Like a mirage speeding across the dusty desert outside Pueblo, Colorado, the first hydrogen-fuel-cell passenger train in the United States is getting warmed up on its test track. It will soon be shipped to Southern California, where it is slated to carry riders on San Bernardino County's Arrow commuter rail service before the end of the year. The best way to decarbonize railroads is the subject of growing debate among regulators, industry, and activists. The debate is partly technological, revolving around whether hydrogen fuel cells, batteries, or overhead electric wires offer the best performance for different railroad situations. In the insular world of railroading, this hydrogen-powered train is a Rorschach test.

Millions of people have watched Mike Hughes die. It happened on February 22, 2020, not far from Highway 247 near the Mojave Desert city of Barstow, California. A homemade rocket ship with Hughes strapped in it took off from a launching pad mounted on a truck. A trail of steam billowed behind the rocket as it swerved and then shot upward, a detached parachute unfurling ominously in its wake. In a video recorded by the journalist Justin Chapman, Hughes disappears into the sky, a dark pinpoint in a vast, uncaring blueness.

Ryan Gainer, a teen with autism, was a cross-country runner who worked out his frustrations with six-mile runs and dreamed of becoming an engineer. On Saturday afternoon, the 15-year-old became upset that his parents had demanded he complete his household chores before he would be allowed to play video games or listen to music on his computer, according to DeWitt Lacy, a civil rights attorney representing Ryan's family. Any teen would be upset by that," Lacy said. Some people with autism experience more heightened emotions and on that day Ryan responded by breaking glass on the front door, Lacy said. A family member called 911 for help, asking dispatch to send deputies to "take him in" because he was breaking glass and hitting his sister, according to a portion of the call released by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department. But instead a responding deputy fatally shot the teen, saying he had threatened the deputy with a garden tool. A 15-year-old Apple Valley youth was shot and killed by a San Bernardino County sheriff's deputy during an altercation with family members. Ryan's death has heightened concerns from activists about law enforcement's use of force against people suffering from mental health issues and the lack of supportive services available for families when they call police for help. The death was not the first. The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department was sued last year after deputies shot and killed Tony Garza while he was in the middle of a mental health crisis. In 2019, an off-duty LAPD officer fatally shot 32-year-old Kenneth French, who had a cognitive disability, during an altercation inside a Costco in Corona. Zoe Gross works as the advocacy director at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, a nonprofit organization run by and for individuals on the autism spectrum. Gross said it's critical that law enforcement release a fuller picture of what happened during their encounter with Ryan to better understand what could have been done differently. "The autistic community has seen far too many cases of law enforcement profiling, targeting, and using excessive, sometimes deadly force on Black autistic people," Gross said. "Because of the prevalence of police violence and the amount of unmet need in our communities, we must fund and implement alternatives to policing." Gross said these alternatives could include dispatching other types of first responders for people in crisis, such as specially trained EMTs, as well as funding community services that could provide support before people resort to calling authorities. Lacy, the Gainer family's attorney, said the sheriff's department had experience with Ryan and had responded to the family's home on previous occasions. "Once they typed up the address, it should have clearly shown this was somebody that had some mental health issues at times," Lacy said. "They should have used deescalating techniques.

Kismet Jackson used to carry her handgun just about everywhere in San Bernardino County. To get her nails done. To pick up her prescription. To hang out with her grandchildren. For her, it was all about staying safe. "Being out and about, you just want to protect yourself," explained Jackson, an Air Force veteran and member of the National African American Gun Assn.

An unknown object with flashing lights appeared to hover over Marine base in Twentynine Palms, California, in 2021. A Stanford University pathology professor said, "Aliens have been on Earth for a long time and are still here," and claims there are experts working on reverse engineering unknown crashed crafts. Dr. Garry Nolan made the bold statements during last week's SALT iConnections conference in Manhattan during a session called, "The Pentagon, Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Crashed UFOs." The host, Alex Klokus, said that's tough to believe and asked him to assign a probability to that statement that extraterrestrial life visited Earth. "I think it's an advanced form of intelligence that using some kind of intermediaries," Nolan said.

Ryan Owen holds an MBA from the University of South Carolina, and has rich experience in financial services, having worked with Liberty Mutual, Sun Life, and other financial firms. Ryan writes and edits AI industry trends and use-cases for Emerj's editorial and client content. Dick and Mac McDonald opened the first McDonald's restaurant in San Bernardino, California in 1940. By the end of the decade, the restaurant added its now-famous French fries. Ray Kroc joined the growing organization in 1954, purchased it in 1961, and served as its CEO into the early 1970s.

Ask for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby's drive-thru east of Los Angeles and you may be talking to Tori -- an artificially intelligent voice assistant that will take your order and send it to the line cooks. "It doesn't call sick," says Amir Siddiqi, whose family installed the AI voice at its Arby's franchise this year in Ontario, California. And the reliability of it is great." The pandemic didn't just threaten Americans' health when it slammed the U.S. in 2020 -- it may also have posed a long-term threat to many of their jobs. Faced with worker shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate service sector jobs that economists once considered safe, assuming that machines couldn't easily provide the human contact they believed customers would demand. Past experience suggests that such automation waves eventually create more jobs than they destroy, but that they also disproportionately wipe out less skilled jobs that many low-income workers depend on. Resulting growing pains for the U.S. economy could be severe. If not for the pandemic, Siddiqi probably wouldn't have bothered investing in new technology that could alienate existing employees and some customers. But it's gone smoothly, he says: "Basically, there's less people needed but those folks are now working in the kitchen and other areas." Ideally, automation can redeploy workers into better and more interesting work, so long as they can get the appropriate technical training, says Johannes Moenius, an economist at the University of Redlands. But although that's happening now, it's not moving quickly enough, he says. Worse, an entire class of service jobs created when manufacturing began to deploy more automation may now be at risk. "The robots escaped the manufacturing sector and went into the much larger service sector," he says. "I regarded contact jobs as safe.

Ask for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby's drive-thru east of Los Angeles and you may be talking to Tori -- an artificially intelligent voice assistant that will take your order and send it to the line cooks. "It doesn't call sick," says Amir Siddiqi, whose family installed the AI voice at its Arby's franchise this year in Ontario, California. And the reliability of it is great." The pandemic didn't just threaten Americans' health when it slammed the U.S. in 2020 -- it may also have posed a long-term threat to many of their jobs. Faced with worker shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate service sector jobs that economists once considered safe, assuming that machines couldn't easily provide the human contact they believed customers would demand. Past experience suggests that such automation waves eventually create more jobs than they destroy, but that they also disproportionately wipe out less skilled jobs that many low-income workers depend on. Resulting growing pains for the U.S. economy could be severe. If not for the pandemic, Siddiqi probably wouldn't have bothered investing in new technology that could alienate existing employees and some customers. But it's gone smoothly, he says: "Basically, there's less people needed but those folks are now working in the kitchen and other areas." Ideally, automation can redeploy workers into better and more interesting work, so long as they can get the appropriate technical training, says Johannes Moenius, an economist at the University of Redlands. But although that's happening now, it's not moving quickly enough, he says. Worse, an entire class of service jobs created when manufacturing began to deploy more automation may now be at risk. "The robots escaped the manufacturing sector and went into the much larger service sector," he says. "I regarded contact jobs as safe.

Federal safety regulators are sending a team to California to investigate a fatal freeway crash involving a Tesla, just after authorities near Oakland arrested a man in another Tesla rolling down a freeway with no one behind the steering wheel. Experts say both cases raise pressure on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to take action on Tesla's partially automated driving system called Autopilot, which has been involved in multiple crashes that have resulted in at least three U.S. deaths. The probe of the May 5 crash in Fontana, California, east of Los Angeles, is the 29th case involving a Tesla that the agency has responded to. "The details of whether the Tesla was in autonomous mode are still under investigation," Officer Stephen Rawls, a spokesperson for the California Highway Patrol, said in an email Wednesday. The Tesla driver, a 35-year-old man whose name has not been released, was killed and another man was seriously injured when the electric car struck an overturned semi on a freeway.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Nov. 24 are here. Check out what's clicking on FoxNews.com The prosthetic legs of a double amputee and soon-to-be high school wrestling captain were stolen from a gym closet in California last week, putting his dreams of winning a state championship or even wrestling this season in doubt. Brett Winters, a senior at Pacific High School in San Bernardino, California, was born without tibia bones in his legs. As a baby, his mother was told by doctors that Winters could either spend life in a wheelchair or amputate his legs.