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New York Is the Latest State to Consider a Data Center Pause

WIRED

Red and blue states alike have introduced legislation in recent weeks that would halt data center development, citing concerns from climate to high energy prices. An Amazon Web Services data center in Stone Ridge, Virginia.Photograph: Nathan Howard/Getty Images Two New York lawmakers on Friday announced that they are introducing a bill that would impose a three-year moratorium on data center development. The announcement makes New York at least the sixth state to introduce legislation putting a pause on data center development in the past few weeks--one of the latest signs of a growing and bipartisan backlash that is quickly finding traction in statehouses around the country. Data center moratoriums are "being tested as a model throughout states in this country," said state senator Liz Krueger, a Democrat, who presented the bill at a press conference Friday with its cosponsor, assembly member Anna Kelles, also a Democrat. "Democrats and Republicans are moving forward with exactly these kinds of moratoriums. New York should be in the front of the line to get this done."


What We Know About the Winter Storm About to Hit the US--and What We Don't

WIRED

What We Know About the Winter Storm About to Hit the US--and What We Don't A huge portion of the United States is going to be hit with snow or freezing rain this weekend. Exactly where, what, and how much remains uncertain. Over the past weekend, when weather models first started forecasting a winter storm that would sweep over large parts of the country, Sean Sublette, a meteorologist living in Virginia, started telling people in his area to prepare for snow . At the time, Sublette says, "a lot of the data started to point to a substantial snow storm for the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast, with significant ice farther southward into Carolina's Tennessee Valley." Then, Sublette woke up Wednesday morning.


The Download: digitizing India, and scoring embryos

MIT Technology Review

The man who made India digital isn't done yet Nandan Nilekani can't stop trying to push India into the future. He started nearly 30 years ago, masterminding an ongoing experiment in technological state capacity that started with Aadhaar--the world's largest digital identity system. Using Aadhaar as the bedrock, Nilekani and people working with him went on to build a sprawling collection of free, interoperating online tools that add up to nothing less than a digital infrastructure for society, covering government services, banking, and health care. They offer convenience and access that would be eye-popping in wealthy countries a tenth of India's size. At 70 years old, Nilekani should be retired. But he has a few more ideas.


Opposed to Data Centers? The Working Families Party Wants You to Run for Office

WIRED

The influential progressive third party announced Thursday that it was putting out a recruitment call for candidates specifically opposed to data centers. The Working Families Party said Thursday that it is putting out a specific recruitment call for people who are organizing against data centers in their communities to run for office. The announcement comes amid a period of heightened political turmoil around data centers, as some high-profile Democrats wade into the fight. Earlier this week, three Democrats in the Senate sent letters seeking information from Big Tech companies about how data centers impact electricity bills, while senator Bernie Sanders, the independent from Vermont, became the first national politician to call for a moratorium on data center construction. "We see our role as responding to what working families and working people are concerned about, what issues are keeping them up at night," says Ravi Mangla, the national press secretary for the Working Families Party. "We would be ignoring the needs of our constituents if we were not responding to the issue of data centers and their impacts on communities."


FBI Says DC Pipe Bomb Suspect Brian Cole Kept Buying Bomb Parts After January 6

WIRED

The 30-year-old Virginia resident evaded capture for years after authorities discovered pipe bombs planted near buildings in Washington, DC, the day before the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack. Prince William County police seal the street in front of the home of suspected January 6, 2021, pipe bomber on December 4, 2025, in Woodbridge, Virginia. Federal agents have arrested a suspect identified as Brian Cole. Federal agents on Thursday announced the arrest of a suspect charged with planting the two pipe bombs discovered near the US Capitol complex on the eve of January 6, 2021 . Authorities identified the man as Brian J. Cole Jr., a resident of Woodbridge, Virginia.


marge__neurips_final_ (2)

Michael Lewis

Neural Information Processing Systems

MARGE performs comparably to XLM-R, but with significant variation across languages. We only show results for languages in all model's Table 8: Number of documents per language used for pre-training. Katherine G. Johnson (née Coleman; August 26, 1918 - February 24, 2020) was an She contributed to the science of the U.S. Air Force and space programs,


If the US Has to Build Data Centers, Here's Where They Should Go

WIRED

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.


Shocking map reveals where power-hungry data centers could spark next public health disaster in the US

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Entitled son, 21, of top lawyer mows down police with his Mercedes G-Wagen...as he smiles in his mugshot Tupac's humiliating intimate disfigurement revealed... and how his lies to cover it up led to his murder Trump'humiliates' speaker Mike Johnson in private conversation as government shutdown rumbles on'I'm Madeline - and this is what I have to say to Lily Allen': Read world exclusive reveal of mother who had affair with star's husband David Harbour, how it started and how she feels about THOSE texts being exposed Loved up Katy Perry holds hands with Justin Trudeau as they officially confirm romance while celebrating the singer's birthday in Paris Furrow-browed boyfriend'strangled girlfriend and set her house on fire while newborn baby was inside' I've uncovered my husband's filthy Viagra habit: But, warns DEAR JANE, one thing YOU are doing is making it so much worse I've started having heart palpitations. Jackie Kennedy's revenge romance with American political icon: Revealed for first time in titillating love letters, the man who helped her cope with JFK's cheating The night that haunted a Wisconsin town forever... and the little girl whose trick-or-treat next door ended in horror Why going gray may save you from CANCER... as scientists make bombshell breakthrough Brazen demands for flying private REVEALED by the woman paid to fulfill them: 'Answer is always yes' They sneered at Trump's'eagle graveyards' - but now Biden's hated windmills crippling an American legend are haunting the US military Kim Kardashian's just been caught in a despicable lie. She can cry all she wants... there's no hiding the truth now: CAROLINE BULLOCK Tua Tagovailoa's swollen eye sparks concern after Dolphins QB woke up with mystery illness on day of Falcons game JD Vance's wife is given secret role in Trump's deal-making inner circle: 'I'll have Usha look at it' The Biden blunder that allowed an alleged October 7 'monster' to become a restaurant worker in Louisiana How I reversed my hair loss and lost 8 stone aged 45 - without weight-loss jabs. A growing network of at least 5,000 data centers across the US is becoming a hidden public health threat, scientists have warned. That is because the energy-hungry backbone of artificial intelligence pumps out dangerous pollutants that can cause asthma, cancer and even death.


Virginia Lt. Gov. candidate enlists AI to represent Dem opponent after she rejected debate offers

FOX News

Republican John Reid used AI to create a mock debate with Democratic rival Ghazala Hashmi for the Virginia lieutenant governor's race after she declined real debates.


InfoAgent: Advancing Autonomous Information-Seeking Agents

Zhang, Gongrui, Zhu, Jialiang, Yang, Ruiqi, Qiu, Kai, Zhang, Miaosen, Wu, Zhirong, Dai, Qi, Liu, Bei, Luo, Chong, Yang, Zhengyuan, Li, Linjie, Wang, Lijuan, Chen, Weizhu, Zhang, Yuan, Li, Xin, Liu, Zhaoyi, Geng, Xin, Guo, Baining

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Building Large Language Model agents that expand their capabilities by interacting with external tools represents a new frontier in AI research and applications. In this paper, we introduce InfoAgent, a deep research agent powered by an innovative data synthesis pipeline and orchestrated web search tools. To construct challenging, hard-to-find queries, we build entity trees and apply sub-tree sampling with entity fuzzification to systematically increase question difficulty. Unlike prior work that relies heavily on commercial search tools, we develop a dedicated self-hosted search infrastructure, enhancing transparency of agent environments and facilitating further advancement of agent capacity. We evaluate the effectiveness of our data pipeline by measuring the average number of tool calls required to correctly answer a question, and also show that our agent yields better performance when equipped with our tools. Our InfoAgent is post-trained from Qwen3-14B using a two-stage recipe: cold-start supervised finetun-ing to instill long-horizon search behaviors, followed by reinforcement learning which significantly improves reasoning-driven tool use. With our methods, InfoAgent achieves 15.3% accuracy on BrowseComp, 29.2% on BrowseComp-ZH, and 40.4% on Xbench-DS, outperforming prior open-source deep research agents such as WebSailor-72B and DeepDive-32B. The Internet has revolutionized the way people acquire knowledge, yet the tools that mediate access to online information have evolved unevenly (Zhang et al., 2025). Recently, researchers have enhanced Large Language Models (LLMs) with agentic capabilities via Reinforcement Learning (RL), which allows them to autonomously plan, search, and learn in an ongoing loop (OpenAI, 2025b). Deep Research Agents (DRAs) are distinguished by their ability to plan, reason, execute multi-step information-seeking actions, such as retrieving documents from the Internet via given tools, and complete complex research tasks. Recognizing their potential, major AI providers have raced to deliver commercial implementations (OpenAI, 2025a; Perplexity, 2025; xAI, 2025a; Google, 2025). This phenomenon shows that deep research is becoming a defining feature of next-generation information platforms. The implementation of DRA faces two challenges: effective strategy for data synthesis and the establishment of an efficient interactive environment. Existing open-source DRAs often perform shallow searches, mainly because they are trained on relatively simple data (Jin et al., 2025; Li et al., 2025c). Training dataset must encompass a broad range of data, which is of various uncertain types, so that the agent is forced to link disparate pieces of information and infer new knowledge when retrieving documents. Meanwhile, some agents are trained in simulated environments, which are underpowered when confronted with challenging real-world problems (Jin et al., 2025).