Environment

The Trump administration is quietly weakening regulations meant to protect groundwater and limit radiation exposure to workers at new nuclear reactors, NPR reports. Trump has worked to speed up the deployment of new nuclear reactor designs to power AI data centers.

Forecasters are increasingly turning to new AI tools, using them alongside conventional physics-based models to improve predictions. Nvidia and Google, for example, each claim that their AI weather models have outperformed traditional forecasting methods.

President Trump has talked about dismantling FEMA as his administration slashes staff from federal agencies. But now, FEMA will “cease offboarding” workers, CNN reports. A major winter storm threatens to wreck power grids and make travel treacherous across much of the US over the weekend and into next week.

Scientists announced a new expedition to study the potential origin of ‘dark oxygen’ rising from the abyss, a recent discovery that’s been contested by some other researchers and mining companies seeking to exploit new sources of battery minerals along the seafloor.

Planet-heating carbon and methane pollution had actually fallen by around 20 percent over the past decade, but ticked back up again in 2025 as the Trump administration slashed environmental regulations.

At least 25 were canceled last year in the US, according to an analysis by Heatmap Pro. It’s a significant increase from 2024 as local opposition to energy and water-intensive data centers grows across the nation.

It made up the towns of “Whata Bod” and “Orangeotild,” for example.

That includes the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and other initiatives tackling environmental and human rights issues.

In Virginia, environmental group Food & Water Watch found that one permanent data center job is created for every $13 million invested. It estimates that data centers account for 0.01 percent of US jobs, but 4.4 percent of electricity consumption, and is petitioning Congress to end all new data center construction.

Since his administration attacked Caracas and arrested President Nicolás Maduro, Trump’s been clear that he wants US companies to “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken [oil] infrastructure” in Venezuela. That’s easier said than done with massive logistical challenges and political instability still weighing on the oil industry in the region.

Scientists have had to contend with a spate of misinformation this year about efforts to purportedly resurrect long-lost species like the woolly mammoth.

The Trump administration has taken down content about the human causes of global warming — greenhouse gases from fossil fuels — from the Environmental Protection Agency website, part of a larger purge of science-backed information on federal websites.

They used 30 times more electricity on average than other models according to research by the AI Energy Score project that included responses to 1,000 written prompts. “We should be smarter about the way that we use AI ... Choosing the right model for the right task is important,” Hugging Face research scientist Sasha Luccioni tells Bloomberg.

Negotiators are deadlocked in a tumultuous close to United Nations climate talks. A proposed roadmap for transitioning away from coal, oil, and gas has become a flashpoint. “We’re facing the reality of a no-deal scenario” EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra said earlier today.

A blaze broke out in the conference venue Thursday, just ahead of negotiations scheduled to come to a close today in Brazil.