It’s the classic awkward icebreaker: If you could invite anyone, dead or alive, to a dinner party, who would it be? Aristotle? Ailias is a company based in Surrey, UK, which promises to make that hypothetical a reality. It can reanimate historical and current legends with 3D hologram avatars that are fully conversational, knowledgeable, and can be delivered to you in a box.

The technology isn’t bespoke. Many companies provide life-size hologram displays for events and parties, everything from floating 3D displays of Santa’s sleigh or 3D Holo-Trucks. The physicist Dennis Gabor even won a Nobel Prize in 1971 for his work that led to holography, even though a life-size Elon Musk isn’t probably the result that he (or anyone) had in mind.

What sets Ailias apart is the company’s playful focus on history and education, which the company describes as “ultra character creation.” The company focuses on animating dead notable personalities into real-feeling conversational holograms, designed for interaction rather than spectacle. Ailias’ holograms can juggle, do squats, or even breakdance, making your party, exhibition or just about any event an extra special occasion.

Man in the Box

Ailias offers pricing on request, with costs varying depending on whether clients opt for rental, purchase, or whether you’re seeking bespoke characters and activation. When I visited the offices, director Adrian Broadway noted that a minimum week’s rental would run into the thousands of pounds, which includes software subscription costs, delivery, and installation.

Ailias’ current roster has over 70 characters that could be staged in their bespoke boxes, including Henry VIII, Beethoven, Julius Caesar, and a suspiciously sexy Cleopatra. That these are mostly historical figures is no coincidence—Broadway describes these boxes as great for educational settings or museum exhibitions, but admits it also has to do with copyright restrictions on characters as well.

In the United Kingdom, the use of someone’s identity for commercial purposes is treated as a trademark. (In the United States, the right to publicity is protected in some form in most states.) That is to say, if Ailias used a well-known or living celebrity, that would likely land the company in court. But a long-dead historical figure like Henry VIII is unlikely to cause trouble.

In this instance, Ailias had cleared the copyright concerns for the 7-foot-tall AI Albert Einstein, so after hitting the Start Chat button, I talked to Einstein about a wide range of topics, everything from science, music, to his thoughts on Elon Musk. He had a pleasant, soft German accent, and I was impressed at the response speed. Ailias notes that it takes under two seconds for each avatar to respond, which feels about right.

For an educational hologram, I often found myself answering more questions than I was asking. There were times Einstein felt like a large, animated ChatGPT conversation but with a German accent. This is to be expected, as Ailias relies on open source AI and third-party generative video to create the conversations. But there’s no sense of verisimilitude anyway, since Einstein wasn’t really 7 feet tall. I took the opportunity to ask, like an 11-year-old boy would, “Who would win in a fight, you or Isaac Newton?”

It held up as any AI language model would, deflecting back to its area of expertise by settling on a sensible, “It would be more of a fight of ideas.” In the aim of being at least semi-professional, that’s as far as I went. But I’d imagine the language model would do fine with most things a preteen could throw at it.

But in the worst worst-case scenario, we don’t have any control. Instead, the station will crack through the atmosphere. Sure, many pieces will likely end up in the ocean, but some might hit people, possibly in a town or a city. The station could break apart across thousands of miles and multiple continents. This would be exceedingly hard to anticipate. As NASA puts it, “Calculating the probability of this penetration cascading into loss of deorbit capability has a very large range of variables, making predictions ineffective.”

This almost certainly won’t happen to the ISS. At the same time, it’s a far more extreme version of the only way an American space station has ever come down. In 1979, after years spent vacant in orbit, Skylab, the US’s first space station, started sinking toward the atmosphere, where it threatened to fall and drop molten spacecraft parts on Earth. At that point, NASA officials had to remotely wake up its computers and, with only limited control of the station, direct it over a location that would endanger the fewest humans.

In the months before, space agency officials were in frequent contact with the State Department, which disseminated the latest predicted trajectories to embassies across the world. In these situations, oops doesn’t cut it: When one of the Salyuts, a Soviet space station model, was deorbited a few decades ago, flaming bits were littered across Argentina, scaring people and requiring the deployment of at least a few firefighters, according to local newspaper reports.

The ISS is far bigger than either the Salyuts or Skylab. In an uncontrolled deorbit, pieces of debris “up to car and train size,” say experts on the official ISS space station advisory committee, will rain down from the sky. NASA confirms this would pose “a significant risk to the public worldwide.”

OK—the nightmare is over. Thus concludes my anxiety-ridden spiral. Here are the facts as they stand in 2026:

As far as WIRED can tell, no one has ever died because a piece of space station hit them. Some pieces of Skylab did fall on a remote part of Western Australia, and Jimmy Carter formally apologized, but no one was hurt. The odds of a piece hitting a populated area are low. Most of the world is ocean, and most land is uninhabited. In 2024, a piece of space trash that was ejected from the ISS survived atmospheric burn-up, fell through the sky, and crashed through the roof of a home belonging to a very real, and rightfully perturbed, Florida man. He tweeted about it and then sued NASA, but he wasn’t injured.

For this story, WIRED reviewed dozens of NASA documents, including backup plans and contingencies for emergencies, and spoke to more than a dozen people, including three astronauts who’ve visited the ISS, and no one seemed that freaked out. One astronaut said the most worrisome scenario that actively crossed his mind in orbit was getting a toothache. The ISS has had some emergencies, including a first-ever medical evacuation in January, but generally things have been remarkably stable. In fact, one of the most impressive things about the ISS is that nothing very dramatic has ever happened to it. No experiment has gone too haywire. It hasn’t been hit by an asteroid.

“El Mencho” is dead.

This weekend, Mexican Army Special Forces killed Nemesio Rubén “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, the head of the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) in Tapalpa, Jalisco, Mexico. Following confirmation of El Mencho’s death by federal authorities, experts anticipate a profound reconfiguration of the global drug trafficking landscape, a scenario that could lead to a new and dangerous wave of violence.

The focus will turn to the CJNG’s mechanisms of control, intimidation, financing, and recruitment that granted the cartel unprecedented operational capacity. Much of its strength stemmed from the weakening of long-standing rivals through the sophisticated use of social media and artificial intelligence, state-of-the-art specialized weaponry, and a flexible internal structure.

The US State Department says that CJNG maintains a presence and contacts in “almost all of Mexico,” the American continent, and countries such as Australia, China, and various Southeast Asian nations. The agency underscores the cartel’s criminal versatility: In addition to fentanyl trafficking, it is involved in extortion, migrant smuggling, oil and mineral theft, and illicit arms trade.

How Was the CJNG Born?

The CJNG traces its roots to the Sinaloa Cartel, led by Joaquín Guzmán Loera, also known as “El Chapo.” Around 2007, this group formed an armed wing in Jalisco under the command of Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel Villarreal. This was the Milenio Cartel, also known as Los Valencia. During this period, Guzmán’s operatives were vying for control of Jalisco territories against Los Zetas, a splinter group of the Gulf Cartel.

In its early years, the CJNG presented itself as “Los Mata Zetas” (The Zeta Killers). According to the BBC, its first documented appearance occurred in September 2011, when it claimed responsibility, through a video circulated on social media, for the discovery of 35 bodies in Boca del Río, a municipality in the state of Veracruz.

By then, the alliance with the Sinaloa Cartel had already fractured after a confrontation with federal forces that culminated in 2010 with the death of Ignacio Coronel. Leadership fell to Oseguera Cervantes, who spearheaded a rapid expansion in methamphetamine production and trafficking.

Cartels Embracing Tech

In less than five years, the CJNG displaced the Knights Templar from southern Michoacán and expelled Los Zetas from northern Jalisco and parts of Zacatecas. After Guzmán Loera’s capture and extradition, the group strengthened its strategy by recruiting financial and chemical specialists to boost the manufacture of synthetic drugs and diversify its income through money-laundering schemes in sectors such as livestock, mining, agriculture, and construction, as well as expanding extortion of small- and medium-size businesses.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) notes that the CJNG operates in more than 40 countries and has a financial structure known as Los Cuinis, headed by Abigael González Valencia, Oseguera’s brother-in-law. This network coordinates money-laundering operations through international trade, cryptocurrencies, and links with Asian networks.

Several investigations have documented the use of digital tools for recruitment and fraud. In 2024, Interpol warned that groups like the CJNG were involved in large-scale financial scams supported by AI, natural language models, and cryptocurrencies. It also detected the expansion of human trafficking for forced criminal activity in scam compounds.

A study by El Colegio de México, in collaboration with the Civic AI Lab at Northeastern University in Boston, revealed that TikTok has become a recruitment tool for Mexican cartels, including CJNG. The research identified 100 active accounts linked to illicit organizations and categorized their content as recruitment, border crossings, illegal businesses, prostitution, propaganda, and arms sales. Forty-seven percent of the accounts promoted the recruitment of new members, and 31 percent disseminated propaganda messages. The report highlighted that the CJNG accounted for 54.3 percent of the detected accounts, followed by the Sinaloa Cartel and the Northeast Cartel.