Author: user
The Trump administration suffered a series of legal setbacks this week after a judge allowed construction to resume on several offshore wind farms under construction on the East Coast. In December, the Interior Ministry ordered the suspension of five projects with a total capacity of 6 gigawatts, citing national security concerns. The judicial order will allow construction to resume on three projects: Revolution Wind off the coast of Rhode Island, Empire Wind off the coast of New York, and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind off the coast of Virginia. The developers filed their own lawsuits shortly after the Trump administration issued…
Ravi LakshmananJanuary 17, 2026Law enforcement/cybercrime Law enforcement authorities in Ukraine and Germany have identified two Ukrainian nationals suspected of working for the Russia-linked ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group Black Basta. Additionally, authorities noted that the group’s alleged leader, 35-year-old Russian Oleg Evgenievich Nefedov (Нефедов Олег Евгеньевич), has been added to the European Union’s Most Wanted List and Interpol’s Red Notice List. “According to the investigation, the suspects specialized in technical hacking of protected systems and were involved in preparing cyber attacks using ransomware,” the Ukrainian Cyber Police said in a statement. According to the agency, the suspects operated as “hash crackers” who…
Anahita Lavelac had aspirations of becoming an aerospace engineer, but her career took a different turn when a challenge in autonomous robotics inspired her to start Ocean, a company that builds fleets of robots to collect ocean data. In 2021, Lavelac, a well-known sailor, decided to build a robot and compete in the MicroTransat Challenge, a competition in which participants build autonomous sail-powered micro robots to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Like everyone else who tried this challenge, she failed. “We realized that half of the reason all these attempts failed was that, first of all, it’s obviously difficult to make…
Ancient Rome is well known for its advanced water systems and sanitary facilities, including public baths and toilets. But new research suggests that the first baths built in Pompeii may not have been particularly comfortable, as the dirty, contaminated water was changed only once a day.”It is very likely that the bathing experience in this small bathing facility was probably not hygienic and therefore not very welcoming,” study lead author Gül Schurmelihindi, a geoarchaeologist at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, told Live Science in an email.To investigate the composition of the water supply, Sürmelihindi and colleagues analyzed a compound…
This week’s science news went way over our heads, as astronauts and space agencies made their way to the front pages. Topping the list is the early return of 11 International Space Station (ISS) crew members on Thursday (January 15) due to a medical emergency.News of the crew’s early return is the first in the agency’s 25-year history and comes less than a week ago. It began when one of the astronauts experienced an undisclosed medical problem. The evacuation will leave only four astronauts on the ISS until their replacement, Crew 12, arrives next month.This wasn’t the only news released…
In the classic 1975 British comedy film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, King Arthur battles a mysterious Black Knight who refuses to let him pass. Arthur deftly defeats his enemy by cutting off their limbs one by one, but the knight is unwilling to admit defeat and insists that the damage is “just a flesh wound.”Dark humor aside, this film raises the question of how much of your body you can lose and still survive. There are approximately 80 organs in the human body, but only five are defined as critical organs essential to sustaining life. The lungs and…
January 17, 2026Ravi LakshmananArtificial intelligence/data privacy OpenAI announced Friday that it will begin showing ads on ChatGPT to U.S. adult users who are logged in on both the free and ChatGPT Go tiers in the coming weeks, as the artificial intelligence (AI) company expands access to low-cost subscriptions globally. “People should know that their data and conversations are protected and will never be sold to advertisers,” OpenAI said. “And we need to keep the bar high and give users control over their experience, so they see truly relevant, high-quality ads and can even turn off personalization if they want.” The…
Elon Musk is seeking a staggering $79 billion to $134 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming the AI companies defrauded him by abandoning their nonprofit mission, Bloomberg first reported. That figure comes from expert witness C. Paul Wazan, a financial economist who, according to his bio, has been deposed nearly 100 times in complex commercial cases and testified more than a dozen times in court. Wazan, who specializes in valuations and calculating damages in high-stakes disputes, determined that Musk is entitled to a significant portion of OpenAI’s current valuation of $500 billion based on the $38 million seed…
Runpod, an AI app hosting platform launched four years ago, has reached an annual revenue run rate of $120 million, founders Zhen Lu and Pardeep Singh told TechCrunch. Their startup journey is a wild example that if you build well and your timing is lucky, they will come. This story includes our journey to over $1 million in revenue. VC Radhika Malik, a partner at Dell Technologies Capital, raised a $20 million seed round after seeing some posts on Reddit. The company acquired another major angel investor, Hugging Face co-founder Julien Chaumont, because he used the product and reached out…
Earlier this week, the California Attorney General’s Office announced that it was investigating xAI over reports that its chatbot Grok was being used to create non-consensual sexual images of women and minors. On Friday, the government sent a cease-and-desist letter to the company, demanding that it immediately stop producing CSAM, which contains non-consensual intimate images and child sexual abuse material. “Today, I sent a cease-and-desist letter to xAI, demanding that the company immediately cease producing and distributing deepfakes, non-consensual intimate images, and child sexual abuse material,” California AG Rob Bonta said in a press release. “The production of this material…