Axios

Many venture capitalists are alarmed by the Trump administration's cuts to academic research, at Harvard and beyond, given that such funding has helped forge such foundational technologies as the internet and gene editing.

• Lux Capital wants to help fill the void.

Hollywood giant Jeffrey Katzenberg at Axios' AI+ Summit Wednesday likened the arrival of artificial intelligence to the advent of computer graphics in the 1990s, which revolutionized animation.

The big picture: Whether Hollywood overcomes its unease to eventually embrace AI could be a bellwether for the technology's impact on other industries and on jobs.

Impulse Space, a California-based maker of spacecraft for "tugging" satellites across orbits, has raised $300 million in Series C funding led by Linse Capital.

Why it matters: This is the picks and shovels of defense-tech, akin to what oilfield service companies were to the fracking boom.

NASA spends hundreds of millions of dollars per state on average annually through its scientific missions, a recent analysis shows.

Why it matters: The space agency's science efforts bear the brunt of the cuts in the Trump administration's proposed budget, down nearly 50% to $3.9 billion.

Wildfires in Canada have forced thousands of residents to evacuate in three provinces, impacting air quality in the U.S. — and smoke from the deadly fires has even blown across the Atlantic and reached parts of Europe.

The big picture: The fires that killed two people in Manitoba have been hitting air quality across the country and into the U.S. for days, with the latest alerts affecting Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin and parts of Michigan on Tuesday.