America's tech companies and data center developers "are increasingly losing fights in communities where people don't want to live next to them, or even near them," reports the Associated Press: Communities across the United States are reading about — and learning from — each other's battles against data center proposals that are fast multiplying in number and size to meet steep demand as developers branch out in search of faster connections to power sources... [A]s more people hear about a data center coming to their community, once-sleepy municipal board meetings in farming towns and growing suburbs now feature crowded rooms of angry residents pressuring local officials to reject the requests...

A growing number of proposals are going down in defeat, sounding alarms across the data center constellation of Big Tech firms, real estate developers, electric utilities, labor unions and more. Andy Cvengros, who helps lead the data center practice at commercial real estate giant JLL, counted seven or eight deals he'd worked on in recent months that saw opponents going door-to-door, handing out shirts or putting signs in people's yards. "It's becoming a huge problem," Cvengros said. Data Center Watch, a project of 10a Labs, an AI security consultancy, said it is seeing a sharp escalation in community, political and regulatory disruptions to data center development. Between April and June alone, its latest reporting period, it counted 20 proposals valued at $98 billion in 11 states that were blocked or delayed amid local opposition and state-level pushback. That amounts to two-thirds of the projects it was tracking...

For some people angry over steep increases in electric bills, their patience is thin for data centers that could bring still-higher increases. Losing open space, farmland, forest or rural character is a big concern. So is the damage to quality of life, property values or health by on-site diesel generators kicking on or the constant hum of servers. Others worry that wells and aquifers could run dry...

2025'S final months finally saw the publication of J.R.R. Tolkein's The Bovadium Fragments, writes the Los Angeles Review of Books: Anyone who has read Tolkien's letters will know that he is at his funniest when filled with rage, and The Bovadium Fragments is a work brimming with Tolkien's fury — specifically, ire over mankind's obsession with motor vehicles. Tolkien's anger is expressed through a playful satire told from the perspective of a group of future archaeologists who are studying the titular fragments, which tell of a civilization that asphyxiated itself on its own exhaust fumes. Tolkien's fictional fragments use the language of ancient myth, reframing modern issues like traffic congestion and parking with a grandeur that highlights their total absurdity. It is Tolkien at his angriest and funniest, making The Bovadium Fragments a minor treasure in his ever-growing catalog...

As Tolkien put it in one of his private letters, "the spirit of 'Isengard,' if not of Mordor, is of course always cropping up. The present design of destroying Oxford in order to accommodate motor-cars is a case." Readers of The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) will recognize the allusion. In the author's magnum opus, Isengard is a kind of industrial hell, endlessly feeding its furnaces with felled trees... The Bovadium Fragments brings Tolkien's visceral hatred of such machines to the fore for the first time — on the same level as Isengard or the scoured Shire. In Tolkien's story, the words "Motores" and "monsters" are interchangeable. And with his grand, mythic register, Tolkien defamiliarizes the car enough for modern readers to see it as he does — as truly monstrous. "[T]he Motores continued to bring forth an ever larger progeny," Tolkien writes. "[M]any of the citizens harboured the monsters, feeding them with the costly oils and essences which they required, and building houses for them in their gardens...."

One suspects that Tolkien would have preferred to see Oxford return to the era of the donkey cart. That kind of nostalgia is familiar in Tolkien's work — the idea that we developed just a little too far, skipping past an Eden we failed to recognize a generation or two ago. (For Tolkien, the paragon of paradise seems to have been a rural village around the time of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.) But he also knows that mankind's impulse to develop is something we cannot help. And the inevitable blowback we get from our hubris is something we cannot avoid. That defeatist attitude is suggested in the frame narrative to The Bovadium Fragments, in which the archaeologists smugly declare their superiority to the extinct citizens of old Oxford. "We at any rate are not likely to fall into such folly," one of them says.

In their more enlightened future, we are told, they only pursue the more benign science of longevity. Their wish is that one day they shall "at last conquer mortality, and not 'die like animals.'" But humans are animals, Tolkien argues. And in stretching beyond that, we may find progress and modern conveniences like motorcars. But perhaps we also pave a road to Isengard. And we may not recognize that destination until it is too late — until we are trapped within its walls, suffocating on our own exhaust fumes.

North Dakota passed a law last May to promote development of rare earth minerals in the state. But the law's language apparently also includes two fake mineral names, according to the Bismarck Tribune, "that appear to be inspired by coal company lawyers who worked on the bill." The inclusion of fictional substances is being called an embarrassment by one state official, a possible practical joke by coal industry leaders and mystifying by the lawmakers who worked on the bill, the North Dakota Monitor reported.

The fake minerals are friezium and stralium, apparent references to Christopher Friez and David Straley, attorneys for North American Coal who were closely involved in drafting the bill and its amendments. Straley said they were not responsible for adding the fake names. "I assume it was put in to embarrass us, or to make light of it, or have a practical joke," Straley said, adding it could have been a clerical error.

Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring questioned the two substances listed in state law during a recent meeting of the North Dakota Industrial Commission, which is poised to adopt rules based on the legislation... Friezium and stralium first appeared in the bill on the last afternoon of the legislative session as lawmakers hurried to pass several final bills... The amended bill is labeled as prepared by Legislative Council for Rep. Dick Anderson, R-Willow City, the prime sponsor and chair of the conference committee. Anderson said the amendments were prepared by a group of attorneys and legislators, including representatives from the coal industry...

Jonathan Fortner, president of the Lignite Energy Council that represents the coal industry, said it's unfortunate this happened in such an important bill. "From the president on down, everyone's interested in developing domestic critical minerals for national security reasons," Fortner said. "While this may have been a legislative joke between some people that somehow got through, the bigger picture is one that is important and is a very serious matter."

"The ancient evolution of fish mouths could help solve a modern source of plastic pollution," writes ScienceAlert.

"Inspired by these natural filtration systems, scientists in Germany have invented a way to remove 99 percent of plastic particles from water. It's based on how some fish filter-feed to eat microscopic prey." The research team has already filed a patent in Germany, and in the future, they hope their creation will help curb a ubiquitous form of plastic pollution that many are unaware of. Every time a load of laundry is done, millions of microplastics are washed from the fibers of our clothes into local waterways. By some estimates, up to 90 percent of plastic in 'sewage sludge' comes from washing machines. This material is then often used in agriculture as soil or fertilizer, possibly exposing those who eat the resulting crops to these pollutants...

Unlike other plastic filtration systems on the market, this one reduces clogging by 85 percent.

Reddit "has overtaken TikTok as Britain's fourth most-visited social media service," reports the Guardian: The platform has undergone huge growth over the last two years, with an 88% increase in the proportion of UK internet users it reaches. Three in five Brits online now encounter the site, up from a third in 2023, according to Ofcom. Its popularity is rising fastest with younger internet users. It is now the sixth most visited organisation of any kind by UK users aged between 18 and 24, up from 10th a year earlier. More than three-quarters of that cohort now visit it....

The UK is a boom market for the platform, with the second largest user base behind the US, according to company records. A series of factors are behind its rise. However, a change in Google's search algorithms last year to prioritise helpful content from discussion forums appears to have been a significant driver. A recent deal with Google that allows the company to train its AI model on Reddit's content also appears to have provided a boost. Reddit is the most-cited source for Google AI overviews, which is likely to see more people directed to its forums. It has a similar deal with OpenAI, which owns the most popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
According to the article, Reddit "believes it is also benefiting from shifting internet habits, as younger users seek out human-generated reviews and opinions."

Remember how California's government negotiated a 2024 deal where Google contributed millions to California's local newsrooms to offset advertisers moving to the search engine?

"A year after it was cemented — and billed as a model that could succeed where entire countries and continents had fallen short — the agreement is tangled in budget cuts, bureaucratic infighting and unresolved questions about who controls the money," reports Politico, "leaving journalists empty-handed and casting doubt on whether the lofty experiment will ever live up to its promise." The program, initially framed as a nearly $250 million commitment over five years, has secured just $20 million in new money for journalists in its first year, with no guarantee the funding will continue. It's changed hands twice since the University of California, Berkeley withdrew its support [with school officials "worried they wouldn't have enough of a say in how the money was distributed"]. Suggestions that other big tech players like ChatGPT-maker OpenAI could front more resources haven't materialized. A $62.5 million "AI accelerator" tied to the deal hasn't been set up yet.

Not a single newsroom has seen a dollar of funding, and there's no definitive timeline spelling out when they will... [The article adds later that state officials "have yet to draft precise rules for how California will decide which newsrooms get cash..."] Conversations with at least 20 people involved in the deal's rollout reveal how California's budget shortfalls and intraparty spats among Democrats scrambled it... California's struggle to launch its program has dampened hopes of replicating its model in other states such as Oregon, Illinois and New York, where lawmakers have tried but failed to make Big Tech pay for news...

When [California governor] Newsom unveiled his final state budget plan in May 2025 after a $12 billion deficit suddenly scrambled the state's finances, California's first-year commitment was reduced from $30 million to $10 million. Google followed suit within days and cut its first-year contribution from $15 million to $10 million... Whether the program even continues past 2026 is also unclear. Newsom's office declined to confirm whether the state will provide its $10 million commitment to the fund in the coming 2026-27 state budget. Newsom will also be termed out in 2027, and there's no requirement for his successor to honor the state's agreement with Google.

CNBC reports that U.S. airlines have "canceled hundreds of flights to airports in Puerto Rico and Aruba, according to flight tallies from FlightAware and carriers' sites."

JetBlue, Southwest, and American Airlines were among the multiple airlines showing cancelled flights, which "included close to 300 flights to and from San Juan, Puerto Rico's Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport, more than 40% of the day's schedule, according to FlightAware." Airlines canceled flights throughout the Caribbean on Saturday following U.S. strikes on Venezuela after the Federal Aviation Administration ordered commercial aircraft to avoid airspace in parts of the region.... It wasn't immediately clear how long the disruptions would last, though such broad restrictions are often temporary. Airlines said they would waive change fees and fare differences for customers affected by the airspace closures who could fly later in the month.
CNN cites a U.S. official who says more than 150 U.S. aircraft (including helicopters) launched from 20 different bases "on land and sea" during Friday's attack.

The U.S. has said the lights were out in Caracas during the attack, presumably because of a targeted strike on their power grid. "Videos filmed by Caracas residents showed parts of the city in the dark," reports the Miami Herald.

United Nations secretary-general António Guterres issued a statement via his spokesman saying he was "deeply concerned that the rules of international law have not been respected," (according to a Reuters report cited by the Guardian). The Guardian adds that "a number of nations have called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, in New York, today, as a result of the U.S.'s unilateral action."

86 aircraft were affected by an incident in Denver ,and 256 more in Dallas-Fort Worth, America's Federal Aviation Admistrationtold the Washington Post: The pilots flying into Denver International Airport could tell something was wrong. In urgent calls to air traffic controllers, they reported that the Global Positioning System was going haywire, forcing them to rely on backup navigation systems for more than a day. The Federal Aviation Administration issued a warning to air traffic in the area. Eight months later, in October 2022, it happened again — this time at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, which shut down a runway as pilots and air traffic controllers scrambled over two days without GPS to guide them. Federal officials have not said who was responsible for interfering with the systems or why it took so long to get them back online, though they've said the Denver incident was unintentional. But the disruptions stoked fear about the security vulnerabilities of GPS, a satellite network relied on daily by 6 billion people, businesses and governments.

Over the past two years, interference with the U.S. Global Positioning System has grown dramatically, threatening a network that is highly vulnerable to attack in a conflict. The danger could be posed by enemy or rogue nation-states — or even just hobbyists with commercially available equipment. Efforts by the Pentagon to upgrade GPS have been delayed by years and have cost billions, as adversaries are developing increasingly sophisticated ways to jam and trick the system with false signals that make it think it is somewhere it isn't. And it's not just civilian airline traffic at risk. The underpinnings of modern life and entire economies could be disrupted by a broad attack on the fragile satellite system — power grids, financial systems, cellphone networks — raising the prospect of catastrophe in an era of increasing electronic warfare...

A report last year by the OpsGroup, an organization of international airline operators, found that in January 2024, about 300 flights per day were affected by GPS interference. By late last year, that number had grown to 1,500 flights per day as conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East continued. And in a one-month period, between July and August last year, some 41,000 flights were affected. "While GPS interference is not a new phenomenon, the scale and effects of the current wave of spoofing are unprecedented," the report found...

The Pentagon has launched eight of its next-generation GPS III satellites, which broadcast the military-grade signal that is more resistant to jamming and spoofing. Lockheed Martin, the contractor building the satellites, is also developing a next-generation spacecraft, which would have the ability to emit an even stronger "spot beam" directly to areas used by U.S. forces, making it even more difficult to jam.

New York City's statewide smartphone ban that went into effect this fall has been largely successful at getting students to focus in class and socialize at lunch, but teachers across the city have discovered an unexpected side effect: many teenagers cannot read analog clocks. "The constant refrain is 'Miss, what time is it?'" said Madi Mornhinweg, a high school English teacher in Manhattan, who eventually started responding by asking students to identify the big hand and little hand themselves.

Tiana Millen, an assistant principal at Cardozo High School in Queens, said the ban has helped move foot traffic more swiftly through hallways and gotten more students to class on time -- they just don't know it because they can't read the wall clocks. The city's education department says students learn clock-reading in first and second grade. A 2017 Oklahoma study found only one in five children ages 6-12 could read analog clocks, and England began replacing classroom analog clocks with digital ones in 2018.

A new sweeping meta-analysis has found no reliable link between economic inequality and well-being or mental health, challenging a long-held assumption that has shaped public health policy discussions for decades. The study, led by Nicolas Sommet at the University of Lausanne and Annahita Ehsan at the University of British Columbia, synthesized 168 studies involving more than 11 million participants across most world regions. The researchers screened thousands of scientific papers and contacted hundreds of researchers to compile the dataset, extracting more than 100 study features from each paper and linking them to more than 500 World Bank indicators.

They also replicated their findings using Gallup World Poll data spanning 2005 to 2021, which surveyed more than two million respondents from more than 150 countries. People living in more economically unequal places did not, on average, report lower life satisfaction or happiness than those in more equal places. The average effect across studies was not statistically significant and was practically equivalent to zero. Studies that did find links between inequality and poorer mental health turned out to reflect publication bias, where small, noisy studies reporting larger effects were over-represented in the literature. The study adds: Further analyses showed that the near-zero averages conceal more-complex patterns. Greater income inequality was associated with lower well-being in high-inflation contexts and, surprisingly, higher well-being in low-inflation contexts. Greater inequality was also associated with poorer mental health in studies in which the average income was lower. We conclude that inequality is a catalyst that amplifies other determinants of well-being and mental health (such as inflation and poverty) but on its own is not a root cause of negative effects on well-being and mental health.

President Donald Trump signed into law this month a measure that prohibits anyone based in China and other adversarial countries from accessing the Pentagon's cloud computing systems. From a report: The ban, which is tucked inside the $900 billion defense policy law, was enacted in response to a ProPublica investigation this year that exposed how Microsoft used China-based engineers to service the Defense Department's computer systems for nearly a decade -- a practice that left some of the country's most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary.

U.S.-based supervisors, known as "digital escorts," were supposed to serve as a check on these foreign employees, but we found they often lacked the expertise needed to effectively supervise engineers with far more advanced technical skills. In the wake of the reporting, leading members of Congress called on the Defense Department to strengthen its security requirements while blasting Microsoft for what some Republicans called "a national betrayal." Cybersecurity and intelligence experts have told ProPublica that the arrangement posed major risks to national security, given that laws in China grant the country's officials broad authority to collect data.

The International Publishers Association spent the past year promoting the slogan "Democracy depends on reading," but Atlantic senior editor Adam Kirsch argues that this utilitarian pitch fundamentally misunderstands why people become readers in the first place.

The most recent Survey of Public Participation in the Arts found that less than half of Americans read a single book in 2022, and only 38% read a novel or short story. A University of Florida and University College London study found daily reading for pleasure fell 3% annually from 2003 to 2023. Among 13-year-olds, just 14% read for fun almost every day in 2023, down from 27% a decade earlier.

Kirsch says to stop treating reading as civic medicine. "It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice," he writes. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn't stop people from buying dangerous books. Now that books are deemed virtuous, nobody picks them up. He points to Don Quixote and Madame Bovary -- novels whose protagonists are ruined by their reading habits. Great writers, he notes, never idealized literature the way educators do. The pitch to young readers should emphasize staying up late reading under the covers by flashlight, hoping nobody finds out.

A new study [PDF] from Cardiff University analyzing a decade of the popular topical debate programme BBC Question Time found that the broadcaster's flagship political debate show relies disproportionately on journalists and pundits from right-wing media outlets, particularly those connected to The Spectator magazine.

Researcher Matt Walsh examined 391 editions and 1,885 panellist appearances between 2014 and 2024. Journalists from right-leaning publications accounted for 59.59% of media guest slots, compared to just 16.86% for left-leaning outlets. The Spectator, a conservative magazine with a circulation of roughly 65,000, had an outsized presence among the most frequently booked guests. The study's list of top non-politician appearances reads like a roster of right-wing media figures. Isabel Oakeshott appeared 14 times, Julia Hartley-Brewer 13, Kate Andrews (formerly of the Institute for Economic Affairs and now at The Spectator) 13, and Tim Stanley of The Telegraph and Spectator also 13.

No equivalent frequency existed for left-wing journalists; Novara Media's Ash Sarkar and podcaster Alastair Campbell each appeared six times. Walsh said that the programme's need to be entertaining may explain some of these choices, as columnists unconstrained by party talking points tend to generate livelier debate. The BBC maintains that Question Time aims to present a "breadth of viewpoints," but the data suggests the programme's construction of impartiality tilts notably in one direction.

CBS News: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has printed its final newspaper, marking the end of a 157-year chapter in Georgia history and officially transitioning the longtime publication into a fully digital news outlet.

The front-page story of the final print edition asks a fitting question: "What is the future of local media in Atlanta?" The historic last issue is also being sold for $8, a significant increase from the typical $2.00 price.

Wednesday, Dec. 31, marks the last day The AJC will be delivered to driveways across metro Atlanta. Starting Jan. 1, 2026, the newspaper will exist exclusively online, a move its leadership says reflects how readers now consume news and ensures the organization's future.

AJC President and Publisher Andrew Morse said the decision was not made lightly, especially given how deeply the paper is woven into daily life for generations of readers. The move makes Atlanta the only major U.S. city without a daily printed newspaper.

Iran is offering to sell advanced weapons systems including ballistic missiles, drones and warships to foreign governments for cryptocurrency, in a bid to use digital assets to bypass western financial controls. From a report: Iran's Ministry of Defence Export Center, known as Mindex, says it is prepared to negotiate military contracts that allow payment in digital currencies, as well as through barter arrangements and Iranian rials, according to promotional documents and payment terms analysed by the Financial Times.

The offer, introduced during the past year, appears to mark one of the first known instances in which a nation state has publicly indicated its willingness to accept cryptocurrency as payment for the export of strategic military hardware. Mindex, a state-run body responsible for Iran's overseas defence sales, says it has client relationships with 35 countries and advertises a catalogue of weapons that includes Emad ballistic missiles, Shahed drones, Shahid Soleimani-class warships and short-range air defence systems.