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EQT Offtakes 2 MMtpa for 20 Years from Port Arthur LNG Phase 2

EQT Corp. has committed to buying two million metric tons per annum (MMtpa) for 20 years from Sempra’s planned Port Arthur LNG Phase II project in Jefferson County, Texas. “EQT will purchase the LNG on a free-on-board basis at a price indexed to Henry Hub”, EQT and Sempra Infrastructure, part of San Diego, California-based energy infrastructure company Sempra, said in a joint statement. Sempra Infrastructure chief executive Justin Bird said, “This development project can help fortify America’s position as a leading energy exporter, which is a shared goal of EQT and Sempra Infrastructure”. Earlier this month ConocoPhillips signed an agreement to buy four MMtpa over 20 years on a free-on-board basis from Port Arthur LNG Phase II. ConocoPhillips had already signed up for five MMtpa over 20 years from the under-construction first phase, from which it has also agreed to acquire a 30 percent equity stake. “With continued momentum in the project’s development, Sempra Infrastructure continues to target making a final investment decision on the Port Arthur LNG Phase II project in 2025”, the statement said. “All major permits for the Port Arthur LNG Phase II development project have been secured”, it added. In July Sempra secured a 20-year agreement to supply 1.5 MMtpa from phase II to Japan’s JERA Co. Inc. on a free-on-board basis. In June Sempra and Saudi Arabian Oil Co. (Aramco) progressed a heads-of-agreement document on phase II into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) under which the state-owned oil giant plans to buy five MMtpa for 20 years. The MOU also provides for Aramco’s potential acquisition of a 25 percent interest. In May the Department of Energy (DOE) granted phase II a permit to export to countries without a free trade agreement (FTA) with the U.S., marking the resumption of federal permitting for LNG export to

Read More »

Software commands 40% of cybersecurity budgets as gen AI attacks execute in milliseconds

“With volatility now the norm, security and risk leaders need practical guidance on managing existing spending and new budgetary necessities,” states Forrester’s 2026 Budget Planning Guide, revealing a fundamental shift in how organizations allocate cybersecurity resources.Software now commands 40% of cybersecurity spending, exceeding hardware at 15.8%, outsourcing at 15% and surpassing personnel costs at 29% by 11 percentage points while organizations defend against gen AI attacks executing in milliseconds versus a Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) of 181 days according to IBM’s latest Cost of a Data Breach Report.Three converging threats are flipping cybersecurity on its head: what once protected organizations is now working against them. Generative AI (gen AI) is enabling attackers to craft 10,000 personalized phishing emails per minute using scraped LinkedIn profiles and corporate communications. NIST’s 2030 quantum deadline threatens retroactive decryption of $425 billion in currently protected data. Deepfake fraud that surged 3,000% in 2024 now bypasses biometric authentication in 97% of attempts, forcing security leaders to reimagine defensive architectures fundamentally.Caption: Software now commands 40% of cybersecurity budgets in 2025, representing an 11 percentage point premium over personnel costs at 29%, as organizations layer security solutions to combat gen AI threats executing in milliseconds. Source: Forrester’s 2026 Budget Planning Guide

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How Sakana AI’s new evolutionary algorithm builds powerful AI models without expensive retraining

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now A new evolutionary technique from Japan-based AI lab Sakana AI enables developers to augment the capabilities of AI models without costly training and fine-tuning processes. The technique, called Model Merging of Natural Niches (M2N2), overcomes the limitations of other model merging methods and can even evolve new models entirely from scratch. M2N2 can be applied to different types of machine learning models, including large language models (LLMs) and text-to-image generators. For enterprises looking to build custom AI solutions, the approach offers a powerful and efficient way to create specialized models by combining the strengths of existing open-source variants. What is model merging? Model merging is a technique for integrating the knowledge of multiple specialized AI models into a single, more capable model. Instead of fine-tuning, which refines a single pre-trained model using new data, merging combines the parameters of several models simultaneously. This process can consolidate a wealth of knowledge into one asset without requiring expensive, gradient-based training or access to the original training data. For enterprise teams, this offers several practical advantages over traditional fine-tuning. In comments to VentureBeat, the paper’s authors said model merging is a gradient-free process that only requires forward passes, making it computationally cheaper than fine-tuning, which involves costly gradient updates. Merging also sidesteps the need for carefully balanced training data and mitigates the risk of “catastrophic forgetting,” where a model loses its original capabilities after learning a new task. The technique is especially powerful when the training data for specialist models isn’t available, as merging only requires the model weights themselves. AI Scaling Hits Its Limits Power caps, rising token costs, and inference delays are reshaping enterprise AI.

Read More »

Energy Department Issues Final Export Authorization to Commonwealth LNG

WASHINGTON— U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright today announced the Department of Energy’s (DOE) final authorization for Commonwealth LNG, LLC to export up to 1.21 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of natural gas as liquefied natural gas (LNG) to non-free trade agreement (FTA) countries from its proposed project in Cameron Parish, Louisiana. Today’s action follows DOE’s conditional authorization to Commonwealth LNG, LLC in February 2025 and reflects the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) June 2025 approval for the siting, construction, and operation of the facility. It also incorporates DOE’s May 2025 response to comments on the 2024 LNG Export Study that reaffirms that U.S. LNG exports strengthen America’s energy leadership, expand opportunities for American workers, and provide allies with secure access to reliable U.S. energy. “Finalizing this authorization moves us closer to delivering more American LNG to the world, advancing President Trump’s energy dominance agenda,” Secretary Wright said. “As DOE found earlier this year and affirms again in this order, expanding America’s LNG export capacity bolsters our economy, strengthens the energy security of our allies and trading partners and ensures the U.S. can continue to lead the world in the production of affordable, reliable and secure energy.” “We are glad to do our part in Commonwealth’s recent progress toward its final investment decision and look forward to its contribution to our nation’s success.” said Tala Goudarzi, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. Commonwealth LNG, owned by Kimmeridge, has secured long-term off-take agreements for LNG with Malaysia’s PETRONAS, global energy commodities trading entity Glencore LTD, and Japan’s JERA, and recently announced an engineering, procurement, and construction contract with Technip Energies to advance the project.  Background:  The United States currently operates eight large-scale LNG export projects, with several more under construction or expansion. Under

Read More »

Namibia’s Ambition to Become Oil Hotspot Tested by Wildcatter

Searching for oil prospects in a block bigger than Rhode Island, Travis Smithard made a last-minute decision to send the Noble Venturer drillship twice as far as originally planned to spud a well off Namibia’s coast.  The switch paid off. The 230-meter (750 feet) vessel’s journey through the Atlantic waters led to Rhino Resources Ltd. announcing a significant discovery in April. That put the privately owned company on the map in Namibia with majors like Shell Plc and TotalEnergies SE, whose finds in the past three years have made the southern African nation a new exploration hotspot. Now the spotlight is on the wildcatter again as it drills another well called Volans, which it bypassed earlier this year to focus on Capricornus about 15 kilometers (9 miles) away. The market is closely watching the fortunes of each new campaign to see if Namibia — a major supplier of commodities like uranium and diamonds, but which doesn’t yet produce any crude — really has the resources to match its oil ambitions.  Rhino’s diversion to the Capricornus well was to “sort of broaden the aperture here a little bit” to understand a wider swath of the block, Chief Executive Officer Smithard said in an interview in the capital Windhoek. The decision was based on data that allowed for a quick change, he said. The area is poised to become a major African basin, with producers scrutinizing the best projects to hold as the energy transition moves the world closer to peak oil demand. Namibia aims to start output by 2030, and at one point there was optimism that it could become another Guyana — where a giant oil discovery has transformed the sparsely populated country’s economy. “We are currently very, very busy at a stage where we are now trying to cross over the path of moving Namibia from

Read More »

Oil Posts First Monthly Loss Since April

Oil notched its first monthly loss since April, with trading dominated by concerns about a looming glut and geopolitical issues, including US-led efforts to end the war in Ukraine. West Texas Intermediate for October delivery slid 0.9% to settle near $64 a barrel, with the US benchmark down 7.6% this month. Brent closed above $68. Oil has lost ground in August on worries that global supplies will run ahead of demand in the coming quarters, boosting stockpiles. The commodity’s slump deepened on Friday after US consumer sentiment declined to a three-month low, reflecting concerns that tariffs will hurt the economy. Investors are also focused on Ukraine and potential shifts in crude flows from Russia. US President Donald Trump was “not happy” about Moscow’s recent strikes on Ukraine, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said. Washington has imposed a 50% levy on most Indian imports to punish the South Asian nation for buying Russian crude. Moscow unleashed a wave of drone and missile strikes on Kyiv earlier this week, in defiance of US calls for an end to the fighting, killing 18 people, Ukrainian authorities said. A meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russia’s Vladimir Putin was unlikely, according to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Trump has threatened “very big consequences” if Moscow doesn’t come to the negotiating table. Oil is down 11% this year on concerns that Trump’s trade war will hurt energy consumption at the same time that OPEC+ is working to restore idled capacity. “More OPEC+ oil is coming to the market amid worries over US economic growth, which keeps the market well-supplied,” said Jens Naervig Pedersen, a strategist at Danske Bank AS. Trading volumes on Friday were muted ahead of the Labor Day holiday weekend in the US, contributing to exaggerated price swings. Oil Prices WTI for

Read More »

EQT Offtakes 2 MMtpa for 20 Years from Port Arthur LNG Phase 2

EQT Corp. has committed to buying two million metric tons per annum (MMtpa) for 20 years from Sempra’s planned Port Arthur LNG Phase II project in Jefferson County, Texas. “EQT will purchase the LNG on a free-on-board basis at a price indexed to Henry Hub”, EQT and Sempra Infrastructure, part of San Diego, California-based energy infrastructure company Sempra, said in a joint statement. Sempra Infrastructure chief executive Justin Bird said, “This development project can help fortify America’s position as a leading energy exporter, which is a shared goal of EQT and Sempra Infrastructure”. Earlier this month ConocoPhillips signed an agreement to buy four MMtpa over 20 years on a free-on-board basis from Port Arthur LNG Phase II. ConocoPhillips had already signed up for five MMtpa over 20 years from the under-construction first phase, from which it has also agreed to acquire a 30 percent equity stake. “With continued momentum in the project’s development, Sempra Infrastructure continues to target making a final investment decision on the Port Arthur LNG Phase II project in 2025”, the statement said. “All major permits for the Port Arthur LNG Phase II development project have been secured”, it added. In July Sempra secured a 20-year agreement to supply 1.5 MMtpa from phase II to Japan’s JERA Co. Inc. on a free-on-board basis. In June Sempra and Saudi Arabian Oil Co. (Aramco) progressed a heads-of-agreement document on phase II into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) under which the state-owned oil giant plans to buy five MMtpa for 20 years. The MOU also provides for Aramco’s potential acquisition of a 25 percent interest. In May the Department of Energy (DOE) granted phase II a permit to export to countries without a free trade agreement (FTA) with the U.S., marking the resumption of federal permitting for LNG export to

Read More »

Software commands 40% of cybersecurity budgets as gen AI attacks execute in milliseconds

“With volatility now the norm, security and risk leaders need practical guidance on managing existing spending and new budgetary necessities,” states Forrester’s 2026 Budget Planning Guide, revealing a fundamental shift in how organizations allocate cybersecurity resources.Software now commands 40% of cybersecurity spending, exceeding hardware at 15.8%, outsourcing at 15% and surpassing personnel costs at 29% by 11 percentage points while organizations defend against gen AI attacks executing in milliseconds versus a Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) of 181 days according to IBM’s latest Cost of a Data Breach Report.Three converging threats are flipping cybersecurity on its head: what once protected organizations is now working against them. Generative AI (gen AI) is enabling attackers to craft 10,000 personalized phishing emails per minute using scraped LinkedIn profiles and corporate communications. NIST’s 2030 quantum deadline threatens retroactive decryption of $425 billion in currently protected data. Deepfake fraud that surged 3,000% in 2024 now bypasses biometric authentication in 97% of attempts, forcing security leaders to reimagine defensive architectures fundamentally.Caption: Software now commands 40% of cybersecurity budgets in 2025, representing an 11 percentage point premium over personnel costs at 29%, as organizations layer security solutions to combat gen AI threats executing in milliseconds. Source: Forrester’s 2026 Budget Planning Guide

Read More »

How Sakana AI’s new evolutionary algorithm builds powerful AI models without expensive retraining

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now A new evolutionary technique from Japan-based AI lab Sakana AI enables developers to augment the capabilities of AI models without costly training and fine-tuning processes. The technique, called Model Merging of Natural Niches (M2N2), overcomes the limitations of other model merging methods and can even evolve new models entirely from scratch. M2N2 can be applied to different types of machine learning models, including large language models (LLMs) and text-to-image generators. For enterprises looking to build custom AI solutions, the approach offers a powerful and efficient way to create specialized models by combining the strengths of existing open-source variants. What is model merging? Model merging is a technique for integrating the knowledge of multiple specialized AI models into a single, more capable model. Instead of fine-tuning, which refines a single pre-trained model using new data, merging combines the parameters of several models simultaneously. This process can consolidate a wealth of knowledge into one asset without requiring expensive, gradient-based training or access to the original training data. For enterprise teams, this offers several practical advantages over traditional fine-tuning. In comments to VentureBeat, the paper’s authors said model merging is a gradient-free process that only requires forward passes, making it computationally cheaper than fine-tuning, which involves costly gradient updates. Merging also sidesteps the need for carefully balanced training data and mitigates the risk of “catastrophic forgetting,” where a model loses its original capabilities after learning a new task. The technique is especially powerful when the training data for specialist models isn’t available, as merging only requires the model weights themselves. AI Scaling Hits Its Limits Power caps, rising token costs, and inference delays are reshaping enterprise AI.

Read More »

Energy Department Issues Final Export Authorization to Commonwealth LNG

WASHINGTON— U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright today announced the Department of Energy’s (DOE) final authorization for Commonwealth LNG, LLC to export up to 1.21 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of natural gas as liquefied natural gas (LNG) to non-free trade agreement (FTA) countries from its proposed project in Cameron Parish, Louisiana. Today’s action follows DOE’s conditional authorization to Commonwealth LNG, LLC in February 2025 and reflects the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) June 2025 approval for the siting, construction, and operation of the facility. It also incorporates DOE’s May 2025 response to comments on the 2024 LNG Export Study that reaffirms that U.S. LNG exports strengthen America’s energy leadership, expand opportunities for American workers, and provide allies with secure access to reliable U.S. energy. “Finalizing this authorization moves us closer to delivering more American LNG to the world, advancing President Trump’s energy dominance agenda,” Secretary Wright said. “As DOE found earlier this year and affirms again in this order, expanding America’s LNG export capacity bolsters our economy, strengthens the energy security of our allies and trading partners and ensures the U.S. can continue to lead the world in the production of affordable, reliable and secure energy.” “We are glad to do our part in Commonwealth’s recent progress toward its final investment decision and look forward to its contribution to our nation’s success.” said Tala Goudarzi, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. Commonwealth LNG, owned by Kimmeridge, has secured long-term off-take agreements for LNG with Malaysia’s PETRONAS, global energy commodities trading entity Glencore LTD, and Japan’s JERA, and recently announced an engineering, procurement, and construction contract with Technip Energies to advance the project.  Background:  The United States currently operates eight large-scale LNG export projects, with several more under construction or expansion. Under

Read More »

Namibia’s Ambition to Become Oil Hotspot Tested by Wildcatter

Searching for oil prospects in a block bigger than Rhode Island, Travis Smithard made a last-minute decision to send the Noble Venturer drillship twice as far as originally planned to spud a well off Namibia’s coast.  The switch paid off. The 230-meter (750 feet) vessel’s journey through the Atlantic waters led to Rhino Resources Ltd. announcing a significant discovery in April. That put the privately owned company on the map in Namibia with majors like Shell Plc and TotalEnergies SE, whose finds in the past three years have made the southern African nation a new exploration hotspot. Now the spotlight is on the wildcatter again as it drills another well called Volans, which it bypassed earlier this year to focus on Capricornus about 15 kilometers (9 miles) away. The market is closely watching the fortunes of each new campaign to see if Namibia — a major supplier of commodities like uranium and diamonds, but which doesn’t yet produce any crude — really has the resources to match its oil ambitions.  Rhino’s diversion to the Capricornus well was to “sort of broaden the aperture here a little bit” to understand a wider swath of the block, Chief Executive Officer Smithard said in an interview in the capital Windhoek. The decision was based on data that allowed for a quick change, he said. The area is poised to become a major African basin, with producers scrutinizing the best projects to hold as the energy transition moves the world closer to peak oil demand. Namibia aims to start output by 2030, and at one point there was optimism that it could become another Guyana — where a giant oil discovery has transformed the sparsely populated country’s economy. “We are currently very, very busy at a stage where we are now trying to cross over the path of moving Namibia from

Read More »

Oil Posts First Monthly Loss Since April

Oil notched its first monthly loss since April, with trading dominated by concerns about a looming glut and geopolitical issues, including US-led efforts to end the war in Ukraine. West Texas Intermediate for October delivery slid 0.9% to settle near $64 a barrel, with the US benchmark down 7.6% this month. Brent closed above $68. Oil has lost ground in August on worries that global supplies will run ahead of demand in the coming quarters, boosting stockpiles. The commodity’s slump deepened on Friday after US consumer sentiment declined to a three-month low, reflecting concerns that tariffs will hurt the economy. Investors are also focused on Ukraine and potential shifts in crude flows from Russia. US President Donald Trump was “not happy” about Moscow’s recent strikes on Ukraine, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said. Washington has imposed a 50% levy on most Indian imports to punish the South Asian nation for buying Russian crude. Moscow unleashed a wave of drone and missile strikes on Kyiv earlier this week, in defiance of US calls for an end to the fighting, killing 18 people, Ukrainian authorities said. A meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russia’s Vladimir Putin was unlikely, according to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Trump has threatened “very big consequences” if Moscow doesn’t come to the negotiating table. Oil is down 11% this year on concerns that Trump’s trade war will hurt energy consumption at the same time that OPEC+ is working to restore idled capacity. “More OPEC+ oil is coming to the market amid worries over US economic growth, which keeps the market well-supplied,” said Jens Naervig Pedersen, a strategist at Danske Bank AS. Trading volumes on Friday were muted ahead of the Labor Day holiday weekend in the US, contributing to exaggerated price swings. Oil Prices WTI for

Read More »

EQT Offtakes 2 MMtpa for 20 Years from Port Arthur LNG Phase 2

EQT Corp. has committed to buying two million metric tons per annum (MMtpa) for 20 years from Sempra’s planned Port Arthur LNG Phase II project in Jefferson County, Texas. “EQT will purchase the LNG on a free-on-board basis at a price indexed to Henry Hub”, EQT and Sempra Infrastructure, part of San Diego, California-based energy infrastructure company Sempra, said in a joint statement. Sempra Infrastructure chief executive Justin Bird said, “This development project can help fortify America’s position as a leading energy exporter, which is a shared goal of EQT and Sempra Infrastructure”. Earlier this month ConocoPhillips signed an agreement to buy four MMtpa over 20 years on a free-on-board basis from Port Arthur LNG Phase II. ConocoPhillips had already signed up for five MMtpa over 20 years from the under-construction first phase, from which it has also agreed to acquire a 30 percent equity stake. “With continued momentum in the project’s development, Sempra Infrastructure continues to target making a final investment decision on the Port Arthur LNG Phase II project in 2025”, the statement said. “All major permits for the Port Arthur LNG Phase II development project have been secured”, it added. In July Sempra secured a 20-year agreement to supply 1.5 MMtpa from phase II to Japan’s JERA Co. Inc. on a free-on-board basis. In June Sempra and Saudi Arabian Oil Co. (Aramco) progressed a heads-of-agreement document on phase II into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) under which the state-owned oil giant plans to buy five MMtpa for 20 years. The MOU also provides for Aramco’s potential acquisition of a 25 percent interest. In May the Department of Energy (DOE) granted phase II a permit to export to countries without a free trade agreement (FTA) with the U.S., marking the resumption of federal permitting for LNG export to

Read More »

Energy Department Issues Final Export Authorization to Commonwealth LNG

WASHINGTON— U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright today announced the Department of Energy’s (DOE) final authorization for Commonwealth LNG, LLC to export up to 1.21 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of natural gas as liquefied natural gas (LNG) to non-free trade agreement (FTA) countries from its proposed project in Cameron Parish, Louisiana. Today’s action follows DOE’s conditional authorization to Commonwealth LNG, LLC in February 2025 and reflects the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) June 2025 approval for the siting, construction, and operation of the facility. It also incorporates DOE’s May 2025 response to comments on the 2024 LNG Export Study that reaffirms that U.S. LNG exports strengthen America’s energy leadership, expand opportunities for American workers, and provide allies with secure access to reliable U.S. energy. “Finalizing this authorization moves us closer to delivering more American LNG to the world, advancing President Trump’s energy dominance agenda,” Secretary Wright said. “As DOE found earlier this year and affirms again in this order, expanding America’s LNG export capacity bolsters our economy, strengthens the energy security of our allies and trading partners and ensures the U.S. can continue to lead the world in the production of affordable, reliable and secure energy.” “We are glad to do our part in Commonwealth’s recent progress toward its final investment decision and look forward to its contribution to our nation’s success.” said Tala Goudarzi, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. Commonwealth LNG, owned by Kimmeridge, has secured long-term off-take agreements for LNG with Malaysia’s PETRONAS, global energy commodities trading entity Glencore LTD, and Japan’s JERA, and recently announced an engineering, procurement, and construction contract with Technip Energies to advance the project.  Background:  The United States currently operates eight large-scale LNG export projects, with several more under construction or expansion. Under

Read More »

Oil Posts First Monthly Loss Since April

Oil notched its first monthly loss since April, with trading dominated by concerns about a looming glut and geopolitical issues, including US-led efforts to end the war in Ukraine. West Texas Intermediate for October delivery slid 0.9% to settle near $64 a barrel, with the US benchmark down 7.6% this month. Brent closed above $68. Oil has lost ground in August on worries that global supplies will run ahead of demand in the coming quarters, boosting stockpiles. The commodity’s slump deepened on Friday after US consumer sentiment declined to a three-month low, reflecting concerns that tariffs will hurt the economy. Investors are also focused on Ukraine and potential shifts in crude flows from Russia. US President Donald Trump was “not happy” about Moscow’s recent strikes on Ukraine, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said. Washington has imposed a 50% levy on most Indian imports to punish the South Asian nation for buying Russian crude. Moscow unleashed a wave of drone and missile strikes on Kyiv earlier this week, in defiance of US calls for an end to the fighting, killing 18 people, Ukrainian authorities said. A meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russia’s Vladimir Putin was unlikely, according to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Trump has threatened “very big consequences” if Moscow doesn’t come to the negotiating table. Oil is down 11% this year on concerns that Trump’s trade war will hurt energy consumption at the same time that OPEC+ is working to restore idled capacity. “More OPEC+ oil is coming to the market amid worries over US economic growth, which keeps the market well-supplied,” said Jens Naervig Pedersen, a strategist at Danske Bank AS. Trading volumes on Friday were muted ahead of the Labor Day holiday weekend in the US, contributing to exaggerated price swings. Oil Prices WTI for

Read More »

Namibia’s Ambition to Become Oil Hotspot Tested by Wildcatter

Searching for oil prospects in a block bigger than Rhode Island, Travis Smithard made a last-minute decision to send the Noble Venturer drillship twice as far as originally planned to spud a well off Namibia’s coast.  The switch paid off. The 230-meter (750 feet) vessel’s journey through the Atlantic waters led to Rhino Resources Ltd. announcing a significant discovery in April. That put the privately owned company on the map in Namibia with majors like Shell Plc and TotalEnergies SE, whose finds in the past three years have made the southern African nation a new exploration hotspot. Now the spotlight is on the wildcatter again as it drills another well called Volans, which it bypassed earlier this year to focus on Capricornus about 15 kilometers (9 miles) away. The market is closely watching the fortunes of each new campaign to see if Namibia — a major supplier of commodities like uranium and diamonds, but which doesn’t yet produce any crude — really has the resources to match its oil ambitions.  Rhino’s diversion to the Capricornus well was to “sort of broaden the aperture here a little bit” to understand a wider swath of the block, Chief Executive Officer Smithard said in an interview in the capital Windhoek. The decision was based on data that allowed for a quick change, he said. The area is poised to become a major African basin, with producers scrutinizing the best projects to hold as the energy transition moves the world closer to peak oil demand. Namibia aims to start output by 2030, and at one point there was optimism that it could become another Guyana — where a giant oil discovery has transformed the sparsely populated country’s economy. “We are currently very, very busy at a stage where we are now trying to cross over the path of moving Namibia from

Read More »

Energy Department Announces Over $35 Million to Advance Emerging Energy Technologies

WASHINGTON— The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced more than $35 million for 42 projects through DOE’s Technology Commercialization Fund (TCF) to help move emerging energy technologies related to grid security, artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, and advanced manufacturing from DOE National Laboratories, plants, and sites to market. The selected projects will leverage over $21 million in cost share from private and public partners, bringing total funding to more than $57.5 million.  The TCF program, managed through the Office of Technology Commercialization’s Core Laboratory Infrastructure for Market Readiness (CLIMR) Lab Call, strengthens America’s economic and national security by supporting public-private partnerships that maximize taxpayer investments, advance American innovation, and ensure the United States stays ahead in global competitiveness.  “The Energy Department’s National Labs play an important role in ensuring the United States leads the world in innovation,” said Secretary Wright. “These projects have the potential to accelerate technological breakthroughs that will define the future of science and help secure America’s energy future.”  This year’s selections span across 19 DOE National Labs, plants, and sites. Highlights include:  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will launch America’s Cradle to Commerce (AC2C), building on the Cradle to Commerce (C2C) program, providing wraparound support for lab-to-market innovation. In just 18 months, C2C has proven impact with more than $15M raised by participating startups and five commercial pilots launched.   Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will strengthen and expand the free-to-use Visual Intellectual Property Search (VIPS) tool through a VIPS 2.0 project. The updated platform will provide seamless search capabilities across a comprehensive list of National Lab innovations available for licensing or open-source use. Argonne National Laboratory will advance commercialization of the OpenMC Monte Carlo particle transport code through the Exascale Computing Project, supporting nuclear safety and analysis code, addressing remaining barriers to market readiness and helping accelerate

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Daenerys Discovery Is a Game Changer for Talos

The Daenerys discovery is a game changer for Talos in the Gulf of America (GoA). That’s what Wood Mackenzie said in a note sent to Rigzone by the Wood Mackenzie team this week, adding that the find could add more than 50 million barrels of oil equivalent to Talos’ net proved reserves. “For Talos, the discovery is a game changer,” Miles Sasser, Wood Mackenzie Upstream Senior Research Analyst, said in the note. “The company’s GoA portfolio was ageing, but Daenerys could add more than 50 million… barrels of oil equivalent [to] net proved reserves. That would increase its YE2024 proved reserves of 194 million barrels of oil equivalent more than 25 percent,” he added. “This is the company’s largest discovery to date in the GoA. While Talos has not released volumes, a 200 million barrel of oil equivalent discovery would make Daenerys GoA’s biggest find since Shell’s Whale in 2017,” he continued. In the note, Wood Mackenzie highlighted that the discovery well was drilled to a total vertical depth of 33,228 feet and pointed out that it was finished 12 days early and $16 million under budget, “demonstrating strong operational execution by the Talos-led consortium”. Wood Mackenzie stated in the note that its preliminary prospect valuation suggests peak production could reach 65,000 barrels per day. The company added in the note that the discovery “marks a strategic shift for Talos, which has traditionally focused on lower-risk infrastructure-led exploration (ILX) projects”. “Beyond Daenerys, the company has two additional large exploration projects in its pipeline – Enterprise and Hershey – both with pre-drill estimates exceeding 100 million barrels of oil equivalent each, signaling Talos’ embrace of a more aggressive high-impact exploration strategy,” Wood Mackenzie said in the note. Combined with BP’s Far South discovery in April, 2025 is the best year for

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Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs).  In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

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John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

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2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

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OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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Three Aberdeen oil company headquarters sell for £45m

Three Aberdeen oil company headquarters have been sold in a deal worth £45 million. The CNOOC, Apache and Taqa buildings at the Prime Four business park in Kingswells have been acquired by EEH Ventures. The trio of buildings, totalling 275,000 sq ft, were previously owned by Canadian firm BMO. The financial services powerhouse first bought the buildings in 2014 but took the decision to sell the buildings as part of a “long-standing strategy to reduce their office exposure across the UK”. The deal was the largest to take place throughout Scotland during the last quarter of 2024. Trio of buildings snapped up London headquartered EEH Ventures was founded in 2013 and owns a number of residential, offices, shopping centres and hotels throughout the UK. All three Kingswells-based buildings were pre-let, designed and constructed by Aberdeen property developer Drum in 2012 on a 15-year lease. © Supplied by CBREThe Aberdeen headquarters of Taqa. Image: CBRE The North Sea headquarters of Middle-East oil firm Taqa has previously been described as “an amazing success story in the Granite City”. Taqa announced in 2023 that it intends to cease production from all of its UK North Sea platforms by the end of 2027. Meanwhile, Apache revealed at the end of last year it is planning to exit the North Sea by the end of 2029 blaming the windfall tax. The US firm first entered the North Sea in 2003 but will wrap up all of its UK operations by 2030. Aberdeen big deals The Prime Four acquisition wasn’t the biggest Granite City commercial property sale of 2024. American private equity firm Lone Star bought Union Square shopping centre from Hammerson for £111m. © ShutterstockAberdeen city centre. Hammerson, who also built the property, had originally been seeking £150m. BP’s North Sea headquarters in Stoneywood, Aberdeen, was also sold. Manchester-based

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2025 ransomware predictions, trends, and how to prepare

Zscaler ThreatLabz research team has revealed critical insights and predictions on ransomware trends for 2025. The latest Ransomware Report uncovered a surge in sophisticated tactics and extortion attacks. As ransomware remains a key concern for CISOs and CIOs, the report sheds light on actionable strategies to mitigate risks. Top Ransomware Predictions for 2025: ● AI-Powered Social Engineering: In 2025, GenAI will fuel voice phishing (vishing) attacks. With the proliferation of GenAI-based tooling, initial access broker groups will increasingly leverage AI-generated voices; which sound more and more realistic by adopting local accents and dialects to enhance credibility and success rates. ● The Trifecta of Social Engineering Attacks: Vishing, Ransomware and Data Exfiltration. Additionally, sophisticated ransomware groups, like the Dark Angels, will continue the trend of low-volume, high-impact attacks; preferring to focus on an individual company, stealing vast amounts of data without encrypting files, and evading media and law enforcement scrutiny. ● Targeted Industries Under Siege: Manufacturing, healthcare, education, energy will remain primary targets, with no slowdown in attacks expected. ● New SEC Regulations Drive Increased Transparency: 2025 will see an uptick in reported ransomware attacks and payouts due to new, tighter SEC requirements mandating that public companies report material incidents within four business days. ● Ransomware Payouts Are on the Rise: In 2025 ransom demands will most likely increase due to an evolving ecosystem of cybercrime groups, specializing in designated attack tactics, and collaboration by these groups that have entered a sophisticated profit sharing model using Ransomware-as-a-Service. To combat damaging ransomware attacks, Zscaler ThreatLabz recommends the following strategies. ● Fighting AI with AI: As threat actors use AI to identify vulnerabilities, organizations must counter with AI-powered zero trust security systems that detect and mitigate new threats. ● Advantages of adopting a Zero Trust architecture: A Zero Trust cloud security platform stops

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Software commands 40% of cybersecurity budgets as gen AI attacks execute in milliseconds

“With volatility now the norm, security and risk leaders need practical guidance on managing existing spending and new budgetary necessities,” states Forrester’s 2026 Budget Planning Guide, revealing a fundamental shift in how organizations allocate cybersecurity resources.Software now commands 40% of cybersecurity spending, exceeding hardware at 15.8%, outsourcing at 15% and surpassing personnel costs at 29% by 11 percentage points while organizations defend against gen AI attacks executing in milliseconds versus a Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) of 181 days according to IBM’s latest Cost of a Data Breach Report.Three converging threats are flipping cybersecurity on its head: what once protected organizations is now working against them. Generative AI (gen AI) is enabling attackers to craft 10,000 personalized phishing emails per minute using scraped LinkedIn profiles and corporate communications. NIST’s 2030 quantum deadline threatens retroactive decryption of $425 billion in currently protected data. Deepfake fraud that surged 3,000% in 2024 now bypasses biometric authentication in 97% of attempts, forcing security leaders to reimagine defensive architectures fundamentally.Caption: Software now commands 40% of cybersecurity budgets in 2025, representing an 11 percentage point premium over personnel costs at 29%, as organizations layer security solutions to combat gen AI threats executing in milliseconds. Source: Forrester’s 2026 Budget Planning Guide

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How Sakana AI’s new evolutionary algorithm builds powerful AI models without expensive retraining

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now A new evolutionary technique from Japan-based AI lab Sakana AI enables developers to augment the capabilities of AI models without costly training and fine-tuning processes. The technique, called Model Merging of Natural Niches (M2N2), overcomes the limitations of other model merging methods and can even evolve new models entirely from scratch. M2N2 can be applied to different types of machine learning models, including large language models (LLMs) and text-to-image generators. For enterprises looking to build custom AI solutions, the approach offers a powerful and efficient way to create specialized models by combining the strengths of existing open-source variants. What is model merging? Model merging is a technique for integrating the knowledge of multiple specialized AI models into a single, more capable model. Instead of fine-tuning, which refines a single pre-trained model using new data, merging combines the parameters of several models simultaneously. This process can consolidate a wealth of knowledge into one asset without requiring expensive, gradient-based training or access to the original training data. For enterprise teams, this offers several practical advantages over traditional fine-tuning. In comments to VentureBeat, the paper’s authors said model merging is a gradient-free process that only requires forward passes, making it computationally cheaper than fine-tuning, which involves costly gradient updates. Merging also sidesteps the need for carefully balanced training data and mitigates the risk of “catastrophic forgetting,” where a model loses its original capabilities after learning a new task. The technique is especially powerful when the training data for specialist models isn’t available, as merging only requires the model weights themselves. AI Scaling Hits Its Limits Power caps, rising token costs, and inference delays are reshaping enterprise AI.

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How Intuit killed the chatbot crutch – and built an agentic AI playbook you can copy

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now In the frenzied land rush for generative AI that followed ChatGPT’s debut, the mandate from Intuit’s CEO was clear: ship the company’s largest, most shocking AI-driven launch by Sept. 2023. Responding with blazing speed, the $200 billion company behind QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Mailchimp, delivered Intuit Assist. It was a classic first attempt: a chat-style assistant bolted onto the side of its applications, designed to prove Intuit was on the cutting edge. It was supposed to be a game-changer. Instead, it flopped. “When you take a beautiful, well-designed user interface and you simply plop human-like chat on the side, that doesn’t necessarily make it better,” Alex Balazs, Intuit’s Chief Technology Officer, told VentureBeat. AI Scaling Hits Its Limits Power caps, rising token costs, and inference delays are reshaping enterprise AI. Join our exclusive salon to discover how top teams are: Secure your spot to stay ahead: https://bit.ly/4mwGngO The failed launch plunged the company into what Dave Talach, SVP of the QuickBooks team, calls the “trough of disillusionment.” The chatbot took up valuable screen space and created confusion. “There was a blinking cursor. We almost put a cognitive burden on people, like, what can it do? Can I trust it?” Talach recalls. The pressure was palpable; he had to present to Intuit’s Board of Directors to explain what went wrong and what the team had learned. What followed was not a minor course correction, but a grueling nine-month pivot to “burn the boats” and reinvent how the 40-year-old giant builds products. This is the inside story of how Intuit emerged with a real-world playbook for enterprise AI that other leaders can follow. How a split-screen observation

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The Download: humans in space, and India’s thorium ambitions

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The case against humans in space Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are bitter rivals in the commercial space race, but they agree on one thing: Settling space is an existential imperative. Space is the place. The final frontier. It is our human destiny to transcend our home world and expand our civilization to extraterrestrial vistas.This belief has been mainstream for decades, but its rise has been positively meteoric in this new gilded age of astropreneurs.But as visions of giant orbital stations and Martian cities dance in our heads, a case against human space colonization has found its footing in a number of recent books, from doubts about the practical feasibility of off-Earth communities, to realism about the harsh environment of space and the enormous tax it would exact on the human body. Read the full story.—Becky Ferreira This story is from our new print edition, which is all about the future of security. Subscribe here to catch future copies when they land.
This American nuclear company could help India’s thorium dream
For just the second time in nearly two decades, the United States has granted an export license to an American company planning to sell nuclear technology to India, MIT Technology Review has learned.  The decision to greenlight Clean Core Thorium Energy’s license is a major step toward closer cooperation between the two countries on atomic energy and marks a milestone in the development of thorium as an alternative to uranium for fueling nuclear reactors. Read more about why it’s such a big deal. —Alexander C. Kaufman RFK Jr’s plan to improve America’s diet is missing the point A lot of Americans don’t eat well. And they’re paying for it with their health. A diet high in sugar, sodium, and saturated fat can increase the risk of problems like diabetes, heart disease, and kidney disease, to name a few. And those are among the leading causes of death in the US. This is hardly news. But this week Robert F Kennedy Jr., who heads the US Department of Health and Human Services, floated a new solution to the problem: teaching medical students more about the role of nutrition in health could help turn things around. It certainly sounds like a good idea. If more Americans ate a healthier diet, we could expect to see a decrease in those diseases. 

But this framing of America’s health crisis is overly simplistic, especially given that plenty of the administration’s other actions have directly undermined health in multiple ways—including by canceling a vital nutrition education program. And at any rate, there are other, more effective ways to tackle the chronic-disease crisis. Read the full story. —Jessica Hamzelou This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 RFK Jr’s deputy has been chosen to be the new acting head of the CDCJim O’Neill is likely to greenlight his boss’s federal vaccine policy plans. (WP $)+ The future of the department looks decidedly precarious. (The Atlantic $)+ Everything you need to know about Jim O’Neill, the longevity enthusiast who is now RFK Jr.’s right-hand man. (MIT Technology Review) 2 A man killed his mother and himself after conversing with ChatGPTThe chatbot encouraged Stein-Erik Soelberg’s paranoia while repeatedly assuring him he was sane. (WSJ $)+ An AI chatbot told a user how to kill himself—but the company doesn’t want to “censor” it. (MIT Technology Review)
3 China is cracking down on excess competition in its AI sectorThe country is hellbent on avoiding wasteful investment. (Bloomberg $)+ China is laser-focused on engineering, not so much on litigating. (Wired $)+ China built hundreds of AI data centers to catch the AI boom. Now many stand unused. (MIT Technology Review) 4 The EU should be prepared to walk away from a US trade dealIts competition commissioner worries Trump may act on his threats to target the bloc. (FT $)+ The French President had a similar warning for his ministers. (Politico)
5 xAI has released a new Grok agentic coding modelAt a significantly lower price than its rivals. (Reuters)+ This no-code website builder has been valued at $2 billion. (TechCrunch)+ The second wave of AI coding is here. (MIT Technology Review) 6 A US mail change has thrown online businesses into turmoilAll package deliveries are due to face duties from this week. (Insider $) 7 A former DOGE official is running America’s biggest MDMA companyAnd Antonio Gracias is not the only member of the department with ties to the psychedelics industry. (The Guardian)+ Other DOGE workers are joining Trump’s new National Design Studio. (Wired $)+ The FDA said no to the use of MDMA as a therapy last year. (MIT Technology Review) 8 How chatbots fake having personalitiesThey have no persistent self—despite what they may tell you. (Ars Technica)+ What is AI? (MIT Technology Review) 9 The future of podcasting is murkyHundreds of shows have folded. The medium is in desperate need of an archive. (NY Mag $)+ The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age. (MIT Technology Review)10 Do we even know what we want to watch anymore?We’re so reliant on algorithms, it’s hard to know. (New Yorker $)
Quote of the day “We’re scared for ourselves and for the country.”  —An anonymous CDC worker tells the New York Times about the mood inside the agency following the firing of their new director Susan Monarez.
One more thing How a tiny Pacific Island became the global capital of cybercrimeTokelau, a string of three isolated atolls strung out across the Pacific, is so remote that it was the last place on Earth to be connected to the telephone—only in 1997. Just three years later, the islands received a fax with an unlikely business proposal that would change everything. It was from an early internet entrepreneur from Amsterdam, named Joost Zuurbier. He wanted to manage Tokelau’s country-code top-level domain, or ccTLD—the short string of characters that is tacked onto the end of a URL—in exchange for money. In the succeeding years, tiny Tokelau became an unlikely internet giant—but not in the way it may have hoped. Until recently, its .tk domain had more users than any other country’s: a staggering 25 million—but the vast majority were spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals. Now the territory is desperately trying to clean up .tk. Its international standing, and even its sovereignty, may depend on it. Read the full story. —Jacob Judah We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)+ Scientists are using yeast to help save the bees.+ How to become super productive 😌+ Why North American mammoths were genetic freaks of nature.+ I love Seal’s steadfast refusal to explain his lyrics to Kiss from a Rose.

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This American nuclear company could help India’s thorium dream

For just the second time in nearly two decades, the United States has granted an export license to an American company planning to sell nuclear technology to India, MIT Technology Review has learned. The decision to greenlight Clean Core Thorium Energy’s license is a major step toward closer cooperation between the two countries on atomic energy and marks a milestone in the development of thorium as an alternative to uranium for fueling nuclear reactors.  Starting from the issuance last week, the thorium fuel produced by the Chicago-based company can be shipped to reactors in India, where it could be loaded into the cores of existing reactors. Once Clean Core receives final approval from Indian regulators, it will become one of the first American companies to sell nuclear technology to India, just as the world’s most populous nation has started relaxing strict rules that have long kept the US private sector from entering its atomic power industry.  “This license marks a turning point, not just for Clean Core but for the US-India civil nuclear partnership,” says Mehul Shah, the company’s chief executive and founder. “It places thorium at the center of the global energy transformation.” Thorium has long been seen as a good alternative to uranium because it’s more abundant, produces both smaller amounts of long-lived radioactive waste and fewer byproducts with centuries-long half-lives, and reduces the risk that materials from the fuel cycle will be diverted into weapons manufacturing. 
But at least some uranium fuel is needed to make thorium atoms split, making it an imperfect replacement. It’s also less well suited for use in the light-water reactors that power the vast majority of commercial nuclear plants worldwide. And in any case, the complex, highly regulated nuclear industry is extremely resistant to change. For India, which has scant uranium reserves but abundant deposits of thorium, the latter metal has been part of a long-term strategy for reducing dependence on imported fuels. The nation started negotiating a nuclear export treaty with the US in the early 2000s, and a 123 Agreement—a special, Senate-approved treaty the US requires with another country before sending it any civilian nuclear products—was approved in 2008.
A new approach While most thorium advocates have envisioned new reactors designed to run on this fuel, which would mean rebuilding the nuclear industry from the ground up, Shah and his team took a different approach. Clean Core created a new type of fuel that blends thorium with a more concentrated type of uranium called HALEU (high-assay low-enriched uranium). This blended fuel can be used in India’s pressurized heavy-water reactors, which make up the bulk of the country’s existing fleet and many of the new units under development now.  Thorium isn’t a fissile material itself, meaning its atoms aren’t inherently unstable enough for an extra neutron to easily split the nuclei and release energy. But the metal has what’s known as “fertile properties,” meaning it can absorb neutrons and transform into the fissile material uranium-233. Uranium-233 produces fewer long-lived radioactive isotopes than the uranium-235 that makes up the fissionable part of traditional fuel pellets. Most commercial reactors run on low-enriched uranium, which is about 5% U-235. When the fuel is spent, roughly 95% of the energy potential is left in the metal. And what remains is a highly toxic cocktail of long-lived radioactive isotopes such as cesium-137 and plutonium-239, which keep the waste dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Another concern is that the plutonium could be extracted for use in weapons.  Enriched up to 20%, HALEU allows reactors to extract more of the available energy and thus reduce the volume of waste. Clean Core’s fuel goes further: The HALEU provides the initial spark to ignite fertile thorium and triggers a reaction that can burn much hotter and utilize the vast majority of the material in the core, as a study published last year in the journal Nuclear Engineering and Design showed. “Thorium provides attributes needed to achieve higher burnups,” says Koroush Shirvan, an MIT professor of nuclear science and engineering who helped design Clean Core’s fuel assemblies. “It is enabling technology to go to higher burnups, which reduces your spent fuel volume, increases your fuel efficiency, and reduces the amount of uranium that you need.”  Compared with traditional uranium fuel, Clean Core says, its fuel reduces waste by more than 85% while avoiding the most problematic isotopes produced during fission. “The result is a safer, more sustainable cycle that reframes nuclear power not as a source of millennia-long liabilities but as a pathway to cleaner energy and a viable future fuel supply,” says Milan Shah, Clean Core’s chief operating officer and Mehul’s son. Pressurized heavy-water reactors are particularly well suited to thorium because heavy water—a version of H2O that has an extra neutron on the hydrogen atom—absorbs fewer neutrons during the fission process, increasing efficiency by allowing more neutrons to be captured by the thorium. There are 46 so-called PHWRs operating worldwide: 17 in Canada, 19 in India, three each in Argentina and South Korea, and two each in China and Romania, according to data from the International Atomic Energy Agency. In 1954, India set out a three-stage development plan for nuclear power that involved eventually phasing thorium into the fuel cycle for its fleet.  Yet in the 56 years since India built its first commercial nuclear plant, its state-controlled industry has remained relatively shut off to the private sector and the rest of the world. When the US signed the 123 Agreement with India in 2008, the moment heralded an era in which the subcontinent could become a testing ground for new American reactor designs. 

In 2010, however, India passed the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act. The legislation was based on what lawmakers saw as legal shortcomings in the wake of the 1984 Bhopal chemical factory disaster, when a subsidiary of the American industrial giant Dow Chemical avoided major payouts to the victims of a catastrophe that killed thousands. Under this law, responsibility for an accident at an Indian nuclear plant would fall on suppliers. The statute effectively killed any exports to India, since few companies could shoulder that burden. Only Russia’s state-owned Rosatom charged ahead with exporting reactors to India. But things are changing. In a joint statement issued after a February 2025 summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump “announced their commitment to fully realise the US-India 123 Civil Nuclear Agreement by moving forward with plans to work together to build US-designed nuclear reactors in India through large scale localisation and possible technology transfer.”  In March 2025, US federal officials gave the nuclear developer Holtec International an export license to sell Indian companies its as-yet-unbuilt small modular reactors, which are based on the light-water reactor design used in the US. In April, the Indian government suggested it would reform the nuclear liability law to relax rules on foreign companies in hopes of drawing more overseas developers. Last month, a top minister confirmed that the Modi administration would overhaul the law.  “For India, the thing they need to do is get another international vendor in the marketplace,” says Chris Gadomski, the chief nuclear analyst at the consultancy BloombergNEF. Path of least resistance But Shah sees larger potential for Clean Core. Unlike Holtec, whose export license was endorsed by the two Mumbai-based industrial giants Larsen & Toubro and Tata Consulting Engineers, Clean Core had its permit approved by two of India’s atomic regulators and its main state-owned nuclear company. By focusing on fuel rather than new reactors, Clean Core could become a vendor to the majority of the existing plants already operating in India.  Its technology diverges not only from that of other US nuclear companies but also from the approach used in China. Last year, China made waves by bringing its first thorium-fueled reactor online. This enabled it to establish a new foothold in a technology the US had invented and then abandoned, and it gave Beijing another leg up in atomic energy. But scaling that technology will require building out a whole new kind of reactor. That comes at a cost. A recent Johns Hopkins University study found that China’s success in building nuclear reactors stemmed in large part from standardization and repetition of successful designs, virtually all of which have been light-water reactors. Using thorium in existing heavy-water reactors lowers the bar for popularizing the fuel, according to the younger Shah.  “We think ours is the path of least resistance,” Milan Shah says. “Maybe not being completely revolutionary in the way you look at nuclear today, but incredibly evolutionary to progress humanity forward.” 
The company has plans to go beyond pressurized heavy-water reactors. Within two years, the elder Shah says, Clean Core plans to design a version of its fuel that could work in the light-water reactors that make up the entire US fleet of 94. But it’s not a simple conversion. For starters, there’s the size: While the PHWR fuel rods are about 50 centimeters in length, the rods that go into light-water reactors are roughly four meters long. Then there’s the history of challenges with light water’s absorption of neutrons that could otherwise be captured to induce fission in the thorium.  For Anil Kakodkar, the former chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission and a mentor to Shah, popularizing thorium could help rectify one of the darker chapters in his country’s nuclear development. In 1974, India became the first country since the signing of the first global Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to successfully test an atomic weapon. New Delhi was never a signatory to the pact. But the milestone prompted neighboring Pakistan to develop its own weapons. 
In response, President Jimmy Carter tried to demonstrate Washington’s commitment to reversing the Cold War arms race by sacrificing the first US effort to commercialize nuclear waste recycling, since the technology to separate plutonium and other radioisotopes from uranium in spent fuel was widely seen as a potential new source of weapons-grade material. By running its own reactors on thorium, Kakodkar says, India can chart a new path for newcomer nations that want to harness the power of the atom without stoking fears that nuclear weapons capability will spread.  “The proliferation concerns will be dismissed to a significant extent, allowing more rapid growth of nuclear power in emerging countries,” he says. “That will be a good thing for the world at large.”  Alexander C. Kaufman is a reporter who has covered energy, climate change, pollution, business, and geopolitics for more than a decade. 

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RFK Jr’s plan to improve America’s diet is missing the point

A lot of Americans don’t eat well. And they’re paying for it with their health. A diet high in sugar, sodium, and saturated fat can increase the risk of problems like diabetes, heart disease, and kidney disease, to name a few. And those are among the leading causes of death in the US. This is hardly news. But this week Robert F Kennedy Jr., who heads the US Department of Health and Human Services, floated a new solution to the problem. Kennedy and education secretary Linda McMahon think that teaching medical students more about the role of nutrition in health could help turn things around. “I’m working with Linda on forcing medical schools … to put nutrition into medical school education,” Kennedy said during a cabinet meeting on August 26. The next day, HHS released a statement calling for “increased nutrition education” for medical students. “We can reverse the chronic-disease epidemic simply by changing our diets and lifestyles,” Kennedy said in an accompanying video statement. “But to do that, we need nutrition to be a basic part of every doctor’s training.”
It certainly sounds like a good idea. If more Americans ate a healthier diet, we could expect to see a decrease in those diseases. But this framing of America’s health crisis is overly simplistic, especially given that plenty of the administration’s other actions have directly undermined health in multiple ways—including by canceling a vital nutrition education program. At any rate, there are other, more effective ways to tackle the chronic-disease crisis.
The biggest killers, heart disease and stroke, are responsible for more than a third of deaths, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A healthy diet can reduce your risk of developing those conditions. And it makes total sense to educate the future doctors of America about nutrition. Medical bodies are on board with the idea, too. “The importance of nutrition in medical education is increasingly clear, and we support expanded, evidence-based instruction to better equip physicians to prevent and manage chronic disease and improve patient outcomes,” David H. Aizuss, chair of the American Medical Association’s board of trustees, said in a statement. But it’s not as though medical students aren’t getting any nutrition education. And that training has increased in the last five years, according to surveys carried out by the American Association of Medical Colleges. Kennedy has referred to a 2021 survey suggesting that medical students in the US get only around one hour of nutrition education per year. But the AAMC argues that nutrition education increasingly happens through “integrated experiences” rather than stand-alone lectures. “Medical schools understand the critical role that nutrition plays in preventing, managing, and treating chronic health conditions, and incorporate significant nutrition education across their required curricula,” Alison J. Whelan, AAMC’s chief academic officer, said in a statement. That’s not to say there isn’t room for improvement. Gabby Headrick, a food systems dietician and associate director of food and nutrition policy at George Washington University’s Institute for Food Safety & Nutrition Security, thinks nutritionists could take a more prominent role in patient care, too. But it’s somewhat galling for the administration to choose medical education as its focus given the recent cuts in federal funding that will affect health. For example, funding for the National Diabetes Prevention Program, which offers support and guidance to help thousands of people adopt healthy diets and exercise routines, was canceled by the Trump administration in March. The focus on medical schools also overlooks one of the biggest factors behind poor nutrition in the US: access to healthy food. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that increased costs make it harder for most Americans to eat well. Twenty percent of the people surveyed acknowledged that their diets were not healthy.

“So many people know what a healthy diet is, and they know what should be on their plate every night,” says Headrick, who has researched this issue. “But the vast majority of folks just truly do not have the money or the time to get the food on the plate.” The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has been helping low-income Americans afford some of those healthier foods. It supported over 41 million people in 2024. But under the Trump administration’s tax and spending bill, the program is set to lose around $186 billion in funding over the next 10 years. Kennedy’s focus is on education. And it just so happens that there is a nutrition education program in place—one that helps people of all ages learn not only what healthy foods are, but how to source them on a budget and use them to prepare meals. SNAP-Ed, as it’s known, has already provided this support to millions of Americans. Under the Trump administration, it is set to be eliminated. It is difficult to see how these actions are going to help people adopt healthier diets. What might be a better approach? I put the question to Headrick: If she were in charge, what policies would she enact? “Universal health care,” she told me. Being able to access health care without risking financial hardship not only improves health outcomes and life expectancy; it also spares people from medical debt—something that affects around 40% of adults in the US, according to a recent survey. And the Trump administration’s plans to cut federal health spending by about a trillion dollars over the next decade certainly aren’t going to help with that. All told, around 16 million people could lose their health insurance by 2034, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office. “The evidence suggests that if we cut folks’ social benefit programs, such as access to health care and food, we are going to see detrimental impacts,” says Headrick. “And it’s going to cause an increased burden of preventable disease.” This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

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EQT Offtakes 2 MMtpa for 20 Years from Port Arthur LNG Phase 2

EQT Corp. has committed to buying two million metric tons per annum (MMtpa) for 20 years from Sempra’s planned Port Arthur LNG Phase II project in Jefferson County, Texas. “EQT will purchase the LNG on a free-on-board basis at a price indexed to Henry Hub”, EQT and Sempra Infrastructure, part of San Diego, California-based energy infrastructure company Sempra, said in a joint statement. Sempra Infrastructure chief executive Justin Bird said, “This development project can help fortify America’s position as a leading energy exporter, which is a shared goal of EQT and Sempra Infrastructure”. Earlier this month ConocoPhillips signed an agreement to buy four MMtpa over 20 years on a free-on-board basis from Port Arthur LNG Phase II. ConocoPhillips had already signed up for five MMtpa over 20 years from the under-construction first phase, from which it has also agreed to acquire a 30 percent equity stake. “With continued momentum in the project’s development, Sempra Infrastructure continues to target making a final investment decision on the Port Arthur LNG Phase II project in 2025”, the statement said. “All major permits for the Port Arthur LNG Phase II development project have been secured”, it added. In July Sempra secured a 20-year agreement to supply 1.5 MMtpa from phase II to Japan’s JERA Co. Inc. on a free-on-board basis. In June Sempra and Saudi Arabian Oil Co. (Aramco) progressed a heads-of-agreement document on phase II into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) under which the state-owned oil giant plans to buy five MMtpa for 20 years. The MOU also provides for Aramco’s potential acquisition of a 25 percent interest. In May the Department of Energy (DOE) granted phase II a permit to export to countries without a free trade agreement (FTA) with the U.S., marking the resumption of federal permitting for LNG export to

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Software commands 40% of cybersecurity budgets as gen AI attacks execute in milliseconds

“With volatility now the norm, security and risk leaders need practical guidance on managing existing spending and new budgetary necessities,” states Forrester’s 2026 Budget Planning Guide, revealing a fundamental shift in how organizations allocate cybersecurity resources.Software now commands 40% of cybersecurity spending, exceeding hardware at 15.8%, outsourcing at 15% and surpassing personnel costs at 29% by 11 percentage points while organizations defend against gen AI attacks executing in milliseconds versus a Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) of 181 days according to IBM’s latest Cost of a Data Breach Report.Three converging threats are flipping cybersecurity on its head: what once protected organizations is now working against them. Generative AI (gen AI) is enabling attackers to craft 10,000 personalized phishing emails per minute using scraped LinkedIn profiles and corporate communications. NIST’s 2030 quantum deadline threatens retroactive decryption of $425 billion in currently protected data. Deepfake fraud that surged 3,000% in 2024 now bypasses biometric authentication in 97% of attempts, forcing security leaders to reimagine defensive architectures fundamentally.Caption: Software now commands 40% of cybersecurity budgets in 2025, representing an 11 percentage point premium over personnel costs at 29%, as organizations layer security solutions to combat gen AI threats executing in milliseconds. Source: Forrester’s 2026 Budget Planning Guide

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How Sakana AI’s new evolutionary algorithm builds powerful AI models without expensive retraining

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now A new evolutionary technique from Japan-based AI lab Sakana AI enables developers to augment the capabilities of AI models without costly training and fine-tuning processes. The technique, called Model Merging of Natural Niches (M2N2), overcomes the limitations of other model merging methods and can even evolve new models entirely from scratch. M2N2 can be applied to different types of machine learning models, including large language models (LLMs) and text-to-image generators. For enterprises looking to build custom AI solutions, the approach offers a powerful and efficient way to create specialized models by combining the strengths of existing open-source variants. What is model merging? Model merging is a technique for integrating the knowledge of multiple specialized AI models into a single, more capable model. Instead of fine-tuning, which refines a single pre-trained model using new data, merging combines the parameters of several models simultaneously. This process can consolidate a wealth of knowledge into one asset without requiring expensive, gradient-based training or access to the original training data. For enterprise teams, this offers several practical advantages over traditional fine-tuning. In comments to VentureBeat, the paper’s authors said model merging is a gradient-free process that only requires forward passes, making it computationally cheaper than fine-tuning, which involves costly gradient updates. Merging also sidesteps the need for carefully balanced training data and mitigates the risk of “catastrophic forgetting,” where a model loses its original capabilities after learning a new task. The technique is especially powerful when the training data for specialist models isn’t available, as merging only requires the model weights themselves. AI Scaling Hits Its Limits Power caps, rising token costs, and inference delays are reshaping enterprise AI.

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Energy Department Issues Final Export Authorization to Commonwealth LNG

WASHINGTON— U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright today announced the Department of Energy’s (DOE) final authorization for Commonwealth LNG, LLC to export up to 1.21 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of natural gas as liquefied natural gas (LNG) to non-free trade agreement (FTA) countries from its proposed project in Cameron Parish, Louisiana. Today’s action follows DOE’s conditional authorization to Commonwealth LNG, LLC in February 2025 and reflects the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) June 2025 approval for the siting, construction, and operation of the facility. It also incorporates DOE’s May 2025 response to comments on the 2024 LNG Export Study that reaffirms that U.S. LNG exports strengthen America’s energy leadership, expand opportunities for American workers, and provide allies with secure access to reliable U.S. energy. “Finalizing this authorization moves us closer to delivering more American LNG to the world, advancing President Trump’s energy dominance agenda,” Secretary Wright said. “As DOE found earlier this year and affirms again in this order, expanding America’s LNG export capacity bolsters our economy, strengthens the energy security of our allies and trading partners and ensures the U.S. can continue to lead the world in the production of affordable, reliable and secure energy.” “We are glad to do our part in Commonwealth’s recent progress toward its final investment decision and look forward to its contribution to our nation’s success.” said Tala Goudarzi, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. Commonwealth LNG, owned by Kimmeridge, has secured long-term off-take agreements for LNG with Malaysia’s PETRONAS, global energy commodities trading entity Glencore LTD, and Japan’s JERA, and recently announced an engineering, procurement, and construction contract with Technip Energies to advance the project.  Background:  The United States currently operates eight large-scale LNG export projects, with several more under construction or expansion. Under

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Namibia’s Ambition to Become Oil Hotspot Tested by Wildcatter

Searching for oil prospects in a block bigger than Rhode Island, Travis Smithard made a last-minute decision to send the Noble Venturer drillship twice as far as originally planned to spud a well off Namibia’s coast.  The switch paid off. The 230-meter (750 feet) vessel’s journey through the Atlantic waters led to Rhino Resources Ltd. announcing a significant discovery in April. That put the privately owned company on the map in Namibia with majors like Shell Plc and TotalEnergies SE, whose finds in the past three years have made the southern African nation a new exploration hotspot. Now the spotlight is on the wildcatter again as it drills another well called Volans, which it bypassed earlier this year to focus on Capricornus about 15 kilometers (9 miles) away. The market is closely watching the fortunes of each new campaign to see if Namibia — a major supplier of commodities like uranium and diamonds, but which doesn’t yet produce any crude — really has the resources to match its oil ambitions.  Rhino’s diversion to the Capricornus well was to “sort of broaden the aperture here a little bit” to understand a wider swath of the block, Chief Executive Officer Smithard said in an interview in the capital Windhoek. The decision was based on data that allowed for a quick change, he said. The area is poised to become a major African basin, with producers scrutinizing the best projects to hold as the energy transition moves the world closer to peak oil demand. Namibia aims to start output by 2030, and at one point there was optimism that it could become another Guyana — where a giant oil discovery has transformed the sparsely populated country’s economy. “We are currently very, very busy at a stage where we are now trying to cross over the path of moving Namibia from

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Oil Posts First Monthly Loss Since April

Oil notched its first monthly loss since April, with trading dominated by concerns about a looming glut and geopolitical issues, including US-led efforts to end the war in Ukraine. West Texas Intermediate for October delivery slid 0.9% to settle near $64 a barrel, with the US benchmark down 7.6% this month. Brent closed above $68. Oil has lost ground in August on worries that global supplies will run ahead of demand in the coming quarters, boosting stockpiles. The commodity’s slump deepened on Friday after US consumer sentiment declined to a three-month low, reflecting concerns that tariffs will hurt the economy. Investors are also focused on Ukraine and potential shifts in crude flows from Russia. US President Donald Trump was “not happy” about Moscow’s recent strikes on Ukraine, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said. Washington has imposed a 50% levy on most Indian imports to punish the South Asian nation for buying Russian crude. Moscow unleashed a wave of drone and missile strikes on Kyiv earlier this week, in defiance of US calls for an end to the fighting, killing 18 people, Ukrainian authorities said. A meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russia’s Vladimir Putin was unlikely, according to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Trump has threatened “very big consequences” if Moscow doesn’t come to the negotiating table. Oil is down 11% this year on concerns that Trump’s trade war will hurt energy consumption at the same time that OPEC+ is working to restore idled capacity. “More OPEC+ oil is coming to the market amid worries over US economic growth, which keeps the market well-supplied,” said Jens Naervig Pedersen, a strategist at Danske Bank AS. Trading volumes on Friday were muted ahead of the Labor Day holiday weekend in the US, contributing to exaggerated price swings. Oil Prices WTI for

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