Building trade unions, including Steamfitters UA Local 602, are mobilizing to pressure politicians who oppose new data center construction, with leadership warning members they will withhold political support from officials seen as hostile to the industry. An internal memo obtained by the Wall Street Journal frames the fight as an 'existential moment' for the union, given how much work data centers generate in the Maryland-DC-Virginia corridor known as data center alley.
WIRED's testing roundup for 2026 mesh Wi-Fi systems highlights different products for different needs: the Asus ZenWifi BD5 Outdoor as a weatherproof, PoE-powered node for existing Asus AiMesh setups, TP-Link's tri-band Deco BE67 as a strong all-around Wi-Fi 7 performer despite some setup glitches, and the budget Netgear Orbi 370 as a dual-band system that struggled badly with satellite-node speeds in real-world testing. The TP-Link Deco BE25 is also named a top pick for outdoor coverage on non-Asus networks.
NASA sent the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into orbit on Sunday, equipping it with a 2.4-meter mirror matching Hubble's but pairing it with a 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument. That camera can capture images at least 100 times larger than Hubble's per shot and scan the sky roughly 1,000 times faster, letting it map billions of stars and galaxies and search for around 100,000 exoplanets.
A new survey-based study examines how AI adoption in U.S. workplaces affects employment, looking beyond layoffs to also measure job creation and promotions tied to tools like ChatGPT. The research suggests that while some workers face displacement, others are seeing new roles or career advancement as a result of AI integration.
A Mother Jones investigation found 19 police agencies in ten states spent nearly $1 million of opioid settlement money on automatic license plate readers from companies like Flock and Axon. The funds were originally allocated to help communities devastated by the opioid crisis, but state distribution agencies instead routed portions to police departments, which pitched surveillance tech as a crime-fighting tool.
A Wonder Tools newsletter roundup highlights software for private AI chats, offline audio transcription, and secure PDF redaction that all run without sending user data to external servers. The focus is on tools designed so sensitive information stays on the user's own device rather than being uploaded for processing.
A new open-source project called Open OSCAR Server, written in Go, lets classic AIM and ICQ clients connect and communicate again by reimplementing the old OSCAR and TOC protocols. It supports a wide range of legacy Windows clients from the late 1990s through 2000s, along with features like buddy lists, chat rooms, file sharing, and user profiles.
Conservation Through Public Health, working with the EU-Africa NESTLER project, gathered disease samples from cattle and poultry near Bwindi Impenetrable National Park and combined them with gorilla health monitoring records. The pooled data is being fed into AI models designed to predict zoonotic disease outbreaks before they spread among wildlife, livestock and people, shifting the group's approach from reactive response to proactive prevention.
Gamescom, the world's largest in-person gaming expo, took place this week in Cologne, Germany, with attendance expected to surpass last year's 350,000 visitors. Major publishers like Xbox and Sega showcased upcoming titles alongside small indie teams, with highlights including a new Witcher 3 expansion and Alien: Isolation 2.
Mobile virtual network operators such as Mint Mobile don't own towers or spectrum; instead they lease network capacity from major carriers like T-Mobile and resell it at lower prices. Because they run leaner operations—often prepaid, with no retail stores, no bundled streaming perks, and third-party device financing—MVNOs can undercut the big carriers on cost, though subscribers may face slower speeds during network congestion since direct carrier customers get priority.
Court documents and industry estimates show major games like The Last of Us Part II and Horizon Forbidden West cost over $200 million each, while Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War topped $700 million across its life cycle. GTA VI, in development for nearly a decade, is expected to surpass all of these figures even before factoring in its eventual online mode.
Apple's long-rumored Health app revamp, internally known as Project Mulberry, missed its expected debut in iOS 26.4 and again at WWDC27. Speculation now points to a possible unveiling alongside the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 next month, given Apple's history of introducing health features outside its June keynote.
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