The US Department of Justice is investigating Nvidia’s acquisition of Run:ai, an Israeli artificial intelligence startup, for potential antitrust violations, said a person familiar with discussions the government agency has had with third parties.
The DoJ has asked market participants about the competitive impact of the transaction, which Nvidia announced in April. The price was not disclosed but a report from TechCrunch estimated it at $700 million.
The scope of the probe remains unclear, the person said. But the DoJ has inquired about matters including whether the deal could quash emerging competition in the up-and-coming sector and entrench Nvidia’s dominant market position.
Nvidia on Thursday said the company “wins on merit” and “scrupulously adher[es] to all laws.”
“We’ll continue to support aspiring innovators in every industry and market and are happy to provide any information regulators need,” it added.
Run:ai did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The DoJ declined to comment.
The investigation comes as US regulators and enforcers have heightened scrutiny of anti-competitive behavior in AI, particularly where it dovetails with big tech groups such as Nvidia.
Jonathan Kanter, head of the DoJ’s antitrust division, told the Financial Times in June that he was examining “monopoly choke points” in areas including the data used to train large language models as well as access to essential hardware such as graphics processing unit chips. He added that the GPUs needed to train LLMs had become a “scarce resource.”
Nvidia dominates sales of the most advanced GPUs. Run:ai, which had an existing collaboration with the tech giant, has developed a platform that optimizes the use of GPUs.
As part of the probe, which was first reported by Politico, the DoJ is seeking information on how Nvidia decides the allocation of its chips, the person said.
Government lawyers are also inquiring about Nvidia’s software platform, Cuda, which enables chips originally designed for graphics to speed up AI applications and is seen by industry figures as one of Nvidia’s most critical tools.
The DoJ and the US Federal Trade Commission, a competition regulator, in June reached an agreement that divided antitrust oversight of critical AI players. The DoJ will spearhead probes into Nvidia, while the FTC will oversee the assessment of Microsoft and OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT.
Nothing has a new smartphone—the Phone (2a) Plus—nearly identical to the Phone (2a) it released earlier this year, but with slightly beefed-up specs. It costs $399 and is available in the US through the same beta program. But it isn’t the new Android handset we find most interesting, it’s the company’s new widget.
The “News Reporter” widget, available by default on all Nothing and CMF smartphones plus other Android and iOS devices via the Nothing X app, lets you quickly play a news bulletin summarized by artificial intelligence. It is read out by the synthesized voice of Tim Holbrow, the company’s chief financial officer. (Nothing is using ElevenLabs’ tech for sound synthesis and output.) As soon as you tap the widget, you’re greeted by a soothing British voice:
“Welcome to Nothing News, where the only thing we take seriously is not taking anything seriously. I’m Tim, your CFO and reluctant news reader. Today, we’re making something out of nothing, because that’s literally our job.”
The widget will start cycling through a selection of news stories—you can press and hold the widget and tap Edit to add or remove categories you’re interested in, such as business, entertainment, tech, and sports. These news stories are pulled from “trusted English-language news sources” through News API, using Meta’s Llama large language models for the summary.
Enlarge/ Nothing’s News Reporter widget is available on all Nothing and CMF phones by default. If you download the Nothing X app, you can also access it on Android and iOS.
You can swipe down the notification bar and press the next button on the media playback notification to skip a story, to which Holbrow will add a quip. “Not feeling that one? Let’s find another.” After I skipped quite a few in a row, AI Holbrow asked, “Do you even like news?”
The summaries are one minute each (roughly), and you get eight stories per day. Every morning, the widget will refresh with a fresh batch. Unfortunately, and frustratingly, the widget doesn’t give you much to go on if you want to read more. There’s no attribution to where it pulled the news from, and no links are provided to read directly from the source.
Every smartphone company has been touting some kind of generative AI feature in new devices this year. Samsung has Galaxy AI; Google has its Gemini chatbot and a bevy of AI features in Pixel phones; Motorola introduced Moto AI recently; and even OnePlus has been teasing a few AI features in its phones, like AI Eraser, which lets you remove unwanted objects from photos. Nothing introduced a ChatGPT integration in its earbuds earlier this year, and this widget is the latest generative AI feature to land.
That said, it’s hardly the first time we’ve seen a news summarization feature. Back when Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant were gaining popularity, one of the top features was to ask the voice assistant to play the news—you’d be able to hear short news clips from various sources, like NPR and CNN. That said, I like the implementation in Nothing’s widget, but I’d also like to see attribution and a way to dig deeper into a story if it’s interesting.
What about that phone?
As for the Nothing Phone (2a) Plus, I’ve been using it for several days and it’s … indiscernible from the Phone (2a) I reviewed positively in March. I love the new gray color option, which hides smudges on the rear better and makes the phone’s already fun design pop even more. You still get the same Glyph light functionality, allowing the LEDs to light up for notifications and calendar events, and even double as a visualizer when playing music.
Enlarge/ Nothing Phone (2a) on the left, Nothing Phone (2a) Plus on the right.
The top change here is the processor. Inside is MediaTek’s Dimensity 7350 Pro 5G (as opposed to the Phone (2a)’s Dimensity 7200 Pro), which offers a 10 percent increase in CPU power, and a 30 percent jump in graphics performance. Honestly, I didn’t notice a huge bump in speed, and my benchmark scores show a very tiny boost.
The next upgrade is in the camera, namely, the selfie camera and its new 50-MP sensor that can shoot 4K at 30 frames per second (up from 32 megapixels). The company says it has issued seven updates since the launch of the Phone (2a) with 26 improvements to the camera, which include upgrades to loading speeds, color consistency, and blur accuracy in portrait mode. The Phone (2a) Plus launches with all of those improvements, and the 50-MP front and ultrawide cameras on the rear are the same.
Selfies indeed look much nicer, especially in low light, where my face appears sharper with better HDR and a more balanced exposure. The rear cameras produce nice results considering the price, and I found daytime renders to deliver natural-looking colors. It can still struggle with super high-contrast scenes, but this is a solid camera system.
Lastly, the wired charging on the phone now supports 50 watts (up from 45 watts), which supposedly gets you a 10 percent charging speed boost. Everything else is identical from the Phone (2a)’s specs, from the 6.7-inch AMOLED display to the 5,000-mAh battery.
Nothing new
I’ve enjoyed the phone over the past few days, but its launch is so peculiar, considering it doesn’t introduce any groundbreaking updates to the Phone (2a). So I asked the company why it decided to launch the (2a) Plus now. “We aren’t launching Phone (3) until next year, and we saw an opportunity to enhance the smartphone we launched in March with Phone (2a) Plus, a new smartphone—catered towards power users—at an accessible price point,” says Jane Nho, Nothing’s head of PR in the US. The company launched its last flagship phone, the Phone (2), in July 2023.
So there you have it: The Phone (2a) Plus is a seemingly painless way for Nothing to try and stay relevant amidst all the other smartphone launches, still have an AI story, boost sales, and oddly try and make some sort of digital celebrity out of its CFO.
Nothing says it’ll go on sale August 3 in London at Nothing’s store in Soho, in gray and black, with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage. In the US, the device will follow the same beta program system as the Phone (2a) and CMF Phone 1. That means you’ll have to sign up for the beta, and once you’re accepted, you’ll be able to purchase the device for $399. It’ll be available on August 7 at 9 am ET.
Facebook owner Meta has agreed to pay $1.4 billion to the state of Texas to settle claims that the company harvested millions of citizens’ biometric data without proper consent.
The settlement, to be paid over five years, is the largest ever obtained from an action brought by a single US state, said a statement from Attorney General Ken Paxton.
It also marks one of the largest penalties levied at Meta by regulators, second only to a $5 billion settlement it paid the US Federal Trade Commission in 2019 for the misuse of user data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal.
The original complaint filed by Paxton in February 2022 accused Facebook’s now-closed facial recognition system of collecting biometric identifiers of “millions of Texans” from photos and videos posted on the platform without “informed consent.”
Meta launched a feature in 2011 called “tag suggestions” that recommended to users who to tag in photos and videos by scanning the “facial geometry” of those pictured, Paxton’s office said.
In 2021, a year before the lawsuit was filed, Meta announced it was shuttering its facial recognition system including the tag suggestions feature. It wiped the biometric data it had collected from 1 billion users, citing legal “uncertainty.”
The latest fine comes amid growing concern globally over privacy and data protection risks related to facial recognition, as well as algorithmic bias, although legislation is patchy, differing from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
In 2021, Facebook agreed to pay a $650 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit in Illinois under a state privacy law over similar allegations related to its face-tagging system.
“This historic settlement demonstrates our commitment to standing up to the world’s biggest technology companies and holding them accountable for breaking the law and violating Texans’ privacy rights,” Paxton said in a statement. “Any abuse of Texans’ sensitive data will be met with the full force of the law.”
Meta previously said that the claims were without merit. However, the company and Texas agreed at the end of May to settle the lawsuit, just weeks before a trial was set to begin.
A spokesperson for Meta said on Tuesday: “We are pleased to resolve this matter, and look forward to exploring future opportunities to deepen our business investments in Texas, including potentially developing data centers.”
Scientists are uncovering various ways that air pollution can interfere with the ability of insects to pollinate plants.
In the summers of 2018 and 2019, ecologist James Ryalls and his colleagues would go out to a field near Reading in southern England to stare at the insects buzzing around black mustard plants. Each time a bee, hoverfly, moth, butterfly, or other insect tried to get at the pollen or nectar in the small yellow flowers, they’d make a note.
It was part of an unusual experiment. Some patches of mustard plants were surrounded by pipes that released ozone and nitrogen oxides—polluting gases produced around power plants and conventional cars. Other plots had pipes releasing normal air.
The results startled the scientists. Plants smothered by pollutants were visited by up to 70 percent fewer insects overall, and their flowers received 90 percent fewer visits compared with those in unpolluted plots. The concentrations of pollutants were well below what US regulators consider safe. “We didn’t expect it to be quite as dramatic as that,” says study coauthor Robbie Girling, an entomologist at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia and a visiting professor at the University of Reading.
A growing body of research suggests that pollution can disrupt insect attraction to plants—at a time when many insect populations are already suffering deep declines due to agricultural chemicals, habitat loss, and climate change. Around 75 percent of wild flowering plants and around 35 percent of food crops rely on animals to move pollen around, so that plants can fertilize one another and form seeds. Even the black mustard plants used in the experiment, which can self-fertilize, exhibited a drop of 14 percent to 31 percent in successful pollination as measured by the number of seedpods, seeds per pod, and seedpod weight from plants engulfed by dirty air.
Scientists are still working out how strong and widespread these effects of pollution are, and how they operate. They’re learning that pollution may have a surprising diversity of effects, from changing the scents that draw insects to flowers to warping the creatures’ ability to smell, learn, and remember.
This research is still young, says Jeff Riffell, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington. “We’re only touching the tip of the iceberg, if you will, in terms of how these effects are influencing these pollinators.”
Altered scents
Insects often rely on smell to get around. As they buzz about in their neighborhoods, they learn to associate flowers that are good sources of nectar and pollen with their scents. Although some species, like honeybees, also use directions from their hive mates and visual landmarks like trees to navigate, even they critically depend on the sense of smell for sniffing out favorite flowers from afar. Nocturnal pollinators such as moths are particularly talented smellers. “They can smell these patches of flowers from a kilometer away,” Riffell says.
One of the effects of pollution—and what Girling suspects was largely responsible for the pollination declines at the England site—is how it perturbs these flowery aromas. Each fragrance is a unique blend of dozens of compounds that are chemically reactive and degrade in the air. Gases such as ozone or nitrogen oxide will quickly react with these molecules and cause odors to vanish even faster than usual. “For very reactive scents, the plume can only travel a third of the distance than it should actually travel when there is no pollution,” says atmospheric scientist Jose D. Fuentes of Penn State University, who has simulated the influence of ozone on floral scent compounds.
And if some compounds degrade faster than others, the bouquet of scents that insects associate with particular plants transforms, potentially rendering them unrecognizable. Girling and his colleagues observed this in experiments in a wind tunnel into which they delivered ozone. The tunnel was also outfitted with a device that steadily released a synthetic blend of floral odors (an actual flower would have wilted, says coauthor Ben Langford, an atmospheric chemist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology). Using chemical detectors, the team watched the flowery scent plume shorten and narrow as ozone ate away at the edges, with some compounds dropping off entirely as others persisted.
The scientists had trained honeybees to detect the original flowery scent by exposing them to the odor, then giving them sugar water—until they automatically stuck out their tongue-like proboscises to taste it upon smelling the scent. But when bees were tested with ozonated odor representing the edges of the scent plume, either 6 or 12 meters away from the source, only 32 percent and 10 percent, respectively, stuck out their proboscises. The bee is “sniffing a completely different odor at that point,” Langford says.
Researchers also have observed that striped cucumber beetles and buff-tailed bumblebees struggle to recognize their host plants above certain levels of ozone. Some of the most dramatic observations are at night, when extremely reactive pollutants called nitrate radicals accumulate. Riffell and colleagues recently found that about 50 percent fewer tobacco hornworm moths were attracted to the pale evening primrose when the plant’s aroma was altered by these pollutants, and white-lined sphinx moths didn’t recognize the scent at all. This reduced the number of seeds and fruits by 28 percent, the team found in outdoor pollination experiments. “It’s having a really big effect on the plant’s ability to produce seeds,” Riffell says.
An accountant who fills out spreadsheets at the beach, a dog groomer who always has time for one more client, a basketball player who shoots free throws to the point of exhaustion.
Every profession has its share of hard chargers and overachievers. But for some workers—perhaps more than ever in our always-on, always-connected world—the drive to send one more email, clip one more poodle, sink one more shot becomes all-consuming.
Workaholism is a common feature of the modern workplace. A recent review gauging its pervasiveness across occupational fields and cultures found that roughly 15 percent of workers qualify as workaholics. That adds up to millions of overextended employees around the world who don’t know when—or how, or why—to quit.
Whether driven by ambition, a penchant for perfectionism, or the small rush of completing a task, they work past any semblance of reason. A healthy work ethic can cross the line into an addiction, a shift with far-reaching consequences, says Toon Taris, a behavioral scientist and work researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
“Workaholism” is a word that gets thrown around loosely and sometimes glibly, says Taris, but the actual affliction is more common, more complex, and more dangerous than many people realize.
What workaholism is—and isn’t
Psychologists and employment researchers have tinkered with measures and definitions of workaholism for decades, and today the picture is coming into focus. In a major shift, workaholism is now viewed as an addiction with its own set of risk factors and consequences, says Taris, who, with occupational health scientist Jan de Jonge of Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, explored the phenomenon in the 2024 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.
Taris stresses that the “workaholic” label doesn’t apply to people who put in long hours because they love their jobs. Those people are considered engaged workers, he says. “That’s fine. No problems there.” People who temporarily put themselves through the grinder to advance their careers or keep up on car or house payments don’t count, either. Workaholism is in a different category from capitalism.
The growing consensus is that true workaholism encompasses four dimensions: motivations, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, says Malissa Clark, an industrial/organizational psychologist at the University of Georgia in Athens. In 2020, Clark and colleagues proposed in the Journal of Applied Psychology that, in sum, workaholism involves an inner compulsion to work, having persistent thoughts about work, experiencing negative feelings when not working, and working beyond what is reasonably expected.
Some personality types are especially likely to fall into the work trap. Perfectionists, extroverts, and people with type A (ambitious, aggressive, and impatient) personalities are prone to workaholism, Clark and coauthors found in a 2016 meta-analysis. They had expected people with low self-esteem to be at risk, but that link was nowhere to be found. Workaholics may put themselves through the wringer, but it’s not necessarily out of a sense of inadequacy or self-loathing.
Enlarge/ As female macaques age, the size of their social network shrinks.
Walnut was born on June 3, 1995, at the start of what would become an unusually hot summer, on an island called Rum (pronounced room), the largest of the Small Isles off the west coast of Scotland. We know this because since 1974, researchers have diligently recorded the births of red deer like her, and caught, weighed and marked every calf they could get their hands on—about 9 out of every 10.
Near the cottage in Kilmory on the northern side of the island where the researchers are based, there has been no hunting since the project began, which allowed the deer to relax and get used to human observers. Walnut was a regular there, grazing the invariably short-clipped grass in this popular spot. “She would always just be there in the group, with her sisters and their families,” says biologist Alison Morris, who has lived on Rum for more than 23 years and studies the deer year-round.
Walnut raised 14 offspring, the last one in 2013, when she was 18 years old. In her later years, Morris recalls, Walnut would spend most of her time away from the herd, usually with Vanity, another female (called a hind) of the same age who had never calved. “They were often seen affectionately grooming each other, and after Walnut died of old age in October 2016, at the age of 21—quite extraordinary for a hind—Vanity spent most of her time alone. She died two years later, at the grand age of 23.”
Are old hinds left behind?
Such a shift in social life is common in aging red deer females, says ecologist Gregory Albery, now at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, who spent months on the island studying the deer during his PhD training. (Males roam around more and associate less consistently with others, so they are harder to study.) “Older females tend to be observed in the company of fewer others. That was easy to establish,” he says. “The more difficult question to answer has been why we are seeing this pattern, and what it means.”
The first question one should ask, Albery says, is whether individual deer alter their behavior to associate with fewer others as they age, or whether individuals that associate with fewer others tend to live to an older age. This is the kind of question that many researchers are unable to answer when simply comparing individuals of different ages. But long-term studies like the one at Rum can do so through long-term tracking of populations. Forty times a year, the deer are censused by fieldworkers like Morris who recognize the deer on sight and meticulously note where they are and with whom.
When they accounted for the age and survival of the deer in their analysis, Albery and colleagues found that the link between age and number of associates remained solid: Social connections do, indeed, decrease as individuals age. Might this be because many of the older deer’s friends have died? On the contrary, Albery and colleagues found that older deer who had recently lost friends tended to hang out with others more often.
So why do old hinds have fewer contacts? Part of the explanation may be that they don’t range as widely as they grow older. Studying the deer for a couple of months would not have exposed this trend, says Albery: It was only revealed by tracking the same individuals through time. “Deer with a larger home range generally live longer,” he explains, so an analysis at any single point in time would show larger ranges for older deer and suggest that home ranges expand with age. Tracking individuals through time reveals the opposite is true. “Their home ranges decrease in size as they age,” Albery says.
It is unlikely that older deer move around less because they are concentrating on the core of their favorite habitat, says Albery. The center of their range shifts with age, and they are observed more often in taller and probably less nutritious vegetation, away from the most popular spots. This indicates there might be some kind of competitive exclusion going on: Perhaps more energetic, younger deer with offspring to feed are colonizing the best grazing patches.
On the other hand, older deer may also have different preferences. “Perhaps the longer grasses are easier to eat when your incisors are too worn to clip the short grass everyone else is after,” Albery says. Plus the deer don’t have to bend over as far to reach the longer grass.
A recent study by Albery and colleagues in Nature Ecology & Evolution found that older deer reduce their contacts more than you’d expect if their shrinking range was the only cause. That suggests the behavior may have evolved for a reason—one that Albery prosaically summarizes as, “Deer shit where they eat.”
Gastrointestinal worms are rampant on the island. And though the deer do not get infected through direct contact with others, being at the same place at the same time probably does increase their risk of ingesting eggs or larvae in the still-warm droppings of one of their associates.
“Younger animals need to put themselves out there to make friends, but perhaps when you’re older and you already have some, the risk of disease just isn’t worth it,” says study coauthor Josh Firth, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Oxford.
In addition, says ecologist Daniel Nussey of the University of Edinburgh, another coauthor, “there are indications that the immune system of aging deer is less effective in suppressing worm infections, so they might be more likely to die from them.”
Enlarge/ Police observe the Eiffel Tower from Trocadero ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on July 22, 2024.
On the eve of the Olympics opening ceremony, Paris is a city swamped in security. Forty thousand barriers divide the French capital. Packs of police officers wearing stab vests patrol pretty, cobbled streets. The river Seine is out of bounds to anyone who has not already been vetted and issued a personal QR code. Khaki-clad soldiers, present since the 2015 terrorist attacks, linger near a canal-side boulangerie, wearing berets and clutching large guns to their chests.
French interior minister Gérald Darmanin has spent the past week justifying these measures as vigilance—not overkill. France is facing the “biggest security challenge any country has ever had to organize in a time of peace,” he told reporters on Tuesday. In an interview with weekly newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, he explained that “potentially dangerous individuals” have been caught applying to work or volunteer at the Olympics, including 257 radical Islamists, 181 members of the far left, and 95 from the far right. Yesterday, he told French news broadcaster BFM that a Russian citizen had been arrested on suspicion of plotting “large scale” acts of “destabilization” during the Games.
Parisians are still grumbling about road closures and bike lanes that abruptly end without warning, while human rights groups are denouncing “unacceptable risks to fundamental rights.” For the Games, this is nothing new. Complaints about dystopian security are almost an Olympics tradition. Previous iterations have been characterized as Lockdown London, Fortress Tokyo, and the “arms race” in Rio. This time, it is the least-visible security measures that have emerged as some of the most controversial. Security measures in Paris have been turbocharged by a new type of AI, as the city enables controversial algorithms to crawl CCTV footage of transport stations looking for threats. The system was first tested in Paris back in March at two Depeche Mode concerts.
For critics and supporters alike, algorithmic oversight of CCTV footage offers a glimpse of the security systems of the future, where there is simply too much surveillance footage for human operators to physically watch. “The software is an extension of the police,” says Noémie Levain, a member of the activist group La Quadrature du Net, which opposes AI surveillance. “It’s the eyes of the police multiplied.”
Near the entrance of the Porte de Pantin metro station, surveillance cameras are bolted to the ceiling, encased in an easily overlooked gray metal box. A small sign is pinned to the wall above the bin, informing anyone willing to stop and read that they are part of a “video surveillance analysis experiment.” The company which runs the Paris metro RATP “is likely” to use “automated analysis in real time” of the CCTV images “in which you can appear,” the sign explains to the oblivious passengers rushing past. The experiment, it says, runs until March 2025.
Porte de Pantin is on the edge of the park La Villette, home to the Olympics’ Park of Nations, where fans can eat or drink in pavilions dedicated to 15 different countries. The Metro stop is also one of 46 train and metro stations where the CCTV algorithms will be deployed during the Olympics, according to an announcement by the Prefecture du Paris, a unit of the interior ministry. City representatives did not reply to WIRED’s questions on whether there are plans to use AI surveillance outside the transport network. Under a March 2023 law, algorithms are allowed to search CCTV footage in real-time for eight “events,” including crowd surges, abnormally large groups of people, abandoned objects, weapons, or a person falling to the ground.
“What we’re doing is transforming CCTV cameras into a powerful monitoring tool,” says Matthias Houllier, cofounder of Wintics, one of four French companies that won contracts to have their algorithms deployed at the Olympics. “With thousands of cameras, it’s impossible for police officers [to react to every camera].”
This month, the Silicon Valley company filed a pair of lawsuits, neither of which have been previously reported, that demand hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages from two alleged vandals. Waymo attorneys said in court papers that the alleged vandalism, which ruined dozens of tires and a tail end, are a significant threat to the company’s reputation. Riding in a vehicle in which the steering wheel swivels on its own can be scary enough. Having to worry about attackers allegedly targeting the rides could undermine Waymo’s ride-hailing business before it even gets past its earliest stage.
Waymo, which falls under the umbrella of Google parent Alphabet, operates a ride-hailing service in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles that is comparable to Uber and Lyft except with sensors and software controlling the driving. While its cars haven’t contributed to any known deadly crashes, US regulators continue to probe their sometimeserratic driving. Waymo spokesperson Sandy Karp says the company always prioritizes safety and that the lawsuits reflect that strategy. She declined further comment for this story.
In a filing last week in the California Superior Court of San Francisco County, Waymo sued a Tesla Model 3 driver whom it alleges intentionally rear-ended one of its autonomous Jaguar crossovers. According to the suit, the driver, Konstantine Nikka-Sher Piterman, claimed in a post on X that “Waymo just rekt me” before going on to ask Tesla CEO Elon Musk for a job. The other lawsuit from this month, filed in the same court, targets Ronaile Burton, who allegedly slashed the tires of at least 19 Waymo vehicles. San Francisco prosecutors have filed criminal charges against her to which she has pleaded not guilty. A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.
Burton’s public defender, Adam Birka-White, says in a statement that Burton “is someone in need of help and not jail” and that prosecutors continue “to prioritize punishing poor people at the behest of corporations, in this case involving a tech company that is under federal investigation for creating dangerous conditions on our streets.”
An attorney for Burton in the civil case hasn’t been named in court records, and Burton is currently in jail and couldn’t be reached for comment. Piterman didn’t respond to a voicemail, a LinkedIn message, and emails seeking comment. He hasn’t responded in court to the accusations.
Based on available records from courts in San Francisco and Phoenix, it appears that Waymo hasn’t previously filed similar lawsuits.
In the Tesla case, Piterman “unlawfully, maliciously, and intentionally” sped his car past a stop sign and into a Waymo car in San Francisco on March 19, according to the company’s suit. When the Waymo tried to pull over, Piterman allegedly drove the Tesla into the Waymo car again. He then allegedly entered the Waymo and later threatened a Waymo representative who responded to the scene in person. San Francisco police cited Piterman, according to the lawsuit. The police didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Founded in Dresden in the early 1990s, Germany’s Solarwatt quickly became an emblem of Europe’s renewable energy ambitions and bold plan to build a solar power industry.
Its opening of a new solar panel plant in Dresden in late 2021 was hailed as a small victory in the battle to wrestle market share from the Chinese groups that have historically supplied the bulk of panels used in Europe.
Now, Solarwatt is preparing to halt production at the plant and shift that work to China.
“It is a big pity for our employees, but from an economic point of view we could not do otherwise,” said Peter Bachmann, the company’s chief product officer.
Solarwatt is not alone. A global supply glut has pummelled solar panel prices over the past two years, leaving swaths of Europe’s manufacturers unprofitable, threatening US President Joe Biden’s ambition to turn America into a renewable energy force and even ricocheting back on the Chinese companies that dominate the global market.
“We are in a crisis,” said Johan Lindahl, secretary-general of the European Solar Manufacturing Council, the European industry’s trade body.
Yet as companies in Europe, the US, and China cut jobs, delay projects, and mothball facilities, an abundance of cheap solar panels has delivered one significant upside—consumers and businesses are installing them in ever greater numbers.
Electricity generated from solar power is expected to surpass that of wind and nuclear by 2028, according to the International Energy Agency.
The picture underlines the quandary confronting governments that have pledged to decarbonise their economies, but will find doing so harder unless the historic shift from fossil fuels is both affordable for the public and creates new jobs.
Governments face a “delicate and difficult balancing act,” said Michael Parr, director of trade group Ultra Low Carbon Solar Alliance. They must “maximize renewables deployment and carbon reductions, bolster domestic manufacturing sectors, keep energy prices low, and ensure energy security.”
The industry, which spans wafer, cell, and panel manufacturers, as well as companies that install panels, employed more than 800,000 people in Europe at the end of last year, according to SolarPower Europe. In the US almost 265,000 work in the sector, figures from the Interstate Renewable Energy Council show.
“There is overcapacity in every segment, starting with polysilicon and finishing with the module,” said Yana Hryshko, head of global solar supply chain research at the consultancy Wood Mackenzie.
According to BloombergNEF, panel prices have plunged more than 60 percent since July 2022. The scale of the damage inflicted has sparked calls for Brussels to protect European companies from what the industry says are state-subsidized Chinese products.
Europe’s solar panel manufacturing capacity has collapsed by about half to 3 gigawatts since November as companies have failed, mothballed facilities, or shifted production abroad, the European Solar Manufacturing Council estimates. In rough terms, a gigawatt can potentially supply electricity for 1mn homes.
The hollowing out comes as the EU is banking on solar power playing a major role in the bloc meeting its target of generating 45 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2030. In the US, the Biden administration has set a target of achieving a 100 percent carbon pollution-free electricity grid by 2035.
Climate change is a global challenge, but executives said the solar industry’s predicament exposed how attempts to address it can quickly fracture along national and regional lines.
“There’s trade policy and then there’s climate policy, and they aren’t in sync,” said Andres Gluski, chief executive of AES, one of the world’s biggest developers of clean energy. “That’s a problem.”
Brussels has so far resisted demands to impose tariffs. It first levied them in 2012 but reversed that in 2018, partly in what proved a successful attempt to quicken the uptake of solar. Chinese imports now account for the lion’s share of Europe’s solar panels.
In May, the European Commission introduced the Net Zero Industry Act, legislation aimed at bolstering the bloc’s clean energy industries by cutting red tape and promoting a regional supply chain.
But Gunter Erfurt, chief executive of Switzerland-based Meyer Burger, the country’s largest solar panel maker, is skeptical it will be enough.
“You need to create a level playing field,” he said. Meyer Burger would benefit if the EU imposed tariffs because it has operations in Germany.
On April 11, a small company called Graphyte began pumping out beige bricks, somewhat the consistency of particle board, from its new plant in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The bricks don’t look like much, but they come with a lofty goal: to help stop climate change.
Graphyte, a startup backed by billionaire Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, will bury its bricks deep underground, trapping carbon there. The company bills it as the largest carbon dioxide removal project in the world.
Scientists have long warned of the dire threat posed by global warming. It’s gotten so bad though that the long-sought mitigation, cutting carbon dioxide emissions from every sector of the economy, might not be enough of a fix. To stave off the worst—including large swaths of the Earth exposed to severe heat waves, water scarcity, and crop failures—some experts say there is a deep need to remove previously emitted carbon, too. And that can be done anywhere on Earth—even in places not known for climate-friendly policies, like Arkansas.
Graphyte aims to store carbon that would otherwise be released from plant material as it burns or decomposes at a competitive sub-$100 per metric ton, and it wants to open new operations as soon as possible, single-handedly removing tens of thousands of tons of carbon annually, said Barclay Rogers, the company’s founder and CEO. Nevertheless, that’s nowhere near the amount of carbon that will have to be removed to register as a blip in global carbon emissions. “I’m worried about our scale of deployment,” he said. “I think we need to get serious fast.”
Hundreds of carbon removal startups have popped up over the past few years, but the fledgling industry has made little progress so far. That leads to the inevitable question: Could Graphyte and companies like it actually play a major role in combating climate change? And will a popular business model among these companies, inviting other companies to voluntarily buy “carbon credits” for those buried bricks, actually work?
Whether carbon emissions are cut to begin with, or pulled out of the atmosphere after they’ve already been let loose, climate scientists stress that there is no time to waste. The clock began ticking years ago, with the arrival of unprecedented fires and floods, superstorms, and intense droughts around the world. But carbon removal, as it’s currently envisioned, also poses additional sociological, economic, and ethical questions. Skeptics, for instance, say it could discourage more pressing efforts on cutting carbon emissions, leaving some experts wondering whether it will even work at all.
Still, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s forefront group of climate experts, is counting on carbon removal technology to dramatically scale up. If the industry is to make a difference, experimentation and research and development should be done quickly, within the next few years, said Gregory Nemet, professor of public affairs who studies low-carbon innovation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Then after that is the time to really start going big and scaling up so that it becomes climate-relevant,” he added. “Scale-up is a big challenge.”
Enlarge/ Top: A view of the downtown Memphis skyline, including the Hernando De Soto bridge which has been retrofitted for earthquakes. Memphis is located around 40 miles from a fault line in the quake-prone New Madrid system.
iStock via Getty Images
The first earthquake struck while the town was still asleep. Around 2: 00 am on Dec. 16, 1811, New Madrid—a small frontier settlement of 400 people on land now located in Missouri—was jolted awake. Panicked townsfolk fled their homes as buildings collapsed and the smell of sulfur filled the air.
The episode didn’t last long. But the worst was yet to come. Nearly two months later, after dozens of aftershocks and another massive quake, the fault line running directly under the town ruptured. Thirty-one-year-old resident Eliza Bryan watched in horror as the Mississippi River receded and swept away boats full of people. In nearby fields, geysers of sand erupted, and a rumble filled the air.
In the end, the town had dropped at least 15 feet. Bryan and others spent a year and a half living in makeshift camps while they waited for the aftershocks to end. Four years later, the shocks had become less common. At last, the rattled townspeople began “to hope that ere long they will entirely cease,” Bryan wrote in a letter.
Whether Bryan’s hope will stand the test of time is an open question.
The US Geological Survey released a report in December 2023 detailing the risk of dangerous earthquakes around the country. As expected on the hazard map, deep red risk lines run through California and Alaska. But the map also sports a big bull’s eye in the middle of the country—right over New Madrid.
The USGS estimates that the region has a 25 to 40 percent chance of a magnitude 6.0 or higher earthquake in the next 50 years, and as much as a 10 percent chance of a repeat of the 1811-1812 sequence. While the risk is much lower compared to, say, California, experts say that when it comes to earthquake resistance, the New Madrid region suffers from inadequate building codes and infrastructure.
Caught in this seismic splash zone are millions of people living across five states—mostly in Tennessee and Missouri, as well as Kentucky, Illinois, and Arkansas—including two major cities, Memphis and St. Louis. Mississippi, Alabama, and Indiana have also been noted as places of concern.
In response to the potential for calamity, geologists have learned a lot about this odd earthquake hotspot over the last few decades. Yet one mystery has persisted: why earthquakes even happen here in the first place.
This is a problem, experts say. Without a clear mechanism for why New Madrid experiences earthquakes, scientists are still struggling to answer some of the most basic questions, like when—or even if—another large earthquake will strike the region. In Missouri today, earthquakes are “not as front of mind” as other natural disasters, said Jeff Briggs, earthquake program manager for the Missouri State Emergency Management Agency.
But when the next big shake comes, “it’s going to be the biggest natural disaster this state has ever experienced.”
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is in talks to buy cybersecurity start-up Wiz for about $23 billion, in what would be the largest acquisition in the tech group’s history, according to people familiar with the matter.
Alphabet’s discussions to acquire Wiz are still weeks away from completion, said one person with direct knowledge of the matter, while people briefed about the transaction said there was still a chance the deal would fall apart, with a number of details still needing to be addressed in talks.
If a deal were to be reached it would be a test case for antitrust regulators, which in recent years have been cracking down on tech groups buying out emerging companies in the sector. Alphabet’s last big deal came more than a decade ago with the $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility.
The acquisition of Wiz would mark a further big push into cyber security for Alphabet, two years after it acquired Mandiant for $5.4 billion.
New York-headquartered Wiz has raised about $2 billion from investors since its founding four years ago, according to data provider PitchBook. The start-up, led by Israeli founder and former Microsoft executive Assaf Rappaport, was most recently valued at $12 billion. Its backers include venture capital firms Sequoia and Thrive.
Wiz, which counts multinational groups including Salesforce, Mars, and BMW as customers, helps companies secure programs in the cloud. That has led to a surge in revenue as corporations increasingly operate their software and store data online—Wiz has said it has hit about $350 million in annual recurring revenue, a metric often used by software start-ups.
A deal would be among the largest acquisitions of a company backed by venture capital.
Wiz declined to comment on the talks, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
