Futurism

Revelers celebrating US independence day in San Francisco over the weekend were stopped in their tracks as an untold number of Waymo robotaxis stalled, exacerbating the city’s horrible holiday gridlock. According to NBC News, several Waymos had to be towed out of busy roadways after their batteries died on one of the city’s worst traffic days of the year so far. On top of intense fog and significant public transit slowdowns, travelers had to bob and weave past the bricked electric

Earlier this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella proudly touted his company’s $7.3 billion Fairwater data center in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, as the “world’s most powerful AI data center,” connecting “hundreds of thousands” of power-hungry chips “into a single seamless cluster.” However, local residents aren’t even remotely as enthusiastic about the facility cropping up in their neighborhood. Last week, three residents of the village of Stu

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 Trum

Throughout his second stint in the Oval Office, Donald Trump has raked in over a billion dollars on the backs of his most loyal acolytes. Some of his grifts harken back to the Trump cons of yesteryear, like the spectacularly cringeworthy Trump Mobile smartphone, a “made in America” device that was, predictably, produced entirely in China. Most of the president’s most successful pulls, however, are predicated on either the cryptocurrency market, where winner-take-all scams ar

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 s

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.” The disease Johnson says he was diagnosed with

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

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

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

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 b

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

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 t

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 cu

Set foot in Dowagiac, a sleepy town in Southwest Michigan, and you’ll immediately notice two things that stand out in the otherwise rustic surroundings: a massive 30 megawatt data center — and the constant ear piercing noise it emits. No one knows this better than the Marjorie and Billy Finn, a married couple who live right in front of the sprawling complex. The constant hum is like a jet engine, Billy Finn told MLive. Using his own decibel meter in a video taken by the newspaper, he me

Do you like kicking back and watching some sports after a long day? Do you like AI? Would you like more AI-generated content in your sports? You might not have much of a choice — at least if Itai Epstein, vice president of new ventures at WSC Sports, has anything to say about it. At the Microsoft AI Tour Tel Aviv 2026, Calcalist reports, Epstein bragged that his company is blazing new territory by churning out World Cup-themed AI slop for sports broadcasters all around the world. “Wi

Last month, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta became embroiled in a major controversy after Wired found that it had discreetly included facial recognition tech in the software of its lineup of popular smart glasses. The camera-equipped spectacles had already become a privacy lightning rod, with users secretly recording strangers, often without their consent — earning the spectacles the pejorative nickname of “pervert glasses.” Now, in addition to their already steep price, Meta&#821

Researchers are starting to get a closer view of the various gray-market peptides making the rounds on the back of the “looksmaxxing” trend, and it isn’t looking good. In a new interview with Axios, Anthony Rossi, a dermatological surgeon at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, warned that the substance “Melanotan II” isn’t exactly the best thing you can put in your body. Also known as the “Barbie drug,” melanotan II is an unregulated, syn

One woman is dead after a wayward Tesla barreled into the Urbane Cafe, a strip mall restaurant in Simi Valley, California. The driver of the Tesla, identified as a 64-year-old woman, was taken to the hospital for minor injuries, ABC News reported. The woman was riding with four juvenile passengers, one of whom also had to be taken to the hospital. At least five others were injured when the Tesla blew through the cafe’s outdoor patio area. “We’re still trying to determine

Gone are the days of university freshmen reading classical philosophers like Plato or contemporary pedagogues like Ta-Nehisi Coates. These days, incoming college students are lucky if they can get through Judy Blume’s “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.” According to a new “Survey of Adult Skills” conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development — a forum for 38 high-income, predominantly Western countries — a not insignificant number of adul

Meta conducted a secretive program that directed hundreds of contractors to pose as teenagers while bombarding its competitors’ AI models with disturbing prompts ranging from suicide to cannibalism. Internally known as “Cannes,” the project, run by Meta contractor Covalen, targeted OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Character.AI chatbots using throwaway under-18 accounts, Wired reports. This was seemingly done to stress test the models, with the contract