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Despite having all the resources in the world to offer their offspring a high-quality education, a cohort of wealthy entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are choosing to educate them using AI instead.As the Wall Street Journal reports, a private school network called Alpha School is luring in rich parents across the country, offering them an eyebrow-raising education that includes hours of AI-based tutoring — for a searing $75,000 a year. It also has a decidedly political tilt. The Trump administration has heavily promoted the private school network, which “rejects DEI” and avoids discussions of “hot-button social issues.”The use of AI in…

With public anger at AI data centers boiling over, all it takes is one bad neighbor to get every data center in town locked out.That’s the story unfolding in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where local officials are revoking waste-dumping privileges for every data center campus connected to municipal water services. As Cowboy State Daily reported, the Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities has rolled out a sweeping ban on fill-and-flush discharge, the process in which data centers flood their cooling systems with water before powering up for the first time.That decision came after one bad actor, the Meta-affiliated data center company Goat Systems…

Bryan Johnson, in his quest for eternal youth, has been dealt a mortal blow.Last week, the longevity-obsessed tech investor revealed that he had been diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disease in which his “stomach is eating itself.”But, true to his mission, Johnson believes he can biohack his way out of this gut-punch, too.“I’m going to try and solve it,” he wrote on X. “Will share all.”

Mysterious metallic orbs washed up on a secluded beach in Australia, and experts say they likely fell from a spacecraft.Locals called the police after discovering three large metal orbs on Friday. A total of six were eventually found, with local news outlet 7 News reporting that police warned the public that the items may contain hazardous chemicals. Emergency responders approached the orbs in hazmat suits, establishing a 164-foot safety perimeter around them before eventually declaring them “safe.”Meanwhile, the Australian Space Agency confirmed to The Guardian that it’s helping to determine where the strange orbs may have come from. Experts say…

Scientists turned a bunch of cockroaches into remote-controllable cyborgs — and then built them little scuba suits so they can swim underwater, transforming them into powerful amphibian troopers.Rest assured, they (the scientists, not the roaches) aren’t intent on world domination. Instead, they propose that one day a swarm of these biological drones could be used to poke around dangerous environments, such as disaster areas — or, even more ambitiously, other planets. They published a new study about the project this week in the journal Nature Communications.“The ultimate goal is to [take this technology to] space,” study coauthor Hirotaka Sato Nanyang…

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk maintains an extremely close relationship with Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr.Under Carr’s leadership, Musk’s rocket company has effectively been given carte blanche in its efforts to roll out its orbital Starlink broadband service to more Americans, a glaring conflict of interest that could have profound implications for society.That’s despite concerns over thousands or even millions of satellites cluttering our planet’s already extremely busy orbit and the environmentally damaging rocket launches that send them up.And the space-based network is already starting to experience some major strains — as some experts have long predicted. It’s a lesson…

Over the past five decades, China has planted 66 billion trees in a massive wall that spans the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts. This reforestation effort intended to stop the deserts’ spread is working — but, it turns out, with a surprising twist.In a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, researchers found that the trees planted in the so-called “Great Green Wall” appear to grow faster than trees in natural forests, possibly because they respond to the rising CO2 levels in our atmosphere better.Still, it’s mysterious. Study lead author Yuhang Luo, a landscape ecologist at Peking University in…

Government officials in Alabama are giving an old riverboat casino a from Indiana a new life — not floating down the state’s copious waterways, but at the bottom of the sea.Alabama-based news channel WPMI detailed the unusual plan to scuttle the riverboat, called the Argosy VI, off the coast of Orange Beach, a small city roughly an hour south east of Mobile. According to the outlet, the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources purchased the Argosy VI with plans to turn it into an artificial reef.Earlier this week, teams of workers gutted the interior of the vessel, clearing slot…

A comprehensive review found that mRNA vaccines — a popular target of viral vaccine conspiracy theories and medical misinformation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic — are a resoundingly safe and effective feat of modern medicine.Published this week in the journal The Lancet, the review confirmed that mRNA vaccines are robustly effective at preventing the spread of infectious diseases like COVID, and show incredible promise for treating diseases like cancer as well. It was conducted by an international team of researchers based in Canada, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and took the drug’s manufacturing, clinical trials,…

We’re officially in an El Niño year, and as predicted, it’s a scorcher. Record temperatures are already being recorded around the world, from the streets of New York to the icy shelves of the Antarctic. Even the surface waters of the world’s waterways are under unprecedented stress from the heat, with the average global ocean temperature breaking the all-time record high for the month of June.The human impact, as predicted, is already staggering. While the heat waves currently baking North America, South Asia, South America and Africa are sure to have their fair share of tragedy, early reporting on weather-related…