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From Iran to Ukraine, everyone’s trying to hack security cameras

civic hacking, Security, security cameras, syndication / Mike M. / March 7, 2026

Research shows apparent Iranian state hackers trying to hijack consumer-grade cameras.

Cameras are placed in public areas in Tehran. Credit: Anadolu/Getty Images

For decades, satellites, drones, and human spotters have all been part of war’s surveillance and reconnaissance tool kit. In an age of cheap, insecure, Internet-connected consumer devices, however, militaries have gained another powerful set of eyes on the ground: every hackable security camera installed outside a home or on a city street, pointed at potential bombing targets.

On Wednesday, Tel Aviv–based security firm Check Point released new research describing hundreds of hacking attempts that targeted consumer-grade security cameras around the Middle East—with many apparently timed to Iran’s recent missile and drone strikes on targets that included Israel, Qatar, and Cyprus. Those camera-hijacking efforts, some of which Check Point has attributed to a hacker group that’s been previously linked to Iranian intelligence, suggest that Iran’s military has tried to use civilian surveillance cameras as a means to spot targets, plan strikes, or assess damage from its attacks as it retaliates for the US and Israeli bombings that have sparked a widening war in the region.

Iran wouldn’t be the first to adopt that camera-hacking surveillance tactic. Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported that the Israeli military had accessed “nearly all” the traffic cameras in Iran’s capital of Tehran and, in partnership with the CIA, used them to target the air strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. In Ukraine, the country’s officials have warned for years that Russia has hacked consumer surveillance cameras to target strikes and spy on troop movements—while Ukrainian hackers have hijacked Russian cameras to surveil Russian troops and perhaps even to monitor its own attacks.

Exploiting the insecurity of networked civilian cameras is, in other words, becoming part of the standard operating procedures of armed forces around the world: A relatively cheap and accessible means of getting eyes on a target hundreds of thousands of miles away. “Now hacking cameras has become part of the playbook of military activity,” says Sergey Shykevich, who leads threat intelligence research at Check Point. “You get direct visibility without using any expensive military means such as satellites, often with better resolution.”

“For any attacker who is planning military activity, it’s now a straightforward act to try it,” Shykevich adds, “because it’s easy and provides very good value for your effort.”

In the latest example of that recon technique, Check Point found that hackers had attempted to exploit five distinct vulnerabilities in Hikvision and Dahua security cameras that would have allowed their takeover. Shykevich describes dozens of attempts—which Check Point says it blocked—across Bahrain, Cyprus, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as hundreds more in Israel itself. Check Point notes it could view attempted intrusions only on networks equipped with its firewall network appliances and that its findings are likely skewed by the company’s relatively larger customer base in Israel.

None of the five vulnerabilities are “complicated or sophisticated,” Shykevich says. All of them have been patched in previous software updates from Hikvision and Dahua and were discovered years ago—one as early as 2017. Yet as with hackable bugs in so many Internet-of-things devices, they persist in security cameras because owners rarely install updates or even become aware that they’re available. (Hikvision and Dahua are both effectively banned in the United States due to security concerns; neither company responded to WIRED’s request for comment on the hacking campaign.)

Check Point found that the camera-hacking attempts were largely timed to February 28 and March 1, just as the US and Israel were beginning their air strikes across Iran. Some of the attempted camera takeovers also occurred in mid-January, as protests spread across Iran and the US and Israel made preparations for their attacks. Check Point says it has tied the targeting of the cameras to three distinct groups it believes to be Iranian in origin, based on the servers and VPNs they used to carry out the campaign. Some of those servers, Shykevich notes, have been previously linked in particular to the Iranian hacker group known as Handala, which several cybersecurity companies have identified as working on behalf of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security.

In fact, Check Point says it tracked similar Iranian targeting of cameras as early as last June during Israel’s previous 12-day war with Iran. The head of Israel’s National Cybersecurity Directorate, Yossi Karadi, also warned at the time that Iranian hackers were using civilian camera systems to target Israelis and had compromised a street camera across from the country’s Weizmann Institute of Science before hitting it with a missile.

The joint US and Israeli strikes on Iran and the assassination of Khamenei have revealed, however, just how thoroughly Israel’s own hackers—or those of its allies, including potentially the US—had penetrated Tehran’s camera systems, too. Israeli intelligence sources speaking to the Financial Times described assembling the patterns of life of Iranian security guards around Khamenei based on the real-time data that traffic cameras provided across the city. “We knew Tehran like we know Jerusalem,” one source told the FT.

Prior to the current escalating war in the Middle East, the powerful surveillance role of hacked civilian cameras first became apparent in the midst of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Ukrainian officials warned in January 2024, for instance, that Russian forces had hacked two security cameras in the capital of Kyiv to observe Ukrainian infrastructure targets and air defenses. “The aggressor used these cameras to collect data to prepare and adjust strikes on Kyiv,” reads a post from Ukraine’s SSU intelligence service.

The SSU went so far, it writes, as to somehow disable 10,000 Internet-connected cameras—it didn’t reveal how—that could be used by Russia’s military. “The SSU is calling on the owners of street webcams to stop online broadcasts from their devices, and on citizens to report any streams from such cameras,” the post reads.

Even as Ukraine has attempted to block that spying technique, it seems also to have adopted it. When the Ukrainian military used its own underwater drone to blow up a Russian submarine in the bay of Sevastopol in Crimea, it published video that defense-focused news outlet The Military Times noted looked very much like it had come from a hacked surveillance camera. A BBC report about Ukrainian hacktivist group One Fist notes more explicitly that they were commended by the Ukrainian government for work that included hacking cameras to watch Russia’s movement of matériel across the Kerch Bridge between Russia and Crimea.

“The advantages of co-opting a civilian camera network are presence and expense,” says Peter W. Singer, a military-focused researcher at the New America Foundation and the author of the 2015 science fiction novel Ghost Fleet, which imagines future war scenarios. “The adversary’s already done the work for you. They’ve placed cameras all around a city.”

Singer notes that hacking those cameras is vastly cheaper and easier than relying on satellites or high-altitude drones. The trick is stealthier than drones, too, which are only viable when the enemy has few air defenses, and drones can often be detected by countersurveillance measures. Ground-level, hacked cameras also offer angles and perspectives that aren’t possible with the bird’s-eye view of a satellite or drone, he adds. All of that makes them powerful tools for reconnaissance, targeting, and what he calls “bomb damage assessment” after a strike.

Hacked cameras are a tough problem to solve, in part, because those who have the ability to secure them rarely suffer the consequences of that surveillance, says Beau Woods, a security researcher who formerly worked as an adviser to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. “The manufacturer of the device and the owner of the device are not the victim,” Woods says. “So the victim isn’t in a position to control the tool that’s used by the adversary.”

The difficulty of pinning down responsibility for Internet-connected consumer cameras means that their role in military surveillance is likely to persist for many years—and wars—to come.

“Who’s liable, who’s responsible, who’s accountable?” Woods asks. “The camera itself is not directly causing the harm. But it’s part of the kill chain.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

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Apple users in the US can no longer download ByteDance’s Chinese apps

Apple, bytedance, china, Policy, syndication, tiktok / Kris Guyer / March 7, 2026

In recent years, however, Apple has been developing more sophisticated mechanisms to identify where an App Store user is physically located. In 2023, the tech outlet 9to5Mac reported that Apple devices had created a new system called “countryd” to precisely determine a person’s location based on “data such as current GPS location, country code from the Wi-Fi router, and information obtained from the SIM card.”

Observers theorized that the new system was created in response to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, which went into effect in 2024 and required Apple to begin allowing people in the EU to download apps from third-party app marketplaces. Apple complied with the EU regulation, but it restricted the accessibility of alternative app stores only to people physically in the territory of the EU.

The exact mechanism Apple uses to enable geoblocking of iPhone apps is unclear, says Friso Bostoen, assistant professor of law at Tilburg University who has studied the effect of EU regulations on Apple. “Presumably, there’s some on-device processing saying, ‘Look, this phone is somewhere in the EU borders, so you get an eligibility green check mark.’” And if the device detects that an EU resident leaves the region for more than 90 days, according to Apple’s policy, that eligibility is withdrawn, Bostoen says.

The new restriction on ByteDance apps in the US resembles the EU-specific geographical restrictions that were previously reported. Some ByteDance users have said that they are able to circumvent the restrictions by using virtual private networks, which allow people to spoof their device’s location, but the work-arounds aren’t foolproof.

“Apple may use the IP address of your Internet connection to approximate your location in order to determine whether certain apps that are subject to legal restrictions in some regions can be made available to you,” the App Store’s legal terms explicitly state. But according to online archives of the terms page, this specific sentence was added at the end of January 2025, shortly after the company first removed ByteDance apps from the US version of the App Store.

So far, there’ve been few instances of Apple actually implementing technical capabilities to geoblock users. “However, you could think about this having some wider spillover effects if this becomes the more general way of ensuring that apps that shouldn’t be available indeed aren’t available,” Bostoen says. “If Apple gets more sophisticated about blocking access in a way that cannot simply be circumvented with a VPN, obviously citizens in those places are now left with much less liberty.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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This is why our electricity bills are so high right now

electricity, energy policy, Policy, syndication, utilities / Rejus Almole / March 3, 2026

Trump, however, asserted in his State of the Union address that prices were going down. “Nobody can believe when they see the kind of numbers and especially energy, when they see energy going down to numbers like that,” he said. “It’s like another big tax cut.” He proposed what he called a “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” that will require major tech companies to provide for their own power needs. It was not immediately clear how that plan would be carried out or whether it would alleviate the burden on a power system that still needs to make upgrades to replace aging equipment and address extreme-weather threats.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, blames Democrats for high electricity prices. “High electricity prices are a choice,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright has said repeatedly. On February 18, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt took up the argument, saying “red states with Republican legislatures currently enjoy lower average retail electricity prices than blue states with Democrat legislatures.”

Both are echoing a talking point that a fossil fuel industry-aligned think tank, the Institute for Energy Research, began promoting last year. The group released a report, Blue States, High Rates, that concluded 86 percent of states with above-average electricity prices voted for the Democratic presidential candidates in 2020 and 2024.

But the latest figures from the EIA show that states that voted for Trump in 2024 are sharing the pain of the power price shocks sweeping the country; 13 of the 24 states where prices rose in 2025 by more than the US average of 5 percent voted for the Republican candidate.

Last November’s elections made clear that anger about power prices crosses political fault lines. Not only did Democrats win the New Jersey and Virginia governors’ races with campaigns focused on high electricity prices, Democratic candidates also ousted two Republicans from seats on Georgia’s Public Service Commission by campaigning against recent rate hikes for Georgia Power. They were the first Democrats to win state-level office in a statewide election since 2006 in Georgia. The state will be a key midterm battleground this year, with pivotal races for US Senate and governor.

Both Democrats and climate activists are committed to the electricity cost message in their campaigns against the Trump administration and Republicans this year.

“The energy affordability crisis is not a red or blue issue,” said David Kieve, the president of Environmental Defense Fund Action, in an email last week. “It’s a pocketbook issue.”

Dan Gearino covers the business and policy of renewable energy and utilities, often with an emphasis on the midwestern United States. He is the main author of ICN’s Inside Clean Energy newsletter. He came to ICN in 2018 after a nine-year tenure at The Columbus Dispatch, where he covered the business of energy. Before that, he covered politics and business in Iowa and in New Hampshire. He grew up in Warren County, Iowa, just south of Des Moines, and lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Marianne Lavelle is the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Inside Climate News. She has covered environment, science, law, and business in Washington, D.C. for more than two decades. She has won the Polk Award, the Investigative Editors and Reporters Award, and numerous other honors. Lavelle spent four years as online energy news editor and writer at National Geographic. She spearheaded a project on climate lobbying for the nonprofit journalism organization, the Center for Public Integrity. She also has worked at U.S. News and World Report magazine and The National Law Journal. While there, she led the award-winning 1992 investigation, “Unequal Protection,” on the disparity in environmental law enforcement against polluters in minority and white communities. Lavelle received her master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and is a graduate of Villanova University.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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Iowa county adopts strict zoning rules for data centers, but residents still worry

AI, data centers, envirtonme, regulation, syndication / Paul Patrick / March 2, 2026

Though the rules are among the strictest in the US, locals say they aren’t enough.

A rendering of the QTS data center currently under construction in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Credit: QTS

PALO, Iowa—There are two restaurants in Palo, not counting the chicken wings and pizza sold at the only gas station in town.

All three establishments, including the gas station, stand on the same half-mile stretch of First Street, an artery that divides the marshy floodplain of the Cedar River to the east from hundreds of acres of cornfields on the west.

During historic flooding in 2008, the Cedar River surged 10 feet above its previous record, cresting at 31 feet and wiping out homes and businesses well outside the floodplain.

Nearly 20 years later, those structures have been rebuilt, but Palo residents still worry about the river. Except these days, they worry that data centers will drink it dry.

In an effort to shield residents and natural resources from the negative impacts of hyperscale data center development in rural Linn County, officials have adopted what may be one of the most comprehensive local data center zoning ordinances in the nation.

The new ordinance requires data center developers to conduct a comprehensive water study as part of their zoning application and to enter into a water-use agreement with the county before construction. It also places limits on noise and light pollution, introduces mandatory setbacks of 1,000 feet from residentially zoned property, and requires developers to compensate the county for damage to roads or infrastructure during construction and to contribute to a community betterment fund.

“We are trying to put together the most protective, transparent ordinance possible,” Kirsten Running-Marquardt, chair of the Linn County Board of Supervisors, told the nearly 100 residents who gathered for the draft ordinance’s first public reading in early February.

But seated beneath a van-sized American flag hanging from the rafters of the drafty Palo Community Center gymnasium, residents asked for even stronger protections.

One by one, they approached the microphone at the front of the gym to voice concerns about water use, electricity rates, light pollution, the impacts of low-frequency noise on livestock, and the county’s ability to enforce the terms of the ordinance. Some, including Dorothy Landt of Palo, called for a complete moratorium on new data center development.

“Why has Linn County, Iowa, become a dumping ground for soon-to-be obsolete technology that spoils our landscape and robs us of our resources?” Landt asked. “While I admire the efforts of the Board of Supervisors to propose a data center ordinance, I would prefer to see all future data centers banned from Linn County.”

The county is already home to two major data center projects, operated by Google and QTS. Both are located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa’s second-largest city, and are therefore subject to its laws. The new ordinance would apply only to unincorporated areas of the county, which make up more than two-thirds of its geographic footprint.

In October 2025, Google informed the Linn County Board of Supervisors of early plans to construct a six-building campus in Palo, part of unincorporated Linn County, alongside the soon-to-reopen Duane Arnold Energy Center, Iowa’s sole nuclear power plant. Later that month, Google signed a 25-year power purchase agreement with the plant, committing to buy the bulk of the electricity it generates.

A view of the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Palo, Iowa. Credit: NextEra Energy

Google has not yet submitted a formal application to the county for the second campus, but its announcement last year, as well as interest from another, unnamed, hyperscale data company, prompted Linn County officials to begin work on an ordinance setting the terms for any new development, said Charlie Nichols, director of planning and development for Linn County.

“I just don’t want to be misled by anything. … I want to know as much as possible before we go ahead with this,” Sue Biederman of Cedar Rapids told supervisors at the public meeting in February.

In drafting the ordinance, Nichols and his staff drew on the experiences of communities nationwide, meeting with local government officials in regions that have seen massive booms in data center development, including several counties in northern Virginia, the “data center capital of the world.”

As data center development balloons, many communities that initially zoned the operations as warehouses or standard commercial users are abandoning that practice, Nichols noted.

The extreme energy and water demands of data centers simply cannot be accounted for by existing zoning frameworks, he said. “These are generational uses with generational infrastructure impacts, and treating them as a normal warehouse or normal commercial user is just not working.”

Loudoun County, Virginia, for example, is home to 198 data centers, nearly all of which were built before the county required conditional or “special exception” use designations for data centers. At the urging of hyperscale-weary residents, the county is now in the second phase of a plan to establish data-center-specific zoning standards.

Similar reassessments are taking place across the country, Chris Jordan, program manager for AI and innovation at the National League of Cities, wrote in an email to Inside Climate News. “We’re seeing tighter zoning standards, more required impact studies, and in some cases temporary moratoria while communities assess infrastructure capacity,” Jordan wrote.

The Linn County, Iowa, ordinance goes one step further than tightening existing zoning rules. Instead, it creates a new, exclusive-use zoning district for data centers, granting county officials the power to set specific application requirements and development standards for projects.

Residents of Linn County, Iowa, gather at the Palo Community Center on Feb. 4 to comment on a draft of a new data center ordinance. Credit: Anika Jane Beamer/Inside Climate News

No other counties in the state have introduced similar zoning requirements, said Nichols. In fact, few jurisdictions nationwide have.

“Linn County’s approach is more comprehensive than many local zoning updates we’ve seen,” Jordan wrote. The creation of a data center-specific district, especially one that requires formal water-use agreements and economic development agreements, goes further than typical zoning amendments for data centers, Jordan said.

Despite the layers of protection baked into the new ordinance, Linn County still has limited ability to protect local water resources. Without a municipal water utility, permitting in rural Iowa communities falls to the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR), explained Nichols. Similarly, electric rates fall under the jurisdiction of the state utilities commission and cannot be regulated by the county.

Data centers may tap rivers or drill deep wells into shared aquifers, so long as that use complies with the terms of their water-use permit from the Iowa DNR. That leaves the Cedar River and public and private wells, which provide drinking water to much of Linn County, vulnerable.

Residents fear a new, large water user will dry up their wells, as occurred near a Meta data center in Mansfield, Georgia.

“We know that we can have multi-year droughts. The question is, are we depleting that river and the water table faster than it’s running?” Leland Freie, a Linn County resident, told supervisors at the first public meeting on the ordinance.

Without superseding state authority, the Linn County ordinance attempts to claw back a bit more local control, Nichols explained.

As part of their zoning application, data centers would submit a study “prepared by a qualified professional” assessing the capacity of proposed water sources, anticipating demands and cooling technologies, and developing contingency plans in case the water supply is interrupted.

Requiring a water study ensures, at a minimum, a baseline understanding of local water resources and dynamics near proposed data centers. That’s something the state of Iowa generally lacks, said Cara Matteson, a former geologist and the sustainability director for Linn County.

DNR staff told Matteson that water data gathered in Linn County by qualified researchers on behalf of a data center applicant would be incorporated in state-level permitting and enforcement decisions.

The department confirmed in an email to Inside Climate News that it would use the additional local water data.

If a data center’s application is approved, developers would then enter into an agreement with Linn County, outlining terms for water-use monitoring and reporting to both the county and the DNR. The agreement could also include contingency plans for droughts.

Still, the county has limited ability to act on the water monitoring data it’s seeking. The DNR doesn’t just issue water-use permits; it also issues penalties for permit violations.

Linn County’s zoning rule underwent several modifications in response to questions raised by attendees at the first two public readings, Nichols said.

From its first reading to final adoption, the ordinance has expanded to include language setting light pollution standards, requiring a waste management plan, including the Iowa DNR in the water-use agreement to address potential well interference issues, and requiring an applicant-led public meeting before any zoning commission meetings.

“I am very confident that no ordinance for data centers in Iowa is asking for more information or asking for more requirements to be met than our ordinance right now,” said Nichols at the final reading.

The Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance has said that it strongly supports current and future data center development in the area. The new ordinance is not an effective moratorium, Nichols said. He said he “strongly believes” that a data center can be built within the adopted framework.

Google spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment.

New rules may prompt data centers to develop elsewhere, acknowledged Brandy Meisheid, a supervisor whose district includes many of Linn County’s smaller communities. But the ordinance sets out to protect residents, not developers, Meisheid said. “If it’s too high a price for them to pay, they don’t have to come.”

Anika Jane Beamer covers the environment and climate change in Iowa, with a particular focus on water, soil, and CAFOs. A lifelong Midwesterner, she writes about changing ecosystems from one of the most transformed landscapes on the continent. She holds a master’s degree in science writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as a bachelor’s degree in biology and Spanish from Grinnell College. She is a former Outrider Fellow at Inside Climate News and was named a Taylor-Blakeslee Graduate Fellow by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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The strange animals that control their body heat

heterothermy, homeothermy, mammals, Science, syndication / Mike M. / March 1, 2026

Some creatures can dramatically alter their internal temperature and outlast storms, floods and, predators

An edible dormouse. Credit: DeAgostini/Getty Images

In 1774, British physician-scientist Charles Blagden received an unusual invitation from a fellow physician: to spend time in a small room that was hotter, he wrote, “than it was formerly thought any living creature could bear.”

Many people may have been appalled by this offer, but Blagden was delighted by the opportunity for self-experimentation. He marveled as his own temperature remained at 98° Fahrenheit (approximately 37° Celsius), even as the temperature of the room approached 200°F (about 93°C).

Today, this ability to maintain a stable body temperature—called homeothermy—is known to exist among myriad species of mammals and birds. But there are also some notable exceptions. The body temperature of the fat-tailed dwarf lemur, for example, can fluctuate by nearly 45°F (25°C) over a single day.

In fact, a growing body of research suggests that many more animals than scientists once appreciated employ this flexible approach—heterothermy—varying their body temperature for minutes, hours, or weeks at a time. This may help the animals to persist through all sorts of dangers.

“Because we’re homeotherms, we assume all mammals work the way we do,” says Danielle Levesque, a mammalian ecophysiologist at the University of Maine. But in recent years, as improvements in technology allowed researchers to more easily track small animals and their metabolisms in the wild, “we’re starting to find a lot more weirdness,” she says.

The most extreme—and well-known—form of heterothermy is classic hibernation, which has been most extensively studied in critters who use it to save energy and so survive the long, cold winters of the Northern Hemisphere. These animals enter long periods of what scientists call deep torpor, when metabolism slows to a crawl and body temperature can drop to just above freezing.

But hibernation is just one end of what some scientists now consider a spectrum. Many mammals can deploy shorter bouts of shallow torpor—loosely defined as smaller reductions in metabolism and smaller fluctuations in body temperature—as the need arises, suggesting that torpor has more functions than scientists previously realized.

“It’s extremely complicated,” says comparative physiologist Fritz Geiser of the University of New England in Australia. “It’s much more interesting than homeothermy.”

Australian eastern long-eared bats, for example, adjust their torpor use based on day-to-day changes in weather conditions. Mari Aas Fjelldal, a bat biologist at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and the University of Helsinki, used tiny transmitters to measure skin temperatures as 37 free-ranging bats in Australia went about their daily lives. Like many heterothermic species, the bats spent more time in torpor when it was cold, but they also sank into torpor more often as rain and wind speeds picked up, Fjelldal and colleagues reported in Oecologia in 2021. This hunkering down makes sense, says Fjelldal: Wind and rain make flying more energetically demanding—a big problem when you weigh less than a small packet of M&M’s—and make it more costly to find the insects the bats eat.

There are even reports of pregnant hoary bats entering torpor during unpredictable spring storms, a physiological maneuver that basically pauses their pregnancies. “It means that they can, to some degree, actually decide a bit when to give birth,” says Fjelldal, “which is really handy when you’re living in an environment that can be quite harsh in the spring.” Fjelldal, who wasn’t involved in that study, notes that producing milk is expensive metabolically, so it’s advantageous to give birth when food availability is good.

Other animals, like sugar gliders—tiny, pink-nosed marsupials that “fly” through the trees using wing-like folds of skin—rarely use torpor but seem able to take advantage of it in the case of major weather emergencies. During a storm with category 1 cyclone winds of nearly 100 kilometers per hour and 9.5 centimeters of rain falling in a single night, the gliders were more likely to stay cuddled up in their tree-hole nests, and many entered torpor, reducing body temperature from 94.1°F (34.5°C) to an average of about 66°F (19°C), Geiser and colleagues found.

Similarly, in response to an accidental flooding event in the lab, researchers observed a highly unusual period of multiday torpor in a golden spiny mouse, its temperature reaching a low of about 75°F (24°C).

This more flexible use of torpor can help heterotherms wait out a catastrophe, Geiser says. In contrast, homeothermic species can’t just dial back their need for food and water and may not be able to outlast challenging conditions.

“Maybe there’s no food, maybe no water, it may be really warm,” says ecophysiologist Julia Nowack of Liverpool John Moores University in England, a coauthor on the sugar glider study. Torpor, especially in the tropics, has “lots of different triggers.”

Threats of a different sort, such as the presence of predators, can also prompt hunkering down. The (perhaps perfectly named) edible dormouse, for example, sometimes enters long periods of torpor in early summer. At first, this behavior puzzled researchers—why snooze away the summer, when temperatures are comfortable and food abundant, especially if it meant forgoing the chance to reproduce?

After looking at years of data collected by various scientists, a pair of researchers concluded that because spring and early summer are especially active periods for owls, these small snackable critters were likely opting to spend their nights torpid, safely hidden in underground burrows, to avoid becoming dinner. In what is thought to be a similar strategy to avoid nocturnal predators, Fjelldal’s bats alter their torpor use slightly depending on the phase of the moon, spending more time torpid as the moon grows fuller and they become easier to spot.

The fat-tailed dunnart, a mouse-like carnivorous marsupial native to Australia, is a third species to lie low when it feels more at risk of being eaten. In one study, researchers placed dunnarts in two types of enclosures: Some had lots of ground cover in the form of plastic sheeting, simulating an environment protected from predators, while other enclosures had little cover, simulating a greater risk of predation. In the higher-risk settings, the animals foraged less and their body temperatures became more variable.

Levesque, who has studied similar non-torpor temperature flexibility in large tree shrews, says that even small variations in body temperature can be important for saving water and energy.

Indeed, water loss during hot weather can pose serious risks to many mammals, and heterothermy is an important conservation tool for some. As Blagden observed, people are marvelously capable of maintaining stable temperatures even in horrifically hot environments, due in large part to our sweating abilities. But this isn’t necessarily a good strategy for smaller mammals—such evaporative cooling in a sweltering climate can quickly lead to dehydration.

Instead, creatures like Madagascar’s leaf-nosed bats use torpor. On warm days, the bats enter mini bouts of torpor lasting just a few minutes. But during especially hot days, the bats become torpid for up to seven hours, reducing their metabolism to less than 25 percent of normal and allowing their body temperature to rise as high as 109.2°F (42.9°C). And in an experiment with ringtail possums, slightly raising their body temperature by about 3°C (5.4°F) during a simulated heat wave saved the animals an estimated 10 grams of water per hour — a lot for a creature weighing less than 800 grams.

This heterothermic way of life gives some animals a bit of a buffer when it comes to coping with variability in their environments, says physiological ecologist Liam McGuire of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. But it can only do so much, he says; heterothermy is unlikely to exempt them from the challenge of rapidly evolving weather conditions brought by climate change.

As for Blagden, he saw the human body as remarkable in its capacity to maintain a steady temperature, even by “generating cold” when ambient temperatures climbed too high. Today, however, scientists are beginning to appreciate that for many mammals, allowing body temperature to be a bit more flexible may be key to survival as well.

This story originally appeared at Knowable Magazine.

Knowable Magazine explores the real-world significance of scholarly work through a journalistic lens.

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Trump moves to ban Anthropic from the US government

AI, Anthrophic, Department of Defense, department of war, Pentagon, Policy, syndication / Rejus Almole / February 28, 2026

The dispute between Anthropic and the Department of Defense has escalated in recent days, with officials publicly trading barbs with the AI company on social media.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, earlier this week. He gave the company until Friday to commit to changing the terms of its contract to allow “all lawful use” of its models. Hegseth praised Anthropic’s products during the meeting and said that the Department of Defense wanted to continue working with Anthropic, according to one source familiar with interaction who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Some experts say that the dispute boils down to a clash over vibes rather than concrete disagreements over how artificial intelligence should be deployed. “This is such an unnecessary dispute in my opinion,” says Michael Horowitz, an expert on military use of AI and former Deputy Assistant Secretary for emerging technologies at the Pentagon. “It is about theoretical use cases that are not on the table for now.”

Horowitz notes that Anthropic has supported all of the ways the Department of Defense has proposed using its technology thus far. “My sense is that the Pentagon and Anthropic agree at present about the use cases where the technology is not ready for prime time,” he adds.

Anthropic was founded on the idea that AI should be built with safety at its core. In January, Amoedi penned a blog post about the risks of powerful artificial intelligence that touched upon the dangers of fully autonomous AI-controlled weapons.

“These weapons also have legitimate uses in the defense of democracy,” Amodei wrote. “But they are a dangerous weapon to wield.”

Additional reporting by Paresh Dave.

This story originally appeared at WIRED.com

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Block lays off 40% of workforce as it goes all-in on AI tools

AI, block, coding, layoffs, syndication / Rejus Almole / February 28, 2026

The staff reduction at Block comes as anxiety rises about AI leading to job losses across vast parts of the economy.

Investors and economists are grappling with an influx of US economic data and corporate announcements in an effort to gauge the impact the technology could be having on the labor market. The latest non-farm payrolls figures were better than expected, suggesting the domestic jobs market was stabilizing, but several big US companies have committed to cutting staff.

Amazon, UPS, Dow, Nike, Home Depot, and others in late January announced they would be cutting a combined 52,000 jobs.

Dorsey said the cuts at Block, which owns the payment processor Square, came despite what he described as a “strong” financial performance in 2025.

Block has made a contrarian bet on bitcoin at a time when many payment companies favored stablecoins: cash-like digital tokens that became regulated in the US last year.

Block’s strategy was spearheaded by Dorsey, a “bitcoin maximalist” who has said he believes the digital currency will eventually eclipse the dollar.

The company offers payment services in bitcoin for merchants and consumers—and suffered a loss on its own bitcoin holdings as the price of the cryptocurrency dropped 23 percent this year.

In contrast, payment companies that made a bet on stablecoins experienced a boost. Stripe earlier this week said its stablecoin transaction volumes increased fourfold last year.

In its fiscal fourth quarter, Block reported revenue of almost $6.3 billion, in line with Wall Street expectations. Its earnings tumbled to 19 cents a share, owing to a $234 million hit on its bitcoin holdings.

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15 state attorneys general sue RFK Jr. over “anti-science” vaccine policy

anti-vaccine activists, health, HHS, rfk jr, syndication, vaccines / Mike M. / February 26, 2026

This administration may be hazardous to your health

Trump administration’s reduced vaccine schedule “throws science out the window.”

A healthcare worker receives a Pfizer-BioNtech Covid-19 vaccine at Jackson Memorial Hospital on December 15, 2020 in Miami, Florida. Credit: Getty Images | Joe Raedle

Scientists have long warned that a warming world is likely to hasten the spread of infectious diseases, making vaccination even more critical to safeguard public health.

And though most scientists hail vaccines as one of public health’s greatest achievements, they have provoked fear, distrust, and contentious resistance since Edward Jenner invented the first vaccine, to prevent smallpox, in the late 1700s.

Yet, until now, the United States never installed an outspoken vaccine critic like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a top health official with the power to upend federal childhood vaccine recommendations. Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy and other top officials in the Trump administration have waged an “unprecedented attack on the nation’s evidence-based childhood immunization schedule,” a lawsuit, filed by 15 states, charged on Tuesday. Their actions will make people sicker and strain state resources, the suit claims.

A coalition of 14 attorneys general and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, is suing Kennedy, who has long promoted debunked theories linking vaccines to autism, as well as HHS, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and its acting director, Jay Bhattacharya.

The multistate coalition is suing the agencies and their leaders, Mayes said in a press briefing Tuesday, “over their needlessly confusing, scientifically unsound, and unlawful revision of America’s immunization schedule.”

The suit also challenges Kennedy’s abrupt firing and “unlawful replacement” of 17 experts on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which recommends which vaccines children and adults should receive, “with unqualified individuals whose minority anti-vaccine views align with Kennedy’s.”

In January, the CDC, with advice from the reconstituted ACIP, took seven childhood shots off the list of vaccines routinely recommended for all children, rescinding the CDC’s established guidance that vaccines protecting against rotavirus, meningococcal disease, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, influenza, COVID-19, and respiratory syncytial virus should be universally administered.

All the “demoted” vaccines, as the lawsuit calls them, prevent diseases that carry the risk of death. The January CDC memo recommends that parents consult with doctors for these vaccines, “taking the risk profile of each unique child into account.”

It does not make provisions for the millions of Americans who lack access to health providers who would provide such consultations.

ACIP’s vaccine recommendations have traditionally guided US health insurance coverage decisions, state school vaccine requirements, and physicians’ advice to parents and patients, Bonta said at the briefing. But Kennedy fired all the voting ACIP members four months after he promised Congress during his confirmation hearing that he’d leave the panel intact, Bonta said, noting that the suit is the 59th California has filed against the second Trump administration.

Kennedy said his unprecedented removal of the ACIP experts was “prioritizing the restoration of public trust above any specific pro- or anti-vaccine agenda,” in a press release in June.

Yet Kennedy’s picks include vaccine skeptics who “lack the requisite scientific knowledge and expertise to advise HHS and CDC on the ‘use of vaccines and related agents for effective control of vaccine-preventable diseases,’” as required by the committee’s charter, the suit argues.

“What Secretary Kennedy has done and what the Trump administration has enabled, throws science out the window, replaces qualified experts with unqualified ideologues, and then uses the resulting confusion to undermine public confidence in vaccines that have saved millions of lives,” Mayes said.

Stoking vaccine doubts leads to lower vaccination rates, which leads to more disease outbreaks—such as the hundreds of measles cases reported in 26 states over the past two months—more children in hospitals and greater strain on state Medicaid systems and public health infrastructure, Mayes said.

Democratic states are doing everything they can to fill the gaps left by this administration’s policies, she said. “But diseases cross state lines.”

Sowing doubt and confusion

The administration cited Denmark’s more limited childhood immunization schedule to justify its changes, but the Scandinavian country has fewer circulating infectious diseases and universal health care for a population that is tiny compared to the United States, the suit notes.

“Copying Denmark’s vaccine schedule without copying Denmark’s healthcare system doesn’t give families more options,” Mayes said, noting that millions of Americans lack access to health care, particularly in rural areas. “It just leaves kids unprotected from serious diseases.”

Inside Climate News asked HHS how it will ensure that parents without access to health care get their children the vaccines they need and how the administration plans to protect vulnerable populations as climate change fuels the spread of infectious diseases.

“This is a publicity stunt dressed up as a lawsuit,” said HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard, ignoring the questions. “By law, the health secretary has clear authority to make determinations on the CDC immunization schedule and the composition of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The CDC immunization schedule reforms reflect common-sense public health policy shared by peer, developed countries.”

The revised childhood immunization schedule wasn’t based on new science or expert consensus, Mayes said. “It was based on an ideological agenda, one that Secretary Kennedy has been pushing for years.”

Kennedy has been at the forefront of a dangerous movement that has significantly eroded trust in safe and effective vaccines, Bonta said. “While RFK Jr. is entitled to his own personal opinions, opinions, mind you, not facts, he isn’t entitled to use his opinions as the basis for breaking the law and endangering our children.”

The actions that RFK Jr. and ACIP have taken flout decades of scientific research, harm public health, and strain state resources by sowing doubt and confusion in vaccines and in science, Bonta said.

“California will be forced to expend resources to treat once rare diseases, to respond to outbreaks, and to combat misinformation,” he said. “I refuse to allow RFK Jr. to threaten the health and well being of the more than eight million young people who call the Golden State home, the 400,000 babies that are born here in California each year.”

Routine childhood vaccinations will prevent approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations, and 1,129,000 deaths among US children born between 1994 and 2023, scientists with the CDC reported in August 2024, before Donald Trump returned to office. The immunizations resulted in direct savings of $540 billion and societal savings of $2.7 trillion, they concluded.

“Without these vaccines, not only will our children and vulnerable individuals get sick, but our healthcare systems will have to shoulder the burden of increased preventable illnesses, preventable hospital visits, and avoidable costs,” Bonta said. “Vaccines save lives and save our states money. To get rid of them is illogical and unconscionable.”

Climate-fueled outbreaks

Two weeks before Bonta filed his latest lawsuit against the Trump administration, he denounced the Environmental Protection Agency’s repeal of the 2009 endangerment finding that recognized climate change as a threat to public health and welfare and provided the legal grounds to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

The Trump administration’s endangerment finding recision, like its overhaul of the vaccine schedule, “is completely divorced from and untethered from science and facts and data and evidence,” Bonta said at the briefing Tuesday, noting that California will continue to push back against the EPA’s action.

“We must follow the facts, the science, the evidence and data, including the interconnectivity between climate change and the spread of vaccine-preventable diseases,” Bonta said.

Climate hazards such as drought, floods, and heatwaves have exacerbated outbreaks of more than half of human infectious diseases, researchers reported in Nature Climate Change in 2022, either by impairing people’s resistance or bolstering transmission of pathogens. The team warned that the number of pathogenic diseases and transmission pathways worsened by climatic hazards “are too numerous for comprehensive societal adaptations,” underscoring the urgent need to address the source of the problem: greenhouse gases.

Arizona is seeing more extreme heat events as a result of climate change, leaving people with underlying conditions at greater risk of heat-related illness and death.

“A lack of vaccines, a lack of access to vaccines starting at birth, will make our population sicker and more vulnerable to extreme heat and to climate-related disasters,” Mayes said. “And that will be sort of a self-perpetuating cycle where you have a less healthy population that is less capable of withstanding the impacts of climate change, and then you have climate change that is expanding and growing ever-more dangerous, having a greater and greater impact on a less healthy society.”

The only bodies that are capable of providing scientific guidance and advice on vaccines to the entire country are the CDC and ACIP, Mayes said. “And we now basically don’t have that across a number of these diseases and vaccines,” she said. “So we’re not protected, and we’re going to continue to see these outbreaks across the country, including in our states, even though we’re doing everything we can to protect ourselves.”

Liza Gross is a reporter for Inside Climate News based in Northern California. She is the author of The Science Writers’ Investigative Reporting Handbook and a contributor to The Science Writers’ Handbook, both funded by National Association of Science Writers’ Peggy Girshman Idea Grants. She has long covered science, conservation, agriculture, public and environmental health and justice with a focus on the misuse of science for private gain. Prior to joining ICN, she worked as a part-time magazine editor for the open-access journal PLOS Biology, a reporter for the Food & Environment Reporting Network and produced freelance stories for numerous national outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Discover, and Mother Jones. Her work has won awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Society of Professional Journalists NorCal, and Association of Food Journalists.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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Pete Hegseth tells Anthropic to fall in line with DoD desires, or else

AI, Anthropic, Department of Defense, llm, Pete Hegseth, syndication / Tim Belzer / February 25, 2026

The act gives the administration the ability to “allocate materials, services and facilities” for national defense. The Trump and Biden administrations used the act to address a shortage of medical supplies during the coronavirus pandemic, and Trump has also used the DPA to order an increase in the US’s production of critical minerals.

The Pentagon has pushed for open-ended use of AI technology, aiming to expand the set of tools at its disposal to counter threats and to undertake military operations.

The department released its AI strategy last month, with Hegseth saying in a memo that “AI-enabled warfare and AI-enabled capability development will redefine the character of military affairs over the next decade.”

He added the US military “must build on its lead” over foreign adversaries to make soldiers “more lethal and efficient,” and that the AI race was “fueled by the accelerating pace” of innovation coming from the private sector.

Anthropic has expressed particular concern about its models being used for lethal missions that do not have a human in the loop, arguing that state of the art AI models are not reliable enough to be trusted in those contexts, said people familiar with the negotiations.

It had also pushed for new rules to govern the use of AI models for mass domestic surveillance, even where that was legal under current regulations, they added.

A decision to cut Anthropic from the defense department’s supply chain would have significant ramifications for national security work and the company, which has a $200 million contract with the department.

It would also have an impact on partners, including Palantir, that make use of Anthropic’s models.

Claude was used in the US capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January. That mission prompted queries from Anthropic about the exact manner in which its model was used, said people familiar with the matter.

A person with knowledge of Tuesday’s meeting said Amodei had stressed to Hegseth that his company had never objected to legitimate military operations.

The Defense Department declined to comment.

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Meta could end up owning 10% of AMD in new chip deal

AI, AMD, Meta, syndication, Tech / Tim Belzer / February 24, 2026

Su said the warrant structure would help “make sure that we are always a clear seat at the table when [Meta] are thinking about what they need next.”

Meta’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said he expected AMD to be “an important partner for many years to come.”

Meta has said that it will almost double its AI infrastructure spending this year to as much as $135 billion, as US tech giants rush to build the data centers to train and run AI software. It is already one of AMD’s biggest AI chip customers.

“We don’t believe that a single silicon solution will work for all of our workloads,” said Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of infrastructure. “There’s a place for Nvidia, there’s a place for AMD and… there’s a place for our own custom silicon as well. We need all three.”

Under the deal, AMD will build a custom version of its MI450 AI chips for Meta. They will be used primarily for “inference” workloads, the process of running models after they have been trained.

The chips need 6 gigawatts of power—equivalent to the amount required by 5 million US households for a year.

Increasingly creative funding arrangements to support massive AI infrastructure build-outs have emerged in recent years, leading to warnings about circular financing.

AMD has, for example, helped data center builder Crusoe secure a $300 million loan from Goldman Sachs by offering a backstop guaranteeing the use of its chips if Crusoe is unable to find customers after installing them in an Ohio facility.

Tech giants such as Meta, historically flush with cash, are meanwhile facing the prospect of tapping bond and equity markets or stemming capital returns to shareholders to help fund their unprecedented infrastructure plans. The Facebook and Instagram parent raised $30 billion in October, marking its biggest bond sale to date.

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AIs can generate near-verbatim copies of novels from training data

AI, AI jailbreak, copyright, LLM training, Policy, syndication / Tim Belzer / February 23, 2026

A US court last year found that Anthropic’s training of LLMs on some copyrighted content could be considered fair use as it was deemed “transformative.”

But it determined that storing pirated works was “inherently, irredeemably infringing,” which then led the AI group to pay $1.5 billion to settle the lawsuit.

In Germany, a ruling from November last year found that OpenAI had infringed on copyright because its model had memorized song lyrics. The case, brought by GEMA, an association representing composers, lyricists, and publishers, was considered a landmark ruling in the EU.

Rudy Telscher, a partner at law firm Husch Blackwell, said reproducing an entire book without jailbreaking is “clearly a copyright violation.” But “it’s a matter of whether this is happening enough that [AI models] could be vicariously liable for the infringement,” he added.

Anthropic said the jailbreaking technique used in the Stanford and Yale research was impractical for normal users and would require more effort to extract the text than just purchasing the content.

The company also added that its model does not store copies of specific datasets but learns from patterns and relationships between words and strings in its training data.

xAI, OpenAI, and Google did not respond to requests for comment.

The fact that AI labs have put safeguards in place to prevent training data from being extracted means they are aware of the problem, said Imperial’s de Montjoye.

Ben Zhao, a computer science professor at the University of Chicago, questioned whether AI labs really needed to use copyrighted content in training data to create cutting-edge models in the first place.

“Whether the technical result can be done or not, it’s still a question of should we be doing this?” Zhao said. “The legal side should eventually hold their ground and really be the arbiter in this whole process.”

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Study shows how rocket launches pollute the atmosphere

industrial waste, Space, space pollution, spacex, syndication / Kris Guyer / February 22, 2026

Atmospheric scientist Laura Revell, with the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, presented research showing that rocket exhaust in the atmosphere can erase some of the hard-won gains in mitigating ozone depletion.

In a high-growth scenario for the space industry, there could be as many as 2,000 launches per year, which her modeling shows could result in about 3 percent ozone loss, equal to the atmospheric impacts of a bad wildfire season in Australia. She said most of the damage comes from chlorine-rich solid rocket fuels and black carbon in the plumes.

The black carbon could also warm parts of the stratosphere by about half-a-degree Celsius as it absorbs sunlight. That heats the surrounding air and can shift winds that steer storms and areas of precipitation.

“This is probably not a fuel type that we want to start using in massive quantities in the future,” she added.

Researchers at the conference estimated that in the past five years, the mass of human‑made material injected into the upper atmosphere by re‑entries has doubled to nearly a kiloton a year. For some metals like lithium, the amount is already much larger than that contributed by disintegrating meteors.

In the emerging field of space sustainability science, researchers say orbital space and near-space should be considered part of the global environment. A 2022 journal article co-authored by Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, argued that the upper reaches of the atmosphere are experiencing increased impacts from human activities.

The expanding commercial use of what appears to be a free resource is actually shifting its real costs onto others, the article noted.

At last year’s European Geosciences Union conference, Leonard Schulz, who studies space pollution at the Technical University Braunschweig in Germany, said, “If you put large amounts of catalytic metals in the atmosphere, I immediately think about geoengineering.”

There may not be time to wait for more scientific certainty, Schulz said: “In 10 years, it might be too late to do anything about it.”

Bob Berwyn is an Austria-based reporter who has covered climate science and international climate policy for more than a decade. Previously, he reported on the environment, endangered species and public lands for several Colorado newspapers, and also worked as editor and assistant editor at community newspapers in the Colorado Rockies.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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