The Northern suburbs of Toledo, Ohio turned into a real life Don DeLillo novel overnight, after an explosion at a chemical facility sent plumes of industrial compounds billowing into the sky.
According to the local station WTOL11, the blast happened at a chemical distribution site in Ohio’s Lucas County on Tuesday night, prompting an immediate evacuation order for anybody living within one mile of the disaster zone. Those within three miles were given an order to shelter in place.
In a press conference on Wednesday, city emergency officials explained that the leaking chemical exhaust is glycidyl methacrylate, an industrial manufacturing chemical broadly suspected to be carcinogenic to humans.
Maps show numerous residential neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity, the closest being a trailer park just 0.25 miles as the crow flies from the site of the chemical explosion. The nearby Ottawa river, a tributary of Lake Erie, is situated under a half mile to the South.
Complicating matters for first responders and any broader evacuation order is the onset of a fog alert, which combined with the hazmat emergency has turned Toledo into America’s apocalypse zone du jour.
Images circulated by WTOL11 on Facebook show the cataclysmic scenes unfolding across the city, with commenters expressing confusion over whether the clouds of haze were caused by the airborne chemical leak, the fog, or a noxious mix of both.
“I can’t see out my window,” one Toledo resident wrote. “Should I and my dog leave?”
Top AI labs have been hiring subject matter experts across academic disciplines for years at this point — often turning them into glorified fact-checkers whose labor is used to train the AI models of tomorrow. Still, Google’s latest job listing is odd, even by those admittedly strange standards, and may reveal a lot about the future big tech has in mind for humanity.
As reported by the tech industry publication Data Center Dynamics, Google’s AI research lab, DeepMind is now hiring a team of “highly qualified physicists and nuclear engineers” for the role of “nuclear subject matter expert in the Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and high-yield Explosives team within the Responsible Development and Innovation team.”
According to the job listing, interested candidate should have a PhD in a field like plasma physics or nuclear engineering, or else “equivalent practical experience,” on top of experience collaborating with a US government lab and familiarity with policy related to “stockpile stewardship, nonproliferation, arms control, or threat reduction” — and that’s just at a minimum.
Ideally, Google says it would prefer its candidates to also have experience to have experience working with AI safety, as well as expertise in computational modeling, experience working at “major laser user facilities,” or the ability to design evaluations and mitigations that are “demonstrably unclassified and non-export controlled by developing dual use science proxies for weapons topics.”
The lucky candidates will be offered a salary in the ballpark of $174,000 to $252,000, with a 15 percent bonus on top.
The job won’t be easy, however. As the listing notes, the role involves evaluating safety risks of so-called “frontier AI models” in the “nuclear domain.” Specifically, this means “model assistance in fission, fusion, and thermonuclear weapons proliferation, radiation hydrodynamics, magnetohydrodynamics, etc. in a demonstrably unclassified and non-export controlled manner.”
Put together, it reads as if Google’s top AI research lab expects the company’s AI tools to start churning out actionable instructions for developing nuclear devices, and is now hiring nuclear physicists to help spearhead the defense efforts.
How serious the scenario is remains to be seen — but Google is clearly willing to put its money where its mouth is.
A biodiversity research team journeying into the incredibly diverse subtropical forests of China’s Ailaoshan Mountains took a strange companion with them: a robotic dog.
The robot, a Lynx M20S developed by DEEP Robotics, assisted the team on a trip organized by the China Association for Scientific Expedition, China’s state-run tabloid the Global Times reported. Photos of the expedition show the researchers using the robot like a pack mule to carry field and imaging supplies, though the unit reportedly also assisted with other tasks like route scouting, image recording, and data collection.
At one point, the robot was even used to capture footage of a rare parasitic plant known as Monotropa uniflora, as well as forest gibbons (though, to be fair, these are tasks a human scientist could surely perform just as well.)
Whether the expedition amounts to a practical deployment or a frivolous gimmick probably depends on how you view commercial robots as a whole. Though it can carry a load of about 220 pounds, the battery life on the Lynx M20S lasts just 2.5 to 3.5 hours, likely putting a decent burden on any researchers who have to lug replacement batteries up the Ailaoshan Mountain range or figure out a way to charge them in situ.
At the same time, it makes for a pretty effective product demo. The Ailaoshan Mountain range and its surrounding area are notoriously treacherous, with navigation of ravines and dense primeval forests complicated by extreme outbursts of precipitation. In 2021, a rapid change in weather on the range resulted in the deaths of four experienced geological researchers — an illustrative example of the kinds of conditions one can expect on the Ailaoshan Mountains.
As a device designed for challenging outdoor terrain, the Lynx M20S’s apparently successful participation in this trek seems to validate the company’s engineering efforts.
In December 2015, 195 countries at the UN Climate Change Conference signed the Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty on climate change. The treaty’s overarching goal was to keep the “temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.”
While unquestionably meant well, the agreement has quickly turned into little more than a footnote as global warming has stormed ahead. Scientists have long warned that we’re on a path to blaze past that foreboding threshold in a matter of years, possibly by 2030.
And now, according to the latest projections, that day is poised to come even sooner. In a new article in the journal Climate and Atmospheric Science, two researchers from the University of Kansas claim that a recent doubling in the rate of global warming means that we could blow past the Paris Agreement threshold as soon as 2028.
The researchers analyzed temperature records through last year and observed a “statistically significant doubling of the global warming rate” between 2011 and 2025, compared to the period between 1971 and 2025.
“Extrapolating this accelerated rate projects a crossing of the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold by 2028, nearly a decade earlier than previous estimates,” they concluded. “These findings suggest a narrower window remains to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, underscoring the urgency for rapid and substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.”
Realistically, it’s hard to imagine that we won’t fail to stop the warming in time.
“However, the inertia of existing political, economic, and technological systems3 limits the pace at which such actions can be implemented, narrowing the remaining window for achieving the 1.5 degrees Celsius target,” the researchers concluded in their paper.
The United States, long among the biggest carbon polluters on the planet, has not only officially withdrawn from the Paris Agreement twice during Donald Trump’s terms as president, but his administration has actively reversed environmental laws while giving the fossil fuel industry free rein through deregulation.
It’s a sad state of affairs that the UN Environment Program appears to be painfully aware of. In a new Emissions Gap Report, published today, the body found that “new climate pledges under the Paris Agreement have only slightly lowered global temperature rise over the course of this century.”
“Given the size of the cuts needed, the short time available to deliver them and a challenging political climate, a higher exceedance of 1.5°C will happen, very likely within the next decade,” the report reads.
Worse yet, we have the tools to make substantial cuts to greenhouse emissions — but we’re not using them due to a lack of incentives.
“The required low-carbon technologies to deliver big emission cuts are available,” the report concludes. “Wind and solar energy development is booming, lowering deployment costs.”
“This means the international community can accelerate climate action, should they choose to do so,” it continues. “However, delivering faster cuts requires would require navigating a challenging geopolitical environment, delivering a massive increase in support to developing countries, and redesigning the international financial architecture.”
A 94-year-old electronics mogul is in hot water with Chicago authorities, who claim that his hare-brained plan to feed hungry squirrels is instead sustaining a massive plague of rats.
As previous owner of the billion-dollar electrical manufacturing company Tripp Lite, businessman Barre Seid has been putting his largess to use by paying a small army of workers to sprinkle an assortment of tree nuts across Chicago-area parks, Fortune reports.
As local resident Caroline Novak told Chicago WGN, it’s “like a luxury mélange of really nice nuts: I’m talking Brazil nuts and walnuts… these are not acorns.”
Though Seid’s target audience seems to be local squirrels, residents and city officials note that rats have quickly grown to depend on the regular feedings. As Novak’s husband told WGN, he counted over 40 rats digging holes near nut piles during a recent walk through Lincoln Park.
The bizarre operation has evidently been underway for years at this point, earning the billionaire heaps of civil violations carrying relatively small fines. Wealthy as he is, Seid has reportedly had no problem paying those fees and carrying on — the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, as the old saying goes.
“When you’re a billionaire and you have a weird hobby and someone tries to stop you, you have complete impunity,” Novak told Block Club Chicago in a separate interview. “You just triple down because why not? You’ll pay $40,000 in fines. You don’t care.”
Now in 2026, authorities in Chicago are reaching their breaking point. Alderman Timmy Knudsen — whose jurisdiction covers the area of Lincoln Park Seid’s workers are active in — is now pushing the Chicago Park District to sue Seid in order to stop the nuttiness once and for all.
“For years, a billionaire family has carried out a paid operation to feed local wildlife, disrupting our rat abatement efforts and causing an infestation that has made parts of the park unusable for other residents,” Knudsen’s office told Fortune in a statement. “We’re hopeful that raising awareness and drawing attention to the issue will ultimately lead to better behavior and a safer park for our community.”
Since the debut of Garrett P Serviss’ 1898 novel “Edison’s Conquest of Mars,” space-based warfare was relegated to the imagination — but no longer.
In an address on the “State of the Space Force” on Tuesday, reported by Space.com, chief of space operations for the US Space Force General Douglas Schiess informed the public that the Pentagon has definitively deployed active space-based weapons platforms.
“Let me be crystal clear: today, Guardians operate on-orbit weapons that can defend the joint force against space-enabled attacks,” Schiess said. “Space is both a battlefield and the backbone of our joint force.”
Schiess stopped short of providing any details about the weapons, instead sharing a war story of one Space Force operator named “Specialist Gray.”
“Even as alarm red sirens were blaring and incoming missiles targeted her site, she courageously held the line, protecting forces, denying adversary capability, and delivering space effects until her commander had to literally pull her from the console to safety,” Schiess recounted with a dramatic flair. “She locked onto the target, optimized her weapon system and waged electromagnetic warfare against a determined adversary.”
As Space.com notes, those descriptive elements may point to a kind of non-physical platform, like a signal jammer or a microwave emitter, though it’s anyone’s guess what weapon “Specialist Gray” was supposed to be operating.
The news came just ahead of the Space Force’s request for over $71 billion in additional funding for 2027, adding to the over $100 billion it’s already been allocated, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported.
Evidently, the orbital-weapons announcement was meant to give that absurd request some extra oomph — which, if granted, it would represent the single highest one-year budget adjustment received by any US military branch since 1952.
According to new reporting by The Guardian, nearly all of the top ten global producers of forever chemicals, otherwise known as polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, plan to ramp up production quotas on the back of the data center boom.
There’s a clear market demand for this: PFAS play a huge role in data center construction, where they’re used in cooling systems, AI chips, circuit boards, and fire suppression systems — not to mention the coating on thousands of miles of cables used to connect these components together.
Though components laden with PFAS are found throughout the industrial world, their use in data centers is particularly troubling. Because these facilities run almost non-stop save for the rare pause for maintenance, their components break down remarkably quickly, which means data center owners are constantly scrapping old parts in favor of new ones.
When those old components are tossed to the curb, the PFAS will almost inevitably wind up in the environment, increasing the likelihood that they wind up in the food chain. When we eat contaminated plant and animal products, these forever chemicals accumulate in our body, where they may contribute to a laundry list of debilitating health problems.
“These companies’ expansion plans show that unless governments and regulators insist on a rapid phaseout, we will face a new tidal wave of forever chemicals,” Anne-Sofie Bäckar, executive director of Swedish chemical watchdog ChemSec, told The Guardian.
Of course, PFAS are far from the only toxic discharge attributable to the AI data center boom. On Monday, the Gothamist reported that nearly 5,000 gallons of diesel fuel had somehow spilled out of the Equinix Data Center in Secaucus, New Jersey, flowing directly into a tributary creek in the New Jersey Meadowlands.
As Climate Revolution Action Network executive director Ben Dziobek told the Gothamist, it’s proof that data centers harms extend far beyond their property lines.
“Leaving this [data centers] to individual towns doesn’t make any sense,” Dziobek said. “Data centers create problems that don’t stop at municipal boundaries, whether it’s pollution or straining the grid and driving up everyone’s electric bills.”
Choosing to bury their heads in the sand on behalf of the citizens of this country and perhaps the planet at large, the Trump administration has announced that the Environmental Protection Agency will eliminate limits on greenhouse gas pollution produced by coal and natural gas power plants, the Associated Press reports.
Needless to say, it would be a staggering setback in the federal government’s ability to tackle climate change, and the effects could be long-lasting in both an environmental and legal sense. The administration is also proposing a separate rule that could prevent future administrations from imposing restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, all but ensuring a future of ecological catastrophe.
“Tearing down our national protections against climate pollution from power plants will have enormous costs for the health, safety and well-being of families across the country,” Vickie Patton, general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, told the AP. “Americans everywhere are already suffering from record-breaking heat, more dangerous floods and storms, and skyrocketing insurance costs.”
Manish Bapna, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the New York Timesthat the EPA “is ending its legal and moral responsibility to end climate pollution.”
These changes, which involve repealing regulations passed under the preceding Biden and Obama administrations and passing new ones, have been a long time coming.
Led by EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, the agency first proposed them last year, arguing that CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions from power plants are neither a significant contributor to “dangerous pollution” that harms human health, nor to climate change. It follows, Trump’s EPA argues, that the agency doesn’t have the authority to regulate the emissions under the Clean Air Act, the US’s landmark air quality control law passed in 1963.
The action will almost certainly face fierce legal challenges from environmental groups.
“The Sierra Club will fight back against this reckless and dangerous proposal with everything we have in the courts, in Congress, and in communities across the country,” Holly Bender, the group’s chief program officer, said in a statement.
Trump has long been a climate change skeptic, calling it not only a “hoax,” but the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” Upon taking office in 2025, he immediately withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement for the second time (the first happened during his first term, and was overturned by president Biden). The international treaty is an agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, past which scientists say the worst effects of climate change will be irreversible.
A clear beneficiary of the changes is the coal industry, which Trump has gone to great lengths to appease. He has proposed relaxing regulations around how it disposes of its toxic waste, and directed the federal government to pour $700 million into supporting the industry. But “clean, beautiful coal,” as Trump calls it, is pound for pound the most carbon-emitting fuel and the largest source of global CO2 emissions.
In the age of AI agents, it’s no longer enough to ask how much electricity a single chatbot prompt uses. Today’s AI models are even more complicated systems, often designed to complete complex tasks autonomously, and are made up not only of large language models, but a host of other tools and application layers which demand much more power than the humble standalone chatbot.
That makes calculating their total electricity usage a much bigger can of worms. Yet with virtual radio silence from the top private AI labs on internal energy use, it’s nearly impossible to say definitively what kind of impact our AI assistants are having on the electrical grid.
In a blog post flagged by Wired‘s Molly Taft, the climate scientist Zeke Hausfather took it upon himself to calculate the likely energy demand behind his typical sessions with Claude Code, an AI-coding assistant developed by Anthropic.
Measuring the number of tokens his AI assistant consumed, Hausfather estimated that his average daily use fell in the range of 1.2 to 5.9 kWh — an alarming amount for a single consumer, consuming more electricity than two refrigerators running all day long.
Most of this token consumption, 3.2 billion over an eight-week period, came from the agent “re-reading its own working memory,” Hausfather wrote, which happens every time the tool takes a new step.
“Every time an agent takes a step (eg, runs a command, reads a file, or calls a tool), the model re-processes its entire accumulated context,” the climate scientist wrote.
“The text I actually see (eg, the model’s output) is only around 0.4 percent of total tokens processed,” Hausfather continued. “Some 96 percent of the tokens are cache reads where the agent re-reads its own context at each of those 14,000 steps. This matters enormously for the energy estimate, because a cached token is much cheaper to re-read than a fresh one is to process.”
Extrapolating those results out over a year, Hausfather contends that he would emit “a bit more per year than running an electric clothes dryer, and about half as much as driving an electric car 11,500 miles in California.”
That might not sound like much, but over an entire population of AI users, it adds up quickly. Likewise, it “represents a net new source of emissions, at a time when global temperatures are skyrocketing and our emissions reduction goals are increasingly off track,” the climate scientist explains.
The exact climate toll, though, remains hazy. As Wired notes, AI sustainability researcher Boris Gamazaychikov called the calculation a “good effort,” but one based on old data. Gamazaychikov’s own research on agentic AI energy consumption should be due out later in September — and when it drops, it could drastically change our understanding of the true cost of AI agents.
These days, large language models are pushing the line between schizophrenic break and reality closer than ever before.
In a wild new post that’s going viral on X-formerly-Twitter, an enterprising young biochemist named Douglas Yao showcased a new drug he’s been developing with the aid of ChatGPT. He’s not employed by any pharma company, and his drug lab is setup on a couple folding tables in his garage.
Specifically, Yao enthuses about a new drug he calls “PAC-3310,” which he says is meant to treat schizophrenia. “It was designed by ChatGPT,” Yao explains, “and I synthesized it in a chemistry lab I built in my garage.”
The result is a small vial of yellow powder — the first sample of 3310, apparently — which Yao says is modeled after the recently-authorized antipsychotic Cobenfy, “but improved.”
This vial contains a new drug called PAC-3310. It was designed by ChatGPT, and I synthesized it in a chemistry lab I built in my garage.
PAC-3310 is a new selective M4 muscarinic receptor agonist for treating schizophrenia – similar to the recent breakthrough drug Cobenfry, but… pic.twitter.com/o7z6iLR50T
On his GitHub page, Yao boasts that he’s used AI to “design several thousand new small molecule drugs” over the past year, including a “new Alzheimer’s drug,” which he’s developing in addition to the schizophrenia treatment.
“I then taught myself synthetic chemistry, built a chem lab in my garage, and synthesized a hundred of them,” he continued. “I’m now testing these compounds in cell lines and mice.”
But whatever the one-man pharma lab hopes to accomplish is difficult to say. Yao references the fact that “drug developers typically spend tens of millions of dollars generating pre-clinical efficacy evidence for a new drug,” saying that “my approach can do this at 1/1000 the cost.” This seems to suggest dreams of someday manufacturing the various drugs on a massive scale for human consumption — a process that would take years of grueling and expensive work for a well-resourced drug lab, let alone a solo entrepreneur using a box fan as a fume hood.
For instance, to even approach the Food and Drug Administration’s “New Drug Application” — itself a costly 12-month process requiring inspection of the facility where the drug will be manufactured — one first has to conduct rounds of preclinical testing followed by three phases of clinical trials. Forget “tens of millions,” as Yao mentions; this is a process that can easily cost several billion.
Even then success is far from guaranteed, as only 13.8 percent of drugs that enter clinical trials go on to obtain full approval from the FDA.
While Yao might have been right at home in the free-wheeling research landscape of the 1970s, we no longer live in a world where a mad genius can synthesize hundreds of new drugs a year from a private lab. For one thing, the regulatory environment is much more demanding, as outlined above, to say nothing of the fact that all the low-hanging fruit has been picked from the vine decades ago.
When it comes to Yao’s ChatGPT-generated Alzheimer’s treatment, the landscape is particularly fraught. As one 2019 study found, no new drug has been approved to treat Alzheimer’s since 2003, and not for a lack of trying: as the study notes, over 200 proposed substances meant to treat the disease have either failed in clinical trials or been abandoned by their creators.
The graveyard of failed Alzheimer’s treatments is so vast that the renowned organic chemist Derek Lowe has built a blog on drug discovery which routinely features after-actionreports on failed substances designed to treat the neurodegenerative disease. Simply put, to think that ChatGPT alone is enough to overcome these scientific and institutional hurdles is delusional.
Replies to Yao’s post were quick to point out the irony here, of using ChatGPT — which is well-known for leading vulnerable users down dangerous breaks from reality — to synthesize drugs to treat cognitive diseases like Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia.
“Hello schizophrenic, take this medicine that chatgpt made for you,” one poster quipped on X.
Another replied that “believing you single-handedly cured schizophrenia on a commercial laundry folding table in a garage is, ironically, a classic symptom of schizophrenia.”
When the Denver board of Water Commissioners approved stage one drought restrictions back in March, they did so facing some of the driest conditions in decades. According to the US Drought Monitor, the watershed sourced for Denver’s water utility is experiencing a “severe to exceptional drought,” while the Denver metropolitan area has been in a “severe drought.”
As a result, residents and businesses have been asked to scale back. Denverites now have to limit watering their lawns to two days a week, chosen by address. And even on those days, customers are prohibited from watering between the hours of 10am and 6pm, Gadget Review reports.
Yet as some 1.5 million customers honor the restrictions, one major customer is evidently refusing to close the tap: a brand new AI data center.
In a now-viral video circulating on social media, an unidentified resident of Denver’s Elyria-Swansea neighborhood filmed the massive lawn of a data center being sprayed with copious amounts of water.
“You better believe that they are watering their entire green with so many sprinklers that it’s literally making a giant pond,” the woman says.
Denver residents see local DATA CENTER water its massive lawns while the whole are faces drought restrictions pic.twitter.com/rrj7vMrhpt
The identity of the data center in question is unconfirmed, but it’s likely the new 18 megawatt facility owned by the cloud computing company CoreSite. At around 170,000 square feet in size, the mammoth facility recently went live in Elyria-Swansea, though not without sparking a wide-ranging debate around Denver’s zoning regulations.
It isn’t known which tech companies are renting out space in CoreSite’s Denver facility, but elsewhere the company has proudly partnered with tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
As for the water use, it’s impossible to say whether the lawn sprinklers were in violation of the city’s drought restrictions without knowing the exact time and date that the reel was filmed. It’s also possible that the facility is using recycled water to irrigate its grass, though that approach has proved disastrous in other cities.
Going forward, Gadget Review notes that all lawn sprinklers will be fully restricted as of October 1, with a ban set to last until Spring of next year. If Denver’s data centers are still spewing after the cut-off, it remains to be seen how — or even if — local leaders plan to hold the facility’s owners accountable.
Drilling thousands of miles into the Earth to study our planet’s inner layers — its thin crust, rigid mantle, liquid outer core, and solid inner core — simply isn’t feasible given technological limitations.
Instead, geologists typically use clever tricks to explore our planet’s interior, like probing seismic activity triggered by the dynamics of these shifting layers to plumb their mysteries.
And much like these layers, that picture continues to evolve. As detailed in a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences analyzed data from over two million earthquakes across the planet that took place between 1990 and 2024, using a machine learning algorithm to identify structures lurking several thousand miles below the surface.
They identified almost 175,000 “PKP precursors,” mysterious seismic signals that arrive at earthquake detectors before the main event, which can allow scientists to map the Earth’s innermost structures. More specifically, scientists believe the precursors are triggered by “small heterogeneities” just above the region where the Earth’s solid mantle meets its liquid iron core, roughly 1,800 miles below the surface.
While identifying these precursors has “traditionally required painstaking manual screening, a slow and laborious process,” the researchers noted, the new algorithm allowed them to identify “roughly ten times more” PKP precursors “than all previous studies combined.”
With this data in hand, the scientists set out to create what they claim to be the “most complete global map to date of potential small-scale heterogeneities in the Earth’s deep interior,” which includes six new areas that “host significant heterogeneities that had never been documented before.”
“Whereas previous studies could only identify sparse, isolated patches sampled by precursors, our results reveal that these potential heterogeneities may extend across broad regions in the form of continuous bands,” the researchers concluded.
The scientists suggest that these ancient structures — six larger groups spread out across the interior of the globe, as seen in the image above — could be related to subduction zones, where material that gets dragged deep below the surface is chemically altered by the extreme pressure and temperature of the core-mantle boundary. As Science Alert points out, this can spur the material take on vastly different physical properties.
The data could help us identify the time or severity of future seismic activity — and bring us one small step closer in unraveling the mysteries surrounding the formation of the Earth’s various layers and how tectonic plates formed.
While American tech billionaires fret over the capabilities of Chinese AI, one national security advisor has a brilliant idea to flatten the competition: simply bomb their data centers to smithereens.
In a new report titled “Superpowers and AGI,” former Obama-era national security official Jacob Stokes calls for United States to begin preparing readiness drills in response to Chinese AI development — up to and including military strikes on the nation’s data centers, the South China Morning Post reported.
AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to the theoretical point at which an AI model achieves human, or superhuman, levels of reasoning and intelligence. Though the science is still out on whether such a system is even possible, Stokes’ report begins from the assumption that AGI is inevitable, and that if the US can’t get to it first, its military needs to prepare to take drastic action.
Referring to the US as a hypothetical “laggard state” behind China’s achievement of AGI, Stokes — now the deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, a prominent DC think tank — writes that the country could “try to sabotage the leading state’s AGI systems, either through physical infiltration or offensive cyber operations; that is, cyberattack.”
“Cyberattacks to sabotage AGI might not provoke large-scale retaliation,” Stokes considers, given that “cyberattacks are already to some extent considered normal state behavior below [the] threshold of war.”
But waging an unprecedented cyberwar is just one of many scenarios he outlines. As Stokes observes, AI doesn’t just live online; it also requires immense computing power from physical facilities to run.
“The final option,” therefore, “would be the most dangerous and carry the most escalation risk: kinetic attacks, meaning destroying things with missiles and bombs.”
“Data centers can be bombed with conventional munitions,” Stokes writes. (He’s not the first thinker to suggest bombings to stop powerful AI; in 2023, AI critic Eliezer Yudkowsky suggested that countries needed to be ready to “destroy a rogue data center by airstrike.”)
Of course, the China hawk isn’t numb to what such an attack would mean for the world.
“Bombing would cross a major threshold that heretofore has not been crossed in US-China relations,” Stokes continues. “Trying to think through the particulars of that will be especially important, in part because it will help policymakers… start to work backwards based on the unique nature of the technology, in the same way that in a past era, policymakers would learn about nuclear weapons.”
The difference is that nuclear weapons are physical objects which can be empirically observed. AGI, in contrast, remains a fantasy — albeit one which can evidently justify preparations to make war — not unlike the fiction of weapons of mass destruction which justified the brutal invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003.
And that’s not to mention the fact that China’s approach to AI development is dramatically different than the United States’, which currently leads the world in most large language model (LLM) benchmarks. If anybody is chasing AGI, it’s the US — which surely wouldn’t take kindly to news that Chinese leaders were organizing war games around its own AI development.
Even so, Stokes is undeterred in painting China as the ultimate boogeyman. He warns that Chinese AI companies could make a “surprise technological breakthrough” that brings it closer to AGI, and thus the ability to produce cutting-edge “offensive cyber tools — in other words, cyber weapons.”
Stokes, who previously served as national security advisor to then-vice president Joe Biden as well as the Department of Homeland Security, has long worried about the economic strength of the US relative to its chosen adversaries. Still, his latest comments mark a severe escalation, even for the US national security establishment.
While making a mountain out of a Chinese molehill, Stokes’ report also takes a blind eye to the present-day use of AI by his own country’s military. In Iran, for example, US forces have used LLMs like Claude and Grok to help plan out bombing campaigns — which may have played a role in the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school bombing, which killed over 150 elementary students and staff.
With so many climate projections and mitigation strategies eyeing far-away years like 2050, it can be tempting to assume there’s still time to reverse the worst impacts of an ever-warming planet.
Unfortunately, that’s no longer in the cards — at least according to the United Nations Environment Programme, which just released a dismal report calling for the “world to face the inevitability of exceeding global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius” above pre-industrial levels.
That’s significant, because the 1.5 degree threshold has long been associated with a range of grim climate tipping points at which the planet will experience irreversible consequences such as the “breakdowns of major ocean circulation systems, abrupt thawing of boreal permafrost, and collapse of tropical coral reef systems,” per a UN climate explainer.
The new UN paper, coming on the heels of the hottest summer on record and pessimistically titled “Limiting Overshoot,” identifies the consequences of this reality, and recommends some immediate actions to keep things from spiraling even further.
Though most scientists agree we’re hovering around the 1.4 degree point at the moment, the UN notes that even in the best case scenario, where “all climate commitments and policies are implemented, warming is projected to reach 1.8 degrees Celsius at a minimum.” If we follow our current track, however, the report highlights the distinct possibility of hitting 2.6 degrees by the year 2100.
That catastrophic future is far from certain, although drastic intervention is becoming increasingly urgent if we hope to stave it off. Underscoring the severity of the present moment, the UN frames the situation in terms of maintaining warming at the 1.5 degree mark — no longer a theoretical ceiling, but the new floor going forward. Doing so, the report authors write, depends “on achieving sustained net-negative CO2 emissions at global scale in the second half of this century, and potentially further reductions of non-CO2 emissions.”
“Decisions taken this decade will determine whether viable options remain to gradually reverse warming back to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” they explain.
Speaking to CBCNews, UN Environment Programme executive director Inger Andersen said “let’s be very clear, 1.5 target is still the goal.”
“But now we need to approach it differently from above,” Andersen explained. “Every tenth of a degree we avoid still means less damage.”
Around the world, the demand for cleaner alternatives to petroleum-based jet fuel is rising.
By 2030, the European Union will require a minimum sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) blend of 6 percent, which will rise to 70 percent by 2050. Countries like the United Kingdom, Singapore, Japan, and Brazil are instituting similar policies, putting pressure on players in the global energy trade to ease reliance on crude oil.
SAF can come from all kinds of recycled waste byproducts like plant material, animal fat, and used cooking oil — the latter of which has already become a major source for existing SAF supplies. Unfortunately, the flow of extra spent fry oil is already slowing to a trickle as refiners swoop in to secure the gloop.
That’s where Chinese company Niutech comes in. In a new press release, first spotted by Interesting Engineering, Niutech announced a massive contract with an anonymous “global energy major” to build out an “industrial continuous waste plastic pyrolysis production line” capable of churning out 10,000 to 50,000 tons of plastic-derived SAF each year.
That might seem like a lot to unpack, but it’s really pretty simple. Basically, the Chinese firm is announcing the development of a massive supply line that turns plastic garbage into usable jet fuel. It plans to do so using a thermal decomposition process called pyrolysis, in which plastic waste is heated to extraordinary temperatures in an oxygen-free environment.
Though it isn’t new, pyrolysis remains something of a niche for the industrial-grade plastics-recycling space. For this approach to meet the growing need for SAF, it first has to graduate beyond the realm of small eco-startups into a widely-accepted industry standard — which appears to be Niutech’s goal.
Unlike previous SAF initiatives involving plastics, this particular production line will all be under one roof, cutting down on the need for costly shipping and handling. The Niutech refinery is also said to make use of a smorgasbord of plastics like polyethylene, nylon, polypropylene, and ABS, all “without complex pre-treatment such as washing, sorting or drying” — streamlining the complex process of sorting plastic and converting it to refinable oil at this kind of scale.
Should Niutech and its anonymous industry partner succeed in bringing the system online, it would undoubtedly serve as a constant source of plastics-based SAF for the global aviation industry, and as a role model for other refineries to follow.
“Large-scale pyrolysis projects impose stringent requirements on continuous operational capability,” a Niutech spokesperson said in the company’s press release. “Niutech has focused on pyrolysis technology for nearly 40 years and brings mature equipment and extensive project experience. This partnership is another validation of the strength of our industrial continuous technology.”
In a lake in northern British Columbia, an island suddenly appeared, almost out of thin air, thickly covered in fully-grown trees. When a boater posted footage of the new island on social media, incredulous officials thought the video was AI-generated, according to the New York Times.
But it was no hoax. Satellite imagery of Williston Lake, an artificial reservoir and Canada’s largest body of freshwater, confirmed that the nearly two-and-a-half acre island was real.
“This is a first for us, for this reservoir,” Bob Gammer, a spokesman for BC Hydro, the government-owned utility that operates the reservoir, told the NYT.
Speaking to The Guardian, he added: “In the days of AI, you really needed another form of verification or evidence like a corroborating eyewitness account. And soon, we got that.”
The island was floating roughly 60 miles west of the reservoir’s WAC Bennett dam. BC Hydro believes the island is a chunk of the reservoir that broke off from a sheltered piece of shoreline due to water levels that are the highest in 14 years. Over the course of several years, logs and woody debris could have accumulated in this area, Gammer explained, forming a sort of raft on which trees can grow — and embark on naval expeditions, apparently.
“We could easily see that a mass of woody debris with live vegetation on top of it rises up, floats and breaks free from the shoreline,” Gammer told the NYT. “Then the winds in the reservoir carry it out into open water. So that’s our best guess at how this all came to be.”
Just as experts began coming to terms with the new island, it showed it had another trick up its sleeve. Sometime around August 5, the island disappeared, according to Scientific American. Then on August 15, fresh satellite imagery showed that it had reappeared again — some 20 miles northwest of where it was first spotted, hugging the shore.
Did the island swink, swim, or — we find ourselves asking because of its incredible powers — turn invisible? It’s likely that it temporarily drifted to shore, blending in with the shoreline before drifting out to the water again.
Patel lacked virtually any degree of relevant working experience for the job before the Senate confirmed him — and now, the agency is opening the doors for even more highly questionable hirings.
As inside sources told CBS News, the FBI has quietly lowered standards of its background checks for potential federal agents and other personnel. The bureau is now officially looking the other way when it comes to prostitution, for instance — as long as recruits didn’t hire sex workers over three times.
Even more eyebrow-raising is that the FBI is even allowing the consideration of candidates who engaged in bestiality or animal cruelty, according to CBS‘ sources. However, any such incidents would’ve had to have taken place before the candidate turned 18.
The broadcaster’s sources also said there was no distinction between candidates who were forced into sexual activity with animals or if they did so willingly. An FBI spokesperson claimed that eligibility requirements were limited to a “narrow set of circumstances, such as in cases where a person was sexually abused with animals as a child.”
Experts, however, were appalled at the news, arguing that the FBI is undermining its responsibility in vetting applicants by changing background check standards.
“Bestiality is clearly a potential indication of a more serious emotional issue, and even in a circumstance where it is not, the pool of candidates should be extensive enough that the criteria should certainly not be eliminated,” former FBI agent James Davidson told CBS.
Before the changes, which were reportedly implemented earlier this summer, the FBI’s webpage was clear about automatically disqualifying special agents who engaged in “prostitution or bestiality.”
Both current and former FBI employees told the CBS that the bureau could now be hiring “people with questionable backgrounds,” allowing them to undermine the integrity of the service. Others warned that the news was evidence of a major “recruiting problem.”
Considering the fact that the agency is being helmed by a personality as controversial as Patel, these changes shouldn’t come as too much of a shock.
While he hasn’t personally acknowledged the latest changes, Patel has frequently called for new hiring standards at the bureau, arguing that “we are losing too many qualified candidates to the rigors of the requirements from yesteryear” in a July interview with former FBI agent John Nantz.
Patel’s motivation for lowering standards could be to bring in his closest associates. As ProPublica reported in November, his personal assistant didn’t clear their polygraph test and required a waiver, claims the FBI has since denied.
Two are dead and over 25 buildings damaged after a cataclysmic explosion at a cannabis facility in Sand Springs, Oklahoma last week.
According to initial reporting by KTUL, the blast happened at 1:30am, and literally blew the roof off the building, sending out shockwaves that could be felt up to 30 to 40 miles away.
“It was like around 1:20, 1:25. And it was just a big boom,” local man Donovan Ruffin, who lives a mile away from the blast, told the news channel. “Me and my wife woke up at the same time. And as soon as I heard it, I woke up… I have a window right by my bed, so I seen a flash.”
Ryan Bassham, the owner of the THC facility where the explosion occurred, was later arrested on murder charges, People reported, after defying an order from the fire marshal to halt extraction operations.
One explanation being offered up — though not officially confirmed — is that the explosion traces back to the use of butane to produce THC concentrate.
One of the more popular methods by which the cannabis industry produces concentrated products like rosin is through a process known as butane hash oil (BHO) extraction. Basically, producers use liquid butane as a solvent, pouring it over raw plants at temperatures in the ballpark of -40 degrees Fahrenheit.
Because liquid butane has an exceptionally low boiling point — 30.02 degrees Fahrenheit to be exact — the solvent can be easily cooked off after mixing with the plant matter, leaving just the dissolved cannabinoids behind. Though this is said to be one of the most straightforward methods for concentrating cannabis, the use of highly flammable butane makes it one of the most dangerous.
As the publisher Technology Networks explained in a blog post on BHO extraction, a “faulty gasket or improper check could lead to disaster.”
Overall, there is no national count of BHO-related explosions or injuries, so it’s difficult to say how common an occurrence it is. According to one clinical study conducted at the burn unit of the University of California, Davis Medical Center, there were at least eight BHO-related hospitalizations between 2011 and 2012, though that number is likely higher today after a decade of legalization and cannabis industry growth.
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.
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.”
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