A Saturn-mass exoplanet candidate orbiting Alpha Centauri A at about 1–2 AU was directly imaged by JWST, potentially the closest directly imaged planet to its star at roughly 4 light-years from Earth. OpenAI released GPT-5 to about 700 million ChatGPT users, delivering significantly improved reasoning, problem-solving, domain expertise, and on-demand software coding with an enterprise…
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Crew-10, comprising NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA’s Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos’ Kirill Peskov, is targeting undocking on Aug 8, 2025, with splashdown off the California coast on Aug 9, 2025, marking the first crewed California splashdown under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program after a five-month science mission. China completed the first full-scale test…
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Major AI Product Launches & Updates (Aug 7–8, 2025) Corporate Moves, Funding Frenzy & Executive Shakeups Breakthroughs in AI Research & Innovation Government & Legal Developments in AI AI Ethics, Safety & Society: Key Debates of the Week Sources: OpenAI GPT-5 launch report (Reuters) reuters.com reuters.com; Google $1B education initiative (Reuters) reuters.com reuters.com; Anthropic model…
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OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others, restructured in 2019 into a capped-profit model, and by late 2024 was valued at about $150 billion after ChatGPT’s rapid adoption. GPT-4, released in March 2023, is OpenAI’s multimodal model that accepts text and images, with a context window up to 32K tokens…
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In June 2025 Character.AI appointed Karandeep Anand as CEO and announced a 60-day action plan to improve memory, relax the safety filter, and add creator tools, while Google licensed Character.AI’s LLM and took a stake, valuing the company at about $2.5–$3 billion. Character.AI launched official iOS and Android apps in 2023, logged 1.7 million installs…
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MIT and Duke researchers used AI to design polymers with iron-based ferrocenes that absorb stress, dramatically speeding up additive discovery from weeks per candidate, with findings published in ACS Central Science. Profluent Bio used a protein language model trained on 500 million sequences to invent OpenCRISPR-1, the first CRISPR enzyme designed entirely by AI, which…
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MIT and Duke University researchers used AI to design tougher plastics, identifying iron-based ferrocene additives and mechanophores that make polymer networks absorb stress, with results published in ACS Central Science. Profluent Bio used generative AI to create OpenCRISPR-1, the first AI-designed CRISPR enzyme, which edited human genome cells and was trained on 500 million sequences,…
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As of mid-2025, commercial N-type TOPCon cells reach about 23–24% efficiency, with best mass-produced TOPCon modules at 23.8% and JinkoSolar reporting 26.4% cell efficiency in tests. Heterojunction (HJT) solar cells regularly reach 25%+ efficiency in production, with Longi reporting a 27.3% lab cell efficiency. Perovskite–silicon tandem cells have surpassed 33% efficiency in labs (Longi 33.9%,…
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Fujitsu announced R&D on a superconducting quantum computer with over 10,000 physical qubits, targeting completion in fiscal 2030, using its STAR fault-tolerant architecture to reach 250 logical qubits by 2030 and 1,000 logical qubits by 2035 as part of a Japan-backed industrialization effort. IonQ and Oak Ridge National Laboratory demonstrated a quantum-enhanced power-grid optimization using…
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OpenAI raised $8.3 billion at a $300 billion valuation in a funding round led by Dragoneer with a $2.8 billion check, as SoftBank commits up to $40 billion in total (with $10 billion already in April and $30 billion more by year-end) and new backers include Blackstone, TPG, and Sequoia. AI-driven M&A surged to $2.6…
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