AI industry says Trump plans to tax chips in the “single dumbest way imaginable”

AI industry says Trump plans to tax chips in the “single dumbest way imaginable”

fivenewscrypto    août 29, 2026   

Donald Trump may be preparing to announce sweeping new semiconductor tariffs at the absolute worst time, the tech industry fears.

On Thursday, Politico reported that a wide range of new semiconductor tariffs, which the tech industry expects will “doom” artificial intelligence innovation in the US, could be imposed in the coming “weeks or months.”

About eight people familiar with the Trump administration’s plans were granted anonymity to discuss how the tariffs might work. They suggested that the framework for tariffs may change as it becomes finalized, but one approach under consideration could “dramatically expand the number of tech products subject to the duties, hitting not just chips but potentially many of the goods made with them, such as gaming consoles or the servers that fill data centers.”

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The iconic T-38 jets flown by astronauts just got a spiffy new look

The iconic T-38 jets flown by astronauts just got a spiffy new look

fivenewscrypto    août 29, 2026   

For the first time in decades, NASA has rolled out one of its iconic astronaut training aircraft with a bold, new look.

The space agency debuted a new livery on one of its T-38 jets in celebration of its program to return astronauts to the Moon. The Artemis design retains nods to what made the "white rocket" immediately recognizable, but adds a new colorway and painted graphics to make clear where NASA is headed.

"This new 'Artemis' livery has a black and white paint scheme with blue and red stripes that separate those two paint schemes," said Sean Brady, who proposed and designed the new livery while serving as the T-38 project pilot in NASA's Aircraft Operations Division (AOD), part of the Flight Operations Directorate at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "The Artemis program logo in the back and a picture of the Moon is on the left and right side of the rear fuselage."

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RFK Jr. goes full anti-vaccine bananas over two measles deaths—one was a newborn

RFK Jr. goes full anti-vaccine bananas over two measles deaths—one was a newborn

fivenewscrypto    août 29, 2026   

In the wake of news on Tuesday that two people in Pennsylvania died from measles, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been posting a slew of anti-vaccine rhetoric and misinformation on social media—marking a resurgence of his old ways as a fervent opponent of lifesaving immunizations.

The deaths are the first measles-linked fatalities in Pennsylvania in 35 years and are the first US  measles deaths reported in 2026. They occurred amid an explosive outbreak in the state that has reached nearly 400 confirmed cases, as well as an ongoing nationwide surge for the vaccine-preventable disease. The US has tallied nearly 2,800 cases so far this year, the highest total since 1991.

Pennsylvania health officials initially declined to provide details about the deaths, only reporting that they were in unvaccinated people from Lancaster County. However, news broke Wednesday that one of the deaths occurred in a newborn baby. That heart-wrenching news was swiftly entangled in the anti-vaccine misinformation Kennedy was spewing online.

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Why did 1,000 world citizens bury their underpants?

Why did 1,000 world citizens bury their underpants?

fivenewscrypto    août 28, 2026   

A thousand people voluntarily buried their cotton underpants for two months—not to keep the Underpants Gnomes from stealing them, but as part of a citizen science project to map out soil health in 25 countries around the world. The results of this unique experiment were reported in a new paper published in the journal Plants People Planet.

“Our results show that how soil is managed can significantly affect both soil life and soil quality,” said co-author Marcel van der Heijden, an agroecologist at the University of Zurich. “Healthy, biologically active soil is crucial for fertility, nutrient cycling and many other ecosystem services.”

Soil health is critical for agriculture and, by extension, food security, not to mention a healthy global ecosystem, but it has been declining worldwide, per the authors. One key indicator of soil health is decomposition rates of complex organic matter, breaking down stuff like leaves, wood, even cadavers into simpler organic and inorganic compounds, releasing C0₂ and nutrients in the process. There have been relatively few large-scale national decomposition studies involving different land use types, although smaller studies have shown that how humans use a site can significantly affect the soil's biological diversity.

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Panic passes Trump tariff refunds back to the Playdate customers who paid them

Panic passes Trump tariff refunds back to the Playdate customers who paid them

fivenewscrypto    août 28, 2026   

Panic, the indie game publishers behind the quirky, yellow crank-sporting Playdate gaming handheld, is issuing refunds to customers who had to shoulder the cost of inappropriate tariffs imposed by the Trump administration this year.

The news comes months after the Supreme Court said in a February ruling that those tariffs were illegal, which also demanded that the administration refund the companies that had to temporarily pay the import taxes. In an update posted on the Playdate help site this week, Panic noted that it has finally "begun to receive refunds of the tariffs we paid in the last year" and had consequently "refunded all tariffs charged to customers."

In the initial version of that tariff note, Panic explained that it couldn't afford to simply "absorb" the 19 percent tariffs it was being charged to import Playdate hardware made overseas because "our margins on Playdate are low." As such, while the tax was in effect, it was passed along to customers as an explicit subtotal line item at the bottom of all Playdate orders. That's in contrast to companies like Nintendo, which vaguely cited "market conditions" and tariff "uncertainty" in raising the asking price of legacy hardware and some Switch 2 accessories last year.

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Traders brought Central American cacao to Georgia 1,000 years ago

Traders brought Central American cacao to Georgia 1,000 years ago

fivenewscrypto    août 28, 2026   

A thousand years ago, feasts in what’s now northern Georgia state included cacao from Central America.

Potsherds discarded after an 11th-century feast at Etowah—an Indigenous city just north of what’s now Atlanta—contained traces of cacao, a raw ingredient of chocolate. The chemical residue and ancient DNA reveal that not only did the Mississippian people who built the city have excellent taste, they also had trade connections that reached at least 3,000 kilometers to Central America. And in a sense, chocolate may have helped build the Mississippian mounds.

Ancient dirty dishes

University of South Carolina archaeologist Adam King and his colleagues found fragments of ancient DNA from Theobroma cacao in the inner surfaces of potsherds from long-ago feasts at Etowah. Fruit from the cacao tree contains beans that, when dried and roasted, produce chocolate in all its glorious forms. Cacao only grows in the tropics, which means the nearest actual cacao trees would have been at least a 3,000-kilometer trek away from the woodlands of the eastern US. And that means the Mississippian people who lived in Etowah must have had continent-spanning trade connections.

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How much of a problem is AI’s water use?

How much of a problem is AI’s water use?

fivenewscrypto    août 28, 2026   

“Protect our water,” “Water for people not AI,” “Don’t mess with our water,” declare protest signs from Texas to New Mexico to Arizona. Angered by water use, energy consumption, and pollution, locals are increasingly protesting the rapid expansion of data centers in the United States as tech companies work to rapidly expand capacity for AI.

Many data centers rely at least partly on water to absorb heat from air or surfaces, and then cause cooling as it evaporates, just like sweating keeps our bodies cool. The processors inside data centers can reach internal temperatures of up to 176° Fahrenheit, for the same reasons that an overtaxed laptop heats up.

But while there’s little doubt that data centers are consuming significant amounts of energy, water consumption is more complicated. Claims circulating online bring scant clarity, ranging from articles claiming that chatbots can consume 500 ml of water per query to some online commentators declaring AI's water issue to be nonexistent. And the consumption data from large tech companies themselves are often incomplete and inconsistent.

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