NEWS 18 June 2026 Reliance on artificial-intelligence tools degrades the abilities of physicians and software engineers, studies show. By Mariana Lenharo0 Mariana Lenharo Mariana Lenharo is a reporter for Nature in New York City. View author publications Search author on: PubMed Google Scholar You…

We’re living through the most answer-rich moment in human history. Need a market analysis? A product brief? A launch strategy? AI can generate something polished in seconds. Some of it still makes my jaw drop. But there’s a growing risk inside companies that I don’t think leaders are talking about…

Updated 5 hours ago - World Barak Ravid Add Axios on Google Add Axios as your preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Add Axios on Google Smoke rises from the town of Shweikin and the Ali al-Tahir hill area in southern Lebanon following Israeli airstrikes on June 20. Photo: Ramiz…

Everything we hear about artificial intelligence is conflicting, and hearing about it feels inescapable. AI is terrible. AI is wonderful. It will break the world. It will transform the future. It’s essential to embrace it. It’s a moral imperative to abstain from using it. The Guardian’s journalism…

Through early 2026, several large companies blew past their annual AI budgets in a matter of months. Uber and ServiceNow, according to The Information, exhausted their entire yearly allocations for Anthropic’s tools in the first months of the year, and Uber capped spending at $1,500 per employee per…

El Niño, Nature’s chaotic climate agent, has formed in a warmed-up Pacific Ocean and is expected to grow to historic strength, meteorologists announced on Thursday. Experts said the El Niño, a natural warming cycle, should further heat a globe already warming from fossil fuel pollution and will…

Arizona officials have indefinitely closed a popular lake to visitors after its entire population of fish died recently. The recreation and wildlife department that maintains San Carlos Lake said in a Facebook statement on Friday that drought conditions as well as water released from a dam there…

A man has been shot in the head during a protest in a town in central Kenya against a proposed US Ebola quarantine facility for its citizens. Photographs from the scene appeared to show a person lying motionless on the ground. Dozens of people had gathered near Laikipia airbase, the proposed site of…

Anthropic said it will “abruptly disable” its most advanced AI models for all users after the US government ordered it to suspend access to the models for foreign nationals, citing national security concerns. The company received the export control directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5…

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we…

Researchers at Amazon had used a series of prompts to get Anthropic’s Fable 5 model to provide them with information. Dado Ruvic/Reuters The Trump administration’s decision to halt all foreign use of Anthropic’s most capable AI models was prompted by conversations between Amazon AMZN -1.23%decrease;…

Military strikes that damaged two water storage facilities in southern Iran may constitute a war crime, military and legal experts say, after reviewing media reports and visual evidence of a 10 June strike on Bemani, a small district about 2 miles from the strait of Hormuz. It’s unclear if the…

by Lawrence Winnerman There is a tanker offloading somewhere on the Gulf Coast in the Houston Ship Channel right now. Its cargo was loaded in the second week of February, before the war began, on contracts signed in a country that no longer exists. The crude in its tanks is being pumped through…

For first time, Americans are getting more of their electricity from solar than coal | Grist Your privacy at Grist We use cookies for enhanced user experience, and for analyzing the site's performance and traffic. For more information, check out our Privacy Policy. [#GPC_BANNER_ICON#]…

US inflation jumped to an annual rate of 4.2% in May, the third consecutive monthly increase since the start of the Iran war and a three-year high, as Americans continue to face steep oil prices. Prices have increased sharply over the past several months, rising at an annual rate of 3.3% in March…

A customer shops for produce in an H-E-B grocery store on May 11 in Austin, Texas. Brandon Bell/Getty Images Sign up for the Planet Money newsletter. The world is confusing. Economics can help. Affordability has been a politically potent word, but an ill-defined measure of financial pain, often used…

Gift a 404 Media subscription to a friend. Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with the target account. The claims coincide with a series of high-profile…

NEW YORK (AP) — Amid spring cleaning season, it can be tempting to dismiss housework as drudgery, so dreaded or anxiety-inducing that it’s best delegated to others if at all possible. But experts from Zen monks to psychologists say there are mental health benefits to be found in such manual chores…

20 May 2026 Categories: Writing Updates Life Personal Mental Health Above: Lily of the Valley, May’s birth month flower. Delicate, tiny white teacup-shaped flowers are striking against the vibrant green leaves. May 20, 2026 I don’t know about you, but here in northern New England, we’re finally…

I’m an AI tool junkie. I’ve been writing about agent workflows, async coding bots, and AI-powered workspaces for over a two years. I use Cursor, Claude Code, and a rotating cast of models nearly every single day. I am (by most definitions) a power user. There’s a specific kind of brain rot spreading…

The average price of a gallon of gas in California already stands at more than $6, but more uncertainty looms as the last oil tanker headed from the Middle East arrived in the Golden state this week. The Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday that the New Corolla, which left the Middle East for…

SUPHAN BURI, Thailand — Saithong Jamjai has just finished harvesting the rice on the 19 hectares of farmland she owns in central Thailand and now is the time to sow again. But she won’t, she said, because of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. She has gone over the math for weeks. Because of surging…

RSA Conference 2026 is running right now in San Francisco, and the headline finding from the AI security track is blunt: 100% of tested AI coding environments are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks. That includes Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot, Roo Code, JetBrains Junie, Cline,…

Comet does not enforce a hard boundary between user intent and untrusted third-party content, and there is no hard boundary preventing the agent from taking sensitive actions or operating inside sensitive environments once influenced. As a result, Comet can be induced to navigate the 1Password Web…

The poor and middle pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the very rich pay lawyers – and the ultra-rich pay politicians. It’s not an original remark, but it bears repeating until everyone has heard it. The more money billionaires accumulate, the greater their control of the political system – which…

The hacker who set all 156 of Dallas’ emergency sirens roaring Friday night didn’t do it by breaching a computer system — they did it entirely by radio. A city official says that Dallas’ sirens are controlled by radios, not computers and software, and that it was a vulnerability in the radio system…

Remember environmentalist Paul Ehrlich’s 1960s-vintage prediction about how overpopulation would deplete the Earth’s resources and condemn millions to starvation? His Malthusian condemnation of humanity’s voracious appetite has kept a grip on the debate over the future of the planet, even scaring…

When Preeti Malani, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan, reviewed six years of data on loneliness among older Americans, one pattern kept surfacing: the people most likely to report chronic isolation weren’t always the ones you’d expect. They weren’t uniformly the…

Solar panels may be benefiting the world in more ways than one. We know that solar power now dominates the global renewable energy market, enabling millions around the world to drastically reduce not only their monthly bills, but also their carbon footprint. But another benefit has been found in the…

PARIS (AP) — Europe has “maybe six weeks or so (of) jet fuel left,” the head of the International Energy Agency said Thursday in a wide-ranging Associated Press interview, warning of possible flight cancellations “soon” if oil supplies remain blocked by the Iran war. IEA Executive Director Fatih…

In this article BIRD+14.82 (+595.18%) Tim Brown, co-founder and co-chairman of sports shoe manufacturer Allbirds, speaks on stage at the OMR Festival digital trade show, May 10, 2023. Marcus Brandt | Picture Alliance | Getty Images Allbirds made a surprising announcement Wednesday that it is…

15 April 2026 Categories: Writing Updates Above: Character art of Jaslan and Jack dancing at night. More on this below. April 15, 2026 It’s 3 a.m. and my cats are lonely. That was a Matchbox Twenty joke. Forgive me, I’m tired. While this time of day is often not conducive to writing stories, I still…

‘You can try to minimise the impact that this situation has on your mental health but it’s becoming impossible.” After six weeks stranded in the Gulf, one of the 20,000 seafarers trapped by Iran’s chokehold on the strait of Hormuz is reaching their limit. Yet with the fragile Middle East ceasefire…

The US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, summoned major American bank chiefs to a meeting in Washington this week amid concerns over the cyber risks posed by Anthropic’s latest AI model, according to reports. Bosses including the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, were said to have gathered at…

There's a Windows XP machine running right now, at an airport you've probably flown through in the last six months, because nobody has updated the middleware it talks to and the middleware has a dependency on something older than the iPhone. That machine isn't a curiosity. It's the entire story of…

Last Tuesday I was on a coaching call with an engineering manager. Let's call her Sarah (because that's her name). She was describing a situation I've now heard about forty times in the last twelve months. Her most senior developer, a guy with twelve years of experience and very strong opinions…

In 1958, Mao ordered every village in China to produce steel. Farmers melted down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces and reported spectacular numbers. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Thirty million people starved. In 2026, every other company is having top down mandate on AI…