Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller urged policymakers and bankers to stop fearing DeFi and stablecoins, saying they will drive the next wave of innovation in the US payments system.
The judge cited ongoing cooperation of the defendants in the case as one of the reasons for unfreezing the stablecoins.
The next era of the space economy isn’t just about rockets and satellites — it’s about infrastructure, autonomy, and entirely new models for building and defending off-Earth assets. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 this October 27–29 in San Francisco’s Moscone West, the Space Stage is where this shift gets real.
Read more The battery materials startup raised significant Series D funding to expand its manufacturing capability. At the same time, it bought out partner SK’s stake in a joint venture.
Read more Google’s Pixel event was awkward and forced, underselling the technology it had on display.
Read more India is set to ban real-money gaming nationwide under a proposed law that has just passed the lower house of parliament.
Read more SpaceX’s plans to launch Starship from Florida could have implications for the state’s booming airports.
Read more NASA and IBM have released a new open-source machine learning model to help scientists better understand and predict the physics and weather patterns of the sun. Surya, trained on over a decade’s worth of NASA solar data, should help give scientists an early warning when a dangerous solar flare is likely to hit Earth.
Solar storms occur when the sun erupts energy and particles into space. They can produce solar flares and slower-moving coronal mass ejections that can disrupt radio signals, flip computer bits onboard satellites, and endanger astronauts with bursts of radiation.
There’s no way to prevent these sorts of effects, but being able to predict when a large solar flare will occur could let people work around them. However, as Louise Harra, an astrophysicist at ETH Zurich, puts it, “when it erupts is always the sticking point.”
Scientists can easily tell from an image of the sun if there will be a solar flare in the near future, says Harra, who did not work on Surya. But knowing the exact timing and strength of a flare is much harder, she says. That’s a problem because a flare’s size can make the difference between small regional radio blackouts every few weeks (which can still be disruptive) or a devastating solar superstorm that would cause satellites to fall out of orbit and electrical grids to fail. Some solar scientists believe we are overdue for a solar superstorm of this magnitude.
While machine learning has been used to study solar weather events before, the researchers behind Surya hope the quality and sheer scale of their data will help it predict a wider range of events more accurately.
The model’s training data came from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which collects pictures of the sun at many different wavelengths of light simultaneously. That made for a dataset of over 250 terabytes in total.
Early testing of Surya showed it could predict some solar flares two hours in advance. “It can predict the solar flare’s shape, the position in the sun, the intensity,” says Juan Bernabe-Moreno, an AI researcher at IBM who led the Surya project. Two hours may not be enough to protect against all the impacts a strong flare could have, but every moment counts. IBM claims in a blog post that this can as much as double the warning time currently possible with state-of-the-art methods, though exact reported lead times vary. It’s possible this predictive power could be improved through, for example, fine-tuning or by adding other data, as well.
According to Harra, the hidden patterns underlying events like solar flares are hard to understand from Earth. She says that while astrophysicists know the conditions that make these events happen, they still do not understand why they occur when they do. “It’s just those tiny destabilizations that we know happen, but we don’t know when,” says Harra. The promise of Surya lies in whether it can find the patterns underlying those destabilizations faster than any existing methods, buying us extra time.
However, Bernabe-Moreno is excited for the potential beyond predicting solar flares. He hopes to use Surya alongside previous models he worked on for IBM and NASA that predict weather here on Earth to better understand how solar storms and Earth weather are connected. “There is some evidence about solar weather influencing lightning, for example,” he says. “What are the cross effects, and where and how do you map the influence from one type of weather to the other?”
Because Surya is a foundation model, trained without a specialized job, NASA and IBM hope that it can find many patterns in the sun’s physics, much as general-purpose large language models like ChatGPT can take on many different tasks. They believe Surya could even enable new understandings about how other celestial bodies work.
“Understanding the sun is a proxy for understanding many other stars,” Bernabe-Moreno says. “We look at the sun as a laboratory.”
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.
How churches use data and AI as engines of surveillance
On a Sunday morning in a Midwestern megachurch, worshippers step through sliding glass doors into a bustling lobby—unaware they’ve just passed through a gauntlet of biometric surveillance. High-speed cameras snap multiple face “probes” per second, before passing the results to a local neural network that distills these images into digital fingerprints. Before people find their seats, they are matched against an on-premises database—tagged with names, membership tiers, and watch-list flags—that’s stored behind the church’s firewall.
This hypothetical scene reflects real capabilities increasingly woven into places of worship nationwide, where spiritual care and surveillance converge in ways few congregants ever realize.
Where Big Tech’s rationalist ethos and evangelical spirituality once mixed like oil and holy water, now they’re combining to redraw the contours of community and pastoral power in modern spiritual life. Read the full story.
—Alex Ashley
This story is from our forthcoming print issue, which is all about security. If you haven’t already, subscribe now to receive future issues once they land.
MIT Technology Review Narrated: How to run an LLM on your laptop
For people who are concerned about privacy, want to break free from the control of the big LLM companies, or just enjoy tinkering, local models offer a compelling alternative to ChatGPT and its web-based peers. Here’s how to get started running one from the safety and comfort of your own computer.
This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 US tech stocks are sliding over fears the AI bubble may be about to burst
After an MIT report found that the vast majority of organizations are getting zero return on their AI investments. (FT $)
+ Even Sam Altman thinks the current hype is unsustainable. (CNBC)
2 Meta is reportedly weighing up downsizing its AI division
It wants to split it into four groups—and layoffs could be imminent. (NYT $)+ What’s happening with the metaverse, then? (NY Mag $)
+ Meta is desperately hoping its AI hiring spree will pay off. (Bloomberg $)
3 The American Academy of Pediatrics is defying RFK Jr
By releasing its own vaccination schedule for children. (Ars Technica)
+ It’s breaking with current CDC recommendations. (CNN)
+ Why US federal health agencies are abandoning mRNA vaccines. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Elon Musk’s America Party isn’t going so well
He’s said to be refocusing his attention on his companies instead. (WSJ $)
5 The White House has a TikTok account now
The very same TikTok that Donald Trump once tried to ban. (WP $)
+ What appears to have changed Congress’ stance? (The Verge)
+ There’s still no sign of a sale on the horizon. (The Guardian)
6 Nvidia is working on another chip for China
One that’s faster and more powerful than its current H20 model. (Reuters)
7 How AGI preppers are bracing themselves for an AI apocalypse
Some are spending all their retirement savings along the way. (Insider $)
8 Demand for critical minerals is soaring
Is there a less-invasive way to mine them? (New Scientist $)
+ The race to produce rare earth elements. (MIT Technology Review)
9 What’s an automaker CEO to do?
In our increasingly topsy turvy world, many of them feel like they can’t win. (Wired $)
10 This mattress company is building an AI agent for sleep
Eight Sleep’s agent could simulate digital twins of a user’s sleep habits. (The Information $)
+ I tried to hack my insomnia with technology. Here’s what worked. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“Too many cooks, too many kitchens.”
—Tech investor M.G. Siegler wryly comments on the news Meta is planning to restructure its AI division in a post on Bluesky.
One more thing
Responsible AI has a burnout problem
Margaret Mitchell had been working at Google for two years before she realized she needed a break. Only after she spoke with a therapist did she understand the problem: she was burnt out.
Mitchell, who now works as chief ethics scientist at the AI startup Hugging Face, is far from alone in her experience. Burnout is becoming increasingly common in responsible AI teams.
All the practitioners MIT Technology Review interviewed spoke enthusiastically about their work: it is fueled by passion, a sense of urgency, and the satisfaction of building solutions for real problems. But that sense of mission can be overwhelming without the right support. Read the full story.
—Melissa Heikkilä
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.)
+ Check out Wes Andersons’ quirky love letter to New York 
+ Uhoh—beware the rise of the groomzilla.
+ The Rocky Horror Picture Show is 50 years old, if you can believe it.
+ Whisk me away to Lake George ASAP.