If the US Has to Build Data Centers, Here's Where They Should Go A new analysis tries to calculate the coming environmental footprint of AI in the US and finds that the ideal sites for data centers aren't where they're being built. A data center for cryptocurrency mining, cloud services, and AI computing in Stutsman County, North Dakota.Video: halbergman/Getty Images Tech companies have invested so much money in building data centers in recent months, it's actively driving the US economy--and the AI race is showing no signs of slowing down. Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg told President Donald Trump last week that the company would spend $600 billion on US infrastructure--including data centers--by 2028, while OpenAI has committed already to spending $1.4 trillion. An extensive new analysis looks at the environmental footprint of data centers in the US to get a handle on what, exactly, the country might be facing as this buildout continues over the next few years--and where the US should be building data centers to avoid the most harmful environmental impacts. The study, published in the journal Nature Communications on Monday, uses a variety of data, including demand for AI chips and information on state electricity and water scarcity, to project the potential environmental impacts of future data centers through the end of the decade. The study models a number of different possible scenarios on how data centers could affect the US and the planet--and cautions that tech companies' net zero promises aren't likely to hold up against the energy and water needs of the massive facilities they're building.

The bizarre virus turning harmless rabbits into terrifying, tentacle-faced creatures has been spotted by more Americans, sparking fears that a wildlife crisis is emerging. The'Frankenstein' rabbits recently made headlines in Colorado, as locals reported seeing the infected animals wandering through neighborhoods. However, the sightings have not been isolated that state. Residents in Minnesota and Nebraska have shared more images and stories of these deformed rabbits popping up. The rabbits are infected with the cottontail papilloma virus (CRPV), also known as Shope papilloma virus, which causes horn- or tentacle-like tumors to grow around the animals' heads and faces.

Why is untangling two small knots more difficult than unravelling one big one? Surprisingly, mathematicians have found that larger and seemingly more complex knots created by joining two simpler ones together can sometimes be easier to undo, invalidating a conjecture posed almost 90 years ago. "We were looking for a counterexample without really having an expectation of finding one, because this conjecture had been around so long," says Mark Brittenham at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. "In the back of our heads, we were thinking that the conjecture was likely to be true. It was very unexpected and very surprising. Mathematicians like Brittenham study knots by treating them as tangled loops with joined ends. One of the most important concepts in knot theory is that each knot has an unknotting number, which is the number of times you would have to sever the string, move another piece of the loop through the gap and then re-join the ends before you reached a circle with no crossings at all – known as the "unknot". Calculating unknotting numbers can be a very computationally intensive task, and there are still knots with as few as 10 crossings that have no solution. Because of this, it can be helpful to break knots down into two or more simpler knots to analyse them, with those that can't be split any further known as prime knots, analogous to prime numbers. But a long-standing mystery is whether the unknotting numbers of the two knots added together would give you the unknotting number of the larger knot. Intuitively, it might make sense that a combined knot would be at least as hard to undo as the sum of its constituent parts, and in 1937, it was conjectured that undoing the combined knot could never be easier. The latest on what's new in science and why it matters each day. Now, Brittenham and Susan Hermiller, also at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, have shown that there are cases when this isn't true. "The conjecture's been around for 88 years and as people continue not to find anything wrong with it, people get more hopeful that it's true," says Hermiller. "First, we found one, and then quickly we found infinitely many pairs of knots for whom the connected sum had unknotting numbers that were strictly less than the sum of the unknotting numbers of the two pieces." "We've shown that we don't understand unknotting numbers nearly as well as we thought we did," says Brittenham. "There could be – even for knots that aren't connected sums – more efficient ways than we ever imagined for unknotting them.

We present the Methods for Open Agent Systems Evaluation Initiative (MOASEI) Competition, a multi-agent AI benchmarking event designed to evaluate decision-making under open-world conditions. Built on the free-range-zoo environment suite, MOASEI introduced dynamic, partially observable domains with agent and task openness--settings where entities may appear, disappear, or change behavior over time. The 2025 competition featured three tracks--Wildfire, Rideshare, and Cybersecurity--each highlighting distinct dimensions of openness and coordination complexity. Eleven teams from international institutions participated, with four of those teams submitting diverse solutions including graph neural networks, convolutional architectures, predictive modeling, and large language model--driven meta--optimization. Evaluation metrics centered on expected utility, robustness to perturbations, and responsiveness to environmental change. The results reveal promising strategies for generalization and adaptation in open environments, offering both empirical insight and infrastructure for future research. This report details the competition's design, findings, and contributions to the open-agent systems research community.

The police chief of a small Nebraska city has come forward with a warning for New Jersey after his community was terrorized by mystery drones. Ord, Nebraska Police Chief Chris Grooms revealed to DailyMail.com Across nearly three weeks of nighttime encounters, typically between 7pm and 11pm, these inexplicable SUV-sized drones operated'with impunity,' Chief Grooms said, and sometimes seemed to be'toying with law enforcement.' 'A lot of reports by ranchers stated that these objects were harassing their horses or cattle on a nightly basis,' he added. Some of the drones reached speeds of 120mph.

A family in the Midwest is expressing enormous gratitude for their video doorbell system -- which alerted them to a wildfire that began burning right outside their home. Misty Schlake of Gothenberg, Nebraska, downloaded the stunning recording from her Ring Video Doorbell and sent it to the home security company. "Ring did so much more than [let] us know someone was at our door! It saved my son's life and our home!" The doorbell notified Schlake's 18-year-old son, who was home alone at the time, that there was movement outside their family home on Thursday, April 21, at around 9:15 p.m. "When he went to the door, he saw our land was on fire," Schlake wrote in comments to Ring.

Google built its brand on Search, and the tech giant has not forgotten that. In what the company calls "the biggest leap forward in the past five years, and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search," Google today announced that it has leveraged its pretrained language model BERT to dramatically improve the understanding of search queries. The next time when you search in Google you won't need to worry about speaking or typing each word precisely to get the results you're looking for, thanks to BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). BERT is a neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) pretraining introduced and open-sourced by Google last year. When applied to ranking and featured snippets in search, BERT models can process words in relation to all other words in a sentence rather than considering them one-by-one and in order. This enables a better "understanding" of context, which is particularly helpful when it comes to longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions strongly affect meaning.

The Lincoln Journal Star reports that the university's researchers are helping lead the study with more than 50 scientists and students from the University of Colorado, Texas Tech University and the University of Oklahoma. The research beginning in May is funded through a three-year, $2.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

OMAHA, NEBRASKA – A 92-year-old woman has been buried in Nebraska with British military honors for a secret that she held for decades: her World War II service as a code breaker of German intelligence communications. The Union Jack was draped over Jean Briggs Watters' casket during her burial Monday, the Omaha World-Herald reported. The tribute honored Watters for her role decoding for a top-secret military program led by British mathematician Alan Turing, who was the subject of the 2014 Oscar-winning film "The Imitation Game." Watters was among about 10,000 people, mostly women, who participated in the Allied effort to crack German communication codes throughout the war. She operated an electro-mechanical machine, known as a "bombe," to decipher signals the German armed forces sent out from its sophisticated Enigma encryption machines.

The tribute honored Watters for her role decoding for a top-secret military program led by British mathematician Alan Turing, who was the subject of the 2014 Oscar-winning film "The Imitation Game ." Watters was among about 10,000 people, mostly women, who participated in the Allied effort to crack German communication codes throughout the war.