In 1916, hybrid cars could've changed history. But Ford wouldn't allow it. Henry Ford's monopoly on the automobile industry meant that hybrids wouldn't see the light of day for decades. In 1916, Clinton Edgar Woods, a forgotten automobile inventor, designed the first commercial hybrid cars. But Ford's Model T had already cornered the market.

As the data center backlash grows, support is growing for server factories and the hundreds of jobs they're expected to bring. Last month, Pamela Griffin and two other residents of Taylor, Texas, took to the lectern at a city council meeting to object to a data center project. But later, they sat back as council members discussed a proposed tech factory. Griffin didn't speak up against that development. A similar contrast is repeating in communities across the US.

Plus: Trump has climbed down from his plan for the US to take Greenland. Yann LeCun's new venture is a contrarian bet against large language models Yann LeCun is a Turing Award recipient and a top AI researcher, but he has long been a contrarian figure in the tech world. He believes that the industry's current obsession with large language models is wrong-headed and will ultimately fail to solve many pressing problems. Instead, he thinks we should be betting on world models--a different type of AI that accurately reflects the dynamics of the real world. Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that he recently left Meta, where he had served as chief scientist for FAIR (Fundamental AI Research), the company's influential research lab that he founded. LeCun sat down with MIT Technology Review in an exclusive online interview from his Paris apartment to discuss his new venture, life after Meta, the future of artificial intelligence, and why he thinks the industry is chasing the wrong ideas.

The president wants big tech to pay more for electricity, but he's curbing renewable projects that could boost supply Donald Trump is worried about datacenters. Specifically, he is concerned about their effects on an already expensive electricity market in the United States. Will Americans' resentment of sharply rising energy costs scuttle his party's November election ambitions? The US president's anxiety is evident in two actions in recent weeks. On 13 January, Trump and Microsoft's president jointly announced that the tech giant would pay more for its datacenters, paying full property taxes and accepting neither tax reductions nor electricity rate discounts in towns where it operates datacenters.

A large Russian aerial strike on Ukraine has again left half of Kyiv's residential buildings without heating or power as temperatures across the country continue to hover around -10C. Drones, ballistic and cruise missiles targeted several locations in Ukraine, including Kyiv, Dnipro in the centre and Odesa in the south. Air raid alerts in the capital lasted for most of the night. On Tuesday, sirens rang out again as Russian drones and cruise missiles approached the capital. President Volodymyr Zelensky said a significant number of targets had been intercepted.

China's Renewable Energy Revolution Is a Huge Mess That Might Save the World A global onslaught of cheap Chinese green power is upending everything in its path. No one is ready for its repercussions. There's a particular kind of sci-fi nerd who equates fusion tech with utopia. If we could only harness the engine of the stars, it would uncork near limitless energy and neatly sweep away a whole mess of humanity's problems. But how would that work exactly? What would the transition look like?

Hydrogen produces only water emissions, plus the fuel-cell trucks are quick. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Filling up a hydrogen tank is much like filling up a gas-powered car in both the basic experience and in the time it takes. That's been a major barrier for EVs thus far; adding 20 minutes or more for each recharge on a road trip is not nearly as appealing as pulling up to a Chevron station and getting out of there in a few minutes. However, hydrogen hasn't yet caught on as a large-scale solution largely due to funding, even though even the US Department of Energy says it has "several benefits over conventional combustion-based technologies currently used in many power plants and vehicles."

Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Two people have been killed and dozens injured in overnight Russian drone attacks across Ukraine, where strikes on energy infrastructure have caused power outages in freezing temperatures, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In a social media post on Sunday, Zelenskyy said the Sumy, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhia, Khmelnytskyi and Odesa regions were targeted in an attack that included more than 200 drones.

At a crucial moment for climate change, these technologies show us where we're heading. I know it's a bit late to say, but it never quite feels like the year has started until the new edition of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies list comes out. For 25 years, has put together this package, which highlights the technologies that we think are going to matter in the future. This year's version has some stars, including gene resurrection (remember all the dire wolf hype last year?) And of course, the world of climate and energy is represented with sodium-ion batteries, next-generation nuclear, and hyperscale AI data centers . Let's take a look at what ended up on the list, and what it says about this moment for climate tech.

In these politically divisive times, there's one thing we all agree on--we don't want a giant data center in our backyard. Behold, the hyperscale data center! Massive structures, with thousands of specialized computer chips running in parallel to perform the complex calculations required by advanced AI models. A single facility can cover millions of square feet, built with millions of pounds of steel, aluminum, and concrete; feature hundreds of miles of wiring, connecting some hundreds of thousands of high-end GPU chips, and chewing through hundreds of megawatt-hours of electricity. These facilities run so hot from all that computing power that their cooling systems are triumphs of engineering complexity in themselves. But the star of the show are those chips with their advanced processors.