When you’re a scientist relying on government funding to conduct your research, and that government suddenly yoinks all your money in the name of “efficiency,” you have to get creative to keep the lights on.

Such has been the experience of Daniel Blumstein, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, renowned for his work on studying the ground-dwelling rodents known as marmots. After the Trump administration cancelled billions of dollars in federal research grants last year, he and his colleagues decided to start creating content dedicated to the charming mammals — on OnlyFans.

As SFGate reports, their account, called “OnlyMarms,” promises near-daily “unfiltered yellow-bellied marmot content from the Rockies.” Subscribing is free, but users can leave tips on the cute photos and videos they post, which goes towards funding the research. 

It’s a win for everyone: shy gooners have a convenient explanation for all the OnlyFans transactions in their bank accounts, and the scientists get to keep doing the work they’re doing. Thank you, marmots, for being so adorable.

“Sometimes I’m just posting the videos I think will get the most ‘aws,'” Emily Renkey, a student in Blumstein’s lab who started the account, told SFGate. “But my favorite is when I find footage of a particular behavior and I can use that to educate people.”

The Trump administration’s cost-cutting regime has crippled scientific research in the US. In efforts led by Elon Musk’s now defunct Department of Government Efficiency, it cancelled more than 1,700 grants worth some $1.4 billion at the National Science Foundation in 2025. In 2026, the NSF has so far awarded just a fraction of the $9 billion grant money it has typically distributed in recent years, and the White House has proposed slashing its budget by nearly half for the 2027 fiscal year. 

Many of the grant cancellations were clearly politically motivated, targeting research into climate change — and even research that simply contains the word “climate” — something Trump has called a “hoax.” Even more flagrantly, the administration recently admitted in court documents that it canceled research grants in certain states “based solely” on whether they supported Trump in the 2024 election.

Why marmot research ended up in the administration’s crosshairs is anyone’s guess, but it’s invaluable work. Blumstein and his colleagues have spent years closely tracking the charming rodents, forming what is one of the longest-running studies of free-living mammals in the world, according to SFGate.

These long-term projects ask “some of the most important questions in our time,” Blumstein said, providing our best window into studying evolution in real-time. But their value may not be immediately obvious to the people in charge of crunching the numbers. Historically, this hasn’t been a problem for Blumstein, as his program had received funding from the NSF for over a decade. But now, under the new regime, he’s applied to renew the grant three times, before the agency told him to stop applying at all.

“After the third time, our program officer told my colleague… that they will never fund us because they think we have too much data,” Blumstein told SFGate. “I don’t even know how to parse that sentence. It’s nuts.”

Blumstein’s marmot program, as it stands, is running on fumes. OnlyMarms has only brought in a few hundred dollars, and the lab is looking for more traditional sources of funding, too.

More on science funding: Trump Orders Construction of Powerful Quantum Computer

The post Scientists Forced to Go on OnlyFans After Their Funding Was Cut appeared first on Futurism.

When the United States ratified the 13th amendment in 1865, federal lawmakers very nearly outlawed slavery for good — but not entirely. Tucked within arguably the most important corner of the US constitution is a massive caveat: “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States” (emphasis added.)

In the 160-some years since that amendment, a quieter type of forced servitude has lived on in the US: prison labor. From the debt peonage of the post-Civil War reconstruction era to the privatized contracting of the 21st century, prison labor is a massive money maker, generating $11 billion worth of revenue in 2022 alone.

As horrifying a thought as it is, one of the companies still benefiting from the practice is in the news for another reason: spreading a gut-busting diarrhea parasite through mass-produced shredded lettuce in grocery stores and fast food outlets.

It turns out that Taylor Farms, the agricultural company widely believed to be behind the cyclospora outbreak currently raging throughout the US, is also heavily involved in modern-day forced labor.

In reporting from 2023 that was resurfaced this week on social media, the publication Prison Legal News revealed that Taylor Farms was contracting labor from the Arizona Department of Correction, Rehabilitation, and Reentry for the low, low price of just $4.75 an hour — far below the cost to pay a non-incarcerated worker the federal minimum wage. (And to be clear, that’s not the hourly wage paid to the inmate, which is capped at $1.50 in Arizona.)

Taylor Farms is just one firm involved in the practice in Arizona. Others include Hickman’s Egg Farms, NatureSweet, and Televerde, each of which contracted labor from Arizona DCRR’s for-profit arm, Arizona Correctional Industries. That company’s job is basically to churn out bulk goods for the state of Arizona, like license plates, though it also makes quite a bit of money selling the labor-hours of incarcerated people to private companies.

Worse yet, some of those incarcerated workers may have been here as non-citizens — meaning it would be illegal to employ them in the same low-wage jobs if they weren’t being held in detention. As Prison Legal noted at the time, at least 26 prisoners employed by these companies had been detained by ICE, meaning that outside of incarceration, hiring them would have been illegal. To put it bluntly: their status as prisoners was the only thing that made the arrangement legal.

In all, the DCRR told Prison Legal it had hired out 15,700 “Mexican nationals” between 2008 and 2023, though couldn’t say how many of those workers were undocumented immigrants.

As Ruben Reyes, director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association told the publication at the time: “I’m venturing a guess that a large majority of the people who are labeled a Mexican national by [DCRR] are unauthorized to work here.”

Put into context, the revelation is a horrifying twist in an already nauseating story of corporate greed and deregulation. Though the institution of slavery may have been formally abolished, its legacy lives on — fully embraced by the for-profit companies pumping our food supply full of parasites.

Taylor Farms didn’t respond to a request for comment.

More on incarceration: Prisoners Alarmed to Discover That a Startup Is Training an AI Based on Their Phone Calls

The post The Diarrhea Lettuce Company Has Been Linked to Forced Labor appeared first on Futurism.

There’s data center activism, fought with Facebook groups and petitions, and then there’s data center annihilation, fought with guided missile and suicide drones.

Recently, the Iranian military announced it had hit and damaged two Amazon data centers in the island country of Bahrain with a volley of cruise missiles.

After the attack, the Iranian state media outlet Tasnim published a partial statement from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, saying that the “IRGC Aerospace warriors… in response to the aggression and assault… by the child-killing American army on the under-construction and civilian facilities of DarKhoveyn, attacked and destroyed the central data infrastructure of the American company Amazon in Bahrain with several cruise missiles.”

Using images from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellites, Bloomberg confirmed an attack on the data center campus had taken place, though noted it’s difficult to say how bad the damage is (Amazon refused to comment on Bloomberg‘s reporting.)

“Analysis of Sentinel-2 images shows evidence of damage to both facilities, but does not provide insight into the extent of the damage,” Adam Farrar, Bloomberg‘s senior geoeconomics analyst said.

Overall, it marks the fourth such attack on a data center since the US began the war in February. Back in March, the IRGC announced a number of US tech companies as “Iran’s new targets,” including Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle. Now that the war is heating back up, it seems that they’re becoming targets yet again.

Militarily, it’s a logical move, as US tech companies have been integral to the American war effort. The Pentagon is using a host of AI models to gather intelligence and select military targets for annihilation, most notably the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school, which was destroyed in a triple-tap strike resulting in the deaths of over 120 school children, as well as parents and teachers.

Perhaps above all, it’s a statement to American president Donald Trump: the longer the hostilities linger, the more economic and technological havoc Iran is willing to unleash on the region.

More on Iran: The US Military Has Been Using Elon Musk’s Grok AI to Bomb Iran

The post Iran Appears to Be Blasting Amazon Data Centers Off the Map appeared first on Futurism.

Don’t worry about the death toll and economic devastation. There’s money to be made!

As the United States launches a “heavy wave” of strikes against Iran, a conflict that turned from a limited incursion into an extremely expensive and painfully drawn-out war, some clear winners are starting to emerge — and we’re definitely not talking about the American people.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, British fossil fuel giant Shell is reaping enormous profits thanks to spiking oil prices triggered by the conflict in Iran. Its second-quarter adjusted earnings rose from just shy of $7 billion the previous quarter to a stunning $9.84 billion in the most recent one. That’s well above already-lofty expectations from analysts, who predicted earnings of $8.92 billion. It’s also double compared to the same period last year, indicating a major surge in profits, in large part due to the violence in Iran.

Shell isn’t alone in the oil industry. Both Chevron and ExxonMobil are expected to report “monster earnings,” as CNBC put it, later this week.

The earnings highlight how major players in the fossil fuels industry are benefiting massively from Donald Trump’s war on Iran, a perverse reality as the number of war and civilian casualties continues to rise. Meanwhile, the American people are forced to pick up the tab, paying record prices at the gas pump.

The Trump administration has extensive ties to the industry and has made countless attempts to thwart the development of renewable energy. It has revived US-based oil refineries and has made deep investments in coal — despite the industries’ central roles in worsening a devastating environmental crisis.

Beyond the oil and gas industry, major banks including JPMorgan are making record profits during the ongoing war thanks to heavy trading volumes as investors rush to dump volatile assets or buy the dip.

President Trump himself has also massively benefited from the turmoil, making billions while in office.

Then there’s the Department of Defense’s many contractors, which are also seeing strong growth in sales and profits. Three of the biggest defense contractors, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman, reported record sales backlogs boosted by the Iran war earlier this year, from anti-ballistic missile systems to Patriot drones and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

In short, it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see who the real winners and losers of Trump’s prolonged war are. It’s a conflict lining the pockets of the military industrial complex and fossil fuel companies — the last thing a society suffering the effects of human-induced climate change and reeling from political instability needs.

More on the war: The Iran War Has Cut Off Supply of a Gas the AI Industry Desperately Needs

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The West Pacific has swung back into an El Niño phase, bringing nearly unprecedented heat to vast swaths of the globe.

Some of El Niño’s impacts are immediately apparent, or will be in the months to come: blistering high temps, of course, but also major amounts of rainfall for some, and extreme drought for others. Unfortunately, those weather patterns don’t just come and go. They also have a major impact on agricultural production, from the plains of the American Midwest to the rice paddies of Southeast Asia — and, as a result, a huge influence on the global economy.

As Reuters observes, El Niño conditions will likely have an inflationary effect on the economies of developing countries, as the ensuing weather flips typical rainfall totals on their head.

In Asia, for example, rainfall totals are likely to be much lower than usual, a situation expected to wreak havoc on countries like India and Vietnam. With India’s weather bureau projecting the driest conditions in over a decade, this year’s rice harvest is at risk. Lower rice yields would tighten supply, raising food prices for millions.

Central banks, in turn, could be forced to keep borrowing rates high, in order to keep rising prices in check.

“People are forecasting rate hikes for the second half of the year, especially for the South Asian countries, ​which are kind of the most impacted by El Niño such as India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand,” equity portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments Gary Tan told Reuters. “El Niño is ​just going to make inflation more sticky.”

A similar situation is possible across Africa, Reuters warns, as agricultural sectors in countries like Kenya are particularly susceptible to weather disruptions.

In today’s incredibly connected economy, in other words, it doesn’t take a butterfly flapping its wings to make waves half a world a way — just some warm ocean water in the middle of the Pacific.

More on El Niño: Scientists Propose Dimming Sun to Combat El Niño

The post El Niño Set to Upend the World Economy appeared first on Futurism.

Over the past year or so, a puzzling idea has taken hold among billionaires ranging from Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos: that instead of trying to force data centers on communities that don’t want them down on Earth, it would be much easier just to launch them into space.

The economics and logistics of the scheme, many experts have pointed out, are absolutely absurd. And even beyond those practical concerns, if corporations actually did somehow manage to fill the planet’s orbit with the facilities, scientists are now warning that the environmental cost would be devastating.

A new petition organized by the group EarthJustice, first reported by the Guardian, is warning of “catastrophic” consequences for the planet if the billionaire-backed dream ever came to pass. The 29-page petition calls on the US Federal Communications Commission to investigate current orbital data center licensing requests as potentially in violation of “federal law,” joining the chorus of experts warning that it’s a horrible idea for just about everybody.

“The FCC is currently considering multiple requests for licensing extraordinary numbers of satellite-based data centers to be placed into low-earth orbit over the next decade,” the petition begins. “The proponents of these proposals describe their plans in grandiose, civilization-changing terms. But these same proponents have refused to embrace any inquiry into the impacts of their self claimed epochal technology on the environment, science, economy, or other values. This is not just poor planning and a missed opportunity: it violates federal law.”

The filing does double duty. On top of formally petitioning the FCC to prepare an environmental assessment, it’s also a “petition to deny,” which is a legal mechanism that requires the petitioner to back up their claims with verified facts. That requirement turns the document into a de facto review article — with 113 footnote citations, it’s easily one of the most detailed public accounts yet of what orbital data centers could actually cost the planet.

“The operation of more than a million data center satellites threatens potentially catastrophic forms and quantities of atmospheric pollution, risking damage to the climate, to the ozone layer, to human health, and to the chemistry of the stratosphere itself,” the petition reads.

In particular, the petition warns that giving free rein to tech billionaires to clutter our skies with experimental data centers would accelerate our contamination of the stratosphere, which is currently facing an unprecedented rise in heavy metals, noxious gasses, and carbon particles thanks to record satellite launches.

Satellite companies run by tech and aerospace tycoons are already facing scrutiny for their lack of transparency around this type of pollution, a situation the petition warns would make significantly worse. As the petition authors write, they are “concerned that no [company] has yet provided more than a token acknowledgment of environmental risks.”

“Moreover,” the authors continue, “no [company] has provided satisfactory detail to explain how it will mitigate the cumulative environmental harms flowing from the foreseeable operation of more than a million satellites [emphasis in original], orbiting our planet, colliding and disintegrating and plummeting back to Earth.”

More on data centers: Climate Activists Pelt Microsoft Data Center With Balloons Full of Acid

The post The Type of Orbital Data Centers That Billionaires Want to Launch Into Space Would Wreak Ecological Catastrophe, Scientists Warn appeared first on Futurism.

Consumers and agricultural workers rejoice: the Trump administration has killed a key regulation meant to keep toxic human and industrial waste sludge from our food supply, because toxic sludge is apparently not a threat to public health.

On Monday, the Guardian reported that the Environmental Protection Agency is tossing out a major body of research that formed the basis for regulations which would have effectively limited the amount of sewage byproduct we’re allowed to spray into the environment.

The research, published not even two years ago, was conducted in order to study the consequences of toxic PFAS “forever chemical” compounds in treated sewer sludge — called “biosolids” in the wastewater treatment industry. The findings showed that any amount of PFAS above 1 part per billion in sewer sludge used as fertilizer represents an increased cancer risk for farmers, as well as consumers.

That’s a problem, because previous EPA tests have found PFAS levels as high as 9.4 parts per billion in sludge used for agricultural purposes.

The Trump administration, however, says that’s not a problem, because it’s not like we’re spraying biosolids on everything — and so what if a few farm workers get cancer? In a nine-page draft memorandum released by the agency’s Office of Water, the EPA justified the decision by blasting previous EPA research, saying that earlier study created a “misconception” that “all biosolids and sewage sludge use and disposal practices will negatively affect the public.”

“Currently data does not indicate that there are widespread impacts to the food supply from biosolids containing PFOA and PFOS at the national level, and the general public is not likely to be exposed to sewage sludge-impacted foods,” the new draft insists. “The EPA estimates that sewage sludge is applied to less than 1 percent of America’s farmland annually.”

As with any data coming out of the Trump administration, these factual claims should be taken with a hefty grain of salt. Even assuming that basic assertion is correct, it still leaves the farmers and agricultural workers laboring on that farmland exposed.

“It’s shocking for the EPA to take a scientific assessment and simply throw it out,” Laura Dumais, an attorney with the non-profit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility told the Guardian. “Basically, they’re saying: farmers’ lives don’t matter.”

It’s also a particularly grim decision in light of the cyclospora outbreak currently roiling the US. Though cyclospora is a parasite and not a type of PFAS, studies have identified agricultural biosolids as a potential source of the gut-busting organism in the food supply. (Also noteworthy is the fact that the company broadly suspected to be responsible for the outbreak, Taylor Farms, made a substantial donation to Donald Trump’s MAGA Inc just days after the FDA pushed back a major regulation on food traceability.)

And as the Trump administration strips regulations that would clamp down on sewer sludge contamination in industrial agriculture, it acknowledges that “approximately 20 percent of sewage sludge managed each year is sold directly to the public or applied to sites where the public might be exposed.”

Rather than continuing with regulations that would make the public safer, the new EPA memorandum advises Americans to “research the supplier of the sewage sludge” and avoid “application of sewage sludge in locations where children may have access to the soil.”

For public health advocates like Dumais, the move amounts to a complete dereliction of the EPA’s duty to the public.

She told the Guardian that “it’s shocking that the EPA is willing to throw all of these people under the bus and the EPA’s solution here is ‘do your own research — we’re not going to regulate anything, so if you think it’s dangerous then figure it out for yourself.'”

More on Trump: Trump Administration Scrapping Nuclear Energy Rules Requiring Plants to Keep Radiation Levels “As Low as Reasonably Achievable”

The post Trump Administration Declares Toxic Sewer Sludge Not a Threat to Public Health appeared first on Futurism.

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 US Midwest and North-East, making the air hazardous to breathe.

Things aren’t necessarily any prettier outside of the smoke-zone — just wetter. Communities situated around the Guadalupe River in Texas are reeling after near endless rainfall triggered massive floods across the state for the second year in a row.

So far, at least one person is dead, while thousands have been forced to evacuate. At least 57 counties representing over six million people were placed under flood watches over the past few days. With even more rain on the horizon, it remains to be seen when Texas will get relief from the torrential downfalls.

Stepping back, it’s clear this cascade of extremes isn’t happening in a vacuum. The overlapping wildfires, floods, and heat waves are all being amplified by the same climate forces: a rapidly warming planet, fueled in no small part by skyrocketing carbon emissions from the US itself.

All in all, it’s been an action-packed summer as the El Niño cycle rolls on — and unfortunately, the devastation is far from over.

More on climate disaster: Scientists Propose Dimming Sun to Combat El Niño

The post As Much of the East Coast Is Choking on Wildfire Smoke, Texas Is Drowning in Life-Threatening Floods appeared first on Futurism.

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 site because of its “ample” access to power and its proximity to the startup’s existing headquarters.

Per TechCrunch, Realta recently demonstrated that it could generate electricity using a fusion device dubbed Wisconsin HTS Axisymmetric Mirror, or WHAM for short, a successful experiment that the startup claimed as the first of its kind.

Put simply, nuclear reactors replicate the process our Sun uses to generate energy by fusing atoms together under extreme conditions. Realta’s WHAM uses a novel process called direct energy conversion (DEC), which extracts electricity from charged particles emitted by plasma. That sets it aside from other fusion reactor designs that capture heat to spin turbines and generate electricity.

Despite early promising results — scientists only recently started showing that fusion reactors can indeed generate a surplus of energy — we’re still far from proving that it’s a scalable and renewable source of electricity.

But that hasn’t stopped a flourishing cottage industry of fusion startups from trying. With backing from some of the most influential names in tech, from OpenAI’s Sam Altman to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, companies are promising a safer alternative to conventional nuclear fission reactors that can’t experience catastrophic meltdowns.

Even old hot dog factories are fair game as firms like Realta pursue the idea. Besides, we think that it’s only natural that Realta works on turning some old Oscar Mayer Weinermobiles into fusion-powered cars.

More on nuclear fusion: There’s a Glaring Safety Problem With Nuclear Energy Startups

The post Decrepit Oscar Mayer Hot Dog Factory Is Getting a Major Fusion Reactor Facelift appeared first on Futurism.

When Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the DOGE boys started snipping wires across DC, they took out critical programs like the government’s premier climate research website and the hurricane-hunter aircraft gathering data on dangerous storms.

While they were at it, the Trump administration also ripped up a project that would have vastly improved the country’s ability to monitor wildfires. The GeoXO program was a project originally encompassing six satellites that would greatly improve the resolution available to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to monitor atmospheric conditions like wildfire smoke, as well as weather events like lightning strikes, and climate observations such as color changes in the ocean’s surface.

The six satellites were meant to encompass three regions split between the US West, Central, and East. Starting in April 2025, however, the Trump administration directed the NOAA to make drastic cuts to GeoXO. These included cutting two satellites from the mission altogether — scrapping the central observation region entirely — and canceling major contracts for existing GeoXO instruments. The purported goal was to refocus the program on a “core weather mission,” as opposed to long-term climate monitoring, following the administration’s broader attacks on any effort to mitigate or even mention climate change.

One of those cancelled instruments, the GeoXO Atmospheric Composition device, was a high-resolution spectrometer designed to give the NOAA advanced capabilities to monitor air pollutants, like ozone, nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, and excess particulate matter. In the long term, the tool would have helped scientists paint a clearer picture of how particular weather events relate to broader climate shifts, an NOAA report explains.

Of course, the timing of the cancellation couldn’t have been worse. Huge swaths of the United States and Canada are currently being smoked out by noxious fumes emanating from hundreds of wildfires across North America.

Though the GeoXO program wouldn’t have gone live until the 2030s, Trump’s decision represents a devastating loss for our future ability to monitor this exact phenomenon, which is becoming something of an annual tradition for millions of people.

As Susan Anenberg, chair of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University observed, the NOAA “had spent years planning an air pollution instrument on the GeoXO satellite which would provide near-real-time, location-specific data on smoke levels, giving people the information they need to avoid exposure.”

Anenberg explained that the public health benefits this kind of monitoring would provide “could amount to about $13 billion per year.”

“As smoke events happen more often,” Anenberg continued, “we need more data, not less.”

More on Trump: Prices Already Spiking at Trump’s Mysterious Gas Stations That Promised Cheap Fuel

The post Trump Decimated a Satellite Program That Would’ve Vastly Improved Wildfire Smoke Monitoring appeared first on Futurism.

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.

“This has got to move f***ing quick here,” he added, after communicating with someone on the radio.

This is near Armstrong, Ontario.

When will the Canadian National Railway Company make a statement about this incident? pic.twitter.com/6bKJYugeR0

— Sol Mamakwa (@solmamakwa) July 14, 2026

The incident took place near Armstrong, Ontario, said Sol Mamakwa, an Ontario lawmaker who uploaded the video. Wildfires have been scouring their way across northern Canada this week, with at least 54 fires active in the country, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center. Some 4.7 million acres of land have been burned by wildfires this year.

The blazes have forced dozens of communities to evacuate, including First Nations communities. Downwind of the disaster, Toronto, the largest city in the country, has been choked by wildfire smoke, turning the sky orange and plunging air quality levels to the worst in the world.

The train engineers in the video reportedly made it out safe. The Canadian National Railway Company (CN) confirmed that the train was stopped in Armstrong, telling Global News that all employees in the area were evacuated overnight Monday.

How they got stuck is unclear. It appears that they’re waiting for another train to pass them, which is seen later in the video, so they can proceed on the single track ahead. A thread on the r/railroading subreddit has a more dramatic telling, claiming that the engineers had crashed into the train cars that they left behind after going back to rescue a foreman, causing the engines to shut down. Allegedly, they then tried to escape on a hi-rail, a truck that can drive on both roads and train tracks, but it caught on fire, forcing them to make it out on foot. A movie-worthy story if true, but we couldn’t independently verify this account.

Even with the hellish conditions bearing down around them, the engineers were able to find moments of levity. When the other train finally emerged through the inferno and lumbered past them, the camera man couldn’t help but exclaim.

“Woo! That’s a meet and a half, eh?” he said.

More on the environment: A Staggering Number of People Are Dying Because of Record Heatwaves

The post Terrifying Video Shows Locomotive Engulfed in Wildfire Flames appeared first on Futurism.

Europeans are being crushed by deadly temperatures.

Record-breaking heatwaves across much of the continent have claimed thousands of lives and created a perfect storm for destructive wildfires, as The New York Times reports.

A staggering number of these deaths, experts urge, are linked to climate change. Britain’s national weather agency, Met Office, said that of the 2,700 deaths in England and Wales believed to be the result of extreme heat so far this season — and we’re barely halfway through summer — around 42 percent were likely the result of the “human-caused” climate change.

“However, it is clear that human-caused climate change is leading to more frequent and more intense summer heatwaves,” said Mark McCarthy, Met Office’s manager of climate attribution, in a statement. “This intensification is driving many impacts, including those affecting human health and mortality and other issues, such as agriculture, effects on transport infrastructure and biodiversity.”

In addition to the thousands of deaths in England and Wales, France has estimated that roughly a thousand excess deaths and hundreds of hospitalizations were caused by extreme heat, while Germany announced last week that its unprecedented temperatures have so far been linked to about 5,100 deaths.

French authorities continue to fight multiple major wildfires. The country’s national weather service, Météo-France, said last week that “the intense heat and dry soil have created an exceptional risk of forest fires.” Wales, Spain, and Portugal are also facing fires, which have collectively burned through tens of thousands of acres. Tens of thousands of people have been displaced by the blazes.

This year’s European fire season has already eclipsed the historical average and threatens to surpass the record set last summer.

Worst of all: this summer isn’t even an outlier. Extreme weather is worsening year-round around the globe. As it stands, this is the new normal — and scientists are warning that people and nations need to adapt.

“People need to be aware that we are now seeing dangerous climate change fueled heat that is claiming lives, disrupting schools and hospitals and shutting down transport and infrastructure,” said Imperial College London researcher Clair Barnes, who works on climate change and extreme weather, in a statement.

“It’s time we woke up to the fact that we now live in a country with dangerously hot summers,” Barnes continued. “To protect people during future extremes, we must urgently adapt to the reality of the climate we now have, and double down on global efforts to reach net zero emissions to stop this from getting worse.”

More on extreme heat: Climate Scientists Aghast at How Bad Things Are Getting, and So Fast

The post A Staggering Number of People Are Dying Because of Record Heatwaves appeared first on Futurism.

As government agencies go, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has left a lot to be desired, often operating less like a government watchdog and more as an industry partner. There’s fee recovery, for example, which effectively mandates the industry pay its own regulators’ salary, as well as the NRC’s habit of trusting voluntary leak reports from reactor operators, not to mention its history of hiding internal safety data to protect its reputation.

As if those deficiencies weren’t bad enough, president Donald Trump is now stripping what’s left of the commission’s mandate down to the bone. Last week, the NRC proposed a bold amendment to its long-standing nuclear safety principles: deleting a line requiring nuclear plant operators to keep radiation exposure “as low as is reasonably achievable.”

According to the Hill, the NRC justifies the move by saying it will remove “unnecessary ambiguity.” But critics say this rule is the whole reason energy companies bother keeping radiation levels as low as possible in the first place.

“Facility owners felt like… ALARA [as low as reasonably achievable] was forcing them to go well below the allowable radiation limits and spend a lot of money to do that,” director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists Edwin Lyman told the Hill. “This is opening the door for sloppier practices,” Lyman continued, and “worse management.”

It gets worse. Also per the Hill, the NRC likewise announced plans to significantly weaken its approach to the National Environmental Policy Act, a foundational piece of legislation dating back to 1970. On Wednesday, the NRC said it wants to gut draft environmental reviews entirely — which, in practice, means kneecapping the public’s chance to weigh in before a reactor gets the green light.

If that weren’t enough, the commission also wants to wash its hands of its mandate to review basic environmental nuisances like noise, dust, and air pollution associated with nuclear facilities. That’s if they even do a review in the first place, as the proposed changes would exempt certain existing reactors, and even new reactors from regular inspection altogether, the Hill reports.

The proposed changes come just a few months after the US Department of Energy began stripping safety regulations that limited nuclear workers’ exposure to radiation. In effect, these changes allow energy companies to speed up productivity, unlocking higher profits at their workers’ expense.

The timing of it all is hard to overstate: with several new nuclear reactors gearing up for operations throughout the US, it’s clear the Trump administration is doing all it can to fast-track incoming nuclear facilities, consequences be damned.

More on nuclear energy: There’s a Glaring Safety Problem With Nuclear Energy Startups

The post Trump Administration Scrapping Nuclear Energy Rules Requiring Plants to Keep Radiation Levels “As Low as Reasonably Achievable” appeared first on Futurism.

Last month, the United Nations warned that this year’s El Niño, a naturally occurring climate pattern characterized by unusually warm ocean surface temperatures throughout the Pacific, would be particularly extreme.

“The world must treat it as the urgent climate warning it is,” the World Metereological Organization cautioned at the time. “El Niño conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world.”

Indeed, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed that there was a rising chance of a “very strong” El Niño, triggering drastic temperature swings and more frequent extreme weather events, from severe storms to major flooding. Meanwhile, human-driven climate change will only amplify these effects, making this summer particularly precarious.

But scientists say we’re not entirely helpless. According to a new study published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday by researchers at UC San Diego, weather-altering interventions — including the radical proposition of dimming the Sun — could tamp down El Niño’s impacts.

The concept, broadly referred to as geoengineering, is deceptively simple. By injecting special particles into the Earth’s stratosphere, more of the Sun’s rays are reflected back into space, allowing the surface below to cool. It’s the same basic principle as a volcanic eruption injecting chemicals that cause global temperatures to drop, like with the Krakatau blast in 1883.

In their study, the researchers argued that “marine cloud brightening,” a solar geongeering concept that involves using aerosols to make clouds over the sea brighter and therefore reflect more sunlight, could “theoretically mitigate extremes” of seasonal phenomena, including El Niño.

“As long-term anthropogenic warming and short-term natural variability often compound to produce extreme weather events, our findings suggest it may be worth considering interventions which target natural variability, rather than the forced response to greenhouse gases,” the paper reads. “Such an approach could result in similar physical risk reduction with shorter duration interventions that carry less sociotechnical risk than a sustained deployment.”

Geoengineering has proven highly controversial in the past, creating a major rift among climate scientists and public outcry that’s halted experiments before they even started. Critics argue it’s a distraction from more important solutions, like reducing the burning of fossil fuels, and that we still don’t have a full picture of possible knock-on environmental effects. There are also major questions of governance — who gets to decide where these aerosols are released and when?

While coauthor and UC San Diego climate scientist Kate Ricke would normally fall into this camp of scientists urging for more research to understand the risks, she and her colleagues argued that extreme but temporary events like El Niños could serve as the perfect testing ground for strategic marine cloud brightening.

“One of the biggest social concerns around geoengineering is the fact that if we use it to reduce long-term climate risks, we have to deploy it continuously for an indefinite period of time,” said coauthor and University of Chicago postdoctoral researcher Jessica Wan, who was a graduate student at Ricke’s lab, in a statement. “If we could target natural variability, we could get some of the benefits of geoengineering without having to employ it indefinitely.”

For their latest paper, Ricke and her team built on a 2023 study which found that bushfire smoke over the Pacific Ocean had emitted major amounts of aerosols, which brightened clouds and caused more solar radiation to reflect back into space.

The team simulated what would happen if cloud brightening chemicals would’ve been deployed intentionally during previous El Niños and found that it would indeed weaken the weather pattern’s effects.

Other experts were left unconvinced.

“These models are imperfect, and there’s the possibility that you’ll create an unpredicted problem that is worse than the problem you’re trying to solve,” Texas A&M University professor of atmospheric science Andrew Dessler, who was not involved in the research, told Wired. “I think this is a really interesting paper, and I learned a few things reading it, but I certainly would not say that this is a great idea and we should implement it.”

As such, considering the many unknowns, there still aren’t any concrete plans to test the idea out in the real world. But the authors argue it’s worth a shot nonetheless.

“It’s a different way of thinking about geoengineering,” said Ricke in the statement. “We need to understand a lot more, but if there is a way to use this in addition to the risk-reduction tools to mitigate El Niños, why wouldn’t we consider it?”

More on geoengineering: Research Paper Warns That There’s a Massive Experiment at Work to Geoengineer the Earth’s Climate

The post Scientists Propose Dimming Sun to Combat El Niño appeared first on Futurism.

The July 4 holiday weekend wasn’t just a scorcher — it was so hot it disrupted public events and strained power grids as temperatures soared into the triple digits.

Across the pond, Europe is bracing for yet another devastating, record-breaking heatwave. And it’s barely out of the last one, which was responsible for at least 1,300 excess deaths.

Even climate scientists, who have long watched as global warming rears its ugly head, are astonished at the accelerating trend. As Bloomberg reports, their models have long predicted rising temperatures due to human activity and the burning of fossil fuels. Yet the trend is speeding up to a degree that has caught even experts off guard.

The year 2023, in particular, was so far off the charts that researchers are still trying to make sense of what exactly happened. Even when adjusting for extra water vapor from volcanic eruptions, or natural climate variability, the month of September of that year was such a spike, it bored a hole through even the most pessimistic climate models.

“We could call them super-extremes or mega-extremes,” University of Exeter climate change and Earth system science chair Tim Lenton told Bloomberg. “We’re starting to see extremes on a spatial scale and a magnitude that’s really surprising.”

“Extreme events are so far outside anything we have expected,” Imperial College London climate scientist Friederike Otto added. “It’s not so important whether it’s what we expected as experts. It’s whether it’s what we expect as people on the ground.”

If there’s one certainty, it’s that it’s bound to get worse. A slowing of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a system that circulates warm ocean water northward, where it cools back down, could mean even more extreme heat for Europe. Scientists fear that a collapse of the AMOC is no longer a matter of if, but when.

Meanwhile, despite a global shift to renewable energy and major growth in solar electricity generation, much of the world is still moving in the wrong direction. Major corporations are abandoning their climate pledges thanks to the current obsession with AI.

Even the World Bank is giving up on its climate targets as it comes under pressure from the Trump administration, which has been hellbent on dismantling climate initiatives and atmospheric science funding while going all-in on the burning of fossil fuels.

More on climate science: Scientists Horrified by Record-Breaking Ocean Temperatures

The post Climate Scientists Aghast at How Bad Things Are Getting, and So Fast appeared first on Futurism.

The massive surge of fossil fuel-powered data centers cropping up across the country are emitting an enormous amount of pollution, a pulsing indication that we’re headed in the wrong direction in the midst of a climate crisis.

The extent of the this polluting activity is confounding. As climate action group Floodlight found in a recent investigation spotted by Wired, Texas has become the epicenter of the United States’ current obsession with constructing AI data centers. Companies are exploiting regulatory loopholes as they construct new facilities powered by pollutant-spewing onsite gas plants.

The rate of growth of this “shadow grid” of custom power plants, some of which are big enough to fuel entire cities, is so enormous that the only global entity installing more gigawatts of gas plants than Texas is China, according to environmental group Global Energy Monitor.

On a national scale, scientists are still racing to wrap their heads around the environmental footprint of our new AI obsession. Cornell researchers found that at the current rate of AI growth, the burgeoning industry could represent 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, the equivalent of adding five to ten million cars to US roadways.

Meanwhile, ongoing projects like the one in Abilene, Texas, the starting point of president Donald Trump’s flagship $500 billion Stargate project, are obtaining environmental permits that are usually reserved for small businesses like gas stations or dry cleaners, as Wired reports. The project’s facilities feature a whopping 62 diesel backup generators, making it orders of magnitude bigger than smaller ventures that use just one or two.

According to Floodlight, at least 38 data centers in Texas are using such regulatory loopholes to gain permits for onsite power sources, representing northward of 2,100 backup diesel generators, and yearly emissions of 2,500 tons of nitrogen oxides, which are highly toxic gases.

One common tactic for operators in Texas, according to Floodlight, is to announce a small data center development that would come in under pollution thresholds, only to suddenly expand once established.

Worse yet, for residents, it’s already likely too late to do anything against the data center expansion.

“The only chance to stop something like this is to do it at the very, very, very beginning of the process — before the permit is issued — through the public participation process,” former Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) staffer James Doty told Wired.

More on data center pollution: Amazon Is Spewing a Record Breaking Amount of Pollution to Power Its AI Data Centers

The post The Pollution Being Churned Out by AI Data Centers Is So Severe That It’s Almost Incomprehensible appeared first on Futurism.

The United States is in the grips of one of the most drastic reversals of green energy infrastructure currently underway on our increasingly warm world. It probably comes as little surprise, then, that the Land of the Free was one of the key drivers of global emissions in 2025.

According to a new statistical review by the Energy Institute, a London-based non-profit, energy supplies are skyrocketing — and as they do, so are emissions.

North America made up 47 percent of the world’s total emissions increase across 2025, led by the US. Much of that was fueled by outsize demand for data centers: as OilPrice.com analyst Robert Rapier notes, the US accounted for 40 percent of global data center electricity consumption, indicative of the impact the country’s AI boom is having on global emissions overall.

Though the US also added some renewable energy — solar capacity alone grew by over 28 percent compared to the previous year — that doesn’t automatically mean dirty, non-renewable energy shrank. As Rapier observes, much of North America’s emissions growth was led specifically by the rising coal-based emissions in the US, which grew by 13 percent.

“Many people assume that if solar and wind are growing quickly, fossil fuels must be shrinking,” Rapier writes. “That is not what the data show. In a growing energy system, both can happen at once. Renewables can rise sharply, while fossil fuel use also rises.”

Part of this is the fact that renewable energy has not grown fast enough to offset other energy sources.

As Rapier obverses, “solar certainly has not failed. But clean energy growth has to be large enough to meet new demand while also displacing existing fossil fuel consumption. In 2025, that did not happen.”

More on climate change: Scientists Horrified by Record-Breaking Ocean Temperatures

The post You’ll Never Guess Which Country Is Causing the Most Global Warming appeared first on Futurism.