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A return to vernacular buildings, which maintain interiors at a comfortable temperature through architectural design rather than energy-intensive technical installations, could significantly reduce energy consumption for heating and cooling. However, it’s not a short-term solution: it would require a large amount of time, money, and energy to replace the existing building stock.

Fortunately, history offers an alternative solution that can be deployed more quickly and with fewer resources: textiles. Before the Industrial Revolution, people added a temporary layer of textile insulation to either the interior or the exterior of a building, depending on the climate and the season. In cold weather, walls, floors, roofs, windows, doors, and furniture were insulated with drapery and carpetry. In hot weather, windows, doors, facades, roofs, courtyards, and streets were shaded by awnings and toldos.

Removable insulation can achieve significant energy savings with much more flexibility than permanently enclosed insulation materials. Because modern insulation methods require construction permits and structural interventions to a building, they are expensive, time-consuming, and only accessible to home owners. Furthermore, modern insulation methods are ill-suited for older buildings, in which case they are often not financially and energetically sustainable.

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that the House passed is objectionable for many reasons, most obviously because it is the most regressive economic bill of my lifetime, the class war condensed into in legislative form. Its tax policies and spending cuts will erode the well being of Americans slowly for decades to come. Its most immediate destabilizing impact, however—the one that has the potential to push our democracy to the brink—is its vast expansion of the Homeland Security budget, which will be used to build ICE into a huge national army of loyalists under Trump’s control. The money to build America’s brownshirts is in the pipeline. Whereas our military-industrial complex is a threat to the rest of the world, this force will be a direct threat to all of us in the USA. This is the Proud Boys, at national scale, with badges. It is a very dangerous prospect.

Everything I am writing about here has been previously reported in the past few weeks since the House sent the bill to the Senate. But, from my vantage point, the public has not quite grasped just how horrifying a precipice we are on. When you consider the scale of protest already unleashed by the ICE raids in LA; Trump and Stephen Miller’s clear intent to double and triple and quadruple down on the ICE raids and crush the protests with military force; Trump’s unhinged declaration yesterday that “we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York” to achieve “the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History”; and then connect this deep well of poisonous intent with the staggering expansion of ICE’s size and scope that will occur if this bill’s funding comes through, what you will see is the setup for not just a mass deportation program, but a violent national clash between a militarized, government-sanctioned army of Trump loyalists and everyone else.

How much does ICE stand to grow if this bill’s funding comes through? A lot. The all-in costs of deportation over the next decade could reach a trillion fucking dollars, according to this Cato analysis. That includes the border wall and a huge expansion of prisons for immigrants, to a size nearly on par with the federal prison system.

San Francisco-based Wildtype will be the first company to launch cultivated seafood in the US after securing an FDA ‘no questions’ letter regarding the safety of its cell cultured salmon.

Wildtype is the fourth cultivated-protein producer to complete a US pre-market scientific and safety consultation after UPSIDE Foods, GOOD Meat, and Mission Barns, and the third to have full approval to sell (Mission Barns is still awaiting the final go-ahead from the USDA for its cultivated fat).

It will debut its wares at the James Beard award-winning Haitian restaurant Kann in Portland, Oregon, on Thursday nights in June, then every day starting in July, before expanding into four additional restaurants.

For years, the Los Angeles County jail has been known as the United States’ largest mental health institution.

An astonishing 5,901 people – nearly half of its population – struggle with mental health issues. In some parts of the jail, incarcerated individuals in quilted robes are chained to metal tables so they can’t harm themselves or others. For years, the U.S. Department of Justice has been monitoring the jail system – also the nation’s largest – to assess its mental health care.

And yet it’s making progress, particularly with a peer-to-peer program called Forensic Inpatient (FIP) Stepdown that the Monitor reported on four years ago. Since then, the nascent program has grown more than sixfold overall, spreading to the women’s jail. Incarcerated people trained as mental health assistants are helping hundreds of others with severe mental illness who are held at the same facility. The California state prison system – long under federal court orders to improve mental health care – is taking notice. Many familiar with the county program see it as a national model.

As super-contagious measles continues to spread and nears a six-year U.S. record, cases in its original epicenter of West Texas may be subsiding as hesitant residents become more concerned and willing to vaccinate, while North Dakota is a new focus with the highest rate of any state.

The reality of measles may be overcoming vaccine misinformation in some areas, despite the purge of experts from decision-making roles in the Trump administration under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The nation’s top vaccine expert resigned under pressure in March.

In West Texas, where outbreaks are concentrated, the city of Lubbock hasn’t seen a new case in 20 days, said Katherine Wells, public health director for the city. The area is east of the largest Texas outbreaks, which were centered on a Mennonite community with religious objections to vaccination.

Wells attributed the recent success to a combination of more vaccinations, public awareness campaigns and willingness to stay home when sick to avoid transmission.

In North Dakota, however, the state’s 34 cases give it the highest rate in the nation, followed by New Mexico and Texas, according to the North Dakota Public Health Association, a nonprofit health advocacy group that published an analysis of individual states’ data on Facebook. The state’s first case since 2011 was reported May 2.

The “No Kings Day” nationwide rallies against Donald Trump/for democracy on Saturday turned out millions of people.

That’s per a collective crowdsourcing effort led by Strength In Numbers, and involving many members of the independent data journalism community. We systematized reports from official sources, accounts from the media, and self-reported attendance from thousands of social media posts into a single spreadsheet. (Researchers, please take our data!)

As of midnight on Sunday, June 15, we have data from about 40% of No Kings Day events held yesterday, accounting for over 2.6m attendees. According to our back-of-the-envelope math, that puts total attendance somewhere in the 4-6 million people range. That means roughly 1.2-1.8% of the U.S. population attended a No Kings Day event somewhere in the country yesterday. Organizers say 5m turned out, but don’t release public event-by-event numbers.

Yesterday, demonstrators gathered in more than 2000 locations across the United States and around the globe for overwhelming peaceful, exuberant, and defiant anti-Trump protests, with the shared theme of “No Kings.”

With the possible exception of the early days of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, there have never been this many coordinated protests on a single day in the United States before. The ubiquity of these protests is historic.

This minimizing horseshit is more than institutional arrogance and bad reporting. It's a continuation of a longstanding Times habit of downplaying both the scale and significance of protest, especially when it's overwhelmingly nonviolent, as the No Kings demonstrations were.

Rather than linger on the possible causes for this consistent distortion, I want to focus here instead on why it matters that demonstrations against the current Trump regime have been more ubiquitous and numerous than at almost any other time in U.S. history.

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Relooted, which made its debut last week during the Summer Game Fest-adjacent Day of the Devs showcase, immediately turned heads. Its Killmonger-approved premise confronts one of the most uncomfortable truths undergirding Western society: We stole a lot of stuff! Land and lives, mainly, but as an extension of that, artifacts — precious pieces of the histories empires like the US and UK snuffed out. In Relooted, your crack team of liberators from a plethora of different African countries heists them back.

The game’s dev team is composed of people from African countries like Lesotho, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Tanzania, but during Summer Game Fest’s multi-day, demo-centric Play Days event, creative director Ben Myres, who is white and was raised in South Africa, manned the booth alone. This was not always the plan: Myres was originally going to be accompanied by another developer from South-Africa-based studio Nyamakop, whom Aftermath has granted anonymity due to their concerns that speaking out might exacerbate the challenges they’ve already faced entering the United States.

Sometimes, human material culture involves traces of other animals, too. Zooarchaeologists like me are trained to identify the remains of other species from archaeological sites by analysing bones, teeth and shells. We use these remains to gain insight into what people in the past ate and how they hunted. We learn where and when wild species were tamed or domesticated, and how animals’ bodies were used as resources, whether for tools and adornments or as potent symbols in human societies. We are not, generally, interested in the histories of the animals themselves, but rather how animals have intersected with human histories. We certainly don’t ask what kinds of things bears may have discovered and forgotten centuries ago. To put it simply: zooarchaeology is the study of animals as material culture, not an archaeology of animals and their material culture.

This is based on a well-established belief: humans make and do things because only we have culture, and when those things we make and do change over time, we call it history. When animals make and do things, we call it instinct, not culture. When the things they make and do change over time, we call it evolution, not history. Anthropologists have pointed out that this is an unusual way of thinking: at what point did we stop merely evolving from our long line of hominid ancestors, cross an irreversible threshold from nature to culture, and kickstart history?

The unique trajectory afforded to humans compared with all other animals is evident in paleoanthropologists’ use of the phrase ‘anatomically modern humans’. This terminology tries to make sense of the fact that there were members of our species hundreds of thousands of years ago who had the same morphological characteristics and physical capacities that we have today, but who seemingly had not yet taken the step into a new world of culture. By contrast, as the British anthropologist Tim Ingold argues, we never speak of ‘anatomically modern chimpanzees’ or ‘anatomically modern elephants’ because the assumption is that those species have remained entirely unchanged in their behaviours since they first took on the physical forms we see today. The difference, we assume, is that they have no culture.

But what if archaeologists and zooarchaeologists found traces that told a different story? What if some of the cultural making and doing that we consider to be uniquely human was being done by animals first?

In several caves in France, such as Bara-Bahau, Baume-Latrone and Margot, human-made finger flutings or ‘meanders’ follow earlier cave bear scratches. Some of these long lines of finger-combed grooves are superimposed directly over claw marks. Others are located near the bear-made traces, echoing their orientation. In Aldène cave in the south of France, human artists ‘completed’ earlier animal markings. More than 35,000 years ago, a single engraved line added above the gouges left by a cave bear created the outline of a mammoth from trunk to tail – the claw marks were used to suggest a shaggy coat and limbs. In Pech-Merle, the same cave where Lemozi mistook cave bear claw marks as human carvings of a wounded shaman, a niche within a narrow crawlway is marked by four cave bear claw marks. These marks are associated with five human handprints, rubbed in red ochre, that date to the Gravettian period, about 30,000 years ago. For Lorblanchet and Bahn, the association between the traces of cave bear paws and human hands is no accident: ‘It is remarkable (and the Gravettians doubtless noticed it),’ they wrote, ‘that a rubbed adult hand, with fingers slightly apart, leaves a trace identical in size to that of an adult cave bear clawmark.’

Nonhuman carvings laid the literal and figurative foundations for human art.

An estimated 68% of internet activity starts on search engines and about 90% of searches happen on Google. If the internet is a garden, Google is the Sun that lets the flowers grow.

This arrangement held strong for decades, but a seemingly minor change has some convinced that the system is crumbling. You'll soon see a new AI tool on Google Search. You may find it very useful. But if critics' predictions come true, it will also have seismic consequences for the internet. They paint a picture where quality information could grow scarcer online and large numbers of people might lose their jobs. Optimists say instead this could improve the web's business model and expand opportunities to find great content. But, for better or worse, your digital experiences may never be the same again.

On 20 May 2025, Google's chief executive Sundar Pichai walked on stage at the company's annual developer conference. It's been a year since the launch of AI Overviews, the AI-generated responses you've probably seen at the top of Google Search results. Now, Pichai said, Google is going further. "For those who want an end-to-end AI Search experience, we are introducing an all-new AI Mode," he said. "It's a total reimagining of Search."

You might be sceptical after years of AI hype, but this, for once, is the real deal.

People use Google Search five trillion times a year – it defines the shape of the internet. AI Mode is a radical departure. Unlike AI Overviews, AI Mode replaces traditional search results altogether. Instead, a chatbot effectively creates a miniature article to answer your question. As you read this, AI Mode is rolling out to users in the US, appearing as a button on the search engine and the company's app. It's optional for now, but Google's head of Search, Liz Reid, said it plainly when launching the tool: "This is the future of Google Search."

In 2020, as the world was gripped by the coronavirus, the killing of George Floyd shocked Americans into action and into the streets by the millions, protesting the unrelenting killing of Black people by police.

The moment sparked a nascent reckoning in America around systemic racism and institutional inequality — in many cases, with Black women at the center. They led protests and were hired to fix broken institutions and diversify boards. They also did the emotional labor of educating their friends and neighbors. Already the backbone of our democracy, many were called on to also be a bridge to racial healing.

Then, it seemed like the country was ready to listen, understand and move toward a freer, fairer, more equal democracy. Five years later, many of these same Black women find themselves at the center of a backlash, confronted with attacks on the diversity, equity and inclusion efforts that were previously championed.

As I reflected on the five-year anniversary of the start of the reckoning, I thought about the Black women who were on the frontlines — in the streets and workplace, from the boardroom to the classroom. At this milestone, I wanted to hear from them about what this moment had cost them, then and now.

I reached out to several Black women I talk to often with a single question: “Five years after the racial reckoning of 2020, what did that moment ask of you — and what, if anything, did it give back?” Their answers, in their own words (with some editing for length and clarity), were insightful and honest.

[...]Baby Steps' title may sound like an infantalising putdown of its protagonist, but in this era of Dualshock uniformity, it is genuinely wonderful to learn to walk "for the first time". Especially in the context of an open world game, a genre that prides frictionless exploration like few others. There are glowing waypoints on the skyline, but you can't just zip along the obvious routes. You have to study what's underfoot and organise your mass accordingly, and when you fall, it's at once ludicrous and frustrating and a source of connection.

You notice how certain helpful rocks snag at Nate's limbs, stopping him rolling too far. You see how he catches himself on his elbows as he slides, a tentative advertisement for having some degree of survival instinct. You appreciate the torquing of his spine as he bumps and slithers, and you feel the smaller, context-sensitive adjustments to what the controls do - the little, evolving motions that are presumably far too thoughtless and subtle to be offered up in a tutorial.