In the final weeks before Romania’s presidential vote in November 2024, TikTok accounts that had previously spent years posting about manicures or fashion suddenly started promoting a little-known politician named Calin Georgescu.

His posts, espousing hard-line views on immigration and anti-Semitic tropes, were viewed 120 million times before the vote. Georgescu, who had previously been polling in the single digits, stunned observers by winning the election’s first round with 23 percent of the vote.

In the Netherlands, Adriana Iamnitchi was watching closely. As chair of computational social sciences at Maastricht University, she leads the research into disinformation campaigns. She wanted to know how pro-Georgescu content was being monetized on TikTok through hidden influencer marketing and livestreamed political content.

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With summer heat comes pool parties, beach days, backyard cookouts, and, of course, swarms of bloodthirsty mosquitoes.

But while insect bites have always been a side effect of time spent outdoors, the species doing the biting are changing in historically temperate regions like New England. As climate change makes these areas warmer and wetter, their ranges are expanding—and any diseases they carry come with them.

In Connecticut, for example, a statewide mosquito monitoring program has detected 54 different species, including invasives like the Asian tiger mosquito, which can transmit potentially serious diseases including dengue and Zika. The mosquito’s historical territory is in hot and humid climates farther south, but it has been moving north.

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Energy companies are raising money at IPO at their fastest pace this century, taking advantage of investors’ hunt for new ways to bet on the boom in power-intensive AI data centers.

Initial public offerings for energy firms raised $12.6 billion in the first half of this year, according to data firm Dealogic. That marks the highest half-year level since the peak of the dotcom bubble in late 1999 and the highest first-half figure on record. It is well above 2025’s full-year total of $4.3 billion.

The surge in fundraising comes as access to the vast amounts of energy needed to run data centers emerges as a bottleneck in a multi-trillion-dollar AI investment boom.

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