All posts tagged: bubble

Cassini-Huygens mission finds lopsided shift in Saturn’s magnetic bubble

Cassini-Huygens mission finds lopsided shift in Saturn’s magnetic bubble

Published by Jenni Sidey

Saturn’s magnetic shield does not sit where many scientists would expect. After combing through years of data from the Cassini spacecraft, researchers found that a key opening in Saturn’s magnetosphere, the region where solar wind particles can slip into the planet’s atmosphere, is pushed well away from the noon position seen at Earth. Instead, it tends to sit in the afternoon sector, usually between 13:00 and 15:00 local time, and sometimes stretches as far as 20:00. That skew, the team says, points to a basic difference in how giant planets work. The finding comes from a study in Nature Communications based on Cassini-Huygens mission data collected between 2004 and 2010. The researchers argue that Saturn’s rapid rotation, combined with the heavy plasma supplied largely by its moon Enceladus, reshapes the planet’s magnetic environment in a way that sets it apart from Earth’s more solar-wind-driven system. At Earth, the cusp of the magnetosphere usually lines up near local noon. That is where magnetic field lines bend in a way that allows charged solar particles to funnel …

Iran war risks private credit crisis and AI bubble bursting, Bank of England warns – POLITICO

Iran war risks private credit crisis and AI bubble bursting, Bank of England warns – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

“A tightening of supply could also affect relatively more resilient borrowers reliant on private-market finance, including UK corporates, especially as UK private markets are heavily dependent on overseas investors,” it said. Market participants should, it added, have a “clear understanding of their direct and indirect exposures to risky credit markets.”  At the same time, fears that the record-high prices of AI-focused stocks could collapse and send ripples through the financial system have persisted, with the FPC highlighting that valuations for U.S. tech firms focused on AI remain “particularly stretched.” “Despite the volatility that the conflict has generated, risk premia in global equity and debt markets remain compressed by historical standards, heightening the risk of a sharp correction if macroeconomic conditions worsen,” said the committee. “AI-related repricing could transmit widely throughout the financial system and impact the real economy.” Finally, the FPC warned that existing sovereign debt vulnerabilities could be worsened by the conflict, as “a relatively high use of leverage by a small number of hedge funds pursuing similar strategies” risked causing stress on the …

Tech Billionaires Are Quietly Rooting for AI Bubble to Collapse

Tech Billionaires Are Quietly Rooting for AI Bubble to Collapse

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Some of the wealthiest business people in the world are chopping it up about something that defies orthodoxy: the AI bubble, they hope, will soon collapse. Gone are the days of debating whether AI is an economic bubble. Having already fallen $800 billion short of turning a profit on the AI boom, some of the tech industry’s biggest players have accepted that the financial arithmetic on AI just doesn’t add up. But here’s the catch: though the AI bubble objectively makes life harder for the rest of us, to the silicon valley elite, the economic consequences of its downfall could actually be a good thing. New reporting by the Atlantic details the heterodox sentiment sweeping through the tech industry. The pro-Bubble stance has its roots in a 2024 book called “Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation,” by tech investors Tobias Huber and Byrne Hobart. These fellas argued that there are essentially two kinds of economic bubble: the …

CEOs Say Yeah, AI Might Be a Bubble, But They’re Gonna Keep Shoveling Money Into the Furnace Because All Their Friends Are

CEOs Say Yeah, AI Might Be a Bubble, But They’re Gonna Keep Shoveling Money Into the Furnace Because All Their Friends Are

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech A new survey by accounting firm KPMG US found a contradiction in how CEOs are thinking about AI: though a full quarter of the 100 execs polled said they believe we’re in the midst of an AI spending bubble, an overwhelming 80 percent said they plan on pouring money into the tech anyway. “The sentiment about deploying AI is most certainly accelerating,” KPMG US CEO Tim Walsh told Business Insider of the dissonant findings. There was also a pretty stunning gap between what CEOs felt about their companies and about the economy overall. Though 83 percent of those surveyed had confidence in their company’s continued growth over the next year, just 55 percent felt the same about the US economy, the report found. That survey comes on the heels of another survey by Boston Consulting Group in January, which canvassed 2,360 executives across nine industries. In all, a whopping 94 percent of CEOs said they’ll continue investing in …

The limits of bubble thinking: How AI breaks every historical analogy

The limits of bubble thinking: How AI breaks every historical analogy

Published by skeptic

It’s always the same story: A new technology appears and everyone starts talking about how it’ll change everything. Then capital rushes in, companies form overnight, and valuations climb faster than anyone can justify. Then, many many months later, the warnings arrive, and people suddenly remember the dot-com crash or crypto. You’ve probably seen it before. And if you have, you probably think AI is the next bubble. Humans are great at pattern-matching. We’ve evolved to see patterns, so when something familiar emerges, we instinctively map it onto the closest story we already know. We think we’ve seen it before, and we’re confident we know how it ends. But that instinct can mislead us. AI feels like a bubble because we’re forcing something genuinely discontinuous into a familiar story. The idea that everything that rises quickly must ultimately collapse sounds prudent. But it doesn’t mean it’ll always be true. Why markets keep overshooting Every major technological shift produces the same outward symptoms: Inflated expectations, followed by high-visibility failure. Dot-com, mobile, and crypto all went through a …

NASA Spots Sun-like Star Inflating Massive Bubble

NASA Spots Sun-like Star Inflating Massive Bubble

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have spotted a young star just 120 light years away engaging in what is an aptly childish pastime: blowing a bubble. The bubble, of course, is not the product of a soapy solution but hot gasses being pushed outward by the star’s powerful stellar winds. This astrosphere, as it’s known, swallows the entire star, and could be a glimpse of how our star system formed its own protective bubble, called the heliosphere, billions of years ago. At roughly the same mass and temperature as the Sun, the star — technically designated as HD 61005 — is also considered a G-type yellow dwarf, but at a much younger 100 millions years of age, compared to the Sun’s five billion years. That makes this detection, described in a new study set to be published in The Astrophysical Journal, the first time an astrosphere has been spotted around a Sun-like star anywhere in the cosmos. …

Michael Pollan’s New Book Pops the AI Bubble

Michael Pollan’s New Book Pops the AI Bubble

Published by Daniella Wilson

Here is a possibility worth holding in mind, just for a moment. What if humans are something better than machines? For that matter, what if it isn’t close? In a way, the thought sits uneasily. For about 500 years, the scientific method has existed in a state of almost-continual triumph, while humankind has endured a triple fall as a consequence: first from the center of the universe (Copernicus), then from the center of the world (Darwin), and finally from the command of their own minds (Freud). Upon each of these revolutions, and at a thousand points of scientific inquiry between, our pride has received another debilitating shock. Nor has it been much of a battle. For instance, not long before the debate on evolution, we received an equally devastating proof that humans were not separate from the natural world, but a part of it—cell theory. It was less controversial only because it was irrefutable; a child with a microscope could see that a stalk of grass and the skin from his thumb had the same …

AI bubble watch: Spooked market sparks trillion tech sell-off

AI bubble watch: Spooked market sparks $1 trillion tech sell-off

Published by skeptic

Are investors already getting weary of tech’s golden goose, artificial intelligence? On Friday, tech stocks took a hit on Wall Street, and the underlying cause seems to be alarm over record AI infrastructure spending. Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Nvidia, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle were among just some of the companies whose falling shares accounted for $1 trillion in losses from Big Tech stocks, as CNBC reported. Big tech companies like Amazon and Google have been furiously ramping up capital expenditures to build AI data centers and shifting focus to AI products and services.  The immediate spark for the Friday sell-off was the Amazon fourth-quarter earnings report. The e-commerce giant projected that its capital expenditures would reach $200 billion in 2026. CNBC reported that Amazon’s Capex figure was $50 billion higher than expected, and the stock market reacted accordingly. Speaking to CNBC, GAM Investments’ investment director Paul Markham explained why AI would affect these companies on the stock market. Mashable Light Speed “Questions over the extent of capex [capital expenditures] as a result of LLM build-outs, the …

Investors Concerned AI Bubble Is Finally Popping

Investors Concerned AI Bubble Is Finally Popping

Published by José Betancourt

For quite some time now, investors have fought the suggestion that the artificial intelligence industry may be forming a massive bubble, risking an eventual collapse of epic proportions that could take down the US economy with it. But shaking off those fears has proven increasingly difficult as the tech stock market reels from a major selloff this week. Amazon shares tumbled nine percent Friday morning after claiming that its spending would hit an astronomical $200 billion this year as part of its efforts to keep up in the ongoing AI race. Shares are down over eight percent over the last five days, indicating it’s not just a blip. Microsoft has been hit hard lately as well, with shares also plunging almost eight percent over the last five days, following its biggest single-day loss since the pandemic last week. Other tech companies, including AI chipmaker Nvidia, Oracle, Alphabet, and Meta, all saw their shares drop significantly this week as they indicated they remained committed to spending vast sums to scale up their AI infrastructure investments. As …

‘The first time was like floating on a bubble but before long I was wearing incontinence pads’

‘The first time was like floating on a bubble but before long I was wearing incontinence pads’

Published by Sam Flores

When you first meet Oliver Westall, nothing about him hints at the battles he’s faced. At 25, he sits in a hoodie and shorts, grinning and laughing, the very picture of health. But behind that easy smile lies a story of relentless struggle – a dark addiction he couldn’t shake, not until he confronted just how badly it had ravaged his body. Today, Oliver’s mission is simple but powerful: to show people that no matter how far you’ve fallen, it’s never too late to reclaim your life. What began as recreational ketamine use in his mid-teens quickly spiralled into a daily, all-consuming addiction. “The first time I used it, I felt like I was floating on a bubble,” he recalled. “It instantly took away my anxiety and made me feel warm and numb inside.” For the biggest stories in Wales first sign up to our daily newsletter here. By the age of 16, he was dealing ketamine to fund a £55k-a-year habit, meaning he was surrounded by the drug constantly. At his peak, he was …