The Planet on, and off.
Gas cars are now a minority of the world’s new car sales. Gasoline-only vehicles made up 49% of global new-vehicle sales in the first half of 2026, down from 73% in 2021, according to Mobility Global data. It’s the first time on record that they’ve been under half. But there’s Read more…
Hackers remotely manipulated connected refrigeration systems at hundreds of French supermarkets, reportedly pushing some fridges and freezers to 50C (122F), spoiling food and even sparking fires. French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu ordered a cybersecurity investigation into the hacks, with similar incidents reported in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany, and Belgium. In Read more…
When Russia began attacking Ukrainian data centers and telecommunication infrastructure, it apparently failed to prepare for possible retaliation. Now Russia’s digital services are facing widespread outages after Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of the largest data centers owned by Russian tech giant Yandex within several days. Pro-Kremlin bloggers are Read more…
America’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said on Tuesday that it will rewrite its vehicle lighting standards, to address concerns about headlight glare and allow for the latest safety-improving lighting technologies. NHTSA said it plans to improve rules for LEDs, dusk sensors, automatic high beams and replaceable light sources. The Read more…
A physicist has put a definite date on Doomsday,” The New York Times wrote on November 4, 1960. “He calculates that it will come on Friday the Thirteenth in November, 2026 A. D. On that date, or thereabouts, the human population will have expanded so far as to approach infinity Read more…
Independent researchers say they’ve identified a large “fleet” of AI agents apparently running on Tencent infrastructure and making parallel queries against Alibaba’s Amap mapping service. Researchers, however, resisted the term “swarm,” noting that there seems to be little coordination between their different queries. “‘Agent fleet,’ not ‘swarm:’” one researcher wrote Read more…
Communities across California are rushing to prepare for the imminent arrival of the so-called “Kelvin wave,” a massive underwater band of warm water threatening to inundate swaths of the vast North American shoreline. The wave is nearing southern California and expected to reach the San Francisco Bay Area by early Read more…