Deforestation has killed more than half a million people in the tropics over the past two decades as a result of heat-related illness, a study has found. The Guardian: Land clearance is raising the temperature in the rainforests of the Amazon, Congo and south-east Asia because it reduces shade, diminishes rainfall and increases the risk of fire, the authors of the paper found. Deforestation is responsible for more than a third of the warming experienced by people living in the affected regions, which is on top of the effect of global climate disruption. About 345 million people across the tropics suffered from this localised, deforestation-caused warming between 2001 and 2020. For 2.6 million of them, the additional heating added 3C to their heat exposure. In many cases, this was deadly. The researchers estimated that warming due to deforestation accounted for 28,330 annual deaths over that 20-year period.

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The FBI and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world warned Wednesday that a Chinese-government hacking campaign that previously penetrated nine U.S. telecommunications companies has expanded into other industries and regions, striking at least 200 American organizations and 80 countries. From a report: The joint advisory was issued with the close allies in the Five Eyes English-language intelligence-sharing arrangement and also agencies from Finland, Netherlands, Poland and the Czech Republic, an unusually broad array meant to demonstrate global resolve against what intelligence officials said is a pernicious campaign that exceeds accepted norms for snooping. "The expectation of privacy here was violated, not just in the U.S., but globally," FBI Assistant Director Brett Leatherman, who heads the bureau's cyber division, told The Washington Post in an interview. Chinese hackers won deep access to major communication carriers in the U.S. and elsewhere, then extracted call records and some law enforcement directives, which allowed them to build out a map of who was calling whom and whom the U.S. suspected of spying, Leatherman said. Prominent politicians in both major U.S. parties were among the ultimate victims.

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Phonemaker Nothing used professional stock photos to demonstrate its Phone 3's camera capabilities on retail demo units, according to The Verge. Five images the company presented as community-captured samples were licensed photographs from the Stills marketplace, taken with other cameras in 2023. The Verge verified EXIF data confirming one image predated the Phone 3's release. Co-founder Akis Evangelidis acknowledged the photos were placeholders intended for pre-production testing that weren't replaced before deployment to stores.

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South Korea has passed a bill banning the use of mobile phones and smart devices during class hours in schools -- becoming the latest country to restrict phone use among children and teens. From a report: The law, which comes into effect from the next school year in March 2026, is the result of a bi-partisan effort to curb smartphone addiction, as more research points to its harmful effects. Lawmakers, parents and teachers argue that smartphone use is affecting students' academic performance and takes away time they could have spent studying.

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Wikipedia's volunteer editors have rejected founder Jimmy Wales' proposal to use ChatGPT for article review guidance after the AI tool produced error-filled feedback when Wales tested it on a draft submission. The ChatGPT response misidentified Wikipedia policies, suggested citing non-existent sources and recommended using press releases despite explicit policy prohibitions. Editors argued automated systems producing incorrect advice would undermine Wikipedia's human-centered model. The conflict follows earlier tensions over the Wikimedia Foundation's AI experiments, including a paused AI summary feature and new policies targeting AI-generated content.

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Digital resurrections of deceased individuals are emerging as the next commercial frontier in AI, with the digital afterlife industry projected to reach $80 billion within a decade. Companies developing these AI avatars are exploring revenue models ranging from interstitial advertising during conversations to data collection about users' preferences. StoryFile CEO Alex Quinn confirmed his company is exploring methods to monetize interactions between users and deceased relatives' digital replicas, including probing for consumer information during conversations. The technology has already demonstrated persuasive capabilities in legal proceedings, where an AI recreation of road rage victim Chris Pelkey delivered testimony that contributed to a maximum sentence. Current implementations operate through subscription models, though no federal regulations govern commercial applications of posthumous AI representations despite state-level protections for deceased individuals' likeness rights.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinTelegraph: Paying interest on stablecoin deposits could spark a wave of bank outflows similar to the money market fund boom of the 1980s, Citi's Future of Finance head Ronit Ghose warned in a report published Monday. According to the Financial Times, Ghose compared the potential outflows caused by paying interest on stablecoins to the rise of money market funds in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those funds ballooned from about $4 billion in 1975 to $235 billion in 1982, outpacing banks whose deposit rates were tightly regulated, Federal Reserve data showed. Withdrawals from bank accounts exceeded new deposits by $32 billion between 1981 and 1982. Sean Viergutz, banking and capital markets advisory leader at consultancy PwC, similarly suggested that a shift from consumers to higher-yielding stablecoins could spell trouble for the banking sector. "Banks may face higher funding costs by relying more on wholesale markets or raising deposit rates, which could make credit more expensive for households and businesses," he said. The GENIUS Act does not allow stablecoin issuers to offer interest to holders, but it does not extend the ban to crypto exchanges or affiliated businesses. The regulatory setup led to a significant reaction by the banking sector. Several US banking groups led by the Bank Policy Institute have urged local regulators to close what they say is a loophole that may indirectly allow stablecoin issuers to pay interest or yields on stablecoins. In a recent letter, the organization argued that the so-called loophole may disrupt the flow of credit to American businesses and families, potentially triggering $6.6 trillion in deposit outflows from the traditional banking system.

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schwit1 shares a report from the Korea Herald: Korean Air, South Korea's flagship carrier, on Tuesday announced a sweeping $50 billion deal to purchase next-generation aircraft from Boeing and spare engines from GE Aerospace and CFM International, its largest-ever investment aimed at fueling long-term growth. The deal, signed during President Lee Jae Myung's visit to Washington, includes $36.2 billion for 103 Boeing aircraft, $690 million for 19 spare engines, and a $13 billion long-term engine maintenance contract. The fleet order spans a wide mix of models: 20 Boeing 777-9s, 25 Boeing 787-10s, 50 Boeing 737-10s, and eight Boeing 777-8F freighters. Deliveries will be phased through the end of the 2030s. Korean Air will also acquire 11 spare engines from GE Aerospace and eight from CFM International, alongside a 20-year maintenance service agreement with GE covering 28 aircraft.

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alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: You've probably heard it before in a meeting: 'Let's touch base offline to align our bandwidth on this workflow.' Corporate jargon like this is easy to laugh at -- but its negative impact in the office can be serious. According to a new study, using too much jargon in the workplace can hurt employees' ability to process messages, leading them to experience negative feelings and making them feel less confident. In turn, they're less likely to reach out and ask for or share information with their colleagues. "You need people to be willing to collaborate, share ideas and look for more information if they don't understand something at work," said Olivia Bullock, Ph.D., an assistant professor of advertising at the University of Florida and co-author of the new study. "And jargon might actually be impeding that information flow across teams." Age made a difference, though. Older workers had a harder time processing jargon, but were more likely to intend to ask for more information to clarify the message. Younger employees were less likely to seek and share information when confused by jargon. "It gives credence to the idea that younger people are more vulnerable to these workplace dynamics," Bullock said. "If you're onboarding younger employees, explain everything clearly." The findings have been published in the International Journal of Business Communication.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: A genetically modified pig lung transplanted into a brain-dead human patient functioned for nine days in a new achievement that reveals both the promise and significant challenges of xenotransplantation. Over the course of the experiment, the patient showed increasing signs of organ rejection before scientists at the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University in China terminated the experiment, allowing the recipient to pass away. It's the first time a pig lung has been transplanted into a human patient, demonstrating a significant step forward, and giving scientists new problems to solve as they develop this emerging medical technique further. [...] The goal of the experiment was not to achieve a successful transplantation on the first try -- that would have been pretty incredible, but not a realistic expectation. Rather, the researchers wanted to observe how the patient's immune system responded to the transplanted organ. The patient was a 39-year-old man who was declared brain-dead by four separate clinical assessments after undergoing a brain hemorrhage. His family provided written informed consent for the experiment. The donor pig is what is known as a six-gene-edited pig, a Bama miniature pig with six CRISPR gene edits, housed in an isolated facility with rigorous disinfection protocols. These edits are all focused on minimizing the immune and inflammatory responses of the patient. In a careful surgical procedure, the pig's left lung was placed into the patient's chest cavity, and connected to their airways, arteries, and veins. The paper does not explain the fate of the pig, but donor pigs do not typically survive the removal of a major organ. The patient was also treated with a number of immunosuppressants that the researchers adjusted according to changes observed in the patient's body over time. Initially, all seemed well, with none of the immediate signs of hyperacute rejection in the critical few hours following the procedure. However, by 24 hours after the transplant had taken place, severe swelling (edema) was observed, possibly as a result of blood flow being restored to the area of the transplant. Antibody-mediated rejection damaged the tissue further on days three and six of the experiment. The result of the damage was primary graft dysfunction, a type of severe lung injury occurring within 72 hours of a transplant, and the leading cause of death in lung transplant patients. Some recovery was taking place by day nine, but the experiment had run its course. The research has been published in Nature Medicine.

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Canada's tech job market has collapsed from its pandemic-era boom, with postings down 19% from 2020 levels. Analysts say the decline was sharper than the overall job market and worsened after ChatGPT's debut in 2022 fueled AI-driven shifts in workforce demand. The Canadian Press reports: "The Canadian tech world remains stuck in a hiring freeze," said Brendon Bernard, Indeed's senior economist. "While both the tech job market and the overall job market have definitely cooled off from their 2022 peaks, the cool off has been much sharper in tech." He thinks the fall was likely caused by the market adjusting after a pandemic boom in hiring along with recent artificial intelligence advances that have reduced tech firms' interest in expanding their workforces. "We went from this really hot job market with job postings through the roof to one where job postings really crashed, falling well below their pre-pandemic levels," Bernard said. However, he sees AI's recent boom as a "watershed moment." While much of the decline in tech job postings has been in software engineer roles, Indeed found hiring for AI-related jobs was still up compared to early 2020. In fact, machine learning engineers and roles that support AI infrastructure, such as data engineers and data centre technicians, were among the job titles with postings still above early-2020 levels. At the same time, Indeed saw postings for senior and manager-level tech jobs drop sharply from their 2022 peak, but as of early 2025, they were still up five per cent from their pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, basic and junior tech titles were down 25 per cent. When it compared Canada's overall decline in tech job postings, Indeed found the country's decrease from pre-pandemic levels was somewhat milder than the retrenchment it has observed in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany. The U.S. fall amounted to 34 per cent, while in the U.K. it was 41 per cent. France saw a 38 per cent drop and Germany experienced a 29 per cent decrease. "All this just highlights is that this tech hiring freeze is a global tech hiring freeze," Bernard said.

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Google DeepMind's new "nano banana" model (officially named Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) has taken the top spot on AI image-editing leaderboards by delivering far more consistent edits than before. It's being rolled out to the Gemini app today. Ars Technica has the details: AI image editing allows you to modify images with a prompt rather than mucking around in Photoshop. Google first provided editing capabilities in Gemini earlier this year, and the model was more than competent out of the gate. But like all generative systems, the non-deterministic nature meant that elements of the image would often change in unpredictable ways. Google says nano banana (technically Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) has unrivaled consistency across edits -- it can actually remember the details instead of rolling the dice every time you make a change. This unlocks several interesting uses for AI image editing. Google suggests uploading a photo of a person and changing their style or attire. For example, you can reimagine someone as a matador or a '90s sitcom character. Because the nano banana model can maintain consistency through edits, the results should still look like the person in the original source image. This is also the case when you make multiple edits in a row. Google says that even down the line, the results should look like the original source material. Gemini's enhanced image editing can also merge multiple images, allowing you to use them as the fodder for a new image of your choosing. Google's example below takes separate images of a woman and a dog and uses them to generate a new snapshot of the dog getting cuddles -- possibly the best use of generative AI yet. Gemini image editing can also merge things in more abstract ways and will follow your prompts to create just about anything that doesn't run afoul of the model's guard rails.

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Dish's parent company EchoStar is selling $23 billion worth of 5G spectrum licenses to AT&T and shifting Boost Mobile onto AT&T and T-Mobile networks, effectively abandoning its bid to become the fourth major U.S. wireless carrier. The Verge reports: As part of T-Mobile's deal to acquire Sprint in 2019, the Department of Justice stipulated that another company must replace it as the fourth major wireless carrier. Dish came forward to acquire Boost Mobile from Sprint, paying $1.4 billion to purchase the budget carrier and other prepaid assets. Since then, Dish has spent billions acquiring spectrum to build out its own 5G network, which the company said was close to reaching 80 percent of the US population as of last year, in line with the Federal Communications Commission's deadline to meet certain coverage requirements. But Dish struggled to repay mounting debt, leading it to rejoin EchoStar, the company it originally spun off from in 2008. And at the same time, it came under renewed pressure from the FCC to make use of its spectrum. In April, the Elon Musk-owned SpaceX wrote a letter to the FCC saying EchoStar "barely uses" the AWS-4 (2GHz) spectrum band for satellite connectivity. Weeks later, FCC chair Brendan Carr opened an investigation into EchoStar's 5G expansion, criticizing the company's slow buildout and claiming that it had lost Boost Mobile customers since its acquisition of the carrier. Carr also questioned EchoStar's use of the AWS-4 spectrum, which isn't included in its deal with AT&T. In July, Carr said that he's not concerned with having a fourth mobile provider, saying during an open meeting that there isn't a "magic number" of carriers needed in the US to maintain competition. "We're always looking at a confluence of different factors to make sure that there's sufficient competition," he said, as reported by Fierce Network. Now, EchoStar will become a hybrid mobile network operator, which is a carrier that operates on its own network, in addition to using other companies' infrastructure. As noted in the press release, Boost Mobile will provide connectivity through AT&T towers and the T-Mobile network. "This ensures the survival of Boost Mobile," [said Roger Entner, founder and lead analyst at Recon Analytics]. "It gives them money, but at the end, they don't have much of a network left."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A German court has told Apple to stop advertising its Watches as being carbon-neutral, ruling that this was misleading and could not fly under the country's competition law. Apple has been marketing its newest smartwatches as being carbon-neutral for nearly two years now, with an array of rationales. It claims that clean energy for manufacturing, along with greener materials and shipping, lop around three-quarters off the carbon emissions for each model of the Apple Watch. The remaining emissions are offset by the purchase of carbon credits, according to Apple. Deutsche Umwelthilfe (well, DUH – that's the acronym), a prominent environmental group, begged to differ on that last point. It applied for an injunction in May and Tuesday's ruling (in German), which will only be published in full later this week, led it to claim victory. The ruling means Apple can't advertise the Watch as a "CO2-neutral product" in Germany. [...] The ruling revolved around the Paraguayan forestry program that Apple claimed was offsetting some of the Watch's production emissions. The project involves commercial eucalyptus plantations on leased land, where the leases for three-quarters of the land will run out in 2029 with no guarantee of renewal. According to the court, consumers' expectations of carbon compensation schemes are shaped by the prominent 2015 Paris Agreement, which commits countries to achieving carbon neutrality by the second half of this century. It said consumers would therefore "assume" that the carbon-neutrality claims around the Apple Watch would mean neutrality was assured through 2050. That leaves a 21-year gap of uncertainty in this case. The Verified Carbon Standard program, in which Apple is participating, has a "pooled buffer account" scheme to hedge against this sort of uncertainty. However, the German court was not impressed, saying it would only allow Apple to monitor the situation after the leases run out, which is a far cry from definitely being able to keep offsetting those emissions if the plantation gets cleared.

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BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Hosting.com has acquired Rocket.net, bringing the fast-growing managed WordPress hosting company under its corporate umbrella. The move gives hosting.com a proven SaaS platform and a strong brand in WordPress hosting, while Rocket.net gains the capital and global reach of a much larger player. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. Rocket.net will continue to operate under its own name, but it is now part of hosting.com's family of brands. As part of the deal, Rocket.net founder and CEO Ben Gabler has been appointed Chief Product Officer at hosting.com, where he will lead product and software engineering across the entire company. [...] For hosting.com, the acquisition strengthens its ability to serve a wider range of customers. The company, founded in 2019, already operates more than 20 data centers, powers over 3 million websites, and serves 600,000 customers worldwide with a team of 900 employees. The Rocket.net platform will now be rolled out across hosting.com's global footprint, including the USA, UK, Germany, and Singapore, as well as new regions such as Mexico, the UAE, and Australia. Both companies stress that their commitment to WordPress and open source will remain intact. Hosting.com already sponsors global WordCamps and encourages employees to contribute to the WordPress project, while Rocket.net has long positioned itself as a champion of the open web.

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According to The Information, Apple executives have debated acquiring Mistral AI and Perplexity to strengthen its AI capabilities. MacRumors reports: Services chief Eddy Cue is apparently the most vocal advocate of a deal to buy AI firms to bolster the company's offerings. Cue previously supported propositions of Apple acquiring Netflix and Tesla, both of which Apple CEO Tim Cook turned down. Other executives such as software chief Craig Federighi have reportedly been reluctant to acquire AI startups, believing that Apple can build its own AI technology in-house. [...] Apple is said to be hesitant to do a deal, which would likely cost billions of dollars. Apple has rarely spent more than a hundred million dollars on an acquisition, with Beats at $3 billion and Intel's wireless modem business at $1 billion. If a federal ruling ends the $20 billion deal between Apple and Alphabet that makes Google the default search engine on its devices, the company could be compelled to acquire an AI-powered search startup to fill that gap. For now, Apple apparently told bankers that it plans to continue with its strategy of focusing on smaller deals in AI.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Before 16-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide, he had spent months consulting ChatGPT about his plans to end his life. Now, his parents are filing the first known wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI, The New York Times reports. Many consumer-facing AI chatbots are programmed to activate safety features if a user expresses intent to harm themselves or others. But research has shown that these safeguards are far from foolproof. In Raine's case, while using a paid version of ChatGPT-4o, the AI often encouraged him to seek professional help or contact a help line. However, he was able to bypass these guardrails by telling ChatGPT that he was asking about methods of suicide for a fictional story he was writing. OpenAI has addressed these shortcomings on its blog. "As the world adapts to this new technology, we feel a deep responsibility to help those who need it most," the post reads. "We are continuously improving how our models respond in sensitive interactions." Still, the company acknowledged the limitations of the existing safety training for large models. "Our safeguards work more reliably in common, short exchanges," the post continues. "We have learned over time that these safeguards can sometimes be less reliable in long interactions: as the back-and-forth grows, parts of the model's safety training may degrade."

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Anthropic reached a settlement with authors in a high-stakes copyright class action that threatened the AI company with potentially billions of dollars in damages. From a report: In a Tuesday filing in the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, both sides asked the court to pause all proceedings while they finalize the deal. The parties signed a binding term sheet on Aug. 25 outlining the core terms of a proposed class settlement to resolve litigation brought by authors. "This historic settlement will benefit all class members," said the authors' counsel, Justin Nelson of Susman Godfrey LLP. "We look forward to announcing details of the settlement in the coming weeks." The case is one of several copyright actions brought against AI developers in courts around the country. Judge William Alsup of the US District Court for the Northern District of California had allowed the class action to proceed for authors whose books were contained in two pirate databases Anthropic downloaded.

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The Michigan Supreme Court has drawn a firm line around digital privacy, ruling that police cannot use overly broad warrants to comb through every corner of a person's phone. From a report: In People v. Carson, the court found [PDF] that warrants for digital devices must include specific limitations, allowing access only to information directly tied to the suspected crime. Michael Carson became the focus of a theft investigation involving money allegedly taken from a neighbor's safe. Authorities secured a warrant to search his phone, but the document placed no boundaries on what could be examined. It permitted access to all data on the device, including messages, photos, contacts, and documents, without any restriction based on time period or relevance. Investigators collected over a thousand pages of information, much of it unrelated to the accusation. The court ruled that this kind of expansive warrant violates the Fourth Amendment, which requires particularity in describing what police may search and seize.

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Air pollution from oil and gas causes more than 90,000 premature deaths and sickens hundreds of thousands of people across the US each year, a new study shows, with disproportionately high impacts on communities of color. From a report: More than 10,000 annual pre-term births are attributable to fine particulate matter from oil and gas, the authors found, also linking 216,000 annual childhood-onset asthma cases to the sector's nitrogen dioxide emissions and 1,610 annual lifetime cancer cases to its hazardous air pollutants. The highest number of impacts are seen in California, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, while the per-capita incidences are highest in New Jersey, Washington DC, New York, California and Maryland.

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