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Falls are one of the biggest health risks facing older adults. Every year, millions of older people fall and many suffer broken bones, head injuries, loss of independence, and long hospital stays. A serious fall can also make people afraid to move around, which can lead to less physical activity, weaker muscles, and an even […]
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The United States Army (the Army) has awarded Rune Technologies a $99 million Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract for its proprietary TyrOS platform.
The IDIQ framework will run for five years, during which authorized Department of War (DoW) organizations can place orders for the software and associated services through the contract, up to a maximum cumulative value of $99 million.
“Established by the Army and available for broader DoW use, the vehicle enables Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, Airmen, Guardians, Commanders, Sustainers, acquisition professionals, and contracting teams to rapidly access and field-proven software solutions at the speed of operations,” Rune explains in an official press release.
This differs from “normal” military procurement in that it offers a potential rapid-adoption pathway for interested parties. For anyone even remotely familiar with military purchases (which can take many months to years), this could reduce procurement timelines from many months to just days.
But what is the big deal with the new software? Well, Rune’s TyrOS is akin to a mix of Amazon, Google Maps, inventory management, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, and predictive analytics in one place. In this sense, it acts a bit like an AI-assisted logistics operating system.
Windows for war
Windows for war, if you like. “Logistics is the distribution layer of military power, and it has to move at the speed of the fight,” said David Tuttle, Co-Founder and CEO of Rune Technologies.
“This contract gives sustainment teams across the Army and joint force a single, repeatable way to deploy TyrOS and other Rune capabilities into their units, while reducing acquisition friction and accelerating capability delivery to the tactical edge,” he added.
The system not only tells users that an asset needs resupply but can also identify potential bottlenecks and recommend alternative courses of action.
So, the AI will go far beyond something simple like “fuel will run out here in X days.” It will help users find alternative sources, reroute convoys to assist, etc., before a crisis occurs.
Beyond predictive modeling, one of TyrOS’ strengths, Rune explains, is that it uses a native large language model (LLM) as part of its interface. So, instead of clicking through menus, a user can simply ask a question using natural language to get the answer they want.
Say they ask something like “show every artillery battalion that will be below 30% ammunition within the next 72 hours.” The AI converts that into database queries and produces an answer.
Proactive, not reactive
But it gets better than that. As Rune explains, its software features a specially designed AI agent called Saga. This sophisticated piece of software effectively acts as an automated AI logistician in the system.
To this end, it is able to autonomously detect issues and then generate recommendations for action. A human still approves the decision, but the planning work is largely automated.
Yet another innovation is something called “edge-first architecture.” Normally, AI systems rely heavily on cloud servers, which, in turn, rely on stable and reliable telecommunications.
But satellite link failures, network jamming, and physical severing of telecoms are something of an occupational hazard in war. Edge-first means the AI runs locally on military computers or servers.
So even if disconnected from headquarters, a brigade can still use the system. Not too shabby.
You are sitting still, more or less, but the galaxy beneath you is not. The Milky Way and its neighbours are tearing through space at more than two million kilometres an hour, and that motion is not random. It is the result of a tug-of-war: distant concentrations of mass pulling us forward, and a vast, near-empty region of space effectively shoving us from behind.
The speed is real and measured. The direction tells a story about how matter is spread across the universe.
How we know we are moving
The yardstick is the cosmic microwave background, the faint afterglow of the early universe that fills the sky in every direction. If we were truly at rest, it would look the same temperature all around us. It does not. It reads very slightly hotter in one direction and cooler in the opposite one, a pattern called the dipole, and that asymmetry is a Doppler effect caused by our own movement into it, much as the pitch of a siren rises as it races toward you.
Read off that dipole, the Local Group of galaxies is moving at about 631 kilometres a second relative to the background, which works out to roughly 2.3 million kilometres an hour. We are not drifting. We are racing.
The pull ahead
Some of that motion has a long-known cause. In the direction we are heading lies the Great Attractor, a concentration of mass partly hidden behind the dust of our own galactic disc, which is why it took so long to make sense of. Beyond it sits something larger still, the Shapley Concentration, the densest collection of galaxy clusters in our part of the universe.
These overdense regions do what mass does. They pull, and the Local Group is being drawn toward them across hundreds of millions of light-years.
The push behind
The pull was only half the picture, and the other half is stranger. In 2017, a team led by Yehuda Hoffman mapped the local flow of galaxies and found that the motion is also being driven by a huge, sparsely populated region on the opposite side, which they named the Dipole Repeller.
A void cannot literally push anything. But gravity is a competition between directions, and a region with very little matter exerts very little pull. With density on one side and near-emptiness on the other, the net effect is that we drift away from the emptiness as surely as if it were pushing, falling toward the fuller side of the sky. The 2017 work found that this push and the pull ahead are of roughly equal importance.
What it actually means
None of this is the galaxy falling toward a single dramatic point. It is the Local Group riding the large-scale lumpiness of the cosmos, sliding down the gentle gradient from where matter is thin toward where it is thick.
The map is still being sharpened. The Great Attractor lies in the so-called Zone of Avoidance, the band of sky our own galaxy blocks from view, so it is awkward to study, and the Dipole Repeller is inferred from models of how thousands of galaxies are flowing rather than from a clear photograph of nothing. The broad conclusion, that we are caught between a distant abundance of mass and a distant absence of it, is well supported. The fine detail is still being filled in.
It is a strange thing to sit with. The ground feels still, the sky looks fixed, and all the while the entire galaxy is being carried across the universe at a speed no human machine has ever approached, pulled by what is out there and pushed by what is not.
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The notebooks Marie Curie filled with her research are still dangerous to touch. More than a century after she wrote in them, the pages remain radioactively contaminated, mostly with radium-226, and the original volumes are kept under strict radiation controls. To read them at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, where they are stored in lead-lined boxes, you sign a liability waiver and put on protective clothing first.
This is not a curiosity of preservation. It is a direct consequence of the physics Curie helped uncover.
Why a notebook stays dangerous
The contamination is dominated by radium-226, and the key number is its half-life: about 1,600 years. A half-life is the time it takes for half of a radioactive substance to decay away. After a hundred years, radium-226 has barely begun, only a few per cent of it is gone, which is why a century has done almost nothing to make these pages safer. It also decays into a chain of further radioactive products, including radon gas, so the contamination is not one substance sitting quietly but a small, self-renewing source.
On that timescale, estimates suggest the notebooks will stay hazardous to handle freely until around the year 3500. The ink and paper are ordinary. What soaked into them is not.
How a notebook gets contaminated
Curie worked with radium and polonium by hand, every day, at a time when no one understood what that exposure did. She and her husband Pierre had isolated the two elements in 1898, and she coined the term radioactivity itself, but the harm in what they were handling was simply not yet known. She stirred glowing solutions, carried test tubes of radioactive material in her pockets, and is said to have kept a sample by her bed because she liked its glow.
In a laboratory like that, radioactive dust gets onto everything: the bench, the door handles, the pages of the notebook open beside the work. It was not just her papers. Her furniture, her cookbook, and her clothing carry the same contamination, and her old laboratory in Paris was not fully decontaminated until 1991, nearly sixty years after her death.
The controls around them
So the library treats them as what they are, low-level radioactive objects of immense historical value. They sit in boxes lined with lead, because radium-226 and its decay products emit gamma radiation that ordinary materials do not stop. A researcher who wants to consult an original signs an acknowledgement of the risk and works under protection. The notebooks form part of a wider Curie collection the library holds, available to scholars only on those terms.
The hazard is real but modest if handled correctly, which is the point of the controls. The waiver is less about a single dangerous afternoon than about making sure no one treats a radioactive artefact as if it were just an old book.
A record of what was not yet known
There is something fitting, and sad, in all of this. The notebooks are the working record of the woman who gave us the word radioactivity, and they are radioactive because she did the work before anyone, including her, grasped the cost.
Curie died in 1934 of a blood disorder widely linked to her years of exposure. Her pages will go on quietly emitting radiation for another fifteen centuries, long after the science they describe became common knowledge, a physical reminder of how new and how dangerous that knowledge once was. By the time the pages can finally be handled bare-handed, they will have outlasted her by the better part of two thousand years.
Les Français sont de vrais « jardinophiles » ! Et vous ? Avec cette chronique, (re)découvrez une plante, un fruit, un légume. Si certaines plantes séduisent par leur feuillage, leurs fleurs ou leurs fruits, rares sont les espèces capables de surprendre à chaque saison. Le Clerodendrum...
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