Google said on Tuesday that it will turn off artificial intelligence in its educational apps for K-12 student accounts unless school administrators expressly enable it. The Alphabet-owned search giant said that after surveying school administrators and teachers, it wants educational institutions to control students’ access to various AI capabilities. “We believe schools should have control…
It began with a phone call. A grassroots write-in campaign had been launched weeks before Tuesday’s midterm election in an effort to keep longtime Alabama Sheriff Jay Jones in office. Jones was ousted in May by about 300 votes in a bitterly fought Republican primary in Lee County by a former sheriff’s deputy, Cameron Hunt. …
On a May evening back in 1950, Evelyn Trent had just finished feeding her rabbits when, she claims, she looked up and saw a slow-moving, metallic disk-shaped object hovering above her farm. Though some dismissed it as a hoax, her account was added to a growing list of unexplained events that sparked America’s first UFO…
As a mist of rain sprinkled the fields around him in Homestead, Florida, Ford bemoaned how expensive it had been running a fossil fuel-powered irrigation system on his five-acre farm — and how bad it was for the planet. Earlier this month, Ford installed an automated underground system that uses a solar-powered pump to periodically saturate…
Washington — Ace Parsi describes himself as “personally pretty against AI.” The Democrat is running an uphill race against Republican Rep. Riley Moore in ruby-red West Virginia and has drafted a legislative proposal to block new data centers that don’t have buy-in from constituents. But after what he said was probably the most complicated decision…
DoorDash said Thursday that it will buy Instacart for $17 billion, uniting one of the nation’s top grocery delivery services with a major food delivery company. DoorDash, which will pay $65 per share for Instacart, said the acquisition will benefit communities by enabling more supermarkets to use Instacart’s platform to run their websites. “Instacart has…
A new study from Boston University estimating that nearly 75% of NFL players who died over a 15-year period had signs of CTE in their brains is raising concern, and experts say it demonstrates the need to collect more data on the condition. CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is a degenerative brain disease found in people…
Jury selection begins today in Los Angeles for a trial against Meta and Snap brought by two plaintiffs who claim the companies’ platforms were designed to be addictive — the latest in a wave of cases focusing on social media’s impact on young people’s mental health. The plaintiffs sued in 2023, alleging that endless scrolling,…
From AI chatbots to lifestyle trends, the concept of optimizing one’s life came sharply into focus in 2026. That’s why Dictionary.com picked “maxxing,” a reflection of our increasingly online society, as its latest Word of the Year. “Maxxing (sometimes -maxxing) is short for ‘maximizing,’” says Dictionary.com. “This trendy term can be used on its own…
As greater scrutiny is falling on online sports betting companies for the way they offer extravagant perks to customers who are losing large sums of money, there is another question emerging about this fast-growing industry: how the companies treat their biggest winners. States and state lawmakers have raised questions about a practice called “limiting” —…
