Author: publisher

Since riding Donald Trump’s coattails to power, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has taken his haphazard anti-vaccine views and enshrined them as a core tenet of US health policy.According to 16 current and former health officials who spoke to Reuters, RFK Jr has taken much more drastic measures to push his anti-vaccine agenda than was previously known.Speaking on condition of anonymity, two officials told the news agency that RFK approached National Institute of Health director Jay Bhattacharya earlier this year with a proposal to spend up to $5 billion in tax dollars to establish links between vaccines and autism.As Reuters notes,…

Meta patented AI tech that constantly analyzes your voice and surroundings in order to detect your emotional state. Finally, exactly what we were all asking for: Meta being granted constant access to our offline lives.As first caught by Patentlyze, a patent published on July 2 describes a system that records all the user’s “audible communications” and combines it with “contextual factors” like “time of day, location, user activity, or digital interaction.” Audio may be “transcribed, and an emotional-state machine learning model may interpret verbal and nonverbal cues to determine emotional indicators.”In other words, the system listens to you and everything…

Unsure what to do with your rancid old hot dog factory? Apparently, the answer is simple: turn it into a fusion reactor facility.As TechCrunch reports, a company called Realta Fusion is building a fusion reactor inside an old Oscar Mayer hot dog factory in Wisconsin. The refurbished facility is called Forge, and according to Realta cofounder and CEO Kieran Furlong, it’s due to begin operations by 2029 to test whether fusion reactors can actually make a profit by generating more electricity than they require.“From sausages to fusion,” Furlong told TechCrunch, touting Realta as Wisconsin’s nuclear “state champion.”The company chose the…

Despite a financial situation more reminiscent of a Ponzi scheme than a technological revolution, the data center boom is continuing at a rapid pace, bringing novel kinds of biological contamination, ear-splitting noise, and unprecedented levels of pollution to communities across the US.Those environmental burdens also come with a financial one: skyrocketing demand for electricity, which is increasing the cost of utilities for renters and homeowners alike.According to a report by Monitoring Analytics, an independent monitor for the largest transmission company in the US, PJM, data center demand is expected to drive over $23 billion in customer price increases by 2028.…

Look, dating in the 2020s sucks. The apps are bad, people are rude, and the etiquette of it all seems to be evolving at the speed of sound. Yet for all the downsides, there’s nothing that can’t be made 100 times worse with the addition of AI slop.For better or worse, that’s exactly what Hinge founder Justin McLeod has in mind for his latest dating app, “Overtone.”First spotted by TechCrunch, McLeod announced an $18 million round of funding on the company’s blog. While that’s a hefty chunk of change for any startup, confidence from venture capitalists isn’t exactly shocking considering…

Like a tornado descending from the heavens, data centers are tearing through homes across the US, roaring like a jet engine, leaving schools without power, and decimating entire communities unlucky enough to stand in their path.Case in point, one Georgia family has been forced to sell their home, after the state utility concern decided it needed to build a new transmission line to connect new AI data centers.As reported by CBS, the Brown family of Coweta County, Georgia decided to sell their home to Georgia Power, rather than risk seizure by eminent domain.Ansley Brown, whose parents raised her in the…

Meta executives claimed that a controversial facial recognition feature didn’t “exist.” Fast forward a few weeks later, and they’re describing the feature in public — and in detail.In June, a Wired investigation revealed that Meta had quietly infused unreleased facial recognition tech into its “AI Glasses,” the tech giant’s chatbot and camera-equipped smart glasses. While the feature, dubbed NameTag, was inaccessible to consumers, it was designed to register faces encountered by Meta glasses wearers “into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and check each one against faceprints stored on the user’s phone,” according to the magazine.It’s safe to say that…

From the factories of Detroit to the postal warehouses in Shenzhen, a new kind of worker is clocking in — and the humans it’s replacing aren’t going down without a fight.In late June, thousands of rank-and-file workers in the Korean Metal Workers’ Union voted to authorize a strike in response to Hyundai’s announcement it would deploy over 25,000 humanoid robots across its factories.Weeks later, that strike is slowing production at a Hyundai factory down to a trickle. According to the Wall Street Journal, the workers began a partial strike after negotiations broke down last week. Starting on Monday, workers refused…

Fresh off a month that saw all but five states mired in severe drought, the US is reeling from multiple crises of national proportions.First, there’s the record-breaking heat dome which is currently baking most of the continental US. According to the Guardian, over 100 million Americans are currently living under extreme heat warnings, forecasted to persist well into the weekend.At the same time, the country is being smoked out by dozens of wildfires across North America, a situation the heat wave isn’t exactly helping. On top of that, smoke from over 800 blazes in Canada is helping choke out the…

Outer space: it’s cold, it’s dark, it’s mostly empty. And it’s occasionally very sweet.Astronomers peering into the heart of our galaxy have spotted traces of erythrulose, the same kind of sugar that’s found in raspberries, kiwis, and other fruits, speckled in a giant gas cloud.The delectable discovery, detailed in a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, is the first time sugar, a key ingredient for life, has been detected in interstellar space.The detection “tells us that these sugars are more common than we previously thought,” study lead author Izaskun Jiménez-Serra, an astrochemist at Spain’s Centre for Astrobiology, told…