An asteroid that could level a city now has a 3.1-percent chance of striking Earth in 2032, according to NASA data released Tuesday — making it the most threatening space rock ever recorded by modern forecasting.

Despite the rising odds, experts say there is no need for alarm. The global astronomical community is closely monitoring the situation and the James Webb Space Telescope is set to fix its gaze on the object, known as 2024 YR4, next month.

“I’m not panicking,” Bruce Betts, chief scientist for the nonprofit Planetary Society told AFP.

“Naturally when you see the percentages go up, it doesn’t make you feel warm and fuzzy and good,” he added, but explained that as astronomers gather more data, the probability will likely edge up before rapidly dropping to zero.

2024 YR4 was first detected on December 27 last year by the El Sauce Observatory in Chile.

Astronomers estimate its size to be between 130 and 300 feet (40–90 meters) wide, based on its brightness. Analysis of its light signatures suggests it has a fairly typical composition, rather than being a rare metal-rich asteroid.

The International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), a worldwide planetary defense collaboration, issued a warning memo on January 29 after the impact probability had crossed one percent. Since then, the figure has fluctuated but continues to trend upward.

NASA’s latest calculations estimate the impact probability at 3.1 percent, up from 1.6 percent last month, with a potential Earth impact date of December 22, 2032.

Richard Moissl, head of the European Space Agency’s planetary defense office, which puts the risk slightly lower at 2.8 percent told AFP that  this “is not a crisis at this point in time. This is not the dinosaur killer. This is not the planet killer. This is at most dangerous for a city.”

If the risk rises over 10 percent, IAWN would issue a formal warning, leading to a “recommendation for all UN members who have territories in potentially threatened areas to start terrestrial preparedness,” explained Moissl.

Unlike the six-mile-wide (10-kilometer-wide) asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, 2024 YR4 is classified as a “city killer” — not a global catastrophe, but still capable of causing significant destruction.

Its potential devastation comes less from its size and more from its velocity, which could be nearly 40,000 miles per hour if it hits.

If it enters Earth’s atmosphere, the most likely scenario is an airburst, meaning it would explode midair with a force of approximately eight megatons of TNT — more than 500 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.

But an impact crater cannot be ruled out if the size is closer to the higher end of estimates, said Betts.

The potential impact corridor spans the eastern Pacific, northern South America, the Atlantic, Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and South Asia — though Moissl emphasized it is far too early for people to consider drastic decisions like relocation.

The good news: there’s ample time to act.

NASA’s 2022 DART mission proved that spacecraft can successfully alter an asteroid’s path, and scientists have theorized other methods, such as using lasers to create thrust by vaporizing part of the surface, pulling it off course with a spacecraft’s gravity, or even using nuclear explosions as a last resort. — Agence France-Presse

The Panjshir provincial media office said in a statement on Wednesday, February 1 that practical work was to connect the province to fiber optic will begin within the next month.

The statement said that this project covers a 36-kilometer route from Gulbahar to Bazarak, and the districts of Shatal, Anaba and Rukha will also benefit from fiber optic services.

The statement added that the project is being implemented by Afghan Wireless, Afghan Telecom and ICG companies as a result of the efforts of the Panjshir provincial administration and the special attention of the leadership of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

Chinese tech company Alibaba on Wednesday released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model that it claimed surpassed the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3, Reuters reported.

The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max’s release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition.

“Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms … almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” Alibaba’s cloud unit said in an announcement posted on its official WeChat account, referring to OpenAI and Meta’s most advanced open-source AI models.

The Jan. 10 release of DeepSeek’s AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, as well as the Jan. 20 release of its R1 model, has shocked Silicon Valley and caused tech shares to plunge, with the Chinese startup’s purportedly low development and usage costs prompting investors to question huge spending plans by leading AI firms in the United States, read the report.

But DeepSeek’s success has also led to a scramble among its domestic competitors to upgrade their own AI models.

Two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, TikTok owner ByteDance released an update to its flagship AI model, which it claimed outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that measures how well AI models understand and respond to complex instructions.

This echoed DeepSeek’s claim that its R1 model rivalled OpenAI’s o1 on several performance benchmarks.

The predecessor of DeepSeek’s V3 model, DeepSeek-V2, triggered an AI model price war in China after it was released last May.

The fact that DeepSeek-V2 was open-source and unprecedentedly cheap, only 1 yuan ($0.14) per 1 million tokens – or units of data processed by the AI model – led to Alibaba’s cloud unit announcing price cuts of up to 97% on a range of models.

Other Chinese tech companies followed suit, including Baidu, which released China’s first equivalent to ChatGPT in March 2023, and the country’s most valuable internet company Tencent.

Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek’s enigmatic founder, said in a rare interview with Chinese media outlet Waves in July that the startup “did not care” about price wars and that achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) was its main goal.

OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.

While large Chinese tech companies like Alibaba have hundreds of thousands of employees, DeepSeek operates like a research lab, staffed mainly by young graduates and doctorate students from top Chinese universities.

Liang said in his July interview that he believed China’s largest tech companies might not be well suited to the future of the AI industry, contrasting their high costs and top-down structures with DeepSeek’s lean operation and loose management style, Reuters reported.

“Large foundational models require continued innovation, tech giants’ capabilities have their limits,” he said.