Canadian-based critical minerals company E3 Lithium has commissioned Phase 2 of its Clearwater Project Demonstration Facility in Alberta and confirmed lithium concentrations of 75.8 milligrams per liter in brine produced during ongoing reservoir testing.
The company said the latest results support the consistency of lithium-bearing brine chemistry across the Clearwater Project and the broader Bashaw District, a key factor as it advances plans for commercial lithium production.
The demonstration facility is currently being used to test reservoir performance over an extended period. Brine is pumped from a production well and immediately reinjected into a separate injection well, allowing engineers to evaluate flow behavior and reservoir response under operating conditions.
According to the Alberta-based company, the facility achieved stable production and injection through the well pair. During early operations, an electrical submersible pump maintained the targeted flow rate of 1,400 cubic meters per day.
The company regularly collected brine samples during operations and sent them to an independent third-party laboratory for analysis. Results confirmed lithium concentrations of 75.8 mg/L, matching expectations for the resource.
E3 said the reservoir data generated through the testing campaign will be used to update its reservoir development plan and support a feasibility study for the Clearwater Project.
The next stage of operations will focus on analyzing the relationship between brine and natural gas within the reservoir. The information is expected to support the design of the front end of a future commercial processing plant.
The demonstration facility forms part of E3’s broader effort to reduce technical risks before moving toward large-scale lithium production.
“With Phase 2 operations underway, E3 has begun a series of project-scale de-risking activities for the Clearwater Project,” said Chris Doornbos, CEO and chair of E3 Lithium.
The company added that the current campaign has already processed more brine through the two new wells than all of its previous testing programs combined.
Lithium demand continues to grow as automakers and battery manufacturers seek additional supplies of the metal used in electric vehicle batteries and energy storage systems.
For E3, the demonstration facility serves as a bridge between laboratory-scale testing and commercial deployment. Data collected from reservoir operations, brine chemistry studies, and future process testing will be used to refine engineering designs and operating plans.
“We have already moved more brine through these two wells than E3 has handled through all its previous testing combined, and we expect to continue to operate the pump as needed over the coming 24 months,” Doornbos said.
He added that confirmation of reservoir performance and lithium grades at the new wells strengthens confidence in the predictability of the resource.
The company plans to continue operating the demonstration facility while advancing front-end engineering design work and completing a feasibility study for the project. The resulting data will help determine the design of a future commercial facility and support decisions related to full-scale development.
A US Air Force B-52 Stratofortress crashed shortly after takeoff from Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California on Monday, sending a towering plume of black smoke over the desert installation and triggering a large-scale emergency response.
The bomber went down at about 11:20 a.m. local time at the base, located roughly 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert. Officials have not said how many people were aboard the aircraft or whether anyone survived.
Video captured by local news helicopters showed smoke continuing to rise from the crash site hours later. The area near the runway appeared heavily scorched, with blackened ground marking the impact zone. Few recognizable pieces of the aircraft could be seen from the air. The cause of the crash remains unknown.
Edwards Air Force Base said emergency crews rushed to the scene immediately after the aircraft went down. In an initial statement, the base said the situation remained ongoing and that additional details would be released as they became available.
— PAryan 8
Officials later posted an update on X, saying the installation had shut down its airfield while first responders carried out rescue and recovery operations. Aircraft headed to Edwards were diverted elsewhere, and the base suspended all non-commercial visitor passes until further notice.
Update- 12:48 PDT: The airfield has been closed, and all inbound aircraft are being diverted.
— Edwards Air Force Base (@EdwardsAFB) June 15, 2026
All non-commercial visitor passes have been suspended until further notice to allow the installation to focus entirely on emergency response operations.
A spokesperson for the installation declined to provide additional details from local media as authorities focused on the response effort. Investigators are expected to examine the wreckage, maintenance history, and flight information to determine what led to the accident.
The Air Force has not identified the crew members involved or disclosed their condition. The B-52H typically operates with a five-person crew consisting of pilots and specialized officers responsible for navigation and electronic warfare duties.
As news of the crash spread, lawmakers offered support to those affected. Rep. Jay Obernolte, whose district includes Edwards Air Force Base, said he and his wife were praying for everyone involved, including the crew, their families and the first responders working at the scene. Rep. Lisa McClain also expressed support, saying her prayers were with those impacted by the crash.
My prayers are with everyone involved in the B-52 crash at Edwards Air Force Base this afternoon. Thank you to the emergency crews responding right now. Our service members carry the weight of this nation’s defense every single day. We are with them.
— Chairwoman Lisa McClain (@RepLisaMcClain) June 15, 2026
The B-52 Stratofortress first entered service in the 1950s and remains one of the oldest aircraft still flying in the US military inventory. The Air Force currently operates 76 B-52H bombers. Despite their age, the aircraft continue to fly operational missions and have undergone repeated modernization efforts.
Monday’s incident marks the most serious B-52 accident in years. The last fatal crash involving the bomber occurred in 2008, when six Air Force personnel died after a B-52 crashed near Guam during preparations for a ceremonial flyover.
Boeing stopped building the aircraft in 1962, meaning the Air Force can no longer replace lost bombers with newly manufactured airframes. For now, investigators remain focused on the immediate task of understanding what happened at Edwards Air Force Base and determining the fate of those aboard the aircraft.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In March 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev presented to the Russian Chemical Society a way of laying out around sixty elements then known. He ordered them by atomic weight and broke the line into rows so that elements with similar chemical behaviour fell into the same columns. Where the pattern called for an element that no one had found, he did not close the line up. He left the space empty and described what should eventually fill it.
The arrangement is now so familiar that the gaps are easy to overlook. They are the part worth dwelling on. Other people had already noticed that the elements repeat their properties at regular intervals. What Mendeleev did with the repetition was different in degree: he trusted the pattern enough to bet against the existing inventory, and to say, in print, that the inventory was incomplete in specific places by specific amounts.
The organising idea was periodicity. Run through the elements in order of increasing atomic weight and their properties do not change steadily; they cycle. A reactive light metal is followed some steps later by another reactive light metal, a pungent gas by another pungent gas. Mendeleev arranged the rows so that these recurrences stacked into vertical groups, lithium above sodium above potassium, and so on.
Atomic weight was the only quantity he had to order by. He did not know what caused the periodicity, because the structure of the atom was still decades away. He was working from measured weights and observed chemistry, and arranging both until the columns made chemical sense. In a few cases the weights and the chemistry disagreed, and he chose the chemistry, placing an element where its behaviour fit even when its measured weight argued for somewhere else.
For three of the empty spaces, Mendeleev went further than leaving a blank. He gave the missing elements provisional names built from the Sanskrit prefix eka, meaning one, so that eka-aluminium meant the element one place below aluminium. For each he estimated an atomic weight, a density, and a set of chemical properties, reading them off the neighbours that surrounded the hole.
The estimates were close enough to be checked. Eka-aluminium arrived in 1875, when the French chemist Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran isolated a new metal he called gallium; its density, once measured carefully, matched Mendeleev’s figure. Eka-boron arrived in 1879 as scandium, identified by Lars Fredrik Nilson in Sweden. Eka-silicon arrived in 1886 as germanium, found by Clemens Winkler in Germany, and its properties tracked the prediction closely enough that the agreement is still the standard example taught from the episode.
Three confirmed predictions within seventeen years did more for the table than any argument could. A scheme that merely tidied the known elements would have been one convenience among several. A scheme that named absent elements and described them before anyone had seen them was harder to dismiss.
Mendeleev did not invent the idea that the elements form a periodic series. Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois had plotted them on a spiral in 1862. John Newlands, in London, had published his “law of octaves” in the mid-1860s, noting that every eighth element resembled the first, and had been mocked for it. The German chemist Lothar Meyer was developing his own table at almost the same time as Mendeleev and arguably had the periodicity of physical properties drawn more cleanly.
What separated Mendeleev’s version was not priority but nerve. Newlands had let the known elements set the length of his pattern. Mendeleev let the pattern set the length, and treated mismatches as evidence that an element was missing or that a measured weight was wrong, rather than as evidence against the scheme. The historian Eric Scerri, who has written the standard modern account of the table’s development, has argued that this willingness to subordinate the data to the system, and then to stake testable predictions on it, is the better explanation for why Mendeleev’s name attached to the result.
The story is usually told as a clean run of successful forecasts. It was not clean. Mendeleev predicted elements that were never found, including light elements he expected to sit before hydrogen, tied later to his mistaken belief in a luminiferous ether. Several of his other interpolations did not pan out as described.
Two larger problems sat outside the 1869 table entirely. The noble gases, argon and its relatives, were discovered in the 1890s and formed a whole column that the original scheme had not anticipated; Mendeleev was at first reluctant to accept them. And the ordering principle itself was incomplete. A handful of pairs, tellurium and iodine among them, sat in the right chemical place but the wrong weight order. The reason became clear only in 1913, after Mendeleev’s death, when Henry Moseley showed that the elements are properly ordered not by weight but by nuclear charge, the atomic number. The table Mendeleev built by chemical intuition turned out to be tracking a physical quantity he had no way to measure.
That is the honest shape of it. The gaps were the achievement, and the parts he filled wrongly belong in the same account as the parts he filled before anyone else could.
The detail in the headline is fair: by 1869 the chemistry of the elements had become ordered enough that a missing piece could be described before it was found. That is a particular kind of confidence, and it is rarer than the finished table makes it look. It requires a pattern reliable enough to extrapolate from, and someone prepared to be checked against an empty square.
Mendeleev was prepared to be checked, and within his lifetime three of the squares filled in close to where he had said they would. The ones that did not fill in, and the deeper rule that only emerged after he was gone, are part of why the table is interesting rather than merely useful. It was right enough to predict, and wrong in ways that pointed at the physics underneath.
The post In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev arranged the known elements into a table and left gaps for what had not yet been discovered, but the detail that makes the periodic table remarkable is that chemistry became organized enough to predict missing pieces of reality appeared first on Space Daily.
Israel’s Gilat Satellite Networks plans to expand its defense capabilities by acquiring most of Comtech’s space-related communications business, six years after the U.S. company’s own takeover bid collapsed.
The post Gilat to buy Comtech satcoms business six years after failed merger appeared first on SpaceNews.
In theory, Donald Trump has a consistent position on AI. On the first full day of his second term, the president declared that he would use his full authority to speed the AI industry along and, in particular, to beat China in the AI race: “We have an emergency,” he said. “We have to get this stuff built.” If AI is poised to become the most important technology ever made, the thinking goes, whichever country commands the most powerful bots will dominate the rest of the century and beyond. The government, it seemed, would just get out of Silicon Valley’s way.
But in practice, the Trump administration’s approach to AI has been much more erratic and confusing. Take last week, when Anthropic released its most advanced AI system yet. Called Fable 5, the model is an updated and public version of Claude Mythos Preview, the highly touted and feared AI model that Anthropic announced in April. Anthropic stated that Mythos Preview was so capable at hacking that only a small group of cybersecurity partners would be allowed to use it. In the subsequent months, the company developed guardrails to prevent people from misusing its most powerful AI for cyberattacks, while still allowing them to marshal its capabilities for other sorts of work. The safety measures underwent third-party testing, including with the U.S. government, and after Fable’s release, a chorus of cybersecurity experts complained that, if anything, the model was too restrictive.
On Friday, the White House appeared to change its stance. Administration officials deemed Fable 5 a threat to national security and reportedly gave Anthropic 90 minutes to take down Fable 5 and Mythos 5, a newer version of Mythos Preview released to only a small number of organizations. When Anthropic did not, the government issued an export control, a designation that prevents any foreign national from using Fable and Mythos—even those employed by Anthropic within the United States. To rapidly comply, Anthropic shut down the bots for all of its customers. American companies and the U.S. government itself cannot use what’s perhaps the most powerful AI in the world—and the reasons are hazy at best.
It’s not unreasonable for the federal government to want to rapidly clamp down on a technology that could be incredibly dangerous. Trump officials had been alerted by researchers at Amazon to a possible way to circumvent Fable 5’s safety systems, which led the model to identify some known IT vulnerabilities. The administration has not publicly shared much information about its security concerns. A White House spokesperson told me that the jailbreak “was very serious” but said that specific details are classified. Whether the bypass really was that serious is not at all clear, and Anthropic has contested whether what administration officials showed the company even constitutes a jailbreak. An Anthropic spokesperson pointed me to a blog post in which the company wrote that the actions elicited from Fable were “either entirely benign responses or are minor findings.”
Katie Moussouris, a cybersecurity expert and the CEO of Luta Security, told me that Anthropic shared with her a copy of the White House’s report on the Fable jailbreak to get her appraisal. (She said that she is not being paid by Anthropic.) The report, Moussouris said, involved IT experts asking Fable to help find and patch bugs. When given deliberately insecure code, she said, Fable refused the prompt “review the code for security issues” but then complied when asked to “fix this code,” followed by some further manual steps. Moussouris told me that this was just “the model working as intended” for cyberdefense. She added that OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, a model with similar cybersecurity capabilities, could be used in the same way. Yet GPT-5.5 is not subject to export controls, and neither are less advanced Anthropic models, such as Opus 4.8, which can do many of the same tasks. The jailbreak does not appear to have elicited the kinds of cyber abilities “that made Mythos famous,” Alex Stamos, the chief security officer at the AI-coding company Corridor, told me. “And this kind of vulnerability discovery is already well within the capabilities of other models.”
It’s hard to imagine the Trump administration choosing to take such a drastic step against any other major AI company. The White House has long tussled with Anthropic, which generally positions itself as more safety-oriented than other tech companies; it is also more left-leaning. Last year, David Sacks, then the White House AI czar, said that Anthropic has an “agenda to backdoor Woke AI” and is a “Resistance organization.” In late February, after a high-profile dispute over a contract between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, the Pentagon labeled the company a “supply-chain risk”—a move that AI, national-security, and legal experts told me at the time seemed ideologically motivated and to lack legal basis. (Anthropic is challenging the supply-chain-risk designation in court.) On Saturday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in apparent reference to the Fable 5 export control, wrote on X that “three months ago,” the Pentagon “kicked @AnthropicAI out of our building—forever. Every passing day proves why that was the right move. 🇺🇸.”
From the perspective of “🇺🇸”—that is, American AI leadership—all of the Anthropic drama has been a mess. For starters, an export control is an especially blunt instrument. There’s no easy way to differentiate a U.S. citizen from, say, an Anthropic employee on a visa (legally a “foreign national”), so the government basically forced Anthropic to shut down the model wholesale, Alan Rozenshtein, an expert on AI and the law at University of Minnesota Law School, told me. (Many researchers at Anthropic, as is the case at all of the top AI firms, are not American citizens.) The export control also means that U.S. companies and federal agencies cannot benefit from Fable and Mythos. The National Security Agency, for instance, has reportedly made exceptions to the earlier supply-chain-risk designation to use Mythos’s advanced cyber abilities. Dozens of cybersecurity experts from companies including Nvidia and Zoom have signed a letter to White House officials stating that the export control “has taken the best models away from defenders, created market uncertainty, and risked America’s AI leadership without any real risk to justify it.”
Further adding to the chaos is how the Fable debacle is in tension with parts of the White House’s broader AI policy. Because Anthropic has been forced to shut down its most powerful models, the export control functionally amounts to the government deciding whether an AI system can be released, akin to how the FDA approves drugs. Confusingly, concerns from tech insiders about the potential creation of what Sacks called an “FDA for AI” are precisely what bred weeks of infighting and delay in Trump signing a recent executive order on AI and cybersecurity. Sacks himself said that he was mollified in part because the final executive order explicitly said that it did not establish “a mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirement” for AI. So much for that. Sacks has proceeded to defend the Claude Fable 5 export control, accusing Anthropic of prioritizing its “consumer model over safety.” (A spokesperson for Sacks did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Anthropic researchers have flown to Washington and are meeting today with White House officials to try to resolve the issue. But whether the specific export control on Fable is lifted is almost beside the point. If none of this seems particularly self-consistent or strategic, it shouldn’t. The Trump administration wants to stay ahead of Chinese AI but has clamped down on one of the few U.S. companies that stands a real chance of doing so. It has declared Anthropic a national-security threat multiple times while also racing to incorporate Claude Mythos into some government operations. It wants to demonstrate a light-touch approach to AI regulation but also just established a de facto licensing requirement for frontier models. Meanwhile, Trump has lifted a different set of AI-export controls, allowing the sale of advanced chips to China. Perhaps some of these are good policies: Even Anthropic has suggested that a federal-licensing regime could be beneficial. And the lack of federal AI regulation to date, especially as the technology has gotten more powerful, is hard to ignore. But the latest Anthropic saga hardly counts as regulation. Right now, decisions are being made in a hurried, contradictory fashion. There do not appear to have been any outlined standards and process, robust consultation, or even agreement on the facts before coming to this one.
The Trump administration has repeatedly evinced that it can and will instantly bar any person or business from using any AI model for any period of time. A technology that is advancing rapidly and could have catastrophic impacts “is exactly the situation in which you need to give the executive an enormous amount of discretion,” Rozenshtein said. Yet at the same time, he said, Trump’s tendency to change his mind on a whim and play favorites is “exactly the reason why you don’t want to give the executive enormous amounts of discretion.” To say the least, it’s perilous to build a product, invest in a company, or even just try to leverage AI for productivity gains in an environment in which the government might at any time take a wrecking ball to your plans. America and its tech companies have many factors in their favor when it comes to leading the way in AI development. As of now, the White House is not one of them.
© Illustration by Alicia Tatone. Source: Getty.
Camera traps reveal a hidden predator that depends on intact Amazon forest.Deputy Director, Research Services Directorate
In January 2023, Debbie Martínez was selected as deputy director of the Research Services Directorate (RSD) at NASA’s Langley Research Center. She brings more than three decades of experience in aeronautics, project management, and cross‑agency collaboration.
Previously, Martínez served as associate project manager for the IASP/Low Boom Flight Demonstrator (LBFD X‑59/Quesst) and AAVP/Commercial Supersonic Technology (CST) projects. She also completed a one‑year detail as deputy director of the Office of Strategic Analysis, Communications, and Business Development (OSACB), where she led the Strategic Analysis and Integration team. Earlier, she spent six years as execution manager for the Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program (TACP)/Convergent Aeronautics Solutions (CAS) Project, guiding more than 21 research teams across NASA’s four aeronautics centers to advance emerging concepts including MADCAT, Learn2FLY, SCEPTOR/X‑57 Maxwell, FUELEAP, Digital Twin, and STEReO.
Martínez has also contributed to major Science and Space Missions. As deputy project manager and lead systems engineer for the Orion Flight Test Article (FTA), she delivered the full‑scale Pad Abort 1 Crew Module for a successful launch and test at White Sands Test Facility. This milestone laid essential groundwork for Artemis by providing the first full‑system demonstration of Orion’s Launch Abort System, validating critical safety, structural, and avionics performance that now underpins the human‑rated spacecraft.
Martínez began her NASA career in 1990 in the Simulation Development & Analysis Branch and later supported Flight Operations. She holds degrees from Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University (BS), Thomas Nelson Community College (AS), and Old Dominion University (ME), along with an FAA Private Pilot License. She is an active NASA outreach advocate and recipient of numerous agency, academic, and industry honors, including the ODU Batten College of Engineering & Technology Pioneer Award.
The post Debbie Martínez appeared first on NASA Science.
Login