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China's Tianwen-two mission has reached a milestone that deserves more attention than it's getting. The probe has successfully rendezvoused with Kamo'oalewa, a small asteroid that orbits near Earth, sending back the first close-up images of its surface. The next phase involves landing and collecting samples for return to Earth — a genuinely difficult feat that only a handful of missions have ever pulled off.
Closer to home, a Bloomberg investigation reveals that after nearly one billion dollars in government investment, the United States still cannot manufacture medical gloves at scale domestically. It sounds almost absurd, but the story is really about how deeply specialized global supply chains have become, and how difficult and expensive it is to rebuild that kind of industrial knowledge once it's gone.
And on the cultural side of tech, the creators of the new MGM-plus crime drama The Westies are making a point of saying no artificial intelligence was used to recreate nineteen-eighties New York. They're calling it a completely analogue process — which in twenty twenty-six has apparently become a selling point worth advertising, a signal of just how much the conversation around AI and creative authenticity has shifted.
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