The Download: the dangers of DOGE, and how to blow up an asteroid

—Steven Renderos is the executive director of Media Justice

Tech buzzwords are clanging through the halls of Washington, DC. The Trump administration has promised to “leverage blockchain technology” to reorganize the US Agency for International Development, and Elon Musk’s DOGE has already unleashed an internal chatbot to automate agency tasks—with bigger plans on the horizon to take over for laid-off employees.

The executive order that created DOGE in the first place claims the agency intends to “modernize Federal technology and software.” But jamming hyped-up tech into government workflows isn’t a formula for efficiency. Successful, safe civic tech requires a human-centered approach that understands and respects the needs of citizens.

Unfortunately, this administration laid off all the federal workers with the know-how for that. And if this administration doesn’t change its approach soon, American citizens are going to suffer far more than they probably realize. Read the full story.

Meet the researchers testing the “Armageddon” approach to asteroid defense

One day, in the near or far future, an asteroid about the length of a football stadium will find itself on a collision course with Earth. If we are lucky, it will land in the middle of the vast ocean, creating a good-size but innocuous tsunami, or in an uninhabited patch of desert. But if it has a city in its crosshairs, one of the worst natural disasters in modern times will unfold. Homes dozens of miles away will fold like cardboard. Millions of people could die.

Fortunately for all 8 billion of us, planetary defense—the science of preventing asteroid impacts—is a highly active field of research. We already know that at least one method works: ramming the rock with an uncrewed spacecraft to push it away from Earth.

But there are circumstances in which giving an asteroid a physical shove might not be enough to protect the planet. If that’s the case, we could need another method, one that is notoriously difficult to test in real life: a nuclear explosion. Read the full story.

—Robin George Andrews

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