This Mine Predicts Major Wars. It’s Opening Again
August 7th, 2026Via: Bloomberg:
Near a windswept beach off the southern coast of Australia lies a weirdly accurate indicator of global conflict.
Sprawling over 80 hectares (200 acres) between a platypus stream and a penguin colony, the Dolphin Mine was for many years the biggest employer on King Island, a speck of 1,600 people halfway between Tasmania and the Australian mainland. The only other industries are cattle, tourism, fishing and kelp. As one of the world’s largest deposits of tungsten — a preternaturally tough metal used to harden bullets, shells and armor plating — the pit has risen and fallen through more than a century of war and peace.
First opened in 1917 to support munitions production in World War I, it shut down three years later when peace crashed the tungsten market. Starting up again in 1938 on the eve of World War II, it was saved twice more as conflict broke out first in Korea and then Vietnam. In 1990, exactly 12 months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it closed, seemingly for good. Water flooded its pit and underground tunnels, and the workers’ settlement became a ghost town.
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Since the start of 2025, prices have jumped almost eight-fold, attracting the attention of many players, including the president of the United States. Donald Trump’s sons are collaborating with the family of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on a tungsten project in Kazakhstan, according to the New York Times.
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Kevin Pallas is betting that global interest in tungsten will work in the Dolphin Mine’s favor. As executive chairman of the pit’s owner Group 6 Metals Ltd., he’s teamed up with a group of aging mineral investors to bring the flooded underground tunnels back into operation.
The Argentine Ranch Where Tech CEOs Plan to Ride Out the Apocalypse
August 7th, 2026Via: Financial Times:
In the foothills of the Andes, across an expanse of rugged terrain five times the size of Manhattan, a group of entrepreneurs is preparing for the end.
A handful of small prefab homes, geodesic domes and an airstrip have sprung up in the past two years on the remote Wamani ranch, an hour via dirt roads from the nearest village in far-west Argentina.
Far from the world’s nuclear superpowers and close to Patagonia’s abundant oil reserves and the fertile plains of Argentine wine capital Mendoza, Wamani is Argentine-Spanish tech founder Martín Varsavsky’s best guess at a place that would survive armageddon.
“We’re already in World War Three, the battle lines are already drawn,” said Varsavsky, over the phone to Wamani from a business trip to San Francisco, describing a conflict that pits Russia, China, North Korea and Iran against “most of the rest” of the world.
“It just makes sense to have a refuge,” he says.
AMD Acquires AI Chip Startup Taalas to Boost Inference Performance by Etching Models Into Silicon
August 7th, 2026Via: Register:
In AMD’s latest bid to upset Nvidia’s dominance in AI hardware, the House of Zen has acquired AI chip company Taalas, which bakes model weights directly into silicon in a process that promises to boost inference performance by an order of magnitude or more.
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The startup’s chips don’t rely on HBM to store the model weights but rather etch them directly into the silicon. In a sense, Taalas’ chips are really model-specific integrated circuits or MSICs.
Perhaps more importantly, Taalas’ tech isn’t just conceptual. In February, the startup revealed its first test chip fabbed on TSMC’s 6nm process tech, which it called the HC1. Initial benchmarks saw the chip serve Meta’s Llama 3.1 8B at a blistering 16,960 tokens a second — when announced last February, that was 48x faster than Nvidia’s GPUs and 8.5x faster than Cerebras’ accelerators.
While Llama 3.1 is ancient by today’s standards, having made its debut all the way back in mid 2024, the reticle-sized chip was really intended to prove the concept.
Taalas has been incredibly secretive about how its chips actually work, but we know its processors are comprised of two main regions: the mask-ROM recall fabric where model weights are etched, and the SRAM recall fabric where KV caches and fine-tuning adapters are stored.
For its second-gen HC2 chip due out this summer, Taalas aims to boost parameter count to 20 billion parameters. That might not sound like much, but just like with GPUs for larger models, weights are simply distributed across multiple accelerators using pipeline parallelism.
At 20 billion parameters per chip, you’d need just 50 accelerators to support a trillion-parameter model, and AMD just so happens to have a rack-scale compute platform and in-house system design team that can comfortably accommodate that.
That’s quite a bit more space and power efficient than Nvidia’s recently unveiled LPX systems, which would need a few dozen GPUs and at least 2,000 Groq LPUs to serve the same model.
“Scientists Use AI to Create Entirely New Viruses – and Give Urgent Warning”
August 7th, 2026Via: Independent:
AI has been used to create new viruses for the first ever time – and researchers have warned that it could be the beginning of a dangerous new trend.
In the new study, researchers used an artificial intelligence system to make bacteriophages, a virus that infect bacteria and are used to treat infections. The newly developed viruses are able to kill E coli bugs that could not be treated with naturally occurring viruses, the scientists say.
But scientists warned that it could represent a dangerous new moment in safety and security. The technology appears to be racing ahead of the ability to use it safely, experts away from the study warned.
“Although this is promising for life sciences applications, it also raises urgent biosafety and biosecurity questions,” wrote Tom Inglesby and Moritz Hanke, from the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not.”
The scientists behind the study recognised the potential danger of the work. They urged others taking part in similar research to ““consult both safety and security professionals throughout the project”.
Global Food Prices Hit Three-Year High As War, Chokepoint Chaos And El Nino Spark Perfect Storm
August 7th, 2026Via: ZeroHedge:
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Price Index climbed to a three-year high in July, extending its upward trajectory as conflicts across Eurasia (the Black Sea and the Hormuz chokepoint) disrupt critical trade routes and mounting El Niño risks threaten global harvests.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s FAO Food Price Index, which tracks monthly changes in the international prices of a basket of globally traded food commodities, averaged 131.09 last month, up .6% from the previous month, led by gains in grain, sugar, and vegetable oils.
Wheat surged 5.8% during the month to a two-year high, while corn climbed 3.6%. Vegetable oil prices reached their highest since June 2022, while meat and dairy prices declined, according to the FAO.
Fueling the price surge is the widening Russia-Ukraine war in the Black Sea, where attacks are increasing and threaten critical bulk-shipping corridors. Disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz are also pushing food prices higher by raising energy, fertilizer, and transportation costs. Layered on top of all this are deteriorating crop conditions in major growing regions across the world as El Niño risks mount, a threat that has been flagged for many months.
Strange Scenes in the Desert…
August 7th, 2026Via: Modernity:
Footage circulating purporting to be from the North African desert shows what looks like an enormous column of sub-Saharan African men moving under escort.
FDA Approves New mRNA Vaccine, Despite Risks
August 7th, 2026BREAKING–FDA Approves Moderna's mRNA Influenza Vaccine Despite 75.3% Rate of Adverse Reactions
According to the FDA briefing document, severe systemic reactions were 4× MORE COMMON than with the traditional flu shot. Data consistent with mRNA being a more dangerous vaccine… pic.twitter.com/vfLhFPq2fn
— Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH® (@P_McCulloughMD) August 6, 2026
Via: CNBC:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Moderna’s flu vaccine for people aged 50 and older, the company said on Wednesday, marking the first approval of a messenger ?RNA-based vaccine for seasonal flu.
The shot, mFlusiva, was given a traditional approval for adults aged 50 to 64, ?and an accelerated approval for ?those 65 years and ?older.
Moderna has agreed to run an additional study and submit more data in adults 65 and older to confirm the vaccine’s benefit in that age group.
Massie on “Big Bankruptcy Bill”
August 7th, 2026I’m sorry if you’re a Republican and don’t want to hear this but the National Debt is $3.6 Trillion higher than when Trump took office 18 months ago. Here’s the 90 second speech I gave the night they passed the Big Bankruptcy Bill. pic.twitter.com/0otMoWkR1V
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) August 7, 2026
AI Surveillance Pricing: “One of the Biggest Scams in American History”
August 6th, 2026I literally gasped watching this
American bought a cheap phone, hired someone to use it in poor neighborhoods, and visit places acting like they have no money
After a day, apps on that phone had cheaper prices than a normal persons phone
Dynamic pricing is real and we are… pic.twitter.com/Ax5q1TwouM
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) August 5, 2026
Via: Forbes:
The Global Elite, World Commerce Corporation and UFOs
August 4th, 2026Via: Jason Samosa:
