History is already being made at the Milano Cortina Games--and they haven't even started. Typically, it's a cool costume at the opening ceremony, or a new cauldron for the Olympic flame, or maybe a new fancy stadium the host city will have no use for in 10 years. Then there are the brand-new records set during each Games, jaw-dropping examples of human strength, talent, and mind-melting perseverance. But for the 2026 Winter Olympics, some of the most notable firsts are coming out of the Olympic Village rather than the individual venues. They are the ones pushing their sports forward and making history in the process.

Dinosaur National Monument workers discovered fossils during parking lot construction in September, the first find in over a century. The fossils are believed to belong to the Diplodocus.

What it's like to be in the middle of a conspiracy theory (according to a conspiracy theory expert) It's something of a familiar cycle by now: Tragedy hits; rampant misinformation and conspiracy theories follow. It's often even more acute in the case of a natural disaster, when conspiracy theories about what "really" caused the calamity run right into culture-war-driven climate change denialism. Put together, these theories obscure real causes while elevating fake ones. I've studied these ideas extensively, having spent the last 10 years writing about conspiracy theories and disinformation as a journalist and researcher. I've covered everything from the rise of QAnon to whether Donald Trump faked his assassination attempt. I've written three books, testified to Congress, and even written a report for the January 6th Committee.

What it's like to be in the middle of a conspiracy theory (according to a conspiracy theory expert) Mike Rothschild has spent years studying the rise of QAnon and antivaccine conspiracism. After his house in Altadena, California, burned down, he found himself mired in similarly sticky webs of misinformation. On a gloomy Saturday morning this past May, a few months after entire blocks of Altadena, California, were destroyed by wildfires, several dozen survivors met at a local church to vent their built-up frustration, anger, blame, and anguish. As I sat there listening to one horror story after another, I almost felt sorry for the very polite consultants who were being paid to sit there, and who couldn't do a thing about what they were hearing. Hosted by a third-party arbiter at the behest of Los Angeles County, the gathering was a listening session in which survivors could "share their experiences with emergency alerts and evacuations" for a report on how the response to the Eaton Fire months earlier had succeeded and failed. It didn't take long to see just how much failure there had been. After a small fire started in the bone-dry brush of Pasadena's Eaton Canyon early in the evening of Tuesday, January 7, 2025, the raging Santa Ana winds blew its embers into nearby Altadena, the historically Black and middle-class town just to the north. By Wednesday morning, much of it was burning.

The 2025 Exposure One Awards honor the beauty of monochrome. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Black and white photography dates back to 1826 and while color images eventually took over, monochrome photos still deliver an unmatched impact. The 2025 Exposure One Awards honor the beauty of black and white. "Long regarded as one of photography's most enduring languages, black and white continues to reveal the essential truths of form, light, and shadow," the contest writes in a statement.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Chris Heinrich will never forget the winter day he and his family evacuated their home in Altadena, California, as a vertical wall of flame was slowly bearing down on their neighborhood from the mountains. "It was dark," he told Slate. "There was no internet, my daughter was crying, the wind was blowing." Even as the fires approached, he said, he didn't really believe that their house would burn.

Jeffrey and Cheryll Ku shared a video recorded on their Ring doorbell showing the terrifying moment the Eaton Fire approached their home. Altadena residents Jeffrey and Cheryll Ku shared harrowing footage of their Jan. The Kus are among Los Angeles residents forced to flee from the wildfires that tore through the city. On social media, the Kus described the experience as "34 minutes of pure terror." "The Eaton fire had just started in the hillside above us and we had to act FAST," Jeffrey Ku wrote in an Instagram post.

It has been predicted that if recent advancement in machine learning continue uninterrupted, human-level or even superintelligent Artificially Intelligent (AI) systems will be designed at some point in the near future [1]. Currently available (and near-term predicted) AI software is subhuman in its general intelligence capability but it is already capable of being hazardous in a number of narrow domains [2], mostly with regard to privacy, discrimination [3, 4], crime automation or armed conflict [5]. Superintelligent AI, predicted to be developed in the longer term, is widely anticipated [6] to be far more dangerous and is potentially capable of causing a lot of harm including an existential risk event for the humanity as a whole [7, 8]. Together the short-term and long-term concerns are known as AI Risk [9]. An infinite number of pathways exists to a state of the world in which a dangerous AI is unleashed [10].

In Octavia E. Butler's novel "Parable of the Sower" (1993), a climate-change Book of Exodus set in a scorched mid-twenty-twenties California, a preacher's daughter named Lauren Oya Olamina tries to convince a friend that their world has veered off course. Disaster surrounds their fortified suburb of Los Angeles: water shortages, a measles epidemic, fires set by drug-addicted pyromaniacs, and bandits who prey on the unhoused multitudes that roam the lawless highways. Outsiders throw severed limbs over the walls of their neighborhood, "gifts of envy and hate." Lauren knows it's time to get out: I'm talking about the day a big gang of those hungry, desperate, crazy people outside decide to come in. I'm talking about what we've got to do before that happens so that we can survive and rebuild--or at least survive and escape to be something other than beggars. . . .