Powderhorn

The Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines urging Americans to eat far more meat and dairy products will, if followed, come at a major cost to the planet via huge swathes of habitat razed for farmland and millions of tons of extra planet-heating emissions.

A new inverted food pyramid recently released by Donald Trump’s health department emphasizes pictures of steak, poultry, ground beef and whole milk, alongside fruits and vegetables, as the most important foods to eat.

The new guidelines are designed to nearly double the amount of protein currently consumed by Americans. “Protein and healthy fats are essential and were wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines,” said Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary. “We are ending the war on saturated fats.”

But a surge in meat-eating by Americans would involve flattening vast tracts of ecosystems such as forests to make way for the hefty environmental hoofprint of raised livestock, emitting large quantities of greenhouse gases in the process, experts have warned.

Seriously, what the fuck is going on with fabs right now?

Micron has found a way to add new DRAM manufacturing capacity in a hurry by acquiring a chipmaking campus from Taiwanese outfit Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (PSMC).

The two companies announced the deal last weekend. Micron’s version of events says it’s signed a letter of intent to acquire Powerchip’s entire P5 site in Tongluo, Taiwan, for total cash consideration of US$1.8 billion.

China’s population fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2025 as the birthrate plunged to another record low despite the introduction of polices aimed at encouraging people to have children.

Registered births dropped to 7.92 million in 2025 – or 5.63 for every 1,000 members of the population – down 17% from 9.54 million in 2024, and the lowest since records began in 1949.

The population dropped by 3.39 million to 1.405 billion, a faster fall than 2024, while deaths rose to 11.31 million from 10.93 million in 2024, figures from China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) revealed.

Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said births in 2025 were “roughly the same level as in 1738, when China’s population was only about 150 million”.

It just occurred to me when calling my college roommate that basically, it's three. With my mom, I let it go all the way to voicemail, as she's nearly 80 and may be on the other end of the house.

But with most of my friends, if they don't answer in two rings, it's a lost cause absent external influences.

The promise of Just the Browser sounds good. Rather than fork one of the big-name browsers, just run a tiny script that turns off all the bits and functions you don't want.

Just the Browser is a new project by developer Corbin Davenport. It aims to fight the rising tide of undesirable browser features such as telemetry, LLM bot features billed as AI, and sponsored content by a clever lateral move. It uses the enterprise management features built into the leading browsers to turn these things off.

The concept is simple and appealing. Enough people want de-enshittified browsers that there are multiple forks of the big names. For Firefox, there are Waterfox and Zen as well as LibreWolf and Floorp, and projects based off much older versions of the codebase such as Pale Moon. Most people, though, tend to use Chrome and there are lots of browsers based on its Chromium upstream too, including Microsoft Edge, the Chinese-owned Opera, and from some of the people behind the original Norwegian Opera browser, Vivaldi.

Scientists have been forced to rethink the intelligence of cattle after an Austrian cow named Veronika displayed an impressive – and until now undocumented – knack for tool use.

Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker from a small town in Carinthia near the Italian border, keeps Veronika as a pet and noticed that she occasionally played with sticks and used them to scratch her body.

Wiegele said Veronika began playing with pieces of wood years ago, then worked out how to scratch herself with sticks. He said she also recognised family members’ voices and hurried to meet them when they called.

“I was naturally amazed by her extraordinary intelligence and thought how much we could learn from animals: patience, calmness, contentment, and gentleness,” he said.

Word soon got around and before long a video clip of the cow’s behaviour reached biologists in Vienna who specialise in animal intelligence. They immediately grasped the importance of the footage. “It was a cow using an actual tool,” said Dr Antonio Osuna Mascaró at the city’s University of Veterinary Medicine. “We got everything ready and jumped in the car to visit.”

The world’s oldest monastic brewery, Germany’s Weltenburger, is being sold to the Munich brewers Schneider Weisse as part of consolidation in the sector in response to plunging sales.

Beer has been brewed at Weltenburg Abbey, a stunning, still active monastery on the banks of the Danube in Bavaria, for nearly 1,000 years.

Although the facility is still owned by the Catholic church, the Benedictine monks handed over production of the brand’s award-winning lager and signature dark brews half a century ago to hired staff from the Bischofshof brewery, which will also be sold to Schneider.

The diocese of Regensburg and Schneider Weisse agreed on the sale after several years in which Weltenburger’s business was in the red, meaning the church had to inject its own funds to prop it up, local media reported.

Happy MLK Day!

Several years ago, near Chester, Pa., Jason Ipock’s aunt was looking to downsize now that she had retired. In her possession was a collection of old family home videos that took up too much room.

Some of the films were in worn-out film canisters, and Ipock worried they’d soon be unplayable. “I decided that I should have the family films digitized, so that we’ll always have a copy in the event of a catastrophe,” he said.

One had a label that stood out from the others: “Martin Luther King.” Ipock had heard stories about this film for years from his aunt and grandmother, Mary Ipock, and decided to digitize it first by going to a film store in Philadelphia.

The result was an MP4 file, a 13-minute film – in color.

If you peruse the slew of recent articles and podcasts about people dating AI, you might notice a pattern: Many of the sources are women. Scan a subreddit such as r/MyBoyfriendIsAI and r/AIRelationships, and there too you’ll find a whole lot of women—many of whom have grown disappointed with human men. “Has anyone else lost their want to date real men after using AI?” one Reddit user posted a few months ago. Below came 74 responses: “I just don’t think real life men have the conversational skill that my AI has,” someone said. “I’ve seen how many women got cheated on, hurt and taken advantaged of by the men they’re with,” another offered. One person, who claimed that her spouse hardly spoke to her anymore, said that when people ask why she has an AI boyfriend, she tells them, “ChatGPT is the only reason my husband is not buried in the yard.”

Several recent studies have shown that, in general, men have been using AI significantly more than women. One 2024 study found that in the United States, 50 percent of men said they’d used generative AI over the past 12 months—and only 37 percent of women said the same. Last year, a working paper found that, globally, the gender gap held “across nearly all regions, sectors, and occupations.” Also in 2025, the app-analytics firm Appfigures concluded that ChatGPT’s mobile users were about 85 percent male.

However hesitant many women may be to use AI, though, a substantial number are taking romantic refuge in the digital world. In a 2025 survey, Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute found that 31 percent of the young-adult men polled said they’d chatted with an AI partner, whereas 23 percent of the young-adult women said the same—a gap, but not a massive one. And seemingly far more than men, women are congregating to talk about their AI sweethearts: sharing funny chatbot quotes or prompts for training the AI on how to respond; complimenting “family photos” of the AI and human partners beaming at each other; consoling one another when a system update wipes out the partner they’ve grown to love. Simon Lermen, a developer and an AI researcher, conducted an independent analysis of AI-romance subreddits from January through September of last year and found that, of the users whose gender could be identified, about 89 percent of them were women.

I recently tried out an "AI companion," and it's like dating an alcoholic. You have to provide the same backstory every day just to get anywhere meaningful.

For the past week, I’ve found myself playing the same 23-second CNN clip on repeat. I’ve watched it in bed, during my commute to work, at the office, midway through making carrot soup, and while brushing my teeth. In the video, Harry Enten, the network’s chief data analyst, stares into the camera and breathlessly tells his audience about the gambling odds that Donald Trump will buy any of Greenland. “The people who are putting their money where their mouth is—they are absolutely taking this seriously,” Enten says. He taps the giant touch screen behind him and pulls up a made-for-TV graphic: Based on how people were betting online at the time, there was a 36 percent chance that the president would annex Greenland. “Whoa, way up there!” Enten yells, slapping his hands together. “My goodness gracious!” The ticker at the bottom of the screen speeds through other odds: Will Gavin Newsom win the next presidential election? 19 percent chance. Will Viktor Orbán be out as the leader of Hungary before the end of the year? 48 percent chance.

These odds were pulled from Kalshi, which hilariously claims not to be a gambling platform: It’s a “prediction market.” People go to sites such as Kalshi and Polymarket—another big prediction market—in order to put money down on a given news event. Nobody would bet on something that they didn’t believe would happen, the thinking goes, and so the markets are meant to forecast the likelihood of a given outcome.

Prediction markets let you wager on basically anything. Will Elon Musk father another baby by June 30? Will Jesus return this year? Will Israel strike Gaza tomorrow? Will the longevity guru Bryan Johnson’s next functional sperm count be greater than “20.0 M/ejac”? These sites have recently boomed in popularity—particularly among terminally online young men who trade meme stocks and siphon from their 401(k)s to buy up bitcoin. But now prediction markets are creeping into the mainstream. CNN announced a deal with Kalshi last month to integrate the site’s data into its broadcasts, which has led to betting odds showing up in segments about Democrats possibly retaking the House, credit-card interest rates, and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. At least twice in the past two weeks, Enten has told viewers about the value of data from people who are “putting their money where their mouth is.”

The global cost of greenhouse gas emissions are nearly double what scientists previously thought, according to a study published Thursday by researchers at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

It is the first time a social cost of carbon (SCC) assessment—a key measure of economic harm caused by climate change—has included damages to the ocean. Global coral loss, fisheries disruption and coastal infrastructure destruction are estimated to cost nearly $2 trillion annually, fundamentally changing how we measure climate finance.

“For decades, we’ve been estimating the economic cost of climate change while effectively assigning a value of zero to the ocean,” said Bernardo Bastien-Olvera, who led the study during his postdoctoral fellowship at Scripps. “Ocean loss is not just an environmental issue, but a central part of the economic story of climate change.”

Of note, the fisheries reporter behind this piece is Johnny Sturgeon.

Rackspace’s new pricing for its email hosting services is “devastating,” according to a partner that has been using Rackspace as its email provider since 1999.

In recent weeks, Rackspace updated its email hosting pricing. Its standard plan is now $10 per mailbox per month. Businesses can also pay for the Rackspace Email Plus add-on for an extra $2/mailbox/month (for “file storage, mobile sync, Office-compatible apps, and messaging”), and the Archiving add-on for an extra $6/mailbox/month (for unlimited storage).

As recently as November 2025, Rackspace charged $3/mailbox/month for its Standard plan, and an extra $1/mailbox/month for the Email Plus add-on, and an additional $3/mailbox/month for the Archival add-on, according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Apropos of nothing, I worked in the same office park as Rackspace HQ when I moved to Austin. They threw a lot of employee parties.