This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they’re going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here. While scrolling through my TikTok feed, I often find myself thinking of Elizabeth Báthory. Legend has it that […]
Each episode of HBO’s The Pitt features some degree of medical trauma that almost makes the hospital drama feel like a horror series. Some patients are dealing with gnarly lacerations while others are fighting off vicious blood infections that could rob them of their limbs, and the chaos of working in an emergency room often […]
Maybe you’ve heard, but Elon Musk is apparently a Moon fan now. He has historically been the ultimate cheerleader for human missions to Mars, and as recently as last year, he said his aim was to go straight to the red planet and that the Moon was “a distraction.” Now, he has apparently changed his […]
This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they’re going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here. For the past week, I’ve been thinking about the fact that Oura has gone to Washington. The Oura […]
The Trump administration just eliminated the landmark finding that has underpinned federal regulations on planet-heating pollution since 2009. For nearly the past two decades, the “endangerment finding” has allowed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to craft rules limiting greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. Rather than repealing those rules individually, the Trump administration […]
Anthropic is the latest AI company promising to limit the impact its data centers have on nearby residents’ electricity bills. The company said it would pay higher monthly electricity charges in order to cover 100 percent of the upgrades needed to connect its data centers to power grids. “This includes the shares of these costs […]
Donna Collins lives about 20 miles from where Meta’s biggest data center is being built, in a house her family has lived in for five generations. Construction has thrown the small agricultural community in North Louisiana into the spotlight as a high-profile example of how the infrastructure behind generative AI could impact nearby residents. For […]
Microsoft wants to design more efficient data centers using materials that allow electricity to flow with zero resistance. If these new materials, called high-temperature superconductors, can make it to market, Microsoft thinks it could be a game changer for how data centers and the energy infrastructure they connect to are built. Tech companies are facing […]
In between hobnobbing with royalty and world leaders and abusing children and young women, Jeffrey Epstein appears to have been googling himself regularly. Across several batches of documents related to the convicted sex offender made public, we see Epstein shoot off emails to associates, complaining that his digital footprint includes factual information about his crimes. […]
One year and nearly 2,000 pages of documents later, a group suing to uncover what the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was doing at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says the agency has withheld relevant documents “in bad faith” and is asking a court to allow discovery and depositions to draw out the information. “Thus […]