Whether you’re looking for medical advice or tips on industrial agriculture, one thing is abundantly clear: never trust an AI chatbot without first getting a second opinion, preferably from a human who has actual expertise in the topic.

That’s the takeaway from an incident in the small city of Chuzhou, China, after a large langue model dispensed some advice that led to the untimely death of 25 acres worth of produce.

According to the Taiwanese publication CTWANT, a 67-year-old farmer surnamed Wu decided to start consulting an AI chatbot for advice nearly a year ago. He was reportedly skeptical at first, though the farmer began to let his guard down after some early successes with the AI’s farming tips.

Since that time, Wu has come to rely on his LLM for everything from fertilizing guidance to scheduling various tasks around the farm. After months of fruitful consultations, he decided to follow his AI chatbot’s new pesticide plan to the letter, letting loose on some 25 acres of precious sesame seedlings, all without ever double-checking with an expert or outside documentation.

The plan generated for him was basically a Long Island ice tea of agro-chemicals: a mix of “high-efficiency flupyridine” and “flufenazate” for pesky weeds, with plenty of “thiamethoxam” and “emamectin benzoate” for bugs and other pests, CT reported.

Not even a day after treatment, Wu says his juvenile sesame crop began to wither and die.

Per a video interview later translated by Tom’s Hardware, the farmer offered some hard-earned advice to any other growers looking to use his concoction: “If you spray it, the next day the seedlings won’t survive.”

“Both the grass and the seedlings will die, and the seedlings will die even faster,” Wu lamented.

It’s just the latest case of an LLM cooking up some slop that lands a professional in hot water. If nothing else, Wu’s in good company: he joins a host of other dupes across the legal, medical, financial, education, and media industries who’ve likewise fallen prey to an AI chatbot’s inaccurate output.

More on farms: The Diarrhea Lettuce Company Has Been Linked to Forced Labor

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It’s not just you — the United States is going through a record-bustingly hot summer.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the contiguous US averaged 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit in July, which is even hotter than the July 1936 Dust Bowl, an environmental and agricultural disaster marked by devastating dust storms.

Much like the Dust Bowl, which was the result of both natural and human-made factors, this year’s record-breaking temperatures are the result of a strong El Niño — a naturally occuring weather pattern — exacerbating the calamitous effects of human-caused climate change.

“It’s not good when you’re breaking records from the Dust Bowl, which we are in this case,” Yale Climate Connections meteorologist Jeff Masters told the Associated Press. “And that was a crazy sort of situation where you put tens of millions of people in motion. You had this great migration because of the drought and the heat that hit the center of the US — just a cataclysmic event in US history.”

“If we’re exceeding records from the Dust Bowl, that says that we’re in deep trouble,” Masters added.

While the heat was more concentrated in the Midwest during the Dust Bowl, all 48 lower states experienced excessive heat this summer — at least one degree Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average.

And instead of focusing on ways to fight the effects of climate change, much of the country is moving in the opposite direction. The Trump administration is closely aligned with the fossil fuel industry and is actively seeking to reopen coal-burning plants. AI data centers powered by gas generators are compounding a major uptick in greenhouse gas emissions.

The result is a country literally on fire, while suffering the second-worst July drought conditions on record for the contiguous US, according to Yale Climate Connections. Per the US Drought Monitor, a whopping 71 percent of the contiguous US experienced abnormal dryness or drought during the first week of August, coming on top of billions of dollars in direct damages during the first half of 2026.

Meanwhile, major wildfires continue to burn across both the US and Canada, exposing millions to dangerous levels of air pollution and causing an estimated 4,000 premature deaths across the continent within a single week last month, according to The Economist.

The prognosis is just as grim as one might think.

“This may be one of the coolest years we’re gonna experience for the rest of our lives,” Masters told the AP.

To give humanity a fighting chance we need to “stop burning so many fossil fuels,” he added. “We also need to be spending money to adapt to the new climate that we’ve put in place.”

More on climate change: AI Data Centers Are Causing Unfathomable Amounts of Air Pollution, and It Gets Worse With Each New One They Build

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Tech Goliaths are scrambling to build as much AI computing capacity as they possibly can, come hell or low water. One of the dominant players in the space, Amazon Web Services, has its heart set on an AI data center so enormous that it could easily become the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.

According to the New York Times, Amazon has confirmed its investment in a massive gas-burning power plant in Texas, meant to supply up to 7.65 gigawatts of energy to a planned data center in Pecos County. Should it come online as planned, the plant’s 35 turbines would be allowed to spew 33 million tons of CO2 a year, the NYT notes, which would easily make it the largest single fount of emissions in the country.

That’s a stunning amount of carbon exhaust, putting that single data center in a league with entire countries including Switzerland, Ireland, and Bulgaria.

It would also be in stark defiance of Amazon’s stated climate goals, which center on reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

That’s not lost on the tech giant. But as Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan told the NYT, the “world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge.”

“We’re being transparent about the challenges, investing in innovation, and delivering measurable results,” Callahan continued. “Growth and sustainability don’t have to be in opposition — in fact, our results show they reinforce each other.”

Even without the new Pecos County plant, Amazon’s emissions are staggering. The company recently disclosed a record increase in its total emissions last year, with company-wide electricity usage rising by 34 percent across 2025.

That the company is blatantly papering over its previous climate commitments isn’t a shocker at this point, in other words, as the company reaches new emission highs with each passing year.

More on Amazon: Jeff Bezos Harshly Criticized for $200 Million Pledge to Protect the World’s Most Endangered Species

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Water levels in rivers across Europe are reaching astonishing lows lately as a record heatwave continues to bake much of the continent.

Images captured by the European Union’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite revealed the extraordinary extent of the drought, which is clearly desiccating Europe’s major waterways. Water levels in one of those rivers, the Danube, have become so low that ancient ruins are beginning to surface for the first time in centuries.

As Reuters reported, the portion of the Danube that flows through Bulgaria has slowed to a mere trickle, revealing foundations of the Constantine Bridge, a nearly 1,700 year-old structure that was opened for business back during the rule of Roman Emperor Constantine the Great in the year 328 AD.

Though the bridge is believed to have been destroyed just a few decades after it was finished, researchers regard it as among the longest bridges engineered by the Roman Empire, a marvel of ancient engineering. Though receding water levels come with plenty of downsides, Pavel Popov, a Bulgarian archeologist with the Pleven Regional Historical Museum told Reuters that the droughts do offer a unique opportunity to study the ancient wonder.

“For archaeologists, these moments are ​extremely valuable because nature briefly reveals an object that ​is hidden beneath the Danube for most of the time,” Popov explained. “It gives us ​a rare opportunity to observe, document and study it ​in its real environment.”

After the ruins surfaced, Reuters reports that local researchers used drones to survey the exposed ruins, with the low water levels offering a chance to trace the bridge’s physical footprint and evaluate the condition of the foundation materials.

Numerous other treasures have surfaced across the Danube, like the remains of a mammoth tusk in the Bulgarian village of Ryahovo, and a sunken Nazi warship near the Croatian town of Opatovac.

More on climate change: El Niño Already Killing Thousands in Europe

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Scientists have finally created what might be the only thing that can get meatheads to eat their veggies: protein lettuce.

By literally shooting pig genes into the chloroplasts of lettuce and tobacco cells, an international team of researchers were able to grow produce that contained the animal protein myoglobin, they report in a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science.

Is this the pathway to the next ridiculous protein-infused snack? (We’re looking at you, protein popcorn.) Not quite. Instead, the scientists say their findings could pave the way to weaning ourselves off of environmentally-destructive meat.

“Our study demonstrates, for the first time, that higher plants can stably produce myoglobin, one of the key proteins responsible for many of meat’s desirable properties,” study lead atuhor Alexia Groff, a plant biotechnology researcher at Imperial College London, told ScienceAlert. “This is very relevant at a time when the demand for sustainable food production platforms is greater than ever.”

To combine pig genes with plant DNA, the researchers used a machine called a biolistic particle delivery system, or a “gene gun.” The nickname is apt: it works by firing microscopic metal particles covered in genes into their target. (Biolistic, by the way, is a portmanteau of “biological ballistics.”)

The target, this time, were the chloroplasts of lettuce and tobacco seedlings. Because of their “bacterial ancestry and their high number of copies per cell,” Groff explained in a statement about the work, “chloroplasts are generally much better at making large amounts of protein than the cell nucleus.”

Their genetic bullets hit the bullseye. In followup tests, the seedlings showed they had incorporated the pig DNA into the chloroplast genome. When the plants grew into adulthood and produced seeds, their offspring still possessed the transferred genes.

In all, the lettuce and tobacco plants yielded about 800 mg and 810 mg of myoglobin protein per kilogram of their dry weight. That’s ten times less than beef, but because growing plants is far more efficient than raising animals, the tradeoff could be worth it.

“Plant cultivation is far more resource-efficient than livestock production; consequently, plant-derived myoglobin could achieve protein yields per hectare that rival — or even potentially exceed — those of animal agriculture,” the authors wrote in the study, “whilst also benefiting from substantially lower water use and greenhouse gas emissions.”

If this gets adopted at scale, these protein-infused plants could be dried up and be used to bolster the protein in plant-based meats.

Other researchers caution that the food still needs to be proven safe to eat and sustainable to produce, but are optimistic about the findings.

“This an important advance on earlier plant and algal research.  Demonstrating stable myoglobin production in plant chloroplasts, including in an edible crop, raises the possibility of using plants as scalable, low-input production platforms alongside microbial fermentation,” Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro, director of the ICL’s Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein, said in a statement. “In the longer term, this could diversify how and where these ingredients are produced.”

More on lettuce: Trump’s Explosive Diarrhea Scandal Is Getting Worse and Worse

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Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and his actor buddy Leonardo DiCaprio are catching some heavy flak recently, but for a seemingly bizarre reason: pledging millions of dollars to protect 100 of the world’s most threatened animal species.

The charity initiative, called the Phoenix Species Project, was first revealed on DiCaprio’s Instagram account, where the six-time academy award nominee described it as the “largest single philanthropic initiative ever dedicated to the recovery of Critically Endangered species, across 30 countries.”

“I could not be prouder to announce this,” DiCaprio continued. “Save these species, and we protect everything around them. The forests, the rivers, and the climate itself.”

For such a seemingly altruistic venture, the response to the announcement was strikingly polarized. As the Independent noted, DiCaprio and Bezos were summarily blasted for engaging in “greenwashing,” a negative term given to the strategy employed by massive corporations and the wealthy to cover their outsize impact on the environment with a little eco-charity.

“As soon as people realize and actually feel the effects of what those rich f***s did to our planet they suddenly start their greenwashing campaign,” one Redditor wrote in response to the announcement, per the Independent.

“Uber-wealthy people helping a fraction of the problems that they cause,” another commenter lamented. “For publicity.”

It certainly wouldn’t be the first time Bezos has been accused of greenwashing, especially given the immense carbon footprint of his flagship company Amazon. In 2020, for example, the billionaire’s Bezos Earth Fund pledged $10 billion to protect biodiversity, bringing a massive amount of money to the global effort to mitigate climate change — at least on paper.

As the backlash illustrates, your reaction to the those types of efforts probably hinge on your economic and social worldview.

The haters aren’t just being petty, though. As the Journal of Political Inquiry observed, Bezos’s wealth is only possible thanks to his previous position as chief executive of one of the largest corporate polluters on the planet. Between 2020 and 2021 alone, Amazon’s carbon dioxide emissions grew by 18 percent, while his space company Blue Origin is altering the outer atmosphere in ways we’re only starting to understand.

And his empire’s carbon emissions have only skyrocketed since then, as the demand for cloud computing supersedes previous pledges to clamp down on Amazon’s extraordinary excretions of noxious pollutants.

In other words, it’s no wonder the masses are rising up in opposition to the billionaire and his actor friend — if only online, at least for now.

More on billionaires: The Type of Orbital Data Centers That Billionaires Want to Launch Into Space Would Wreak Ecological Catastrophe, Scientists Warn

The post Jeff Bezos Harshly Criticized for $200 Million Pledge to Protect the World’s Most Endangered Species appeared first on Futurism.

The amount of pollution spilling out of fossil-fuel generators is astounding. In the United States, this explosion of emissions is led by states like Texas, which on a global scale is comparable only to China in terms of new infrastructure powered by dead dinosaurs.

And as more data centers crop up throughout the US, that problem — of rising emissions linked to the accelerating demand for any kind of electricity — is only going to get worse.

According to reporting by the New York Times, the US currently has at least 82 data center-linked gas generators either in development or in the proposal stage. These are massive facilities which rival public electrical generators in size and power, only they’re not managed by the government, and the power they generate isn’t meant for citizens.

Instead, these are private generators, developed by big tech companies like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta or Elon Musk’s xAI. The electricity they’ll supply is intended only for data centers, which grow ever-hungrier for power as new iterations of AI chips and energy-hungry large language models enter into production.

Assuming all 82 of those plants come online as planned, the NYT notes they could spew enough emissions in one year to rival the output of half the passenger cars in the US.

That’s an astonishing amount of pollution, made possible thanks to industry-friendly state regulators in places like Texas and Ohio, where permits for behemoth fossil fuel fired generators are approved in as little as 18 days, often without public disclosure.

It’s possible that moratoriums on new data centers might slow the burn, but unless states begin the unlikely task of banning new gas generators for existing facilities, we can expect US fossil fuel emissions to continue to rise precipitously in the years to come.

More on data centers: The Number of Regular People Being Arrested for Protesting Data Centers Is Astounding

The post AI Data Centers Are Causing Unfathomable Amounts of Air Pollution, and It Gets Worse With Each New One They Build appeared first on Futurism.

When Texas’s privately-run electrical grid collapsed amid a battery of winter storms in February of 2021, it plunged over 4.5 million people into darkness, and contributed to hundreds of deaths due to the lack of water, food, and heat.

A similarly tragic story almost unfolded in July of this year — had in not been for the deployment of a jaw dropping amount of solar power infrastructure that kept the grid from collapsing under the strain.

New reporting by the Texas Tribune details the state’s rapid adoption of solar energy, specifically solar panels and storage batteries. The paper notes that when the organization that manages state’s electrical grid — the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) — broke record energy demands on both July 21st and 22nd, it hardly registered as an event, because its solar infrastructure ensured there was a 20,000 megawatt buffer padding the grid’s capacity.

“We hit an all time peak, and we had no issue hitting that peak,” Thomas Gleeson, chair of Texas’s Public Utility Commission, told the Tribune.

Unsurprisingly, those moments of peak demand coincided with oppressive summer temperatures, with the heat index reaching 116 degrees Fahrenheit in Dallas on July 22nd. The Tribune notes that at various points, solar power accounted for over 45 percent of the state’s total electrical generation, breaking state records both for total electricity generated by solar panels and for total electricity discharged from solar batteries.

As the power grid’s capacity grows, so too will the demand. Though ERCOT is standing strong for now, the state estimates that by 2032, statewide electric demand will be nearly double what it was on July 22nd.

To combat that reality, the utility firm says it has some 460 gigawatts of generation cued up for development, around 70 percent of which is made up of solar infrastructure.

Of course, it will also help if Texas governor Greg Abbott sticks to his recently enacted data center moratorium, which put the brakes on over 474 gigawatts worth of impending electrical stress, at least temporarily. Long-term, it’s unlikely that Texas will refuse the nearly 1,800 data center projects looking to call the state home — an unending game of chicken between the tech industry and a utility provider scrambling to keep up with growing demand.

More on Texas: Climate Scientists Shake Their Heads as First US City Running Completely Out of Water

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Residents of Fort Wayne, Indiana may have to say goodbye to over four acres of federally protected wetland — at least if Google has its way.

New reporting by local publication WANE revealed that a company called Hatchworks LLC, a data center developer for the tech giant, is looking to fill in several acres of federal wetlands as part of the third phase of “Project Zodiac,” a $2 billion hyperscale data center project.

As WANE reports, Hatchworks submitted an application to purchase 4.26 acres of forested wetland outside of Fort Wayne. Of that, about 2.13 acres of the land may soon be paved over to build three new buildings, as well as a labyrinth of waste water pipes and electrical infrastructure.

Granted, four acres isn’t the largest footprint in the world — that’s roughly the size of your average Walmart supercenter — but if the application proceeds, it would nonetheless see a private company hoovering up protected land for the sake of wealth accumulation.

And if state authorities decide to go ahead with the data center campus, it would be permanently carving up a slice of Indiana’s all-important floodplains. These wetlands serve many valuable functions, not just as home for diverse plant and animal life, but also as a natural basin for rainwater, protecting nearby communities from flooding and soil erosion.

Much of the incoming data center campus would occupy a parcel of pre-paved farmland, likely geoengineered from its original wetland long ago. Rather than color within those lines, Google’s Hatchworks would rather stick to its original design plans, explaining in its filing with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management that it’s simply impossible to avoid shellacking the marshland.

“It was determined that meeting the project purpose and completely avoiding water resources was not feasible,” the filing reads. “Priority was placed upon avoiding as much of the large woodlots… as possible. Given these constraints, and the required layout and dimensions of the data center buildings, it is not possible to accommodate the development without impacts to the woodlot containing [the wetlands].”

“Environmental stewardship is central to our data center design. Our engineers have intentionally designed the layout of our Fort Wayne campus to avoid more than 75 percent of regulated wetlands — preserving over 32 acres of the highest-quality forested land on the property,” a Google spokesperson said after this story was first published. “To address minimal impacts across approximately nine acres, we’re providing over 18 acres of mitigation credits for a 2-to-1 net gain in conserved and restored wetlands in Allen County and across Indiana.”

The proposal will soon go to a virtual public hearing before it’s approved, though developers already have an anticipated start date of September 14. Given that previous phases of the Google campus are already completed, it’s hard to imagine Indiana officials will prevent the bulldozers from rolling in — though with enough public backlash, anything is possible.

More on data centers: Meta’s AI Data Center Caught Leaking Deadly Bacteria Into Water Town Uses for Irrigation

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A Massachusetts man is feeling some buyer’s remorse after securing a $5.5 million mortgage on a mansion poised to fall into the Cape Cod Bay.

The man, John Bonomi Jr, first made headlines five years ago when he purchased the sprawling 5,817-square-foot estate against warnings from area conservationists, who advised that the beach was eroding at a rate of six feet per year as rising sea levels take their toll.

Bonomi’s house, meanwhile, sat just 12 to 14 feet away from the rapidly-disappearing escarpment — and that was 2021.

Fast forward half a decade, and the situation — not to mention the mansion’s foundation — has only deteriorated as the continual lashing of ocean waves takes its toll. According to the Boston Globe, Bonomi is now trying to recoup his costs by filing suit against JP Morgan Chase, the bank that originally serviced his ill-fated mortgage.

As for his legal strategy, the property owner is essentially pleading insanity, saying that he was “acting under an uncontrollable manic psychosis at the time” he agreed to the terms of the mortgage. It’s a fascinating argument, especially because Bonomi has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

“No rational person… would have considered purchasing the Property, and certainly not at the full asking price,” the suit argues. “It is a recognized diagnostic fact that a symptom of bipolar disorder is irrational risk-taking and impulsive behavior, including reckless spending.”

While Bonomi may have a point — it’s astonishing that JP Morgan Chase gave him the green light, mental health episode or not — it remains to be seen whether the courts agree.

According to the Globe, the bank originally lobbied to get the case dismissed. It answered Bonomi’s filings in May, however, saying that, “to the extent a response is required, Chase denies the allegations contained therein and leaves Plaintiff to his proofs.”

More on housing: Family Horrified When They’re Forced to Sell Their Beloved Home to Make Way for AI Data Centers

The post Man Sues Bank for Being Stupid Enough to Give Him a Mortgage Even When Experts Were Warning Him It Was About to Fall Into the Ocean appeared first on Futurism.

Temperatures in Japan have gotten so extreme that zoo animals are dropping dead — though this may be as much an indictment of the conditions that the animals are made to live in as it is climate change.

On Monday, Tokyo’s Tama Zoological park announced that three of its female lions had died of what’s suspected to be heat-related illness. Their deaths occurred within five days of each other, as the country is gripped by a grueling spell of intense heat.

Per multiple reports, preliminary autopsies showed that the lions, named Mugi, Ichigo, and Ruena, had suffered from systemic dehydration and multiple organ failure before dying.

“We believe heat stress was a contributing factor,” the zoo said in a statement.

Japan experienced its first “cruelly hot day” toward the end of July, in a historic heat wave that caused multiple cities to be scorched with temperatures over 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Tokyo’s average daily temperature that month was 90 degrees Fahrenheit, which would feel like 110 degrees when accounting for humidity. 

The “cruelly hot day,” by the way, was introduced by Japan’s meteorological agency this year in anticipation of a sweltering summer. It’s no exaggeration to say that it’s now so hot in Japan that the country invented a new word for it: “kokushobi.”

On the first day to receive this official designation, at least 260 people in Tokyo were taken to the hospital, according to local reports. Between July 20 and 26, some 18,600 people across Japan were hospitalized for heatstroke, with 45 of them pronounced dead on arrival, the country’s Fire and Disaster Management Agency said.

While temperatures have temporarily fallen, the overall heat hasn’t relented, as this Wednesday Japan’s Environment Ministry issued a heatstroke alert for most of western and southern Japan, per the Associated Press.

It’s brutal for humans, and no less so for animals in captivity. According to the Tama zoo, one of the lions, the three year old Mugi, began showing signs of appetite loss in mid-July and was unable to stand the day after the symptoms appeared. 

The zoo staff tried to cool her off by spraying her with water and providing her fluids with intravenous dips, but Mugi eventually died on July 28. The 11-year-old Ichigo died three days later, and 15-year-old Ruena two days after that.

Four other lions who were ill are showing signs of recovery, the zoo said, with six others that have appeared to be in good health throughout the ordeal.

Experts say that along with the extreme temperatures, it’s the high humidity that makes it difficult for the lions to stay cool. Rather than sweating, they regulate their body temperature by panting, pushing hot moisture out of their airways.

“Lions are more used to a dry heat environment,” Aaron Whitnall, a zookeeper in England who cares for 11 lions, told the New York Times, though he said it was to early to speculate on the exact cause of the lions’ deaths.

During spells of extreme heat and humidity, zoos should give lions ample shade, deploy cooling pads, and mist them with water, Whitnall said. At his Big Cat Sanctuary in England, zookeepers gave the animals popsicles made with frozen animal blood to help them stay cool.

The Tama Zoo has suspended its lion exhibit since last month, and hasn’t announced when it’ll re-open.

More on heat: Global Warming Is Rapidly Accelerating, New Paper Finds

The post It’s So Hot in Japan That Zoo Animals Are Dropping Dead appeared first on Futurism.

Google’s notorious AI Overview just handed would-be Flock vandals a perfect excuse to carve into the company’s controversial AI-integrated license plate readers (ALPRs).

ALRPs are wildly unpopular, especially online, where privacy-minded communities trade memes and videos cheering on destruction of the surveillance equipment. One of the more popular bits in this space centers on the idea that Flock’s ALPR’s are supposedly packed with valuable metals like gold, copper, and zinc — so, the tongue-in-cheek riffing goes, why not crack one open and cash in at the nearest scrapyard?

Clever or not, the meme hinges on a spurious claim. ALPRs do contain trace amounts of gold and other metals, just not enough to be worth the trouble. Unless you’re well versed in breaking down circuit boards, you’d be hard pressed to earn enough to buy a Big Mac, let alone recoup your labor costs.

Google, itself an exemplar of AI-enabled surveillance, apparently missed the joke.

Search “how much gold does a Flock camera have” and Google’s AI Overview doesn’t even push back a little bit. Instead, it flatly asserts that a “Flock safety camera contains about 1 to 5 grams of gold used in its internal circuit boards and wiring.” (At today’s gold prices, that would mean each Flock camera contained up to $650 of gold.)

Google goes on to claim that Flock’s ALPRs hold anywhere from two to 23 pounds of copper, which would be an engineering marvel considering the whole device only weighs three pounds.

Google’s AI Overview cites two sources to back up its summary, and neither holds up.

The first is an anonymous Substack post from an account called do.not.obey.do.not.comply, claiming the “rough scrap value of these metals per camera is estimated to be $150 to $500.” Google’s summary skips the fine print, however: that figure comes from “estimates based on scrap-value discussions” — vibes, in other words, as opposed to actual reporting or financial information.

The second is an AI-generated Instagram post riffing on the same meme, egging vandals on to gut the camera to access their supposedly precious innards. The account behind that post seems to belong to a weed grower, with most other posts about plant cloning, hydroponics, and fully grown cannabis flower.

There’s a real irony buried in all this AI slop: one AI-surveillance company’s search engine is quietly manufacturing an excuse to destroy another AI-surveillance company’s product. If that doesn’t sum up the current state of the AI-obsessed tech industry, nothing will.

Google didn’t respond to a request for comment.

More on Flock: Flock Employee Quits In Disgust, Saying the Company Is Silencing Protestors

The post Google’s AI Is Telling Users That Flock Cameras Are Filled With Valuable Gold and Copper appeared first on Futurism.

It’s a well-established fact that the Earth has been warming ever since the advent of industrialization. While climate skeptics have traditionally argued that the timing of this is merely a coincidence — that burning huge amounts of fossil fuels isn’t a significant factor contributing to long-term climate change — a new piece of research means they might have to come up with a new thesis, and fast.

The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that the rate of global warming is not merely chugging along at a steady clip. Instead, it’s accelerating at an astonishing rate. Scientists found that, between 2015 and 2025, the Earth warmed at rate of 0.35 degrees Celsius (0.63 degrees Fahrenheit), compared to an average of around 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade between 1970 and 2015.

Because of all the factors that impact climate data, it can be tough to say for certain whether our planet is actually warming at a faster or slower rate compared to previous eras. To cut through the clutter, the study authors looked at five global temperature datasets, controlling for non-human factors like El Niño cycles, solar patterns, and volcanic activity.

“We filter out known natural influences in the observational data, so that the ‘noise’ is reduced, making the underlying long-term warming signal more clearly visible,” study co-author and retired statistician Grant Foster explained in a press release.

Unfortunately, the acceleration came with a statistical certainty of over 98 percent — the first statistically significant evidence that the climate isn’t just getting warmer, it’s doing so at an increasingly faster clip.

In the release, the study’s other co-author Stefan Rahmstorf warned that the faster warming puts us at a major risk of blowing past the 1.5 degree Celsius limit before 2030, a threshold that experts have warned would have huge consequences for planet Earth (indeed, other studies show we may have already blown past it.)

“If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5 degree C limit of the Paris Agreement before 2030,” Rahmstorf explained. “How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to zero.”

More on climate change: A Staggering Number of People Are Dying Because of Record Heatwaves

The post Global Warming Is Rapidly Accelerating, New Paper Finds appeared first on Futurism.

When the Federal Aviation Administration shut down air traffic to El Paso Airport earlier this year, nobody could have guessed than an experimental high-energy laser weapon was the cause. After days of chaos and speculation, it was revealed that Customs and Border Patrol officials had fired off a laser volley from a US Army base adjacent the El Paso Airport.

Though the trigger-happy Border Patrol grunts evidently thought they were firing at drug-smuggling drones, their real target turned out to be a kids’ party balloon. Regardless, it was later reported that the cutting-edge weapon was taken for a test-drive a week before FAA and Pentagon officials had a chance to discuss how to safely implement the laser device, making it a small miracle that nobody in the air was killed.

Not every use of an experimental aerospace weapon goes off without a hitch, however.

New bombshell reporting by Wired reveals an incident in which the testing of an experimental GPS jammer resulted in a medical plane crashing into the side of a mountain.

The horrifying incident happened in May, the publication reports, when a small twin-engine medevac aircraft carrying two pilots and two medical workers departed from Roswell, New Mexico. Heading West for the small mountain village of Ruidoso, the crew became the victim of an electronic warfare exercise being conducted at the nearby White Sands Missile Range, a test which rendered their navigational system inoperable.

Due to a combination of low visibility and an air-traffic control that was stretched far beyond capacity — at least three other planes reported navigation disruptions due to the GPS jamming — the pilots failed to register a mountainous formation between their plane and the landing strip.

As airline pilot and aviation crash analyst Juan Browne told Wired, the visual effect of that approach would have been stupefying. “When those lights go out, man, you know you are in big trouble,” Browne explained.

Unfortunately, the disoriented crew ran straight into the side of a mountain they likely never saw, resulting in the loss of every life on board. It’s the first known instance where military GPS jamming played a role in downing a civilian plane in US airspace. Reported incidents of GPS jamming within the continental US have skyrocketed in recent years. According to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, the number of GPS interference events went from four in 2020 to 50 in 2024, and 40 across 2025.

After the initial publication of this piece, a spokesperson for the US Army provided a statement in response.

“The Army is aware of the release of the NTSB’s preliminary report into the crash of a civilian medical evacuation flight on May 14 in the vicinity of Ruidoso, New Mexico,” it read. “As the incident remains under investigation, we cannot comment at this time.”

Though the crew involved in the New Mexico crash was warned that GPS interference may be present, there evidently weren’t enough safeguards or air traffic control personnel in place to prevent a tragedy.

Updated with comment from the US Army.

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

The post It Appears That the US Military Accidentally Killed Everybody on Board a Civilian Medevac Flight in New Mexico appeared first on Futurism.

After heaps of criticism, SpaceX said it’ll remove the dozens of fumes-belching gas turbines it’s using to power its gargantuan data centers near Memphis, Tennessee — which it’s been using without a permit — a year from now.

In an update on its website spotted by TechCrunch, the Elon Musk-owned company laid out its plan to hook up the sprawling AI facilities, some of the largest in the world, to a 1.2 gigawatt nantural gas power plant. 

Credit where credit’s due: it’s an improvement over the dismal status quo. But it’ll take a while, and in the meantime the company plans to continue to use its preponderance of 69 portable gas turbines that were trucked in to sustain its data centers. It won’t fully remove them until July 2027, a full year from now.

“We care deeply about being good neighbors and we regularly reconfigure power operations to reduce noise from the facility and minimize our impact on the local Southaven community,” the company said.

The “Colossus” data center campus, comprising two separate data centers, has come under fire from locals and activist groups. The Southern Environmental Law Center, on behalf of the NAACP, sued xAI — which is now known as SpaceXAI, after being rolled into Musk’s rocket company prior to its initial public offering — for operating the turbines without a permit and spewing harmful pollutants.

At the time, the lawsuit estimated that the gas turbines could emit more than 2,000 tons of smog-forming nitric oxides every year. It also claimed that the turbines release hazardous chemicals like formaldehyde, a known carcinogen linked to lung and nasal cancer that can also inflame airways.

In May, Politico reported that the data center had become one of the largest emitters of smog-producing nitrogen oxides in the county, where smog levels were already considered unhealthy before the facility went online. 

Some parents in nearby communities have complained that their children have developed respiratory problems since the facility went online. And residents in the predominantly black neighborhood of Boxtown say that the fumes are so oppressive that it’s making it hard for them to breathe.

More on data centers: Data Center Emits Constant Screeching Noise Directly Into Man’s House

The post SpaceX Vows to Keep Poisoning Nearby Towns With Its Fume-Belching Data Center For Another Year appeared first on Futurism.

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

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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

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