Insights – Page 2

Inside Chicago’s surveillance panopticon

Early on the morning of September 2, 2024, a Chicago Transit Authority Blue Line train was the scene of a random and horrific mass shooting. Four people were shot and killed on a westbound train as it approached the suburb of Forest Park. The police swiftly activated a digital dragnet—a surveillance network that connects thousands of cameras in the city. The process began with a quick review of the transit agency’s surveillance cameras, which captured the alleged gunman shooting the victims execution style. Law enforcement followed the suspect, through real-time footage, across the rapid-transit system. Police officials circulated the images to transit staff and to thousands of officers. An officer in the adjacent suburb of Riverdale recognized the suspect from a previous arrest. By the time he was captured at another train station, just 90 minutes after the shooting, authorities already had his name, address, and previous arrest history. Little of this process would come as much surprise to Chicagoans. The city has tens of thousands of surveillance cameras—up to 45,000, by some estimates. That’s among the highest numbers per capita in the US. Chicago boasts one of the largest license plate reader systems in the country, and the ability to access audio and video surveillance from independent agencies such as the Chicago Public Schools, the Chicago Park District, and the public transportation system as well as many residential and commercial security systems such as Ring doorbell cameras. Law enforcement and security advocates say this vast monitoring system protects public safety and works well. But activists and many residents say it’s a surveillance panopticon that creates a chilling effect on behavior and violates guarantees of privacy and free speech. Black and Latino communities in Chicago have historically been targeted by excessive policing and surveillance, says Lance Williams, a scholar of urban violence at Northeastern Illinois University. That scrutiny has created new problems without delivering the promised safety, he suggests. In order to “solve the problem of crime or violence and make these communities safer,” he says, “you have to deal with structural problems,” such as the shortage of livable-wage jobs, affordable housing, and mental-health services across the city.
Recent years have seen some effective pushback against the surveillance. Until recently, for example, the city was the largest customer of ShotSpotter acoustic sensors, which are designed to detect gunfire and alert police. The system was introduced in a small area on the South Side in 2012. By 2018, an area of about 136 square miles—some 60% of the city—was covered by the acoustic surveillance network. Critics questioned ShotSpotter’s effectiveness and objected that the sensors were installed largely in Black and Latino neighborhoods. Those critiques gained urgency with the fatal shooting in March 2021 of a 13-year-old, Adam Toledo, by police responding to a ShotSpotter alert. The tragedy became the touchstone of the #StopShotSpotter protest movement and one of the major issues in Brandon Johnson’s successful mayoral campaign in 2023. When he reached office, Johnson followed through, ending the city’s contract with SoundThinking, the San Francisco Bay Area company behind ShotSpotter. In total, it’s estimated the city paid more than $53 million for the system.
In response to a request for comment, SoundThinking said that ShotSpotter enables law enforcement “to reach the scene faster, render aid to victims, and locate evidence more effectively.” It stated the company “plays no part in the selection of deployment areas” but added: “We believe communities experiencing the highest levels of gun violence deserve the same rapid emergency response as any other neighborhood.” While there has been successful resistance to police surveillance in the nation’s third-largest city, there are also countervailing forces: governments and officials in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs are moving to expand the use of surveillance, also in response to public pressure. Even the victory against acoustic surveillance might be short-lived. Early last year, the city issued a request for proposals for gun violence detection technology. Many people in and around Chicago—digital privacy and surveillance activists, defense attorneys, law enforcement officials, and ordinary citizens—are part of this push and pull. Here are some of their stories. Alejandro Ruizesparza and Freddy MartinezCofounders, Lucy Parsons Labs Oak Park, a quiet suburb at Chicago’s western border, is the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway. It includes the world’s largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright–designed buildings and homes. Until recently, the village of Oak Park was also the center of a three-year-long campaign against an unwelcome addition to its manicured lawns and Prairie-style architecture: automated license plate readers from a company called Flock Safety. These are high-speed cameras that automatically scan license plates to look for stolen or wanted vehicles, or for drivers with outstanding warrants. Freddy Martinez (left) and Alejandro Ruizesparza (right) direct Lucy Parsons Labs, a charitable organization focused on digital rights.AKILAH TOWNSEND An Oak Park group called Freedom to Thrive—made up of parents, activists, lawyers, data scientists, and many others—suspected that this technology was not a good or equitable addition to their neighborhood. So the group engaged the Chicago-based nonprofit Lucy Parsons Labs to help navigate the often intimidating process of requesting license plate reader data under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. Lucy Parsons Labs, which is named for a turn-of-the-century Chicago labor organizer, investigates technologies such as license plate readers, gunshot detection systems, and police bodycams. LPL provides digital security and public records training to a variety of groups and is frequently called on to help community members audit and analyze surveillance systems that are targeting their neighborhoods. It’s led by two first-generation Mexican-Americans from the city’s Southwest Side. Alejandro Ruizesparza has a background in community organizing and data science. Freddy Martinez was also a community organizer and has a background in physics.
The group is now approaching its 10th year, but it was an all-volunteer effort until 2022. That’s when LPL received its first unrestricted, multi-year operational grant from a large foundation: the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, known worldwide for its so-called “genius grants.” A grant from the Ford Foundation followed the next year. The additional resources—a significant amount compared with the previous all-volunteer budget, acknowledges Ruizesparza—meant the two cofounders and two volunteers became full-time employees. But the group is determined not to become “too comfortable” and lose its edge. There is a tenacity to Lucy Parsons Labs’ work—a “sense of scrappiness,” they say—because “we did so much of this work with no money.” One of LPL’s primary strategies is filing extensive FOIA requests for raw data sets of police surveillance. The process can take a while, but it often reveals issues. In the case of Oak Park, the FOIA requests were just one tool that Freedom to Thrive and LPL used to sort out what was going on. The data revealed that in the first 10 months of operation, the eight Flock license plate readers the town had deployed scanned 3,000,000 plates. But only 42 scans led to an alert—an infinitesimal yield of 0.000014%.
At the same time, the impacts of those few flagged license plates were disproportionate. While Oak Park’s population of about 53,000 is only 19% Black, Black drivers made up 85% of those flagged by the Flock cameras, seemingly amplifying what were already concerning racial disparities in the village’s traffic stops. Flock did not respond to a request for comment. “We became almost de facto experts in navigating the process and the law. I think that sort of speaks to some of the DIY punk aesthetic.” Freddy Martinez, cofounder, Lucy Parsons Labs LPL brings a mix of radical politics and critical theory to its mission. Most surveillance technologies are “largely extensions of the plantation systems,” says Ruizesparza. The comparison makes sense: Many slaveholding communities required enslaved persons to carry signed documents to leave plantations and wear badges with numbers sewn to their clothing. The group says it aims to empower local communities to push back against biased policing technologies through technical assistance, training, and litigation—and to demystify algorithms and surveillance tools in the process. “When we talk to people, they realize that you don’t need to know how to run a regression to understand that a technology has negative implications on your life,” says Ruizesparza. “You don’t need to understand how circuits work to understand that you probably shouldn’t have all of these cameras embedded in only Black and brown regions of a city.”
The group came by some of its techniques through experimentation. “When LPL was first getting started, we didn’t really feel like FOIA would have been a good way of getting information. We didn’t know anything about it,” says Martinez. “Along the way, we were very successful in uncovering a lot of surveillance practices.” One of the covert surveillance practices uncovered by those aggressive FOIA requests, for example, was the Chicago Police Department’s use of “Stingray” equipment, portable surveillance devices deployed to track and monitor mobile phones. The contentious issue of Oak Park’s license plate readers was finally put to a vote in late August. The village trustees voted 5–2 to terminate the contract with Flock Safety. Since then, community-based groups from across the country—as far away as California—have contacted LPL to say the Chicago collective’s work has inspired their own efforts, says Martinez: “We became almost de facto experts in navigating the process and the law. I think that sort of speaks to some of the DIY punk aesthetic.” Brian Strockis Chief, Oak Brook Police Department If you drive about 20 miles west of Chicago, you’ll find Oakbrook Center, one of the nation’s leading luxury shopping destinations. The open-air mall includes Neiman-Marcus, Louis Vuitton, and Gucci and attracts high-end shoppers from across the region. It’s also become a destination for retail theft crews that coordinate “smash and grabs” and often escape with thousands of dollars’ worth of inventory that can be quickly sold, such as sunglasses or luxury handbags. In early December, police say, a Chicago man tried to lead officers on what could have been a dangerous high-speed chase from the mall. Patrol cars raced to the scene. So did a “first responder drone,” built by Flock Safety and deployed by the Oak Brook Police Department. The drone identified the suspect vehicle from the mall parking lot using its license plate reader and snapped high-definition photos that were texted to officers on the ground. The suspect was later tracked to Chicago, where he was arrested. Brian Strockis, chief of the Oak Brook Police Department, led the way in introducing drones as first responders in the state of Illinois.AKILAH TOWNSEND This was the type of outcome that Brian Strockis, chief of the Oak Brook Police Department, hoped for when he pioneered the “drone as first responder,” or DFR, program in Illinois. A longtime member of the force, he joined the department almost 25 years ago as a patrol officer, worked his way up the brass ladder, and was awarded the top job in 2022.
Oak Brook was the first municipality in Illinois to deploy a drone as a first responder. One of the main reasons, says Strockis, was to reduce the number of high-speed chases, which are potentially dangerous to officers, suspects, and civilians. A drone is also a more effective and cost-efficient way to deal with suspects in fleeing vehicles, says Strockis. Police say there was the potential for a dangerous high-speed chase. Patrol cars raced to the scene. But the first unit to arrive was a drone. “It’s a force multiplier in that we’re able to do more with less,” says the chief, who spoke with me in his office at Oak Brook’s Village Hall.
The department’s drone autonomously launches from the roof of the building and responds to about 10 to 12 service calls per day, at speeds up to 45 miles per hour. It arrives at crime scenes before patrol officers in nine out of every 10 cases. Next door to Village Hall is the Oak Brook Police Department’s real-time crime center, a large room with two video walls that integrates livestreams from the first-responder drone, handheld drones, traffic cameras, license plate readers, and about a thousand private security cameras. When I visited, the two DFR operators demonstrated how the machine can fly itself or be directed to locations from a destination entered on Google Maps. They sent it off to a nearby forest preserve and then directed it to return to the rooftop base, where it docks automatically, changes batteries, and charges. After the demo, one of the drone operators logged the flight, as required by state law. Strockis says he is aware of the privacy concerns around using this technology but that protections are in place. For example, the drone cannot be used for random or mass surveillance, he says, because the camera is always pointed straight ahead during flight and does not angle down until it reaches its desired location. The drone’s payload does not include facial recognition technology, which is restricted by state law, he says. The drone video footage is invaluable, he adds, because “you are seeing the events as they’re transpiring from an angle that you wouldn’t otherwise be privy to.” It’s an extra layer of protection for the public as well as for the officers, says the chief: “For every incident that an officer responds to now, you have squad car and bodycam video. You likely have cell-phone video from the public, officers, complainants, from offenders. So adding this element is probably the best video source on a scene that the police are going to anyway.” Mark Wallace Executive director, Citizens to Abolish Red Light Cameras Mark Wallace wears several hats. By day he is a real estate investor and mortgage lender. But he is probably best known to many Chicagoans—especially across the city’s largely African-American communities on the South and West Sides—as a talk radio host for the station WVON and one of the leading voices against the city’s extensive network of red-light and speed cameras. For the past two decades, city officials have maintained that the cameras—which are officially known as “automated enforcement”—are a crucial safety measure. They are also a substantial revenue stream, generating around $150 million a year and a total of some $2.5 billion since they were installed.
Urged on by a radio listener, Mark Wallace started organizing against Chicago’s red-light and speed cameras, a substantial revenue stream for the city that has been found to disproportionately burden majority Black and Latino areas.AKILAH TOWNSEND “The one thing that the cameras have the ability to do is generate a lot of money,” Wallace says. He describes the tickets as a “cash grab” that disproportionately affects Black and Latino communities. A groundbreaking 2022 analysis by ProPublica found, in fact, that households in majority Black and Latino zip codes were ticketed at much higher rates than others, in part because the cameras in those areas were more likely to be installed near expressway ramps and on wider streets, which encouraged faster speeds. The tickets, which can quickly rack up late fees, were also found to cause more of a financial burden in such communities, the report found. These were some of the same concerns that many people expressed on the radio and in meetings, Wallace says. Chicago’s automated traffic enforcement began in 2003, and it became the most extensive—and most lucrative—such program in the country. About 300 red-light cameras and 200 speed cameras are set up near schools and parks. The cost of the tickets can quickly double if they are not paid or contested—providing a windfall for the city. Wallace began his advocacy against the cameras soon after arriving at the radio station in the early 2010s. A younger listener called in and said, he recalls, “that he enjoyed the information that came from WVON but that we didn’t do anything.” The comment stuck with him, especially in light of WVON’s storied history. The station was closely involved in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and broadcast Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches during his Chicago campaign. Wallace hoped to change the caller’s perception about the station. He had firsthand experience with red-light cameras, having been ticketed himself, and decided to take them on as a cause. He scheduled a meeting at his church for a Friday night, promoting it on his show. “More than 300 people showed up,” he remembers, chatting with me in the spacious project studio and office in the basement of his townhouse on the city’s South Side. “That said to me there are a lot of people who see this inequity and injustice.” Wallace began using his platform on WVON—The People’s Show—to mobilize communities around social and economic justice, and many discussions revolved around the automated enforcement program. The cause gained traction after city and state officials were found to have taken thousands of dollars from technology and surveillance companies to make sure their cameras remained on the streets. Wallace and his group, Citizens to Abolish Red Light Cameras, want to repeal the ordinances authorizing the city’s camera programs. That hasn’t happened so far, but political pressure from the group paved the way for a Chicago City Council ordinance that required public meetings before any red-light cameras are installed, removed, or relocated. The group hopes for more restrictions for speed cameras, too. “It was never about me personally. It was about ensuring that we could demonstrate to people that you have power,” says Wallace. “If you don’t like something, as Barack Obama would say, get a pen and clipboard and go to work to fight to make these changes.” Jonathan Manes Senior counsel, MacArthur Justice Center Derick Scruggs, a 30-year-old father and licensed armed security guard, was working in the parking lot of an AutoZone on Chicago’s Southwest Side on April 19, 2021. That’s when he was detained, interrogated, and subjected to a “humiliating body search” by two Chicago police officers, Scruggs later attested. “I was just doing my job when police officers came at me, handcuffed me, and treated me like a criminal—just because I was near a ShotSpotter alert,” he says. The officers found no evidence of a shooting and released Scruggs. But the next day, the police returned and arrested him for an alleged violation related to his security guard paperwork. Prosecutors later dismissed the charges, but he was held in custody overnight and was then fired from his job. “Because of what they did,” he says, “I lost my job, couldn’t work for months, and got evicted from my apartment.” Jonathan Manes litigated cases related to detentions at Guantanamo Bay and the legality of drone strikes before turning his attention to Chicago’s implementation of gunshot detection technology.AKILAH TOWNSEND Scruggs is believed to be among thousands of Chicagoans who’ve been questioned, detained, or arrested by police because they were near the location of a ShotSpotter alert, according to an analysis by the City of Chicago Office of Inspector General. The case caught the attention of Jonathan Manes, a law professor at Northwestern and senior counsel at the MacArthur Justice Center, a public interest law firm. Manes previously worked in national security law, but when he joined the justice center about six years ago, he chose to focus squarely on the intersection of civil rights with police surveillance and technology. “My goal was to identify areas that weren’t well covered by other civil rights organizations but were a concern for people here in Chicago,” he says. “There is a need for much broader structural change to how the city chooses to use surveillance technology and then deploys it.” Jonathan Manes, senior counsel, MacArthur Justice Center And when he and his colleagues looked into ShotSpotter, they revealed a disturbing problem: The system generated alerts that yielded no evidence of gun-related crimes but were used by police as a pretext for other actions. There seemed to be “a pattern of people being stopped, detained, questioned, sometimes arrested, in response to a ShotSpotter alert—often resulting in charges that have nothing to do with guns,” Manes says. The system also directed a “massive number of police deployments onto the South and West Sides of the city,” Manes says. Those regions are home to most of Chicago’s Black and Latino residents. The research showed that 80% of the city’s Black population but only 30% of its white population lived in districts covered by the system. Manes brought Scruggs’s case into a lawsuit that he was already developing against the city’s use of ShotSpotter. In late 2025, he and his colleagues reached a settlement that prohibits police officers from doing what they did in Scruggs’s case—stopping or searching people simply because they are near the location of a gunshot detection alert. Chicago had already decommissioned ShotSpotter in 2024, but the agreement will cover any future gunshot detection systems. Manes is carefully watching to see what happens next. Though Manes is pleased with the settlement, he points out that it narrowly focused on how police resources were used after the gunshot detection system was operational. “There is a need for much broader structural change to how the city chooses to use surveillance technology and then deploys it,” he adds. He supports laws that require disclosure from local officials and law enforcement about what technologies are being proposed and how civil rights could be affected. More than two dozen jurisdictions nationwide have adopted surveillance transparency laws, including San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and New York City. But so far Chicago is not on that list. Rod McCullom is a Chicago-based science and technology writer whose focus areas include AI, biometrics, cognition, and the science of crime and violence.

Favorable Wi-Fi 7 prices won’t be around for long, Dell’Oro Group warns

Another contributing factor is that some Wi-Fi 7 access points have only two radios, whereas Wi-Fi 6 APs generally have three to support 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz bands, Morgan says. Finally, some vendors offer a wider range of Wi-Fi 7 equipment models than in previous generations. The lower-end models in their portfolios help reduce the average price of all Wi-Fi 7 products, Morgan’s research shows. So, whether you pay a premium for Wi-Fi 7 vs. Wi-Fi 6 or 6E may depend on which models you need. Act now, these deals won’t last Whatever your particular case, if you are in the market for a Wi-Fi 7 upgrade, don’t dally. “In the overall wireless LAN market, not just Wi-Fi 7, we’re going to start to see prices rise,” Morgan says. Price hikes will be largely due to the uncertain availability of memory chips required for WLAN hardware – an issue that’s driving price hikes across all sorts of equipment. “Vendors have already started to raise list prices, even though it’s been in the few percentage points so far,” she said. “We expect further price hikes over the next year.” Lead times are also volatile. Channel partners are telling Dell’Oro that lead times can vary day-to-day, measured in months one day and weeks the next. “There doesn’t seem to be a consistent trend across specific products or specific vendors. It seems volatile across the whole market,” Morgan says. As a result, partners are tightening the windows on how long quotes are valid, because they don’t know how or whether their own pricing will change. While there’s no hard-and-fast rule of thumb, and timing may depend on existing contracts, Morgan says the typical window is probably a matter of weeks.

Raising the temp on liquid cooling

IBM isn’t the only one. “We’ve been doing liquid cooling since 2012 on our supercomputers,” says Scott Tease, vice president and general manager of AI and high-performance computing at Lenovo’s infrastructure solutions group. “And we’ve been improving it ever since—we’re now on the sixth generation of that technology.” And the liquid Lenovo uses in its Neptune liquid cooling solution is warm water. Or, more precisely, hot water: 45 degrees Celsius. And when the water leaves the servers, it’s even hotter, Tease says. “I don’t have to chill that water, even if I’m in a hot climate,” he says. Even at high temperatures, the water still provides enough cooling to the chips that it has real value. “Generally, a data center will use evaporation to chill water down,” Tease adds. “Since we don’t have to chill the water, we don’t have to use evaporation. That’s huge amounts of savings on the water. For us, it’s almost like a perfect solution. It delivers the highest performance possible, the highest density possible, the lowest power consumption. So, it’s the most sustainable solution possible.” So, how is the water cooled down? It gets piped up to the roof, Tease says, where there are giant radiators with massive amounts of surface area. The heat radiates away, and then all the water flows right back to the servers again. Though not always. The hot water can also be used to, say, heat campus or community swimming pools. “We have data centers in the Nordics who are giving the heat to the local communities’ water systems,” Tease says.

GenAI Pushes Cloud to $119B Quarter as AI Networking Race Intensifies

Cisco Targets the AI Fabric Bottleneck Cisco introduced its Silicon One G300, a new switching ASIC delivering 102.4 Tbps of throughput and designed specifically for large-scale AI cluster deployments. The chip will power next-generation Cisco Nexus 9000 and 8000 systems aimed at hyperscalers, neocloud providers, sovereign cloud operators, and enterprises building AI infrastructure. The company is positioning the platform around a simple premise: at AI-factory scale, the network becomes part of the compute plane. According to Cisco, the G300 architecture enables: 33% higher network utilization 28% reduction in AI job completion time Support for emerging 1.6T Ethernet environments Integrated telemetry and path-based load balancing Martin Lund, EVP of Cisco’s Common Hardware Group, emphasized the growing centrality of data movement. “As AI training and inference continues to scale, data movement is the key to efficient AI compute; the network becomes part of the compute itself,” Lund said. The new systems also reflect another emerging trend in AI infrastructure: the spread of liquid cooling beyond servers and into the networking layer. Cisco says its fully liquid-cooled switch designs can deliver nearly 70% energy efficiency improvement compared with prior approaches, while new 800G linear pluggable optics aim to reduce optical power consumption by up to 50%. Ethernet’s Next Big Test Industry analysts increasingly view AI networking as one of the most consequential battlegrounds in the current infrastructure cycle. Alan Weckel, founder of 650 Group, noted that backend AI networks are rapidly moving toward 1.6T architectures, a shift that could push the Ethernet data center switch market above $100 billion annually. SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel was even more direct in framing the stakes. “Networking has been the fundamental constraint to scaling AI,” Patel said. “At this scale, networking directly determines how much AI compute can actually be utilized.” That reality is driving intense innovation

From Lab to Gigawatt: CoreWeave’s ARENA and the AI Validation Imperative

The Production Readiness Gap AI teams continue to confront a familiar challenge: moving from experimentation to predictable production performance. Models that train successfully on small clusters or sandbox environments often behave very differently when deployed at scale. Performance characteristics shift. Data pipelines strain under sustained load. Cost assumptions unravel. Synthetic benchmarks and reduced test sets rarely capture the complex interactions between compute, storage, networking, and orchestration that define real-world AI systems. The result can be an expensive “Day One” surprise: unexpected infrastructure costs, bottlenecks across distributed components, and delays that ripple across product timelines. CoreWeave’s view is that benchmarking and production launch can no longer be treated as separate phases. Instead, validation must occur in environments that replicate the architectural, operational, and economic realities of live deployment. ARENA is designed around that premise. The platform allows customers to run full workloads on CoreWeave’s production-grade GPU infrastructure, using standardized compute stacks, network configurations, data paths, and service integrations that mirror actual deployment environments. Rather than approximating production behavior, the goal is to observe it directly. Key capabilities include: Running real workloads on GPU clusters that match production configurations. Benchmarking both performance and cost under realistic operational conditions. Diagnosing bottlenecks and scaling behavior across compute, storage, and networking layers. Leveraging standardized observability tools and guided engineering support. CoreWeave positions ARENA as an alternative to traditional demo or sandbox environments; one informed by its own experience operating large-scale AI infrastructure. By validating workloads under production conditions early in the lifecycle, teams gain empirical insight into performance dynamics and cost curves before committing capital and operational resources. Why Production-Scale Validation Has Become Strategic The demand for environments like ARENA reflects how fundamentally AI workloads have changed. Several structural shifts are driving the need for production-scale validation: Continuous, Multi-Layered Workloads AI systems are no longer

Utah’s 4 GW AI Campus Tests the Limits of Speed-to-Power

Back in September 2025, we examined an ambitious proposal from infrastructure developer Joule Capital Partners – often branding the effort as “Joule Power” – in partnership with Caterpillar. The concept is straightforward but consequential: acquire a vast rural tract in Millard County, Utah, and pair an AI-focused data center campus with large-scale, on-site “behind-the-meter” generation to bypass the interconnection queues, transmission constraints, and substation bottlenecks slowing projects nationwide. The appeal is clear: speed-to-power and greater control over delivery timelines. But that speed shifts the project’s risk profile. Instead of navigating traditional utility procurement, the development begins to resemble a distributed power plant subject to industrial permitting, fuel supply logistics, air emissions scrutiny, noise controls, and groundwater governance. These are issues communities typically associate with generation facilities, not hyperscale data centers. Our earlier coverage focused on the technical and strategic logic of pairing compute with on-site generation. Now the story has evolved. Community opposition is emerging as a material variable that could influence schedule and scope. Although groundbreaking was held in November 2025, final site plans and key conditional use permits remain pending at the time of publication. What Is Actually Being Proposed? Public records from Millard County show Joule pursuing a zone change for approximately 4,000 acres (about 6.25 square miles), converting agricultural land near 11000 N McCornick Road to Heavy Industrial use. At a July 2025 public meeting, residents raised familiar concerns that surface when a rural landscape is targeted for hyperscale development: labor influx and housing strain, water use, traffic, dust and wildfire risk, wildlife disruption, and the broader loss of farmland and local character. What has proven less clear is the precise scale and sequencing of the buildout. Local reporting describes an initial phase of six data center buildings, each supported by a substantial fleet of Caterpillar

Inside Chicago’s surveillance panopticon

Favorable Wi-Fi 7 prices won’t be around for long, Dell’Oro Group warns

Raising the temp on liquid cooling

GenAI Pushes Cloud to $119B Quarter as AI Networking Race Intensifies

From Lab to Gigawatt: CoreWeave’s ARENA and the AI Validation Imperative

Utah’s 4 GW AI Campus Tests the Limits of Speed-to-Power

Ovintiv to divest Anadarko assets for $3 billion

In a release Feb. 17, Brendan McCracken, Ovintiv president and chief executive officer, said the company has “built one of the deepest premium inventory positions in our industry in the two most valuable plays in North America, the Permian and the Montney,” and that the Anadarko assets sale “positions [Ovintiv] to deliver superior returns for our shareholders for many years to come.” Ovintiv in 2025 had noted plans to sell the asset to help offset the cost of its acquisition of NuVista Energy Ltd. That $2.7-billion cash and stock deal, which closed earlier this month, added about 930 net 10,000-ft equivalent well locations and about 140,000 net acres (70% undeveloped) in the core of the oil-rich Alberta Montney. Proceeds from the Anadarko assets sale are earmarked for accelerated debt reduction, the company said. Ovintiv’s sale of its Anadarko assets is expected to close early in this year’s second quarter, subject to customary conditions, with an effective date of Jan. 1, 2026.

ExxonMobil transporting, storing captured CO2 from second operation in Louisiana

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Azule Energy discovers oil offshore Angola

Azule Energy and partners discovered oil in Block 15/06 in the offshore Lower Congo basin, offshore Angola. Preliminary estimates indicate oil in place of around 500 million bbl, and the presence of existing nearby production infrastructure—about 18 km from Olombendo FPSO—improves development prospects, the operator said in a release Feb. 13. The Algaita-01 exploration well, spudded on Jan. 10, 2026, was drilled by the Saipem 12000 drillship in a water depth of 667 m. The well encountered oil-bearing sandstones in multiple Upper Miocene intervals. Drilling operations were completed Jan. 26, followed by advanced formation evaluation logs to assess reservoir quality and fluid characteristics. Preliminary interpretation of wireline logging and fluid sampling indicates the presence of multiple reservoir intervals with excellent petrophysical properties and fluid mobilities, the company said. Azule Energy is an incorporated joint venture equally owned by bp plc Eni SpA. The company currently produces around 200,000 boe/d in Angola. Block 15/06 is operated by Azule Energy (36.84%), in partnership with SSI (26.32%) and Sonangol E&P (36.84%).

Cameroon opens nine exploration opportunities spanning two proven oil, gas basins

Cameroon’s National Hydrocarbons Corp. (SNH) is offering nine exploration and production blocks spanning two proven basins in its latest licensing round. The round includes three blocks in the Rio del Rey (RDR) basin (Ndian River, Bolongo Exploration, and Bakassi), and six in the Douala-Kribi Campo (DKC) basin (Etinde Exploration, Bomono, Nkombe Nsepe, Tilapia, Ntem, and Elombo), the African Energy Chamber said in a release Feb. 19. These blocks feature prior drilling, 2D and 3D seismic coverage, identified leads and undrilled prospects, and are located near existing producing fields. The licensing round accommodates multiple contractual frameworks, including Concession Contracts, Production Sharing Contracts, and Risk Service Contracts. Exploration periods vary by block: Bolongo, Bomono, Etinde Exploration, Tilapia, Ntem, and Elombo have an initial 3-year term, renewable twice for 2-year periods, while Bakassi, Kombe-Nsepe, and Ndian River have 5-year initial terms, also renewable. Companies must submit proposals including technical evaluations, minimum work programs, budgets, environmental, and social commitments and local content plans. Minimum work programs require drilling exploration wells, seismic acquisition, and geoscience studies. Proposals are being accepted until Mar. 30, 2026, ahead of a final decision in late April.

Vertex Energy’s Alabama refinery expands base oil production

Vertex Energy Inc. has started production of a new high-viscosity Group III re-refined base oil (RRBO) at subsidiary Vertex Refining Alabama LLC’s 75,000-b/d refining and petrochemical complex in Mobile, Ala. Following first commercial production of its VTX-R4 RRBO at the Mobile refinery in November 2025, Vertex is now producing VTX-R6—a higher-viscosity 6 centistoke (cSt) Group III RRBO—to provide lubricant manufacturers an option that supports thicker finished-lubricant formulations for applications requiring greater film thickness and durability, the operator confirmed on Feb. 18. Commonly used in applications including heavy-duty engine oils, passenger car motor oils, and select gear, transmission, compressor, and hydraulic oils, addition of the 6-cSt viscosity RRBO grade specifically comes as part of Vertex’s program of expanding its portfolio to provide customers increased flexibility to optimize formulations across a broader range of finished lubricant viscosity grades, the company said. Produced at the Mobile refinery from used motor oil collected through Vertex’s integrated network, VTX-R4 and R6 base oil grades are aimed at providing blenders and manufacturers reliable and readily available US-produced alternatives to imported Group III base oils, according to the operator. Vertex did not reveal the Mobile refinery’s current rates of production for either VTX-R4 or R6.

Brazos expands Texas Permian cryogenic gas processing network

Brazos Midstream Holdings LLC has commissioned a new 300-MMcfd cryogenic natural gas processing plant in Martin County, Tex., and started construction of an additional 300-MMcfd facility in neighboring Glasscock County as part of its operational expansion in the Permian’s Midland basin. The newly online Sundance II plant increases the company’s operated Midland basin processing capacity to 500 MMcfd when combined with the existing 200-MMcfd Sundance I plant, which entered service in mid-2024. The two plants form the Sundance complex in Martin County. The largest cryogenic plant Brazos has built to date, Sundance II also expands incremental residue gas and NGL takeaway capacity in the core of the Midland basin, where producer drilling activity remains concentrated, the company said. Cassidy complex under construction Brazos also confirmed construction of the Cassidy processing complex is now under way in Glasscock County. The initial phase, Cassidy I, includes a 300-MMcfd cryogenic plant targeted for completion by yearend 2026. Upon startup of Cassidy I, Brazos’ total operated natural gas processing capacity in the Midland basin will reach 800 MMcfd, according to the operator. Brazos said it has secured grid power and related infrastructure to support future expansion phases at the Cassidy site as producer drilling programs drive additional processing demand. Gathering system expansion Alongside gas processing additions, Brazos said it is expanding its Midland basin gathering footprint with more than 70 miles of new 20-in. and 24-in. high-pressure natural gas gathering pipeline currently under construction. The new lines specifically aim to relieve existing constraints for producers in Reagan, Glasscock, Midland, and Upton counties, the company said. When the pipeline work is completed in mid-2026, the company’s Midland basin system is expected to include about 525 miles of natural gas gathering pipelines and 16 compressor stations. Brazos said its Midland operations are supported by long-term acreage dedications

LG rolls out new AI services to help consumers with daily tasks

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More LG kicked off the AI bandwagon today with a new set of AI services to help consumers in their daily tasks at home, in the car and in the office. The aim of LG’s CES 2025 press event was to show how AI will work in a day of someone’s life, with the goal of redefining the concept of space, said William Joowan Cho, CEO of LG Electronics at the event. The presentation showed LG is fully focused on bringing AI into just about all of its products and services. Cho referred to LG’s AI efforts as “affectionate intelligence,” and he said it stands out from other strategies with its human-centered focus. The strategy focuses on three things: connected devices, capable AI agents and integrated services. One of things the company announced was a strategic partnership with Microsoft on AI innovation, where the companies pledged to join forces to shape the future of AI-powered spaces. One of the outcomes is that Microsoft’s Xbox Ultimate Game Pass will appear via Xbox Cloud on LG’s TVs, helping LG catch up with Samsung in offering cloud gaming natively on its TVs. LG Electronics will bring the Xbox App to select LG smart TVs. That means players with LG Smart TVs will be able to explore the Gaming Portal for direct access to hundreds of games in the Game Pass Ultimate catalog, including popular titles such as Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, and upcoming releases like Avowed (launching February 18, 2025). Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members will be able to play games directly from the Xbox app on select LG Smart TVs through cloud gaming. With Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and a compatible Bluetooth-enabled

Big tech must stop passing the cost of its spiking energy needs onto the public

Julianne Malveaux is an MIT-educated economist, author, educator and political commentator who has written extensively about the critical relationship between public policy, corporate accountability and social equity. The rapid expansion of data centers across the U.S. is not only reshaping the digital economy but also threatening to overwhelm our energy infrastructure. These data centers aren’t just heavy on processing power — they’re heavy on our shared energy infrastructure. For Americans, this could mean serious sticker shock when it comes to their energy bills. Across the country, many households are already feeling the pinch as utilities ramp up investments in costly new infrastructure to power these data centers. With costs almost certain to rise as more data centers come online, state policymakers and energy companies must act now to protect consumers. We need new policies that ensure the cost of these projects is carried by the wealthy big tech companies that profit from them, not by regular energy consumers such as family households and small businesses. According to an analysis from consulting firm Bain & Co., data centers could require more than $2 trillion in new energy resources globally, with U.S. demand alone potentially outpacing supply in the next few years. This unprecedented growth is fueled by the expansion of generative AI, cloud computing and other tech innovations that require massive computing power. Bain’s analysis warns that, to meet this energy demand, U.S. utilities may need to boost annual generation capacity by as much as 26% by 2028 — a staggering jump compared to the 5% yearly increases of the past two decades. This poses a threat to energy affordability and reliability for millions of Americans. Bain’s research estimates that capital investments required to meet data center needs could incrementally raise consumer bills by 1% each year through 2032. That increase may

Final 45V hydrogen tax credit guidance draws mixed response

Dive Brief: The final rule for the 45V clean hydrogen production tax credit, which the U.S. Treasury Department released Friday morning, drew mixed responses from industry leaders and environmentalists. Clean hydrogen development within the U.S. ground to a halt following the release of the initial guidance in December 2023, leading industry participants to call for revisions that would enable more projects to qualify for the tax credit. While the final rule makes “significant improvements” to Treasury’s initial proposal, the guidelines remain “extremely complex,” according to the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association. FCHEA President and CEO Frank Wolak and other industry leaders said they look forward to working with the Trump administration to refine the rule. Dive Insight: Friday’s release closed what Wolak described as a “long chapter” for the hydrogen industry. But industry reaction to the final rule was decidedly mixed, and it remains to be seen whether the rule — which could be overturned as soon as Trump assumes office — will remain unchanged. “The final 45V rule falls short,” Marty Durbin, president of the U.S. Chamber’s Global Energy Institute, said in a statement. “While the rule provides some of the additional flexibility we sought, … we believe that it still will leave billions of dollars of announced projects in limbo. The incoming Administration will have an opportunity to improve the 45V rules to ensure the industry will attract the investments necessary to scale the hydrogen economy and help the U.S. lead the world in clean manufacturing.” But others in the industry felt the rule would be sufficient for ending hydrogen’s year-long malaise. “With this added clarity, many projects that have been delayed may move forward, which can help unlock billions of dollars in investments across the country,” Kim Hedegaard, CEO of Topsoe’s Power-to-X, said in a statement. Topsoe

Texas, Utah, Last Energy challenge NRC’s ‘overburdensome’ microreactor regulations

Dive Brief: A 69-year-old Nuclear Regulatory Commission rule underpinning U.S. nuclear reactor licensing exceeds the agency’s statutory authority and creates an unreasonable burden for microreactor developers, the states of Texas and Utah and advanced nuclear technology company Last Energy said in a lawsuit filed Dec. 30 in federal court in Texas. The plaintiffs asked the Eastern District of Texas court to exempt Last Energy’s 20-MW reactor design and research reactors located in the plaintiff states from the NRC’s definition of nuclear “utilization facilities,” which subjects all U.S. commercial and research reactors to strict regulatory scrutiny, and order the NRC to develop a more flexible definition for use in future licensing proceedings. Regardless of its merits, the lawsuit underscores the need for “continued discussion around proportional regulatory requirements … that align with the hazards of the reactor and correspond to a safety case,” said Patrick White, research director at the Nuclear Innovation Alliance. Dive Insight: Only three commercial nuclear reactors have been built in the United States in the past 28 years, and none are presently under construction, according to a World Nuclear Association tracker cited in the lawsuit. “Building a new commercial reactor of any size in the United States has become virtually impossible,” the plaintiffs said. “The root cause is not lack of demand or technology — but rather the [NRC], which, despite its name, does not really regulate new nuclear reactor construction so much as ensure that it almost never happens.” More than a dozen advanced nuclear technology developers have engaged the NRC in pre-application activities, which the agency says help standardize the content of advanced reactor applications and expedite NRC review. Last Energy is not among them. The pre-application process can itself stretch for years and must be followed by a formal application that can take two

Qualcomm unveils AI chips for PCs, cars, smart homes and enterprises

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Qualcomm unveiled AI technologies and collaborations for PCs, cars, smart homes and enterprises at CES 2025. At the big tech trade show in Las Vegas, Qualcomm Technologies showed how it’s using AI capabilities in its chips to drive the transformation of user experiences across diverse device categories, including PCs, automobiles, smart homes and into enterprises. The company unveiled the Snapdragon X platform, the fourth platform in its high-performance PC portfolio, the Snapdragon X Series, bringing industry-leading performance, multi-day battery life, and AI leadership to more of the Windows ecosystem. Qualcomm has talked about how its processors are making headway grabbing share from the x86-based AMD and Intel rivals through better efficiency. Qualcomm’s neural processing unit gets about 45 TOPS, a key benchmark for AI PCs. The Snapdragon X family of AI PC processors. Additionally, Qualcomm Technologies showcased continued traction of the Snapdragon X Series, with over 60 designs in production or development and more than 100 expected by 2026. Snapdragon for vehicles Qualcomm demoed chips that are expanding its automotive collaborations. It is working with Alpine, Amazon, Leapmotor, Mobis, Royal Enfield, and Sony Honda Mobility, who look to Snapdragon Digital Chassis solutions to drive AI-powered in-cabin and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Qualcomm also announced continued traction for its Snapdragon Elite-tier platforms for automotive, highlighting its work with Desay, Garmin, and Panasonic for Snapdragon Cockpit Elite. Throughout the show, Qualcomm will highlight its holistic approach to improving comfort and focusing on safety with demonstrations on the potential of the convergence of AI, multimodal contextual awareness, and cloudbased services. Attendees will also get a first glimpse of the new Snapdragon Ride Platform with integrated automated driving software stack and system definition jointly

Oil, Gas Execs Reveal Where They Expect WTI Oil Price to Land in the Future

Executives from oil and gas firms have revealed where they expect the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil price to be at various points in the future as part of the fourth quarter Dallas Fed Energy Survey, which was released recently. The average response executives from 131 oil and gas firms gave when asked what they expect the WTI crude oil price to be at the end of 2025 was $71.13 per barrel, the survey showed. The low forecast came in at $53 per barrel, the high forecast was $100 per barrel, and the spot price during the survey was $70.66 per barrel, the survey pointed out. This question was not asked in the previous Dallas Fed Energy Survey, which was released in the third quarter. That survey asked participants what they expect the WTI crude oil price to be at the end of 2024. Executives from 134 oil and gas firms answered this question, offering an average response of $72.66 per barrel, that survey showed. The latest Dallas Fed Energy Survey also asked participants where they expect WTI prices to be in six months, one year, two years, and five years. Executives from 124 oil and gas firms answered this question and gave a mean response of $69 per barrel for the six month mark, $71 per barrel for the year mark, $74 per barrel for the two year mark, and $80 per barrel for the five year mark, the survey showed. Executives from 119 oil and gas firms answered this question in the third quarter Dallas Fed Energy Survey and gave a mean response of $73 per barrel for the six month mark, $76 per barrel for the year mark, $81 per barrel for the two year mark, and $87 per barrel for the five year mark, that

Job titles of the future: Breast biomechanic

Twenty years ago, Joanna Wakefield-Scurr was having persistent pain in her breasts. Her doctor couldn’t diagnose the cause but said a good, supportive bra could help. A professor of biomechanics, Wakefield-Scurr thought she could do a little research and find a science-backed option. Two decades later, she’s still looking. Wakefield-Scurr now leads an 18-person team at the Research Group in Breast Health at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. Their research shows that the most effective high-impact-sports bras have underwires, padded cups, adjustable underbands and shoulder straps, and hook-and-eye closures. These bras reduce breast movement by up to 74% when compared with wearing no bra. But movement might not be the only metric that matters. A biological rarity Few anatomical structures hang outside of the body unsupported by cartilage, muscle, or bone—meaning there wasn’t much historical research to build on. Wakefield-Scurr’s lab was the first to find that when women run, the motion of the torso causes breasts to move in a three-dimensional pattern—swinging side to side and up and down—as well as moving forward and backward. In an hour of slow jogging, boobs can bounce approximately 10,000 times. A sports necessity Wearing a bra that’s too tight can limit breathing. Wearing one that’s too loose can create back, shoulder, and neck pain. Pain can also be caused by the lag between torso and breast movement, which causes what is scientifically known as “breast slap.” The lab’s research has also found that the physical discomfort of bad bras, combined with the embarrassment of flopping around, is the one of the biggest barriers to exercise for women and that if women have a good sports bra, they’re more willing to go for a run.
An open question Some bras function by deliberately compressing breasts. Others encapsulate and support each individual breast. But scientists still don’t know whether it’s more biomechanically important to reduce the breasts’ motion entirely, to reduce the speed at which they move, or to reduce breast slap. Will women constantly be forced to choose between the comfort of a stretchier bra and the support of a more restrictive one? Wakefield-Scurr is excited about new materials she’s tested that tighten or stretch depending on how you move. She’s working with fabric manufacturers and clothing companies to try out their wares. As more women take up high-impact sports, the need to understand what makes a good bra grows. Wakefield-Scurr says her lab can’t keep up with demand. Their cups runneth over. Sara Harrison is a freelance journalist who writes about science, technology, and health.

Community service

The bird is a beautiful silver-gray, and as she dies twitching in the lasernet I’m grateful for two things: First, that she didn’t make a sound. Second, that this will be the very last time. They’re called corpse doves—because the darkest part of their gray plumage surrounds the lighter part, giving the impression that skeleton faces are peeking out from behind trash cans and bushes—and their crime is having the ability to carry diseases that would be compatible with humans. I open my hand, triggering the display from my imprinted handheld, and record an image to verify the elimination. A ding from my palm lets me know I’ve reached my quota for the day and, with that, the year. I’m tempted to give this one a send-off, a real burial with holy words and some flowers, but then I hear a pack of streetrats hooting beside me. My city-issued vest is reflective and nanopainted so it projects a slight glow. I don’t know if it’s to keep us safe like they say, or if it’s just that so many of us are ex-cons working court-ordered labor, and civilians want to be able to keep an eye on us. Either way, everyone treats us like we’re invisible—everyone except children. I switch the lasernet on the bird from electrocute to incinerate and watch as what already looked like a corpse becomes ashes. “Hey, executioner!” says a girl. “Executioner” is not my official title. The branch of city government we work for is called the Department of Mercy, and we’re only ever called technicians. But that doesn’t matter to the child, who can’t be more than eight but has the authority of a judge as she holds up a finger to point me out to her friends.
HENRY HORENSTEIN “Guys, look!” she says, then turns her attention to me. “You hunting something big?” I shake my head, slowly packing up my things. “Something small?” she asks. Then her eyes darken. “You’re not a cat killer, are you?” “No,” I say quickly. “I do horseflies.” I don’t know why I lied, but as the suspicion leaves her face and a smile returns, I’m glad I did. “You should come down by the docks. We’ve got flies! Make your quota in a day.” The girl tosses her hair, making the tinfoil charms she’s wrapped around her braids tinkle like wind chimes. “It’s my last day. But if I get flies again for next year, I’ll swing by.” Another lie, because we both know the city would never send anyone to the docks for flies. Flies are killed because they are a nuisance, which means people only care about clearing them out of suburbs and financial districts. They’d only send a tech down to the docks to kill something that put the city proper at risk through disease, or by using up more resources than they wanted to spare. LeeLee is expecting me home to sit through the reassignments with her and it’s already late, so I hand out a couple of the combination warming and light sticks I get for winter to the pack of children with nowhere to go. As I walk away, the children are laughing so loud it sounds like screaming. They toss the sticks in the air like signal flares, small bright cries for help that no one will see.
LeeLee’s anxiety takes the form of caretaking, and as soon as I’ve stepped through the door I can smell bread warming and soup on the stove. I take off my muffling boots. Another day, I’d leave them on and sneak up on her just to be irritating, and she’d turn and threaten me with whatever kitchen utensil was at hand. But she’ll be extra nervous today, so I remove the shoes that let me catch nervous birds, and step hard on my way in. Sometimes it seems impossible that I can spend a year killing every fragile and defenseless thing I’ve encountered but still take such care with Lee. But I tell myself that the killing isn’t me—it’s just my sentence, and what I do when I have a choice is the only thing that really says anything about me. For the first six months and 400 birds, I believed it. LeeLee flicks on a smile that lasts a whole three seconds when she sees me, then clouds over again. “Soup’s too thin. There wasn’t enough powder for a real broth.” “I like thin soup,” I say. “Not like this. It doesn’t even cover up the taste of the water.” “I like the taste of the water,” I say, which breaks her out of her spiraling enough to roll her eyes. I put my hands on her shoulder to stop her fussing. “The soup is going to be fine,” I say. “So will the reassignment.” I’m not much taller than she is, but when we met in juvie she hadn’t hit her last growth spurt yet, so she still tilts her head back to look me in the eyes. “What if it’s not?” “It will—” “What if you get whatever assignment Jordan got?” There it is. Because two of us didn’t leave juvie together to start community service—three of us did. But Jordan didn’t last three weeks into his assignment before he turned his implements inward. I notice she doesn’t say What if I get what Jordan got? Because LeeLee is more afraid of being left alone than of having to kill something innocent. “We don’t know what his assignment was,” I say. It’s true, but we do know it was bad. Two weeks into our first stretch, a drug meant to sterilize the city’s feral cat population accidentally had the opposite effect. Everyone was pulled off their assigned duty for three days to murder litters of new kittens instead. It nearly broke me and Lee, but Jordan seemed almost grateful.
“Besides, we don’t know if his assignment had anything to do with … what he did. You’re borrowing trouble. Worry in”—I check my palm—“an hour, when you actually know there’s something to worry about.” You’d think it would hover over us too insistently to be ignored, but after we sit down and talk about our day I’m at ease, basking in the warmth of her storytelling and the bread that’s more beige than gray today. When the notification comes in, I am well and truly happy, and I can only hope it isn’t for the last time. We both stiffen when we hear the alert. She looks at me, and I give her a smile and a nod, and then we look down. In the time between hearing the notification and checking it, I imagine all kinds of horrors that could be in my assignment slot. I imagine a picture of kittens, reason enough for the girl I met earlier to condemn me. For a moment, just a flash, I imagine looking down and seeing my own face as my target, or LeeLee’s. But when I finally see the file, the relief that comes over me softens my spine. It’s a plant. Faceless, and bloodless.
I look up, and LeeLee’s eyes are dark as she leans forward, studying my face, looking for whatever crack she failed to see in Jordan. I force myself to smile wide for her. “It’s a plant. I got a plant, Lee.” She reaches forward and squeezes my hands. Hers are shaking. “What did you get?” I ask.
She waves away my question. “I got rats. I can handle it. I was just worried about you.” I spend the rest of the night unbelievably happy. For the next year, I get to kill a thing that does not scream. “You get all that?” the man behind the desk asks, and I nod even though I didn’t. I’ve traded in my boots and lasernet for a hazmat suit and a handheld mister with two different solutions. The man had been talking to me about how to use the solutions, but I can’t process verbal information very well. The whole reason I was sent to the correctional facility as a teen was that too many teachers mistook my processing delays for behavioral infractions. I’m planning to read the manual on my own time before I start in a few hours, but when I pick up the mister and look down the barrel, the equipment guy freaks out. “They were supposed to add sulfur to this batch, but they didn’t. So you won’t smell it. It won’t make you cough or your eyes water. It’ll just be lights out. Good night. You got me?” “Did you not hear me? Don’t even look at that thing without your mask on.” He takes a breath, calmer now that I’ve lowered my hands. “Look, the first solution—it’s fine. It’s keyed to the plant itself and just opens its cells up for whatever solution we put on it. You could drink the stuff. But that second? The orange vial? Don’t even put it in the mister without your mask on. It dissipates quickly, so you’re good once you’re done spraying, but not a second before.” He looks around, then leans in. “They were supposed to add sulfur to this batch, but they didn’t. So you won’t smell it. It won’t make you cough or your eyes water. It’ll just be lights out. Good night. You got me?”
I nod again as I grab the mask I hadn’t noticed before. This time when I thank him, I mean it. It takes me an hour to find the first plant, and when I do it’s beautiful. Lush pink on the inside and dark green on the outside, it looks hearty and primitive. Almost Jurassic. I can see why it’s only in the sewers now: it would be too easy to spot and destroy aboveground in the sea of concrete.
After putting on my mask, I activate the mister and then stand back as it sprays the plant with poison. Nothing happens. I remember the prepping solution and switch the cartridges to coat it in that first. The next time I try the poison, the plant wilts instantly, browning and shrinking like a tire deflating. I was wrong. Plants this size don’t die silently. It makes a wheezing sound, a deep sigh. By the third time I’ve heard it, I swear I can make out the word Please. HENRY HORENSTEIN When I get home, LeeLee’s locked herself in the bathroom, which doesn’t surprise me. I heard that they moved to acid for rats, and the smell of a corpse dissolving is impossible to get used to and even harder to get out of your hair. I eat dinner, read, change for bed, and she’s still in the bathroom. I brush my teeth in the kitchen. The next morning, I have to take a transport to the plant’s habitat on the other end of the city, so I spend the time looking through the file that came with the assignment. Under “Characteristics,” some city government scientist has written, “Large, dark. Resource-intensive. Stubborn.” I stare at the last word. Its own sentence, tacked on like an afterthought. Stubborn. The same word that was written in my file when I got sent from school to the facility where I met LeeLee and Jordan. Large, dark, stubborn, and condemned. I’ve never been called resource-intensive. But I have been called a waste. And maybe that’s why I do it. When I get to my last plant of the day, I don’t reach for the mister. This one is small, young, the green still neon-bright and the teeth at the edges still soft. I pick it up, careful with its roots, and carry it home. I find a discarded water container along the way and place it inside. When I get home I knock on LeeLee’s door. She doesn’t answer, so I leave the plant on the floor as an offering. They aren’t proper flowers, but they smell nice and earthy. It might keep the residual odor from melted organs, fur, and bones from taking over her room. “Killing things is a dumb job,” says the girl. After a week of hearing the death cries of its cousins, I was moved to use some of my allowance to buy cheap fertilizer and growth serum for my plant. The girl and her friends, fewer than before, were panhandling at the megastore across the way. She ran over, braids jingling, as soon as she saw me. I thought she’d leave once I gave her more glowsticks for her friends, but she stayed in step and kept following me.
“It’s not a dumb job,” I say, even though it is. “What’s the point?” I shift my bag to point at the bottom of my vest. Beneath “Mercy Dept.” the department’s slogan is written in cursive: Killing to Save! “See?” She sees the text but doesn’t register it, and I have to remind myself that even getting kicked out of school is a privilege. The city had decided to stop wasting educational resources on me. They’d never even tried with her or the other streetrats. “It just means we kill to help.” “That doesn’t make sense.” Suddenly, all I can think about is Jordan. “Maybe they don’t mind.” “What?” I think of the plants. Maybe they hadn’t been pleading. Maybe they’d been sighing with relief. I think of the birds that eventually stopped running away. “Maybe they’re tired. The city’s right, and their existence isn’t compatible with the world we made. And that’s our fault for being stupid and cruel, but it makes their lives so hard. We’ve made it so they can only live half a life. Maybe the least we can do is finish the job.” It’s a terrible thing to say—even worse to a kid. Her eyes go hard. “What are you killing now, executioner?” The question surprises me. “Sewer plants. Why?” “I don’t believe you.” I’d wanted her to leave me alone, but when she runs away I feel suddenly empty. I have an issue at work when I can’t find my poison vial. I tell them it rolled away in the sewer and I couldn’t catch it in time, because I don’t want to tell them I was unobservant enough to let a street kid steal from me. After a stern warning and a mountain of forms, they issue a new vial and don’t add to my service time. Pulling overtime to make up for the day I didn’t have my poison means it’s days before I get to fertilize my houseplant. LeeLee’s door is open, so I bring in the fertilizer and serum. She’s put the plant on her windowsill, but it prefers indirect sunlight, so I move it to the shelf next to her boxes of knickknacks and trinkets. I add the fertilizer to its soil and am about to spray it with the growth serum when I get an idea. I get the mister from my kit and set it up to spray the prepping solution on the little plant to prime it. I open the window and put on my mask, just in case, but I’m sure the man was telling the truth when he called the first liquid harmless. After its cells are open, I spray it with my store-bought growth serum. I’m halfway through making dinner when I hear the crash and run into LeeLee’s room. “Shit!” The plant has grown huge, turning adult instantly, and its new weight has taken down LeeLee’s shelf. Dainty keepsake boxes are shattered on our concrete floor. I bend to my knees quickly, so focused on fixing my mistake that I don’t register the oddness of the items I’m picking up—jacks, kids’ toys, a bow—until my fingers touch something small and shimmering. It’s a scrap of silver, still rounded in the shape of the braids it was taken from. I got rats. I can handle it. I’d forgotten the city has more than one kind. I’m waiting up when Lee gets home. I don’t make her tell me. I just grab her kit and rummage through it. Where my kit has a hazmat suit, hers has a stealth mesh to render her invisible. Where I keep my mister, she has a gun loaded with vials too large for rats. I have a mini-vac to suck up excess plant matter to prevent seeds from sprouting. She has zip ties. By the time I’m done, she’s already cracking under the weight of everything she tried to protect me from. Within moments she’s sobbing on the floor. I carry her to her bed and get in beside her. I try not to listen too closely as she recounts every horrible moment, but I’m listening at the end, when she tells me she can’t do it anymore. When she confesses that she’s the one who stole my poison, and has only been waiting to take it because she didn’t have the stomach to do to me what Jordan did to us. I tell her how we’ll make playgrounds of dead data centers and use hoses to fill the holes where skyscrapers were, and kids will play Marco Polo swimming over a CEO’s sunken office. I leave her for just a moment, but by the time I lie back in bed beside her I’ve figured it out. I tell her that she won’t have to take her shift tomorrow. I tell her I’m going to go around the city with my mister and my growth serum. That I’ll move plants from sewers to the yards around City Hall and every public space and the support pylons of important people’s companies, and then spray them so they become huge. The city will freak. I tell her it will be like the kittens, but this time we’ll all be pulled off our assignments to kill plants. And maybe the serum will work too well. Maybe the city was right to fear these plants, and they will grow and grow and eat our concrete while the roots crack our foundations and cut our electricity and everything will crumble. And the people with something to lose might suffer, but the rest of us will just laugh at the perfection of rubble. I tell her how we’ll make playgrounds of dead data centers and use hoses to fill the holes where skyscrapers were, and kids will play Marco Polo swimming over a CEO’s sunken office. She asks if I’ll put any at our old detention center. I tell her, Hundreds. I talk long enough that her eyes close, and loud enough that neither of us can hear the sound of my mister blowing. The man who gave it to me was right. Even without the mask, it doesn’t smell like sulfur. It doesn’t smell like anything. Micaiah Johnson’s debut novel, The Space Between Worlds, a Sunday Times bestseller and New York Times Editors’ Choice pick, was named one of the best books of 2020 and one of the best science fiction books of the last decade by NPR. Her first horror novel, The Unhaunting, is due out in fall 2026.

Measles cases are rising. Other vaccine-preventable infections could be next.

There’s a measles outbreak happening close to where I live. Since the start of this year, 34 cases have been confirmed in Enfield, a northern borough of London. Most of those affected are children under the age of 11. One in five have needed hospital treatment. It’s another worrying development for an incredibly contagious and potentially fatal disease. Since October last year, 962 cases of measles have been confirmed in South Carolina. Large outbreaks (with more than 50 confirmed cases) are underway in four US states. Smaller outbreaks are being reported in another 12 states. The vast majority of these cases have been children who were not fully vaccinated. Vaccine hesitancy is thought to be a significant reason children are missing out on important vaccines—the World Health Organization described it as one of the 10 leading threats to global health in 2019. And if we’re seeing more measles cases now, we might expect to soon see more cases of other vaccine-preventable infections, including some that can cause liver cancer or meningitis. Some people will always argue that measles is not a big deal—that infections used to be common, and most people survived them and did just fine. It is true that in most cases kids do recover well from the virus. But not always.
Measles symptoms tend to start with a fever and a runny nose. The telltale rash comes later. In some cases, severe complications develop. They can include pneumonia, blindness, and inflammation of the brain. Some people won’t develop complications until years later. In rare cases, the disease can be fatal. Before the measles vaccine was introduced, in 1963, measles epidemics occurred every two to three years, according to the WHO. Back then, around 2.6 million people died from measles every year. Since it was introduced, the measles vaccine is thought to have prevented almost 59 million deaths.
But vaccination rates have been lagging, says Anne Zink, an emergency medicine physician and clinical fellow at the Yale School of Public Health. “We’ve seen a slow decline in people who are willing to get vaccinated against measles for some time,” she says. “As we get more and more people who are at risk because they’re unvaccinated, the higher the chances that the disease can then spread and take off.” Vaccination rates need to be at 95% to prevent measles outbreaks. But rates are well below that level in some regions. Across South Carolina, the proportion of kindergartners who received both doses of the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles as well as mumps and rubella, has dropped steadily over the last five years, from 94% in 2020-2021 to 91% in 2024-2025. Some schools in the state have coverage rates as low as 20%, state epidemiologist Linda Bell told reporters last month. Vaccination rates are low in London, too. Fewer than 70% of children have received both doses of their MMR by the time they turn five, according to the UK Health Security Agency. In some boroughs, vaccination rates are as low as 58%. So perhaps it’s not surprising we’re seeing outbreaks. The UK is one of six countries to have lost their measles elimination status last month, along with Spain, Austria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan. Canada lost its elimination status last year. The highly contagious measles could be a bellwether for other vaccine-preventable diseases. Zink is already seeing signs. She points to a case of polio that paralyzed a man in New York in 2022. That happened when rates of polio vaccination were low, she says. “Polio is a great example of … a disease that is primarily asymptomatic, and most people don’t have any symptoms whatsoever, but for the people who do get symptoms, it can be life-threatening.” Then there’s mumps—another disease the MMR vaccine protects against. It’s another one of those infections that can be symptom-free and harmless in some, especially children, but nasty for others. It can cause a painful swelling of the testes, and other complications include brain swelling and deafness. (From my personal experience of being hospitalized with mumps, I can attest that even “mild” infections are pretty horrible.) Mumps is less contagious than measles, so we might expect a delay between an uptick in measles cases and the spread of mumps, says Zink. But she says that she’s more concerned about hepatitis B. “It lives on surfaces for a long period of time, and if you’re not vaccinated against it and you’re exposed to it as a kid, you’re at a really high risk of developing liver cancer and death,” she says.

Zink was formerly chief medical officer of Alaska, a state that in the 1970s had the world’s highest rate of childhood liver cancer caused by hepatitis B. Screening and universal newborn vaccination programs eliminated the virus’s spread. Public health experts worry that the current US administration’s position on vaccines may contribute to the decline in vaccine uptake. Last month the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approved changes to childhood vaccination recommendations. The agency no longer recommends the hepatitis B vaccine for all newborns. The chair of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel has also questioned broad vaccine recommendations for polio. Even vitamin injections are being refused by parents, says Zink. A shot of vitamin K at birth can help prevent severe bleeding in some babies. But recent research suggests that parents of 5% of newborns are refusing it (up from 2.9% in 2017). “I can’t tell you how many of my pediatric [doctor] friends have told me about having to care for a kiddo in the ICU with … bleeding into their brain because the kid didn’t get vitamin K at birth,” says Zink. “And that can kill kids, [or have] lifelong, devastating, stroke-like symptoms.” All this paints a pretty bleak picture for children’s health. But things can change. Vaccination can still offer protection to plenty of people at risk of infection. South Carolina’s Department of Public Health is offering free MMR vaccinations to residents at mobile clinics. “It’s easy to think ‘It’s not going to be me,’” says Zink. “Seeing kiddos who don’t have the agency to make decisions [about vaccination] being so sick from vaccine-preventable diseases, to me, is one of the most challenging things of practicing medicine.” This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

Microsoft has a new plan to prove what’s real and what’s AI online

AI-enabled deception now permeates our online lives. There are the high-profile cases you may easily spot, like when White House officials recently shared a manipulated image of a protester in Minnesota and then mocked those asking about it. Other times, it slips quietly into social media feeds and racks up views, like the videos that Russian influence campaigns are currently spreading to discourage Ukrainians from enlisting. It is into this mess that Microsoft has put forward a blueprint, shared with MIT Technology Review, for how to prove what’s real online. An AI safety research team at the company recently evaluated how methods for documenting digital manipulation are faring against today’s most worrying AI developments, like interactive deepfakes and widely accessible hyperrealistic models. It then recommended technical standards that can be adopted by AI companies and social media platforms. To understand the gold standard that Microsoft is pushing, imagine you have a Rembrandt painting and you are trying to document its authenticity. You might describe its provenance with a detailed manifest of where the painting came from and all the times it changed hands. You might apply a watermark that would be invisible to humans but readable by a machine. And you could digitally scan the painting and generate a mathematical signature, like a fingerprint, based on the brush strokes. If you showed the piece at a museum, a skeptical visitor could then examine these proofs to verify that it’s an original.
All of these methods are already being used to varying degrees in the effort to vet content online. Microsoft evaluated 60 different combinations of them, modeling how each setup would hold up under different failure scenarios—from metadata being stripped to content being slightly altered or deliberately manipulated. The team then mapped which combinations produce sound results that platforms can confidently show to people online, and which ones are so unreliable that they may cause more confusion than clarification. Ask AIWhy it matters to you?BETAHere’s why this story might matter to you, according to AI. This is a beta feature and AI hallucinates—it might get weirdTell me why it matters The company’s chief scientific officer, Eric Horvitz, says the work was prompted by legislation—like California’s AI Transparency Act, which will take effect in August—and the speed at which AI has developed to combine video and voice with striking fidelity.
“You might call this self-regulation,” Horvitz told MIT Technology Review. But it’s clear he sees pursuing the work as boosting Microsoft’s image: “We’re also trying to be a selected, desired provider to people who want to know what’s going on in the world.” Nevertheless, Horvitz declined to commit to Microsoft using its own recommendation across its platforms. The company sits at the center of a giant AI content ecosystem: It runs Copilot, which can generate images and text; it operates Azure, the cloud service through which customers can access OpenAI and other major AI models; it owns LinkedIn, one of the world’s largest professional platforms; and it holds a significant stake in OpenAI. But when asked about in-house implementation, Horvitz said in a statement, “Product groups and leaders across the company were involved in this study to inform product road maps and infrastructure, and our engineering teams are taking action on the report’s findings.” It’s important to note that there are inherent limits to these tools; just as they would not tell you what your Rembrandt means, they are not built to determine if content is accurate or not. They only reveal if it has been manipulated. It’s a point that Horvitz says he has to make to lawmakers and others who are skeptical of Big Tech as an arbiter of fact. “It’s not about making any decisions about what’s true and not true,” he said. “It’s about coming up with labels that just tell folks where stuff came from.” Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley who specializes in digital forensics but wasn’t involved in the Microsoft research, says that if the industry adopted the company’s blueprint, it would be meaningfully more difficult to deceive the public with manipulated content. Sophisticated individuals or governments can work to bypass such tools, he says, but the new standard could eliminate a significant portion of misleading material. “I don’t think it solves the problem, but I think it takes a nice big chunk out of it,” he says. Still, there are reasons to see Microsoft’s approach as an example of somewhat naïve techno-optimism. There is growing evidence that people are swayed by AI-generated content even when they know that it is false. And in a recent study of pro-Russian AI-generated videos about the war in Ukraine, comments pointing out that the videos were made with AI received far less engagement than comments treating them as genuine. “Are there people who, no matter what you tell them, are going to believe what they believe?” Farid asks. “Yes.” But, he adds, “there are a vast majority of Americans and citizens around the world who I do think want to know the truth.”

That desire has not exactly led to urgent action from tech companies. Google started adding a watermark to content generated by its AI tools in 2023, which Farid says has been helpful in his investigations. Some platforms use C2PA, a provenance standard Microsoft helped launch in 2021. But the full suite of changes that Microsoft suggests, powerful as they are, might remain only suggestions if they threaten the business models of AI companies or social media platforms. “If the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Elon Musks of the world think that putting ‘AI generated’ labels on something will reduce engagement, then of course they’re incentivized not to do it,” Farid says. Platforms like Meta and Google have already said they’d include labels for AI-generated content, but an audit conducted by Indicator last year found that only 30% of its test posts on Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, and YouTube were correctly labeled as AI-generated. More forceful moves toward content verification might come from the many pieces of AI regulation pending around the world. The European Union’s AI Act, as well as proposed rules in India and elsewhere, would all compel AI companies to require some form of disclosure that a piece of content was generated with AI. One priority from Microsoft is, unsurprisingly, to play a role in shaping these rules. The company waged a lobbying effort during the drafting of California’s AI Transparency Act, which Horvitz said made the legislation’s requirements on how tech companies must disclose AI-generated content “a bit more realistic.” But another is a very real concern about what could happen if the rollout of such content-verification technology is done poorly. Lawmakers are demanding tools that can verify what’s real, but the tools are fragile. If labeling systems are rushed out, inconsistently applied, or frequently wrong, people could come to distrust them altogether, and the entire effort would backfire. That’s why the researchers argue that it may be better in some cases to show nothing at all than a verdict that could be wrong. Inadequate tools could also create new avenues for what the researchers call sociotechnical attacks. Imagine that someone takes a real image of a fraught political event and uses an AI tool to change only an inconsequential share of pixels in the image. When it spreads online, it could be misleadingly classified by platforms as AI-manipulated. But combining provenance and watermark tools would mean platforms could clarify that the content was only partially AI generated, and point out where the changes were made. California’s AI Transparency Act will be the first major test of these tools in the US, but enforcement could be challenged by President Trump’s executive order from late last year seeking to curtail state AI regulations that are “burdensome” to the industry. The administration has also generally taken a posture against efforts to curb disinformation, and last year, via DOGE, it canceled grants related to misinformation. And, of course, official government channels in the Trump administration have shared content manipulated with AI (MIT Technology Review reported that the Department of Homeland Security, for example, uses video generators from Google and Adobe to make content it shares with the public). I asked Horvitz whether fake content from this source worries him as much as that coming from the rest of social media. He initially declined to comment, but then he said, “Governments have not been outside the sectors that have been behind various kinds of manipulative disinformation, and this is worldwide.”

Gemini 3.1 Pro: A smarter model for your most complex tasks

What’s nextSince releasing Gemini 3 Pro in November, your feedback and the pace of progress have driven these rapid improvements. We are releasing 3.1 Pro in preview today to validate these updates and continue to make further advancements in areas such as ambitious agentic workflows before we make it generally available soon.Starting today, Gemini 3.1 Pro in the Gemini app is rolling out with higher limits for users with the Google AI Pro and Ultra plans. 3.1 Pro is also now available on NotebookLM exclusively for Pro and Ultra users. And developers and enterprises can access 3.1 Pro now in preview in the Gemini API via AI Studio, Antigravity, Vertex AI, Gemini Enterprise, Gemini CLI and Android Studio.We can’t wait to see what you build and discover with it.

The Download: autonomous narco submarines, and virtue signaling chatbots

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How uncrewed narco subs could transform the Colombian drug trade For decades, handmade narco subs have been some of the cocaine trade’s most elusive and productive workhorses, ferrying multi-ton loads of illicit drugs from Colombian estuaries toward markets in North America and, increasingly, the rest of the world. Now off-the-shelf technology—Starlink terminals, plug-and-play nautical autopilots, high-resolution video cameras—may be advancing that cat-and-mouse game into a new phase.Uncrewed subs could move more cocaine over longer distances, and they wouldn’t put human smugglers at risk of capture. And law enforcement around the world is just beginning to grapple with what this means for the future. Read the full story. —Eduardo Echeverri López
This story is from the next print issue of MIT Technology Review magazine, which is all about crime. If you haven’t already, subscribe now to receive future issues once they land.
Google DeepMind wants to know if chatbots are just virtue signaling The news: Google DeepMind is calling for the moral behavior of large language models—such as what they do when called on to act as companions, therapists, medical advisors, and so on—to be scrutinized with the same kind of rigor as their ability to code or do math. Why it matters: As LLMs improve, people are asking them to play more and more sensitive roles in their lives. Agents are starting to take actions on people’s behalf. LLMs may be able to influence human decision-making. And yet nobody knows how trustworthy this technology really is at such tasks. Read the full story. —Will Douglas Heaven The building legal case for global climate justice The United States and the European Union grew into economic superpowers by committing climate atrocities. They have burned a wildly disproportionate share of the world’s oil and gas, planting carbon time bombs that will detonate first in the poorest, hottest parts of the globe.Morally, there’s an ironclad case that the countries or companies responsible for this mess should provide compensation. Legally, though, the case has been far harder to make. But now those tides might be turning. Read the full story. —James Temple

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 The US is building an online portal to access content banned elsewhere The freedom.gov site is Washington’s broadbrush solution to global censorship. (Reuters)+ The Trump administration is on a mission to train a cadre of elite coders. (FT $)2 Mark Zuckerberg overruled wellbeing experts to keep beauty filters on InstagramBecause removing them may have impinged on “free expression,” apparently. (FT $)+ The CEO claims that increasing engagement is not Instagram’s goal. (CNBC)+ Instead, the company’s true calling is to give its users “something useful”. (WSJ $)+ A new investigation found Meta is failing to protect children from predators. (WP $)3 Silicon Valley is working on a shadow power grid for US data centersAI firms are planning to build their own private power plants across the US. (WP $)+ They’re pushing the narrative that generative AI will save the Earth. (Wired $)+ We need better metrics to measure data center sustainability with. (IEEE Spectrum)+ The data center boom in the desert. (MIT Technology Review) 4 Russian forces are struggling with Starlink and Telegram crackdownsNew restrictions have left troops without a means to communicate. (Bloomberg $)5 Bill Gates won’t speak at India’s AI summit after allGiven the growing controversy surrounding his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. (BBC)+ The event has been accused of being disorganized and poorly managed. (Reuters)+ AI leaders didn’t appreciate this awkward photoshoot. (Bloomberg $) 6 AI software sales are slowing downLast year’s boom appears to be waning, vendors have warned. (WSJ $)+ What even is the AI bubble? (MIT Technology Review) 7 eBay has acquired its clothes resale rival Depop 👚It’s a naked play to corner younger Gen Z shoppers. (NYT $)
8 There’s a lot more going on inside cells than we originally thoughtIt’s seriously crowded inside there. (Quanta Magazine) 9 What it means to create a chart-topping appDoes anyone care any more? (The Verge)10 Do we really need eight hours of sleep?Research suggests some people really are fine operating on as little as four hours of snooze time. (New Yorker $)
Quote of the day “Too often, those victims have been left to fight alone…That is not justice. It is failure.” —Keir Starmer, the UK’s prime minister, outlines plans to force technology firms to remove deepfake nudes and revenge porn within 48 hours or risk being blocked in the UK, the Guardian reports. One more thing
End of life decisions are difficult and distressing. Could AI help?End-of-life decisions can be extremely upsetting for surrogates—the people who have to make those calls on behalf of another person. Friends or family members may disagree over what’s best for their loved one, which can lead to distressing situations.David Wendler, a bioethicist at the US National Institutes of Health, and his colleagues have been working on an idea for something that could make things easier: an artificial intelligence-based tool that can help surrogates predict what the patients themselves would want in any given situation.Wendler hopes to start building their tool as soon as they secure funding for it, potentially in the coming months. But rolling it out won’t be simple. Critics wonder how such a tool can ethically be trained on a person’s data, and whether life-or-death decisions should ever be entrusted to AI. Read the full story.—Jessica Hamzelou We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + Oakland Library keeps a remarkable public log of all the weird and wonderful artefacts their librarians find tucked away in the pages of their books.+ Orchids are beautiful, but temperamental. Here’s how to keep them alive.+ I love that New York’s Transit Museum is holding a Pizza Rat Debunked event.+ These British indie bands aren’t really lauded at home—but in China, they’re treated like royalty.

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