On Monday, Mayor Patrick Collins of Cheyenne, Wyoming, announced plans for an AI data center that would consume more electricity than all homes in the state combined, according to the Associated Press . The facility, a joint venture between energy infrastructure company Tallgrass and AI data center developer Crusoe, would start at 1.8 gigawatts and scale up to 10 gigawatts of power use.

The project's energy demands are difficult to overstate for Wyoming, the least populous US state. The initial 1.8-gigawatt phase, consuming 15.8 terawatt-hours (TWh) annually, is more than five times the electricity used by every household in the state combined. That figure represents 91 percent of the 17.3 TWh currently consumed by all of Wyoming's residential, commercial, and industrial sectors combined. At its full 10-gigawatt capacity, the proposed data center would consume 87.6 TWh of electricity annually—double the 43.2 TWh the entire state currently generates.

Because drawing this much power from the public grid is untenable, the project will rely on its own dedicated gas generation and renewable energy sources, according to Collins and company officials. However, this massive local demand for electricity—even if self-generated—represents a fundamental shift for a state that currently sends nearly 60 percent of its generated power to other states.

Read full article

Comments

On October 20, 2023, health officials in the County of San Diego, California, put out a press release warning of a Salmonella outbreak linked to raw (unpasteurized) milk. Such an outbreak is not particularly surprising; the reason the vast majority of milk is pasteurized (heated briefly to kill germs) is because milk can easily pick up nasty pathogens in the farmyard that can cause severe illnesses, particularly in children. It's the reason public health officials have long and strongly warned against consuming raw milk.

At the time of the press release, officials in San Diego county had identified nine residents who had been sickened in the outbreak. Of those nine, three were children, and all three children had been hospitalized.

On October 25, the county put out a second press release , reporting that the local case count had risen to 12, and the suspected culprit— raw milk and raw cream from Raw Farm LLC —had been recalled. The same day, Orange County's health department put out its own press release , reporting seven cases among its residents, including one in a 1-year-old infant.

Read full article

Comments

The White House said yesterday that the European Union agreed to scrap a controversial proposal to make online platforms pay for telecom companies' broadband network upgrades and expansions. But European officials have not confirmed the White House claim, and a European Commission spokesperson said the issue must go through the legislative process.

A White House fact sheet on President Trump's trade deal with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen contains a brief reference to Europe agreeing not to impose network usage fees.

"The United States and the European Union intend to address unjustified digital trade barriers," the White House said. "In that respect, the European Union confirms that it will not adopt or maintain network usage fees. Furthermore, the United States and the European Union will maintain zero customs duties on electronic transmissions."

Read full article

Comments

The Trump administration has proposed curbing the government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases by unwinding rules that control emissions from fossil fuel drilling, power plants, and cars.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin on Tuesday announced the proposed rollback of a 2009 declaration that determined carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are a danger to public health and welfare.

“With this proposal, the Trump EPA is proposing to end 16 years of uncertainty for automakers and American consumers,” said Zeldin.

Read full article

Comments

It's undeniable that the rise of the Internet had a profound impact on cartooning as a profession, giving cartoonists both new tools and a new publishing and/or distribution medium. Online culture also spawned the emergence of viral memes in the late 1990s. Michelle Ann Abate, an English professor at The Ohio State University, argues in a paper published in INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, that memes—specifically, image macros—represent a new type of digital comic, right down to the cognitive and creative ways in which they operate.

"One of my areas of specialty has been graphic novels and comics," Abate told Ars. "I've published multiple books on various aspects of comics history and various titles: everything from Charles Schulz's Peanuts to The Far Side , to Little Lulu to Ziggy to The Family Circus . So I've been working on comics as part of the genres and texts and time periods that I look at for many years now."

Her most recent book is 2024's Singular Sensations: A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States , which Abate was researching when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. "I was reading a lot of single panel comics and sharing them with friends during the pandemic, and memes were something we were always sharing, too," Abate said. "It occurred to me one day that there isn't a whole lot of difference between the single panel comics I'm sharing and the memes. In terms of how they function, how they operate, the connection of the verbal and the visual, there's more continuity than there is difference."

Read full article

Comments

Apple's next-generation software updates are just a couple of months away, but Apple isn't done with last year's releases just yet. Apple has released iOS 18.6, iPadOS 18.6, macOS Sequoia 15.6, watchOS 11.6, tvOS 18.6, and visionOS 2.6 to the public today, fixing an issue with sharing movies from the Photos app but mostly patching a long list of security vulnerabilities.

For iOS , iPadOS, and macOS , the list of resolved CVEs covers everything from the Metal graphics API to WebKit to networking to filesystem permissions issues. All told, each of these updates patches over two dozen vulnerabilities, and the other OS updates cover many of the same flaws. According to Apple's release notes, at least, none of these vulnerabilities are being actively exploited in the wild—you should patch as soon as you can, but there appear to be no known zero-day vulnerabilities.

For iOS and iPadOS users in the EU, the updates also include a mechanism for installing alternate app stores and for installing apps directly from websites, in accordance with the EU's Digital Markets Act.

Read full article

Comments

The rise of large language models like ChatGPT has led to widespread concern that "everyone is cheating their way through college," as a recent New York magazine article memorably put it. Now, OpenAI is rolling out a new "Study Mode" that it claims is less about providing answers or doing the work for students and more about helping them "build [a] deep understanding" of complex topics.

Study Mode isn't a new ChatGPT model but a series of "custom system instructions" written for the LLM "in collaboration with teachers, scientists, and pedagogy experts to reflect a core set of behaviors that support deeper learning," OpenAI said. Instead of the usual summary of a subject that stock ChatGPT might give—which one OpenAI employee likened to "a mini textbook chapter"—Study Mode slowly rolls out new information in a "scaffolded" structure. The mode is designed to ask "guiding questions" in the Socratic style and to pause for periodic "knowledge checks" and personalized feedback to make sure the user understands before moving on.

It's unknown how many students will use this guided learning tool instead of just asking ChatGPT to generate answers from the start.

Read full article

Comments

Whistle pet trackers are headed to the Internet of Things (IoT) graveyard. After releasing its first product in 2013, the Seattle-based Whistle has just been acquired by a competitor that has decided to brick all of Whistle's smart GPS and activity monitors.

Tractive, an Austrian company that has also been selling Internet-connected GPS trackers for pets since 2013, on Monday announced its acquisition of Whistle from Mars Petcare, as spotted by The Verge . Mars Petcare is the pet food subsidiary of Mars Inc (which also makes candies like M&M’s), and it acquired Whistle in 2016 for $117 million .

Tractive bought Whistle to expand its business in the US. Until September 30, Whistle owners can get Tractive devices to replace the Whistle trackers that Tractive is bricking. People currently paying for a Whistle subscription will see their subscriptions transferred to their new Tractive device. People with a Whistle device but no subscription must “pay for a Tractive subscription” in order to get a replacement device, Tractive’s website says. Tractive subscriptions start at $108 per year.

Read full article

Comments

Earlier this month, Ars took a look at Volvo’s latest electric vehicle. The EX90 proved to be a rather thoughtful Swedish take on the luxury SUV , albeit one that remains a rare sight on the road. But the EX90 is not the only recipe one can cook with the underlying ingredients. The ingredients in this case are from a platform called SPA2, and to extend the metaphor a bit, the kitchen is the Volvo factory in Ridgeville, South Carolina, which in addition to making a variety of midsize and larger Volvo cars for the US and European markets also produces the Polestar 3.

What’s fascinating is how different the end products are. Intentionally, Polestar and Volvo wisely seek different customers rather than cannibalize each other's sales. As a new brand, Polestar comes with many fewer preconceptions other than the usual arguments that will rage in the comment section over just how much is Swedish versus Chinese, and perhaps the occasional student of history who remembers the touring car racing team that then developed some bright blue special edition Volvo road cars that for a while held a production car lap record around the Nürburgring Nordschliefe.

That historical link is important. Polestar might now mentally slot into the space that Saab used to occupy in the last century as a refuge for customers with eclectic tastes thanks to its clean exterior designs and techwear-inspired interiors. Once past the necessity of basic transportation, aesthetics are as good a reason as most when it comes to picking a particular car. Just thinking of a Polestar as a brand that exemplifies modern Scandinavian design would be to sell it short, though. The driving dynamics are just too good.

Read full article

Comments