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Today’s Big Story

Airbags for Airplanes

The wild proposal uses an AI model that would trigger a Kevlar bubble cocoon in the event of a crash

Are you worried about flying? Personally, I still love getting on a plane for a trip, but with all the headlines recently—from near collisions and door plugs blowing off mid-flight to several fatal crashes—I wouldn’t blame anyone for being on edge.

But AI to the rescue! A pair of aviation engineers from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in India believe they have developed a design that could help prevent these dangerous crashes—a design that involves massive external airbags that would be deployed by artificial intelligence monitoring the flight.

Called Project REBIRTH, the multi-layered safety system would retrofit aircraft with a suite of sensors. If the system determines a crash below 3,000 feet is unavoidable, giant airbags would deploy, forming a protective cocoon designed to absorb impact energy and reduce damage. An infrared beacon and flashing lights would also be activated during the crash with the goal of making the cushioned wreckage easier for emergency responders to locate.

Sure, it sounds (and preliminary design specs look) cartoonishly simple. But the concept, which is all it is right now, is actually quite complicated and was just nominated for the 2025 James Dyson Award. Though still in its early testing phases, they say computer simulations show the system can reduce crash forces by more than 60%. In theory, a softer landing, combined with faster, AI-driven emergency response decisions, could mean the difference between passengers surviving or dying in a crash.

Not bad, right? Of course, these are early days. And an aviation safety expert told Popular Science that while the concept sounds promising, its viability hinges on several unknowns, particularly how much weight the enormous airbags and all its smart fluids would add to aircraft. Which is why the researchers are looking to partner with airlines, aerospace labs and government organizations to get the concept tested, refined and approved by 2030.

Trump at the United Nations

In a meandering address, he rebuked global institutions and complained about immigration and environmentalists

President Donald Trump on Tuesday used his first visit of his second term to the United Nations General Assembly to deliver a grievance-laden speech accusing the world body of offering nothing but “empty words” while warning European leaders that immigration posed an existential threat to their nations. Trump’s remarks outlined a worldview that has come to define his second term: a rejection of globalism, support for closing national borders, and a belief that only his leadership can restore order.

After all, it’s scary out there: Tensions have hit Cold War levels in Eastern Europe, fears are growing of an intifada-style eruption on the West Bank and here in the U.S., inflation is threatening a comeback. But the American president, often referred to as the leader for the free world, had no words of reassurance or poetic invocations of democratic values for our alarmed allies. Trump said he was right about everything … “I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell,” he told them.

Trump, who met last week with Britain's environmentally conscious King Charles at Windsor Castle, called climate change a “con job” and urged a return to a greater reliance on fossil fuels. Scientists say climate change caused by humans is real. Trump’s administration plans to call for sharply narrowing the right to asylum at the United Nations later this month, Reuters reported last week, as it seeks to undo the post-World War Two framework around humanitarian protection.

Government Shutdown Looms Ever Nearer

Budget negotiations are much harder because Congress has given Trump power to cut spending through ‘rescission’

Is it just me, or does it sound like the American government is constantly teetering on the verge of a shutdown? How worried should we be, exactly? Because Congress faces a deadline of Oct. 1 to adopt a spending measure to keep the federal government open. And it’s looking like that might be difficult to do.

Typically, you would get an actual passage of a full budget for a year. But in the last 20 or 30 years or so, since we’ve become a more polarized country with a polarized Congress, we have a lot of what are called continuing resolutions, or CRs. They’re stopgap measures—not the full budget—and don’t tend to make a lot of changes on a lot of the spending priorities that Congress has. According to The Conversation, what’s new this time around is this element of rescissions. This is a tool that’s been available since the 1970s in which presidents ask Congress to rescind spending that they had allocated. This is what happened earlier this year with the rescissions on public broadcasting (NPR and PBS) that got a lot of attention, as well as on USAID.

Then, on Tuesday, President Trump canceled a meeting at the White House with top congressional Democrats to discuss federal funding, writing on social media that he had decided talks would not be “productive,” escalating a standoff that threatens to shut down the government next week. The president also rattled off a list of demands he claimed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries want in exchange for their party’s votes to keep the government funded. The pair had confirmed just shortly before that they were scheduled to meet with the president this week in the Oval Office. “Trump Always Chickens Out,” Jeffries posted on X. “The extremists want to shut down the government because they are unwilling to address the Republican healthcare crisis that is devastating America.”

Some Thought the Rapture Was Happening Yesterday

For better or worse, we’re all still here …

Did you hear all the chatter about the Rapture? Scroll through TikTok and X and it might feel like the end of the world … but alas, like so many predictions before it, nothing happened and the world is still spinning. And all those believers are still around. But why were so many believers preparing to ascend into the heavens?

First, a little background: Some evangelical Christians believe the Bible predicts such an event, known as the Rapture, which essentially marks the beginning of the end of human history. They interpret parts of the Christian New Testament as describing the Rapture, including a passage from First Thessalonians that says followers of Christ “who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.” And now, in 2025, videos about the end times discussion have found a new vehicle—algorithmic social media.

According to Axios, a South African pastor two weeks ago claimed the Rapture would hit Tuesday—and it quickly became TikTok fodder. Joshua Mhlakela said in the Sept. 9 episode of the CentTwinz TV podcast that he was “a billion percent sure” about this, claiming Jesus told him about it in a dream. Since then, the prediction spread online—the hashtag #rapturenow had well over 350,000 videos on TikTok, some of which endorsed the prediction, while many others poked fun at it.

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