Super Persuasion

Pulsar Fusion has achieved first plasma in its Sunbird fusion rocket exhaust system at its Bletchley facility in the UK. The milestone marks a key step toward developing its planned fusion propulsion technology. Sunbird aims to enable much faster travel through deep space than conventional rocket propulsion.

SpaceX’s launch week has been absolutely insane In just FOUR DAYS, SpaceX launched every vehicle in its current orbital lineup: • Falcon 9 • Falcon Heavy • Starship 3 different launch vehicles 4 different launch pads 3 different states: Florida, California and Texas And they basically covered every major category of payload: • Starlink • Crew • Commercial • Military / national security Then on October 1 alone, SpaceX completed THREE launches in less than 13 hours SpaceX is simultaneously operating across almost every major part of orbital spaceflight now Different rockets, different pads, different coasts, completely different missions...all running at the same time No other launch company today is operating across this combination of vehicles, launch sites, mission types and cadence

This Demographics & Housing WebGIS, made by Mohammad VahidiBorji, caught my attention because it shows something I believe is becoming increasingly important in GIS: Turning statistics into spatial intelligence.

By now, it's amply clear that the big bosses of US frontier AI labs are really, really scared of China. And, fascinatingly, part of the answer why might be a tiny place in Inner Mongolia that you've probably never heard of: Ulanqab prefecture. Heard of it? Didn't think so. Even myself, who's traveled to Inner Mongolia twice, had never heard of it before researching this story. This is because, at first glance, this place is pretty unremarkable. Check its Wikipedia page (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulanqa…) and you’ll see the only thing it’s famous for is being the birthplace of He Pingping, who briefly held the Guinness record for world’s shortest man. That’s it, that’s the list! Otherwise, it's just a sparsely populated - 1.5 million people, minuscule by Chinese standards - stretch of windswept grassland on the Mongolian plateau. Except there is one number that tells you there is more to this place that meets the eye: this tiny prefecture consumes nearly 1% of all of China's electricity - and that number is growing by double digit numbers every year. And yes, I did write **consume**, not produce. In fact, when you divide Ulanqab's electricity consumption by the number of households living there, each household in this remote corner of Inner Mongolia "consumes" about 105,000 kWh in electricity, roughly 10 times the U.S. average. Insane electricity consumption numbers. So what are the Ulanqabese doing? Are they all running 10 American households' worth of appliances? Here is another number that might clue you in on the answer: over the past few years, this unremarkable prefecture has quietly signed over half a trillion yuan (and, yes, that’s trillion, with a "T") worth of investment deals from all the major Chinese tech giants. What is going on, you'll have guessed by now, is the most ambitious data center buildup anywhere on earth - and it's really surprising this hasn't been talked about more because the scale is beyond anything else, and by an immense margin. Take Elon Musk's so-called "Colossus" datacenter in Memphis, Tennessee which he pitches as "the world’s largest AI supercomputer." According to their own numbers (x.ai/colossus), Colossus has 200,000 chips, which, let's be clear, is already super impressive. In datacenter lingo, this converts to roughly 5000-6000 "racks": you know, the fridge-sized cabinets full of blinking lights you see in every movie scene set in a server room. How many racks are they building in Ulanqab? Over 5 million. Yes, about one thousand times the scale of "Colossus" 🤯 I tripled-checked the number: it is indeed the official number published by authoritative sources such as "Science and Technology Daily", the official newspaper of China's Ministry of Science and Technology (stdaily.com/web/gdxw/2026-08…). This is an absurdly large amount of compute. What we see appearing in this Inner Mongolian steppe may be the closest thing to a world brain humanity has ever built - a place where a large share of the world's thinking will physically happen. And - as we'll see - what makes this story so fascinating is not just the scale, but why it's getting built in this particular patch of Inner Mongolian grassland which combines a number of characteristics unlike anywhere else. If you believe, as I do - and as both China and the US obviously do as well - that AI will be the defining technology of the 21st century, this makes Ulanqab one of the single most relevant geopolitical places in the world right now. The full story - the Chinese government plan Ulanqab is part of, energy prices, chips and the strategic questions this raises - is here: arnaudbertrand.substack.com/…

You can now explore the entire US with 1-meter 3D LiDAR data! I rebuilt my USGS elevation viewer so you can search any address, zoom all the way into the terrain, and slide between LiDAR and satellite imagery. The detail is incredible. You can pick out riverbeds, ridgelines, old roads, drainage patterns, and terrain completely hidden by trees. Try it here and export your own animated GIF: mattmullin.space/state-lidar Happy exploring!

🚨 Walmart just updated their privacy policy and going forward they will be collecting all this information from you: - Name - IP address - Social media information - Browsing and search activity - Keystroke patterns - Voiceprint - Iris and retina imagery - Face geometry - Palm prints - Fingerprints - Household income - Education - Professional and employment information - Family health - Exact device location - Email address - Shipping address - Criminal history / background check - Individual preferences - Characteristics - Shopping patterns and behaviors - Spending tendencies - License plate data with automated readers in their parking lots - In-store surveillance camera footage - In-store mobile device location with Wi-Fi They will collect some of this data with their app, and some will be collected just from you walking into a store or pulling into a parking lot - Walking into a Walmart their policy lists then use their cameras to get a face geometry as something they may collect - License plate readers in parking lots with time and location stamps - If your phone is in their store and connected to WiFi they can log your location - If you call into customer service they can voiceprint How the heck is this legal?? We need new privacy laws immediately

UNUSUAL A Chinese robot with exceptional capabilities… a perfect integration of a humanoid robot and a robotic arm! A modular design and a 360‑degree work range with no blind spots allow the robot to perform diverse tasks with high efficiency and flexibility. This technical synergy opens new horizons for deploying robots in complex construction projects, reflecting a notable advancement in Chinese automation solutions.

YOUR FAVORITE BREAD IS LACED WITH CARCINOGENIC GLYPHOSATE The Florida Department of Health tested popular bread brands and detected glyphosate in 75% of them: ⚠️DAVE’S KILLER BREAD (White Done Right): 11.85 ppb glyphosate ⚠️DAVE’S KILLER BREAD (21 Whole Grain): 10.38 ppb glyphosate ⚠️NATURE’S OWN (Butter Bread): 190.23 ppb glyphosate ⚠️NATURE’S OWN (Perfectly Crafted White): 132.34 ppb glyphosate ⚠️WONDER BREAD (Classic White): 173.19 ppb glyphosate ⚠️SARA LEE (Honey Wheat): 191.04 ppb glyphosate ✅SARA LEE (Artesano White): No glyphosate detected ✅PEPPERIDGE FARM (Farmhouse Hearty White): No glyphosate detected

Bit-Pong Reinvents Table Tennis With Interactive Gaming by @gigadgets_ #Innovation #EmergingTech #Technology

Nvidia rejected once. Now it's paying 12.9 billion dollars for Hugging Face. - That's 86 times Hugging Face's annual revenue, and no deal is signed yet. - Nvidia offered 500 million dollars for it last year. Hugging Face said no. - Rivals like AMD and Intel run on this platform too. What happens to them now? Facts. Not Spin. Read the full story: unbiasedheadlines.com/articl…