Tue 16 Dec 2025 08.00 ESTLast modified on Tue 16 Dec 2025 08.02 EST The sign outside Tom Hermes's farmyard in Perkins Township in Ohio, a short drive south of the shores of Lake Erie, proudly claims that his family have farmed the land here since 1900. Today, he raises 130 head of cattle and grows corn, wheat, grass and soybeans on 1,200 acres of land. For his family, his animals and wider business, water is life. So when, in May 2024, the Texas-based Aligned Data Centers broke ground on its NEO-01, four-building, 200,000 sq ft data center on a brownfield site that abuts farmland that Hermes rents, he was concerned. "We have city water here. That's going to reduce the pressure if they are sucking all the water," he says of the data center.

Extinction is a part of nature. Of the five billion species that have existed on Earth, 99.9 per cent have vanished. The Triassic-Jurassic extinction, two hundred million years ago, finished off the crocodile-like phytosaur. Sixty-six million years ago, the end-Cretaceous extinction eliminated the Tyrannosaurus rex and the velociraptor; rapid climate change from an asteroid impact was the likely cause. The Neanderthals disappeared some forty thousand years ago. One day--whether from climate change, another asteroid, nuclear war, or something we can't yet imagine--humans will probably be wiped out, too.

The images are so crafted and "painterly" that you may not realise at first they have been dreamed up by a machine in just a few minutes. Maybe you've seen one already, but not realised what it was. It may have looked like something you'd seen before in an art book or a museum. These images are the product of a new AI-generated art scene that's exploded thanks to the development of free and easy-to-use tools that require (at the very least) short text prompts to create unique pictures. The image in the tweet above, for example, was created by giving the text prompt "a summer day" to an AI tool.