Author: wildgreenquest@gmail.com

AI is being touted as the future of weather forecasting—faster and more precise. But new research shows a major blind spot: it often fails at predicting extreme weather. Traditional physics-based models still do better.“They do perform well on a lot of tasks, but for very extreme events—that are the most important for society—they still struggle,” says Sebastian Engelke, a statistics professor at the University of Geneva and one of the authors of a new study in Science that pitted some of the leading AI weather models, including GraphCast and Pangu-Weather, against a database of recent extreme events.For record-breaking heat, like…

Unpacking jargonOne creative way Kristin Moore, a technical product manager at PERQ, a digital marketing platform for property management companies, uses AI is to help ensure she understands her colleagues’ technically advanced conversations. If she’s in a meeting and engineers talk through a topic in a way that she doesn’t grasp, she can upload the recorded conversation through Claude, AI assistant built by Anthropic, and ask it to summarize what she needs to do to follow up.“It picks up on all of that terminology that I don’t understand, and it can simplify it into something that I can consume,” Moore…

Kruh-SONT or kwah-SAHN? That is the question that Google Translate’s new pronunciation feature aims to answer. TechCrunch reports the app now lets you practice speaking words and phrases in Spanish, English and Hindi — and scores your pronunciation. When you translate a word or phrase, you can navigate to the “Practice” menu and hit the “Pronounce” button, which shows phonetics you can say out loud. The app then gives you feedback, like “Some sounds were a little unclear.” The feature resembles Duolingo in how it lets you practice speaking words and sentences. It’s rolling out in the U.S. and India…

Elon Musk on Thursday sparred with an attorney for OpenAI during his third day of testimony in the contentious trial over the company’s pivot from nonprofit status to a for-profit venture valued at hundreds of billions of dollars.The trial centers on the 2015 birth of the ChatGPT maker as a nonprofit startup primarily funded by Musk. It pits the world’s richest person against Sam Altman, a fellow OpenAI co-founder he accuses of betraying promises to keep the company as a nonprofit dedicated to humanity’s benefit.Tempers have flared on both sides of the high-stakes trial, as the morning began with an…

The United Arab Emirates delivered a major blow to OPEC by quitting the oil cartel, and the move could eventually bring gas prices down, according to CNN. Here’s why: The U.A.E. is OPEC’s third-biggest oil producer after Saudi Arabia and Iraq. OPEC production quotas limited the U.A.E.’s oil output to 3.2 million barrels a day, but it has the capacity to produce closer to 5 million barrels a day. The potential additional supply would meet around 1-2% of daily global oil demand. But don’t expect immediate relief at the pump. The national average U.S. gas price is around $4.23, and…

For years, it was common for even the biggest tech companies to have annual capital expenditures, or capex, in the single- to low-double-digit-billion range. You might have heard a tech company say it planned to spend $9 billion, $15 billion, or even $25 billion on research, development, and other costs in the upcoming fiscal year. But lately, capital expenditures at the largest tech companies have been off the charts, with some companies now regularly forecasting single-year capex in the hundreds of billions. The driving factor for this is, of course, artificial intelligence (AI). Some of the biggest names in tech are…

I hadn’t heard the phrase “taking the waters” until I was invited to the Greenbrier, a National Historic Landmark hotel located in West Virginia’s Allegheny Mountains. Although it’s been said for centuries in European spa towns (i.e., prendre les eux in France, heilwasser trinken in Germany), the phrase didn’t pick up in America until the 18th century, right around the time when the Greenbrier first opened in 1778. For decades, presidents, celebrities, and wellness seekers arrived at this grande dame hotel, eager to relax and socialize while taking in all the healing and therapeutic goodness of the resort’s famously mineral-rich…

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.When last Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner was disrupted by a would-be assassin, an event intended to celebrate the First Amendment descended into chaos. After President Donald Trump and other administration officials were whisked to safety, it was unclear whether the festivities would resume. More than an hour later, White House Correspondents’ Association President Weijia Jiang returned to the dais to acknowledge that Trump had posted that the night was over but would be rescheduled.“This is a room full of reporters,” she said. “So I know you’ve all seen the president’s…

Published May 1, 2026 03:56AMWhen I lived on Colorado’s Front Range, I could think of no better way to spend a summer weekend than to rally a group of friends for a camping trip in the mountains. In a state with sprawling public lands, we typically found dispersed sites off dirt roads, but I’ve also camped in bustling KOA-style campgrounds in California and in grassy fields during bike races and festivals in the Northeast. Regardless of the setting, these trips followed a blueprint: we spent all day outdoors, stayed up late talking under the stars, and went home knowing, and…

When Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe crossed the finish line at the London Marathon on April 26, an Adidas attendant was waiting on the sidelines to collect his shoes. The attendant wrote Sawe’s record-breaking time, 1:59.30, on the side of the shoes, waited for him to take some photos with them, and then whisked them off to Adidas’s archives in Herzogenaurach, Germany.In that moment, the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 became the fastest shoe in the world.Sabastian Sawe breaks the two-hour barrier and sets a record time of 1:59.30 at the 2026 London Marathon. [Photo: Adidas]Sawe was the first person to…