Author: admin

The Trump administration’s overhaul of air travel is extending to travelers themselves.U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy launched a new civility campaign titled “The Golden Age of Travel Starts with You” this week, seeking to address the recent surge in unruly passenger incidents and general bad vibes surrounding air travel. “There’s no question we’ve lost sight of what makes travel fun—the excitement, the relaxation, the cordial conversations,” DOT said in a press release on Wednesday.”Americans already feel divided and stressed. We can all do our part to bring back civility, manners, and common sense. When we can unite around shared…

With a runway of smoking-hot coals laid out before them, residents in San Pedro Manrique, Spain, steel themselves as thousands of onlookers cheer them on. The crowd roars when they walk across the fire, sometimes carrying another person on their back.Although the walkers and the crowd perform very different roles during the annual June ritual, they report similar feelings: an ineffable feeling of togetherness, as if the entire group becomes one, said Dimitris Xygalatas, a cognitive anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, who witnessed the Spanish ritual years ago as a researcher.He has experienced similar feelings in a stadium while…

Threads and Bluesky still have quite a way to go to catch up with X in the U.S., according to data from Pew Research Center’s latest report released this week. The research firm asked about these smaller services for the first time and found they’re each used by just under 1 in 10 U.S. adults or fewer. While X is not one of the largest social networks in the U.S., it’s still the one to beat within the smaller market of social apps that focus on short, real-time text posts that appear in a vertical feed. This space has seen…

Conventional wisdom suggests that climate tech is entering a winter season, where political and investor interest and investment levels are cooling — an ironic contrast with the climate itself, which keeps delivering years of record warmth.  A new report from the International Energy Agency suggests there has never been a better time to go all-in on climate tech. In comparing it with the IEA’s stance from a decade ago, it’s clear the world’s expectations about the future have changed dramatically in less than a generation.  In 2014, the International Energy Agency assumed that, absent any international effort to rein in…

Byju Raveendran, the embattled founder of Indian ed-tech giant Byju’s, has blasted a U.S. bankruptcy court’s order directing him to pay more than $1.07 billion. He is denying wrongdoing, accusing lenders of misleading the court, and vowing to appeal a ruling that marks a dramatic fall for a onetime poster boy of India’s startup boom. The Delaware bankruptcy judge issued a default judgment after finding that Raveendran had repeatedly ignored court orders and provided “evasive, incomplete” responses regarding about $533 million that Byju’s U.S. unit allegedly transferred in 2022 and never recovered. The judge also cited issues with a separate…

In order to accelerate the construction of new power plants needed to provide energy for its data centers, Meta is looking to get into the business of trading electricity. Bloomberg reports that both Meta and Microsoft are asking for federal approval to trade power (Apple has already received this approval). According to Meta, this will allow it to make long-term commitments to buy electricity from new plants, while mitigating the risk by having the ability to resell some of that power on wholesale power markets. Meta’s head of global energy, Urvi Parekh, told Bloomberg that power plant developers “want to…

Waymo continues to expand its reach, with the robotaxi company posting Friday that it’s now “officially authorized to drive fully autonomously across more of the Golden State.” Waymo already operates in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles (and outside California as well, in Atlanta, Austin, and Phoenix). But maps published by California’s Department of Motor Vehicles showed that the company can now test and deploy its autonomous vehicles across a much larger area in both the Bay Area and Southern California. In the Bay Area, Waymo’s approved areas of operation now include most of the East Bay and North…

The Trump administration has been targeting state-level AI regulation, with the president declaring in a social media post this week that the industry needs “one Federal Standard instead of a patchwork of 50 State Regulatory Regimes.” This comes after a 10-year ban on state AI regulation was initially included in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” before ultimately getting removed by the Senate in a 99-1 vote.  The idea then apparently took on a new form, with the administration reportedly drafting an executive order that would establish an AI Litigation Task Force with a mission to challenge state AI laws through lawsuits.…

Norfolk Southern railroad worked with the state of Ohio and Youngstown State University to revive plans for a $20 million first responder training center near the site of the worst derailment in a decade in East Palestine, Ohio.Building a training center to help prepare firefighters to deal with a railroad disaster was quickly part of the plan after the derailment on Feb. 3, 2023, that forced the evacuation of roughly half the small town near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border and left residents with worries about the potential long-term health impacts. But Norfolk Southern said last January that East Palestine officials had…

Just weeks before Australia’s social media ban for users under 16 takes effect, the country’s watchdog, eSafety, has added Twitch to the list of banned platforms. Pinterest, however, was excluded, in line with Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age (SMMA) rules. Twitch will no longer allow Australians under 16 to create accounts starting December 10, a Twitch spokesperson told TechCrunch. Existing accounts for users under 16 will be deactivated on January 9. Globally, Twitch is open to users 13 and older, and anyone under the legal age of adulthood in their region must have a parent or guardian involved, the spokesperson…