For all the revolutionary change artificial intelligence promises, it also makes lofty demands. For starters, AI is extraordinarily power hungry. Generating all the electricity that AI <a href="https://www.rcrwireless.com/20250318/uncategorized/ai-data-centers-power">datacenters</a> consume takes forest-loads of energy, not to mention hardware and cooling infrastructure. That stuff all costs a lot, making AI a <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-researchers-tech-industry-dead-end">huge money pit</a>. That's had a big effect on our economy, as the tiniest bit of AI hype can send <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-hype-america-financial-ruin">huge shockwaves</a> through Wall Street and beyond.
But AI's also greedy in less noticeable ways: namely, for your data.
The large language models (LLMs) that underpin products like OpenAI's ChatGPT, for instance, need to devour enormous datasets of written words to fine tune an algorithm to follow the rules of language. They're so hungry for raw data, in fact, that original material for these algorithms to gobble up is becoming hard to come by.
"We’re literally running out of text in the universe to train these systems on," said computer science scholar Stuart Russell <a href="https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/online/data-is-fueling-the-ai-revolution-what-happens-when-it-runs-out/">back in 2023</a>. Now in 2025, the well is all but drying up.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has inadvertently pulled the curtain back on what it looks like to ingest all that data.
In January, Meta <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/new-documents-unredacted-meta-copyright-ai-lawsuit/">lost a huge fight</a> with a group of authors who sued the company for using their books to train its AI. The case uncovered the fact that Meta had illegally downloaded an infamous pirate library, LibGen, to procure millions of legally protected texts. Those books were then fed to Meta's LLM, Llama, after software engineers got approval from <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.415175/gov.uscourts.cand.415175.482.0.pdf">the Zuck himself</a>. In other words, one of the largest companies in the world didn't even bother to pay for a single copy of each book it used to build its AI.
This week, The Atlantic compiled a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-set/682094/">search engine</a> that could trawl the LibGen files and uncover which books, exactly, were scraped by Meta. The scope of Meta's <a href="https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/books-database-libgen-meta-ai-training-andy-warhol-ai-weiwei-1234736227/">data harvesting operation</a> is <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libgen-meta-openai/682093/">extensive</a>, spanning over 7.5 million books and some 81 million academic papers, on top of work published by museums, architects, and artists.
The suit was led by authors like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Sarah Silverman, who had an idea of Meta's data piracy thanks to a previous <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/10/sarah-silverman-sues-openai-meta-copyright-infringement">2023 lawsuit</a>. But the new search tool is now enabling writers and scholars to see what work, exactly, was pirated to train Meta's for-profit LLM — resulting in plenty of discourse around copyright laws, AI ethics, and media piracy.
"My book is in here — and, good! LibGen makes texts available to people who might not otherwise have access," <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/justinling.ca/post/3lkt7qqrzwk2y">said Wired writer Justin Ling</a>. "The problem, imo, isn't LibGen making content available for free: It's Meta stealing that material for profit."
Whether Meta will need to make these writers whole remains to be seen, as a decision isn't expected until summer. Regardless, the damage is already done — Llama is running wild and free on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — a telling moment for the future of data in a world dominated by big tech.
More on AI copyright law: <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-generated-material-labeled-china">All AI-Generated Material Must Be Labeled Online, China Announces</a>

Book Worms

"We’re literally running out of text in the universe to train these systems on."

Cool Site Shows Exactly Which Books Zuckerberg's Minions Illegally Downloaded to Train Meta's AI

As popular as ChatGPT has become, it apparently has a major gender problem.
In an <a href="https://www.psypost.org/new-research-reveals-staggering-gender-gap-in-chatgpt-adoption/">interview with PsyPost</a>, University of Chicago economist Anders Humlum explained that in his research, he's encountered a "staggering gender gap in the adoption of ChatGPT."
At the end of last year, Humlum and his colleague Emilie Vestergaard of the University of Copenhagen revealed in a <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2414972121">paper</a> published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that women were 16 percentage points behind men in ChatGPT adoption.
This trend was evident, the economist told PsyPost, "even among workers in the same jobs handling similar job tasks." Among the eleven "exposed" occupations they assessed — from software developers to teachers and legal professionals to customer service reps — journalists and marketing professionals were the most likely to use OpenAI's flagship chatbot, with roughly 64 percent attesting that they use it for work.
Curiously, financial advisors and accountants had the lowest share of ChatGPT use, weighing in at just 18 percent of workers in those fields who said they use it for work. That could be because, as the paper notes, they "handle sensitive information" as part of their daily duties.
Across the occupations surveyed, however, women were always behind men on adoption rates. Only about 62 percent of female journalists and marketers reported that they use ChatGPT for work — and the disparity was greater for women who work in financial advising, with fewer than 10 percent saying they had used it on the job.
So what's behind the gender gap in ChatGPT adoption? To put it frankly, the researchers haven't quite figured that bit out.
As Humlum and Vestergaard noted in their paper, women are "about as optimistic as men about the time savings from ChatGPT," and seem to even save a bit more time than their male counterparts in the workplace when they do use it. There's some evidence that women have more "adoption friction" — aversion, basically  — to AI due to a lack of training with the tech, and women were more likely than men to say they "do not know how" to use ChatGPT.
The researchers pointed to another 2024 survey that looked into student ChatGPT usage in Norway for potential answers. In the first half of that study, <a href="https://openaccess.nhh.no/nhh-xmlui/handle/11250/3122396">researchers at Norway's Institute of Economics</a> found that of the more than 500 students they surveyed, men were between 10 and 25 percentage points more likely than women to use ChatGPT regularly.
Overall, that Norwegian study found that "female students use ChatGPT much less, are less proficient at writing ChatGPT prompts, and are more sensitive to bans on using ChatGPT," Humlum and Vestergaard wrote. While their Nordic counterparts didn't have any hard-and-fast explanations for that gender gap, both studies documenting the trend make it seem pretty legit.
As he told PsyPost, Humlum is most interested in figuring out "how generative AI is reshaping labor markets" — but this finding was, nevertheless, "a big surprise for us."
More on AI and work: <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-work-education-level">People With This Level of Education Use AI the Most at Work</a>

GenderGPT

This is a pretty surprising finding. 

Scientist Says That ChatGPT Has a "Staggering" Gender Problem

To make great content requires great sacrifice. It just doesn't have to be your sacrifice.
At least, that's the essence of Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson's success as a YouTube creator. In just 13 short years, the now-26 year old content creator has amassed a virtual empire by filming brash "Squid Game"-style videos and poppy viral stunts, which he trades to platforms like YouTube and TikTok in exchange for huge sums of ad revenue, sponsorships, and merchandise sales.
Donaldson's videos are an acquired taste. Primarily marketed toward <a href="https://www.trend-mill.com/p/honey-youtubers-are-poisoning-the">children and young teens</a>, the MrBeast brand thrives off costly productions that put everyday people through the Stanford Prison Experiment-esque challenges in exchange for huge gobs of cash. Examples include "Ages 1-100 Fights For $500,000," where 100 people of different ages compete in tiny cubes to be the last man standing, and "I Helped 2,000 People Walk Again," where Donaldson pays the prosthetic fittings of 2,000 people who couldn't otherwise afford them.
It's these life-changing outcomes that make the content so popular — and that allow Donaldson to play the <a href="https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/mlr/vol78/iss1/2/">benevolent millionaire philanthropist</a>.
Take Donaldson's <a href="https://x.com/MrBeast/status/1902428245846335648">recent post</a> on X-formerly-Twitter as case-in-point: "I have a pilot living in a $2,500,000 private jet and if he doesn’t leave for 100 days he keeps it, a cop/criminal in a jail and if they don’t leave for 100 days they win $500,000, and someone living in a gym until he loses 100 pounds for $500,000."
"Can’t wait to upload these," he concludes.
Like rats in a maze, these folks — largely plucked from Donaldson's audience — are the lifeblood of MrBeast. Though Donaldson and his defenders <a href="https://x.com/MrBeast/status/1902710384714506268">love to point out</a> that MrBeast's <a href="https://www.avclub.com/the-running-man-is-classic-arnold-schwarzenegger-for-b-1798242058">Running Men</a> "can leave whenever," that's sort of beside the point; anyone putting themselves in that desperate situation clearly needs the money, making them easy to manipulate.
As critic Nathan J. Robinson <a href="https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/02/the-beast-within-capitalism">wrote in Current Affairs</a>, the problem with MrBeast is best understood by looking beyond Donaldson himself. "It’s clear that part of the reason people are willing to undergo whatever challenges MrBeast sets is that money has the power to completely change people’s lives," Robinson pined.
"In a world where everybody was doing fine economically," the critic continues, "maybe there wouldn’t be anything objectionable about offering people a reward to participate in some televised challenge, but in this world, where nearly half of Americans can’t afford a $400 emergency expense, a lot of people are going to be grasping for MrBeast’s largesse because they need it."
If there's one thing Donaldson's learned in his years of content creation, it's that charity pays. Thanks to the <a href="https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/2025/02/28/mrbeast-s-empire-is-reportedly-worth-usd5b">industrial scale</a> of his dopamine-pumping almsgiving, the YouTuber has amassed an estimated fortune of <a href="https://podcastle.ai/blog/how-much-money-does-mrbeast-make/">$500 million</a>. That's money for more brand deals, more merchandizing, and more extreme stunts.
As the saying goes: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
More on MrBeast: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/mrbeast-life-miserable-youtube">MrBeast Says His Life Is Full of Sorrow Due to All the Boss Things That Occupy His Schedule</a>

Running Man

"Can't wait to upload these!"

MrBeast Brags About the Human Lives He Has Suspended in Bizarre "Simulations"

The US Space Force has accused China of "dogfighting in space," a term that usually refers to fighter jets caught up in an aerial, close-range battle.
During a defense program conference this week, Space Force vice chief of space operations Michael Guetlein said that the military arm had observed "five different objects in space maneuvering in and out and around each other in synchrony and in control," as <a href="https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2025/03/china-practicing-dogfighting-space-space-force-says/403863/">quoted by Defense One</a>.
The Space Force is "starting to see our near-peers focusing on practicing dogfighting in space with satellite-on-satellite," he said.
If confirmed, the practice could indicate an escalation in the defensive military capabilities of world powers in orbit, highlighting a heating up "<a href="https://futurism.com/25-governments-prevent-space-arms-race">space arms race</a>."
As Defense One reports, Guetlein's comments were referring to maneuvers made by three experimental Chinese satellites — called Shiyan-24C, as well as two still unidentified space objects dubbed Shijian-605 A and B — last year. At the time, the Space Force observed the objects carrying out a "series of proximity operations" in low-Earth orbit, according to Guetlein.
The Shijian-6 system is believed to be <a href="https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2021/12/long-march-4b-shijian-6/">capable of "electronic intelligence</a>" allowing satellites to eavesdrop on communications, including naval comms traffic.
"They are practicing tactics, techniques, and procedures to do on-orbit space operations from one satellite to another," Guetlein said.
The Space Force general said that the satellites are just one of several activities of US adversaries in space, including Russia's "nesting doll," satellite demonstration in 2019, which involved smaller spacecraft <a href="https://www.space.com/russian-spacecraft-stalking-us-spy-satellite-space-force.html">closely following the movement of US satellites</a>.
China has <a href="https://breakingdefense.com/2024/12/chinas-space-moves-highly-mobile-satellites-stalking-geo-spook-space-force/">similarly been accused</a> of having its satellites "zigzag" across different altitudes and come uncomfortably close to US satellites.
Guetlein accused Russia and China of breaking internationally agreed-upon rules.
"Unfortunately, our current adversaries are willing to go against international norms of behavior, go against that gentleman's agreement, and they're willing to do it in very unsafe and unprofessional manners," he said, as quoted by Defense One.
As a result, Guetlein argued there was a growing "capability gap" between the US and its adversaries, which could end up putting the country's assets at risk and allow other countries to claim control over the space domain.
"We're only going to be as good as the amount of resources that we're willing to put towards space superiority," he said at the event this week.
More on satellite-on-satellite action: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/china-spacex-satellites-brightness">China Joins SpaceX in Ruining Astronomy for Everybody</a>

I Have a Bad Feeling About This

It's some serious "satellite-on-satellite" action.

Space Force Says a Chinese Spacecraft Is Practicing Dogfighting Maneuvers in Orbit

Sorry, gym rats, but all that creatine you've been relying on? It may have been for nothing, according to a new clinical trial — at least at the dose you were probably taking it.
After having over fifty people undergo a 12-week resistance training program, a team of researchers in Australia found that the group who took creatine supplements on a daily basis didn't have more substantial gains that the group that didn't, as they wrote in a <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/17/6/1081">study</a> published in the journal Nutrients. 
"We've shown that taking five grams of creatine supplement per day does not make any difference to the amount of lean muscle mass people put on while resistance training," said senior author Mandy Hagstrom, an exercise scientist at UNSW Sydney, in a <a href="https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/03/sports-supplement-creatine-makes-no-difference-to-muscle-gains-trial-finds">statement about the work</a>. "The benefits of creatine may have been overestimated in the past, due to methodological problems with previous studies."
This may come as an assault on a hallowed institution of weightlifting wisdom. The muscle-building benefits of taking creatine, a safe substance produced naturally by the body, wasn't just mere bro science, but backed by a <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10180745/">substantive body</a> <a href="https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/creatine-supplements-can-help-build-muscle-mass">of research</a>. Just swallow five grams a day, the common advice goes, and you're on your way to hypertrophy heaven.
Supplementing creatine is also thought to produce other salubrious effects, promoting brain health, bone health, and even reducing all-around mortality, according to the researchers. Better yet, it's really cheap. If getting big was your calling, there was no reason not to take it.
This latest study puts a dent in that image. To take part in the trial, the researchers selected relatively healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 50 with limited training history. They were all put on the same resistance training program of three lifting sessions per week, and instructed to keep track of what they ate in a food log. To precisely measure muscle growth, their changes in body composition were measured using x-ray imaging techniques.
A key factor that makes the experiment stand out is that it had the participants take creatine a week before they started the program, instead of starting everything all at once. This avoided a problem encountered by previous trials: confounding the creatine's effects with the benefits of lifting weights.
"We had what we call a wash-in phase, where half of the participants started taking the supplement, without changing anything else in their daily life, to give their body a chance to stabilize in terms of its response to the supplement," Hagstrom said in the statement.
At first, the creatine group showed about an extra pound of mass gained in the first week. But this eventually flattened out to match the control group, suggesting that the gains weren't due to muscle mass, but fluid retention; one of creatine's well known effects is causing your muscles to draw in more water.
"Then once they started exercising, they saw no additional benefit from creatine which suggests that five grams per day is not enough if you're taking it for the purposes of building muscle," Hagstrom said.
It's not over for creatine evangelists, though. One potential takeaway is that to produce the mythical muscle-building benefits, we should be taking more creatine — perhaps ten grams per day, instead of five. There's also the possibility that creatine's effects are borne out in the long term for advanced lifters, and not just the several-month period of the study with relative newbies.
"It would be really interesting to see if creatine has more of a long-term benefit," coauthor Imtiaz Desai, a fellow UNSW Sydney exercise scientist, said in the statement. "When you start weight training, you have those beginner gains in strength and those start tapering off around the 12-week mark and become slower, so it's possible the support from creatine might come at a later stage."
More on gains: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/20-year-old-bodybuilder-dies">If You Still Think Bodybuilding Is Healthy, This Woman Just Died at Age 20</a>

Creatine of Habit

Developments

Some good, some not so good.

If You Take Creatine, Scientists Have Fascinating News

It's never been a better time to be an American consumer. Incredible new technological advancements in fast food technology have given us <a href="https://dronelife.com/2024/08/13/flytrex-reaches-new-heights-100000-drone-deliveries-and-counting-in-the-u-s/">burritos delivered by drones</a>, <a href="https://futurism.com/taco-bell-ai-labor">Taco Bell powered by AI</a>, and <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/wendys-surge-pricing">surge pricing on Wendy's burgers</a>.
But all those treats cost money — something many Americans seem to be <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saving-money-emergency-expenses-2025/">running low on</a>. Not to worry, because a new partnership between two beloved startups is making sure you never have to go without.
This week, <a href="https://about.doordash.com/en-us/news/doordash-partners-with-klarna">DoorDash announced</a> that it's partnering with AI-powered payment platform Klarna to allow empty-walleted consumers to take out micro-loans to pay for food and grocery delivery.
On checkout, DoorDash users will soon see Klarna as a payment option along the usual options like debit cards and Apple Pay. If your bank account is empty and payday is a ways off, Klarna will offer three options: pay in full, pay in four interest-free installments, or pay later, presumably with interest.
DoorDash's press release is full of words like "empowers," "freedom," and "flexibility" — a welcome reminder that in this country, liberty and commerce are <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22662889/september-11-anniversary-bush-spend-economy">synonyms</a>. While there's no word yet how burger loans will effect DoorDash's army of <a href="https://documentedny.com/2024/11/13/doordash-immigrant-delivery-workers-stolen-wages/">migrant gig workers</a>, we can probably rest easy knowing that freedom and empowerment are <a href="https://www.amnesty.org.uk/blogs/human-rights-are-answer/insecure-world-gig-economy-and-improving-workers-rights-riz-hussain">top of mind</a>.
And when it comes to commerce, no financial vehicle typifies deep-fried freedom like <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/15/18182167/microcredit-microfinance-poverty-grameen-bank-yunus">micro-loans</a>. Though versions of microlending have always been present in the US, the commercial micro-loan fad really took hold in the early 90s, as international firms lending to the global poor set their sights on America's down-and-out.
After <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1985/08/04/business/reagan-s-hidden-industrial-policy.html">Ronald Reagan's</a> destruction of New Deal social spending and organized labor, America's poor became cash cows for global micro-lenders like <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-microfinance-banks-profit-off-developing-world/?sref=YfHlo0rL">ACCION</a> — and their numbers have been growing ever since. In the following decades, micro-loan companies would pop up in strip malls across the country, offering <a href="https://jacobin.com/2014/10/the-new-loan-sharks/">temporary relief</a> for struggling wage earners, and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/09/us-payday-loans-crisis-borrow-100-to-make-ends-meet-owe-36-times-that-sum">guaranteed returns</a> for lenders. Heck, even our democratic leaders <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/02/members-of-congress-overseeing-payday-lending-have-taken-over-3-4-million-from-the-industry/">love micro-loans</a>.
Today, micro-loans are everywhere, empowering Americans of <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/will-buy-now-pay-later-put-a-generation-of-young-americans-in-a-debt-trap/a-62812002">all ages</a> with the flexibility to "buy now, pay later." When it comes to paying for treats, today's consumers are spoiled for choice as startups like Afterpay guarantee you'll never have to go without <a href="https://www.afterpay.com/en-US/stores/gap">jeans</a>, <a href="https://www.afterpay.com/en-US/stores/target-39380">groceries</a>, or <a href="https://www.afterpay.com/en-US/stores/ulta-beauty">makeup</a>.
Indeed, DoorDash is only the latest of a <a href="https://councils.forbes.com/blog/the-surge-of-buy-now-pay-later">huge list</a> of American companies to add the freedom and flexibility of micro-loans to its lineup. In the words of <a href="https://washingtonspectator.org/never-forget-september-11-mattress/">President George Bush</a>: "go shopping!"
More on food delivery: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/study-food-plastic-containers">This New Paper About Eating Out of Plastic Containers Is a Bit Terrifying</a>

Wage Garnish

It's burger time.

Dystopia Intensifies as Startup Lets You Take Out a Micro-Loan to Get Fast Food

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is now sending drones out on 9-1-1 calls to do the business that their <a href="https://pigeonpostnyc.com/2024/01/15/candy-crushs-parent-company-breathes-sigh-of-relief-after-mayor-saves-nypd-from-budget-cuts/">Candy Crush-addicted</a> human officers are too busy to tackle — and surveilling everyone in sight while they do it.
As the cybersecurity news site <a href="https://therecord.media/nypd-drones-as-first-responders-911-calls-privacy-surveillance">The Record reports</a>, these "drones as first responders" — or DFRs, as the NYPD calls them — can fly up to 45 miles per hour, filming everything on the block with telephoto cameras that can, <a href="https://www.skydio.com/x10">per manufacturer Skydio</a>, identify faces and license plates from nearly a mile away.
Launched <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nypd-drone-as-first-responders-program/">last year</a> as part of <a href="https://gothamist.com/news/short-on-campaign-momentum-mayor-adams-reminisces-about-love-and-turnstile-jumping">embattled mayor Eric Adams</a>' quest to <a href="https://gothamist.com/news/mta-to-stop-selling-metrocards-by-end-of-2025-as-nyc-transit-fares-move-to-omny">shove technology</a> into everything <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/nypd-robot-dog-return">regardless of public opinion</a>, these drones were initially only going to respond to "select priority public safety calls," according to a <a href="https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/827-24/mayor-adams-interim-police-commissioner-donlon-drone-first-responder-program-to#/0">press release issued last November</a> that formally announced the program.
As The Record notes, however, the NYPD's definition of "select priority" seems awfully vague — and it <a href="https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/reports-analysis/uas-drones.page">doesn't actually report</a> how many drones are deployed on police calls, either.
Prior to the program's official launch, the department revealed that they planned to <a href="https://apnews.com/article/drones-labor-day-eric-adams-nypd-jouvert-c2787e87bcad8fa87aa8d34b454ee6cf">use drones to monitor house parties</a> that receive noise complaints over Labor Day Weekend in 2023, which also coincides with J'Ouvert festivities that take place in New York's Caribbean communities. In fact, that festival was cited specifically by a former NYPD commissioner who called the drones a "<a href="https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/632-23/transcript-mayor-adams-delivers-remarks-public-safety-briefing">wonderful thing</a>."
If shelling out for party-surveilling drones seems to you like a misuse of taxpayer funds, you're not alone. In an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/02/new-york-surveillance-drones-labor-day">interview with The Guardian</a> in 2023, a senior strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union called the NYPD's drone usage "dystopian" and a form of "racialized discrimination."
Now that their use has been expanded to do more than just allowing cops to be remote spectators at peoples' backyard parties, those epithets feel prescient.
Because the <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/08/backyard-privacy-age-drones">US Supreme Court has ruled</a> that law enforcement can legally surveil anyone's outdoor property without a warrant via drone, the NYPD has followed suit. Per NYPD policy, drones aren't allowed to operate inside a property warrantless, but outside doesn't count, basically.
As constitutional rights lawyer Sidney Thaxter told The Record, that means the NYPD could film someone in their backyard — and because the department's Skydio drones are <a href="https://www.skydio.com/x10/technical-specs">equipped with telephoto lenses</a>, they could do so from a high enough altitude that anyone who wasn't looking at the sky wouldn't notice the lurking aircraft.
"They can set a drone up in the air far enough away that you can't hear it," Thaxter said, "and they can zoom in and can literally see what's in your hands."
While we don't know exactly how often the NYPD is using their drones, the department has already bragged about deploying them to help them surveil protests and the people demonstrating at them in recent years. After protests erupted across the city in response to the conflict in Gaza, police <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/10/28/metro/nypd-used-drones-to-investigate-pro-palestine-protests-in-nyc/">boasted to the press</a> that they'd used drones 13 times to make a whopping 239 arrests — all in a single week, and all in Brooklyn.
"We got the whole thing on video," assistant NYPD commissioner Kaz Daughtry said, referring to pro-Palestinian protesters who were caught on video throwing eggs and bottles at cops during an <a href="https://pix11.com/news/local-news/nypd-and-protesters-clash-at-pro-palestine-rally-in-brooklyn/">October 2021 demonstration</a> in South Brooklyn. "We’ll be turning that evidence over to the Brooklyn DA’s office to help enhance the arrests."
Amid a larger culture of crackdowns on freedom of speech in New York and around the country, this kind of drone use does indeed feel dystopian — or, as Albert Fox Cahn of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project put it to The Record, as if the NYPD was treating "Black Mirror" as an "instruction manual."
More on NYPD tech: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-fail-uhc-killer-luigi-mangione">AI Completely Failed to Catch CEO Killer, With Cops Instead Relying on Random McDonald’s Employee</a>

Dystopia, Now

The panopticon is here, and it's being run by Eric Adams. 

The NYPD Is Sending Drones to the Sites of 9-1-1 Calls

In a controversial experiment, a team of physicists investigated whether we could harness the Earth's rotational energy to generate electricity.
It's a deceptively simple idea that researchers have only started to grapple with over the last decade. But whether the concept will ever turn into a feasible source of renewable energy remains to be seen, with the team's peers noting their skepticism of the results.
As detailed in <a href="https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.7.013285">their paper</a> published in the journal Physical Review Research, the team led by Princeton University physicist Christoper Chyba, aligned a special device made up of a weak manganese-zinc ferrite conductor and electrodes at each end, at a 57 angle, making it perpendicular to our planet's rotational motion and its magnetic field.
They observed that the device generated 17 microvolts of electricity, which as <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00847-0?WT.ec_id=NATURE-202503&amp;sap-outbound-id=5B02D7C14404C48E454ECAE55766DDE5FD7FB0AB">Nature points out</a> is a fraction of the voltage released by a single neuron firing.
It's a "controversial but intriguing" result, as researchers told the science journal, especially considering the minuscule voltage is extremely difficult to isolate from other physical influences.
"The idea is somewhat counter-intuitive and has been argued since Faraday," University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire emeritus physicist Paul Thomas, who wasn't involved in the research, told Nature.
Retired physicist Rinke Wijngaarden, who found the effect didn't work in his own 2018 experiments added that he's "still convinced that the theory of Chyba et al. cannot be correct."
The device could theoretically work by having the generator pass through the Earth's magnetic field, parts of which remain static, producing a current. However, as the journal points out, electrons could end up rearranging themselves as a result to create an opposing force, negating the effect.
Chyba and his team claim to have corrected for this by coming up with a special material that isn't prone to rearranging itself in this way by maintaining the same electrostatic force inside the device.
In short, plenty of research has yet to be done before we can definitively say that we could harness the Earth's rotational energy to generate power.
But the team of physicists is planning to do just that, attempting to scale up their experiment to generate an actually useful amount of energy.
Intriguingly, assuming that the system would work and would be scaled up to meet the demands of the entire planet, the Earth's rotational spin would only slow by seven milliseconds over the next 100 years, the researchers found — which is <a href="https://www.space.com/55-earths-moon-formation-composition-and-orbit.html">in the same ballpark</a> as the amount the Moon's pull slows the Earth's rotation over the same period.
More on renewable energy: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/capitalists-alarmed-renewables-electricity-free">Capitalists Alarmed as Renewables Keep Making Electricity Temporarily Free</a>

Spin Power

Their experiment had a "controversial but intriguing" result.

Scientists Build Device to Generate Electricity Using the Earth's Rotation

In large part thanks to being in the right place at the right time, researchers discovered a thriving marine ecosystem underneath a 19-miles iceberg after it cracked off the ice sheet off the coast of Antarctica earlier this year.
As the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/03/20/huge-iceberg-broke-off-antarctica-what-scientists-found-under-it-startled-them/">Washington Post reports</a>, a team of researchers on board a vessel called the "Falkor (too)" — yes, that's it's name, including the parentheses — weren't expecting to find many signs of life on the seafloor following the powerful event.
But to their shock, they found potentially dozens of new species trapped underneath, including crustaceans, octopi, sea snails, worms, and fish, per the WaPo — a powerful demonstration of how life can adapt to thrive even in some of the most extreme and remote areas of our planet.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Climate Connections at the Ice-Sea Interface | 4K ROV Highlights" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4uUo0dWp14A?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Footage <a href="https://youtu.be/4uUo0dWp14A">released by the Schmidt Ocean Institute</a>, which facilitated the research, shows a baffling biodiversity, from long, tentacled anthropods to thorny red crustaceans.
One <a href="https://schmidtocean.photoshelter.com/galleries/C0000QszlkoaNkKU/G0000p4LRtGEAfWo/I0000fZL3wSWNtW8/A-Helmet-Jellyfish-in-the-Bellingshausen-Sea-off-Antarctica">image</a> released by the Institute shows off a "helmet jellyfish," which can be seen "with tentacles splayed."
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-346593" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/03/FKt250110-S0793-20250204T151941Z-0-scicam-Periphylla_Predation.jpg" alt="" width="1200" height="675" />
"We didn't expect to find such a beautiful, thriving ecosystem," said University of Aveiro, Portugal, researcher and chief expedition scientist Patricia Esquete in a <a href="https://phys.org/news/2025-03-antarctic-ecosystems-detached-iceberg.html">statement</a>. "Based on the size of the animals, the communities we observed have been there for decades, maybe even hundreds of years."
It's a particularly fascinating place to look for life given the remoteness and darkness. It's also especially pertinent given our planet's rapidly changing climate. As human activity-driven global warming continues to cause glaciers and sea ice to melt, scientists are intrigued to see how a quickly evolving natural environment will affect these ecosystems.
After the berg broke off the ice shelf, Esquete and her team got to work collecting specimens. However, confirming any new species discoveries could take months.
"We seized upon the moment, changed our expedition plan, and went for it so we could look at what was happening in the depths below," said Esquete in the statement.
The formation from which the iceberg broke off in January, dubbed the George VI Ice Shelf, has borne the brunt of climate change and has seen record-high surface melt, as an alarming <a href="https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/15/909/2021/">2021 study</a> showed.
"The George VI Ice Shelf buttresses the largest volume of upstream grounded ice of any Antarctic Peninsula ice shelf," said lead author and CIRES research scientist Alison Banwell in a <a href="https://cires.colorado.edu/news/extreme-melt-antarctica%E2%80%99s-george-vi-ice-shelf">statement</a> at the time. "So if this ice shelf breaks up, ice that rests on land would flow more quickly into the ocean and contribute more to sea level rise than any other ice shelf on the Peninsula."
More on the Antarctic: <a href="https://futurism.com/antarctic-research-stations-chaos-doge">Antarctic Research Stations in Chaos</a>

Creature Feature

Incredible.

Iceberg Breaks Off Antarctica, Revealing Tentacled Creatures Beneath

Cannabis use appears to be linked to a significant increase in heart attack and stroke risk for folks under 50, a new study has found.
As the American College of Cardiology (ACC) explained in a <a href="https://www.acc.org/About-ACC/Press-Releases/2025/03/17/15/35/Cannabis-Users-Face-Substantially-Higher-Risk">statement</a>, Boston University researchers found by analyzing healthcare records for more than 4.6 million patients that those who used cannabis under 50 had a sixfold increase in heart attack risk than their non-stoner counterparts.
What's more, those who dabbled in the devil's lettuce had a four times greater risk of stroke, double the risk of heart failure, and triple the risk of dying from heart attacks or strokes.
In a <a href="https://www.jacc.org/doi/epdf/10.1016/j.jacadv.2025.101698">paper</a> due to be published in the journal JACC: Advances, Boston University clinical instructor Ibrahim Kamel and his team used data from the TriNetX health research network, a tool that allows researchers to access non-identified healthcare records from around the world.
Looking at people under the age of 50 between the years 2010 and 2018, the team identified more than 4.6 million "relatively healthy adults" to see how their healthcare outcomes fared over the years. After narrowing it down to about 90,000 cannabis users and an equivalently sized group of non-users, the researchers found that the risks for heart attacks, stroke, and related deaths were substantially higher among the using group.
In the ACC's statement, Kamel suggested cannabis legalization around the United States should lead doctors to ask their patients more questions about their pot use — especially given the <a href="https://masscannabiscontrol.com/health-effects/">growing body of evidence</a> that it's <a href="https://www.rstreet.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Final-Study-No.-253.pdf">not as risk-free</a> as some advocates would have you think.
"Asking about cannabis use should be part of clinicians' workup to understand patients' overall cardiovascular risk, similar to asking about smoking cigarettes," he said. "At a policy level, a fair warning should be made so that the people who are consuming cannabis know that there are risks."
Still, there are other factors to consider when it comes to weed, which is still <a href="https://www.mpp.org/policy/federal/">illegal on the federal level</a>.
"We should have some caution in interpreting the findings in that cannabis consumption is usually associated with other substances such as cocaine or other illicit drugs that are not accounted for," Kamel said. "Patients should be forthcoming with their doctors and remember that we are their number one advocate and having the full story matters."
Notably, the records Kamel and his team looked at also didn't differentiate between smoking pot and ingesting it in other forms, like edibles. They also didn't look at levels of cannabis use or doses — and anyone who has known true stoners can attest that there's a big difference between a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Hmd7zFG9M">bong-ripper's choked coughing fits</a> and the chilled-out bliss of those who occasionally pop indica gummies.
Still, this link is pretty alarming — and a good reminder that weed, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be consequence-free.
More on weed: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/scientists-weed-cognitive-decline">If You Blazed Massive Amounts of Weed as a Youth, Scientists Have Interesting News</a>