Plus: Almost $2.5 trillion has been wiped off tech stocks. I watched a humanoid robot clean my apartment. It felt like a taste of the future. When I saw an X post about a new humanoid-robot cleaning service in San Francisco, I immediately signed up for the waitlist. I wanted my apartment to feel like, even if just for an hour. The device that arrived at my building belongs to Tau Robotics, a local startup.

I'm not the sort of person who typically pays for a house cleaner. I'm too frugal, and I kind of enjoy putting on a podcast and going to town on my tub with a Magic Eraser. But when I saw an X post about a new humanoid-robot cleaning service in San Francisco, I immediately signed up for the waitlist. I wanted my apartment to feel like, even if just for an hour. I was also motivated by journalistic interest.

Plus: America's data center boom has hit a political wall. Texas was the new epicenter of the AI data center buildout. Texas is the fastest-growing data center market in the US and ground zero for Big Tech's largest AI buildouts. But the blue wave that swept the Lone Star State may jeopardize that position. Democrat James Talarico won the US Senate seat, Gina Hinojosa won the race for governor, and Democrats will take control of the Texas House for the first time in 24 years. They won after making data centers a central issue on the campaign trail.

A sweeping bit of legislation designed to cut red tape could speed up the buildout of energy infrastructure in the US. With the dust barely settled on this week's momentous midterms, the Senate is set to vote on the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA) on November 9. It's a plan that could finally start an overhaul of the slow, complicated process for getting energy projects approved, as part of something called permitting reform. People on both sides of the political aisle have been pushing for this type of change for some years. The key question is whether this will cut greenhouse-gas emissions from the US energy sector or push them higher still. The federal permitting system is designed to protect the environment against industrial pollution from large projects like power plants, transmission lines, and natural-gas pipelines. Today, permitting is governed by a range of laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act. And if there's one thing you might know about the current state of permitting in the US it's that it's slow and incredibly complicated. So in its 417 pages, BAAJA attempts to tighten things up. The bill has provisions that narrow the sorts of projects that need to apply for federal permits and others that enact deadlines in hopes of speeding up a process that today can take years.

Texas is the fastest-growing data center market in the US and ground zero for Big Tech's largest AI buildouts. But the blue wave that swept the Lone Star State may jeopardize that position. Democrat James Talarico won the US Senate seat against Ken Paxton. Gina Hinojosa won the race for governor against the Republican incumbent, Greg Abbott. At the state level, Democrats will take control of the Texas House for the first time in 24 years.

Join a subscriber-only conversation exploring possible paths to keep your mind going. In an effort to reach an elusive continuity of the self, some far-thinking technologists are working on ways to keep your brain going--even beyond death. Join science editor Mary Beth Griggs and senior editor for biomedicine Antonio Regalado for a conversation exploring possible paths to keep your mind going, including gradual brain replacement and uploading our memories to the cloud. Technology that lets us "speak" to our dead relatives has arrived. "We were looking at it wrong": The explosive claim that's upended the AI world Will Douglas Heaven Don't be fooled by this summer of AI hype Timnit Gebru Emily M. Bender An AI "mind-reading" tool can reconstruct what you're looking at from a brain scan Jessica Hamzelou An AI "mind-reading" tool can reconstruct what you're looking at from a brain scan Scientists hope it could be used to reconstruct a person's inner thoughts, mental images, or even dreams. New studies pour cold water on a prominent rejuvenation idea.

I've been locked in to my various screens since results from midterm elections started to roll in last night. And it didn't take long to see the beginning of the blue wave: Democrats took control of both the US House of Representatives and the Senate, a dramatic swing from Donald Trump's victory two years ago. While the results are striking, we probably won't be seeing some of the big climate and energy policy shifts that have come in recent years as Congress and the presidency have changed hands. Instead, we're entering a period of divided government, with a Congress that will likely do battle with Trump's White House over the next two years. But even if the federal government isn't likely to pass laws that overhaul energy and climate policy, the midterm results could be a big deal for energy, especially at the state and local level.

Plus: Democrats have dealt tech billionaires a major midterm setback. These startups hope "blended" food will cut our appetite for red meat In the fall of 2025, Jeff Dodge served hungry students steaming marinara sauce and meatballs. The students loved them: 92% of those who tried them wanted them on the menu. Few could guess that mushrooms had been mixed into the meat. Dodge was testing a new product called 50/Cut from the company Joyn. The blend of seemingly simple ingredients--available as meatballs, burgers, and ground meat--could help solve one of the biggest challenges of the climate crisis: getting people to eat less meat, particularly beef.

Data lineage is the new security perimeter, providing the visibility needed for governance, accountability, and trust, without impeding AI adoption at scale. A sales representative asks an AI agent for customer pricing, and the agent pulls data from multiple sources: restricted pricing systems, internal communications, and archived quotes. The output looks accurate to the agent, so a second agent uses the data to draft the proposal for the sales rep. When it's discovered that the proposal includes unapproved, confidential, and sensitive information, no one can trace where the problematic data entered the workflow or how it spread across systems, files, and agents. This scenario illustrates why AI governance needs to evolve, rapidly and dynamically. As more enterprises begin to use agentic AI in daily workflows, they're realizing that they must manage more than static files; they must manage moving and fragmented data that is continuously ingested, copied, summarized, transformed, reused, and redistributed in new forms.

Plus: Today's midterms will test AI's influence on US politics. How "reverse game theory" could keep AI agents in check A new approach known as "reverse game theory" aims to control powerful AI models by designing systems that incentivize them to stick to the rules. While game theory predicts how rational actors behave under particular rules, reverse game theory designs rules to elicit the behavior we want. Think of splitting a cake: if one person cuts it and the other gets first choice, the cutter has an incentive to make the portions equal. Researchers believe the approach could align AI more closely with our rules and instructions. But big questions remain about whether these mechanisms will work in practice.