amount of text grows, and they're not great at keeping track of a lot of information at once. Here are four new ideas for how to solve the transformer problem --innovations that could change LLMs for good, making them faster, far more efficient, and (maybe) even smarter.

Plus: A new Amazon data center could become the US's most polluting power plant. In 2024, Google DeepMind scientists shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a neural network, AlphaFold, which predicts the structures of proteins. It showed that AI could make groundbreaking scientific discoveries, but AlphaFold may not be the best template for accelerating science. Instead, another approach may hold the key: AI agents. AlphaFold relied on a dataset of roughly 170,000 experimentally validated protein structures that took 53 years and roughly $21 billion worth of experimental work to assemble. Comparable datasets will be difficult or impossible to create in many fields.

Plus: AI has designed new viruses from scratch for the first time. The theory claimed that, under the guise of combating disinformation, a sprawling constellation of government agencies, academics, civil society groups, and Big Tech platforms was suppressing conservative and populist speech online. What began as a relatively niche conspiracy theory from the far right was able to--and continues to--influence a wide range of actions by the second Trump administration. In myriad ways, the idea of the censorship-industrial complex, or CIC, explains the logic behind how the administration operates both at home and internationally. Over the past nine months, and Type Investigations have traced how the theory came to influence the country's most powerful individuals. We found that it took off in 2023, driven by a handful of individuals, with support from a close-knit group of right-wing organizations and media outlets--and an internet activist named Mike Benz at its center.