The United States formally withdrew from the World Health Organization on Thursday, making good on an executive order that President Trump issued on his first day in office pledging to leave the international organization that coordinates global responses to public health threats. The New York Times: While the United States is walking away from the organization, a senior official with the Department of Health and Human Services told reporters on Thursday that the Trump administration was considering some type of narrow, limited engagement with W.H.O. global networks that track infectious diseases, including influenza.

As a W.H.O. member, the United States long sent scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to participate in international decision-making about which strains to include in the flu vaccine. A W.H.O. meeting on next year's vaccine is scheduled for February. The official said the Trump administration would soon disclose how or whether it will participate.

On Thursday, the administration said that all U.S. government funding to the organization had been terminated, and that all assigned federal employees and contractors had been recalled from its Geneva headquarters and its offices worldwide.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: TikTok has finalized a deal to create a new American entity, avoiding the looming threat of a ban in the United States that has been in discussion for years. The social video platform company signed agreements with major investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX to form the new TikTok U.S. joint venture. The new version will operate under "defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurances for U.S. users," the company said in a statement Thursday. American TikTok users can continue using the same app. [...] Adam Presser, who previously worked as TikTok's head of operations and trust and safety, will lead the new venture as its CEO. He will work alongside a seven-member, majority-American board of directors that includes TikTok's CEO Shou Chew.

[...] In addition to an emphasis on data protection, with U.S. user data being stored locally in a system run by Oracle, the joint venture will also focus on TikTok's algorithm. The content recommendation formula, which feeds users specific videos tailored to their preferences and interests, will be retrained, tested and updated on U.S. user data, the company said in its announcement. The algorithm has been a central issue in the security debate over TikTok. China previously maintained the algorithm must remain under Chinese control by law. But the U.S. regulation passed with bipartisan support said any divestment of TikTok must mean the platform cuts ties -- specifically the algorithm -- with ByteDance. Under the terms of this deal, ByteDance would license the algorithm to the U.S. entity for retraining.

The law prohibits "any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm" between ByteDance and a new potential American ownership group, so it is unclear how ByteDance's continued involvement in this arrangement will play out. Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX are the three managing investors, who each hold a 15% share. Other investors include the investment firm of Michael Dell, the billionaire founder of Dell Technologies. ByteDance retains 19.9% of the joint venture.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It's no secret that students worldwide use AI chatbots to do their homework and avoid learning things. On the flip side, students can also use AI as a tool to beef up their knowledge and plan for the future with flashcards or study guides. Google hopes its latest Gemini feature will help with the latter. The company has announced that Gemini can now create free SAT practice tests and coach students to help them get higher scores. As a standardized test, the content of the SAT follows a predictable pattern. So there's no need to use a lengthy, personalized prompt to get Gemini going. Just say something like, "I want to take a practice SAT test," and the chatbot will generate one complete with clickable buttons, graphs, and score analysis.

Of course, generative AI can go off the rails and provide incorrect information, which is a problem when you're trying to learn things. However, Google says it has worked with education firms like The Princeton Review to ensure the AI-generated tests resemble what students will see in the real deal. The interface for Gemini's practice tests includes scoring and the ability to review previous answers. If you are unclear on why a particular answer is right or wrong, the questions have an "Explain answer" button right at the bottom. After you finish the practice exam, the custom interface (which looks a bit like Gemini's Canvas coding tool) can help you follow up on areas that need improvement. Google says support for the SAT is just the start, "with more tests coming in the future."

Half the world's 100 largest cities are experiencing high levels of water stress, with 38 of these sitting in regions of "extremely high water stress," new analysis and mapping has shown. The Guardian: Water stress means that water withdrawals for public water supply and industry are close to exceeding available supplies, often caused by poor management of water resources exacerbated by climate breakdown. Watershed Investigations and the Guardian mapped cities on to stressed catchments revealing that Beijing, New York, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro and Delhi are among those facing extreme stress, while London, Bangkok and Jakarta are classed as being highly stressed.

Separate analysis of NASA satellite data, compiled by scientists at University College London, shows which of the largest 100 cities have been drying or getting wetter over two decades with places such as Chennai, Tehran and Zhengzhou showing strong drying trends and Tokyo, Lagos and Kampala showing strong wetting trends. All 100 cities and their trends can be viewed on a new interactive water security atlas.

An anonymous reader shares a report: An airport made of bamboo? A tower reaching 20 metres high? For many years, bamboo has been mostly known as the favourite food of giant pandas, but a group of engineers say it's time we took it seriously as a building material, too.

This week the Institution of Structural Engineers called for architects to be "bamboo-ready" as they published a manual for designing permanent buildings made of the material, in an effort to encourage low-carbon construction and position bamboo as a proper alternative to steel and concrete.

Bamboo has already been used for a number of boundary-pushing projects around the world. At Terminal 2 of Kempegowda international airport in Bengaluru, India, bamboo tubes make up the ceiling and pillars. The Ninghai bamboo tower in north-east China, which is more than 20 metres tall, is claimed to be the world's first high-rise building made using engineered bamboo.

At the Green School in Bali, a bamboo-made arc serves as the gymnasium and a striking example of how the material is reshaping sustainable architecture. The use of composite bamboo shear walls have proved to be resilient against earthquakes and extreme weather in countries such as Colombia and the Philippines, where sustainable, disaster-resilient housing has been built with locally sourced materials.

Claims that Chinese technology for AI lags the US are a "fairy tale," Arthur Mensch, the chief executive officer of Mistral, said. From a report: "China is not behind the West," Mensch said in an interview on Bloomberg Television at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday. The capabilities of China's open-source technology is "probably stressing the CEOs in the US."

The remarks from the boss of one of Europe's leading AI companies diverge from other tech leaders at Davos, who reassured lawmakers and business chiefs that China is behind the cutting edge by months or years.

An expanded class-action lawsuit filed last Friday alleges that a member of Nvidia's data strategy team directly contacted Anna's Archive -- the sprawling shadow library hosting millions of pirated books -- to explore "including Anna's Archive in pre-training data for our LLMs."

Internal documents cited in the amended complaint show Nvidia sought information about "high-speed access" to the collection, which Anna's Archive charged tens of thousands of dollars for. According to the lawsuit, Anna's Archive warned Nvidia that its library was illegally acquired and maintained, then asked if the company had internal permission to proceed. The pirate library noted it had previously wasted time on other AI companies that couldn't secure approval. Nvidia management allegedly gave "the green light" within a week.

Anna's Archive promised access to roughly 500 terabytes of data, including millions of books normally only accessible through Internet Archive's controlled digital lending system. The lawsuit also alleges Nvidia downloaded books from LibGen, Sci-Hub, and Z-Library.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inside Climate News: Just 32 companies accounted for over half of global fossil carbon emissions in 2024, according to a report published Wednesday by the U.K.-based think tank InfluenceMap. That is down from 36 companies responsible for half the global CO2 emissions in 2023, and 38 companies five years ago. The analysis is the latest update to the Carbon Majors database, which tracks the world's largest oil, gas, coal and cement producers and uses production data to calculate the carbon emissions from each entity's production. The database, first developed by researcher Richard Heede and now hosted by InfluenceMap, quantifies current and historical emissions attributable to nearly 180 companies and provides annual updates. It is the only database of its kind tracking corporate-generated carbon emissions dating back to the start of the Industrial Revolution, research that's being used in efforts to hold major polluters accountable for climate harms.

Despite dire warnings from scientists about the consequences of accelerating climate change, fossil fuel production is continuing apace. Last year, fossil fuel CO2 emissions reached a record high, topping 38 billion metric tons. In 2024 these emissions were 37.4 billion metric tons -- up 0.8 percent from 2023 -- and traceable to 166 oil, gas, coal and cement producers, according to the report. Much of the global carbon emissions in 2024 came from state-owned entities, which represented 16 of the top 20 emitters. The five largest emitters overall -- Saudi Arabia's Aramco, Coal India, China's CHN Energy, National Iranian Oil Co. and Russia's Gazprom -- were all state-controlled, and accounted for 18 percent of the total fossil CO2 emissions in 2024.

ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips and BP -- the top five emitting investor-owned companies -- together were responsible for 5.5 percent of the total emissions in that year. Historically, ExxonMobil and Chevron rank in the top five for fossil carbon emissions generated from 1854 through 2024, accounting for 2.79 percent and 3.08 percent of overall carbon pollution, respectively. According to the analysis, the 178 entities in the database have generated 70 percent of fossil CO2 emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and just 22 entities are responsible for one-third of these emissions. "Each year, global emissions become increasingly concentrated among a shrinking group of high-emitting producers, while overall production continues to grow. Simultaneously, these heavy emitters continue to use lobbying to obstruct a transition that the scientific community has known for decades is essential," said Emmett Connaire, senior analyst at InfluenceMap. The findings of the new analysis, he added, "underscore the growing importance of this kind of rigorous evidence in efforts to determine accountability for climate-related losses."

Ars Technica's Benj Edwards reports: On Saturday, tech entrepreneur Siqi Chen released an open source plugin for Anthropic's Claude Code AI assistant that instructs the AI model to stop writing like an AI model. Called "Humanizer," the simple prompt plugin feeds Claude a list of 24 language and formatting patterns that Wikipedia editors have listed as chatbot giveaways. Chen published the plugin on GitHub, where it has picked up over 1,600 stars as of Monday. "It's really handy that Wikipedia went and collated a detailed list of 'signs of AI writing,'" Chen wrote on X. "So much so that you can just tell your LLM to... not do that."

The source material is a guide from WikiProject AI Cleanup, a group of Wikipedia editors who have been hunting AI-generated articles since late 2023. French Wikipedia editor Ilyas Lebleu founded the project. The volunteers have tagged over 500 articles for review and, in August 2025, published a formal list of the patterns they kept seeing.

Chen's tool is a "skill file" for Claude Code, Anthropic's terminal-based coding assistant, which involves a Markdown-formatted file that adds a list of written instructions (you can see them here) appended to the prompt fed into the large language model (LLM) that powers the assistant. Unlike a normal system prompt, for example, the skill information is formatted in a standardized way that Claude models are fine-tuned to interpret with more precision than a plain system prompt. (Custom skills require a paid Claude subscription with code execution turned on.)

But as with all AI prompts, language models don't always perfectly follow skill files, so does the Humanizer actually work? In our limited testing, Chen's skill file made the AI agent's output sound less precise and more casual, but it could have some drawbacks: it won't improve factuality and might harm coding ability. [...] Even with its drawbacks, it's ironic that one of the web's most referenced rule sets for detecting AI-assisted writing may help some people subvert it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic have transformed millions of lives with easily administered treatments and quick results. Now it turns out the dropped pounds may have a surprising perk for airlines, too: lower fuel costs, as slimmer passengers lighten their aircraft's loads.

According to a study published last week by Jefferies, a financial services firm, the four largest U.S. carriers -- American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines -- could together save as much as $580 million per year on fuel thanks to weight-loss drugs, known as GLP-1s. One in eight U.S. adults said they were taking a GLP-1 in a November survey published by KFF, a nonprofit health research group. Fuel is among airlines' largest expenses. The Jefferies study estimates that the four airlines will together consume 16 billion gallons of fuel in 2026 at a total cost of $38.6 billion, nearly 20 percent of their total expenses.

The savings from skinnier passengers would amount to just 1.5 percent of fuel costs. But airlines and pilots must scrutinize even the smallest changes to a plane's weight and balance, and a lighter payload means each jet burns less fuel to generate the thrust necessary to fly. Investors could also stand to benefit: The researchers estimated that a 2 percent reduction in aircraft weight could boost earnings per share by about 4 percent. "Please note savings are before any lost snack sales," the Jefferies analysts added.

In an opinion piece for The Atlantic, senior editor Saahil Desai argues that media outlets are increasingly treating prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi as legitimate signals of reality. The risk, as Desai warns, is a future where news coverage amplifies manipulable betting odds and turns politics, geopolitics, and even tragedy into speculative gambling theater. Here's an excerpt from the report: [...] The problem is that prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes as much about gambling as about the event itself. This kind of thing has already happened to sports, where the language of "parlays" and "covering the spread" has infiltrated every inch of commentary. ESPN partners with DraftKings to bring its odds to SportsCenter and Monday Night Football; CBS Sports has a betting vertical; FanDuel runs its own streaming network. But the stakes of Greenland's future are more consequential than the NFL playoffs.

The more that prediction markets are treated like news, especially heading into another election, the more every dip and swing in the odds may end up wildly misleading people about what might happen, or influencing what happens in the real world. Yet it's unclear whether these sites are meaningful predictors of anything. After the Golden Globes, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan excitedly posted that his site had correctly predicted 26 of 28 winners, which seems impressive -- but Hollywood awards shows are generally predictable. One recent study found that Polymarket's forecasts in the weeks before the 2024 election were not much better than chance.

These markets are also manipulable. In 2012, one bettor on the now-defunct prediction market Intrade placed a series of huge wagers on Mitt Romney in the two weeks preceding the election, generating a betting line indicative of a tight race. The bettor did not seem motivated by financial gain, according to two researchers who examined the trades. "More plausibly, this trader could have been attempting to manipulate beliefs about the odds of victory in an attempt to boost fundraising, campaign morale, and turnout," they wrote. The trader lost at least $4 million but might have shaped media attention of the race for less than the price of a prime-time ad, they concluded. [...]

The irony of prediction markets is that they are supposed to be a more trustworthy way of gleaning the future than internet clickbait and half-baked punditry, but they risk shredding whatever shared trust we still have left. The suspiciously well-timed bets that one Polymarket user placed right before the capture of Nicolas Maduro may have been just a stroke of phenomenal luck that netted a roughly $400,000 payout. Or maybe someone with inside information was looking for easy money. [...] As Tarek Mansour, Kalshi's CEO, has said, his long-term goal is to "financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion." (Kalshi means "everything" in Arabic.) What could go wrong? As one viral post on X recently put it, "Got a buddy who is praying for world war 3 so he can win $390 on Polymarket." It's a joke. I think.

Just 32 fossil fuel companies were responsible for half the global carbon dioxide emissions driving the climate crisis in 2024, down from 36 a year earlier, a report has revealed. The Guardian: Saudi Aramco was the biggest state-controlled polluter and ExxonMobil was the largest investor-owned polluter. Critics accused the leading fossil fuel companies of "sabotaging climate action" and "being on the wrong side of history" but said the emissions data was increasingly being used to hold the companies accountable.

State-owned fossil fuel producers made up 17 of the top 20 emitters in the Carbon Majors report, which the authors said underscored the political barriers to tackling global heating. All 17 are controlled by countries that opposed a proposed fossil fuel phaseout at the Cop30 UN climate summit in December, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and India. More than 80 other nations had backed the phaseout plan.

The price of water and sewer services for American households has more than doubled since the early 1980s after adjusting for inflation, even though per-capita water use has actually decreased over that period. Households in large cities now spend about $1,300 a year on water and sewer charges, approaching the roughly $1,600 they spend on electricity. The main driver is federal regulation.

Since the Clean Water Act of 1972 and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, the U.S. has spent approximately $5 trillion in contemporary dollars fighting water pollution -- about 0.8% of annual GDP across that period. The EPA itself admits that surface water regulations are the one category of environmental rules where estimated costs exceed estimated benefits.

New York City was required to build a filtration plant to address two minor parasites in water from its Croton aqueduct. The project took a decade longer than expected and cost $3.2 billion, more than double the original estimate. After the plant opened in 2015, the city's Commissioner of Environmental Protection noted that the water would basically be "the same" to the public. Jefferson County, Alabama, meanwhile, descended into what was then the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history in 2011 after EPA-mandated sewer upgrades pushed its debt from $300 million to over $3 billion.

Google has temporarily disabled YouTube's advanced SRV3 caption format after discovering the feature was causing playback errors for some users, according to a statement the company posted. SRV3, also known as YouTube Timed Text, is a custom subtitle system Google introduced around 2018 that allows creators to use custom colors, transparency, animations, and precise text positioning. Creators cannot upload new SRV3 captions while the feature remains disabled, and existing videos that use the format may not display any captions until Google restores it. The company has provided no timeline for when SRV3 will return, and its forum post notes that changes should be temporary for "almost" all videos.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan used his annual letter to creators, published Wednesday, to outline an ambitious 2026 vision that embraces AI-powered creative tools while simultaneously pledging to crack down on the low-quality AI content that has come to be known as "slop."

Mohan identified four AI-related areas that YouTube "must get right in 2026." The platform is working on tools that will let creators use AI to generate Shorts featuring their own likenesses and to experiment with music. "Just as the synthesizer, Photoshop and CGI revolutionized sound and visuals, AI will be a boon to the creatives who are ready to lean in," he wrote. Features like autodubbing, he says, will "transform the viewer experience."

But "the rise of AI has raised concerns about low-quality content, aka 'AI slop,'" he wrote. YouTube is building on its existing spam and clickbait detection systems to reduce the spread of such content. He also flagged deepfakes as a particular concern: "It's becoming harder to detect what's real and what's AI-generated." The platform plans to double down on AI labels and introduce tools that let creators protect their likenesses.