Kilobat CLI Network diagnostics for macOS, in your terminal and your AI agent. (By Philip Seifi)

An API request that times out does not tell you where the trouble started. The Mac may be offline, DNS may return an unexpected address, a configured proxy may be unavailable, or TCP and TLS may fail on the way to the destination. 

Start with the evidence for each layer before changing settings. I built Kilobat CLI to make that first pass easier. It is a free, GPL-3.0-only macOS command-line tool; the Kilobat desktop app is a separate proprietary product. The CLI needs macOS 14 or later. Its Homebrew installation builds from source and requires Xcode 16 or newer: 

Teen Inventor Explores Using Sound Waves to Fight Fires: A Creative Approach to Fire Safety

A great idea doesn't always come from a million-dollar research laboratory. Sometimes it comes from a student who looks at an everyday problem and asks a simple question: Is there a better way to do this? That's exactly what makes the story of Ángela Karime Venegas Hernández so interesting. The young Mexican inventor developed an experimental fire-extinguishing device called Vortex Tech, which uses sound waves instead of traditional water or chemical-based extinguishing agents. Her project attracted international attention and earned a gold medal at the 2026 International Science and Invention Fair in Indonesia. Not bad for an idea that started with a little curiosity and some engineering experimentation!

Lab Work: What a Slow USB Drive Looks Like in Wireshark (And Why Testing Matters)

If you spend enough time troubleshooting networks, you eventually discover that not every performance problem is actually a network problem. Sometimes the culprit is a server, an application, a disk, or a little portable USB drive that seems to have all the time in the world. That is one of the reasons I enjoy doing hands-on lab work. You can read documentation, watch videos, and memorize protocol details, but there is something special about deliberately creating a problem, observing it, and learning what it looks like when it happens in the real world. For this experiment, I connected a slow USB portable drive to a server, copied files to it, and used Wireshark to observe the network traffic associated with the transfer.

Will AI Destroy America? — An Honest Discussion (Keith Bromley)

 A fundamental problem that has finally boiled to the surface is If artificial intelligence (AI) can destroy the United States of America; along with the follow-up question of How will it destroy the United States?

While nobody knows the future for certain, the possibilities of how the United States could be destroyed fits into five basic categories. Note:  there are lots of subcategories that could be created, but let’s just focus on the five highest levels:

Plasma Jet Engines: The Future of Fuel-Free Aviation?

What If a Jet Engine Could Fly Without Burning Fuel?

Imagine an aircraft engine that doesn't burn kerosene, doesn't need a conventional combustion chamber, and instead uses electricity to turn ordinary air into a high-energy plasma. It sounds like something borrowed from a science-fiction movie, but researchers have been investigating exactly this concept.