Calls to poison centers for liver injuries have jumped nearly 400% since 2000. Alcohol plays a role. Yet it does not lead the list. Medications do. Acetaminophen in particular stands out as the top culprit in a new analysis of national data.
Artificial intelligence promises to reshape industries and economies. Yet its physical demands now rival those of entire nations. A report from the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health lays out the scale in stark terms. Global data centers consumed 448 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2025. That figure matches the residential needs of 1.3 billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa for 2.6 years. AI accounted for roughly one-fifth of that total.
PCs once sat idle until summoned. A worker opened an app, typed commands, reviewed outputs. The machine reacted. That model defined decades of office computing. No longer.
AI agents pursue goals across steps. They remember prior actions. They call tools, automate sequences, stay within company rules. The device now partners in the flow of a day. It surfaces data before questions arise. It connects tasks that once lived in silos. Short bursts of input give way to persistent collaboration.
Flock Safety built a network that tracks millions of vehicles every day. Its cameras sit on poles across thousands of communities. They capture license plates, vehicle colors, models, bumper stickers and more. The data flows into a searchable cloud database used by police without warrants in most places. And the company keeps expanding.
But people shouldn’t have to tolerate any of it. A surveillance state that logs ordinary movements erodes freedom at its core. No tweaks to retention periods or audit tools change that fundamental threat.
QuantumScape has spent years promising a better battery for electric vehicles. Faster charging. Longer range. Greater safety. The California company raised billions on those claims after its 2020 SPAC debut. Yet commercial cells remain years away. Its latest update pushes volume production to 2029. Shares have suffered. So has credibility in some corners of the investment community.
The largest battery-electric plane ever constructed completed its maiden flight this week, marking a significant step forward for clean aviation technology. Developed by Swedish company Heart Aerospace, the ES-30 aircraft took to the skies from an airfield in Sweden, demonstrating that a regional airliner powered entirely by batteries can achieve sustained flight. The successful test comes at a time when airlines and manufacturers worldwide seek practical ways to reduce carbon emissions from short-haul routes.
Security teams once treated known vulnerabilities in AI agent runtimes as an unavoidable cost of speed. That changed this summer. NanoClaw, the open-source framework that places lightweight agents inside isolated containers for messaging apps like WhatsApp and Slack, joined forces with Echo, the startup building secure infrastructure for cloud applications. Their joint effort produced a hardened runtime that slashes vulnerabilities from thousands down to a handful. The result stands out in an industry still grappling with the fallout from high-profile breaches.
Developers often treat garbage collection as background noise. They allocate memory. The runtime cleans up. Life goes on. But that assumption hides a more complex reality. A new analysis shows the true expense lies not in the volume of data processed but in the web of live references a program maintains.
One in six new 3D models uploaded to CGTrader now comes from artificial intelligence. Yet those same models bring in just $1 for every $90 in sales. The numbers, drawn from a full year of marketplace data, paint a stark picture. Supply explodes. Demand stays flat. Buyers refuse to bite.
Nintendo has begun flashing warnings on store kiosks. The Switch 2 will cost $50 more starting September 1. Shoppers now face a clear deadline. Buy before that date or pay $499.99 instead of $449.99.
