The US Federal Aviation Administration plans to cut 10 percent of flights in 40 high-traffic airports on Friday morning if Congress fails to reopen the federal government by then, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and FAA chief Bryan Bedford said Wednesday.

The announcement came days after the US agency said it faced widespread shortages of air traffic controllers in half of the country’s 30 busiest airports, and hours-long security lines caused by absences of Transportation Security Administration agents. Federal workers have now gone 35 days without a paycheck amid the longest government shutdown in US history.

Which flights might be canceled, and where, “is data-based,” Duffy said Wednesday. “This is based on, where is the pressure and how do we alleviate the pressure?”

When passengers fly, “they are going to make it to their destinations safely because we’ve done our work,” Duffy said.

The FAA did not immediately respond to WIRED’s questions, and it’s unclear whether the flight cut will affect only commercial airlines, or cargo and private flights, as well. A 10 percent reduction in scheduled commercial flights at 40 airports could lead to some 4,000 to 5,000 canceled flights per day.

For airlines and travelers, a sudden cut in flights will likely lead to some serious logistical headaches. Duffy has warned this week of air travel “mass chaos” should the shutdown drag on.

But airlines have some experience responding to sudden flight reductions due to staffing issues, says Michael McCormick, a former FAA official who now heads the Air Traffic Management program at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

In the spring of 2023, during another period of air traffic controller shortages, the FAA allowed airlines to reduce their capacities in New York-area airports. (Such reductions usually force airlines to forfeit the right to a takeoff or landing; the FAA temporarily nixed that penalty.) In response, airline schedulers were able to quickly “up-gauge,” compensating for the reduced number of flights by replacing small aircraft with larger ones. That way, cutting flights didn’t necessarily reduce the number of passengers flying overall.

Should the FAA follow through on Friday, airlines will likely be able to pull off a similar “up-gauging” process, says McCormick. While flights will be canceled and passengers moved around, this could mean that plenty are still able to get to their destinations. The move might actually give airlines more time to prepare.

“Under the current state, it’s unpredictable which airports are going to be impacted tomorrow,” he says. “This restores some predictability.”

Researchers have developed an ultra-thin 3D display with a wide viewing angle, clear image quality and vivid display depth. By overcoming tradeoffs that typically limit glasses-free 3D displays, the advance could open new possibilities for highly detailed interactive experiences in health care, education and entertainment.

“The new display is just 28 mm thick, dramatically slimmer than conventional directional backlight systems, which typically exceed 500 mm,” said research team leader Xu Liu, from Zhejiang University in China. “This level of compactness, combined with the substantial boost in resolution we achieved, represents an important step toward making the technology practical for real-world products.”

In Optica, the researchers demonstrate an ultra-slim 32-inch directional backlight-based prototype based on the new display design. The prototype is roughly the size of a large computer monitor, has a wide viewing angle of over 120° and a large 3D display volume of 28 × 16 × 39 inches.

“The 3D display maintains crisp image quality across the entire imaging depth, which can help users visualize depth and spatial relationships for tasks requiring precise spatial understanding,” said Rengmao Wu from Zhejiang University, corresponding author of the paper. “This could, for example, help doctors easily see complex anatomical structures such as tumors or fractures in real time.”

Seeing 3D without glasses

3D light field displays create a scene by using a directional backlight to direct light in a highly controlled manner. This design allows each eye to see a slightly different image, creating a natural sense of depth without requiring the viewer to wear 3D glasses. The quality of the rendered 3D effect depends on how accurately the voxels—the 3D pixels that make up the image—are constructed, as well as on their number and size, since smaller, well-constructed voxels enable finer detail and more realistic depth.

“In light field displays employing diffraction gratings or cylindrical lens arrays, voxel size is fundamentally constrained by the angular spread of backlight illumination,” said Xinzhu Sang from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in China, who made key contributions to the work. “Our system significantly improves voxel construction accuracy compared to existing scattering backlight-based 3D displays, achieving highly miniaturized voxels and substantial resolution enhancement.”

Freeform optics—advanced optical elements that use freeform surfaces to precisely control light—provided the design flexibility needed to create the ultra-slim yet expansive directional backlight system. Each beam-shaping channel of the display integrates an LED source, an aperture and a freeform lens that precisely redirects incident light to generate uniform illumination with precise directionality. The researchers tiled these beam-shaping channels to create a tailored large-area directional backlight system. The display also uses a module consisting of two layers of micro-triangular prisms to significantly improve backlight irradiance uniformity while preserving the directionality.

Clear gains over conventional displays

After making a 32-inch prototype based on the new design, the researchers evaluated its performance using a 50-mm fixed-focus lens with an f/2.8 aperture, a setup often used to simulate how the human eye perceives depth and clarity.

In one experiment, they used the ultra-thin 3D light-field display to render images of an astronaut floating outside a space station. The display exhibited a continuous depth range of 1 m and a viewing angle of more than 120°, providing an immersive and realistic visual experience.

They also compared the new design with conventional scattering backlight displays, finding that it produced six times smaller voxels and maintained resolution even when viewed from farther away. The display was also about 100-fold more efficient at using visual information to generate images than scattering backlight displays.

The researchers are now working to further reduce the thickness and weight of the device while improving its optical efficiency. For commercialization, they point out that more work is needed to develop smaller pixel structures, increase pixel density and optimize pixel shape to enhance compatibility with 3D display technology.

The amount of capital pouring into AI data center projects is staggering. Last week, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon reported their 2025 capital expenditures would total roughly $370 billion, and they expect that number to keep rising in 2026. The biggest spender last quarter was Microsoft, which put nearly $35 billion into data centers and other investments, equivalent to 45 percent of its revenue.

Rarely, if ever, has a single technology absorbed this much money this quickly. Warnings of an AI bubble are getting louder every day, but whether or not a crash eventually happens, the frenzy is already reshaping the US economy. Harvard economist Jason Furman estimates that investment in data centers and software processing technology accounted for nearly all of US GDP growth in the first half of 2025.

Today, we’re looking at how data centers are impacting three crucial areas: public markets, jobs, and energy.

Cashing Out

The US stock market is booming, mostly thanks to AI. Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, AI-related stocks have accounted for 75 percent of S&P 500 returns and 80 percent of earnings growth, according to JPMorgan’s Michael Cembalest. The question now is whether that growth will be sustainable as tech firms continue spending heavily on AI infrastructure.

At the start of this year, tech giants were financing their AI projects mostly with cash they had on hand. As financial journalist Derek Thompson pointed out, the ten largest US public companies kicked off 2025 with historically high free cash flow margins. In other words, their businesses were so profitable that they had billions of dollars sitting around to put towards Nvidia GPUs and data center buildouts.

That trend has largely continued through 2025. Alphabet, for example, told investors last week that its capital expenditures this year would be as much as $93 billion, an increase from its previous estimate of $75 billion. But it also reported that revenue was up 33 percent year over year. Put another way, Silicon Valley is both spending more and earning more. That means everything is fine, right?

Not exactly. For one thing, tech giants appear to be using accounting tricks to make their financials look rosier than they may really be in reality. A significant portion of AI investment flows to Nvidia, which releases new versions of its GPUs approximately every two years. But companies like Microsoft and Alphabet are currently estimating that their chips will last six years. If they need to upgrade sooner to stay competitive—a likely possibility—that could wind up eating into their profits and weaken their overall performance.