Amazon's data-center expansion turned Umatilla, Oregon into an unlikely nerve center for American infrastructure investment. The community of roughly 8,000 residents has seen home prices double and local government budgets surge from $7 million in 2011 to a hundred and $44 million in the past fiscal year. Yesenia Leon-Tejeda, a Realtor and daughter of Mexican-born farmhands who once worked 12-hour shifts at a distribution center, is now on pace to close 35 deals this year.

Federal data shows investment in software and information-processing equipment drove most of America's GDP growth in the first half of 2025. Goldman Sachs estimated that roughly 72% of all server-farm capacity sat in just 1% of counties as of July. The region's hydroelectric dams and cheap power attracted Amazon Web Services more than a decade ago. Growth has brought rising costs for housing and child care. Political tensions over spending erupted this year when Mayor Caden Sipe sued the city manager and council members.

A long-simmering battle over who controls credit scoring in America has erupted into open warfare. Fair Isaac, whose FICO score is used in about 90% of consumer-lending decisions in the U.S., announced it will double the price of its mortgage credit score to $10 next year. The company also said it will bypass the three credit-reporting firms that have supplied the data feeding into its algorithm for decades.

Equifax, Experian and TransUnion created VantageScore in 2006 as an alternative to FICO and collectively own the scoring system. The move came months after Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, announced that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would allow lenders to use VantageScore for mortgage approvals. The three credit-reporting firms responded by offering VantageScore free for many loans. Fair Isaac had charged a few cents per score for decades before chief executive Will Lansing began raising prices several years ago. Revenue from selling credit scores reached $920 million in fiscal 2024, nearly five times what it was a decade earlier.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Financial Times: Solar power developers want to cover an area larger than Washington, DC, with silicon panels and batteries, converting sunlight into electricity that will power air conditioners in sweltering Las Vegas along with millions of other homes and businesses. But earlier this month, bureaucrats in charge of federal lands scrapped collective approval for the Esmeralda 7 projects, in what campaigners fear is part of an attack on renewable energy under President Donald Trump. "We will not approve wind or farmer destroying [sic] Solar," he posted on his Truth Social platform in August. Developers will need to reapply individually, slowing progress.

Thousands of miles away on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, it is a different story. China has laid solar panels across an area the size of Chicago high up on the Tibetan Plateau, where the thin air helps more sunlight get through. The Talatan Solar Park is part of China's push to double its solar and wind generation capacity over the coming decade. "Green and low-carbon transition is the trend of our time," President Xi Jinping told delegates at a UN summit in New York last month. China's vast production of solar panels and batteries has also pushed down the prices of renewables hardware for everyone else, meaning it has "become very difficult to make any other choice in some places," according to Heymi Bahar, senior analyst at the International Energy Agency. [...]

More broadly, the US's focus on fossil fuels and pullback of support for clean energy further cedes influence over the future global energy system to China. The US is trying to tie its trading partners into fossil fuels, pressing the EU to buy $750 billion of American oil, natural gas, and nuclear technologies during his presidency as part of a trade deal, scuppering an initiative to begin decarbonizing world shipping and pressuring others to reduce their reliance on Chinese technology. But the collapsing cost of solar panels in particular has spoken for itself in many parts of the world. Experts caution that the US's attacks on renewables could cause lasting damage to its competitiveness against China, even if an administration more favorable to renewables were to follow Trump's.

A top United States regulator plans to unveil a faster approach to approving custom gene-editing treatments, a move designed to unleash a wave of industry investment that will yield cures for patients with rare diseases. From a report: Vinay Prasad, who oversees gene therapies at the Food and Drug Administration, said scientific advances, like Crispr, have forced the agency to relax some of its strict rules. As an example, he cited the case of 10-month-old KJ Muldoon, who this year became the first person in history to have his genes custom edited to cure an inherited disease.

"Regulation has to evolve as fast as science evolves," Prasad said in an interview with Bloomberg News. The agency is "going to be extremely flexible and work very fast with the scientists who want to bring these therapies to kids who need it." Prasad plans to publish a paper in early November outlining the FDA's new approach. He predicted it will spark interest in developing treatments for conditions that may affect only a handful of people.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not let people decline to be scanned by its new facial recognition app, which the agency uses to verify a person's identity and their immigration status, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media. The document also says any face photos taken by the app, called Mobile Fortify, will be stored for 15 years, including those of U.S. citizens.

The document provides new details about the technology behind Mobile Fortify, how the data it collects is processed and stored, and DHS's rationale for using it. On Wednesday 404 Media reported that both ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are scanning peoples' faces in the streets to verify citizenship.

"ICE does not provide the opportunity for individuals to decline or consent to the collection and use of biometric data/photograph collection," the document, called a Privacy Threshold Analysis (PTA), says. A PTA is a document that DHS creates in the process of deploying new technology or updating existing capabilities. It is supposed to be used by DHS's internal privacy offices to determine and describe the privacy risks of a certain piece of tech. "CBP and ICE Privacy are jointly submitting this new mobile app PTA for the ICE Mobile Fortify Mobile App (Mobile Fortify app), a mobile application developed by CBP and made accessible to ICE agents and officers operating in the field," the document, dated February, reads. 404 Media obtained the document (which you can see here) via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with CBP.

Gallup: After peaking at a record high of 39.9% in 2022, the U.S. adult obesity rate has gradually declined to 37.0% in 2025. This is a statistically meaningful decrease representing an estimated 7.6 million fewer obese adults compared with three years ago. Meanwhile, diagnoses of diabetes -- a lifetime disease that can be managed but not cured -- have now reached an all-time high of 13.8%. Both metrics are part of the ongoing Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index.

[...] Over the past year, more Americans have turned to Type 2 antidiabetic GLP-1 drugs such as semaglutide (brand names Ozempic and Wegovy) for weight loss purposes. The percentage of adults who report taking this class of medicine specifically for weight loss has increased to 12.4%, compared with 5.8% in February 2024 when Gallup first measured it. Usage among women (15.2%) continues to outpace men (9.7%), but both groups have more than doubled their use in the past year. These results dovetail with increased awareness of the drugs used for weight loss, which has risen from 80% to 89% nationally in the same period.

New submitter hadleyburg writes: President Trump has directed the Department of War to restart nuclear weapons testing. The directive appears to be a counter measure to rival nations catching up with the US. The last US nuclear test was an underground test, on September 23, 1992, in Nevada.

More than a half dozen federal departments and agencies have backed a proposal to ban future sales of the most popular home routers in the United States on the grounds that the vendor's ties to mainland China make them a national security risk, Washington Post reported Thursday, citing people briefed on the matter. From the report: The proposal, which arose from a months-long risk assessment, calls for blocking sales of networking devices from TP-Link Systems of Irvine, California, which was spun off from a China-based company, TP-Link Technologies, but owns some of that company's former assets in China.

The ban was proposed by the Commerce Department and supported this summer by an interagency process that includes the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and Defense, the people said. "TP-Link vigorously disputes any allegation that its products present national security risks to the United States," Ricca Silverio, a spokeswoman for TP-Link Systems, said in a statement. "TP-Link is a U.S. company committed to supplying high-quality and secure products to the U.S. market and beyond."

If imposed, the ban would be among the largest in consumer history and a possible sign that the East-West divide over tech independence is still deepening amid reports of accelerated Chinese government-supported hacking. Only the legislated ban of Chinese-owned TikTok, which President Donald Trump has averted with executive orders and a pending sale, would impact more U.S. consumers.

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said that maintaining the US edge in AI will require a steady approach that ensures China remains hooked on American technology. From a report: The chipmaker is in an "awkward place" as President Donald Trump prepares to meet with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping later this week, Huang told reporters Tuesday at a company conference in Washington. The Nvidia chief praised Trump's commitment to winning but urged careful engagement with China because of the country's massive software developer base and its growing technology capabilities.

During the meeting, Trump and Xi are expected to finalize an agreement to ease trade tensions between the world's two largest economies. When it comes to those negotiations, Huang said he has "no idea" if GPUs -- the chips central to artificial intelligence capabilities -- will be a topic between Trump and Xi.

Huang was careful to leave the negotiating to Trump but encouraged US leadership to think longer term on its overall AI strategy. "A policy that causes America to lose half of the world's developers is not beneficial long-term," Huang said, warning that it was still possible for the US to cede the AI race to China. Keeping US technology in front requires finesse," he said. "It requires balance. It requires long-term thinking."

Apple is preparing to roll out a new Apple Wallet feature that lets U.S. users create digital IDs linked to their passports, usable at select TSA checkpoints. TechCrunch reports: The feature, previously announced as part of the iOS 26 release, comes on the heels of Apple's expansion of Wallet as more than a payment mechanism or ticket holder, but also a secure place to store a user's digital identity. Currently, support for government IDs in Apple Wallet has rolled out to 12 states and Puerto Rico, or roughly a third of U.S. license holders. However, the passport-tied Digital ID feature didn't arrive with the debut of iOS 26, as Apple said it would come in a future software update. [...]

The coming launch of passport-associated Digital IDs was announced on Sunday by Jennifer Bailey, VP of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet, at the Money 20/20 USA conference, where the exec also shared other stats about Wallet's adoption.

The U.S. has formed a $1 billion partnership with AMD to construct two supercomputers that will tackle large scientific problems ranging from nuclear power to cancer treatments to national security, said Energy Secretary Chris Wright and AMD CEO Lisa Su. From a report: The U.S. is building the two machines to ensure the country has enough supercomputers to run increasingly complex experiments that require harnessing enormous amounts of data-crunching capability. The machines can accelerate the process of making scientific discoveries in areas the U.S. is focused on.

Energy Secretary Wright said the systems would "supercharge" advances in nuclear power and fusion energy, technologies for defense and national security, and the development of drugs. Scientists and companies are trying to replicate fusion, the reaction that fuels the sun, by jamming light atoms in a plasma gas under intense heat and pressure to release massive amounts of energy. "We've made great progress, but plasmas are unstable, and we need to recreate the center of the sun on Earth," Wright told Reuters.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares this article from Interesting Engineering: Bill Gates-backed TerraPower's innovative Natrium reactor project in Wyoming has cleared a critical federal regulatory hurdle. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has successfully completed its final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the project, known as Kemmerer Unit 1, and found no adverse impacts that would block its construction.

The commission officially recommended that a construction permit be issued to TerraPower subsidiary USO for the facility in Lincoln County.

This announcement marks a significant milestone, making the Natrium project the first-ever advanced commercial nuclear power plant in the country to successfully complete this rigorous environmental review process... The first-of-a-kind design utilizes an 840 MW (thermal) pool-type reactor connected to a molten salt-based energy storage system. This storage technology is the plant's most unique feature. It is designed to keep the base output steady, ensuring constant reliability, but it also allows the plant to function like a massive battery. The system can store heat and boost the plant's output to 500 MWe when demand peaks, allowing it to ramp up power quickly to support the grid. TerraPower says it is the only advanced reactor design with this unique capability. The Natrium plant is strategically designed to replace electricity generation capacity following the planned retirement of existing coal-fired facilities in the region.

While the regulatory process for the nuclear components continues, construction on the non-nuclear portions of the site already began in June 2024. When completed, the Natrium plant is poised to be the first utility-scale advanced nuclear power plant in the United States.
The next step for the construction permit application is a final safety evaluation, which is anticipated by December 31, 2025, according to announcement from TerraPower, which notes that the project is being developed through a public-private partnership with the U.S. Energy Department.

"When completed, the Natrium plant will be the first utility-scale advanced nuclear power plant in the United States."

Reason.com explores the fortunes of Aurora Innovation, the first company to put heavy-duty commercial self-driving trucks on public roads (and hopes to expand routes to El Paso, Texas, and Phoenix by the end of the year): An obscure federal rule is slowing the self-driving revolution. When trucks break down, operators are required to place reflective warning cones and road flares around the truck to warn other motorists. The regulations areexacting: Within 10 minutes of stopping, three warning signals must be set in specific locations around the truck. Auroraaskedthe federal Department of Transportation (DOT) to allow warning beacons to be fixed to the truck itself — and activated when a truck becomes disabled. The warning beacons would face both forward and backward, would be more visibleâthan cones (particularly at night), and wouldn't burn out like road flares. Drivers of nonautonomous vehicles could also benefit from that rule change, as they would no longer have to walk into traffic to place the required safety signals.

In December 2024, however, the Transportation Department denied Aurora's request for an exemption to the existing rules, even though regulatorsadmittedin theFederal Registerthat no evidence indicated the truck-mounted beacons would be less safe. Such a study is now underway, but it's unclear how long it will take to draw any conclusions.
The article notes that Aurora has now filed a lawsuit in federal court that seeks to overturn the Transportation Department's denial...

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

The U.S. will expand the use of facial recognition technology to track non-citizens entering and leaving the country in order to combat visa overstays and passport fraud, according to a government document published on Friday. Reuters: A new regulation will allow U.S. border authorities to require non-citizens to be photographed at airports, seaports, land crossings and any other point of departure, expanding on an earlier pilot program.

Under the regulation, set to take effect on December 26, U.S. authorities could require the submission of other biometrics, such as fingerprints or DNA, it said. It also allows border authorities to use facial recognition for children under age 14 and elderly people over age 79, groups that are currently exempted. The tighter border rules reflect a broader effort by U.S. President Donald Trump to crack down on illegal immigration. While the Republican president has surged resources to secure the U.S.-Mexico border, he has also taken steps to reduce the number of people overstaying their visas.

Millions of tons of discarded electronics from the United States are being shipped overseas, much of it to developing countries in Southeast Asia unprepared to safely handle hazardous waste, according to a new report by an environmental watchdog. AP: The Seattle-based Basel Action Network, or BAN, said a two-year investigation found at least 10 U.S. companies exporting used electronics to Asia and the Middle East, in what it says is a "hidden tsunami" of electronic waste. "This new, almost invisible tsunami of e-waste, is taking place ... padding already lucrative profit margins of the electronics recycling sector while allowing a major portion of the American public's and corporate IT equipment to be surreptitiously exported to and processed under harmful conditions in Southeast Asia," the report said.

Electronic waste, or e-waste, includes discarded devices like phones and computers containing both valuable materials and toxic metals like lead, cadmium and mercury. As gadgets are replaced faster, global e-waste is growing five times quicker than it's formally recycled. The world produced a record 62 million metric tons in 2022. That's expected to climb to 82 million by 2030, according to the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union and its research arm, UNITAR.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: A lot of critical financial and government infrastructure runs on Cobol. The more-than-60-year-old mainframe coding language is embedded into payments and transaction rails, even though there are very few Cobol-literate coders available to maintain them. The big argument in favor of sticking with Cobol systems is that they work. The catch is that, whenever they stop working, it is difficult to figure out why. That's not good in a crisis, which is exactly when they're most likely to break. Covid-19 put a lot of strain the US state benefit systems.

The ones that used Cobol for processing unemployment claims failed spectacularly, according to a new working paper from The Atlanta Fed: "States that used an antiquated [unemployment insurance]-benefit system experienced a 2.8 percentage point decline in total credit and debit card consumption relative to card consumption in states with more modern UI benefit systems. [...] Using this estimate in a back-of-the-envelope calculation, I find that the lack of investment in updating UI-benefit systems in COBOL states was associated with a reduction in real GDP of at least $40 billion (in 2019 dollars) lower during this [March 13 2020 to year-end] period

The paper uses Cobol as a proxy for old and inefficient IT, not the direct cause of failure. Claimants faced much longer delays in the 28 states that still used Cobol in 2020, both because of the unprecedented volume of claims and the difficulty updating systems with new eligibility rules, author Michael Navarrete finds. [...] As an aside, one oddity of the data is that Republican-controlled states were more likely to have replaced old IT systems, even though their standard unemployment insurance payments are lower on average. Why? Absolutely no idea, but here are the maps. And, once adjusted for state politics, here's the key finding.

President Trump's $100,000 H-1B visa fee will apply only to new visa applicants outside the country, the government confirmed in new guidance on Monday. From a report: That means that under the new policy, employers won't need to pay the fee for anyone already living in the U.S., such as international students. The new guidance: Under the new guidance published on Monday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said the $100,000 fee will apply only to new applicants living outside the country. Employers will need to pay the fee after their prospective employee's visa is approved, allowing them to move to the U.S.

Previously, the White House had said the fee would apply to all new visa applicants, except those who work for companies or industries that have secured a special waiver. In 2024, roughly 54% of the 141,000 new H-1B visas issued went to immigrants who were already in the U.S. on a different visa type, according to government statistics. If that trend holds, the new fee wouldn't apply to over half of the applicants.

Police arrested 33-year-old Joseph Mayuyo after a series of online threats forced TikTok to evacuate its Culver City headquarters. TechCrunch reports: A press release from the Culver City Police Department says that TikTok employees reported receiving multiple threats, across various social media platforms, from 33-year-old Hawthorne resident Joseph Mayuyo. After an additional message threatened TikTok's Culver City headquarters, police say company security evacuated the office "out of an abundance of caution."

Police then investigated Mayuyo's home, according to the press release. During the investigation, he allegedly posted additional threatening statements, including one declaring that he would not be taken alive. Detectives obtained search and arrest warrants, and they negotiated with Mayuyo for 90 minutes before he voluntarily exited his home and was taken into custody, the police department says.

Business Insider reports that one TikTok employee described the threats as "really scary," while another was concerned that they seemed to specifically target the e-commerce department. Mayuyo's X account has reportedly been suspended for violating the platform's hateful content policy. A Medium account under his name published a post in July criticizing TikTokShop USA as a "scam."

Major health insurers are threatening to drop renowned cancer centers from their networks during contract negotiations, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's president and CEO Selwyn M. Vickers and chairman Scott M. Stuart wrote in a story published by WSJ. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center reported that both Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield and UnitedHealthcare prepared to terminate network agreements while patients underwent active cancer treatment. FTI Consulting found that 45% of 133 provider-payer disputes in 2024 failed to reach timely agreements. The disruptions have affected tens of thousands of patients.

Research published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found that care disruptions lead to more advanced-stage diagnoses and worse outcomes. Similar contract disputes involved Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins University and University of North Carolina Health. New York lawmakers introduced legislation this year requiring insurers to maintain coverage for cancer patients during negotiations and until treatment concludes. Memorial Sloan Kettering's leadership described the practice as using patients as bargaining chips despite record insurer profits.

Trust in America's elite universities has declined sharply over the past decade [non-paywalled source]. A Manhattan Institute survey conducted in June 2025 found that only 42% of Americans have significant trust in higher education, down 15 percentage points from a decade earlier. Trust in Ivy League institutions stands at just 15%.

Harvard is considering building trade schools as part of a settlement with the Trump administration. The proposal comes as elite universities face criticism for shifting focus from academic excellence to shaping students' political and moral values. Princeton changed its informal motto in 2016 to "In the Nation's Service and the Service of Humanity." Grade inflation has become prevalent at elite schools. A Bloomberg column argues universities should adopt more objective admissions criteria, reduce grade inflation, and make education their primary mission again rather than attempting to fix societal problems.