On January 15, a group of utility companies wrote a letter to Lee Zeldin, then president-elect Donald Trumps nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. We provide the electricity for millions of homes, businesses, and institutions across the U.S., create thousands of good-paying jobs, and drive economic progress and American prosperity, the letter stated.After the polite opening, they got right to their main request: Two matters in particular call for immediate action: (1) regulations on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from existing coal-fired and new natural-gas power plants that mandate a carbon capture technology that has not been adequately demonstrated and (2) the unprecedented expansion of the federal regulation of coal combustion residuals (CCR).The companies contend that the federal government has overstepped its authority in its enforcement of these two areas of regulation. The letter asked Zeldin to go easy on themby delivering the regulatory authority back to states and rescinding a 2024 rule that mandated cleanup of coal ash at inactive power plants.What the power companies call coal combustion residuals, and describe as a natural byproduct of generating electricity with coal used for beneficial purposes in U.S. construction and manufacturing, is known more colloquially as coal asha toxic mixture of heavy metals like arsenic and mercury, which, because coal plants are usually built near bodies of water, often comes in contact with groundwater when it is buried in an unlined pit. Over the last century and a half of American coal power generation, power companies have dumped coal ash at hundreds of active and inactive power plants across the country. Zeldin is now the administrator of the EPA, and it appears the power companies are getting their wish. Amid a barrage of press releases that, on March 12, proposed 31 deregulatory actions, were two that seem designed to significantly weaken enforcement of coal ash regulations, environmental attorneys told Grist.Zeldin called it the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen.In the first, the EPA announced that it will encourage states to take over permitting and enforcement of the coal ash rule. When states are delegated the authority by the EPA to issue their own coal ash disposal permits, theyre supposed to adhere to standards at least as stringent as the federal rules, but in some cases state environmental agencies have simply gone rogue and flouted this requirement.Georgia, which received the authority to issue its own permits for coal ash disposal in 2019, has controversially approved plans at several coal plants for the utility Georgia Power to permanently store millions of tons of coal ash in unlined landfills that are partially submerged in groundwater, despite being notified by EPA that this violates the federal rule. In neighboring Alabama, state regulators sought the same delegated authority that their counterparts in Georgia had been granted, but last year the EPA denied their application because they planned to issue permits to Alabama Power that violated the federal rules in the same manner as Georgias.Alabamas was the first application for a state-run coal ash program that the EPA has denied; so far, only Georgia, Texas, and Oklahoma have been approved. But new approvals may be coming soon: EPA will propose a determination on the North Dakota permit program within the next 60 days, the release said.The EPA also said it would be reviewing a rule it finalized in 2024, under president Joe Biden, that closed a longstanding loophole by extending coal ash regulations to cover so-called legacy coal ash ponds at shuttered power plantswhich werent covered by a landmark 2015 rule that regulated coal ash disposal only at power plants in active use.The EPAs review of the 2024 legacy coal ash rule will focus on whether to extend the deadlines for compliance with the rule. Lisa Evans, senior counsel at Earthjustice, said the time frames in the rule as written were already far more lenient than was necessary. Industry already got major concessions from the Biden EPA to establish deadlines that are far in the future, she said.Because coal ashs peak contamination levels arent reached until some 70 years after waste is dumped, longer deadlines can only mean less effective cleanup. The longer you ignore those sites, the worse the pollution gets, Evans said.In the second announcement related to coal ash, the EPA said it will revise a list of its top enforcement priorities that was announced in 2023 and applied to the fiscal years 2024 through 2027. The list of National Enforcement and Compliance Initiatives, or NECI, included six priority areas for action, one of which was Protecting Communities from Coal Ash Contamination.The EPA now intends to align the agencys enforcement priorities with President Trumps executive orders. It said this would be accomplished by immediately revising the NECI list to ensure that enforcement does not discriminate based on race and socioeconomic status (as it has under environmental justice initiatives) or shut down energy production and that it focuses on the most pressing health and safety issues.No further details were provided regarding what this meant for the agencys actual enforcement actions. But a fuller picture is found in an internal agency memo, which was sent by Jeffrey Hall, the acting head of the agencys enforcement and compliance division. The memo, seen by Grist, outlines the ways in which the NECI list was to be updated.Halls memo said that the priorities are under review to ensure alignment between the NECIs and the Administrations directives and priorities, and it laid out a series of directions that applied in the interim to all EPA enforcement and compliance actions. These include a blanket directive that environmental justice considerations shall no longer inform EPAs enforcement and compliance assurance work and another declaring that enforcement and compliance assurance actions shall not shut down any stage of energy production (from exploration to distribution) or power generation absent an imminent and substantial threat to human health or an express statutory or regulatory requirement to the contrary.With respect to coal ash, the memo argues that the NECI priority list focuses in large part on perceived noncompliance with current performance standards and monitoring and testing requirements and is motivated largely by environmental justice considerations, which are inconsistent with the Presidents Executive Orders and the Administrators Initiative. Accordingly, the memo stipulates that enforcement and compliance assurance for coal ash at active power plant facilities shall focus on imminent threats to human health.Due to the wording of the memo, Evans said in an email that it would be entirely possible for EPA to justify avoiding any enforcement whatsoever of the coal ash rule under the NECI.This would be a dramatic reversal of the heightened enforcement that ramped up under the Biden administration. In 2024the first year of the coal ash NECI prioritythe EPA conducted 107 compliance assessments of coal ash sites across 18 states. While only five enforcement cases (orders or agreements by which EPA requires companies to take certain actions) were filed in that year, Evans said it is likely that EPA will find reason for enforcement action at many of the other sites if the investigations are allowed to proceed.Evans said the requirement that enforcement only take place in cases of an imminent threat to human health effectively restricts the agency from enforcing aspects of the coal ash rule designed to prevent imminent threats by requiring proper management and monitoring of toxic waste sites before damage and spills occur.For instance, Evans said, the directive would prohibit the EPA from requiring a utility to repair a faulty groundwater monitoring system. Utilities have gamed the system at some plants by designing monitoring systems that intentionally miss detecting leakage from a coal ash dump, she said, citing a 2022 report by Earthjustice and the Environmental Integrity Project that alleged a widespread practice among power companies of manipulating monitoring data to downplay the extent of contamination.Power companies are supposed to dig wells to assess the groundwater quality at coal ash dumps, and in order to gauge their contamination level they compare it to what should be uncontaminated water samples nearby. But the 2022 report documented examples like coal plants in Texas, Indiana, and Florida where the EPA found that the background wells used for the purpose of providing baseline samples of water quality were dug in contaminated areas near the coal ash dump. The report also documented the practice of intrawell monitoring, or simply analyzing the data from each well in isolation, in order to assess changes in contamination levels over time, rather than contrasted with uncontaminated wells. This method doesnt work unless the wells arent contaminated to begin with, and is prohibited by EPA guidelinesbut the report found it was in use at 108 coal plants nationwide.These practices could essentially be given a free pass under the new enforcement guidance. While these are very significant violations (because contamination is not discovered and cleanup not triggered), they may not rise to an imminent threat, especially if there are no data revealing toxic releases, Evans said.The section of the memo dealing with coal ash also stipulated that any order or other enforcement action that would unduly burden or significantly disrupt power generation requires advance approval from the assistant administrator of the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurancethe politically appointed position temporarily being held by Hall.The memo justifies this requirement on the basis of the Trump administrations stated intention of unleashing American energy. But to Nick Torrey, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, it has little to do with energy productionand more to do with utilities bottom line.Theres nothing about cleaning up coal ash that affects power generation; those are two separate activities, Torrey noted. So what it sounds like is theyre prioritizing polluters interests over peoples drinking water.Gautama Mehta, GristThis article originally appeared in Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for its newsletter here.

Artist and industrial design icon Ross Lovegroves work has always looked like the space-age futureand he has now partnered up with SpaceX on a project that sees him revisiting one of his most famous pieces from the past: The Bernhardt Go chair.CreativeWorkStudios is a company that fosters collaborations with an eye toward art, science and philanthropy. Having worked on a project that connected artist Refik Anadol with the NASA-funded Translational Research Institute for Space Health, CreativeWorkStudios turned to Lovegrove for its next endeavor, a partnership with the Polaris space missions to raise funds for St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital.Ross Lovegrove [Photo: J Harry Edmiston/courtesy CreativeWorkStudios]Lovegrove created the flowing Bernhardt Go chairprobably my favorite objectat the turn of the millennium. With its absence of straight lines and legs that are seemingly reversed, it has a futuristic aesthetic that has landed it a spot in the film Passengers and other sci-fi projects. Which is perhaps why his partnership with the space exploration company feels so immediately organic (and causes you to momentarily forget who owns SpaceX). Using data from the landmark Polaris Dawn mission, Lovegrove is now retrofitting the Bernhardt Go into its next evolution: The $6,500 Polaris Go.A Magnesium-Injected InnovationIts apropos that Lovegrove is working with SpaceX on a project involving this particular chair. Years ago, he was invited out to the company to possibly become its design directorand when he got there, he discovered a couple hundred Bernhardt Go chairs in the canteen.[Photo: courtesy CreativeWorkStudios]While the first Polaris Dawn mission last year yielded a few firsts, such as the first commercial spacewalk, the Bernhardt Go scored one of its own when it launched in the early 2000s. Lovegrove originally designed the chair in aluminum, but found it to be too heavy. So he decided to use pressure die-cast magnesium, which weighs about 30% less without compromising strength. Thing was, it had never been done before, and has not been done since (the chairs were sealed and powder-coated, and are safe).How can I say itit wont burst into flames, but its highly flammable, Lovegrove says with a laugh. It took us a while to find somebody who would take that risk.The Bernhardt Go was hit, with TIME citing it as one of 2001s best designs, and various museums adding the chair to their collections.[Photo: courtesy CreativeWorkStudios]After partnering with CreativeWorkStudios and the Polaris team for the new project, Lovegrove reached out to Bernhardt, which had 210 originals leftand he says the company handed them over.I mean, to suddenly give up your whole stock is pretty remarkable, Lovegrove says. And its because of the St. Judes component. Which is not cynicalits incredibly sincere.Earth from Polaris Dawn [Photo: Jared Isaacman]Taking a New SeatPolaris mission commander (and current nominee to lead NASA) Jared Isaacman has a history of raising funds for St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital, which the Polaris program has partnered with for its trio of missions. Lovegrove says its a cause close to him, as well, owing to a number of family members he has lost to cancer.As he devised ways to update the chair for the project, Lovegrove homed in on the seat pan insert. He decided to utilize data from the shockwaves of the launch to create a pattern emerging from four corners.[It] is a metaphor about the co-joining of forces for the crew membersso, the four coming together form a total balance, and a kind of dynamic unity that comes from the abstract forces of nature.[Photo: courtesy CreativeWorkStudios]Lovegrove says he wanted to find a U.S. supplier linked to the space program to make the inserts, which he was able to do. He could have created it with, say, a 3D-printed polymerbut that doesnt exactly represent space. So instead, the team used an aerospace-grade aluminum alloy, which is laser-cut to a finite dimension and then pressed incredibly thin so as to not impede the weight of the chair. The names of the four astronauts, meanwhile, are set to be laser-engraved onto the pans.Ultimately, Id like to even look at anodizing those, possibly in other colors, so that we could do a limited edition as we roll this out, he says. In a philanthropic way, we have to sell these we have to appeal to people.[Photo: courtesy CreativeWorkStudios]The chairs are priced at $6,500 and are available for preorder on the project website, with 50 percent going to St. Jude. Lovegrove adds that this is the start of a larger project with CreativeWorkStudios and Polaris, where hell take more data and interpret it in various ways, particularly around the physical impact of space on the human bodies.If you look at space programs now, all the space adventure and business development, I think its going to pull [the human race] forward. I think its going to pull everything into a whole new mindset, Lovegrove says. They always say the most abstract thing that mankind can ever do is go into space, because were absolutely not designed to go into space. And then engineers come up and say, Hey, were doing it.As for that forward momentumits always been visually evident in the chair since the start. Has that always driven him?Everything that we do has an implied energy in it, he says. I dont like static things.

Some of the funniest memes I see on social media are photos and videos of dogs that take over their humans beds to the point that their owners have to sleep somewhere else. While I dont have a dog or any pet, I have it on good authority from friends who are fur parents that this is a true story. While your dogs probably have their own beds, it seems that they sleep better if they share the same space with you.Designer: Liam de la BedoyereThe Dog Hut Bed is a personal project by a fur parent himself who wanted to give his dog their own dedicated area in their bed while also freeing up space for the actual human. While some dogs will still probably prefer to get their owners spot, this is an option for those that can be trained, bringing a Scandinavian aesthetic and combining practical piece of furniture but with a touch of warmth between the fur parent and the fur baby. Basically what he did was add a house-shaped headboard to a regular bed with a space inside for the dog to sleep and rest in. Crafted from oak, this bed frame offers a stylish and functional solution for pet ownersThe bed though has to be low as well so that the dog will not have any trouble getting in (although they of course have their own way of getting onto high beds when they want to). Since you get a slanted headboard, you can also use it as a backrest for when you do some nighttime reading or when you need to work while in bed. Of course this is still dependent on your dog distracting you or if they stay inside their house within your bed. Ultimately, the Dog Hut Bed speaks to a universal truth among pet owners: the delicate balance between providing our furry companions with their own space and acknowledging their undeniable desire to be close. Its a testament to the lengths we go to accommodate our pets, blending functionality with a touch of whimsy. Whether it successfully curbs the bed-hogging tendencies of our canine companions remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: its a conversation starter, a design that acknowledges the unique bond between humans and their dogs, and a playful nod to the daily struggles and joys of sharing our livesand our bedswith our beloved pets. And perhaps, just perhaps, it might offer a sliver of extra mattress space for the weary human, a small victory in the ongoing battle for bed domination.The post Dog Hut Bed is designed for fur babies and their humans first appeared on Yanko Design.

While a lot of people are probably squeamish or downright scared when it comes to insects, there are also those who are fascinated with them. Young kids who spend a lot of time outdoors most likely develop an interest in them especially when they find all sorts of insects in their backyard or play area. And of course when we get older, we know that these creatures play a part in the ecosystem, even if we are disgusted by them. The fear and sometimes terror can stem from cultural conditioning, learned phobias, or visceral reactions to their often alien appearances and movements. We slowly begin to understand their importance as pollinators, decomposers, and food sources for other animals as we learn more about them.Designer: Anne NiemetzThis new installation called KIhikihi by artist Anne Niemetz draws attention to insects, particularly cicadas and the intricate relationship they have with their environment and also the added element of human interaction. Drawing inspiration from the chorus cicada (Amphipsalta zelandica) of New Zealand, this captivating interactive sound installation transforms the insects characteristic sounds into a mesmerizing electronic orchestra. It focuses on the sonic qualities of the cicadas, particularly the rhythmic and persistent calls. The name of the exhibit is an onomatopoeic term from the Maori language which is a reflection of the cicadas distinctive sound. The installation creates a polyrhythmic sound cloud where individual electronic insects contribute unique rhythmic patterns that interweave. The interaction comes when participants actively engage with the installation by placing electronic insects onto sculptural trees. This interaction triggers both sound and light responses, creating a dynamic and engaging experience. The sculptural trees themselves emit ambient sounds that subtly shift based on the placement of the electronic insects.Aside from it being an interesting sound installation experience, Kihikihi prompts reflection on the ecological significance of insects and also the consequences of their declining populations. It raises questions about the potential impact of technological replacements, such as robotic pollinators, on our cultural and emotional connection to the natural world. The installation also blends sculptural elements with electronic technology to create an immersive and interactive environment since it involves a combination of sculpture, electronic design and sound coding. The installation brings to the for front, the interrelationship between insects, plants, and humans. In essence, this is a compelling artistic endeavor that combines sound, interaction, and ecological awareness to create a unique and thought-provoking experience. The post Cicada sound exhibition brings interest to insects and their ecosystem first appeared on Yanko Design.

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This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here.This weeks edition of The Algorithm is brought to you not by your usual host, James ODonnell, but Eileen Guo, an investigative reporter at MIT Technology Review.A few weeks ago, when I was at the digital rights conference RightsCon in Taiwan, I watched in real time as civil society organizations from around the world, including the US, grappled with the loss of one of the biggest funders of global digital rights work: the United States government.As I wrote in my dispatch, the Trump administrations shocking, rapid gutting of the US government (and its push into what some prominent political scientists call competitive authoritarianism) also affects the operations and policies of American tech companiesmany of which, of course, have users far beyond US borders. People at RightsCon said they were already seeing changes in these companies willingness to engage with and invest in communities that have smaller user basesespecially non-English-speaking ones.As a result, some policymakers and business leadersin Europe, in particularare reconsidering their reliance on US-based tech and asking whether they can quickly spin up better, homegrown alternatives. This is particularly true for AI.One of the clearest examples of this is in social media. Yasmin Curzi, a Brazilian law professor who researches domestic tech policy, put it to me this way: Since Trumps second administration, we cannot count on [American social media platforms] to do even the bare minimum anymore.Social media content moderation systemswhich already use automation and are also experimenting with deploying large language models to flag problematic postsare failing to detect gender-based violence in places as varied as India, South Africa, and Brazil. If platforms begin to rely even more on LLMs for content moderation, this problem will likely get worse, says Marlena Wisniak, a human rights lawyer who focuses on AI governance at the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law. The LLMs are moderated poorly, and the poorly moderated LLMs are then also used to moderate other content, she tells me. Its so circular, and the errors just keep repeating and amplifying.Part of the problem is that the systems are trained primarily on data from the English-speaking world (and American English at that), and as a result, they perform less well with local languages and context.Even multilingual language models, which are meant to process multiple languages at once, still perform poorly with non-Western languages. For instance, one evaluation of ChatGPTs response to health-care queries found that results were far worse in Chinese and Hindi, which are less well represented in North American data sets, than in English and Spanish.For many at RightsCon, this validates their calls for more community-driven approaches to AIboth in and out of the social media context. These could include small language models, chatbots, and data sets designed for particular uses and specific to particular languages and cultural contexts. These systems could be trained to recognize slang usages and slurs, interpret words or phrases written in a mix of languages and even alphabets, and identify reclaimed language (onetime slurs that the targeted group has decided to embrace). All of these tend to be missed or miscategorized by language models and automated systems trained primarily on Anglo-American English. The founder of the startup Shhor AI, for example, hosted a panel at RightsCon and talked about its new content moderation API focused on Indian vernacular languages.Many similar solutions have been in development for yearsand weve covered a number of them, including a Mozilla-facilitated volunteer-led effort to collect training data in languages other than English, and promising startups like Lelapa AI, which is building AI for African languages. Earlier this year, we even included small language models on our 2025 list of top 10 breakthrough technologies.Still, this moment feels a little different. The second Trump administration, which shapes the actions and policies of American tech companies, is obviously a major factor. But there are others at play.First, recent research and development on language models has reached the point where data set size is no longer a predictor of performance, meaning that more people can create them. In fact, smaller language models might be worthy competitors of multilingual language models in specific, low-resource languages, says Aliya Bhatia, a visiting fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology who researches automated content moderation.Then theres the global landscape. AI competition was a major theme of the recent Paris AI Summit, which took place the week before RightsCon. Since then, theres been a steady stream of announcements about sovereign AI initiatives that aim to give a country (or organization) full control over all aspects of AI development.AI sovereignty is just one part of the desire for broader tech sovereignty thats also been gaining steam, growing out of more sweeping concerns about the privacy and security of data transferred to the United States. The European Union appointed its first commissioner for tech sovereignty, security, and democracy last November and has been working on plans for a Euro Stack, or digital public infrastructure. The definition of this is still somewhat fluid, but it could include the energy, water, chips, cloud services, software, data, and AI needed to support modern society and future innovation. All these are largely provided by US tech companies today. Europes efforts are partly modeled after India Stack, that countrys digital infrastructure that includes the biometric identity system Aadhaar. Just last week, Dutch lawmakers passed several motions to untangle the country from US tech providers.This all fits in with what Andy Yen, CEO of the Switzerland-based digital privacy company Proton, told me at RightsCon. Trump, he said, is causing Europe to move faster to come to the realization that Europe needs to regain its tech sovereignty. This is partly because of the leverage that the president has over tech CEOs, Yen said, and also simply because tech is where the future economic growth of any country is.But just because governments get involved doesnt mean that issues around inclusion in language models will go away. I think there needs to be guardrails about what the role of the government here is. Where it gets tricky is if the government decides These are the languages we want to advance or These are the types of views we want represented in a data set, Bhatia says. Fundamentally, the training data a model trains on is akin to the worldview it develops.Its still too early to know what this will all look like, and how much of it will prove to be hype. But no matter what happens, this is a space well be watching.Now read the rest of The AlgorithmDeeper LearningOpenAI has released its first research into how using ChatGPT affects peoples emotional well-beingOpenAI released two pieces of research last week that explore how ChatGPT affects people who engage with it on emotional issues, yielding some interesting results. Female study participants were slightly less likely to socialize with people than their male counterparts who used the chatbot for the same period of time, our reporter Rhiannon Williams writes. And people who used voice mode in a gender that was not their own reported higher levels of loneliness at the end of the experiment.Why it matters: AI companies have raced to build chatbots that act not just as productivity tools but also as companions, romantic partners, friends, therapists, and more. Legally, its largely still a Wild West landscape. Some have instructed users to harm themselves, and others have offered sexually charged conversations as underage characters represented by deepfakes. More research into how people, especially children, are using these AI models is essential. OpenAIs work is only a start. Read more from Rhiannon Williams.Bits and BytesOpinion Why handing over total control to AI agents would be a huge mistakeCompanies like OpenAI and Butterfly Effect (the startup in China that made Manus) are racing to build AI agents that can do tasks for you by taking over your computer. In this op-ed, some top AI researchers detail the potential missteps that could occur if we cede more control of our digital lives to decision-making AIs.A provocative experiment pitted AI against federal judgesResearch has long shown that judges are influenced by many factors, like how sympathetic they are to defendants, or when their last meal was. Despite AI models inherent problems with biases and hallucinations, researchers at the University of Chicago Law School wondered if they can present more objective opinions. They can, but that doesnt make them better judges, the researchers say. (The Washington Post)Elon Musks truth-seeking chatbot often disagrees with himMusk promised his company xAIs model Grok would be an antidote to the woke and politically influenced chatbots that he says dominate today. But in tests done by the Washington Post, the model contradicted many of Musks claims about specific issues. (The Washington Post)A Disney employee downloaded an AI tool that contained malware, and it ruined his lifeMIT Technology Review has long predicted that the proliferation of AI will enable scammers to up their productivity as never before. One victim of this trend is Matthew Van Andel, a Disney employee who downloaded malware disguised as an AI tool. It led to his firing. (Wall Street Journal)The facial recognition company Clearview attempted to buy Social Security numbers and mugshots for its databaseThree years ago, Clearview was fined for scraping images of individuals faces from the internet. Now, court records reveal that the company was attempting to buy 690 million arrest records and 390 million arrest photos in the USrecords that also contained Social Security numbers, emails, and physical addresses. The deal fell through, but Clearview nonetheless holds one of the largest databases of facial images, and its tools are used by police and federal agencies. (404 Media)