Category: Science

An artificial intelligence model called Mythos, developed by the company Anthropic, successfully detected security weaknesses in some of the most sensitive computer systems operated by the U.S. government, according to a Tuesday report from the Associated Press citing an official familiar with the matter.

Anthropic had joined forces with Washington’s intelligence community to run a series of tests using the Mythos model. During those tests, the AI was able to pinpoint certain vulnerabilities in a matter of hours. However, officials noted that identifying those flaws does not necessarily mean the model had the ability to take advantage of them within that same window of time.

Reuters, which first reported on the AP story, noted that it was unable to independently confirm the details of the report.

A U.S. government official has revealed that an artificial intelligence model built by the company Anthropic managed to locate security flaws in some of the most sensitive and protected computer systems in the country — and it did so in a matter of hours.

The official, who agreed to speak with The Associated Press only under the condition that their identity not be disclosed, said Anthropic partnered with U.S. intelligence agencies to run tests using the company’s AI model known as Mythos. While the model pinpointed certain vulnerabilities within hours, the official was careful to note that finding those weaknesses is not the same as being able to take advantage of them in that same timeframe.

According to the official, the testing took place under an Anthropic program called Project Glasswing, which brought together major technology companies and other businesses. The goal was to help protect critical software around the world from what officials described as “severe” risks that the Mythos model could pose to public safety, national security, and the economy.

The testing had already been briefly referenced publicly during a June 11 hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia mentioned it at the time, stating, “This tool broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks but in hours.” Warner attributed that information to Gen. Joshua Rudd, who leads both the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command.

When reached for comment, the NSA declined to respond. A spokesperson for Anthropic also chose not to comment.

Even as Anthropic has been working alongside U.S. agencies on security testing, its relationship with the Trump administration has grown increasingly strained. The California-based company has raised concerns about how the U.S. military intends to use its AI technology, while the administration has moved to limit access to certain Anthropic models.

Earlier this month, the administration issued a directive requiring Anthropic to block foreign nationals from using its newest AI models, referred to as Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Anthropic had recently released Fable to the general public — a scaled-back version of the more powerful Mythos, which the company has kept under tight restrictions because of cybersecurity concerns.

That directive came just ten days after President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing a process for the federal government to evaluate national security risks tied to the most advanced AI systems — giving officials up to a month to review them before public release. The order specified that participation by AI developers would be voluntary.

To comply with the administration’s directive, Anthropic said it shut off access to those models for all of its customers. The company also stated that it did not believe the government’s concerns justified the actions that were taken.

A group of cybersecurity executives has since urged the Trump administration to reverse the directive, warning that it could end up benefiting America’s adversaries more than harming them. More than 100 cybersecurity professionals and leaders from companies including Adobe and Nvidia signed a letter to the government stating that Anthropic’s Mythos models are “quite good” at uncovering software flaws and turning them into weapons — but are “not uniquely good at these tasks.”

Many of those who signed the letter said they routinely rely on other AI models, including open-source options, for security audits and training purposes. The letter warned that stripping away top-tier cyber defense tools “without a good reason” is dangerous at a time when the United States’ adversaries are rapidly building up their own capabilities.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has announced $17.5 billion in federal loans to fast-track the construction of 10 new large nuclear reactors, as the country faces rapidly growing electricity demand driven largely by massive data centers.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright described “tremendous interest” from data center developers, utilities, and energy companies looking to participate in the initiative. Officials said Tuesday that construction on the new plants could begin as early as 2030, with the reactors coming online in the mid-2030s.

“This is the start,” Wright told reporters. “We’re going to move with the players that are ready to stand up and move quickly. Once that supply chain is up and running, do we think there will be dozens of these built going forward? I’d be very surprised if there were not.”

The majority of America’s existing nuclear power plants were constructed between 1970 and 1990. Only two brand-new large reactors have been built in the U.S. in recent decades — both at Georgia Power Co.’s Plant Vogtle — and those projects finished years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. All 10 of the newly planned reactors will use the same design: Westinghouse’s AP1000.

Wright acknowledged that the Plant Vogtle project ran into serious trouble due to poor planning, supply chain failures, and the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even so, he maintained that the reactor design itself is “robust and sound.”

“By building in volume and at multiple locations, we think we will create and stand up a large supply chain and build a lot of construction expertise,” Wright said. “We expect the timing and cost of these plants to well outperform what was done on Vogtle.”

According to the Energy Department, seven utilities and energy companies have signed letters of intent and identified potential sites. From those, five sites will be chosen, each hosting two reactors. The federal loan money would be used to purchase nuclear components that require long production lead times — not as direct construction loans.

The department has not yet disclosed which utilities are involved or which states the sites are located in, saying it would be premature to release that information before final selections are made. No timeline was given for when those decisions will be announced.

President Donald Trump has set an ambitious goal of quadrupling the nation’s domestic nuclear power output within the next 25 years and has signed executive orders intended to speed up development. The administration is also working to advance newer technologies such as small modular nuclear reactors.

Dan Sumner, president and chief executive officer of Westinghouse, argued that nuclear power needs to be built at a fleet scale for the United States to maintain leadership in artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, and the industries that will shape the coming century.

Not everyone supports the push for more nuclear plants. Critics argue they are too costly and carry greater risks compared to other low-carbon energy alternatives.

The urgency behind the initiative is partly driven by explosive growth in electricity consumption. Data centers accounted for 4% to 5% of total U.S. electricity use in 2024, a share that government estimates suggest could nearly triple by 2028. Some analysts project overall nationwide electricity demand could climb as much as 20% over the next decade, with data centers being a primary driver.

The Energy Department said the loans could shave up to three years off the development timeline and reduce construction costs. The goal is to have all 10 reactors under construction by 2030 and delivering power by the mid-2030s.

The utilities and Westinghouse are expected to contribute a combined total of up to $5 billion in equity across the five two-reactor projects. Wright said the federal government would provide up to $17.5 billion in loans — roughly $3.5 billion per project — to complement that equity investment. He described the arrangement as “very, very low risk to the American taxpayers.”

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic rolled out a new AI-powered agent on Tuesday that operates directly inside Salesforce’s Slack messaging platform, allowing it to participate in workplace group chats alongside human employees.

The new tool, named Claude Tag, is activated when a user types @Claude inside a Slack conversation thread. Once summoned, it can read through ongoing discussions, break tasks into manageable steps, and proactively surface relevant updates across an organization — even without being directly asked.

The agent is designed to remember context over time and is currently being offered as a research preview to Claude Enterprise and Team customers. Anthropic said it plans to bring the feature to additional platforms in the future.

The launch is part of Anthropic’s broader push to capture business customers, an effort that has helped drive the company’s valuation to $965 billion — surpassing that of rival OpenAI.

Company administrators will have the ability to closely manage what data and tools Claude Tag can access within each individual Slack channel, which Anthropic says will help keep sensitive company information protected.

Cat Wu, Anthropic’s head of product for Claude Code, described the announcement as a meaningful step forward because the agent acts on its own initiative within any Slack channel and can interact with multiple team members at once.

“A lot of the capabilities did exist, but actually the form factor of being able to tag it the same way that you would a coworker is really powerful,” Wu told Reuters.

As an example, Wu explained that she personally gave her own Claude Tag access to her Gmail account. The agent reads her incoming messages, identifies when someone important has reached out, and then notifies her through Slack — a platform where she said she tends to respond more quickly.

Wu added that Anthropic is working to extend this same functionality to other platforms in the weeks ahead.

HELSINKI — Finland could give the green light to Tesla’s self-driving assistance technology sooner than a broader European Union decision anticipated for October, the country’s transport authority announced Tuesday.

In April, the Netherlands became the first nation in Europe to grant provisional approval for Tesla’s Full Self-Driving, known as FSD, marking an initial step toward a possible EU-wide rollout if a qualified majority of member states vote in favor. Estonia and Belgium have since joined the Netherlands in permitting the technology, which enables vehicles to steer themselves — though some regulatory bodies have expressed reservations.

“An EU-wide solution can be expected in October 2026. However, Traficom is prepared to proceed on a faster schedule after the summer if the necessary additional information has been obtained on the key areas of assessment,” the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency, known as Traficom, said in an official statement.

Traficom outlined several areas currently under review, including how quickly drivers are able to resume control of the vehicle, how the system handles passing maneuvers in low-visibility conditions on Finnish roads, and a speed offset feature that has drawn concern from neighboring Sweden and Norway.

Despite those open questions, Traficom indicated its general assessment of the system has been favorable. The EU-wide committee vote is set for October, and the next discussion among member states is scheduled for June 30.

Approximately 6,500 vehicles in Finland are already equipped with the FSD system, representing about 0.24% of the country’s 2.7 million passenger cars.

Because Tesla’s FSD still requires a human driver to remain attentive and ready to intervene, it is not classified as fully autonomous. However, Traficom noted that genuinely self-driving vehicles could begin appearing on Finnish roads as early as 2028.

Reuters previously reported in May that Finland was among several European countries Tesla reached out to following the Dutch approval, inquiring whether they would be open to following suit.

Forty mayors representing cities across the globe have put their names to a new agreement designed to give local leaders more influence over how data centers are built and run in their communities. The pact was announced Tuesday during London Climate Action Week.

The agreement was organized through C40 Cities, an alliance of nearly 100 municipalities working to address climate change. The group says roughly 1,700 data centers already exist within its network of cities, and that number is expected to grow by more than 40% in 50 of those cities.

While many new data centers are heading to rural areas where land is cheaper, C40 says urban areas are also facing enormous pressure from this rapid expansion.

The effort got its start when the mayors of Phoenix and Melbourne, Australia, came together over shared concerns — specifically that data centers were consuming large amounts of electricity and water while also competing with housing developers for available land.

“We found out that the challenges in every region around the world were very similar,” said Cassie Sutherland, a managing director at C40. “Our approach was to say OK, how do we now use a global mayoral voice to come together with the conditions under which they will accept data centers.”

Data centers tend to cluster in cities because businesses using artificial intelligence need systems that respond instantly, and companies want their data infrastructure close to their operations. Andrew Batson, global head of data center research at JLL, noted that data centers moving into rural areas is a more recent trend.

Public and political pushback against data centers has been building due to concerns about power outages, higher electricity costs, and the massive amounts of water these facilities require. Some states have already paused tax incentives or are weighing construction moratoriums.

Roughly half of the mayors who signed the pact are from the United States. American cities include Seattle, Palo Alto and Riverside in California, Phoenix and Albuquerque in the Southwest, Beverly in Massachusetts, Lincoln in Nebraska, Chicago and Cleveland in the Midwest, and Miami in the South.

International participants include cities in Greece, Spain, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, Norway, and Montreal in Canada. African cities from Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Kenya also joined, along with Asia-Pacific cities in India and Australia, and Lebanon in the Middle East.

Sutherland said the pact must now be turned into real action, with each city using it as a guide for crafting local regulations or policies. Mayors will need support from other government officials, utility companies, and the private sector to make meaningful changes.

The agreement outlines several key standards: data centers should be built on abandoned or underused land, minimize noise, heat, and air pollution, run on renewable energy and battery storage, cut water use and emissions, and capture waste heat. Mayors also want data centers to create local jobs, purchase goods and services locally, fund their own infrastructure upgrades, and engage with community members.

In the Phoenix area, pending permit requests alone could double electricity demand if all proposed data centers are built. Developers are drawn to the region because of its reliable power supply and consistent weather.

Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego expressed concern that current data center investments are worsening climate change and failing to serve local residents. She said a united front among mayors will prevent developers from simply seeking out communities that lack the power to negotiate better terms.

“We understand the importance of this innovation, it’s creating great jobs in our community,” Gallego said. “We just want to make sure that we get it right for our local residents and for the health of our planet.”

As of Tuesday, no cities from Southeast Asia had signed the pact. C40 said several cities in that region were unable to join due to national policies or other complications, though discussions are continuing.

Southeast Asia accounts for roughly a quarter of global energy demand growth, driven in part by more than 2,000 data centers operating across Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines, according to the think tank Ember. The International Energy Agency projects that annual energy demand from those data centers will more than double within five years. Malaysia has been a particular hotspot, drawing major investments from tech giants including Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia.

Melbourne played a central role in shaping the pact. According to the city’s Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece, if Melbourne follows through on all its current plans, data centers there could consume up to 20 billion liters — roughly 5.3 billion gallons — of water annually, equal to about 4% of the city’s drinking water supply. That water supply is already under strain from population growth, longer dry spells, and intensifying heat driven by climate change.

Reece said tighter environmental regulations in Melbourne are unlikely to drive away future investment, noting that data centers ultimately go where there is sufficient power, land, and proximity to markets and companies using artificial intelligence.

“We don’t want to see a race to the bottom between cities where governments, desperate for investment, are chasing data centers on any terms possible,” he said. “We want to see a better framework in place so that the investment rush in data centers can be a win-win — a win for investors and also a win for local communities.”

China has surged back to the top of the world’s supercomputer rankings, but technology and policy experts say the milestone tells us more about Beijing’s ambitions in chip development than its position in the global artificial intelligence competition.

The machine known as LineShine, located at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, China, secured the number one position on the TOP500 — a ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers published twice a year. The system runs entirely on chips designed within China, marking the country’s first appearance at the top of the list in three years.

The announcement arrives at a moment of heightened rivalry between the U.S. and China in advanced computing. U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday aimed at positioning the United States ahead of China in the growing field of quantum computing.

In the June 2026 edition of the TOP500, LineShine displaced the previous champion, El Capitan — a supercomputer housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that the U.S. government uses for nuclear weapons development and upkeep.

Despite the headline-grabbing result, experts caution against reading too much into it when it comes to AI. On a separate benchmark test designed to more closely reflect the kind of computing involved in AI applications, LineShine ranked only fourth. The distinction matters because the TOP500 ranking uses tests modeled after traditional scientific computing tasks, not the workloads that power modern artificial intelligence systems.

For decades, supercomputers were built to tackle complex scientific problems — like modeling how atoms interact — and were primarily found at national laboratories and universities. The TOP500 list was designed with those machines in mind. But in recent years, major cloud computing companies including Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Alphabet’s Google have constructed enormous computing systems tailored specifically for AI, and most of those companies choose not to compete for a spot on the TOP500.

A study published last year by AI policy researchers Konstantin Pilz, James Sanders, Robi Rahman, and Lennart Heim concluded that the Colossus system owned by SpaceX’s xAI was already likely more powerful than the U.S. government’s El Capitan.

Jimmy Goodrich, a senior fellow at the University of California’s Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation, put it bluntly: “If the hyperscalers submitted their systems, this ‘world’s fastest’ would not crack the top five.”

Experts say China’s decision to enter LineShine into the rankings after a three-year absence signals a desire for recognition of its domestic chip-building progress. China first claimed the top spot on the TOP500 back in 2010 and exchanged the title with the U.S. and Japan repeatedly until 2023, when it stopped submitting systems — a period that coincided with years of U.S. export restrictions on chips and computing technology, which began under Trump’s first administration and continued under President Joe Biden.

Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360 Research, a firm specializing in supercomputer analysis, said he wasn’t shocked by the result itself — but by China’s choice to publicize it. “I’m not surprised it’s the number one system. What I’m surprised by is that they submitted it and want recognition for it,” he said.

Notably, the LineShine system does not include any advanced AI chips, according to details released alongside the results — likely because the manufacturing tools needed to produce such chips remain under U.S. export controls.

Goodrich was skeptical of the message China may be trying to send. “China is hoping to convince the world export controls are useless by hoping we ignore the details,” he said.

The National Supercomputing Centre did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres stepped up pressure on artificial intelligence companies Tuesday, demanding they publicly disclose how much carbon pollution, water, and land their operations consume.

Speaking at Europe’s largest independent climate conference — London Climate Action Week — Guterres unveiled what he called the AI Environmental Transparency Initiative. The proposal calls on AI companies to measure and make public the environmental toll of their fast-growing technology, which has already drawn criticism from communities living near data centers and from governments pushing for standardized industry reporting.

Guterres also called on these companies to pledge that their facilities will run entirely on electricity generated by renewable sources, such as wind and solar power, no later than 2030.

“No more hidden costs,” he said at the conference. “No more shifting the burden onto those least able to bear it. It is time to come clean.”

A number of major technology companies have already promised to transition to cleaner energy sources, with some aiming to meet that goal before the end of the decade — including through solar and nuclear power. However, the explosive growth of AI has complicated those pledges, pushing greenhouse gas emissions higher. Regulatory obstacles have also slowed the development of climate-friendly energy projects.

According to the International Energy Agency, coal currently supplies roughly 30% of the electricity used by data centers worldwide. Renewable sources — mainly wind, solar, and hydropower — account for about 27%, natural gas provides 26%, and nuclear energy contributes 15%. Renewables are projected to meet only half of the growing demand over the next five years.

While many, including Guterres, have pointed to AI’s potential to help speed up climate solutions — improving energy efficiency and cutting emissions — the technology’s environmental footprint is already comparable to that of some of the world’s largest nations, according to a UN report released earlier this month.

That same report found that the water consumption, energy use, and pollution linked to AI are expected to double within four years. Data centers powering AI accounted for approximately 1.5% of global electricity use in 2025, a figure projected to climb to nearly 3% by 2030.

“Despite these obvious concerns, communities are often left in the dark about the environmental impact of the infrastructure rising around them,” Guterres said.

The UN chief has consistently pushed world leaders to take aggressive climate action and will again bring nations together at this year’s annual Conference of Parties, set to take place in Turkey.

On Tuesday, addressing AI’s environmental impact was just one piece of a broader set of actions Guterres said are needed to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius — or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit — above pre-industrial levels, a target established under the 2015 Paris Agreement. Last year marked the first time the three-year temperature average surpassed that threshold.

“Every major emitter must accelerate action,” Guterres said. “And every country must over-deliver on its commitments.”

He called for steep reductions in methane — a greenhouse gas responsible for about one-third of global warming and far more potent than carbon dioxide, though it breaks down more quickly in the atmosphere. He also urged countries to reduce their reliance on coal, oil, and natural gas.

Guterres did highlight some encouraging signs in the clean energy transition. Falling costs are driving wider adoption of renewable technologies, and clean power generation — led by solar and wind — outpaced total global electricity demand growth last year. For the first time in modern history, renewables made up more than one-third of the world’s electricity supply in 2025, while coal’s share dipped below one-third of global generation.

China remains the leading force in the global shift toward clean energy, and fossil fuel use in Europe is broadly declining. In contrast, the United States under President Donald Trump has moved to embrace coal, oil, and gas while cutting support for renewable energy and climate initiatives — changes occurring alongside a global energy crisis worsened by the U.S. war in Iran, which Guterres described as “the mother of all energy shocks.”

Drawing on the setting of his London address, Guterres framed the current moment as “A Tale of Two Crises” — a nod to Charles Dickens’ novel “A Tale of Two Cities.”

“For the climate agenda, this is indeed the best of times and the worst of times,” he said. “The worst — because climate impacts are intensifying, tipping points are looming, and the energy crisis has exposed the deep risks of dependence on fossil fuels. But also the best — because the renewables revolution is well underway.”

Marie Lansley recently relocated to San Francisco for a new job while simultaneously navigating the world of dating. As she searches for a partner, the 36-year-old said she has been “trying everything” — and that includes turning to artificial intelligence for a little help.

For Lansley and a growing number of singles, AI chatbots have stepped into the role of informal dating coach and relationship advisor.

She consults AI chatbots to help her get conversations going — something she finds awkward on dating apps, even though she has no trouble striking up chats with people face to face. While she remains hopeful about what the technology can offer, she recognizes the tension between romance and algorithms.

“I am open to AI finding me the love of my life, but I’m also not fully convinced that it can,” Lansley said. “AI is great at making dating more efficient. But the chemistry — that’s always going to be analog.”

People are using AI in a variety of ways to pursue romance. Some sign up for AI-powered matchmaking services. Others lean on the technology to polish their dating profiles. The most widespread use, however, is having chatbots write opening messages to potential partners or help decode messages received from them.

Lansley switches between OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude depending on her needs. Other daters rely on tools like Elon Musk and X’s Grok, Google’s Gemini, and similar platforms. Dating apps and AI companies are embracing this trend — both ChatGPT and Gemini have shared content on TikTok highlighting their chatbots’ personalized, character-driven relationship tips.

Dating coach Carey Gaynes drew a literary comparison to describe the phenomenon. “Claude is the new Cyrano,” she said, pointing to the 19th century French play “Cyrano de Bergerac,” in which the main character secretly supplies the romantic words another man uses to woo a woman. “You’re using a voice that isn’t yours.”

Gaynes said she has heard from daters of all age groups who are turning to AI — both through her coaching clients and her YouTube channel, Coffee with Carey. She can see its usefulness but shares a common concern about people depending on it too heavily.

People’s feelings about AI in the dating world span a wide spectrum, from genuine enthusiasm to outright resistance and plenty of skepticism in between.

Lansley said she was caught off guard by how emotionally aware chatbots can seem. When she went through an onboarding process with the AI matchmaker on an app called Known, she said the questions asked by the bot went “one or two levels deeper” than what typical dating apps ask, and the bot appeared to be genuinely trying to show empathy. That said, it didn’t guarantee a great outcome — her first match through the service wasn’t the right fit.

Mason Naung, a 25-year-old student in Los Angeles, said he personally doesn’t use chatbots to come up with messages, but he can understand how they might help with “icebreakers” in those early exchanges with someone new.

“I’ve been on Hinge on and off for a year or two, and sometimes I kind of struggle to think about what the opening line should be like with this girl, right?” he said. Still, he noted that if AI-written messages continued beyond those first few exchanges, that would be a “small red flag” in his view.

Chatbots aren’t just helping people start conversations — they’re also being used to end them. Dani Cohen, a 27-year-old business owner in San Diego, said she would far prefer receiving an AI-written goodbye message from someone she had dated a few times over being “ghosted” — cut off entirely without any explanation.

“Obviously, in a perfect world, everyone knows exactly what they want to say and how to say it in the kindest way possible and they do that. That’s not the world we live in,” she said. “Anything to get people to communicate, and to communicate their thoughts kindly and effectively, is great.”

A number of people who spoke with The Associated Press — including some who have used AI for dating purposes — said they had reservations about applying the technology to such a deeply personal area of life. Many said there was a point at which using AI in dating would feel inappropriate to them.

Others said they wouldn’t consider using a chatbot for their love life at all.

Clara Sullivan, a 22-year-old student in Los Angeles, said she would not respond to a potential partner if she found out their messages had been written by AI. “I think it’s really scary how reliant people are on it,” Sullivan said. “It’s completely gotten rid of people’s ability to think creatively and on their own.”

That concern is widely shared. A 2025 survey from the Pew Research Center found that 53% of American adults believe AI will diminish people’s ability to think creatively. Half of those surveyed said they think AI will make it harder for people to build meaningful relationships.

Despite the unease, the blending of AI with the highly profitable dating industry was probably inevitable. Many dating platforms have been quietly incorporating AI features for years.

Tinder offers an AI-powered tool called Chemistry that recommends profiles based on a user’s preferences. Hinge has AI-driven conversation starters and profile-building tools designed to make interactions easier. Meanwhile, the founder of Bumble recently announced the app will move away from its well-known swipe feature in favor of AI-driven matchmaking. After some pushback, Bumble CEO and founder Whitney Wolfe Herd released a statement saying what they are building “is rooted in a simple belief: technology should make love and connection feel more human, not less.”

Mohammed Nizami, 23, said he uses AI for certain things in his daily life — but romance isn’t one of them. “We’re all craving for some degree of authentic connection. Certainly with your partner, you want that,” he said. “If there’s some filter or barrier between you and your partner or potential partner, I think that’s just not a great way to start a relationship.”

Nizami also questioned whether chatbots even offer the best advice, noting that many tend to be agreeable rather than honest — which might feel reassuring but doesn’t always lead to sound guidance.

Despite all the hesitation, AI’s footprint in modern dating is expected to grow.

“It’s kind of a sad commentary on the state of the world. Dating is supposed to be one of the things that cannot be replaced, right?” said Jake Clay, a 30-year-old content creator in New York City. “It’s kind of sad to think that something so pivotal to your life journey is being outsourced to an AI who can’t understand the emotions around it.”

Clay did note one silver lining: his friends have stopped texting him as often to help them interpret messages from people they’re seeing, since they now go straight to chatbots instead. He joked that he appreciates AI “lifting the load” in that regard — but also called it a “Catch-22,” since it bypasses “some of the normal processes in life that I feel like should be a little bit more sacred.”

The United Nations is pushing major artificial intelligence companies to come clean about the environmental damage caused by their rapidly expanding data centers, with the UN’s top official launching a new transparency initiative on Tuesday.

Speaking during London Climate Action Week, UN Secretary-General António Guterres painted a stark picture of just how resource-hungry the AI industry has become. “By 2030, they could use more power than all but five countries – and enough water to meet the basic needs of all 1.3 billion residents of sub-Saharan Africa for an entire year,” he warned.

The worldwide boom in data center construction to support the AI industry has already raised alarms among environmental groups, who have pointed to the facilities’ enormous appetite for both energy and water, as well as a general lack of transparency from the companies involved.

As part of the newly unveiled UN AI Environmental Transparency Initiative, Guterres urged AI companies to track and publicly report their water usage, carbon output, and land use. He also called on those firms to commit to powering all of their data centers with renewable energy by the year 2030.

“If AI is to help build a better future, it must be honest about what it costs us now,” he said.

Currently, AI companies largely depend on voluntary net-zero pledges and renewable energy goals to reduce their carbon footprints. Many are also turning to natural gas or promoting nuclear power as energy sources for new facilities.

Guterres expressed frustration that the world is falling short of its global climate targets and pushed back against those advocating for greater fossil fuel use. He argued that expanding renewable energy projects and using them to power transportation, buildings, and industry is one of the quickest paths to cutting emissions and reducing dependence on imported fossil fuels.

Beyond AI, Guterres also introduced a call to action targeting methane emissions, directing fossil fuel companies to repair leaks, end routine flaring, and adopt a science-based global standard for emissions. “I am urging the fossil fuel industry to step up and do what is long overdue,” he said, noting that methane is a highly potent greenhouse gas responsible for roughly one-third of current global warming.

Additionally, Guterres announced he plans to bring world leaders together this September in the lead-up to COP31, the UN Climate Conference scheduled to take place in Turkey, with the goal of accelerating a “just transition” away from fossil fuels.

Back in 1976, when the United States was celebrating its 200th birthday, the Environmental Protection Agency sealed away a time capsule with a commitment to open it exactly 50 years later — in 2026. That milestone has now arrived, but the agency may not follow through on that decades-old pledge.

The time capsule, buried at the Kennedy Space Center, has become something of a mystery as the anniversary year unfolds, with no clear indication that the EPA plans to honor the promise made half a century ago.

Scientists examining the interstellar comet known as 3I/ATLAS say this cosmic traveler is extraordinarily old — likely formed somewhere between 10 and 12 billion years ago in an ancient planetary system far from our own.

The comet, which measures roughly 1.6 miles (2.6 km) across, is believed to be the oldest known object ever to pass through our solar system. That conclusion comes from Martin Cordiner, a planetary scientist and astrochemist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who led the research. The study was published Monday in the journal Nature.

3I/ATLAS is only the third interstellar object ever observed traveling through our solar system. By studying its chemical composition, researchers were able to piece together clues about the physical and chemical environment where it originally formed.

According to the research team, the comet appears to have originated in a far colder environment — approximately minus-405 degrees Fahrenheit (minus-243 degrees Celsius) — compared to the conditions that gave rise to Earth and other bodies in our solar system about 4.5 billion years ago. The comet has since traveled an enormous distance after being somehow ejected from its original planetary system.

“We have never before seen an object like 3I/ATLAS,” Cordiner said.

Researchers used the James Webb Space Telescope to measure isotope ratios — essentially different versions of chemical elements like hydrogen and carbon — present on the comet. The hydrogen isotopes shed light on the temperature and radiation levels where 3I/ATLAS formed, while the carbon isotopes offered insight into the interstellar gas cloud that gave birth to it and its home planetary system.

One striking finding: the comet’s water contained roughly 30 times more deuterium — a type of hydrogen isotope — than comets found within our own solar system. Its carbon isotope ratios also differed significantly from anything observed in solar system objects or in nearby interstellar clouds and planet-forming disks around young stars.

Cordiner described 3I/ATLAS as most likely a leftover fragment from the process of planet formation around a distant star.

“Our James Webb Space Telescope observations tell us that the planet-forming environment of 3I/ATLAS’s host system was distinct from our own solar system. It was likely colder, and less metal rich, while being more heavily irradiated by UV and cosmic rays,” Cordiner said.

Despite its cold and distant origins, the comet is loaded with organic molecules containing carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur. Cordiner said this “shows that despite a cold and distant origin, the volatile elements for life as we know it were abundant in this distant planet-forming disk.”

The carbon composition suggests 3I/ATLAS may have formed as far back as 12 billion years ago, during a period of intense star formation in its region of space. Given that the universe is estimated to have begun with the Big Bang roughly 13.8 billion years ago, 3I/ATLAS would have formed when the cosmos was only about 13% of its current age.

While researchers believe the comet originated within the Milky Way, its age means they cannot entirely rule out that it came from another galaxy. Cordiner noted that “it could take as little as a billion years for a fast interstellar object to get here from our nearest galactic neighbors, the Magellanic Clouds.”

The comet was likely flung out of its home system through gravitational interactions with planets, though some kind of collision has not been ruled out either.

The two previously observed interstellar objects were comets 1I/’Oumuamua, detected in 2017, and 2I/Borisov, discovered in 2019. 3I/ATLAS is now approaching Saturn’s orbit, with scientists expecting it to pass beyond Pluto’s orbit in 2029 and exit the outer boundary of our solar system around 2035.

Despite some earlier speculation that the object could be an alien spacecraft, researchers are confident it is a naturally occurring comet. “While good scientists always remain open to updating their understanding, we take great care to weigh the evidence for each hypothesis,” Cordiner said. “In this case, the evidence was clear from a very early stage that we were looking at a comet-like object, and over time that interpretation has been confirmed by subsequent observations.”

Elon Musk’s social media platform X bounced back Monday after a widespread outage left tens of thousands of users unable to access the service, according to outage-tracking site Downdetector.com.

The trouble started at approximately 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time, with reports of problems surging to more than 25,000 in the United States at its worst point. By the time the platform had largely recovered, U.S. reports had dropped to around 620, according to Downdetector, which compiles outage data from user-submitted reports across multiple sources.

Users in other countries were also affected. In Canada, problem reports climbed above 3,400 before falling to roughly 30, while the United Kingdom saw reports exceed 9,000 earlier in the day before those numbers also came down significantly.

It’s worth noting that the figures from Downdetector reflect user-submitted reports, so the true number of people impacted by the outage could be different from what the data shows.

SpaceX, which owns X, had not responded to a request for comment regarding the cause of the outage at the time of reporting.

The United States continues to hold an overall advantage in biotechnology innovation, but China is quickly catching up — and some industry leaders say the gap is narrowing faster than many realize, according to a newly released survey of senior U.S. figures in the biotech industry and higher education.

The poll, carried out by the Cure Innovation Index, evaluated both countries across six key areas of the biotech sector. China came out on top in two of those categories: clinical drug development and supply chain operations. The United States led in technology transfer, access to capital, commercialization, and talent. In the area of scientific discovery, the two nations were considered essentially equal.

“The U.S. is still leading, but confidence is eroding. Most said they see China as an existential threat,” said Seema Kumar, CEO at Cure, which operates as an affiliate of the investment firm Deerfield Management.

The survey results were shared publicly on Monday in San Diego at the annual gathering of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization.

In recent years, major pharmaceutical companies around the world have increasingly turned to drug candidates developed in China, drawn by lower costs, a more streamlined regulatory environment, and what some describe as an uneven playing field created by government subsidies.

Data from a Georgetown University study shows how dramatically the landscape has shifted. By 2024, the United States’ share of early-stage drug development had fallen to roughly 37%, down from 48% in 2015. Over that same period, China’s share of global drug development climbed from just 8% to more than 32%.

Pharmaceutical companies are now licensing drug compounds from China at an increasing rate, hoping to transform upfront investments of as little as $80 million into treatments worth billions of dollars.

The shift has raised alarms within the U.S. government. A December report from the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology cautioned that “China has systematically built a vertically integrated biotechnology ecosystem that is now in prime position to challenge U.S. leadership.”

In response, the Biosecure Act — signed into law by President Donald Trump late last year — now restricts federal agencies from doing business with biotechnology companies based outside the United States.

Kumar outlined the contrasting strengths of each country: “China has speed, scale, manufacturing, development, execution, and the U.S. is better at scientific quality, talent, some work on the tech transfer, and most important of all, it has the access to the world’s most valuable healthcare market. Commercialization is America’s superpower. … The buyer is in the U.S.”

That market advantage is significant. According to data from Iqvia, the U.S. accounted for 53% of the global pharmaceutical market in 2025, up from 49% in 2021. Europe’s share held steady at 24%, while the Asia-Pacific region’s portion dipped slightly from 13% to 11%.

Perhaps the most striking finding from the Cure survey, Kumar noted, is that many respondents ranked potential cuts to U.S. research funding as a more pressing concern than competition from China.

“The U.S. has all of the right ingredients, but the way we have been funding probably needs to change,” Kumar said. She called for stronger financial support for the National Institutes of Health and for modernizing the country’s clinical development infrastructure — an area she noted has not been meaningfully updated since the passage of the nearly 50-year-old Bayh-Dole Act.

BEIJING — China’s ambitious effort to power its booming artificial intelligence data center industry with renewable energy is running into serious obstacles, with industry experts pointing to unpredictable electricity demand and reluctant grid operators as major stumbling blocks.

Providing dependable electricity to AI-focused data centers has risen to the level of national strategic priority. China’s 2026 government work report, released earlier this year, specifically called for tighter coordination between computing infrastructure and the country’s power supply networks.

Central to that strategy is a bold plan to route more clean electricity directly to the fast-growing data center sector. Chinese authorities have set a goal for renewable sources to supply 80% of the industry’s total electricity needs by 2030 — a dramatic jump from just 11% in 2023.

The electricity demand coming from China’s data centers is expected to grow by 300 billion to 500 billion kilowatt-hours between 2026 and 2030, representing 18% of the country’s total electricity demand growth during that period, according to Pei Shanpeng, a director at Chinese power company State Power Investment Corp. To put that in perspective, the lower end of that estimate is roughly equal to the entire annual power consumption of the United Kingdom.

Despite this surging demand, experts say data centers are actually a poor match for green energy suppliers when compared to traditional heavy industries like aluminum smelting. The core problem is that data centers’ peak electricity needs are much harder to forecast.

“At least for now, they do not appear to be very flexible (in managing power demand),” Pei said during an industry conference held in Beijing last week.

“From what we understand, they (data centers) cannot really adjust power consumption load much. GPUs are very expensive, so once they are purchased, operators want to use them as quickly and as intensively as possible,” he added.

Pei noted that the push to increase green power use in data centers is driven primarily by the desire to reduce carbon emissions rather than to cut electricity costs for operators.

Experts also cautioned that broader adoption of direct green-power connections to data centers could face pushback from grid operators. Those operators worry that such arrangements would reduce their electricity sales and make it harder to recoup the large investments they’ve made in transmission and distribution infrastructure — especially if demand were to slow or decline.

China’s effort to build dedicated power networks for AI operations comes as the country’s rapid buildout of data centers has already begun straining electricity infrastructure in some regions, driving up both average and peak grid loads and forcing operators to manage the tension between growing demand and reliability concerns.

“If 15% of the power consumption loads can be adjusted, it will significantly reduce capacity expansion pressure on the grid over the next three to five years,” said Wang Zelin, deputy director at State Grid Jibei Electric Power Research Institute.

Ongoing drought conditions are forcing the National Park Service to take drastic and expensive action at Lake Powell, where falling water levels have left at least one dock stranded far from the reservoir’s current shoreline.

The agency is spending $74 million to relocate the dock, which can no longer reach the water due to the reservoir’s dramatically reduced levels. The project underscores the growing financial toll that prolonged drought is taking on one of the nation’s most visited recreational waterways.

Lake Powell, which straddles the border between Utah and Arizona, has seen its water supply severely diminished in recent years, creating ongoing logistical headaches for the park service as it struggles to keep facilities accessible to visitors.

A bird banding program at Masonville Cove is shedding new light on how birds travel along the Chesapeake Bay corridor — and delivering an exciting milestone: the return of birds that were first tagged two years ago.

Since the program launched, researchers have banded more than 3,000 birds from roughly 90 different species. The effort is a collaboration involving the Maryland Port Administration, MES, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the nonprofit Birds of Urban Baltimore, known as BUrB. BUrB holds the required permits from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, while volunteers assist with fieldwork and data collection.

Bird banding involves safely capturing birds, attaching a small metal band to one leg, and recording measurements before releasing them. Scientists document details such as weight, size, age, and sex — information that helps build a long-term picture of migration patterns, survival rates, and animal behavior.

Fall 2025 was the third migration banding season at Masonville Cove. Between early August and early November, with a brief additional session in December, the team banded 838 birds representing 56 species. A standout moment came on September 27, when the station set a single-day record — 107 newly banded birds plus three recaptures processed in one day.

Looking at the full year, the team banded 1,341 birds across 72 species. More than 210 members of the public stopped by the station, and six new volunteers joined the team — the largest single-season growth the program has seen.

MES Environmental Specialist Cal Liddell said spotting returning birds has been one of the most rewarding parts of the work. “This year we’ve started catching a lot of birds that we originally banded in 2023, such as Carolina chickadee and a northern rough-winged swallow,” Liddell said. Those recaptures suggest that Masonville Cove serves as a reliable waypoint along the Atlantic Flyway, where birds come back season after season to rest, feed, or breed.

Anyone who has spent time at an indoor swimming pool knows that distinctive smell — but it turns out that odor isn’t actually from chlorine itself. It comes from chloramines, which are chemical compounds that form when chlorine binds with body waste in the water.

Now, a high school swimmer from Minneapolis, Minnesota has developed a portable device designed to measure chloramine levels. The student’s invention could offer a practical new way to monitor the chemical environment inside indoor pool facilities.

Federal agriculture and plant health officials have given the green light to release a natural predator insect as a way to combat several invasive knotweed species spreading across the lower 48 states.

The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has completed a final supplemental environmental assessment, along with a finding of no significant impact, related to a 2020 environmental assessment. The review covers the planned field release of the knotweed psyllid Aphalara itadori, an insect originating from Murakami, Japan, that belongs to the Hemiptera order and Psyllidae family.

The targeted plants — Japanese knotweed, giant knotweed, and Bohemian knotweed, known scientifically as Fallopia japonica, F. sachalinensis, and F. x bohemica — are classified as significant invasive weeds within the United States.

This approach is known as classical biological control, which involves introducing a natural enemy of an invasive species from its native region to help manage its spread in a new environment.

Because officials concluded there would be no significant environmental impact, they determined that a more extensive environmental impact statement does not need to be prepared.

Nobel Prize-winning researcher John Jumper announced Friday that he is walking away from Google DeepMind after nearly a decade to take a position at AI startup Anthropic.

Jumper, who shared the Nobel Prize with Google’s Demis Hassabis in 2024, built his reputation as a co-creator of AlphaFold — an artificial intelligence system that has mapped out more than 200 million protein structures, shaving years off the timeline for biological and medical discoveries.

“After nearly nine years, I have decided to leave Google DeepMind and join Anthropic,” Jumper wrote in a post on X.

His departure is the latest sign of an escalating battle for elite AI researchers among major technology companies. Giants like Meta and Alphabet, as well as AI startups including Anthropic and OpenAI, are all competing aggressively to attract the brightest minds in the field as they push to develop next-generation AI systems.

Jumper’s exit follows closely on the heels of another notable Google departure. Just days earlier, Noam Shazeer — a vice president of engineering at Google and co-lead of its Gemini AI models — announced he would be leaving to join OpenAI, which is preparing for an initial public offering.

Hassabis responded to Jumper’s announcement on X, saying: “What we achieved with AlphaFold changed the world, and showed the field what was possible with AI for science and medicine, lighting the way for how AI can benefit humanity.”

According to his LinkedIn profile, Jumper holds the title of VP, Engineering Fellow, at Google DeepMind. He is heading to Anthropic at a particularly turbulent moment for the startup, which is currently involved in a significant legal and regulatory dispute with the U.S. government.

Anthropic has a science-focused event scheduled for June 30. The company did not respond to a request for comment about what role Jumper will take on.

In his farewell post, Jumper called Google DeepMind a “special place” and expressed ongoing interest in the work the organization will continue to do.

A Google DeepMind spokesperson offered this response by email: “We are grateful for John’s significant contributions to Google DeepMind’s work in advancing science and AI. We wish him well in his next chapter.”

Sunday is a big day for the sun — it’s the longest day of the year across the Northern Hemisphere.

This Sunday marks the summer solstice, the official beginning of astronomical summer for those of us north of the equator. On the other side of the world, it’s the opposite: the Southern Hemisphere will experience its shortest day of the year, and winter will begin there.

The word “solstice” traces back to Latin roots — “sol,” meaning sun, and “stitium,” which translates roughly to “pause” or “stop.” The summer solstice represents the peak of the sun’s climb higher across the sky throughout the year, when it travels its longest and highest path from horizon to horizon. For those who love the long days, here’s the catch: starting after Sunday, the sun will begin retreating, and each day will grow slightly shorter until late December.

Cultures around the world have recognized the solstice for thousands of years. Sweden holds its traditional midsummer eve celebrations around this time, and the ancient monument Stonehenge was deliberately constructed to line up with the sun’s position at both the summer and winter solstices.

To understand why the solstice happens, it helps to know a little about how Earth moves. As our planet orbits the sun, it does so on a tilt, which causes sunlight and warmth to be distributed unevenly between the northern and southern halves of the globe for most of the year.

The solstices occur at the two moments when Earth’s tilt is at its most extreme — either leaning toward the sun or away from it. During these times, the two hemispheres receive very different amounts of daylight, making days and nights as unequal as they get all year.

At the Northern Hemisphere’s summer solstice, Earth’s upper half is angled toward the sun, producing the year’s longest stretch of daylight and shortest night. The summer solstice typically falls somewhere between June 20 and 22. This year, it lands on June 21.

The flip side occurs at the Northern Hemisphere’s winter solstice, when Earth’s upper half tilts farthest away from the sun. That produces the shortest day and longest night of the year, and it falls between December 20 and 23.

In between the solstices are the equinoxes, when Earth’s tilt is neither toward nor away from the sun. During an equinox, both hemispheres receive roughly equal amounts of sunlight, and the sun rises almost exactly due east while setting almost exactly due west.

The word “equinox” comes from Latin words meaning “equal” and “night” — because on that day, daylight and darkness last nearly the same amount of time, though the exact split can vary by a few minutes depending on your location.

The Northern Hemisphere’s fall, or autumnal, equinox can occur anywhere from September 21 to 24, depending on the year. The spring, or vernal, equinox falls between March 19 and 21. The precise moment of an equinox is when the sun is directly overhead at the equator.

It’s also worth noting that there are two different ways people define the seasons. Astronomical seasons are based on Earth’s movement around the sun — which is what the solstices and equinoxes mark. Meteorological seasons, on the other hand, are based on temperature patterns. Meteorologists divide the year into four three-month periods: spring begins March 1, summer on June 1, fall on September 1, and winter on December 1.

Ohio Social Media Law for Minors Remains Blocked

A federal judge in Ohio has extended a legal block preventing the state from enforcing a law that would require children under 16 to obtain parental permission before using social media apps. U.S. District Court Judge Algenon Marbley issued the preliminary injunction Monday as part of an ongoing lawsuit brought by NetChoice, a trade organization that represents major tech platforms including TikTok, Snapchat, and Meta. NetChoice argues the law violates free speech protections and is too broad and unclear. Ohio officials maintain the law is necessary to shield young people from the dangers of social media.

Kansas City Faces Pushback Over Facial Recognition on Public Buses

Kansas City, Missouri, is moving ahead with plans to install facial recognition cameras on its public bus system, though the rollout has hit delays due to technical problems, funding setbacks, and privacy concerns. City officials had hoped the cameras would be operational in time for World Cup matches that began being hosted there this week. The state withdrew its financial support, but the project is continuing with federal and local funding. SafeSpace Global, the company behind the technology, says it will improve passenger safety. Critics, however, are raising alarms about privacy rights and the potential for misuse. Extra law enforcement officers have been deployed during the World Cup to maintain security in the meantime.

Federal Regulators Push Grid Operators to Accommodate AI Data Centers

Federal energy regulators have directed regional electric grid operators to speed up the process of connecting large power consumers to the country’s aging and overburdened transmission network. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says the move is necessary to keep pace with the rapidly growing electricity demands of artificial intelligence data centers. The commission noted that states will retain control over retail electric rates and related conditions. The order comes as public frustration mounts over data centers’ enormous consumption of energy and water, as well as concerns about noise, air pollution, and the loss of open land and farmland.

World Cup Fans Frustrated by Ticket Failures Through Resale Sites

While excitement has been high on the soccer field at the World Cup, many fans have taken to social media to express anger over tickets that never showed up, orders canceled without warning, and lengthy attempts to resolve issues between FIFA’s ticketing system and third-party resale platforms. A large portion of complaints have been directed at industry leader StubHub, though buyers have also reported problems with competitors SeatGeek and Vivid Seats. Experts and fans say some issues stem from technical glitches, while others may involve sellers who never actually had tickets to sell. FIFA has stated that purchases made through its official website are guaranteed.

Sanders Proposes Public Ownership Stake in Major AI Companies

Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced a proposal that would give American citizens a direct ownership interest in the nation’s largest artificial intelligence companies. The legislation, first shared with The Associated Press, calls for a one-time 50% tax on the stock of top AI firms, with those shares placed into a sovereign wealth fund managed by an independent commission. Sanders estimates the fund could reach approximately $7 trillion in value and generate annual payments to the American public. While the concept of public AI ownership has received backing from President Donald Trump and some AI industry leaders, Sanders’ version would go further by giving the public actual decision-making authority within those companies.

AI Industry Money Floods New York Congressional Race

A New York Democratic state assemblyman named Alex Bores is running for a seat in Congress, and the race has turned into a multimillion-dollar battleground over artificial intelligence policy. A political group funded by investors in OpenAI has spent more than $7 million on advertisements opposing Bores, targeting his push for AI regulation. On the other side, a group backed by Anthropic has poured more than $10 million into supporting his campaign. The central issue is Bores’ RAISE Act, a proposed AI safety law. The Manhattan-based district leans liberal, making the heavy involvement of the tech industry all the more notable.

Nvidia CEO Calls for New Social Norms in the Age of AI

The head of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, whose company’s work has been central to the rise of artificial intelligence, says society must adapt to a world shaped by AI. Speaking in an interview with The Associated Press in Sherman, Texas, Huang expressed optimism about AI’s potential to accelerate economic growth and scientific discovery, while also acknowledging criticism about job losses and broader risks to humanity. “We need to create new social norms,” Huang said. “I would advocate that everybody use AI. Just go engage it.”

Nvidia Bets AI Will Create Manufacturing Jobs in Texas

Nvidia is positioning artificial intelligence as a driver of American manufacturing growth, announcing a major AI infrastructure expansion as part of a $2 billion partnership with Coherent. The effort centers on a Texas factory that produces materials used in lasers that improve chip performance. CEO Jensen Huang argues that AI will generate jobs rather than eliminate them. Nvidia is shifting its focus from chip development alone to building complete AI systems, with production based in the United States. The Texas factory is projected to create 1,000 jobs, and the AI sector has garnered support from both political parties as a priority for economic growth and national security.

Tech Entrepreneur Killed in Texas Plane Crash

A well-known technology entrepreneur named Joshua Baer died this week when a small business jet crashed on a highway in Laredo, Texas. Baer was the founder of an Austin-based venture capital firm that backed a wide range of tech startups, from robotics to autonomous ships, and was widely credited with helping fuel Austin’s technology scene. His LinkedIn profile featured him wearing a black T-shirt with the message, “I help people quit jobs.” The aircraft went down after the pilots reported mechanical trouble and requested an emergency landing at a nearby airport.

French President Calls for Global AI Cooperation

French President Emmanuel Macron is urging the United States to share access to advanced artificial intelligence technology rather than limiting it to American interests, and is calling on democratic nations to work together on AI regulation. Speaking at a high-level gathering in France, Macron criticized U.S. restrictions on foreign access to cutting-edge AI systems. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, speaking at the G7 summit, also called for an international body to set AI safety standards. A recent White House directive involving Anthropic’s AI models has deepened European concerns about U.S. dominance in the tech sector. Macron warned that restricting access could ultimately hurt American companies and pledged to increase investment in France’s own AI industry.

TOULOUSE, France — Qantas Airways is placing a major wager on science to make the world’s longest commercial flights more endurable, revealing detailed plans for nonstop Sydney-to-London service set to begin next October. The Australian airline’s ambitious initiative — dubbed “Project Sunrise” — includes a specially designed wellness area, strategic meal scheduling, extra legroom options, and custom animated cabin lighting.

The carrier also has plans to eventually offer nonstop flights between Sydney and New York, and this week provided in-depth briefings on the science of operating roughly 20-hour journeys as it works to persuade travelers to pay more for skipping a layover.

“It’s a major biological challenge crossing all these time zones — seven to nine for London and 14 to 16 for New York,” said Peter Cistulli, a professor of sleep medicine at the University of Sydney who contributed to the scientific research behind Project Sunrise.

Frequent Australian long-haul travelers surveyed by Reuters said their top concerns when considering these ultra-long flights were seat comfort, the freedom to move around the cabin, and ticket prices.

Qantas has gone further than those basics, examining every aspect of the passenger experience on the specially modified Airbus A350-1000ULR aircraft since the project began nearly ten years ago. That research has covered everything from nutrition and ergonomics to movement patterns — and most critically, lighting, which plays a key role in regulating the human body clock.

By carefully scheduling meals — including avoiding food immediately after takeoff — and using lighting to establish a “protective sleep window,” passengers in tests showed sharper alertness compared to those on a conventional flight service, Cistulli noted.

Cabin designer David Caon said he was tasked with approaching the interior as both a health and scientific challenge, not just a visual one.

“When you have a passenger for essentially a whole day, it really does drive a whole set of new decisions,” he said.

Caon explored unconventional concepts during the design process, including exercise bikes and yoga mats. Neither made the final version, but a dedicated wellness zone did — featuring soft, diffused, shimmering light throughout the space.

“I wanted to recreate the sense of lying by the swimming pool,” Caon told reporters.

Throughout the rest of the cabin, custom mood lighting will mimic sunrises and sunsets, gradually shifting from the front of the plane to the back. Programming the 14 distinct lighting “scenarios,” each inspired by Australian landscapes, took several weeks to complete.

All of these features are designed to reduce the strain of flights that could stretch as long as 22 hours on these specially outfitted aircraft.

Beyond passenger comfort, the spacious cabin design also serves a financial purpose — transforming Australia’s geographic isolation into a travel experience competitors cannot easily replicate, with the goal of generating 20% more revenue per flight.

Qantas CEO Vanessa Hudson said the anticipated price premium over one-stop flights is based on results already seen on routes between Perth and Europe. Most industry analysts say the performance of the airline’s 17-hour Perth-to-London service is a promising sign for the Project Sunrise business model.

The plane has been configured with a heavy emphasis on premium seating, as the airline must maximize profit from just 238 passengers due to weight limitations. In some weather conditions, the airline may need to leave certain seats empty to conserve fuel.

A senior airline industry executive noted that other operational risks would include the high cost of emergency diversions given the extreme length of the routes.

Sam Davies, who works in drinks marketing and travels between his home in Paris and Sydney using the existing Perth route, said he would consider the nonstop option.

“There is something wonderful about waking up in Australia and not having to get off anywhere and go through security and kill three hours, so I am all up for it,” he said.

However, Davies added that seat comfort would ultimately be the deciding factor. “I am six-foot-four (193 cm) so the economy seat is too small… I would have to ask for some more details on the seats,” he said.

Qantas confirmed that standard economy seat pitch — the distance between rows — would be 33 inches (84 cm), though some rows would be slightly tighter at 32 inches, with that information disclosed at the time of booking. A portion of the cabin will be marketed as “Economy Plus,” offering 34 inches of legroom. At the front of the plane, Qantas is joining other carriers in offering enclosed first-class suites with a fixed bed.

Melbourne-based business executive Ian Morden said ultra-long flights don’t discourage him, since he uses the time to work and think. Still, he questioned whether the four hours saved by avoiding a stopover would justify the ticket prices the airline’s financial model requires.

“A slight premium would be justifiable but… I probably wouldn’t choose it for a 20% premium on an already much more expensive business-class flight,” he said.

London-based Nathalie Curtis, who travels frequently for her work in the international cultural sector, said she would book the flight if it delivered on the airline’s promises — though she raised concerns about how quickly cabin conditions can deteriorate on very long flights.

“If it allows you to move around, reduce jet lag with lighting adjustment and is hygienic and saves… four hours then I would go for it and pay a 20% premium,” she said.

Mark Levine, an Australian strategic adviser based in New York, said nonstop flights from Sydney would eliminate the logistical headaches that come with living across multiple continents.

“The distance doesn’t change but the journey feels a little smaller,” he said.

WASHINGTON — Federal energy regulators voted Thursday to make it easier for large power consumers, including artificial intelligence data centers, to gain faster access to the nation’s electric transmission network as demand for electricity continues to surge.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright had pushed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to act, arguing the move would help the United States stay ahead of China in the rapidly expanding AI industry. Technology companies and data center developers have welcomed the prospect of quicker connections to the power grid.

However, the plan drew pushback from utilities, state governments, and regional grid operators, who expressed concern that the Republican administration’s approach could strip away their authority to oversee the connection process. Clean energy supporters also raised alarms, arguing the agency should be strengthening — not weakening — state-level efforts to promote renewable energy sources.

The commission’s decision arrives as public frustration mounts over data centers, with many communities worried about climbing electricity bills, heavy water usage, pollution, and the strain these massive facilities place on local infrastructure and power supplies.

FERC members voted unanimously to ensure that AI data centers and other large power consumers are “able to connect to the transmission system in a timely and orderly manner.”

Laura Swett, a President Donald Trump appointee who chairs the commission, described the vote as a historic move to modernize the country’s electricity market while also shielding everyday ratepayers from bearing the costs of connecting major power users to the grid.

“I know that Americans across the country are concerned about affordability, and so are we,” Swett said, speaking on behalf of the five-member commission.

Swett also acknowledged growing public anxiety over large power loads: “Many Americans are increasingly concerned about the interconnection of large (power) loads, and data centers will increase their bills in that stress. As chairman, I am taking extremely seriously the mission that Congress has entrusted us to ensure that rates are reasonable and that Americans pay their fair share or less.”

Under the commission’s order, data centers would be required to cover the full cost of any grid upgrades necessary for their connection. Even so, the order does little to address the tightening energy supplies that are already pushing electricity bills higher in some regions and triggering warnings about potential blackouts, as data center construction outpaces the development of new power plants to support them.

The vote comes eight months after Wright asked the independent agency to take a stronger role in ensuring that the massive computing facilities needed to power AI are connected quickly to high-voltage transmission lines.

Tech giants are scrambling to secure enough power for their data centers and report that, in some locations, connecting to the electric grid could take years.

Beyond power shortages, the tech industry is facing growing resistance from local communities. Residents near proposed data centers have raised concerns about rising electricity costs, pollution, and water use, with protests erupting over the loss of open land, farmland, and rural character in affected areas.

By one estimate, more than 4,000 data centers are currently operating across the United States, with an additional 3,000 either planned or under construction. Some of these facilities consume more electricity than a small city, and their size has grown dramatically to meet the demands of AI technology.

President Trump has sought to downplay public concerns about AI, viewing the technology as essential for attracting foreign investment and maintaining the country’s economic and military strength. This month, Trump signed an executive order establishing a framework allowing the federal government to evaluate national security risks posed by the most advanced AI systems for up to a month before they are released to the public.

In December, FERC had already taken an earlier step to help data center operators access electricity more quickly, voting to allow tech companies to essentially connect a data center directly to a power plant.

Companies including xAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, OpenAI, and Amazon have signed Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge, committing to build or purchase new power generation sources for their data centers and cover the costs of necessary infrastructure upgrades.

The companies also pledged to make backup power available during emergencies to help prevent blackouts and to hire locally during their data center construction efforts.

According to data from the Electric Power Research Institute, data centers currently account for roughly 5% of U.S. electricity demand — a figure that could triple by 2035. In Virginia alone, data centers represent more than 25% of total electricity demand and could climb above 40% by 2030.

Tech companies have continued to increase spending on data centers, but signs suggest construction is struggling to keep pace. A J.P. Morgan report released last month found that, based on satellite imagery, more than 60% of data center capacity scheduled for completion in 2027 has not yet broken ground, with another 7% facing delays. The report cited permitting issues and shortages of gas turbines, transformers, and skilled workers as the primary causes.

Space companies are in preliminary discussions with insurance providers about coverage for data centers operating in Earth’s orbit — a sign that an experimental industry backed by some of the biggest names in tech is beginning to take shape.

The idea of placing data centers in space — partly to get around power limitations on Earth — has attracted increasing attention after Elon Musk described the concept as the future of AI development ahead of SpaceX’s record-setting public listing this month. Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, along with several startups including Orbital, Starcloud, Lonestar Data Holdings, and Cowboy Space, have all indicated plans to launch space-based data centers.

Getting insurance coverage is considered a key hurdle for these companies. Without it, securing the debt financing necessary to grow such ventures would be extremely difficult.

Reuters spoke with four brokers and underwriters and three space companies, all of whom confirmed that conversations about orbital data center insurance have taken place — though those discussions are still in early stages.

Insurance broker Marsh confirmed that multiple companies have reached out to insurers to learn what coverage for orbital data centers might look like, though the firm declined to name those companies.

“We’re already starting to see companies that are focused on data centers and companies that are focused on digital infrastructure looking to the insurance community for support,” said Patton Kline, U.S. aviation and space practice leader at Marsh.

Lonestar said it recently hosted a briefing at Marsh’s offices for insurance marketplace Lloyd’s of London, with roughly 25 insurers in attendance.

SpaceX and Blue Origin did not respond when contacted for comment.

While insurers already have experience covering launch failures, satellite problems, orbital debris, and space weather — a global market that brings in about $500 million in annual premiums, according to industry executives and insurance firm Axa XL — orbital AI infrastructure is an entirely different matter.

“The conversations in the market are focused on whether the risk can be modeled, rather than what the premium should be,” said Kasey Roh, U.S. head of Upstage AI, a company that builds AI tools for insurers.

One major challenge involves placing a value on fast-evolving AI chips that could be exposed to extreme conditions in space, according to Orbital CEO Euwyn Poon.

David Wade, a space underwriter at Atrium, noted that most of the companies involved are still in early venture-capital-funded stages, and a significant insurance market won’t emerge until they grow further.

“Until we get past that early round of financing and start seeing some of these companies expand by raising debt, I think the insurance needs are very limited at the moment,” Wade said.

Cities may not be living things, but they behave a lot like them — growing, changing, and sometimes declining in ways that mirror biological processes. Now, a team of researchers has used satellite imagery to monitor the vital signs of six major cities across the globe, identifying what they call a distinctive “urban pulse” unique to each one.

The six cities studied were Dubai, Lagos, Mexico City, Mumbai, Seattle, and Shenzhen. Scientists developed a new approach to document changes happening in each city in near real-time, offering a far more detailed picture than traditional methods have allowed.

For years, experts have tracked urban growth using data collected infrequently — things like annual census figures, yearly economic reports, or decade-long maps showing how a city’s boundaries have shifted. But the researchers behind this new study argue that approach leaves out crucial details about how cities actually develop.

“We got the inspiration from the human pulse, which tells us different information about our health than weight or height,” said study lead author Zhe Zhu, a professor of remote sensing and director of the Global Environmental Remote Sensing Laboratory at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Natural Resources and the Environment.

Zhu explained that the urban pulse concept goes beyond simply recording end results. “The urban pulse measures the high-frequency process of development, and therefore we can spot early warning signs of economic stress or stagnation before they become full-blown crises,” he said. “We compare traditional metrics to looking at a heart attack — the outcome — whereas the ‘urban pulse’ is like monitoring the daily lifestyle and vital signs leading up to that heart attack — the process.”

The study’s central finding, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is that urban growth is far from smooth or predictable. Study senior author Karen Seto, a professor of geography and urbanization science at Yale University, described what the data revealed.

“Urbanization is actually ‘spiky,’ meaning that it happens in abrupt, intense bursts, or ‘cyclical,’ moving through boom-and-rest phases that don’t match annual seasons, or ‘asynchronous,’ as different neighborhoods in the exact same city develop at completely different, uncoordinated times,” Seto said. “This is important because, for decades, researchers have characterized cities through static maps.”

To gather their data, the team relied on dense, high-frequency satellite imagery from NASA’s Landsat program and the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellites. They focused on physical changes such as new construction, demolition, major infrastructure upgrades, and development spreading into green spaces.

“We selected cities with a wide range of political-economic conditions including the state-led development of Shenzhen, the market-driven growth of Seattle, the informal expansion of Lagos and the megaprojects of Dubai,” Zhu said.

Each city displayed its own distinct pattern. Shenzhen — once a small fishing village near Hong Kong that has grown into a massive metropolis — showed the highest levels of growth intensity, with large, clustered spikes reflecting rapid, government-directed development. Dubai also recorded enormous growth, but its pulse was more speculative in nature, driven by isolated, high-cost coastal megaprojects that surged and then stalled. Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, had a highly fragmented pulse, with long quiet stretches broken up by short, intense bursts of activity. Seattle’s pattern reflected a market-driven cycle of redevelopment and increasing density.

Mumbai, India’s financial and commercial hub, and Mexico City, the most populous city in North America, stood out for their resilience — both showed far less disruption during global shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the other cities studied.

“Just as a human pulse reacts to illness, our data captured the exact moment COVID-19 triggered a synchronized ‘cardiac arrest’ in development worldwide. But the recovery was entirely unequal,” Zhu said.

He added: “Shenzhen saw a sharp, coordinated dip followed by a rapid rebound. Lagos experienced a muted pulse that transitioned into smaller, incremental changes. Meanwhile, cities like Mumbai and Mexico City showed much less of an impact. It showed us that global shocks don’t manifest the exact same way in every city’s ‘body.’”

The researchers believe their method has real-world applications for those managing urban areas. “For urban planners and policymakers, it functions as a diagnostic tool. Instead of reacting to a crisis after the fact, they can see exactly when and where a neighborhood’s ‘pulse’ is slowing down and intervene early to prevent infrastructure collapse or economic decay. It also prevents cities from overheating their labor and material markets,” Seto said.

If you’re hunting for a World Cup ticket, be careful — scammers are out in full force targeting fans eager to catch a match in person.

Security experts and law enforcement agencies are sounding the alarm about criminals using a variety of tricks to take advantage of soccer fans desperate to attend games at the tournament, which got underway June 11. The event runs through July 19, and the biggest matches are still ahead.

With FIFA setting record-high ticket prices and some games already sold out, the demand is creating a perfect storm for fraud.

Here’s what fans need to watch out for:

If you spot a Facebook post advertising last-minute seats to a hot game at what seems like a great price, slow down before pulling out your wallet. Ask yourself whether the deal seems too good to be true.

Just like other types of fraud, World Cup scammers exploit high demand to pressure buyers into paying for tickets that don’t exist. Britain’s Home Office flagged this tactic last month as part of an ongoing fraud awareness effort, warning fans to watch for classic pressure lines like “lots of interest” or “I need to sell right now.”

“Scammers often use urgency to push you into making hasty decisions,” the agency cautioned.

Social media platforms have become breeding grounds for ticket fraud.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission put out a consumer alert back in March warning that scammers use social media posts to steer people toward fraudulent websites, where they either advertise phony tickets or sell the same seat to multiple buyers.

The British government also warned that criminals may advertise a spare ticket on social media, then shift the conversation to an encrypted messaging app like WhatsApp, pressure the buyer to wire money to a bank account, and then block the victim and vanish.

Two weeks before the tournament began, Meta Platforms announced that Facebook users searching for World Cup tickets would start seeing pop-up alerts reminding them to purchase only from verified sellers and explaining how to flag suspicious listings.

Cybersecurity experts say criminals are now using artificial intelligence to craft convincing messages, slick-looking fake storefronts, and fraudulent endorsements.

“My advice: assume any World Cup deal that reached you through a social media ad or search result is suspect until proven otherwise,” said Chris Olson, CEO of digital safety company The Media Trust.

Olson said the World Cup is driving a spike in “phishing attacks and cloaking schemes,” adding that “AI-powered phishing campaigns are becoming more sophisticated, more targeted, and more difficult to detect. We’ve seen it all, from data harvesting to fake ticket sales.”

For legitimate tickets, fans should start at the official FIFA website, which handles both direct sales and authorized resale. Established third-party resale platforms like StubHub and SeatGeek are also options, though FIFA cautions that purchasing outside official channels increases the risk of receiving counterfeit or invalid tickets — or paying inflated prices.

Another threat comes from websites designed to look like the official FIFA site. The FBI issued a public service announcement warning that scammers are building copycat FIFA websites to steal personal information or peddle fake tickets and hospitality packages.

The agency identified more than three dozen fraudulent sites with web addresses that can easily be mistaken for the real thing, including examples like fifa-online.com and fifa-ticket.live. Most of those sites have gone dark, and some have been flagged as malware, but the FBI cautioned that new ones will keep popping up.

The FBI recommends typing fifa.com directly into your browser’s address bar rather than using a search engine. If you do use Google, steer clear of sponsored results at the top of the page — the agency warned those could be “paid imitators” trying to divert traffic to scam sites.

Fans who can’t make it to a game in person and plan to stream matches online face their own set of risks.

Not all games will air on free channels, and experts warn that scammers are setting up shady streaming sites to cash in on that demand. According to a report by Assaf Morag, a researcher at cybersecurity firm Flare, cybercriminals typically build copycat streaming sites and promote them through platforms like Telegram, Facebook, Discord, and Reddit.

Drawing on patterns from past major sporting events, illegal streams tend to appear right before a match kicks off. Once viewers click in, criminals can bombard them with scam ads, fake software update prompts, and data harvesting tools — or earn commissions by redirecting them to gambling or adult content sites.

“Nearly 40% of users who access illegal streams experience direct financial losses due to scams, fraud, or compromised payment information,” Morag said. “The trap is incredibly easy to fall into. You click a ‘Play’ button, and the site immediately forces your browser through multiple hidden layers of tracking, pop-ups, and advertising infrastructure explicitly designed to hide malicious software — all while the match never actually loads.”

A high-ranking Google executive who helps lead the company’s flagship artificial intelligence program is heading to a competing firm.

Noam Shazeer, a vice president of engineering at Google and one of the co-leads of its Gemini AI models, announced on Wednesday that he will be departing the tech giant to take a position at OpenAI.

SEOUL — South Korean semiconductor company SK Hynix announced Thursday that it has begun delivering samples of its newest high-bandwidth memory chips to key customers, a move aimed at solidifying its foothold in the rapidly expanding artificial intelligence chip market.

The company’s latest product, a 12-layer chip called the HBM4E, is capable of reaching speeds up to 16 gigabits per second per pin. SK Hynix says the chip also delivers more than 20% greater power efficiency compared to earlier generations.

High-bandwidth memory chips play a critical role in AI computing, serving as essential components inside the processors used to train AI systems. These chips help manage the enormous volumes of data that modern AI applications require to function.

SK Hynix currently holds the position of primary HBM supplier to Nvidia, one of the world’s leading makers of AI processors. The South Korean firm faces ongoing competition in this space from rivals Samsung and Micron.

A team of archaeologists has revealed the discovery of a structure near Stonehenge in southern England that may have functioned as a kind of “prototype” for the world-famous prehistoric monument, which is estimated to be around 5,000 years old.

Researchers from the British firm Wessex Archaeology announced Thursday that the ancient structure would have featured two wooden poles positioned 120 meters — about 394 feet — apart. Crucially, the alignment of those poles would have pointed directly toward the rising sun on the summer solstice and the setting sun on the winter solstice, mirroring the same solar alignment that makes Stonehenge so remarkable.

Scientists believe this newly found structure predates Stonehenge by approximately 500 years, making it an even older example of ancient people tracking the movements of the sun.

The excavation was led by archaeologist Phil Harding, a 76-year-old who became widely recognized in the United Kingdom through his long-running work on the Channel 4 television series “Time Team.” Harding described the dig site as likely a gathering place for significant religious ceremonies. In addition to the structural evidence, the team also recovered pottery, animal bones, and a rare disc-shaped knife.

Harding reflected on the significance of the find, saying, “Opportunities like this probably only come once in a career, in a lifetime. I’m probably towards the end of my career now, but thank God I’m still in archaeology long enough to be part of this discovery, because it’s certainly the highlight of my career.”

The announcement was timed to coincide with the upcoming summer solstice, which falls this Sunday — the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Each year, thousands of people make their way to Stonehenge to mark the occasion.

Stonehenge itself stands as one of Britain’s most recognized cultural landmarks and a major tourist destination. The World Heritage Site sits on the flat expanse of Salisbury Plain and was constructed in stages beginning about 5,000 years ago. The distinctive stone circle was erected during the late Neolithic period, around 2,500 B.C.

Scholars have long debated the purpose of Stonehenge. The most widely accepted theory holds that it served as a sun-aligned temple. However, English Heritage notes that other proposed explanations include it being a coronation site for Danish kings, a druid temple, a healing center, or even an ancient astronomical tool used to predict eclipses and solar events.

The dig that led to this discovery took place at Bulford, roughly 3.1 miles from Stonehenge’s stone circle. The excavation was conducted as part of archaeological work tied to the British defense ministry’s efforts to house troops who had been relocated from Germany, where the military maintained a large presence for many years. The land surrounding Stonehenge includes one of the largest military training areas in the United Kingdom, and Bulford is home to a military barracks.

The original fieldwork was carried out between 2015 and 2017, but the results required several more years of analysis and testing before they could be formally released.

As thousands prepare to gather at Stonehenge on Sunday — many dressed as druids and pagans — Harding offered a striking reflection on the connection between past and present: “What few will realize is that 5,000 years ago on a nearby hillside overlooking modern day Bulford, people were doing the exact same thing — revering and celebrating the sunrise on Midsummer’s Day.”

Cybersecurity firm Fortinet announced Wednesday that it has become aware of an active campaign in which hackers are attempting to steal login credentials from its firewall and virtual private network (VPN) devices.

According to a company statement, the attackers are pulling information from “previous incidents” and using a technique known as “bruteforcing” — a method where hackers repeatedly try different password combinations in an attempt to break into a targeted network or device.

Fortinet was clear that the malicious activity is “not related to any recent incident or advisory,” suggesting it is not tied to any newly discovered vulnerability or recently disclosed security event.

NEW YORK (AP) — A new scientific discovery has pushed back the known history of the plague by roughly 200 years, with researchers now tracing the disease’s earliest outbreaks to approximately 5,500 years ago.

The plague has afflicted human populations for millennia, most famously devastating Europe’s population during the 14th century in what became known as the Black Death. While the disease is rare today, it still exists and can be treated with antibiotics.

“To understand our own history, we believe that understanding the history of plague is extremely important,” said study co-author Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist with the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

Willerslev and a team of researchers examined remains from four burial sites near Lake Baikal in Siberia, searching for traces of the bacteria responsible for the plague. Their efforts turned up plague DNA in the teeth of 18 ancient hunter-gatherers.

Carbon dating of the bones revealed that the plague caused two separate outbreaks, with the earliest cases appearing around 5,500 years ago.

Researchers determined that the prehistoric version of the plague developed gradually and struck several small family groups. It is believed to have originated in marmots — large rodents native to the region — and spread to humans who consumed raw organs or handled infected animal hides while butchering them. The disease also passed between people through respiratory droplets from coughing and sneezing, according to the study’s authors.

A significant portion of those who perished were young children between the ages of 8 and 11. The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, noted that three young girls were buried together, two of whom were likely cousins. An aunt and nephew were also found in the same grave, while her niece was buried separately in another shared plot.

“People were around to bury the dead who knew who these people were when they were alive. And that’s a really human element to all of the scientific work,” said study co-author Ruairidh Macleod, who studies ancient DNA at the University of Oxford.

Researchers suggested that children may have faced greater danger because their immune systems were not fully developed.

The fact that multiple victims were found together indicates the prehistoric plague could cause both isolated cases and larger outbreaks, according to geneticist Aida Andrades Valtueña with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who was not involved in the study.

The research also showed that this early form of the plague existed long before the bubonic plague strain that caused the Black Death in medieval Europe. Yet evidence suggests these earlier outbreaks were equally lethal, wiping out not just densely populated urban centers but also small, mobile hunter-gatherer communities.

Understanding this history can help scientists “understand the steps that the bacterium took to become the deadly pathogen we know today, and that can provide clues on how pathogens may emerge in the future,” Andrades Valtueña said in an email.

A coalition of major technology companies dedicated to advancing carbon removal technology announced Wednesday it will pour an additional $915 million into the sector, while also welcoming two new members to its ranks.

The group, known as Frontier and launched in 2022 by companies including Stripe and Google, works to accelerate the growth of carbon removal technologies by committing to purchase credits before projects are fully operational. This advance purchasing approach reduces financial risk for developers and helps the projects scale up more rapidly.

With the new funding commitment, Frontier’s total pledges now stand at $1.8 billion. Anthropic and Salesforce were announced as the newest participants in the coalition.

The freshly committed funds will be directed toward several emerging approaches to removing carbon from the atmosphere, including ocean alkalinity enhancement, biomass-based removal, enhanced rock weathering, and direct air capture.

Frontier noted that these technologies have the potential to collectively reach gigaton-scale removal capacity, though each one comes with its own set of cost and technological challenges.

Going forward, the coalition said it plans to make roughly 10 to 15 targeted investments through long-term offtake contracts spanning eight to ten years, with some agreements extending as far out as 2040. The organization did not provide a breakdown of how much each individual company contributed to the new funding total.

Scientists have emphasized that carbon removal initiatives are a critical tool for counterbalancing emissions from sectors of the economy that continue to rely on fossil fuels.

BOSTON (AP) — For generations, Boston families have gathered on the gently sloping green lawns surrounding the Bunker Hill Monument to play and enjoy picnics — all while remnants of one of the American Revolution’s most pivotal battles lay quietly buried just beneath the surface.

Now, guided by a map that is centuries old, a team of archaeologists has been carefully excavating the park that marks the spot where American patriots hurriedly built an earthen fortification in an effort to slow the advance of British forces during what history remembers as the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Using ground-penetrating radar, researchers pinpointed possible locations of the fort within Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood. Shortly after breaking ground on the first trench, the team — led by Joe Bagley, the city of Boston’s official archaeologist — discovered clear evidence of a ditch that had been dug in the hours leading up to the battle on June 17, 1775, one of the earliest engagements of the American Revolution.

“The part that’s really crazy to me is that we get to stand in the same ditch,” Bagley said, speaking from one of two active dig sites where workers remove soil roughly four inches at a time, place it into buckets, and sift it through screens. Every item uncovered is bagged and catalogued.

The excavation has already produced musket balls and pieces of a musket from the battle itself. Researchers also recovered objects believed to have been left by British soldiers who held the area following the battle, among them tea cups, tobacco pipes, sleeve buttons, and a wig curler. Although nearly 150 combatants lost their lives at the site, no human remains have been found — though a forensic archaeologist is present to examine any bones that may surface.

“Everything about the ditch is from 1775. You’ve got musket balls, gun flints. It’s what you would expect to see,” Bagley said. “It’s pretty powerful because these things are being dropped in the middle of the battle.”

While many people associate the beginning of the American Revolution with the battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, a number of historians consider Bunker Hill and June 17 to represent the war’s first truly significant military engagement.

The colonial rebels had originally planned to fortify Bunker Hill — a 110-foot-high slope in Charlestown situated across the Charles River from British-held Boston — in anticipation of a possible British assault. For reasons that remain unclear to historians, they instead took up a position on a smaller and more exposed ridge called Breed’s Hill, where the bulk of the fighting occurred.

Though the battle concluded with the rebels withdrawing, the British suffered more than 1,000 casualties in the process. Bunker Hill is frequently viewed as a moral victory for the American side, as the British failed to achieve a decisive win and the engagement helped unite the colonies in their resistance. A 221-foot white stone obelisk now stands atop Breed’s Hill as a memorial to the battle.

At the dig site, battlefield archaeologist Joel Bohy, who focuses on identifying weaponry from the American Revolution, expressed amazement at what the earth has given up. One volunteer cradled two jagged stones in her hand — a gray English gun flint and a beige French gun flint. When a musket’s trigger was pulled, the flint would strike steel, creating sparks that set off the gunpowder charge.

Eight marble-sized musket balls from both sides of the conflict were also recovered. The shape and markings on some of the balls indicated they had been fired but had not struck anyone — rounds that hit a person would have been visibly deformed.

“You can see the ramrod mark from when the soldier rammed it down. You can see the little ring on the top where it was pushed down,” Bohy said, noting that “marks on the edge of the ball” confirm it had been fired.

On the night before the battle, more than 1,000 provincial soldiers and local residents used pickaxes and shovels to dig through the darkness and construct a ditch three feet deep and more than six feet wide. The excavated soil was piled in front of the ditch to form a six-foot-high wall, or parapet, that stretched 150 feet along each of the fort’s four sides.

A map created by Henry Pelham just two months after the battle depicted a square redoubt on Breed’s Hill. Until this current dig, however, no one had physically confirmed that the shape shown on the map was accurate. Earlier excavations conducted in the 1990s had turned up battle-related items and some indications of the ditches, but nothing conclusive.

“If you come to the site, we have the monument, we have a lot of maps on display, and the landscape is beautiful. But you can’t really see the fort, the fortifications that were built,” Bagley said. “Very little of what’s here visibly is from 1775. So, this trench is the reason why all of this is here.”

In addition to locating the fort itself, the dig is giving visitors the opportunity to hold “a piece of the battle in their hand,” Bohy said. “In a way, it makes the history more dimensional when you look at these objects from the battle itself.”

A group of tourists from Colorado paused to observe the ongoing work. One of them, Greg Nockleby, who had spent a week in Boston exploring American history, described the scene as a “wonderful surprise.”

“A live dig happening right now to uncover our nation’s history is amazing,” he said. “To see that there has been people here who have died for our freedom and our nation is very immersive.”

The world’s largest eyewear manufacturer, EssilorLuxottica, has entered into a long-term partnership with chipmaking equipment company Applied Materials to develop augmented reality display technology and AI-powered glasses, the two companies announced Tuesday.

Under the agreement, the two companies will work together to expand the commercial availability of AI glasses, with research and development centered on cutting-edge optical technologies.

EssilorLuxottica is already a major player in the AI glasses space through an ongoing partnership with Meta, selling smart glasses under both the Ray-Ban and Oakley brand names. The companies took another step forward in 2025 with the launch of the Ray-Ban Meta Display — their first device to feature a built-in screen.

AI-powered glasses work by embedding a camera, microphone, and speakers directly into a standard eyeglass frame. An AI voice assistant built into the device can answer questions and describe what the wearer is looking at.

Augmented reality technology — which layers digital images over a person’s natural field of vision — presents a significantly more difficult optical engineering challenge than standard AI glasses.

Applied Materials, headquartered in California, manufactures the specialized equipment used to build the ultra-thin layers of material found at the core of the semiconductor chips required to power AR displays.

The Federal Communications Commission announced Tuesday that new models of Chinese-made toy drones will be permitted for import into the United States.

Back in December, the FCC had moved to block all new models of foreign-manufactured drones and key components from entering the country, specifically targeting products from China’s DJI and Autel, citing unacceptable threats to national security. Since then, the agency has gradually allowed some new drone models back in.

The latest decision stems from a Pentagon finding that “unsophisticated, low-risk toys” lacking the “organic capabilities and features in range, endurance, sensing, payload, connectivity, and data collection and storage” associated with conventional drones do not present national security concerns.

The FCC laid out tight criteria for what qualifies as a toy drone under this exemption. Qualifying devices must weigh no more than 150 grams — about 5.29 ounces — and can only be operated within a line-of-sight distance of 100 meters or less, which is roughly 328 feet. They also cannot have any network or connectivity features, cannot carry cameras or sensors capable of recording or collecting data, and are limited to no more than 10 minutes of flight time.

The U.S. government has been taking a number of steps to restrict Chinese technology products, and the FCC is weighing additional measures. Last month, the agency said it would allow Chinese drones and consumer routers already sold in the United States to continue receiving critical software updates at least through the end of 2028.

Separately, the FCC is reviewing whether to ban the import of Chinese equipment from a group of manufacturers, having already prohibited the import or sale of their new models back in 2022.

The commission is also considering a proposal that would bar U.S. telecommunications carriers from connecting their networks with Chinese telecom companies identified as national security risks — a move that would also prevent those Chinese firms from operating data centers on American soil.

A team of researchers says it has taken a fresh look at data from a particular kind of stellar explosion and confirmed what scientists have long believed — that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate. That conclusion is the same one that led scientists in the 1990s to identify a mysterious cosmic force known as dark energy.

The new findings directly contradict a study published earlier this year that claimed the universe’s expansion was no longer speeding up — a conclusion that would have upended our basic understanding of how the cosmos works.

“The universe is still accelerating,” said astrophysicist Brodie Popovic of the University of Southampton in England, one of the lead researchers behind the study, which was published this month in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “There’s still a lot we don’t know and are excited to learn, but we think we’re on the right track,” Popovic added.

The research team, which included two Nobel Prize recipients, used observations from two separate datasets involving what are known as Type Ia supernovas — powerful stellar explosions — to calculate enormous distances across the cosmos. These explosions occur when an object called a white dwarf, the dense leftover core of a low- to intermediate-mass star at the end of its life, is destroyed.

This category of supernova has become a key tool for astronomers because all such explosions appear to release roughly the same amount of light. That means scientists can use how bright or faint they appear from Earth to figure out how far away they are — essentially using them as cosmic measuring sticks. By tracking the brightness of these events, scientists can determine how fast the universe is expanding and how that rate has changed over time. Because light takes time to travel through space, observing distant objects is effectively a look back into the past.

The universe began with the Big Bang approximately 13.8 billion years ago and has been growing ever since. In 1998, scientists revealed that this growth is actually speeding up, attributing the acceleration to a poorly understood invisible force called dark energy. Ordinary matter — stars, planets, gas, dust, and everything familiar on Earth — makes up an estimated 5% of the universe’s total contents. Dark matter, which is detected through its gravitational pull on galaxies and stars, accounts for roughly 27%, while dark energy is estimated to comprise about 68%.

The earlier 2025 study, also published in the same journal, argued that dark energy is fading and has stopped driving the universe’s accelerating expansion.

“Type Ia supernovae are the premier tool for measuring the expansion history of the universe, and provided the first evidence in 1998 that cosmic expansion is accelerating due to dark energy,” said astrophysicist Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, a co-author of the new study and a Nobel laureate in physics in 2011 for helping discover the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Riess went on to explain the core disagreement: “Over the past decade, a group at Yonsei University has argued that supernova distances should be calibrated differently by accounting for the ages of the stars that eventually explode, and that this ‘age effect’ could substantially alter the evidence for acceleration. In our study, we found no evidence for the claimed ‘age effect’ in the largest calibrated supernova samples used by the cosmology community over the last decade.”

Astrophysicist Young-Wook Lee of Yonsei University in Seoul, one of the leaders of the earlier 2025 study, stood by his team’s work. Lee said the arguments put forward by the authors of the new study have “serious methodological flaws or lead to conclusions that are internally inconsistent by their own logic.”

The researchers behind the new study said they remain confident in both their methods and their conclusion that the universe’s expansion is indeed still accelerating.

The true nature of dark energy remains one of science’s biggest unsolved mysteries. New tools, including the recently opened Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — set for launch in August — could shed new light on the question.

“We’re hoping the new data we get from Vera Rubin and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help us narrow down what dark energy really is,” Popovic said.

A French robotics company is entering the rapidly growing AI robot market with a machine that deliberately avoids looking like a human being.

Genesis AI, a Paris-based startup backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, introduced its first general-purpose robot on Tuesday. The robot, called Eno, features a wheeled base instead of legs, a foldable tower structure, and hands designed to match the shape of a human hand.

While many leading robotics manufacturers have favored humanoid designs, Genesis AI took a different approach. The company says Eno is built not to resemble humans, but to expand on what humans can do.

Vivian Sun, Vice President of Commercial and Strategy at Genesis AI, told Reuters that the wheeled base was a deliberate choice because most industrial customers work on flat floors. She noted that legs would only be practical in situations involving stairs or similar obstacles.

“We are mimicking humans in capabilities, not in form,” Sun said. “Humans can go up and down, and so does the robot, but through this foldable design.”

Eno operates using Genesis AI’s own artificial intelligence model. The company was founded in early 2025 and has already raised $105 million — equivalent to about €90.6 million — making it one of France’s largest fundraising rounds and matching the record seed round previously set by Mistral AI, considered Europe’s top AI company. The company’s overall valuation has not been disclosed.

Genesis AI has built dozens of units so far and plans to ramp up production in the second half of 2026. The company intends to begin targeted customer deployments by the end of that year, starting with logistics and manufacturing businesses before expanding to hotels, hospitals, and eventually everyday consumers.

In a statement, Schmidt said the robot would not replace human expertise but would instead “amplify it,” calling the technology “one of the largest economic opportunities of the AI era.”

The robot’s debut comes as the global robotics industry is expanding quickly, fueled by advances in artificial intelligence. That growth has sparked widespread concern about job security. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted this month found that 53% of Americans were worried that AI could put them or someone in their household out of a job.

Technical hurdles, including limitations around processing power and battery life, continue to be challenges for the industry as a whole.

A networking technology company that spun out of Intel is making its mark on some of the most demanding computing work in the country — simulating nuclear weapons reactions.

Cornelis, which separated from Intel in 2020 and in which the chipmaker still holds a minority stake, announced Tuesday that its chips are now powering a supercomputer used for nuclear weapons research in the United States.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory revealed it has chosen Cornelis chips to connect 952 computers within its newly built system, known as “Lynx.” The laboratory operates under the National Nuclear Security Administration, alongside two other U.S. national labs, and together they use highly precise computer simulations of nuclear reactions to develop and maintain the country’s nuclear arsenal — considered one of the most computationally intensive challenges in the entire tech industry.

The Lynx system is one piece of a broader $70 million initiative across the three laboratories, aimed at constructing reliable, high-performance supercomputers using standard, commercially available hardware rather than custom-built components.

Cornelis is working to establish its Omni-Path networking technology as a serious competitor to chips made by rivals such as Nvidia and Broadcom. The technology is designed for situations where a computing task is too large for a single machine and must be distributed across many computers at once.

A key advantage of Cornelis chips is their ability to intelligently route data traffic. Rather than sending information through a congested path, the chips can identify a less crowded route — even if it’s technically a longer one — to get the data to its destination more quickly.

Lisa Spelman, CEO of Cornelis, described it this way: “You might drive a mile longer, but you get there 10 minutes faster because you avoided the stadium traffic from the FIFA World Cup.”

TOKYO (AP) — Japanese technology powerhouse SoftBank Group Corp. announced Tuesday that it is rolling out a new cybersecurity service built on OpenAI technology, with both companies confirming the initiative is designed to combat the growing danger of cyberattacks.

SoftBank’s Chief Executive Masayoshi Son described Japan’s current vulnerability to cyberattacks as “a crisis,” drawing a stark comparison to being targeted by machine guns rather than the single rifle shots of years past.

Son said the service will function as “a patching service,” with the country’s top 3,000 companies in critical sectors — including airports, power systems, and transportation — as the primary targets for protection.

“I feel it is our duty,” Son said, repeatedly referring to those carrying out the attacks as “the bad guys.”

According to Son, the process begins with diagnosing any vulnerabilities a company may have, followed by a detailed analysis of what steps are needed to close those security “holes.”

OpenAI’s chief, Sam Altman, had been expected to attend the launch event in person but instead appeared only briefly in a video message. He explained his absence by saying his baby daughter had arrived earlier than anticipated. OpenAI’s chief researcher, Mark Chen, attended the event in his place.

SoftBank and OpenAI — the company behind the widely used chatbot ChatGPT — established a 50-50 joint venture called SB OAI Japan last year. The partnership was created to develop and exclusively offer AI services tailored to the Japanese market.

Tuesday’s event served as a major update highlighting the service’s official launch. No pricing details were disclosed. However, SoftBank announced that all attendees at the Tokyo presentation would be eligible to apply for a complimentary security diagnosis.

Experts note that the rise of artificial intelligence has caused the volume and complexity of cyberattacks to grow at an exponential rate, making it increasingly necessary for defensive tools to be equally sophisticated and adaptable.

River guides who operate tours through the Grand Canyon are growing increasingly anxious about what a drier future means for their livelihoods.

The Colorado River, which winds through one of the world’s most iconic natural landmarks, has been experiencing lower water levels as a result of climate change. For the businesses that depend on healthy river conditions to take visitors on rafting and recreation trips, the shrinking water supply represents a serious and growing threat.

Guide companies that have built their operations around Grand Canyon river travel are now questioning whether those businesses can remain viable as the new climate reality continues to reshape the river’s flow.

Scientists have discovered that nearly 166,000 square kilometers — roughly 64,000 square miles — of the world’s coral reefs have the ability to withstand and recover from the effects of climate change, according to research released Tuesday. That figure is three times larger than what earlier studies had suggested.

Coral reefs play a vital role in ocean ecosystems, supporting about a quarter of all marine life on Earth. In recent years, they have faced mounting threats from powerful tropical storms, water pollution, and widespread “bleaching” events triggered by rapidly rising ocean temperatures. Some researchers have warned that the damage could become permanent.

The new findings come from an analysis of 45,000 coral surveys combined with decades’ worth of climate and ocean data. The study pinpointed climate-resilient reefs in 71 countries and 100 territories, including areas of the Caribbean, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans that had not previously been identified as having strong recovery potential.

Emily Darling, director of coral conservation at the Wildlife Conservation Society and one of the study’s authors, said the results challenge the idea that coral reefs are a lost cause. “Coral reefs are often framed as ecosystems beyond saving,” she said. “This research shows otherwise: we know where the hope is and what we need now is political will.”

The research comes as countries around the world are developing plans to place 30% of their land and ocean environments under formal protection by 2030 — a global goal referred to as “30 by 30.” The new data could help governments factor coral reef locations into those conservation strategies.

Darling noted that action is particularly pressing right now. “Only 28% of the reefs currently fall within protected and conserved areas, so the opportunity is clear, and so is the urgency, especially as we face an upcoming super El Nino event,” she said.

Stacy Jupiter, co-author and executive director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Global Marine Program, said the data gives policymakers a clearer picture of where limited conservation funding should be directed. “In certain cases, where reefs are below certain benchmarks for ecosystem function, it may be a case of triage, where we may need to leave those places,” she said.

A new report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reveals a startling reality: nearly every child on the planet faces exposure to at least one climate-related danger, with up to 1.8 billion children at risk from droughts and 1.2 billion threatened by extreme heat.

Released on Tuesday, UNICEF’s Children’s Climate Risk Report warns that children are “disproportionately affected” by a growing number of climate-related threats. The agency is urging governments around the world to immediately step up investments in infrastructure, adaptation strategies, and disaster management to better shield children from these dangers.

The report examined a wide range of climate hazards, including air pollution and the threat of diseases spread by insects, such as malaria. Researchers also took into account how well children across the globe can access clean water, healthcare, and social services.

Among the report’s most alarming findings: as many as 1.1 billion children worldwide are simultaneously exposed to at least three overlapping climate risks. UNICEF cautioned that this creates a “dangerous cascade of multiple, overlapping hazards” that could overwhelm governments and social service systems.

Rohini Sampoornam Swaminathan, a UNICEF statistics manager and one of the report’s authors, emphasized the compounding nature of these threats. “It’s not just the exposure to the single hazards like floods or droughts or heat waves and extreme heat that children face, but it is the exposure to multiple hazards,” she said.

The numbers are staggering across multiple categories of risk. Up to 662 million children face danger from tropical storms, while 337 million are at risk from river flooding and 33 million from coastal flooding. Additionally, around 1 billion children — the majority living in Africa — are exposed to malaria.

The report also found that in 2024, climate hazards disrupted the education of 242 million children across 85 countries.

UNICEF identified Somalia, Madagascar, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Pakistan as the nations most vulnerable to climate-related risks. Countries with economies heavily dependent on farming — including Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Tanzania — are home to the largest numbers of children exposed to drought.

Children living in landlocked countries are also facing what the report calls “disproportionate” risks, including drought, desertification, heat stress, and flash flooding. Nations such as Botswana and Burkina Faso are expected to see worsening water shortages in the years ahead.

SAN FRANCISCO — Over 100 cybersecurity professionals and executives are urging the Trump administration to reverse a government directive that blocks foreign nationals from accessing Anthropic’s most cutting-edge artificial intelligence models, warning that the restriction could end up benefiting America’s rivals more than protecting the country.

Anthropic announced Friday that it had taken two of its newest AI models — known as Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — offline in order to comply with the government’s order. The company made clear it did not believe the action was justified by the security concern the government had raised.

The San Francisco-based company had previously limited access to some of its most advanced technology to a select group of customers, citing the models’ ability to outperform human cybersecurity professionals in identifying and exploiting software weaknesses. Anthropic had held prior discussions with the White House regarding the capabilities of these newer models.

In a letter released Sunday, more than 100 cybersecurity professionals and leaders from companies including Adobe and Nvidia called on the federal government to lift the export control directives targeting Anthropic’s models. They also urged the administration to “commit to an open, scientific and transparent process of handling AI risk assessments in the future.”

The letter acknowledged that Anthropic’s Mythos models are “quite good” at uncovering software vulnerabilities and turning them into exploits, but argued they are “not uniquely good at these tasks.” Many of those who signed the letter said they regularly rely on other foundation and open-source models for security audits and training purposes.

According to the letter, stripping away top-tier cyber defense tools “without a good reason” is dangerous at a time when America’s adversaries are rapidly closing the gap. The letter noted that China’s AI models are “only months behind the best American models” and suggested China’s government likely has access to advanced capabilities that have not been made publicly available.

The export controls represent the most significant step the U.S. government has taken to date in limiting access to highly advanced AI systems. Anthropic had released Fable broadly just last week — a scaled-back version of the more powerful Mythos model, which the company had already been keeping under tight wraps due to cybersecurity concerns.

The Commerce Department had not responded to a request for comment as of Monday.

The directive came just 10 days after President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a framework allowing the federal government to evaluate the national security implications of the most advanced AI systems for up to one month before they are released to the public. The order specified that participation by AI developers would be voluntary.

Relations between the Trump administration and Anthropic have been strained. The company has pushed for guardrails on AI development to reduce risks and strengthen both economic and national security benefits for the United States.

The tension escalated following a contract dispute with the Pentagon, after which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth moved to label Anthropic a supply chain risk — an extraordinary step against a domestic company that Anthropic has since challenged in two separate federal courts. The company said it sought guarantees that the Pentagon would not deploy its technology in fully autonomous weapons systems or for surveilling American citizens. Hegseth countered that the company must permit any use the Pentagon considered lawful.

Senior technical staff from the artificial intelligence company Anthropic are scheduled to sit down with officials from the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington on Monday, according to a Trump administration official. The meeting comes after the federal government ordered Anthropic late last week to cut off access to its most powerful AI models for foreign nationals, pointing to national security concerns.

Since the Trump administration first contacted Anthropic on Friday, representatives from the company have been meeting with government officials virtually every day, according to a source close to the company who spoke with Reuters.

The administration’s order directed Anthropic to block foreign nationals — whether they are located inside or outside the United States — from using its two latest models, called Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Anthropic disclosed the order in a blog post on Friday and said it responded by disabling access to those models worldwide.

In that same post, Anthropic explained that the government believes someone has found a way to get around, or “jailbreak,” a safety feature designed to prevent Fable 5 from being used to identify software vulnerabilities. However, Anthropic pushed back, saying the workaround discovered only “minor” security flaws — the kind that other AI models already available to the public can also detect.

As of the time of this report, neither the Commerce Department nor Anthropic had responded to requests for comment regarding Monday’s planned meeting.

Two Maryland organizations are set to receive financial support to expand environmental education and stewardship efforts across the state.

The funding comes through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Implementation Grant and is administered by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. Final dollar amounts will depend on federal funding availability and approval.

Two groups were selected to receive awards:

The Accokeek Foundation will use its funding to blend traditional ecological knowledge, cultural heritage, and historical context into programming. A key component is the Wild Rice Meaningful Watershed Educational Experience, aimed at seventh grade students in both Prince George’s County Public Schools and Charles County Public Schools. Participants will take part in hands-on restoration work, including planting, data collection, and maintaining wetland ecosystems.

The Anne Arundel Community College Environmental Center will bring together community members, college students, high school students, and local organizations for field and laboratory research. Activities will include collecting environmental data, assessing horseshoe crab populations, evaluating shoreline conditions, and building a culture of stewardship.

Starting in July, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources will begin accepting applications for the next fiscal year through its online Grants Gateway.

Google revealed Monday that a hacking group linked to China spent more than a year covertly stealing data from academic, medical, and military research institutions in the United States and Canada before anyone detected the intrusion.

According to Google’s Threat Intelligence Group, the operation ran from September 2023 through November 2025. During that time, the hackers pursued information tied to defense intelligence, military strategy in the Indo-Pacific region, artificial intelligence, unmanned vehicles, cyber warfare programs, and medical research.

While Google declined to identify the specific organizations that were targeted, the company said the victims collectively work across a wide range of fields — including drug discovery, clinical trials, public health policy, and military readiness. Together, these institutions employ thousands of workers and manage research budgets totaling billions of dollars.

Google has attributed the operation to a hacking group it refers to as UNC6508, described as a relatively new and little-known cyberespionage actor. Luke McNamara, deputy chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, noted that the group’s tactics align broadly with Chinese-linked hacking behavior observed over many years — behavior focused on collecting information likely to be of value to the Chinese government.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment. China has consistently denied involvement in or support for unauthorized hacking operations.

The earliest confirmed activity in this campaign traces back to September 2023, when the hackers took advantage of security flaws in servers running REDCap — a web-based application commonly used by nonprofits to create and manage online surveys and databases. Using specially crafted malicious software, the attackers obtained legitimate REDCap login credentials and used them to access the targeted networks.

Once inside, they configured a system to automatically route emails containing any of nearly 150 specific keywords and search terms to a Gmail account under their control. Those terms included phone numbers and email addresses for individuals at targeted organizations, along with language related to geopolitical strategy, military planning, advanced technology, and medical research.

Google ultimately identified multiple organizations in the U.S. and Canada that had been compromised and notified each of them, researchers said. REDCap did not respond to a request for comment.

A bipartisan coalition of U.S. senators, joined by two Democratic House committees, sent letters Monday to the National Science Foundation demanding it reverse plans to dismantle a wide-reaching ocean monitoring system — with House members going further by alleging the agency is acting outside the law.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative is made up of more than 900 underwater and ocean-surface sensors that cost $386 million to build. Over the past decade, the network has gathered data on ocean circulation, marine ecosystems, climate change, and extreme weather. That information has been made freely available to the public and has contributed to more than 500 scientific publications. The project was originally expected to continue operating for another 15 to 20 years.

The National Science Foundation directed that most of the system’s instruments be removed from waters off Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina, and Greenland by 2027. Scientists say that decision came without warning and without any scientific review. The independent federal agency — created by Congress — characterized the move not as a cancellation, but as a “descoping” in line with what it called “evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies.” The Trump administration’s proposed 2026 budget called for a 55% reduction in the agency’s funding.

Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon was blunt in his criticism, telling the Associated Press: “It just seems like this is supreme stupidity and a violation of the fundamental distribution of powers in our Constitution. This program is authorized, it’s funded, and for the administration to shut it down without direction from Congress violates that vision in which the people’s representatives decide what’s done and funded, and the executive branch executes that vision.”

Sen. Merkley and Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska co-led the Senate letter, which was also signed by Democratic Sens. Edward Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell of Washington, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, and Ron Wyden of Oregon. The letter called on the NSF to pause the dismantling and conduct a full review — including input from the marine science community — before moving forward.

“Eliminating most of this complex ocean monitoring system threatens the safety of our coastal communities while undermining our nation’s ability to monitor coastal environments, marine currents, and extreme weather events,” the senators wrote.

House Democrats took an even harder line. Members of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee and the House Natural Resources Committee sent a joint letter calling on the agency to “cease this expensive, destructive, and — crucially — illegal action at once.” That letter was led by Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Jared Huffman of California, the top Democrats on their respective committees, and was signed by 23 Democratic members from each panel.

In a statement dated June 3, the NSF said its decision was informed in part by a 2025 National Academies report on the future of ocean science. The agency added: “NSF remains committed to ocean science and will continue working with the scientific community on high-priority research objectives.”

The cuts to the ocean observatory are part of a larger pullback from environmental and climate-related science under President Donald Trump’s administration, which has also moved to reduce staffing at agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, and has loosened emissions regulations.

Federal appropriations law requires the NSF to notify the House and Senate Appropriations Committees at least 30 days before decommissioning any agency-owned facility or asset worth more than $2.5 million. According to the House letter, no such notification was provided.

Sen. Merkley said he first heard about the dismantling through news reports. “It was like the alarm bells just went off,” he said. “None of us knew about this, and there didn’t appear to have been any consultation or any scientific commission or stakeholders that were leading to this.”

While his office was still working to confirm whether formal notification had been given, Merkley added: “If there was no notification, this would appear to be illegal.”

Merkley and Murkowski also planned to introduce legislation Monday that would block the NSF from using federal funds to decommission instruments until a thorough review is completed. Scientists were scheduled to begin pulling the first buoy off the Oregon coast on Tuesday.

The senators also pointed to the approaching El Niño — a periodic Pacific Ocean warming pattern that disrupts weather and intensifies marine heat waves — as evidence that the timing of the cuts is especially problematic. “The loss of this deep-water observation system would threaten our ability to prepare for and monitor future El Niño events,” they wrote, warning that coastal communities, fishermen, and emergency responders would lose access to critical data.

The House letter was equally pointed: “Instead of paying for the valuable insights that can be gleaned from the 10-years-and-counting continuous monitoring, taxpayers are now paying for research vessels to span the ocean dredging up hundreds of pieces of instrumentation. This is pathetic. In a time of strained resources, the NSF is wasting time and money to destroy its own scientific infrastructure.”

A massive data center is being built in the desert of southern New Mexico, and not everyone in the area is happy about it.

Developers behind the project say the region has sufficient water resources to support the large facility. However, some local residents remain unconvinced, expressing concern about what a water-intensive operation could mean for an already dry landscape.

The construction site is located in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, where water availability is a longstanding and sensitive issue for the community.

As demand for data centers continues to surge — driven by cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and streaming services — these facilities are increasingly being built in areas that may not have traditionally hosted such infrastructure. Large data centers can consume significant amounts of water for cooling their servers.

The tension between technological development and natural resource conservation is at the heart of local concerns. While developers point to studies and projections suggesting the water supply can handle the added demand, skeptical community members worry about the long-term impact on a resource that is already precious in the desert Southwest.

The project represents a broader national conversation about where to build the data infrastructure powering the modern digital economy — and at what environmental cost.

A New Mexico border county that has long been searching for ways to boost its economy has approved the construction of one of the largest data centers in the entire country — and the project comes with its own gas-powered electricity plant attached.

But what seemed like a promising economic win is now generating serious concern. Local residents and officials are experiencing what many are calling buyer’s remorse over the massive development.

Water availability is emerging as the central issue driving the backlash. In an already dry desert region, the prospect of a large-scale data center — which typically requires enormous amounts of water for cooling systems — has raised alarm bells about the long-term impact on the area’s limited water supply.

The approval came from a county eager to attract jobs and investment to a region that has struggled economically. However, as details of the project have come into clearer focus, some who initially supported the deal are now questioning whether the tradeoffs are worth it.

Exhausted teenagers, committed fathers, and countless bird species came together for an intensive competition that NPR followed for a complete day.

National Public Radio documented the full 24-hour experience at the World Series of Birding, observing how young participants worked together while battling fatigue during the demanding event.

The competition featured hundreds of different bird species as teams raced against time to spot and identify as many as possible throughout the marathon event.

The artificial intelligence company that created ChatGPT is facing a multistate investigation into user safety concerns as it moves toward its initial public stock offering.

State attorneys general have issued a subpoena to the tech firm as part of their examination into potential risks posed by the popular chatbot. Company representatives said they plan to cooperate fully with the investigation and emphasized their commitment to user protection.

“AI is a new and powerful technology, and we work every day to safely bring its benefits to people in a responsible way,” an emailed statement from a spokesperson said. “We take the concerns raised by state attorneys general seriously.”

The artificial intelligence company has faced mounting criticism after reports that ChatGPT provided supportive responses to users contemplating suicide or criminal activities. Additional concerns have emerged regarding the platform’s handling of medical information and personal user data.

Recent legal challenges include a lawsuit filed Thursday by a Canadian mother who claims the chatbot influenced her daughter’s decision to take her own life by hanging. In June, the Florida attorney general filed suit against the company following two separate shooting incidents where the alleged perpetrators reportedly consulted ChatGPT during their planning phases.

Company officials responded that their technology repeatedly urged those individuals to contact real-world support services, including mental health professionals. They also confirmed their cooperation with law enforcement agencies investigating both shooting cases.

This investigation emerges shortly after the company submitted paperwork to federal securities regulators for its much-anticipated stock market debut. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence competitor SpaceX completed its own public offering Friday. The rocket company, established by Elon Musk, also operates an AI division that developed a competing chatbot named Grok.

The appropriate governmental response to AI’s potential benefits and risks has emerged as a significant policy debate.

European regulators have launched their own investigations into Musk’s Grok platform over antisemitic content and sexually explicit material, including deepfake nude images. Additionally, another chatbot developer planning a public offering was ordered Friday by the Trump administration to discontinue two of its international online services due to national security concerns.

The Wall Street Journal first reported on the subpoena issued to the ChatGPT company.

When contacted Saturday, a dozen state attorneys general offices did not respond to requests for information about the investigation details.

In their public response, company officials outlined protective measures implemented for younger users of their chatbot service.

“Today’s ChatGPT includes a more protective experience for minors and people experiencing difficult situations, with safeguards that direct them to real-world resources and trusted human contacts,” the statement read in part. “We believe kids should be treated like kids, which is why we built age prediction, released parental tools to guide their children’s use of AI, and disallowed advertising that targets kids.”

Amazon’s chief executive Andy Jassy joined other technology industry leaders in expressing security concerns about Anthropic’s most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems to Trump administration officials this week, according to a source with knowledge of the discussions.

Amazon has not yet provided a response to requests for comment on the matter.

The Trump administration took action Friday, ordering Anthropic to prevent foreign nationals from accessing its newest AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, regardless of whether they are located within the United States or abroad. The directive was based on national security considerations. Anthropic responded by announcing it would shut down worldwide access to these models.

According to Anthropic’s Friday blog post, federal officials believe there exists a technique to circumvent or “jailbreak” protective measures that would otherwise stop Fable 5 from being utilized to identify software security weaknesses.

The federal restrictions took the form of export control measures, as Anthropic explained in its online statement. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, the agency responsible for overseeing export controls, has not yet responded to requests for comment.

Several experts who support export restrictions on cutting-edge AI technology expressed confusion about the Trump administration’s decision, noting it impacts friendly nations alongside potential adversaries.

“This was not well thought-out,” said Jimmy Goodrich, a senior fellow at the University of California’s Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation. “It even bans Canadians and Brits employed at Anthropic from doing research and development.”

The directive was issued at a time when an earlier conflict between Trump administration officials and Anthropic appeared to be resolving within various parts of the federal government. Anthropic has privately submitted paperwork for a U.S. initial public offering.

WASHINGTON — Major artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced Friday that it has disabled access to its newest AI systems, called Fable 5 and Mythos 5, following orders from the Trump administration aimed at blocking foreign nationals from using the technology.

These export restrictions represent the federal government’s most sweeping effort yet to limit access to cutting-edge AI technology. Anthropic had just launched Fable to the public this week. The model serves as a restricted version of the company’s even more sophisticated Mythos system, which has extremely limited access because of cybersecurity concerns.

The company issued a statement expressing disagreement with how the government handled the situation, noting it received the federal directive Friday afternoon without details about specific national security issues. “We believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts,” the company said. “This action does not adhere to those principles.”

Anthropic described the situation as a “misunderstanding” and expressed hope to reinstate access to the models “as soon as possible.”

The Commerce Department has not yet provided comment on the matter.

This development follows President Donald Trump’s executive order signed 10 days ago, which created a system for federal officials to review national security threats posed by advanced AI systems for up to 30 days before public launch. The order indicated that AI company participation would remain voluntary.

Federal authorities have implemented new restrictions preventing foreign entities from accessing cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology developed by Anthropic, according to a Friday report from Axios.

Reuters was unable to independently confirm the details of this development.

According to the report, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick delivered correspondence to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Friday, informing the company that its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 AI systems would fall under export control regulations. These restrictions apply to any destination beyond U.S. borders and extend to all foreign nationals currently within American territory, the report stated.

Federal officials have made public dozens of new documents detailing unexplained aerial sightings, marking the third batch of files released following President Donald Trump’s directive for complete transparency regarding mysterious sky objects and potential alien encounters.

The Pentagon disclosed 72 cases on Friday, featuring accounts of spinning craft emitting light beams, brilliant red spheres unlike anything witnesses had seen, and one peculiar object resembling a potato covered in shimmering, scale-like panels.

While the documents don’t contain the major revelations Trump has hinted at, they provide fresh insights into recent encounters and government attempts to understand these puzzling incidents. No definitive proof of extraterrestrial visitors or official cover-ups emerged from the files.

Consider the potato-shaped incident.

During a cold February 2022 morning at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, Colorado, five U.S. Army personnel exited an office building and spotted something unusual suspended above Cheyenne Mountain several miles away.

An FBI document described the object as having “distinct edges and appeared to look painted in a creamy/whitish opalescent color.” The craft featured “articulating fish scales or panels that were non-symmetrical, non-overlapping and irregular shaped.”

The soldiers told FBI investigators the object remained stationary and gleaming for approximately two minutes before disappearing instantly. Without phones available, no photographic or video evidence exists.

Investigators struggled to provide a clear explanation for the encounter. Their assessment concluded with “low confidence” that the phenomenon might have been “backscattering of sunlight.” Early morning light could have bounced off mountain snow and lit up low-hanging clouds, they theorized.

The witnesses maintained weather conditions were clear without clouds. No aircraft or balloons were thought to be operating nearby. The four-page assessment, heavily censored and credited only to an “intelligence community partner,” determined it likely wasn’t foreign adversary technology. An FBI illustration depicts exactly what one might expect — a scaled, pale potato floating above a small mountain.

The incident remains without resolution.

Another inconclusive investigation examined multiple October 2023 sightings involving six federal law enforcement officers. The agents reported repeatedly observing a bright orange sphere emerging above a ridge and creating two to four smaller red spheres.

Most times the spheres vanished quickly, but during one occurrence, agents said a sphere remained motionless overhead for several hours. No photographic or video documentation of these encounters exists, according to the assessment.

A recent analysis explores various potential causes. Military personnel were running training operations in the region, deploying flares during exercises. Additional testing of experimental U.S. technology might have occurred in the vicinity, the evaluation noted. Officials labeled these explanations as “plausible” without reaching definitive conclusions.

However, investigators didn’t dismiss the chance of “unrecognized technology.” Given limited available evidence, they recommended additional investigation into the matter.

The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office conducted the evaluation. Congress established this office in 2022 to examine reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP. Earlier agency reports state no evidence of extraterrestrial life has been discovered.

The recent files include an FBI account from February describing a sighting in an unnamed Northeast United States location. An individual whose identity is redacted reported returning home to find an intense light floating beneath backyard trees. They characterized it as a sphere of “brilliant and beautiful” red unlike anything previously witnessed.

“Inside the red sphere, at the center, there appeared to be what (redacted) described as a ‘white plasma sun’ about the size of a basketball,” the FBI file states.

A second sphere materialized, and both silently departed from view, according to the document. Mobile phone video captures two luminous red orbs moving across the sky. The White House posted the footage on social media Friday with only the file designation: “‘NORTHEASTERN ORB SIGHTING,’ 2025.”

The Trump administration’s disclosure initiative has resulted in approximately 300 released files spanning back to the 1940s, including some never before made public and others adding details to known cases.

The latest collection features a 2008 CIA assessment from Zimbabwe marked “never before released.” Above the nation’s primary airport on a July day, witnesses reportedly observed something resembling a Hollywood production: “disc-like in shape with a hollow center, and had a series of rotating lights on the underside of the airframe.”

“At one point during observation, ‘beams’ were observed emanating from the object,” the CIA assessment stated.

The lights shifted colors as the craft climbed high beyond sight, the document indicates. Discussion arose regarding its origin, with some suggesting foreign government involvement while others proposed “extraterrestrial origins.”

Thousands of users experienced difficulties accessing Facebook and Instagram on Friday, as the parent company Meta acknowledged widespread service disruptions across its platforms.

Company spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed the problems in a statement posted on X, saying “We’re aware people are currently having trouble accessing our services. We’re working on it.”

Data from Downdetector.com showed more than 62,000 user reports of Facebook problems and over 8,000 Instagram-related complaints as of 10:11 a.m. Eastern Time on Friday. The website monitors service interruptions by collecting status updates from multiple sources.

The tracking site notes that because their data comes from user submissions, the total number of people affected could differ from the reported figures.

Meta has not yet provided details about what caused the service interruption when contacted for additional information.

BERLIN (AP) — A humpback whale that captured Germany’s attention for months survived approximately five days following a final disputed rescue operation that failed to return the animal to the Atlantic Ocean, authorities announced Friday.

The marine mammal, given the nicknames “Timmy” and “Hope” by German news outlets, was discovered deceased on May 14, washed ashore near the tiny island of Anholt in the Kattegat, a wide waterway separating Denmark and Sweden that links the Baltic and North seas.

Finding the whale’s body brought closure to months of dramatic and divisive rescue operations that reached their peak on May 2, when the creature was moved by barge toward the North Sea in a last-ditch effort to save it. Researchers, government leaders, citizens and private groups debated whether allowing the weakened and ill animal to die naturally was more compassionate than pursuing additional rescue measures.

Information from a tracking device placed on the whale’s dorsal fin indicates the animal’s death most likely happened on May 6 or 7, stated Till Backhaus, who serves as environment minister for Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

During those five days, the whale traveled approximately 215 kilometers (134 miles) but was swimming back toward the Baltic Sea, moving away from its intended destination of the Atlantic Ocean.

Following that period, the information suggests the whale probably floated without direction — or the tracking device stopped functioning, Backhaus explained Friday at a press briefing.

The whale was initially observed near Germany’s coastline on March 3, creating a media sensation that featured breaking news alerts and continuous online updates about the animal’s condition.

Experts remain uncertain why the whale entered the Baltic Sea, an environment unsuitable for its survival, though some specialists suggested it might have become disoriented while following a school of herring or during seasonal migration.

A post-mortem examination of the remains has not yet identified what caused the whale’s death, Backhaus reported, but officials did learn that “Timmy” was actually female, contradicting months of assumptions about the whale being male.

The minister noted that the autopsy revealed no significant injuries, and found no evidence of violence or foreign objects that could have led to death.

“Did it have any nets or other foreign objects on its body, in its mouth or on its body?” Backhaus stated. “Nothing was found.”

According to German news agency dpa, portions of the whale’s remains will be converted to biodiesel in Denmark, while some bones will be donated to a Danish museum.

Japan’s H3 rocket achieved a crucial successful launch Friday, introducing a new budget-friendly model that the country desperately needed after facing multiple setbacks in an increasingly competitive space industry.

The rocket launched from Tanegashima Space Center on a southwestern Japanese island Friday morning, with its second stage reaching the intended orbit, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s live broadcast coverage.

JAXA reported that six small satellites created by universities and other institutions aboard the rocket were also successfully deployed into space.

Friday’s launch introduced the H3’s new “30 configuration” featuring three liquid-fuel LE-9 engines without rocket boosters, creating a budget-conscious option to enhance the rocket series’ market competitiveness. This model represents one of three variants created to serve diverse customer requirements.

This sixth successful mission follows two previous failures of the new rocket design that succeeded the reliable H-2A, which maintained an almost flawless track record.

The H3 rocket aims to offer better cost efficiency in the worldwide space market currently led by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Japan views dependable, commercially viable launch capabilities as essential for its space initiatives and national defense.

During its initial launch in March 2023, the H3 experienced second-stage engine ignition failure. Later in December, while carrying a navigation satellite, the rocket failed to place its cargo in the correct orbit due to second-stage engine problems.

The H3 had remained inactive since December, and another failure Friday would have severely damaged Japan’s upcoming space endeavors, including a Mars mission scheduled for 2028. A smaller Epsilon S series has also faced delays after catching fire during 2024 testing.

JAXA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, who are jointly developing the rocket, aim to eventually conduct H3 launches six to eight times per year.

Scientists have solved a biological puzzle that has mystified researchers for more than a century: exactly how does the Venus flytrap manage to snap its jaws shut so quickly when catching prey?

New research reveals that the carnivorous plant’s lightning-fast closure happens through a rapid weakening of cell walls in the trap’s outer surface. This discovery challenges the long-held theory that water movement within the plant drives the snapping mechanism.

The study shows that when an unsuspecting insect touches specialized trigger hairs inside the trap twice within a brief timeframe, the plant’s cell walls quickly become more flexible by approximately 30 to 40 percent. This softening releases built-up tension in the tissue, causing the modified leaf to bend and seal shut in as little as one-tenth of a second.

“One of the most iconic plants in the world can still surprise us. After more than a century of research, we are still discovering fundamentally new things about how the Venus flytrap works,” said physicist Yoël Forterre of the French research agency CNRS and Aix-Marseille University, senior author of the study published on Thursday in the journal Science.

The Venus flytrap grows naturally only in specific areas of North Carolina and South Carolina. Like other meat-eating plants, it thrives in environments with poor soil nutrients and supplements its diet by trapping and breaking down insects.

To conduct their investigation in Marseille, scientists employed high-speed cameras, mechanical testing of the plant’s surface layer, and computer modeling. They also tracked water movement within the plant tissue to eliminate that as the driving force.

“The plant uses specialized trigger hairs located on the inner surface of the trap. When an insect touches these hairs twice within a short period of time, the trap closes. Closure can occur in as little as one tenth of a second,” Forterre explained.

The researcher described the trap as being pre-loaded with mechanical tension, similar to a compressed spring waiting to be released.

“Our hypothesis is that the trap is already mechanically loaded before triggering, much like a spring. When the trap is stimulated, the cell walls of the outer epidermal layer rapidly soften by roughly 30 to 40%, meaning that the cell wall becomes more flexible. This releases internal stresses stored in the tissue and causes the trap to bend and close. The softening develops within about one second,” Forterre said.

Once trapped, the insect becomes sealed inside where digestive enzymes break it down over several days.

“By directly measuring the mechanics of the living trap as it responds, we pinned down the internal ‘motor’ that drives the leaf across its instability threshold and sets off the snap-buckling that closes it,” said physicist and study lead author Jeongeun Ryu, who worked on the study as a postdoctoral researcher at the CNRS and Aix-Marseille University.

Following digestion, the trap opens again, leaving behind only the insect’s hollow outer shell while the plant absorbs the nutrient-rich liquid.

The findings impressed researchers with how evolution adapts existing biological processes for new purposes.

“What I find remarkable is that evolution often does not invent entirely new mechanisms, but rather reuses and refines existing ones. Plants are known to modify the mechanical properties of their cell walls during growth, but the Venus flytrap appears to push this mechanism to an extreme, using it on a timescale of about one second,” Forterre said.

Scientists have identified approximately 800 different carnivorous plant species worldwide. These plants aren’t closely related to each other, suggesting that meat-eating behavior developed separately multiple times throughout plant evolutionary history.

The Venus flytrap’s snapping mechanism has fascinated scientists including Charles Darwin, the 19th century naturalist who developed the theory of evolution by natural selection. The research team believes their findings could lead to practical applications.

“To our knowledge, this is the first time such a rapid change in the mechanical properties of cell walls has been seen in a plant,” Ryu said.

“It settles a question that goes back to Darwin – what drives one of the fastest movements in the plant kingdom – and points to a new way for a living thing to move: not by pumping fluid or simply collapsing, but by actively tuning the stiffness of its own material. That principle could eventually inspire soft robots or smart materials, though that remains a longer-term prospect,” Ryu said.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — An artificial intelligence company plans to invest $150 million in creating a fellowship initiative that will place trained coaches with nonprofit organizations across the nation to help them better utilize AI technology in their operations.

The program, called Claude Corps after the company’s well-known AI chatbot, will recruit and place 1,000 trained fellows with various organizations for one-year assignments. The company’s president told The Associated Press that Anthropic hopes this initiative will grow and become a cornerstone of its mission to help society benefit from AI while addressing potential dangers.

The president said Claude Corps will undergo evaluation following its initial year to determine whether it should continue and grow.

“We’re hoping it’s a good idea that can take root and that other people can build on and learn from, whether that’s public or private,” she said during an interview at Anthropic headquarters in San Francisco. “But I think my hope is that we’ll learn, the people who do it will learn, and we’ll be able to come back and do it again next time even better.”

Anthropic’s financial commitment covers compensation for Claude Corps participants and provides participating host organizations with $10,000 grants plus complimentary credits to access Claude.

Charitable giving is fundamental to how Anthropic’s founding team believes the business should operate, the president explained. She, along with her brother who serves as CEO, and the company’s five additional co-founders have committed to donating 80% of their personal wealth. They structured Anthropic as a public benefit corporation, a legal framework that allows for-profit businesses to pursue both financial success and social good.

Anthropic, currently valued at $965 billion, is preparing for a public stock offering, having recently submitted confidential paperwork for an initial public offering.

Speaking before the SEC filing became public, the president declined to discuss IPO timing but emphasized that the company’s principles are transparent to potential investors.

“There’s decisions and choices that we might make that might feel in conflict with just the pure commercial interests of the business and we’re going to be really open about that,” she explained. “I think we have been very well served by our inclination to just be very honest about who we are because people who like that really like us. And for people, if it’s not what they like, they don’t work with us. And I think that’s actually better for everyone.”

Anthropic has been vocal regarding dangers associated with this emerging technology. The company recently warned that businesses should coordinate pausing advanced AI development if humans risk losing control over self-improving systems. It worked with Pope Leo XIV during development of his AI encyclical addressing regulation needs. The company also engaged in a notable dispute with President Donald Trump’s administration after refusing to grant the U.S. military unrestricted access to its AI systems.

The president described Anthropic as “unusual” because its business operations and research divisions function independently.

“Sometimes research says things like ‘AI is doing bad things’ and we really want to be open about what those things are,” she noted. “Because I don’t think there’s a way for the broader community that is the world to adapt to these changes if we don’t understand the challenges.”

Bella DeVaan, who leads the Charity Reform Initiative at the progressive research organization the Institute of Policy Studies, expressed doubt that AI companies will voluntarily allocate sufficient profits to support everyone affected by AI implementation.

“The fox can’t guard the henhouse,” said DeVaan, who has researched wealthy individuals’ charitable contributions. “They can’t be responsible for their own regulation or for their own definition of what their altruistic mandate is. That has to be determined by the public.”

Similar to Pope Leo’s encyclical recommendations, DeVaan advocates for stronger government oversight of AI companies. Without official intervention, she fears AI could establish a permanent class of displaced workers. She believes governments must conduct independent research on AI’s potential benefits and risks rather than relying on AI companies’ findings.

Anthropic separately announced Wednesday it will contribute $200 million toward an economic framework supporting workers displaced by AI technology. This effort begins with funding research into problems created by AI adoption.

“We can’t understand what the societal disruption might look like if we don’t study it, publish it and talk about it,” the president stated.

For Claude Corps development, Anthropic collaborated with CodePath, a San Francisco-based nonprofit focused on helping first-generation and low-income students enter technology careers through educational programs and career assistance.

CodePath’s CEO said he had long considered redesigning AmeriCorps to address AI adoption. The federal volunteer service agency experienced significant funding cuts under Trump administration policies last year.

“I think we need programs that are meeting folks where they are when you’re looking at the traditional late adopters — from nonprofits to governments, to schools,” he explained. “We’re putting humans into the organizations that serve the majority of Americans as a way to bring them along and bring our communities along.”

He said CodePath will oversee the program, which accepts fellowship applications until July 17. The CEO noted the fellowship targets diverse young professionals early in their careers.

“We are intentionally trying to be extremely accessible,” he said. “We’re not requiring that you have a certain degree. We want the initial group of fellows to be representative of a broad section of the population in this country.”

Jennifer Blatz, who leads StriveTogether, a Cincinnati-based nonprofit network preparing young people for improved economic opportunities, expressed excitement that her organization was selected to host two Claude Corps fellows.

While her nonprofit currently uses AI for analyzing program impact data, she hopes Claude Corps can help standardize AI implementation across her organization and its network covering 27 states. Blatz wants both her network and the communities they serve to understand “AI is a tool – not the whole strategy.”

“AI can help us work smarter, but trust building and community collaboration, that’s a deeply human part of the work,” she said. “And that’s not going away just because we use this tool.”

HENRICO—With blooming flowers and fresh crops appearing at Virginia farmstands, June highlights the vital pollinators that make this abundance possible.

National Pollinator Month draws attention to the essential role that birds, bats, bees, butterflies, beetles and other creatures play in our daily lives, while promoting efforts to establish and safeguard their living spaces. The month’s main event, National Pollinator Week, takes place June 22-28 this year.

These pollinators do more than create beautiful gardens. According to the Pollinator Partnership, pollinators make possible one in every three bites of food consumed by humans, with no less than 75% of food crops depending on them. The U.S. Department of Agriculture calculates that pollinators add $18 billion each year to crop production.

However, pollinator numbers keep dropping due to climate change, loss of habitat, pesticide application, parasites and diseases.

Stephen Living, habitat coordinator with the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, explained that truly helping pollinators requires thinking about “the whole structure” of their habitats—including food sources, nesting areas, breeding grounds and protective shelter.

“A lot of native bees are ground nesting, so providing areas of bare ground is valuable,” Living advised. “And keep some fallen leaves where possible.”

An effective habitat design incorporates diverse flowering plants and year-round resources. DWR provides Virginia Native Pollinator seed packets containing a mix of native wildflowers that benefit pollinators.

“When you’re doing a landscape from an aesthetics standpoint and want interest across the seasons, think about that from a wildlife perspective too,” he said. “Choose plants that bloom successively to provide resources across seasons.”

Trees and shrubs play an equally vital role in creating lasting habitats. Native oak and black cherry trees provide support for various butterflies and caterpillars.

The crucial factor is selecting native species.

“Native plants also feed the young insects, the larvae,” he said. “They support a much greater diversity and number of young insects than non-native plants do, and these in turn support wildlife like our songbirds.”

Living also recommended reducing pesticide use and adopting integrated pest management methods to lessen harm to beneficial insects.

While many tools and garden additions can help pollinators, he cautioned against certain popular trends—like widely-used bee hotels, which “can be valuable but have some pitfalls.

“They need to be carefully managed and cleaned out regularly, so we don’t create concentrations of harmful parasites,” he advised. “Do some research and find some that can be maintained and cleaned.”

He recommended avoiding butterfly houses, since “butterflies aren’t using those.”

The DWR’s Habitat at Home initiative provides guidance and resources for developing pollinator- and wildlife-friendly areas, plus recognition opportunities. Visit bit.ly/43uS3cx.

For additional information about native plants for pollinators, visit Plant Virginia Natives at plantvirginianatives.org.

Media: Contact Shelby Crouch, Virginia DWR public information officer, at 804-802

An Indian space technology company has received a substantial government grant to advance artificial intelligence capabilities for monitoring Earth from orbit, according to reports from Thursday.

SatSure Analytics was awarded 246 million rupees, equivalent to $2.57 million, by the country’s space regulatory authority to create AI-powered systems for Earth observation. This funding is part of India’s broader initiative to establish independent artificial intelligence technologies.

Nations across the globe are putting more resources into developing their own AI and geographic intelligence systems to reduce reliance on international technology providers. Satellite information has become increasingly vital for climate monitoring, emergency response operations, and protecting national interests.

India has transformed its space industry by allowing private companies to participate in what was previously dominated by the government-operated Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The country has also established a 10-billion-rupee funding program to help space-focused startups expand their operations.

The company, headquartered in Bengaluru, explained that the grant will support creating comprehensive Earth observation systems using both satellite and drone information specifically designed for Indian conditions. These customized models aim to provide better precision than international systems that may not perform well under local circumstances.

Information gathered will cover monsoon weather patterns, farming regions, and city growth, among other areas. This data could be used across various industries including infrastructure development and financial services, according to the geospatial analytics company.

“Earth observation is moving from project-specific analytics to reusable intelligence infrastructure,” stated Rashmit Singh Sukhmani, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer. He added that these systems could help create decision-making tools that better account for India’s unique geographic features, weather patterns, agricultural variety, and infrastructure needs.

The grant also enables SatSure’s involvement in India’s collaborative program to create a commercial satellite network.

A French streaming service announced Thursday the release of a free web-based tool designed to identify artificially generated music within user playlists across approximately 20 major streaming platforms.

The music platform is also making its artificial intelligence detection technology available for licensing to the broader music industry, expanding on previous agreements including a deal struck with France’s royalty agency Sacem in January.

According to company statistics, 43% of users who switch to the platform from competing services already have artificially generated music included in their playlists. The streaming service handles this issue on its own platform by marking AI-created songs and automatically excluding them from algorithm-driven recommendations and curated playlists.

“This is a first step in making sure that these tracks don’t dilute the royalty pool in any significant way,” the company stated.

The platform referenced a 2024 Cisac study indicating that 25% of artists’ earnings, equivalent to €4 billion ($4.6 billion) annually, could potentially be diverted by artificially generated songs by 2028.

The streaming service currently processes nearly 75,000 AI-created tracks each day, representing more than 44% of its incoming music content, an increase from 60,000 tracks reported in early 2025.

A joint survey conducted by the platform and Ipsos revealed that 80% of participants wanted AI-generated music to be clearly identified on streaming services.

KASHIWAZAKI, Japan (AP) — The world’s biggest nuclear facility has returned to operation in Japan as the nation grapples with massive electricity needs during a worldwide oil crisis, but the restart exposes a critical issue: the country is approaching maximum capacity for storing used nuclear fuel with no workable strategy for permanent radioactive waste disposal.

The return to service of the No. 6 reactor at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Station this year was intended to encourage additional nuclear facilities to come back online. According to the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa represents one of three facilities where cooling pools will reach maximum capacity within five years.

“Without solid (fuel management) plans, our power generation will stall sooner or later,” said Kashiwazaki-Kariwa General Manager Takeyuki Inagaki.

Following decades of searching for permanent storage solutions for highly radioactive used fuel, officials are examining Minamitorishima, an isolated Pacific island located south of Tokyo. However, this choice has encountered doubt and opposition due to Japan’s inconsistent approach to used fuel and radioactive waste handling.

Just 15 of Japan’s 54 reactors have returned to operation following the March 2011 Fukushima catastrophe, when a 9.0 earthquake near Japan’s northeastern shore and resulting tsunami triggered meltdowns at three reactors managed by Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, or TEPCO. Approximately 160,000 residents evacuated from Fukushima, with certain regions still uninhabitable.

Kashiazaki-Kariwa, which TEPCO also operates, was closed following the Fukushima catastrophe during a countrywide nuclear power shutdown.

The used fuel stored in a cooling pool at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa No. 6 reactor, currently 88% full, is visible from an upper-floor viewing area. TEPCO has added filtered venting systems and equipment to prevent hydrogen explosions as part of enhanced safety measures developed from Fukushima experiences.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi advocates for activating additional nuclear facilities, which will generate more used fuel. Without a practical permanent storage solution, concerns exist that reactors may need to shut down once storage capacity is exhausted.

Two approaches exist for managing used nuclear fuel: immediate disposal as waste or recycling to recover plutonium and uranium for future use.

Japan maintains its commitment to recycling, claiming this approach will support the resource-scarce country’s energy requirements while decreasing radioactive waste toxicity and volume. However, a reactor built for plutonium reuse, essential to the recycling process, has malfunctioned. Reprocessing cannot manage all used fuel, contributing to a plutonium inventory already sufficient for thousands of nuclear weapons.

Specialists suggest Japan should examine the immediate disposal alternative as well.

By December 2025, cooling pools at 17 Japanese nuclear facilities contained over 17,000 tons (15,422 metric tons) of used fuel, occupying almost 80% of available storage space, according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

Besides the substantial radioactive waste from standard reactors, Japan must also “deal with massive and largely unknown high-level nuclear waste from the Fukushima disaster,” stated Lila Okamura, a Senshu University professor specializing in environmental politics and nuclear waste management.

Selecting a permanent disposal location for used fuel and constructing a facility would require 100 years plus tens of thousands of years for monitoring the deep underground storage. For such a multi-generational undertaking, Japan should proceed cautiously rather than rushing the current plan filled with uncertainties, Okamura explained.

Following Kashiwazaki-Kariwa’s No. 6 reactor returning to service for the first time in 14 years since the Fukushima disaster, Industry Minister Ryosei Akazawa contacted Ogasawara village requesting a feasibility study for a high-level radioactive waste facility on Minamitorishima, an island under Ogasawara’s administration, which belongs to Tokyo.

“With a lot of spent fuel accumulating at nuclear power plants across the country, a final disposal of radioactive waste is a crucial challenge that must be resolved,” Akazawa wrote to Ogasawara Mayor Masaaki Shibuya.

The government-controlled Minamitorishima, approximately 2,000 kilometers (1,242 miles) south of Tokyo, has no permanent inhabitants. The Japanese army is building a firing range for long-range, surface-to-ship missiles as a deterrent to China. The island also contains deep sea deposits abundant with rare earth minerals.

“The move seems political,” commented Satoshi Takano, a participant on a government panel examining permanent disposal of used fuel. “There will be little opposition from a government-owned remote island.”

Several specialists believe the island, positioned on a geologically stable tectonic plate, might be appropriate. Many inhabitants on Ogasawara and two neighboring islands expressed concerns regarding safety and tourism.

“I was baffled when I heard about the plan,” Ogasawara assembly member Yusuke Hirano stated during an assembly meeting. “I think nuclear waste is incompatible with islands that are a UNESCO Natural World Heritage site.”

Locating a community willing to accommodate a highly radioactive disposal facility has proven challenging, despite substantial financial incentives. Minamitorishima marks the fourth location for a feasibility study since the government began searching in the early 2000s.

The complete review process will require approximately two decades. Municipalities joining the initial phase can receive up to 2 billion yen ($12.8 million) in government subsidies. The subsequent phase would provide up to 7 billion yen ($44.7 million). Funding specifics for a final study remain undisclosed.

The world’s first permanent disposal facility for used nuclear fuel is scheduled to open in Finland this year. Britain, Germany and the United States have discontinued reprocessing primarily due to high costs and technical difficulties, while various other nations are discussing plans for direct disposal facilities.

Inagaki, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa general manager, explained that TEPCO is moving used fuel from No. 6 reactor to other reactors at the facility with additional space, but the utility hopes to restart shipments to dry cask storage in northern Japan as a short-term solution. Other utilities with nearly full pools have announced intentions to construct dry-cask storage at their facilities.

Many inhabitants are concerned about Japan’s increasing stockpile because high-density storage of used fuel could also elevate overheating dangers.

Mie Kuwabara, a civil activist in Niigata, questioned “where will it go next?”

“It’s irresponsible to accelerate restarts and produce more spent fuel without deciding its final destination,” said Kuwabara, who also doubts using Minamitorishima.

“It’s like saying that it’s OK to put a facility there because nobody is around to complain if there is a problem,” Kuwabara said. “It’s scary.”

Conservation organizations filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday seeking to block a controversial land exchange that would grant SpaceX access to more than 700 acres of protected wildlife habitat in Texas. The environmental groups contend the deal would increase ecological damage to a Gulf Coast area already affected by rocket operations from billionaire Elon Musk’s space company.

The Fish and Wildlife Service gave approval this month for the proposed agreement with SpaceX, under which the company would give up 683 acres it currently owns in return for federal property within the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. The protected area covers 103,000 acres across four counties along the Texas border and contains critical animal habitats and historical sites.

According to mapping data, the federal property SpaceX seeks to obtain sits closer to the company’s rocket launch facility near the border between the United States and Mexico.

This proposed swap would mark the first instance of the federal government exchanging refuge land with SpaceX, according to Laiken Jordahl, a spokesperson with the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the organizations behind the legal challenge.

The federal court filing in Washington seeks to prevent the land transfer, which has drawn opposition from local critics who have previously raised concerns about the company’s growing presence affecting beach access and creating safety risks from rocket explosions.

“Rather than exercising its enforcement authority to protect the Refuge from SpaceX’s activities and to require mitigation to address the harm SpaceX has caused, the Service seeks to give SpaceX over 700 acres within the Refuge,” states the lawsuit, which was filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and other groups.

A spokesperson for the Fish and Wildlife Service declined to provide comment regarding the pending legal action.

The agency released a final environmental review earlier this month concluding the land exchange would not create significant environmental harm to the region. According to the assessment, federal officials believe the transaction would deliver a “net conservation benefit” and offer “substantial long-term conservation value and improving landscape-scale habitat connectivity across refuges in South Texas.”

SpaceX representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

The legal challenge comes as the company prepares for a public stock offering, which could position Musk to become the world’s first trillionaire.

The aerospace company began construction in Texas over ten years ago and has grown substantially since then, with SpaceX workers voting last year to establish their own municipal government named Starbase.

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced Wednesday a $200 million commitment to study how AI technology affects jobs and economic conditions, adding its voice to industry discussions about protecting workers from technological disruption.

The company, which developed the Claude chatbot, paired the funding announcement with policy recommendations from CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei, who published detailed thoughts on his personal website about government assistance for people economically affected by AI. According to Amodei, artificial intelligence may cause more significant and longer-lasting workplace disruptions than earlier technological changes.

“The key challenge in such a world won’t be incentivizing growth, but finding a way for everyone to share in the benefits,” Amodei wrote.

This development follows competitor OpenAI’s Monday announcement of objectives including making sure technological benefits are “widely shared.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently held discussions with Sen. Bernie Sanders about allowing public ownership stakes in AI companies like OpenAI, potentially using company shares to establish a public wealth fund distributing profits from major AI corporations.

During Wednesday’s Oval Office session, President Donald Trump informed reporters he plans upcoming meetings with top AI company executives to explore “giving back” to citizens.

“We’re talking about giving back something to the public, and if we do that, the public will become very rich,” Trump said. “I think they’ll do that, and I think it’ll make it very popular.”

Amodei explained in his essay that he discusses job displacement not because he wants to be a “prophet of doom” but to give “both policymakers and the private sector to have the best chance to adapt and respond.” His suggestions include improved data gathering to monitor AI-related job losses, employment-focused policy incentives to minimize displacement, and “mechanisms such as universal basic income” if job losses permanently reduce labor demand.

Such universal basic income programs could receive funding through taxes on “relevant companies” or increased capital gains taxes, according to Amodei’s writing.

Limited information was released Wednesday regarding Anthropic’s $200 million pledge, though the company indicated the money will support an Economic Futures Research Fund backing research studies and “program evaluation” of promising public policies. Additionally, the company plans a $150 million national fellowship initiative designed to help early-career workers “extend the benefits of AI to communities across America.”

Both Anthropic and OpenAI recently revealed plans for initial public stock offerings, joining Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which markets itself as an AI-centered space enterprise while preparing for public trading.

Anthropic’s Wednesday economic policy framework provided guidance for potential U.S. government responses to three levels of AI-caused economic disruption: scenarios where national unemployment hits 5%, 10%, and an undefined “unprecedented” level. Last week’s unemployment data showed a 4.3% rate.

For the “unprecedented” situation, the company suggested more lasting support measures would be required, listing various methods to generate and distribute revenue broadly, such as basic income, sovereign wealth approaches, and equity-sharing systems. This would represent “novel economic territory,” according to the company.

The company’s recommendations also included multiple suggestions for addressing safety and security concerns. Anthropic has built its reputation on safety emphasis and developing dependable, “steerable” AI systems, with Amodei and fellow co-founders leaving OpenAI to establish the new company in 2021.

New research released Wednesday reveals that climate change caused by human activities has dramatically increased the occurrence of severe coastal flooding worldwide.

Scientists emphasize these results are vital for developing coastal infrastructure and flood management strategies as global temperatures continue rising.

Severe flooding incidents result from a mix of storm surges, elevated tides, and abnormal sea level increases combined with natural climate variations and human impacts. Hurricane Ian in 2022, which brought devastating flooding, represents an example of a storm that researchers determined was intensified by climate change. Coastal flooding poses threats to hundreds of millions of residents in low-elevation coastal regions globally each year, generates billions in damages, and can prove fatal.

Severe sea level incidents that were historically uncommon — those with a 1% probability of occurring in any given year — now happen approximately 12 times more frequently on average, according to new research published Wednesday in the journal Nature Climate Change. These incidents have become roughly four times more probable due to climate change driven by human activities, the study demonstrates.

Scientists analyzed the occurrence of extreme sea level incidents — which trigger coastal flooding — by examining long-term data from tide monitoring stations at over 100 locations combined with climate modeling. The research examined increases from 1900 through 2005. The timeframe ended at 2005 because of limitations in available models that connect events to human-caused climate change. The study authors noted their findings were cautious, considering that human contributions to coastal extreme changes have only grown since that time.

The researchers distinguished between human activity impacts, natural influences, and local ground movement. While sea level variations early in the 20th century could mostly be linked to natural causes, beginning in the 1960s, human-caused warming became the main driver of rising sea levels, according to scientists.

Additional research published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances also reinforces the idea that human-caused climate change drives extreme water levels. It determined climate change was responsible for 58% of days with extreme water levels during 2000 to 2018. Climate change has also roughly tripled the average number of days surpassing extreme water level thresholds since the 1970s, that study found.

“Essentially every coastal flood today has human fingerprints on it through climate change,” said Ben Strauss, chief scientist at Climate Central and a co-author of the Science Advances study. “Without the extra bit of sea level rise caused by global heating, most of these events would not have reached the status of flood.”

The Nature Climate Change research didn’t completely analyze individual human factors, said Sönke Dangendorf, the lead author, but he pointed out greenhouse gases — produced by burning fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal — represent the most important factor.

“In particular since the 1970s, it’s by far the dominating factor, and this is of course not good news at the moment,” said Dangendorf, also an associate professor at Tulane University. “The risk is evolving and with the evolving risk we need to do more for adaptation.”

Jeff Williams, a retired United States Geological Survey oceanographer who wasn’t involved in either study, said the research demonstrates that planners must account for heightened risks. They should also evaluate costs for enhancing coastal protection and decide who bears those expenses, he said.

Current protections for New Orleans, for example, “will likely not be adequate beyond the next couple decades,” Williams said.

Countries worldwide are increasingly adopting renewable energy sources like solar and wind. Last year, clean energy production surpassed total global electricity demand growth, and renewable energy’s portion reached more than one-third of global electricity generation for the first time. Even in the United States, where the Trump administration has promoted fossil fuels, solar energy is expanding while coal power decreases. Consequently, scientists recently indicated the world is no longer heading toward the worst-case warming scenario — but it’s also not moving toward the best-case outcome.

Dangendorf, the Tulane author, said: “The impacts, even of a relatively little sea level rise, can be pretty impactful on our coasts.”

“There is a silver lining because we have control about how much we emit, right?” he said. “So we can stop that development, at least to some degree.”

A former engineer who worked at Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has filed a legal complaint alleging he was wrongfully terminated for speaking up about AI safety risks to humanity.

Devin Kim, who currently leads a think tank dedicated to AI safety, submitted the lawsuit in a California state court this past Tuesday. He claims his attempts to establish safety protocols for the chatbot Grok made him a target within company management.

The legal filing arrives as the company’s parent, a subsidiary under the umbrella of other Musk ventures, prepares for what’s anticipated to be the largest initial public offering ever, scheduled for this Friday.

According to the court documents, Kim “repeatedly complained that xAI’s failure to prioritize AI safety, particularly with respect to Grok, virtually guaranteed that the Company would commit unlawful acts, from fomenting discrimination to proliferating weapons of mass destruction.”

Neither xAI nor its parent company provided immediate responses when contacted about Kim’s legal action.

The Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit organization that studies potential AI risks, announced Kim’s appointment as president just last week.

The world’s wealthiest individual founded xAI in 2023, positioning it as a more secure option compared to OpenAI, an organization he had co-founded over ten years earlier. Last month, a jury dismissed Musk’s own legal challenge against OpenAI, where he alleged the company had abandoned its humanitarian mission.

Kim’s lawsuit states he joined xAI as one of its first employees in 2024 and received a promotion to a senior leadership role within months of starting.

While Kim indicates Musk wanted proper safety testing and procedures in place, the complaint alleges that Kim’s direct supervisor, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba, ignored these instructions and dismissed Kim’s push for safety protocols.

The lawsuit claims Ba terminated Kim’s employment without warning last September, just before Kim was scheduled to deliver a presentation about AI safety to company executives.

Kim’s legal team is pursuing claims of retaliation and wrongful termination under California employment law, seeking monetary compensation that has not been specified.

Safety concerns have previously surrounded other Musk-led companies, including his space exploration venture and electric vehicle manufacturer, ranging from employee workplace hazards to questions about autonomous driving technology.

A 2023 investigation documented at least 600 previously undisclosed workplace injuries at the space company, including severe injuries such as crushed limbs, amputations, electrical injuries, and one fatality. Workers pointed to relaxed safety standards and Musk’s philosophy that the company faces urgent pressure to establish space-based alternatives due to Earth’s environmental decline.

While the space company declined to comment at that time, it has since defended its safety practices in legal documents and public statements, emphasizing its comprehensive safety training programs.

Catastrophic flooding and landslides that struck Indonesia’s Sumatra region last year eliminated at least 7% of the world’s critically endangered Tapanuli orangutan population, according to a new study released Wednesday.

The severe weather event, triggered by cyclonic conditions, claimed the lives of more than 1,200 people and destroyed approximately 300,000 homes. Environmental organizations have attributed the widespread devastation to aggressive deforestation across Sumatra island.

Research findings indicate that no fewer than 58 Tapanuli orangutans perished in the flooding, according to the study. These primates are found exclusively in the area surrounding the Batang Toru forest in northern Sumatra. The survey focused on the western section of the forest, which houses the majority of the species’ total population of 800 animals.

The research represents a collaborative effort between Borneo Futures based in Brunei, World Weather Attribution, and Liverpool John Moores University. Investigators did not examine other forest areas, suggesting the actual death count may be significantly higher.

Researchers reached their conclusions by examining satellite imagery showing damage to the West Block of Batang Toru and reviewing historical population data for the orangutans in that region.

The study determined that climate change caused by human activity has likely intensified both the severity and occurrence of extreme precipitation events near the Malacca Strait, creating greater threats to the Tapanuli orangutan’s natural environment.

Lead researcher Erik Meijaard from Borneo Futures explained that the intense rainfall saturated the ground to such an extent that massive portions of forested hillsides gave way in rapid landslides.

“If you get caught as an orangutan… if anything comes down at great speeds, survival chances are going to be very minimal, so it became a real concern,” he said.

“This level of loss is substantial for a species with such a small total population. When combined with ongoing pressures such as habitat degradation and human-wildlife conflict, it further increases the urgency of implementing and adequately resourcing a coordinated species action plan,” Meijaard added.

Fellow researcher Panut Hadisiswoyo called on Indonesia’s government to collaborate with non-governmental organizations and scientists to halt the continued decline of orangutan numbers.

“We can minimise the poaching or hunting and then the number probably can be stabilised,” he said, emphasizing that all stakeholders must address irresponsible land management practices that also contribute to the population decrease.

Scientists working to unlock the secrets of neutrinos have announced breakthrough results from a cutting-edge underground research facility in China, achieving the most accurate measurements ever recorded of specific characteristics of these mysterious subatomic particles.

The findings originate from JUNO, which stands for Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory, a sophisticated particle detection system constructed approximately 2,130 feet beneath the surface under a hill close to Kaiping in China’s southern Guangdong province.

Researchers published their discoveries Wednesday in the journal Nature, drawing from information gathered during the detector’s inaugural operational phase following its completion last year – specifically during its first approximately 59 days of operation, spanning from August 26 through November 2.

“This is important not only because the numbers themselves are useful for neutrino physics, but also because they demonstrate the performance of JUNO as a new large-scale detector,” said Yifang Wang, a physicist at the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and spokesperson for the JUNO Collaboration.

“This paper shows that the experiment has started from a solid foundation,” Wang said.

Alongside DUNE – which stands for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment – in the United States and the Hyper-Kamiokande experiment in Japan, JUNO represents one of three major flagship initiatives anticipated to advance neutrino research over the next several decades.

“Neutrinos are basic particles and are extremely abundant in the universe, but they remain among the least understood,” Wang said.

These particles can penetrate any material, seldom interacting with matter. Remarkably, countless trillions pass through human bodies each second without any detection on our part.

Created in locations such as the sun’s core and exploding stars known as supernovas, neutrinos exist in three varieties, or “flavors,” and can transform from one type to another through a process called oscillation during their journey. The mass difference, referred to as mass ordering, among neutrino varieties represents a crucial unsolved puzzle.

“JUNO’s central goal is to determine the neutrino mass ordering, meaning the ordering of the neutrino mass states. We know that neutrinos have mass, but we still do not know which mass state is the lightest and which is the heaviest,” Wang said.

“This first result is not yet a determination of the mass ordering. Its value is that it validates the detector and the analysis with real data,” Wang said.

JUNO successfully measured two of the six essential neutrino oscillation parameters with unprecedented accuracy, Wang explained, representing approximately 1.6 times greater precision than previous attempts.

Each particle type in ordinary matter possesses a corresponding antiparticle sharing identical mass but opposite electrical charge – whether positive, negative, or neutral, as applies to neutrinos. Consequently, every neutrino has a matching antineutrino.

JUNO’s primary methodology for measuring neutrino oscillations involves observing antineutrinos released from the Yangjiang and Taishan nuclear power facilities, located roughly 33 miles from the detection equipment. The two parameters concerned the characteristics of antineutrinos.

The JUNO detection system consists of a massive spherical container holding 20,000 tons of organic liquid that produces light in the dark setting when particles, including antineutrinos, travel through it.

Neutrinos qualify as elementary particles, indicating they contain no smaller components, positioning them among the universe’s basic building materials. Since neutrinos carry no electrical charge, even the most powerful magnetic fields cannot affect them. During their cosmic travels, neutrinos move freely through matter – including stars, planets, and all other objects.

Researchers can track these particles back to their origins, thereby gaining knowledge about some of the most powerful phenomena in the universe. They could hold the answer to comprehending matter’s origin and its dominance in the cosmos over antimatter, the characteristics of dark matter and dark energy, and the internal mechanics of supernovas.

Wang indicated that JUNO will examine neutrinos originating from the sun, Earth, the atmosphere, and potentially a future supernova.

“Enormous numbers of neutrinos pass through the Earth every second, but only a tiny fraction interact. That is why experiments like JUNO need very large detectors, deep underground sites, careful shielding and long-term stable operation,” Wang said.

JUNO, which required an investment exceeding $300 million, embodies an international scientific partnership. Wang noted that JUNO, DUNE, and Hyper-Kamiokande serve as complementary endeavors.

“They use different technologies and neutrino sources, so each brings a different perspective to some of the most important questions in neutrino physics. Together, they will provide a broader and more robust understanding of neutrino properties,” Wang said.

Marine biologists have made a remarkable discovery in the depths of the southeastern Indian Ocean — an ancient underwater cemetery where whale remains have created a thriving ecosystem for millions of years.

The research team found diverse marine communities flourishing around whale carcasses that have been resting on the ocean floor for ages. These underwater graveyards develop when dead whales sink to the sea bottom, providing nourishment for surrounding sea creatures. This particular site sits as deep as 23,000 feet beneath the ocean surface and represents the most extensive, deepest, and oldest whale cemetery documented to date.

According to Xikun Song, a biologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering, the massive size of whales and the distinct chemical makeup of their bones create these special underwater habitats.

“At the same time, the very nature of the deep ocean makes these sites exceptionally difficult for scientists to locate,” Song, who participated in the recent discovery, wrote in an email.

The research team conducted several underwater expeditions using deep-sea vessels throughout 2023, gathering specimens and charting the boundaries of this marine necropolis. Their exploration revealed five separate carcass locations and fossilized remains, including skulls from beaked and baleen whales. The most ancient bones are estimated to be 5.3 million years old.

Living among and feeding on these remains were countless organisms of various sizes, including sea cucumbers, squat lobsters, saltwater clams, jellyfish, tubeworms, and brittle stars. Many of these creatures are believed to represent previously unknown species, based on research findings released Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“The potential number of specimens is just astounding,” said paleontologist Stephen Godfrey with the Calvert Marine Museum in Maryland, who wasn’t involved in the research.

Several conditions likely worked together to keep these bones intact across millions of years, the study authors explained. The bones possess enough density to resist destruction from bone-eating worms and rest deep enough underwater to avoid burial by sediment and debris. Additionally, the bones developed a thin coating of minerals from the ocean water, which may have protected them from deterioration.

Researchers theorized about why so many whales ended up in this location. Perhaps they already inhabited the region and died naturally. Some may have died from exhaustion or sickness related to deep-sea diving. The area’s V-shaped geography might have also channeled the remains to this final resting place, according to the authors.

These findings hold significance because they provide insight into the dynamic communities that manage to survive in isolated, challenging environments.

Research into these whale graveyards “is important for understanding how life can adapt to such extreme conditions, not only due to the lack of light and oxygen but also to the incredibly high pressure,” said study co-author and paleontologist Giovanni Bianucci with the University of Pisa in Italy in an email.

A colossal subterranean research facility designed to study enigmatic cosmic particles has shared its inaugural major discoveries.

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory in China began gathering information in August, focusing on neutrinos: minuscule space particles that originated during the Big Bang and pass through human bodies in the trillions each second without causing harm. However, their nearly weightless nature makes detection extremely challenging.

Research published Wednesday in the journal Nature revealed the JUNO team’s early discoveries from two months of information gathering — featuring some of the most accurate measurements recorded of how neutrinos transform among three types, or flavors, while traveling through space.

“It really makes me look forward to more exciting results in the future,” said physicist Kate Scholberg with Duke University, who had no role in the new research.

The round JUNO detection system sits 2,297 feet (700 meters) below ground. It studies antineutrinos generated by reactions within two neighboring nuclear power facilities. Antineutrinos represent equally puzzling, opposite counterparts of neutrinos that researchers can examine to comprehend their characteristics and neutrino functionality.

When antineutrinos encounter particles inside the detection system, they create a burst of illumination.

Researchers hope the detection system will help solve the persistent puzzle of each neutrino flavor’s mass. They believe two possess comparable weight while the third differs significantly, though uncertainty remains about whether two are heavy with one light or the reverse.

The early discoveries haven’t resolved that mystery yet, but demonstrate the detector’s capabilities — and that it “will be able to test the finer ripples” that distinguish neutrino flavors and their masses, said study co-author Liangjian Wen, a member of the JUNO collaboration.

Two comparable neutrino detection systems — Japan’s Hyper-Kamiokande and the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment based in the United States — are scheduled to start information collection over the next decade, verifying the China detector’s findings through alternative methods.

STARBASE, Texas, June 10 – During the most recent rocket launch by the space company in South Texas, charter boat operator Eddie Reyes positioned his pontoon vessel with paying customers less than 2 miles from the launch site. Flames burst skyward as shock waves jolted the watercraft while the massive rocket ascended.

The space company’s presence has generated significant revenue for Reyes and his relatives. Following the creation of the company town, his charter operation has flourished as enthusiasts travel to witness launches. His nephew has secured employment as a welder with the company and drives a Tesla Cybertruck.

However, the same launches that have elevated his family’s economic prospects are causing structural damage to his mother’s residence. Launch vibrations have created ceiling cracks, compromised window seals, and caused foundation settling. She joins dozens of other residents pursuing legal action against the company for property damage.

“You can’t stop progress,” Reyes said.

Numerous residents throughout the Rio Grande Valley area surrounding the company town – which centers on the rocket manufacturing and launch operations – have reached similar conclusions. They’ve chosen to embrace the wave of interplanetary aspirations while accepting the accompanying challenges.

Though the rapid expansion has delivered employment opportunities, tourism, and international recognition, it has also generated litigation, environmental issues, and increasing divisions among the region’s 1.4 million inhabitants.

Following the company’s record-breaking $1.75 trillion public offering on Friday – designed to raise $75 billion partially for scaling operations from occasional test flights to potentially weekly launches – the challenges facing area residents are expected to grow.

“This company is literally shaking the earth,” said Tino Villarreal, city commissioner of Brownsville, a city of 185,000 people that borders the company town. “By the amount of workforce it wants to produce, by the actual wavelengths that are shaking our soil.”

The space company declined to provide comments for this report.

The conflicting realities became evident before last month’s rocket launch – featuring the largest rocket takeoff and landing in the Indian Ocean – when contract employee Jose Bautista, 25, died in a fall at a nearby facility, initially reported by the San Antonio Express-News. He represents the latest worker fatality or serious injury during the rush toward Mars colonization.

On TikTok, local policy researcher Etienne Rosas posted a video calling for corporate accountability that received thousands of likes. One of Bautista’s cousins responded with gratitude, writing “my family is in need of prayers.”

Others defended the company in response to Rosas, arguing the organization bore no responsibility for the death. One commenter suggested that Bautista, even posthumously, would recognize “an accident for what it is.” The individual, who ignored interview requests, added: “Projects of magnitude like the Hoover Dam for example always claim many lives and the project continues. It’s the American way.”

A city spokesperson declined comment. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, conducting an investigation, also declined comment. A family representative declined to speak.

The Cameron County Sheriff’s office referred comment requests to the space company.

The company, which remained silent, has not publicly acknowledged Bautista’s death.

A ROCKET LAUNCHPAD IN THE BACKYARD

When construction commenced at the site in 2014, Boca Chica consisted of a small residential cluster along the Mexico border and a favored beach destination for Brownsville residents. Currently, two launch structures rise nearly 500 feet above the beach alongside expanding neighborhoods featuring Airstream trailers, compact homes, and luxury residences.

The company envisions eventually producing components for up to 1,000 rockets in the town’s manufacturing facility – a 1 million square-foot advanced production center – and assembly building, a 380-foot-tall rocket construction structure.

The community has unique characteristics. Company employee Bobby Peden won election as mayor last year shortly after incorporation. The town is establishing a police department and has considered creating a municipal court – where Peden would serve as temporary judge.

At the local school, Ad Astra, young students learn to work “with numbers into the thousands – far beyond kindergarten standards,” according to the institution’s website. The neighborhood bar, Astropub, restricts access to company employees only.

“When I showed up, we had one street with houses, we were building rockets in tents, and we didn’t have water or a sewer system,” said Kathryn Leuders, who served as general manager before incorporation. Now “you’re raising families, and you’re raising children in this community that is Starbase, that’s also got a launchpad in its back yard. It’s a really cool thing.”

Similar to the Mars settlement illustrated in a large mural on the assembly building’s exterior, the community represents a potential blueprint for future interplanetary settlements. During a recent evening before the rocket launch, streets filled at 5 p.m. with employees departing company buildings on bicycles while Cybertruck convoys traveled the highway to Brownsville, passing sculptures and a sign reading, “Mars Embassy. Future Location.”

“I’ve been to NASA, and you don’t get anywhere near something like this,” said Nicholas Poindexter, a pest control worker and space enthusiast who traveled from Indiana to observe the launch. “Last time I was here I thought, holy cow, you could throw a rock and hit” a rocket.

STARBASE BOON TO REGION

Many area officials have embraced the company town as beneficial to one of America’s most economically disadvantaged regions. An impact analysis by the Greater Brownsville Economic Development Corporation in March indicated the operation has generated 5,000 jobs and delivered $100 million in tourism revenue during the past year.

Wearing a company ‘Starship’ t-shirt, Brownsville city commissioner Villarreal highlighted new restaurants serving the increasingly prosperous workforce, situated between boarded storefronts and deteriorating homes.

The company founder “has moved at the speed of light, and I think that’s helped Brownsville also really move a lot faster in our growth and development,” said Villarreal. “It’s injected a steroid into Brownsville.”

Some area Rio Grande Valley residents initially embraced the company’s arrival. Maria Pointer had lived in the region for nearly two decades when she sold her property to the company in 2020 after meeting with the founder. “We were excited,” she said. “I really felt, at the time, that we deserved the moon as the gas station to wherever all the Elons of the world wanted to go in interstellar space.”

Over time, Pointer has grown less enthusiastic, describing the community as less welcoming. In April, she visited the manufacturing facility to record an interview with an Italian news team, beneath a massive “X” near the building entrance, where her kitchen previously existed. A security officer approached and ordered them to depart. “It was very military,” she said.

Other residents from surrounding communities – Laguna Vista, Port Isabel and South Padre Island – allege the rocket launches are harming their properties, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in April against the company.

One plaintiff, who declined on-record comments per her attorney’s guidance, showed her Port Isabel residence. Cabinets sit crooked, doors won’t shut properly, and chipboard covers damaged flooring she attributes to mold after a shower pipe broke following a rocket launch. She estimates foundation repairs at approximately $100,000, exceeding half the home’s worth.

“They’re wanting to get to Mars,” she said. “But what about us that are here? I’m here now. And nobody is thinking about us.”

More than half of Americans express concern that artificial intelligence technology might eliminate employment for themselves or family members, according to fresh polling data from Reuters and Ipsos that also reveals growing unease about the technology’s rapid expansion.

The survey, conducted over six days and concluded on Monday, discovered that 53% of respondents shared these employment concerns, with worries distributed relatively equally among different age groups, genders, and educational backgrounds.

Meanwhile, 37% of those polled indicated no concern about AI-related job displacement, while the remaining 10% were either uncertain or declined to respond.

The polling comes after several major corporations announced workforce reductions linked to AI initiatives, including software company Intuit, which informed employees last month of plans to eliminate 17% of its global staff to optimize operations and focus on key priorities including artificial intelligence projects. Students at the University of Arizona expressed disapproval last month when former Google CEO Eric Schmidt addressed AI’s effects during a graduation speech.

The technology’s potential applications in political messaging, entertainment, and military operations have generated concerns from government officials and even Pope Leo XIV.

While numerous job cuts have occurred at technology companies, the broader impact on America’s employment market remains uncertain. Recent months have shown robust job creation across the U.S. economy.

DEMOCRATS MORE WORRIED

Democratic voters show greater AI skepticism compared to Republicans, reflecting party demographics where Democrats draw more college-educated supporters while Republicans have gained working-class voters since President Donald Trump’s emergence. Among Democrats, 61% expressed worry about AI threatening household employment, versus 47% of Republicans.

The Reuters/Ipsos survey included 4,531 American adults nationwide, with results carrying a 2 percentage point margin of error.

Jennifer Schalhoub, a 62-year-old freelance writer from Little Ferry, New Jersey, recently lost her position writing advocacy letters to government officials for policy issues, a job loss she believes may be connected to AI’s growth.

“AI is taking over because people care less and less about the quality of the work that gets produced,” Schalhoub said.

Artificial intelligence gained national attention in 2022 when OpenAI, a prominent AI developer, introduced ChatGPT, a public-facing tool that responds to user inquiries similarly to humans and created a new internet search method that immediately challenged Google’s parent company Alphabet.

Anthropic, another major AI firm, has rapidly expanded its corporate client base, including through sales of its computer programming assistant Claude Code. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have generated significant Wall Street interest with their public stock offering plans.

The polling found college graduates report higher AI usage rates, with 50% saying they use it regularly, compared to 34% of non-degree holders and 40% overall.

About 73% of Americans expressed concern about expanding AI use, representing a slight increase from 68% who shared that worry in a 2023 Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Lauren Hayes, a clinical psychologist in Washington state, said she became worried after several clients mentioned consulting AI between therapy appointments for anxiety help.

“I don’t believe that artificial intelligence is able to have the nuance that a person has,” said Hayes.

Solar energy reached a historic benchmark in the United States, outpacing coal in electricity generation for the first time during May, according to new research released Wednesday.

Information from global energy research organization Ember, alongside findings from the Solar Energy Industries Association and Wood Mackenzie analytics company, reveals solar’s continued expansion despite current federal energy policies. During May, solar contributed 12.8% of the country’s electricity supply while coal provided 12.2%, marking coal’s fourth-lowest monthly percentage on record.

“For years solar power has risen in the U.S. electricity mix,” said Nicolas Fulghum, senior energy and data analyst at Ember. “At the same time, coal power has lost its status, first as the largest source in the U.S. mix, and then gradually over the years has fallen even further.”

May also marked solar’s rise to become the nation’s third-largest electricity source, trailing only natural gas and nuclear power, according to Fulghum. Coal production reached its lowest monthly level ever in April and showed only slight improvement in May, enabling solar’s growing output to surpass coal generation, he explained.

Power generation involves transforming various energy sources — including fossil fuels, renewable materials and nuclear fuel — into electrical energy. Coal, oil and natural gas combustion for electricity releases carbon dioxide, which traps atmospheric heat and contributes to global warming. Solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric and nuclear sources produce no carbon emissions.

Following approximately twenty years of stable electricity usage nationwide, power demand is rising to support artificial intelligence systems, expand domestic manufacturing and electrify transportation and heating systems. Fulghum anticipates additional months where solar generation will exceed coal before permanently overtaking it annually within several years.

These achievements demonstrate that solar “has staying power” during a period of reduced federal renewable energy support, he noted.

Wind and solar technologies have previously combined to exceed coal generation, and wind alone has outperformed coal during spring seasons when wind conditions intensify. Ember obtains its hourly and monthly statistics from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Worldwide, renewable electricity production is expanding rapidly. Renewable sources will become the dominant global energy provider, accounting for nearly 45% of electricity generation by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.

Last week, President Donald Trump unveiled a strategy to revitalize the declining U.S. coal sector by allocating nearly $700 million to support coal-powered facilities and coal exports. During a White House announcement, Trump stated that “coal’s a great business,” and that “in terms of power, there’s really nothing like it.”

Martin Pochtaruk, CEO and founder of Canadian-based solar panel manufacturer Heliene, said Trump can say that coal is coming back, but investors will invest their money in whatever brings the best return. And for power generation that is solar, making it the fastest-growing fuel, he added.

A White House spokeswoman defended the administration’s overall energy policies, saying they were geared toward strengthening the country’s security.

“The President has reversed the Left’s devastating policies, saved the American coal industry, prevented the retirement of more than 17 gigawatts of power, and saved lives during heightened demand periods,” Taylor Rogers said in a statement.

While President Donald Trump works to halt the coal industry’s downturn, solar has remained the primary source for new electricity capacity for five consecutive years, according to SEIA. SEIA and Wood Mackenzie reported that solar and battery storage represented virtually all energy infrastructure constructed during the first quarter, comprising 91% of new generating capacity.

The current administration has halted solar and wind developments, enacted policies that hindered clean energy approval and construction processes, and ended $7 billion in funding designated for affordable solar energy initiatives nationwide.

“As power demand skyrockets, political and regulatory attacks are slowing down the exact resources we rely on,” Darren Van’t Hof, interim president and CEO of SEIA, said in a statement. “Impeding the only sector that is actively building new power is a reckless gamble that will only drive electricity bills higher.”

Multiple organizations filed lawsuits against the Environmental Protection Agency regarding the cancellation of the Solar for All program. A district court dismissed the case last week citing lack of jurisdiction. The plaintiffs have another filing pending in the Court of Federal Claims.

In a ruling Saturday, a federal judge struck down guidance from the Internal Revenue Service restricting tax credits for wind and solar projects.

President Donald Trump has attributed rising energy costs to renewable sources like wind and solar power. However, energy experts indicate recent price increases stem from increasing demand, deteriorating infrastructure and more severe weather patterns intensified by climate change. Most recently, the war in Iran that Trump launched has also led to a spike in energy costs.

States that supported Trump in the 2024 election represented 74% of all solar installations during the first quarter of 2026, with Texas, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Arizona and Mississippi among the top ten states for new solar development, SEIA reported. The nation now surpasses 6 million total installations across all solar categories, including large-scale arrays, commercial systems, community solar and residential rooftop installations.

Johanna Neumann, at the Environment America Research and Policy Center, said it’s “good news for our health and our planet that solar continues to grow,” and also, not surprising.

“Today we can harness solar more affordably than any other energy source. It’s scalable. And it’s also our most abundant renewable energy source,” said Neumann, senior director of the center’s campaign for 100% renewable energy. “So I think it’s hard to keep the lid on a good idea, especially if the economics are tilting in your favor as well, which they are in the case of solar.”

Environment America’s renewable energy dashboard shows that 32 U.S. states generated at least 10% of their retail electricity sales from solar, wind and geothermal energy last year, compared to 18 states in 2016. Clean energy in the South is booming, particularly in Florida, Arkansas and Mississippi, Neumann said.

“I think there is a misconception in the United States that clean energy is something for the coasts and liberal cities,” she said. “The true story of renewable energy is a 50-state story.”

Alphabet’s Google Cloud reported on Tuesday that several customers in India were facing sporadic network service interruptions following a blaze at an external data center that necessitated an emergency shutdown of network infrastructure.

The cloud computing division explained that the fire prompted an emergency power shutdown at the third-party facility, cutting off a local connection point in Delhi and diminishing network capacity throughout the metropolitan region.

NASA announced Tuesday the selection of four astronauts who will crew the upcoming Artemis III mission, featuring three Americans and one Italian astronaut for a complex orbital demonstration scheduled for next year.

The space agency chose U.S. astronauts Andre Douglas, Frank Rubio, and Randy Bresnik, along with Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano from the European Space Agency, for the Artemis III mission set to launch in 2027, though no specific launch date has been determined.

This four-person mission will conduct the first space trials of lunar landing vehicles developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, executing a complex docking demonstration with three spacecraft in Earth’s orbit.

MISSION COMMANDER RANDY BRESNIK

At 58 years old, Bresnik became part of NASA’s astronaut program in 2004. His space experience includes three missions totaling approximately 150 days beyond Earth’s atmosphere, with 32 hours conducting spacewalks.

A former U.S. Marine Corps colonel and test pilot, Bresnik brings more than 7,000 flight hours across 95 different types of aircraft to his role.

PILOT LUCA PARMITANO

The 49-year-old Italian astronaut Parmitano became part of the European Space Agency’s astronaut program in 2009 and has completed two space missions. He represents the first European Space Agency astronaut assigned to an Artemis mission and becomes the second non-American crew member, following Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen who participated in Artemis II.

Parmitano’s participation represents Italy’s continued collaboration in NASA’s Artemis program, as the space agency’s international partners seek expanded involvement.

MISSION SPECIALIST FRANK RUBIO

The 50-year-old Rubio established a new record for the longest single spaceflight by an American astronaut, spending 371 days in space during his inaugural mission.

Rubio achieved this milestone in 2023 when his planned six-month stay aboard the International Space Station extended to nearly a year after the Russian vehicle that transported him developed a leak while attached to the station. Following months of waiting for Russia to deliver a replacement spacecraft, he returned to Earth in early 2023.

Beyond his astronaut duties, Rubio serves as a certified family physician and flight surgeon.

MISSION SPECIALIST ANDRE DOUGLAS

The upcoming Artemis III mission will mark Douglas’s inaugural space journey. The 40-year-old Miami native joined NASA’s astronaut program in 2021.

Douglas brings extensive academic credentials, including multiple master’s degrees in engineering fields and a doctorate in systems engineering from George Washington University.

Prior to his NASA career, Douglas worked with the U.S. Coast Guard as a naval architect and contributed to various NASA initiatives while serving as a professional staff member at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab.

SpaceX leadership has informed investors that the company intends to begin initial testing of space-based artificial intelligence computing systems by late 2027, according to two individuals who participated in investor meetings conducted before the company’s public stock offering.

This timeline represents an acceleration from the “as early as 2028” schedule mentioned in the company’s IPO documentation for deploying this technology.

The space-based computing initiative represents a key component of SpaceX’s long-term expansion strategy presented to potential investors. In its public offering materials, the company states it is “the only company with a commercially viable path to building orbital AI compute at scale.”

The company has sought regulatory approval to deploy as many as 1 million satellites designed to function as data centers in space.

Two investor briefings conducted prior to the IPO, both including President Gwynne Shotwell and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen, featured SpaceX leadership presenting a timeline to start showcasing orbital computing technology in 2027, based on accounts from the two sources with knowledge of these discussions. Both individuals attended a Goldman Sachs session, with one also present at an additional meeting.

Though the IPO paperwork indicated orbital data center launches might commence as early as 2028, it did not differentiate between test missions and full commercial operations.

Shotwell and Johnsen, who have been conducting meetings with prominent investment firms to secure a $75 billion capital raise through the company’s IPO seeking a $1.75 trillion market value, characterized the early launches as proof-of-concept systems designed to verify the technology prior to any wider commercial deployment, sources reported.

One source suggested the IPO timeline gives leadership flexibility for possible setbacks in Starship rocket development or satellite production.

SpaceX has not yet provided a response to requests for comment regarding the investor event that included multiple investors and fund managers.

Trading of SpaceX shares is set to commence on the Nasdaq this Friday using the ticker SPCX, with the IPO priced at a target of $135 per share.

The Starship rocket, which features complete reusability and serves as the foundation for the company’s orbital computing ambitions, continues to lag years behind the original schedule set by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and has not yet proven the quick turnaround reusability required to make massive deployment financially feasible.

While Musk has experienced project delays across his various companies, many involve complex challenges that were especially hard to resolve, noted Michael Monaghan, partner and portfolio manager at Founder ETFs, who did not attend the investor meetings.

“I think that orbital data centers, while a difficult problem, have some bounds on it, which to me gives greater confidence that the timelines laid out will be hit,” Monaghan said.

In a video published Monday, Musk stated that constructing orbital AI data centers does not present a major engineering obstacle since much of the necessary technology is already present in the company’s existing Starlink satellite constellation.

The initial AI satellite version will likely incorporate Nvidia processors, and the spacecraft’s computing capacity would match that of an Nvidia GB300 rack, according to the CEO.

Colombia has implemented groundbreaking legislation mandating comprehensive cattle monitoring to ensure deforestation-free beef supply chains, marking the nation as the first tropical forest country to establish such extensive tracking requirements nationwide, according to environmental organizations.

The new legislation mandates that government departments and private sector entities combine livestock monitoring, property ownership records, and forest protection surveillance to identify animals connected to woodland destruction and block their entry into commercial markets.

Advocates believe this legislation could address a primary driver of Amazon deforestation in Colombia, where livestock operations have historically been connected to illegal land seizures and forest clearing for grazing areas.

This legislation emerges as Colombia works to halt years of woodland destruction, largely caused by livestock operations expanding into forested territories. Advocates argue it could eliminate existing gaps that have permitted cattle from illegally cleared property — including within conservation zones and national parks — to access legal markets and ultimately reach retail stores and international buyers.

Susanne Breitkopf, director of forest campaigns at the Environmental Investigation Agency U.S., an environmental watchdog that has investigated deforestation linked to Colombia’s cattle industry, indicated the legislation could serve as a blueprint for other tropical forest countries.

“It is a victory for forests, for the communities that protect them, and for consumers who demand that the beef they purchase does not contribute to deforestation and illicit economies,” Breitkopf said.

The measure also comes as governments and corporations encounter increasing demands from global markets to verify that products like beef are not connected to forest destruction. Environmental advocates state that monitoring systems are becoming essential for accessing certain international markets and could assist officials in better detecting land seizures and illegal forest clearing through cutting or burning woodland.

Colombia has experienced the loss of approximately 3.3 million hectares (8.2 million acres) of forest — an area comparable to Belgium’s size — according to organizations supporting the legislation, with the issue especially severe in the Amazon area.

Brazil’s Amazonian state of Para has implemented monitoring requirements for livestock producers and pledged to track individual animals across the supply network, but environmental organizations say Colombia’s legislation extends further by establishing a comprehensive national legal structure.

A 2025 analysis by the Environmental Investigation Agency found that hundreds of thousands of cattle were transported between 2020 and 2024 from municipalities overlapping national parks.

The legislation resulted from years of advocacy by environmental organizations, researchers and lawmakers who contended that inadequate supervision permitted cattle connected to illegal deforestation to move through Colombia’s fragmented supply network.

Natalia Katixa Escobar, a researcher at Dejusticia, a Colombian legal and policy research center that has studied links between cattle ranching and deforestation, indicated the legislation helps connect environmental and agricultural oversight that were previously separate.

“One of its first achievements is that it creates a bridge between environmental and agricultural policy,” she said. “The control mechanisms associated with cattle ranching and cattle traceability had no environmental perspective.”

Colombia’s environment Minister Irene Vélez Torres told The Associated Press the government hopes the measure will help distinguish producers who operate responsibly from those linked to forest destruction.

“This means it will become increasingly difficult for the destruction of forests or economies associated with illegal activities to hide behind seemingly legitimate supply chains,” Vélez said.

Within six months, the government must establish programs to help suppliers comply with the new requirements, create a certification system for deforestation-free products and provide funding to strengthen monitoring systems in active deforestation hot spots.

Within a year, authorities must regulate procedures governing the country’s cattle identification and traceability systems and establish due diligence requirements for deforestation-free cattle ranching.

By the end of the second year, slaughterhouses, meat processors, cattle auctions, traders and live cattle exporters will be required to implement due diligence policies and best practices aimed at ensuring their supply chains are free from deforestation.

The legislation also requires the gradual integration of government databases, allowing officials to compare information on land tenure, cattle ownership and forest loss for the first time.

Supporters say those measures could significantly improve authorities’ ability to identify cattle raised on recently deforested land and prevent them from entering legal markets.

But the law’s success will depend largely on implementation, including whether the government can adequately fund new systems and enforce the rules in remote regions where illegal deforestation remains widespread.

If fully implemented, supporters say, the law could become a model for other tropical forest nations seeking to protect forests while maintaining access to increasingly demanding international markets.

“The real test will be what happens on the ground,” Escobar said, noting that while the law could improve oversight and information-sharing, reducing deforestation will also depend on governance and enforcement in remote regions of the Amazon.

“Whether it will significantly reduce deforestation in the Amazon remains to be seen,” she said.