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Picture a packed stadium of fans in extreme weather, all clad in their favorite jerseys, cheering and cursing at their favorite American football team or European soccer club. Or a crush of screaming fans, singing and dancing in unison at a Taylor Swift or K-pop concert. Or a sea of costumed Star Wars fans, lightsabers aloft, filling up movie theaters on opening night of a new movie. Plenty of people like to watch sports, attend concerts, and go to the movies. But what about those fansthe diehard ones, if you willwhose dedication goes even further? The fans whose daily lives are deeply intertwined with their interests? Diehard fans tend to have a detailed, intricate knowledge. They collect, display, and cherish memorabilia. They flock to iconic pilgrimage places: Kings Cross Train Station in London for Harry Potter fans, or Graceland in Memphis, for Elvis devotees. Their interests inspire them, shaping how they behave and view the world. This level of devotion seems to go well beyond entertainment. Indeed, it may seem, well, almost religious. Since 2018, I have been studying the realm of comic-con culture: fandoms built on comic books, superheroes, science fiction, anime and manga, gaming, and cosplay. Based on my surveys and follow-up interviews, I have found that many dedicated fans describe something sacred about their experiences, something beyond entertainment and escapism. Defining sacred What does sacred mean, exactly? A popular starting point is French sociologist Emile Durkheim and his 1912 treatise, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. One of Durkheims most enduring legacies is how he defined religion in terms of beliefs and practices about sacred things that unify a community. The sacred, he explained, is something a group sets apart as powerful, transcendent, and holy, clearly distinguished from the mundane world of everyday affairs. This conception of religion includes gods or the supernatural, but it is not exclusive to them. Other beliefs and practices can be sacred, too. Durkheims insights have inspired many scholars, including those who study fan behavior. In my own work as a sociologist, I organize this concept of the sacred into seven specific dimensions. For example, the sacred is powerful: a potent force that garners respect, fear, and awe. The sacred is transcendent: revered and dignified beyond everyday affairs. And the sacred provides meaning: a source of essential values and purpose. Comic-con culture For several years, Ive been distributing surveys at comic conventions on the East Coast of the U.S. and conducting follow-up interviews. The questions gather a variety of data, but also measure whether fans experience their interests as sacred, and in what ways. The results are striking. While fans certainly enjoy entertainment and escape, their responses also highlight several aspects of how I define sacrednessparticularly its ability to instill moral values, provide creative inspiration, and reinforce communal bonds. Many fans describe comic-con culture as a source of principlessuch as inclusivity, compassion, and self-developmentthat guide their behavior. Comics have always focused on issues of justice, inequality, power dynamics, and the ethics around things like use of force, etc., all of which have affected my own feelings and beliefs about ethical behavior, one respondent shared. Other fans highlighted quotes from Spider-Manwith great power comes great responsibilityand Harry Potter: We must choose between what is right and what is easy. Another respondent spoke about the Jedi: the ancient order of monklike warriors who channel forces of good to help others and maintain peace in the Star Wars universe. This universe personifies how to go about treating the world around me and trying to do the next right thing, the fan explained. The Jedi, though not perfect, help me have a personal code in how I treat people. . . . If Jedi were a real religion Id probably be an active participant. Comic-con culture sparks passion and enjoyment; it is a wellspring of inspiration and creativity. The Japanese genres of anime and manga are an art form of self-expression and it creates an [outlet] for individuals to express themselves freely, one person wrote. In particular, they mentioned cosplay, which is short for costume play: the faithful re-creation of a favorite character from a game, movie, or comic, both in dress and mannerisms. Cosplayers are a mainstay of comic conventions, as are cosplay contests. Another remarked, being a fan of tabletop RPGs [role-playing games] allows me to create collaborative stories with others. I consider this storytelling powerful and important. Comic-con culture enables people to connect with like-minded individuals and forge meaningful relationships around these interests. It can also inspire a strong sense of fellowship. Highlighting the power of these connections, one respondent said, as an atheist, theres not much I believe in. Being a fan has inspired me to believe in people, and that there is some purpose to my life. Fandom groups have given me decades-long friendships that span the globe, another said. Finally, comic-con culture is a sanctuary; it provides space for fans to be themselves, helps them cope with personal struggles, and inspires hope. This was a prominent theme. For example, one attendee from Philadelphia divulged mental health issues but explained how his involvement in board-game tournaments and the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons offered a safe space from anxiety: I feel like when Im doing these things, I can really be me. So, its more about letting myself be my true self and not feeling, or not caring, about the others around me that are judging me. Given these findings, I believe that social scientists need to consider popular culture more seriously as a fundamental feature of society that people can make sacred in different ways. Michael Elliott is a professor of sociology at Towson University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Ukraines mineral wealth has been a key factor in its negotiations with the U.S. as the two countries work out details for a ceasefire agreement in Ukraines war with Russia. After a rocky start to those negotiations, officials from the U.S. and Ukraine announced an agreement on March 11, 2025. The U.S. would resume support and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, with some conditions, and both agreed to work toward a comprehensive agreement for developing Ukraines critical mineral resources to expand Ukraines economy and guarantee Ukraines long-term prosperity and security. The initial announcement from Ukraines government stated that critical minerals would also offset the cost of American assistance, but that line was removed from the joint statement. Getting Russia to agree to a ceasefire would be the next step. Theres no doubt that Ukraine has an abundance of critical minerals, or that these resources will be essential to its postwar reconstruction. But what exactly do those resources include, and how abundant and accessible are they? The war has severely limited access to data about Ukraines natural resources. However, as a geoscientist with experience in resource evaluation, I have been reading technical reports, many of them behind paywalls, to understand whats at stake. Heres what we know. Ukraines minerals fuel industries and militaries Ukraines mineral resources are concentrated in two geologic provinces. The larger of these, known as the Ukrainian Shield, is a wide belt running through the center of the country, from the northwest to the southeast. It consists of very old, metamorphic and granitic rocks. A multibillion-year history of fault movement and volcanic activity created a diversity of minerals concentrated in local sites and across some larger regions. A second province, close to Ukraines border with Russia in the east, includes a rift basin known as the Dnipro-Donets Depression. It is filled with sedimentary rocks containing coal, oil, and natural gas. Before Ukraines independence in 1991, both areas supplied the Soviet Union with materials for its industrialization and military. A massive industrial area centered on steelmaking grew in the southeast, where iron, manganese, and coal are especially plentiful. By the 2000s, Ukraine was a significant producer and exporter of these and other minerals. It also mines uranium, used for nuclear power. In addition, Soviet and Ukrainian geoscientists identified deposits of lithium and rare earth metals that remain undeveloped. However, technical reports suggest that assessments of these and some other critical minerals are based on outdated geologic data, that a significant number of mines are inactive due to the war, and that many employ older, inefficient technology. That suggests critical mineral production could be increased by peacetime foreign investment, and that these minerals could provide even greater value than they do today to whomever controls them. Why the U.S. is so interested Critical minerals are defined as resources that are essential to economic or national security and subject to supply risks. They include minerals used in military equipment, computers, batteries, and many other products. A list of 50 critical minerals, created by the U.S. Geological Survey, shows that more than a dozen relied upon by the U.S. are abundant in Ukraine. A majority of those are in the Ukrainian Shield, and roughly 20% of Ukraines total possible reserves are in areas currently occupied by Russias military forces. Critical minerals Ukraine currently mines Three critical minerals especially abundant in Ukraine are manganese, titanium, and graphite. Between 80% and 100% of U.S. demand for each of these currently comes from foreign imports.. Manganese is an essential element in steelmaking and batteries. Ukraine is estimated to have the largest total reserves in the world at 2.4 billion tons. However, the deposits are of fairly low-gradeonly about 11% to 35% of the rock mined is manganese. So it tends to require a lot of material and expensive processing, adding to the total cost. This is also true for graphite, used in battery electrodes and a variety of industrial applications. Graphite occurs in ore bodies located in the south-central and northwestern portion of the Ukrainian Shield. At least six deposits have been identified there, with an estimated total of 343 million tons of ore18.6 million tons of actual graphite. Its the largest source in Europe and the fifth largest globally. Titanium, a key metal for aerospace, ship, and missile technology, is present in as many as 28 locations in Ukraine, both in hard rock and sand or gravel deposits. The size of the total reserve is confidential, but estimates are commonly in the hundreds of millions of tons. A number of other critical minerals that are used in semiconductor and battery technologies are less plentiful in Ukraine but also valuable. Zinc occurs in deposits with other metals such as lead, gold, silver, and copper. Gallium and germanium are byproducts of other oreszinc for gallium, lignite coal for germanium. Nickel and cobalt can be found in ultramafic rock, with nickel more abundant. No figures for Ukraines reserves of these elements were available in early 2025, with the exception of zinc, whose reserves have been estimated at around 6.1 million tons, putting Ukraine among the top 10 nations for zinc. Critical minerals that arent being minedyet Geologists have identified potentially significant volumes in Ukraine of three other types of critical minerals important for energy, military and other uses: lithium, rare earth metals, and scandium. None of these had been mined there as of early 2025, though a lithium deposit had been licensed for commercial extraction. The largest potential lithium reserves exist at three sites in the south-central and southeastern Ukrainian Shield, where the grade of ore is considered moderate to good. How much lithium these reserves hold remains confidential, but technical reports suggest its on the order of 160 million tons of ore and 1.6 million to 3 million tons of lithium oxide. If most of this could be recovered in a profitable way, it would place Ukraine among the top five nations for lithium. Smaller volumes of tantalum and niobium, also used in steel alloys and technology, have also been identified in these reserves. Most of Ukraines lithium occurs as petalite, which, unlike the other main lithium mineral, spodumene, requires more expensive processing. Rare earth elements in Ukraine are known to exist in several sites of volcanic origin and in association with uranium in the south-central portion of the Ukrainian Shield. These havent been developed, though sampling has indicated commercial potential in some sites, while other sites appear less viable. Rare earth elements in high demand for superior magnets and electronicsneodymium, praseodymium, terbium, and dysprosiumare all present in varying amounts in these areas. Other critical minerals are associated with these deposits, especially zirconium, tantalum, and niobium, in undetermined but potentially significant amounts. Finally, scandium, used in aluminum alloys for aerospace components, has been identified as a byproduct of processing titanium ores. Ukraines scandium does not appear to have been studied in enough detail to evaluate its commercial potential. However, world production, about 30 to 40 tons per year, is forecast to grow rapidly. Ukraines mineral future Its clear that Ukraine is endowed with valuable resources. However, extracting them will require roads and railways for access, infrastructure such as electricity and mining and processing technology, investment, technical expertise, environmental considerations, and, above all, cessation of military conflict. Those are the true determinants of Ukraines mining future. This article, originally published March 11, 2025, has been updated with the announced agreement. Scott L. Montgomery is a lecturer at the Jackson School of International Studies at University of Washington. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here. The model is not the product Back in 2023, software engineer Matt Rickard wrote a short post titled, The model is not the product. Its looking like he was absolutely right. He published it not long after the first wave of AI chatbot products hit the markettools that let users query large language models trained on a compressed snapshot of the internet. I remember getting a demo of Microsofts Bing Chat at an event in Redmond that year and telling an enthusiastic Microsoft employee, Yeah, this is cool, but it doesnt seem to know anything usefullike flight information or baseball scores. The model only knew what had been on the internet up to a certain cutoff date. It was an impressive AI model, surebut not much of a product. Today, the race to build the smartest AI model is still onbut its becoming increasingly clear that this wont be the exclusive domain of a few wealthy tech giants. DeepSeek has already demonstrated whats possible with its somewhat-open models. The real value, though, lies in what happens around the model. For example, LLMs became significantly more useful when they gained the ability to fact-check themselves using real-time web dataand cite their sources. Now, models are beginning to operate systems beyond themselves. Both Anthropic and OpenAI, for instance, have models that can control aspects of a personal computer. Most recently, a small Chinese company called Butterfly Effect released Manus, which it describes as the first general autonomous agent. Manus is a system of agents and subagents built using Anthropics Claude 3.5 Sonnet model, along with specialized versions of Alibabas Qwen model. At the center of it is an executor agent that breaks down tasks and assigns them to subagentssome focused on specific objectives, others serving as knowledge or planning agents. Together, they collaborate under the executors direction to handle research, data analysis, report writing, workflow automation, and even code generation and deployment. And all of this happens autonomously in the cloud, without human supervisionso the user can simply walk away while the work gets done. The real magic of Manus isnt in the models themselvesthe team is just using Anthropic and Qwen via APIs available to anyone. Whats powerful is the systems architecture: a network of coordinated agents capable of sourcing information and collaborating dynamically. Manus may well be an early glimpse of where things are headed. A frank talk about the future with Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch Im at the HumanX AI conference this week in Las Vegas, and Ive had a number of conversations with people trying to sell AI models to enterprises. One of my most candid dialogues was with Arthur Mensch, cofounder and CEO of the French AI company Mistraloften referred to as Europes OpenAI. Mistral has seen strong adoption among European enterprises, some of which are drawn to the idea of working with a European lab rather than a U.S. one, Mensch told me. The company has now established a beachhead in the U.S., with a team of engineers based in Palo Alto. Mensch is bullish on Mistrals U.S. prospectshe expects to grow the companys American customer base tenfold by the end of 2025. Enterprise leaders are thinking differently about AI in 2025. Several founders here told me that unlike in 2023 and 2024, buyers are now focused squarely on ROI. They want systems that move beyond pilot projects and start delivering real efficiencies. Mensch says enterprises have developed high expectations for AI, and many now understand that the hard part of deploying it isnt always the model itselfits everything around it: governance, observability, security. Mistral, he says, has gotten good at connecting these layers, along with systems that orchestrate data flows between different models and subsystems. Once enterprises grapple with the complexity of building full AI systemsnot just using AI modelsthey start to see those promised efficiencies, Mensch says. But more importantly, C-suite leaders are beginning to recognize the transformative potential. Done right, AI systems can radically change how information moves through a company. Youre making information sharing easier, he says. Mistral encourages its customers to break down silos so data can flow across departments. One connected AI system might interface with HR, R&D, CRM, and financial tools. The AI can quickly query other departments for information, Mensch explains. You no longer need to query the team. Eventually, Mensch says, every department will be represented by an agent. These agents will take on much of the day-to-day work: compiling research, writing proposals, building marketing campaigns. Theyll share data, coordinate, and collaboratewhile humans shift into oversight roles. The big change? Humans will no longer query the AI for information as they do now, Mensch says. Increasingly, the AI agents will query the humans. Agents will tap the right people for domain expertiseasking someone to review a proposal, weigh in on strategy, or greenlight a document for the CEO. The result, Mensch predicts, will be a flattening of organizations, with traditional middle-management roles gradually disappearing. Google DeepMind creates a brain for robots In keeping with the theme, Googles Gemini model is reaching into new realmsfinding physical embodiment. This week, the company announced two new robotics models designed to serve as the brain for a wide range of robots, from simple robotic arms to more advanced humanoids. The first, called Gemini Robotics, brings Geminis general world knowledge into robotic systems. Its multimodalmeaning it can reason across visual, auditory, and textual inputs. In a demo, a robotic arm equipped with a camera eye sat in front of a toy basketball hoop. When asked to do a slam dunk, it picked up the ball and scoredeven though it had never been specifically trained on that task. Thanks to Geminis broad, generalist understanding, it knew what a slam dunk was and how to perform it. The second model, Gemini Robotics-ER (for Embodied Reasoning), builds on that foundation by integrating physical reasoningan understanding of how objects move through space and time. This enables a robot to detect objects, predict their motion, and anticipate the consequences of its own actions. It might understand, for example, that an egg shouldnt be gripped too tightly. Of course, giving robots this level of intelligence and autonomy raises serious safety concerns. AI models are increasingly capable of acting independentlyand when that autonomy is projected into the physical world, the risks grow. Google DeepMind acknowledges this, pledging to apply a multilayered safety framework to the Gemini robotics models. These systems will inherit Geminis existing safeguards against harmful or dangerous content, and will nclude an added layer of constitutional AIa kind of built-in ethical guidance, reminiscent of Isaac Asimovs Three Laws of Robotics. More AI coverage from Fast Company: Moonvalley launches an AI video generator built for moviemaking NASAs new AI satellites could revolutionize disaster response Box CEO Aaron Levie finds a middle ground on tech policy during Trumps second term Dubbing is terrible. Can AI fix it? 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