Science

The study (pdf) analyzed 37.5 million de-identified Copilot conversations to show patterns in how people interacted with AI, but are we that surprised there’s a spike in existential questions around 2AM?

The Trump administration has taken down content about the human causes of global warming — greenhouse gases from fossil fuels — from the Environmental Protection Agency website, part of a larger purge of science-backed information on federal websites.

SpaceX is planning to go public at a valuation that would make it the biggest listing of all time, Bloomberg reports. “The Elon Musk-led company is targeting a valuation of about $1.5 trillion for the entire company” and while they’re saying they plan for next year, it’s a Musk company so you know what that means: “the timing could slip until 2027.” SpaceX expects $15 billion in 2025 revenue, and $22 billion to $24 billion in 2026, mostly due to Starlink.

Most Brits are used to using Google Maps for restaurant recommendations, but its opaque algorithm can reward chains and existing hits, making it hard for new independent spots to get traction. This map tries to fix that, highlighting restaurants underrated by the algorithm because they don’t get the footfall.

They used 30 times more electricity on average than other models according to research by the AI Energy Score project that included responses to 1,000 written prompts. “We should be smarter about the way that we use AI ... Choosing the right model for the right task is important,” Hugging Face research scientist Sasha Luccioni tells Bloomberg.

On Friday, the handpicked CDC advisory group, containing several known vaccine critics, scrapped the three-decade-old recommendation to vaccinate all babies for hepatitis B at birth, instead delaying the recommended schedule to 2 months, if at all, for babies whose mothers test negative for the disease.

After Simon Fondrie-Teitler called out the Dekoda health tracker’s incorrect use of the term end-to-end encryption because Kohler does have access to the data it collects, the company has updated the toilet cam’s product pages to now say that user data is “encrypted in transit and at rest.”

The city’s lawsuit, against the likes of Coca-Cola, Nestle, and Kraft, accuses them of selling foods that they knew to be “dangerous for human consumption,” saddling both cities and citizens with “enormous costs” thanks to ensuing health issues.

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that launching solar-powered satellites like Project Suncatcher into space in a bid to alleviate power consumption concerns will be viewed as “a more normal way” to build AI data centers within the next decade or so.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) completed its safety evaluation for the Kemmerer Power Station in Wyoming and determined that “there are no safety aspects that would preclude issuing the construction permit” for the plant. The NRC says it could take up to another 18 months to make a licensing decision on the advanced reactor.

We’re listening to testimony from one of the responding officers who arrested Luigi Mangione in a Pennsylvania McDonalds. The officer testified that Mangione’s medical face mask made him stand out as the person who was reported as being suspicious.

The tech industry “needs to earn the social permission to consume energy” for AI data centers he says in an interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner. Nadella also called for faster permitting for new power infrastructure and “innovation” in energy efficiency and generation.

Now, the independent market monitor for the northeast’s PJM Interconnection is asking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to only allow large data centers to connect to the grid if there’s enough capacity available to serve them reliably. PJM is struggling to finalize a plan to cope with surging data center growth.

AI-generated images of food attached to nonsense recipes and Google AI Overview remixes of actual recipes are taking a huge toll on traffic for recipe bloggers. But home cooks are also wasting time and money following recipes that claim to be for cookies but only yield melted pools of cloyingly sweet dough. According to Bloomberg:

The goal is to speed scientific breakthroughs on key priorities including meeting soaring energy demand that’s raising electricity costs for Americans.

Boing Boing plunged the depths of Etsy to find this 3D-printed replica of the Chernobyl power plant, complete with a ruined reactor that lights up and spews “smoke” when you use it as a diffuser or humidifier.

The moss isn’t quite as hardy as the reigning king of extremophiles, the tardigrade, but it put up an impressive showing in an experiment where scientists exposed sporophytes (the reproductive structures that produce spores) to the harsh vacuum of space for 283 days. After crunching the numbers, they believe the moss could survive for around 5,600 days, or a little over 15 years in space and still survive and reproduce. According to the press release: