Good morning. It's Thursday, July 16th, 2026. Here's your daily tech and science briefing.

**Story one: Mira Murati's first shot — Inkling, a 975B open-weights model from Thinking Machines Lab.** The former OpenAI CTO's new startup released its first public model overnight. Inkling is a Mixture-of-Experts transformer with 975 billion total parameters but only 41 billion active at inference — making it surprisingly efficient for a model this size. It handles text, images, and audio, supports a million-token context window, and was pretrained on 45 trillion tokens. The lab is candid that it's not the best model on the market — it's built to be fine-tuned by enterprises who want to build on top of something open and cost-efficient. This is Murati's counter-position to the Anthropic-OpenAI closed ecosystem: a foundation layer anyone can adapt. The weights are live on Hugging Face right now.

**Story two: Space launch costs projected to drop to 273 dollars per kilogram by 2040.** Cambridge economist Alessio Terzi and colleagues at the Politecnico Institute of Turin just published the largest launch-cost dataset ever assembled — 4,400 rockets tracked from 1960 to last year. The cost of putting a kilogram into low Earth orbit has already fallen roughly 96 percent, from about 87,000 dollars in 1960 to just under 3,900 dollars today. Their model projects 1,569 dollars by 2030 and 273 dollars by 2040. The driver, of course, is SpaceX's reusable boosters. But the researchers issue a warning: if the current monopoly dynamics persist, with one company controlling roughly 80 percent of global orbital payload, profit-maximizing behavior could actually delay the next phase of the space economy. A 93-percent price collapse is only useful if the market doesn't bottleneck at the one company making it happen.

**Story three: Electricity as a thermal switch in ceramics.** Researchers have demonstrated that applying an electric field to certain ceramic materials can triple their heat conduction in a preferred direction. This means thermal management — a critical challenge in everything from high-power electronics to spacecraft and propulsion systems — could become actively controllable rather than just a passive materials property. Instead of designing around how heat naturally flows through a material, engineers could modulate it on demand. The implications for heat shields, battery thermal systems, and dense electronic packaging are significant. Published in the physical sciences literature this month, this is the kind of fundamental materials discovery that quietly reshapes engineering down the road.

**Story four: Ground combat robots go live in Ukraine.** Munich-based Circus SE announced today that its robotic troop supply system is now in live operations with the 3rd Army Corps of the Ukrainian Ground Forces. Meanwhile, a major New York Times report details how ground robots in Ukraine have evolved from simple supply mules into platforms that evacuate wounded soldiers, hold defensive positions, and engage targets with decreasing human involvement. Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces are fielding an increasingly diverse arsenal — from the Rys series combat robots developed by local startup Roboneers, to autonomous supply platforms — as the country tries to close a massive troop-numbers gap with Russia. This is no longer a demonstration or a trial. It's active, operational deployment. The future of ground warfare is being stress-tested in real time.

That's all for today. Have a thoughtful Thursday.