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Apocryphal tales of its meals causing the runs have plagued Taco Bell since time immemorial. But this latest parasitic outbreak is something else entirely.As the Washington Post reports, federal and state authorities are investigating whether the fast food chain is behind the outbreak of explosive diarrhea cases across the country — further cementing its scatological legacy.The illness, caused by the cyclosporiasis parasite, has sickened as many as 5,100 people across the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Michigan, which appears to be the epicenter of the outbreak, over 3,700 people have been infected, state authorities…

Twelve nurses in New York City were laid off on Sunday and replaced with AI software, according to their union — a move that comes not long after nurses went on strike and fought for safeguards against AI.One of the laid off workers, Marilyn Shuler, had worked at Montefiore hospital in the Bronx as a utilization nurse for 39 years before suddenly losing her job. Utilization nurses review patient charts to show that their care is medically necessary so that an insurance company will cover it.“I’ve always, always taken so much pride in the organization that I’ve worked for all…

Shares of Elon Musk’s SpaceX are scraping by at record low levels this week, struggling to find any renewed enthusiasm from wary investors.The stock is hovering just below $136, a hair above its original IPO price of $135, and well below its opening price of $150 on the day it went public last month. Shares are down almost nine percent over the last five days alone, and are just shy of 40 percent down compared to their all-time high of $225.The slumping value of Musk’s rocket company has been a brutal wake-up call for some particularly daring investors, who went…

Apocalyptic footage shows a Canadian train crew trapped in their locomotive as it’s devoured by a wildfire.Through the engine’s windows, the towering inferno can be seen raging through the treeline just a few feet away from the unmoving train, the world around them rendered completely orange. Some of the flames come close to licking the glass, as the wildfire blows across the tracks.“This could potentially overtake us here, this has gotten a little scary,” one worker filming the video said, sounding surprisingly nonchalant. “Holy s***.”“Y’all need to hurry up here. Like, seriously, we’re encased in flames now,” the cameraman adds.

Many moviegoers this summer are looking forward to Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated film “The Odyssey.” But have you considered that you could watch a pure AI slop adaptation of the Greek epic instead?Enter “Odysseus: The Fall,” a fully AI-generated movie from the startup Fountain 0. At 135 minutes long, it will certainly test your patience as it hurls screensaver-grade images at you which look cribbed from better movies, creating the impression that this is really a generic amalgamation of other people’s ideas about what Greek mythology should look like, rather than the creators’ own.The director, Ash Koosha, told Hollywood Reporter…

There’s light pollution — and then there are giant orbital space mirrors that blot out the night sky.On July 9, the US Federal Communications Commission approved the construction and launch of a mirror satellite that would bend our star’s illuminating rays to our will from low Earth orbit. The company behind the ambitious venture, Reflect Orbital, claims that its prototype could be used to reflect sunlight down onto dark patches of the Earth, allowing huge solar panel installations to continue generating electricity after nightfall and provide illumination during emergencies.“We’re trying to build something that could replace fossil fuels and really power…

Anthropic is doing what Anthropic does best: putting on its most concerned face so it can convince you they’re the good guys in the industry.Last week, the world’s most valuable AI startup revealed a new commercial that took an unorthodox approach to promoting its technology. Rather than diving straight into bubbly optimism, it starts with a series of grim images as we hear voiceovers from different speakers ask some hard-hitting questions about AI. You couldn’t blame someone for thinking they were watching a PSA. It starts with a burning house — which always bodes well. When someone asks, “Can AI be…

These days, corporations aren’t just using AI as an excuse to justify layoffs, but are increasingly turning to their chatbots for advice deciding who to fire.As Reuters reports, 26 Meta employees filed a lawsuit accusing the company of using an internal AI platform to select targets for the thousands of jobs cut earlier this year. Per the suit, Meta used its AI to cull workers based on opaque productivity metrics and large language model (LLM) token usage, a move which disproportionately targeted people with disabilities, and those who had taken maternity or medical leave — literally adding insult to injury.The…

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has long garnered a reputation for experiencing horrifically racist meltdowns, enabling child abuse, and doxxing users’ home addresses.It should come as no surprise, then, that its supposed “translation” is a piece of work, too. In April, the almost-trillionaire’s social media platform X instated automatic AI translations for all of its users — and the results certainly speak for themselves.As writer and author Parker Molloy pointed out in a recent post on Bluesky, the Grok feature is “taking some interesting liberties” with people’s otherwise sincere posts.Screenshots show how Grok completely botched translations by coming up with…

Across the United States, lawmakers are increasingly caught between two competing pressures: the massive investment flowing into the tech industry to build AI data centers, and a growing, bipartisan backlash against those same facilities, not to mention the massive tech corporations funding them.In New York, governor Kathy Hochul is giving in to the former — at least on paper — by announcing a one-year, state-wide ban on new AI data center construction for facilities with an electrical capacity of 50 megawatts and up.It’s the first time a US state has imposed such a moratorium, highlighting persistent concerns over the rampant…