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Today — 30 October 2026Main stream

Lawsuit Accuses Education Department of Throttling Student Debt Cancellation

30 October 2026 at 20:09
Public servants on the brink of student debt forgiveness are facing setbacks and extensive delays. The American Federation of Teachers sued to help them.

© Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press

Could El Salvador’s Bukele Be Haiti’s Savior?

30 October 2026 at 19:22
The Salvadoran government dispatched more than 2,000 troops to Haiti this week in an extraordinary deployment on foreign soil.

© Michael Anthony Adams/The New York Times

A Salvadoran gunner in a UH-1N Twin Huey helicopter during an aerial patrol over Port-au-Prince last month. Some Salvadoran troops are members of a U.N.-backed international force in Haiti.

Google’s satellite AI server transmits its first response to Earth

By: Emma Roth
30 October 2026 at 18:21

Google's AI chip-equipped satellite has generated its first response from space. In a blog post on Friday, Google says it successfully booted up the satellite's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), allowing the on-board Gemma 4 model to follow through on a prompt to create a haiku about being in space:

Blue marble below

Data streams in silent grace

Starlight feeds my core. ✨

Google says it tried out other space-themed limericks and telemetry prompts as well. The test is part of Google's Project Suncatcher, an experimental initiative that could eventually put AI data centers in space. Google launched the satellite into orbit earlier this …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Rare meteorite from Mars gives us a view into its ancient crust

30 October 2026 at 18:13

Crater counts tell us that most of the Martian surface is more than 3 billion years old, but pieces of Mars we have on Earth tell a different story. The three main classes of Martian meteorites—shergottites, nakhlites, and chassignites—are all 2.4 billion years old or younger. Until now, only two genuinely ancient Martian meteorites were known: Allan Hills 84001, found in Antarctica, and a jumbled rock from northwest Africa nicknamed Black Beauty. Now we have a third one.

A team led by Yang Liu, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has shown that a Martian meteorite called Teghaza 001, found in the Sahara Desert in Mali in 2022, formed at least 4.1 billion years ago. “It's very old and similar to some of the oldest rocks on Earth,” Liu says.

A filtered collection

“We don't fully understand why old Martian rocks are so rare on Earth," Liu said. Part of the answer may lie in how a piece of Mars gets here. It takes a large impact to launch a rock off the planet, and not every rock can survive that. “If the impact hits into loose powder, it may not get cemented to become a rock and fly off Mars' gravity,” Liu said. “So the natural impact already acts as a filter. Weak rocks do not make it off Mars.”

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© Darryl Pitt / Maine Mineral & Gem Museum

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