1. U.S. ban on popular lightbulb goes into effect August 1st
You can thank — or blame — new federal energy efficiency regulations that went into full effect last Tuesday. Quite possibly without you even noticing. The rules establish strict new efficiency standards for bulbs used in homes and businesses and bans the manufacture and sale of those that don’t meet those requirements. Practical incandescent bulbs, which trace their origin to an 1880 Edison patent, can’t meet those standards. Neither can halogen bulbs. The rules also ban imports of less efficient bulbs. The rules don’t affect bulbs that you already own; they also exempt special purpose incandescents such as those used inside ovens.
2. NASA restores contact with Voyager 2 spacecraft
Hurtling ever deeper into interstellar space, Voyager 2 has been out of touch ever since flight controllers accidentally sent a wrong command more than a week ago that tilted its antenna away from Earth. The spacecraft’s antenna shifted a mere 2%, but it was enough to cut communications.
This week, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft is once again communicating with mission control from billions of miles away.
All it took was for the ground team to send an interstellar "shout" across more than 12.3 billion miles instructing the historic probe launched in the 1970s to explore the far reaches of space to turn its antenna back to Earth
3. Australian Senate committee recommends government ban on TikTok be extended to WeChat
An Australian Senate committee has recommended a ban on the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok from federal government devices be extended to China’s most popular social media platform, WeChat. The committee was established last year to examine uses of social media that undermine Australia’s democracy and values, including the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
The committee was particularly concerned by ByteDance-owned TikTok and Tencent-owned WeChat, which is popular with the Chinese diaspora in Australia, because they were run by Chinese authorities, the report said.
4. AI comes up with a corker
The first wine designed by AI has been presented in France. Anthony Aubert and Jean-Charles Mathieu from Aubert & Mathieu asked ChatGPT to create an “exceptional, fruity vinified organic wine from the Languedoc region”. They also asked what the wine should be called, in which bottle and at what price. According to ChatGPT’s instructions, they combined 60% Grenache and 40% Syrah. The AI recommended a Burgundy bottle as “excellent to show off your wine” and a retail price between €50 and €100.
5. LK-99 Superconductor sensation?
In late July, a preprint paper written by scientists from the relatively unknown Quantum Energy Research Centre claimed to have created a material that was a superconductor at room temperature and ambient pressure. The material, known as LK-99, became a viral sensation online and in physics labs as experts rushed to recreate the material and test its properties.
Two weeks later, follow-up preprint papers from more prominent superconductor laboratories have found that LK-99 isn’t a superconductor after all, and is actually a less efficient conductor than copper at room temperature.
A room temperature superconductor would bring the promise of zero-resistance electrical engineering from high-tech science labs—such as particle accelerators at CERN, fusion reactors at ITER, or quantum computers at Google—into our everyday lives by making the electric grid, gadgets, and anything with an electric charge many times more efficient than it is today. For now, that dream remains out of reach. But scientists around the world are still hard at work uncovering the quantum secrets of superconductivity so that, one day, that dream can come true.
6. Pentagon dolling out $18.5M in AI cybersecurity competition
DARPA, the Pentagon agency that funds moonshot technology innovations, is hosting a two-year competition for artificial intelligence experts to create new ways to bolster the world’s cybersecurity.
The competition launches Wednesday at the cybersecurity conference Black Hat in Las Vegas. It asks participants to create tools that can be used by anyone to help identify and fix holes in software to keep hackers from exploiting them. It will dole out a total of $18.5 million to winners in different categories and will formally conclude at the Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas in August 2025.
