Category: Technology News

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration announced it is launching a new program that will allow Americans to share personal health data and medical records across health systems and apps run by private tech companies, promising that will make it easier to access health records and monitor wellness.

More than 60 companies, including major tech companies like Google, Amazon and Apple as well as health care giants like UnitedHealth Group and CVS Health, have agreed to share patient data in the system. The initiative will focus on diabetes and weight management, conversational artificial intelligence that helps patients, and digital tools such as QR codes and apps that register patients for check-ins or track medications.

“For decades America’s health care networks have been overdue for a high tech upgrade,” President Donald Trump said during an event with company CEOs at the White House on Wednesday. “The existing systems are often slow, costly and incompatible with one another, but with today’s announcement, we take a major step to bring health care into the digital age.”

The system, spearheaded by an administration that has already freely shared highly personal data about Americans in ways that have tested legal bounds, could put patients’ desires for more convenience at their doctor’s office on a collision course with their expectations that their medical information be kept private.

“There are enormous ethical and legal concerns,” said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University law professor who specializes in public health. “Patients across America should be very worried that their medical records are going to be used in ways that harm them and their families.”

Officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who will be in charge of maintaining the system, have said patients will need to opt in for the sharing of their medical records and data, which will be kept secure.

Those officials said patients will benefit from a system that lets them quickly call up their own records without the hallmark difficulties, such as requiring the use of fax machines to share documents, that have prevented them from doing so in the past.

“We’re going to have remarkable advances in how consumers can use their own records,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, who leads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said during the White House event.

Popular weight loss and fitness subscription service Noom, which has signed onto the initiative, will be able to pull medical records after the system’s expected launch early next year.

That might include labs or medical tests that the app could use to develop an AI-driven analysis of what might help users lose weight, CEO Geoff Cook told The Associated Press. Apps and health systems will also have access to their competitors’ information, too. Noom would be able to access a person’s data from Apple Health, for example.

“Right now you have a lot of siloed data,” Cook said.

Patients who travel across the country for treatment at the Cleveland Clinic often have a hard time obtaining all their medical records from various providers, said the hospital system’s CEO, Dr. Tomislav Mihaljevic. He said the new system would eliminate that barrier, which sometimes delays treatment or prevents doctors from making an accurate diagnosis because they do not have a full view of a patient’s medical history.

Having seamless access to health app data, such as what patients are eating or how much they are exercising, will also help doctors manage obesity and other chronic diseases, Mihaljevic said.

“These apps give us insight about what’s happening with the patient’s health outside of the physician’s office,” he said.

CMS will also recommend a list of apps on Medicare.gov that are designed to help people manage chronic diseases, as well as help them select health care providers and insurance plans.

Digital privacy advocates are skeptical that patients will be able to count on their data being stored securely.

The federal government, however, has done little to regulate health apps or telehealth programs, said Jeffrey Chester at the Center for Digital Democracy.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and those within his circle have pushed for more technology in health care, advocating for wearable devices that monitor wellness and telehealth.

Kennedy also sought to collect more data from Americans’ medical records, which he has previously said he wants to use to study autism and vaccine safety. Kennedy has filled the agency with staffers who have a history of working at or running health technology startups and businesses.

CMS already has troves of information on more than 140 million Americans who enroll in Medicare and Medicaid. Earlier this month, the federal agency agreed to hand over its massive database, including home addresses, to deportation officials.

The new initiative would deepen the pool of information on patients for the federal government and tech companies. Medical records typically contain far more sensitive information, such as doctors’ notes about conversations with patients and substance abuse or mental health history.

“This scheme is an open door for the further use and monetization of sensitive and personal health information,” Chester said.

The Trump administration tried to launch a less ambitious electronic record program in 2018 that did not get finalized during his first term, but it did not have buy in from major tech companies at the time.

Whether it serves as a chill escape from the onslaught of the real world or simply a way to beat vacation doldrums, a viral Roblox game about gardening has become the surprise hit of the summer.

Grow a Garden, created by a 16-year-old in a few days, has shattered records for the most concurrent players of any game in history, beating out video games that take years and millions of dollars to develop.

And there’s no one to shoot, fight or race. If your last attempt at cultivating vegetables was FarmVille in 2010, don’t worry — your tomatoes will grow even if you never water them.

Grow a Garden is as simple as its name suggests — players can fill a plot of land with plants and animals, harvest and sell, trade or steal each others’ bounty. The game is low stress, with an aesthetic reminiscent of Minecraft and a soundtrack of soothing classical tunes such as Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca playing in the background. Its popularity has further cemented Roblox’ place not just in the gaming world but in popular culture — for better or for worse, it’s where the kids hang out.

“The word I keep hearing used over and over to describe this particular game is that it’s chill, which is just such a nice alternative. I get a lot of sort of that Animal Crossing vibe from it. You know, like you can check in, you can check your gardens, you can get some new seeds, you can plant them,” said Betsy Bozdech, editorial director at the nonprofit Common Sense Media. “I have an 11-year-old son who (plays it) and he says to him the big difference is that a lot of games have a big giant objective that you have to do, but in Grow a Garden, you can just kind of hang out and do what you want.”

Coincidence or not, Grow a Garden soared to popularity around the same time that Take-Two Interactive announced it would delay the launch of its wildly anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 until next year. In late June, the gardening game logged 21.6 million concurrent players, surpassing Fortnite’s previous record of 15.2 million according to Roblox. Analysts who follow Roblox’s stock say Grow a Garden is helping boost the company’s revenue and will push the company’s quarterly earnings numbers above Wall Street’s expectations.

While it’s not clear if the GTA audience flocked to this simple gardening game to pass the time until then, the timing reignited the age-old debate about who gamers are and what titles are taken seriously by the video game establishment. It happened with Candy Crush, with puzzle games, with Animal Crossing. Are people who play cozy games true gamers? Or is the title reserved for the folks who shoot enemies in Call of Duty or drive around creating mayhem in GTA?

“There’s a huge percentage of gamers that play Roblox and the actual industry just views it as like this esoterically immature platform of weird gameplay habits,” said Janzen Madsen, the New Zealand-based CEO and founder of Splitting Point studios, which acquired the game from its teenage creator. “Well, I actually think in five years this is what player expectation is gonna be. And because you guys haven’t embraced it, like you’re not gonna know how to make games.”

To start growing your garden, you’ll need a Roblox account. The game will start you out with an empty plot and some money — sheckles — and a starter seed. From there, you can plant seeds, harvest and sell your crops and buy more seeds, animals or tools for your garden. While it is possible to play the game without spending real-world money, it will take longer. Once you sell enough crops, you earn money to buy more expensive seeds beyond basic carrots and blueberries.

“For me, I just, I really want to get all the rarest stuff. I’m a completionist, so I want everything and that’s what’s fun for me,” said Leah Ashe, a YouTuber who plays Grow a Garden and other popular games to an audience of 5.3 million. “It’s really cool because you can come together because the seed shop is global, so everybody’s shop is the exact same. So you can work with other people and be like, ‘Oh my gosh, the sugar apple is in stock. Get online!’ The seed shop updates every five minutes, so there’s always something pulling you back into the game.”

For Roblox, which has faced a backlash for not doing enough to protect kids on its gaming service, Grow a Garden has served as something of a reprieve — along with new safety measures such as chat restrictions and privacy tools.

New players get help from more established peers who send them gifts and let them know when rare seeds become available in the seed shop.

Bozdech said that “if you have the right supervision and guidance,” Roblox can be a positive experience for kids, allowing them to create their own designs or practice coding, for instance.

“Something like Grow a Garden, particularly, is a nice opportunity maybe for parents and kids to play together,” she said.

And perhaps the slow cultivating of a magical garden can benefit parents too.

“It’s hitting a nerve, you know?” Bozdech said. “People need an escape from the world, I think we all do.”

—-

This story was first published on Jul. 30, 2025. It was updated on Aug. 4, 2025 to correct the spelling of Betsy Bozdech.

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — The Australian government announced YouTube will be among the social media platforms that must ensure account holders are at least 16-years-old from December, reversing a position taken months ago on the popular video-sharing service.

YouTube was listed as an exemption in November last year when the Parliament passed world-first laws that will ban Australian children younger than 16 from platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and X.

Communications Minister Anika Wells released rules Wednesday that decide which online services are defined as “age-restricted social media platforms” and which avoid the age limit.

The age restrictions take effect Dec. 10 and platforms will face fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($33 million) for “failing to take responsible steps” to exclude underage account holders, a government statement said. The steps are not defined.

Wells defended applying the restrictions to YouTube and said the government would not be intimidated by threats of legal action from the platform’s U.S. owner, Alphabet Inc.

“The evidence cannot be ignored that four out of 10 Australian kids report that their most recent harm was on YouTube,” Wells told reporters, referring to government research. “We will not be intimidated by legal threats when this is a genuine fight for the wellbeing of Australian kids.”

Children will be able to access YouTube but will not be allowed to have their own YouTube accounts.

YouTube said the government’s decision “reverses a clear, public commitment to exclude YouTube from this ban.”

“We share the government’s goal of addressing and reducing online harms. Our position remains clear: YouTube is a video sharing platform with a library of free, high-quality content, increasingly viewed on TV screens. It’s not social media,” a YouTube statement said, noting it will consider next steps and engage with the government.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Australia would campaign at a United Nations forum in New York in September for international support for banning children from social media.

“I know from the discussions I’ve had with other leaders that they are looking at this and they are considering what impact social media is having on young people in their respective nations,” Albanese said. “It is a common experience. This is not an Australian experience.”

Last year, the government commissioned an evaluation of age assurance technologies that was to report last month on how young children could be excluded from social media.

The government had yet to receive that evaluation’s final recommendations, Wells said. But she added the platform users won’t have to upload documents such as passports and driver’s licenses to prove their age.

“Platforms have to provide an alternative to providing your own personal identification documents to satisfy themselves of age,” Wells said. “These platforms know with deadly accuracy who we are, what we do and when we do it. And they know that you’ve had a Facebook account since 2009, so they know that you are over 16.”

Exempt services include online gaming, messaging, education and health apps. They are excluded because they are considered less harmful to children.

The minimum age is intended to address harmful impacts on children including addictive behaviors caused by persuasive or manipulative platform design features, social isolation, sleep interference, poor mental and physical health, low life-satisfaction and exposure to inappropriate and harmful content, government documents say.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIV surprised tens of thousands of young Catholics on Tuesday and showed up unexpectedly at a Holy Year welcome ceremony, thrilling the kids and receiving a rock star’s welcome in the first big youth event of his pontificate.

Leo emerged in St. Peter’s Square in his popemobile at the end of an evening Mass that kicked off the Jubilee of Youth, a weeklong celebration for young Catholics. The estimated 120,000 young pilgrims who had packed the square erupted in shocked cheers and chants, as Leo looped around the square and up and down the boulevard leading to it.

For 20 minutes, Leo beamed, waved and clearly seemed to enjoy the outpouring of enthusiasm from his perch on the popemobile, as he took in the sea of cheering, flag-waving young people from around the world as the setting sun cast a golden glow over the basilica.

In a brief off-the-cuff salute and blessing from the altar, he told the young pilgrims that they were beacons of light, hope and peace that the world needs today.

“The world needs messages of hope. You are this message, and must give hope to everyone,” he said in a mix of Spanish, English and Italian. “We want peace in the world. We want peace in the world!”

Leo, the first American pope, hadn’t been expected to meet with the young pilgrims as a group until the weekend, when he was to preside over a vigil Saturday and Mass on Sunday in the highlight of the Jubilee week.

Tuesday’s Mass had been celebrated by the Italian archbishop who organized the Holy Year, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, but it was he who urged the kids to not leave the square at the end, because the pope “had a surprise for us.”

The crowd responded with the classic refrain from Catholic youth gatherings: “This is the youth of the pope.”

Rome abuzz with Catholic youths

This week, downtown Rome has swarmed with energetic, singing and dancing masses of teenage Catholic scouts, church and Catholic school groups whose numbers are expected to swell to 500,000 by the weekend.

It all had the vibe of a scaled-down World Youth Day, the once-every-three-year Catholic Woodstock festival that was inaugurated by St. John Paul II and maintained by every pope since.

Tuesday began with groups of Catholic influencers — priests, nuns and ordinary faithful who use their social media presence to preach and teach the faith — passing through the basilica’s Holy Door, a rite of passage for the estimated 32 million people participating in the Vatican’s 2025 Holy Year celebrations.

Audience with influencers

Francis met with some of the influencers earlier Tuesday and thanked them for using their digital platforms to spread the faith. But he warned them against neglecting human relationships in their pursuit of clicks and followers, and cautioned them to not fall prey to fake news and the “frivolity” of online encounters.

“It is not simply a matter of generating content, but of creating an encounter between hearts,” Leo said in a speech that showed his ease in switching between languages. “Be agents of communion, capable of breaking down the logic of division and polarization, of individualism and egocentrism.”

“It is up to us — to each one of you — to ensure that this culture remains human,” he said. “Our mission — your mission — is to nurture a culture of Christian humanism, and to do so together” in what he called the only networks that really matter: of friendship, love and the “network of God.”

Pablo Licheri, who founded the Catholic Mass Times app, which provides locations and times for Catholic liturgies around the world and has registered 2 million downloads, said that he has been heartened by both Leo’s message of unity and the enthusiasm of young Catholics like him who have descended on Rome.

“I was especially moved to meet so many fellow Catholic influencers in person and to pray together with others who share the same passion for spreading the joy of God’s love,” he said after Tuesday’s Mass.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

NEW YORK (AP) — If you’re a Microsoft Authenticator user, like me, you’ve probably received at least one notice that the app’s password management features are no longer usable and that your stored passwords will be inaccessible starting Aug. 1 unless you have the Edge browser.

Why? Because Microsoft is moving its signature sign-in app to a digital authentication method touted by security experts as an easier and more secure way to log in: passkeys.

“Last year (2024), we observed a staggering 7,000 password attacks per second (more than double the rate from 2023),” Microsoft wrote in a blog post. “Although passwords have been around for centuries, we hope their reign over our online world is ending.”

Authenticator has been a staple in providing multi-factor authentication, one-time passwords and biometric logins for services and some websites. Although the app will continue to provide authentication for passkey-compatible services, it is pushing its password management and autofill functions out to the company’s Edge browser instead.

Note that not all websites and applications have adopted passkeys yet, so many places still rely on passwords.

If you haven’t yet moved to a different password manager system or set up your passkeys, we’re here to help.

How to generate a passkey in Authenticator

Passkeys do away with complex 14 character passwords because you never need to see them. Instead you are using existing biometrics like your face or fingerprints, digital patterns or PINs to access your accounts.

Passkeys are made up of two parts of a code that only makes sense when they’re combined, kind of like a digital key and padlock. You keep half of the encrypted code, typically stored either in the cloud with a compatible verification app — including Authenticator — or on a physical security dongle. The other half is stored on the participating apps, services or accounts you want to access.

The bad news? You do have to set up individual passkeys for each service or application that accepts them. Keeping track of where you can use them versus traditional passwords can be challenging.

If you’ve opened Authenticator in the last few months, you likely were prompted to set up a passkey through a guided experience.

If you didn’t receive such a prompt, you can set up a new passkey by opening the authenticator app on your device. Find and tap on your account, then select “set up a passkey” option. Follow the app’s instructions.

Accessing old passwords in Edge

The good news is that all of your old passwords are synced to your Microsoft account. But to access them after Aug. 1, you will need to first install the Edge browser on your device of choice (and log into it).

For iOS users, navigate to Settings General Autofill & Passwords and turn on Edge.

Android users click their way to Settings General management Passwords and autofill Autofill service and select Edge.

Laptop and desktop users will need to open Edge and navigate to Settings Profiles Passwords. There you should find an autofill toggle and another option to save new passwords to your account.

Downloading your passwords to use in a password manager

Firstly, check out our advice on selecting and using password managers. There are many services — paid and free — out there and options to consider.

Now to export your Authenticator passwords, open the app on your device then navigate to Settings Export Passwords. This will spit out an exported file containing your data.

Most of the password managers out there — including those built into other browsers, or Apple and Android’s own key ring apps — will have an import option, which should accept this file. If you’re having difficulty with the import, it’s best to consult their customer service lines for help.

Tea, a dating discussion app that recently suffered a high-profile cybersecurity breach, announced late Monday that some direct messages were also accessed in the incident.

The app — designed to let women safely discuss men they date — rocketed to the top of the U.S. Apple App Store last week but then confirmed on Friday that thousands of selfies and photo IDs of registered users were exposed in a digital security breach.

404 Media was the first to report on this second security issue, citing an independent security researcher who found it was possible for hackers to access messages between users discussing abortions, cheating partners, and phone numbers.

In a statement posted on its social media accounts, Tea said it “recently learned that some direct messages (DMs) were accessed as part of the initial incident.”

“Out of an abundance of caution, we have taken the affected system offline,” the app said. “At this time, we have found no evidence of access to other parts of our environment.”

It is currently unknown how many messages were left exposed by the vulnerability. Tea said it is “working to identify any users whose personal information was involved and will be offering free identity protection services to those individuals.” The company said Tuesday it will share more information as it becomes available.

Because of the nature of the app — which allows women to anonymously discuss sensitive information about the men they date — users may be particularly vulnerable to malicious actors who try to expose their real-life identities.

Mary Ann Miller, vice president of client experience at identity verification company Prove, said the women who may have had their information compromised should consider making sure they have real-life security precautions in place — such as cameras, locks and “common sense things that you and I think about to be safe and secure in our own home.”

“The average citizen puts more out there in a public-facing view that can put their safety at risk. And I think it’s time for all of us to think about that more carefully,” she said. Companies, meanwhile, “should look for technology that utilizes other forms (besides) IDs to verify an identity” — and only store essential data and discard, securely, verification data that’s no longer needed once a person is verified.

Tea has said about 72,000 images were leaked online in the initial incident, including 13,000 images of selfies or selfies featuring a photo identification that users submitted during account verification. Another 59,000 images publicly viewable in the app from posts, comments and direct messages were also accessed without authorization, a spokesperson said last week.

No email addresses or phone numbers were accessed, the company said, and the breach only affects users who signed up before February 2024.

Most U.S. adults say they use artificial intelligence to search for information, but fewer are using it for work, drafting email or shopping.

Younger adults are most likely to be leaning into AI, with many using it for brainstorming and work tasks.

The new findings from an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll show that 60% of Americans overall — and 74% of those under 30 — use AI to find information at least some of the time.

The poll highlights the ubiquity of AI in some areas — as well as its limits in others. Only about 4 in 10 Americans say they have used AI for work tasks or coming up with ideas, a sign that the tech industry’s promises of highly productive AI assistants still haven’t touched most livelihoods after years of promotion and investment.

At the same time, wider AI adoption by younger Americans shows that could change.

There’s a particularly large age divide on brainstorming: About 6 in 10 adults under age 30 have used AI for coming up with ideas, compared with only 2 in 10 of those age 60 or older. Young adults are also more likely to use AI to come up with ideas at least “daily.”

Young adults are most likely to use AI

Bridging the generations are people like Courtney Thayer, 34, who’s embracing AI in some parts of her life and avoiding it in others.

Thayer said she is regularly using ChatGPT to come up with ideas about planning what to eat, while also having it calculate the nutritional value of the pumpkin-banana-oat bread she’s been baking for years.

“I asked it to make a meal prep for the week, then to add an Asian flair,” said Thayer, of Des Moines, Iowa. “It wasn’t the most flavorful thing I’ve ever had in my life, but it’s a nice stepping off point. More importantly, I use it for the amount so that I’m not over-serving myself and ending up with wasted food.”

The audiologist has embraced AI at work, too, in part because AI technology is imbued in the hearing aids she recommends to patients but also because it makes it easier and faster to draft professional emails.

She avoids it for important information, particularly medical advice, after witnessing chatbots “hallucinate” false information about topics she spent years studying.

Roughly 4 in 10 Americans say they use AI for work tasks at least sometimes, while about one-third say they use it for helping to write emails, create or edit images, or for entertainment, according to the poll. About one-quarter say they use it to shop.

Younger adults are more likely than older ones to say they have used artificial intelligence to help with various tasks, the poll shows.

Searching for information is AI’s most common use

Of the eight options offered in the poll questions, searching for information is the most common way Americans have interacted with AI. And even that may be an undercount, since it’s not always apparent how AI is surfacing what information people see online.

For more than a year, the dominant search engine, Google, has automatically provided AI-generated responses that attempt to answer a person’s search query, appearing at the top of results.

Perhaps defying emerging media consumption trends, 28-year-old Sanaa Wilson usually skips right past those AI-generated summaries.

“It has to be a basic question like, ‘What day does Christmas land on in 2025?’” said the Los Angeles-area resident. “I’ll be like, ‘That makes sense. I trust it.’ But when it gets to specific news, related to what’s happening in California or what’s happening to the education system and stuff like that, I will scroll down a little bit further.”

Wilson, a freelance data scientist, does use AI heavily at work to help with coding, which she said has saved her hundreds of dollars she would have had to pay for training. She also occasionally uses it to come up with work-related ideas, an attempt to bring back a little of the collaborative brainstorming experience she remembers from college life but doesn’t have now.

When it first came out, Wilson said she also used ChatGPT to help write emails, until she learned more about its environmental impact and the possibility it would erode her own writing and thinking skills over time.

“It’s just an email. I can work it out,” she said. “However many minutes it takes, or seconds it takes, I can still type it myself.”

Most don’t use AI for companionship — but it’s more common for young adults

The least common of the eight AI uses was AI companionship, though even that showed an age divide.

Just under 2 in 10 of all adults and about a quarter of those under 30 say they’ve used AI for companionship.

Wilson has no interest in AI companions, though she isn’t surprised that others do because of the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on her generation’s social experiences.

“I totally understand and sympathize behind why people in my age group are leveraging it in that way,” Wilson said.

Thayer, the audiologist, also has no interest in AI companionship, though she tries to be polite with chatbots, just in case they’re keeping track.

“I mean, I am nice to it, just because I’ve watched movies, right?” Thayer said, laughing. “So I’ll say, ‘Can you make me a meal plan, please?’ And, ‘Can you modify this, please?’ And then I’ll say, ‘Thank you.’”

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The AP-NORC poll of 1,437 adults was conducted July 10-14, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.

ZAPOPAN, Mexico (AP) — First the scientists dress dead swine in clothes, then they dispose of the carcasses. Some they wrap in packing tape, others they chop up. They stuff the animals into plastic bags or wrap them in blankets. They cover them in lime or burn them. Some are buried alone, others in groups.

Then they watch.

The pigs are playing an unlikely role as proxies for humans in research to help find the staggering number of people who have gone missing in Mexico during decades of drug cartel violence.

Families of the missing are usually left to look for their loved ones with little support from authorities. But now, government scientists are testing the newest satellite, geophysical and biological mapping techniques — along with the pigs — to offer clues that they hope could lead to the discovery of at least some of the bodies.

130,000 missing and counting

The ranks of Mexico’s missing exploded in the years following the launch of then-President Felipe Calderón’s war against drug cartels in 2006. A strategy that targeted the leaders of a handful of powerful cartels led to a splintering of organized crime and the multiplication of violence to control territory.

With near complete impunity, owing to the complicity or inaction of the authorities, cartels found that making anyone they think is in their way disappear was better than leaving bodies in the street. Mexican administrations have sometimes been unwilling to recognize the problem and at other times are staggered by the scale of violence their justice system is unprepared to address.

Mexico’s disappeared could populate a small city. Official data in 2013 tallied 26,000 missing, but the count now surpasses 130,000 — more than any other Latin American nation. The United Nations has said there are indications that the disappearances are “generalized or systematic.”

If the missing people are found — dead or alive — it is usually by their loved ones. Guided by information from witnesses, parents and siblings search for graves by walking through cartel territory, plunging a metal rod into the earth and sniffing for the scent of death.

Around 6,000 clandestine graves have been found since 2007, and new discoveries are made all the time. Tens of thousands of remains have yet to be identified.

Testing creative solutions

Jalisco, which is home to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, has the largest number of people reported missing in Mexico: 15,500. In March, human bone fragments and hundreds of items of clothing were discovered at a cartel ranch in the state. Authorities denied it was the site of a mass grave.

José Luis Silván, a coordinator of the mapping project and scientist at CentroGeo, a federal research institute focused on geospacial information, said Jalisco’s disappeared are “why we’re here.”

The mapping project, launched in 2023, is a collaboration by Guadalajara University, Mexico’s National Autonomous University and the University of Oxford in England, alongside the Jalisco Search Commission, a state agency that organizes local searches with relatives.

“No other country is pushing so strongly, so creatively” to test and combine new techniques, said Derek Congram, a Canadian forensic anthropologist, whose expertise in geographic information systems inspired the Mexican project.

Still, Congram warns, technology “is not a panacea.”

“Ninety percent of searches are resolved with a good witness and digging,” he said.

Plants, insects and decomposing pigs

Silván walks by a site where scientists buried 14 pigs about two years ago. He says they may not know how well the technology works, where and when it can be used, or under what conditions, for at least three years.

“Flowers came up because of the phosphorous at the surface, we didn’t see that last year,” he said as he took measurements at one of the gravesites. “The mothers who search say that that little yellow flower always blooms over the tombs and they use them as a guide.”

Pigs and humans are closely related, famously sharing about 98% of DNA. But for the mapping project, the physical similarities also matter. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, pigs resemble humans in size, fat distribution and the structure and thickness of skin.

A big Colombian drone mounted with a hyperspectral camera flies over the pig burial site. Generally used by mining companies, the camera measures light reflected by substances in the soil, including nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, and shows how they vary as the pigs decompose. The colorful image it produces offers clues of what to look for in the hunt for graves.

“This isn’t pure science,” Silván said. “It is science and action. Everything learned has to be applied immediately, rather than wait for it to mature, because there’s urgency.”

Researchers also employ thermal drones, laser scanners and other gadgets to register anomalies, underground movements and electrical currents. One set of graves is encased behind a pane of transparent acrylic, providing a window for scientists to observe the pigs’ decomposition in real time.

The Jalisco commission compares and analyzes flies, beetles, plants and soil recovered from the human and pig graves.

Each grave is a living “micro ecosystem,” said Tunuari Chávez, the commission’s director of context analysis.

Science to serve society

Triggered by the disappearance of 43 students in 2014, Silván and his colleagues started gathering information about ground-penetrating radar, electric resistivity and satellite imagery from around the world. They studied University of Tennessee research on human corpses buried at a “body farm.” They looked at grave-mapping techniques used in the Balkans, Colombia and Ukraine.

“What good is science or technology if it doesn’t solve problems?” he said.

They learned new applications of satellite analysis, then began their first experiments burying pigs and studying the substances criminals use to dispose of bodies. They found lime is easily detected, but hydrocarbons, hydrochloric acid and burned flesh are not.

Chávez’s team worked to combine the science with what they knew about how the cartels operate. For example, they determined that disappearances in Jalisco commonly happened along cartel routes between Pacific ports, drug manufacturing facilities and the U.S. border, and that most of the missing are found in the same municipality where they disappeared.

Expert relatives

The experience of the families of the missing also informs the research.

Some observed that graves are often found under trees whose roots grow vertically, so those digging the graves can remain in the shade. Mothers of missing loved ones invited by researchers to visit one of the pig burial sites were able to identify most of the unmarked graves by sight alone, because of the plants and soil placement, Silván said.

“The knowledge flows in both directions,” he said.

Maribel Cedeño, who has been looking for her missing brother for four years, said she believes the drones and other technology will be helpful.

“I never imagined being in this situation, finding bodies, becoming such an expert,” she said of her quest.

Héctor Flores has been searching for his son since 2021. He questions why so much time and effort has been invested in methods that have not led to concrete discoveries, when the families have proven track records with little official support.

Although the research has not yet concluded, the Jalisco Search Commission is already using a thermal drone, a laser scanner and a multispectral camera to help families look for their missing relatives in some cases. But it is unclear whether authorities across Mexico will ever be willing to use, or able to afford, the high-tech aides.

Congram, the forensic scientist, said researchers are aware of the limitations of technology, but that “you always have to try, fail, fail again and keep trying.”

ZAPOPAN, Mexico (AP) — First the scientists dress dead swine in clothes, then they dispose of the carcasses. Some they wrap in packing tape, others they chop up. They stuff the animals into plastic bags or wrap them in blankets. They cover them in lime or burn them. Some are buried alone, others in groups.

Then they watch.

The pigs are playing an unlikely role as proxies for humans in research to help find the staggering number of people who have gone missing in Mexico during decades of drug cartel violence.

Families of the missing are usually left to look for their loved ones with little support from authorities. But now, government scientists are testing the newest satellite, geophysical and biological mapping techniques — along with the pigs — to offer clues that they hope could lead to the discovery of at least some of the bodies.

130,000 missing and counting

The ranks of Mexico’s missing exploded in the years following the launch of then-President Felipe Calderón’s war against drug cartels in 2006. A strategy that targeted the leaders of a handful of powerful cartels led to a splintering of organized crime and the multiplication of violence to control territory.

With near complete impunity, owing to the complicity or inaction of the authorities, cartels found that making anyone they think is in their way disappear was better than leaving bodies in the street. Mexican administrations have sometimes been unwilling to recognize the problem and at other times are staggered by the scale of violence their justice system is unprepared to address.

Mexico’s disappeared could populate a small city. Official data in 2013 tallied 26,000 missing, but the count now surpasses 130,000 — more than any other Latin American nation. The United Nations has said there are indications that the disappearances are “generalized or systematic.”

If the missing people are found — dead or alive — it is usually by their loved ones. Guided by information from witnesses, parents and siblings search for graves by walking through cartel territory, plunging a metal rod into the earth and sniffing for the scent of death.

Around 6,000 clandestine graves have been found since 2007, and new discoveries are made all the time. Tens of thousands of remains have yet to be identified.

Testing creative solutions

Jalisco, which is home to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, has the largest number of people reported missing in Mexico: 15,500. In March, human bone fragments and hundreds of items of clothing were discovered at a cartel ranch in the state. Authorities denied it was the site of a mass grave.

José Luis Silván, a coordinator of the mapping project and scientist at CentroGeo, a federal research institute focused on geospacial information, said Jalisco’s disappeared are “why we’re here.”

The mapping project, launched in 2023, is a collaboration by Guadalajara University, Mexico’s National Autonomous University and the University of Oxford in England, alongside the Jalisco Search Commission, a state agency that organizes local searches with relatives.

“No other country is pushing so strongly, so creatively” to test and combine new techniques, said Derek Congram, a Canadian forensic anthropologist, whose expertise in geographic information systems inspired the Mexican project.

Still, Congram warns, technology “is not a panacea.”

“Ninety percent of searches are resolved with a good witness and digging,” he said.

Plants, insects and decomposing pigs

Silván walks by a site where scientists buried 14 pigs about two years ago. He says they may not know how well the technology works, where and when it can be used, or under what conditions, for at least three years.

“Flowers came up because of the phosphorous at the surface, we didn’t see that last year,” he said as he took measurements at one of the gravesites. “The mothers who search say that that little yellow flower always blooms over the tombs and they use them as a guide.”

Pigs and humans are closely related, famously sharing about 98% of DNA. But for the mapping project, the physical similarities also matter. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, pigs resemble humans in size, fat distribution and the structure and thickness of skin.

A big Colombian drone mounted with a hyperspectral camera flies over the pig burial site. Generally used by mining companies, the camera measures light reflected by substances in the soil, including nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, and shows how they vary as the pigs decompose. The colorful image it produces offers clues of what to look for in the hunt for graves.

“This isn’t pure science,” Silván said. “It is science and action. Everything learned has to be applied immediately, rather than wait for it to mature, because there’s urgency.”

Researchers also employ thermal drones, laser scanners and other gadgets to register anomalies, underground movements and electrical currents. One set of graves is encased behind a pane of transparent acrylic, providing a window for scientists to observe the pigs’ decomposition in real time.

The Jalisco commission compares and analyzes flies, beetles, plants and soil recovered from the human and pig graves.

Each grave is a living “micro ecosystem,” said Tunuari Chávez, the commission’s director of context analysis.

Science to serve society

Triggered by the disappearance of 43 students in 2014, Silván and his colleagues started gathering information about ground-penetrating radar, electric resistivity and satellite imagery from around the world. They studied University of Tennessee research on human corpses buried at a “body farm.” They looked at grave-mapping techniques used in the Balkans, Colombia and Ukraine.

“What good is science or technology if it doesn’t solve problems?” he said.

They learned new applications of satellite analysis, then began their first experiments burying pigs and studying the substances criminals use to dispose of bodies. They found lime is easily detected, but hydrocarbons, hydrochloric acid and burned flesh are not.

Chávez’s team worked to combine the science with what they knew about how the cartels operate. For example, they determined that disappearances in Jalisco commonly happened along cartel routes between Pacific ports, drug manufacturing facilities and the U.S. border, and that most of the missing are found in the same municipality where they disappeared.

Expert relatives

The experience of the families of the missing also informs the research.

Some observed that graves are often found under trees whose roots grow vertically, so those digging the graves can remain in the shade. Mothers of missing loved ones invited by researchers to visit one of the pig burial sites were able to identify most of the unmarked graves by sight alone, because of the plants and soil placement, Silván said.

“The knowledge flows in both directions,” he said.

Maribel Cedeño, who has been looking for her missing brother for four years, said she believes the drones and other technology will be helpful.

“I never imagined being in this situation, finding bodies, becoming such an expert,” she said of her quest.

Héctor Flores has been searching for his son since 2021. He questions why so much time and effort has been invested in methods that have not led to concrete discoveries, when the families have proven track records with little official support.

Although the research has not yet concluded, the Jalisco Search Commission is already using a thermal drone, a laser scanner and a multispectral camera to help families look for their missing relatives in some cases. But it is unclear whether authorities across Mexico will ever be willing to use, or able to afford, the high-tech aides.

Congram, the forensic scientist, said researchers are aware of the limitations of technology, but that “you always have to try, fail, fail again and keep trying.”

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — An artificial intelligence data center that would use more electricity than every home in Wyoming combined before expanding to as much as five times that size will be built soon near Cheyenne, according to the city’s mayor.

“It’s a game changer. It’s huge,” Mayor Patrick Collins said Monday.

With cool weather — good for keeping computer temperatures down — and an abundance of inexpensive electricity from a top energy-producing state, Wyoming’s capital has become a hub of computing power.

The city has been home to Microsoft data centers since 2012. An $800 million data center announced last year by Facebook parent company Meta Platforms is nearing completion, Collins said.

The latest data center, a joint effort between regional energy infrastructure company Tallgrass and AI data center developer Crusoe, would begin at 1.8 gigawatts of electricity and be scalable to 10 gigawatts, according to a joint company statement.

A gigawatt can power as many as 1 million homes. But that’s more homes than Wyoming has people. The least populated state, Wyoming, has about 590,000 people.

And it’s a major exporter of energy. A top producer of coal, oil and gas, Wyoming ranks behind only Texas, New Mexico and Pennsylvania as a top net energy-producing state, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Accounting for fossil fuels, Wyoming produces about 12 times more energy than it consumes. The state exports almost three-fifths of the electricity it produces, according to the EIA.

But this proposed data center is so big, it would have its own dedicated energy from gas generation and renewable sources, according to Collins and company officials.

Gov. Mark Gordon praised the project’s value to the state’s gas industry.

“This is exciting news for Wyoming and for Wyoming natural gas producers,” Gordon said in the statement.

While data centers are energy-hungry, experts say companies can help reduce their effect on the climate by powering them with renewable energy rather than fossil fuels. Even so, electricity customers might see their bills increase as utilities plan for massive data projects on the grid.

The data center would be built several miles (kilometers) south of Cheyenne off U.S. 85 near the Colorado state line. State and local regulators would need to sign off on the project, but Collins was optimistic construction could begin soon.

“I believe their plans are to go sooner rather than later,” Collins said.

OpenAI, the developer of Chat GPT, has been scouring the U.S. for sites for a massive AI data center effort called Stargate, but a Crusoe spokesperson declined to say if the Cheyenne project was one.

“We are not at a stage that we are ready to announce our tenant there,” said the spokesperson, Andrew Schmitt. “I can’t confirm or deny that is going to be one of the stargate.”

Recently, OpenAI announced it had switched on the first phase of a Crusoe-built data center complex in Abilene, Texas, in a partnership with software giant Oracle.

“To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest data center — we think of it as a campus — in the world,” OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane told The Associated Press last week. “It generates, roughly and depending how you count, about a gigawatt of energy.”

OpenAI has also been looking elsewhere in the U.S. to expand its data centers. It said last week that it has entered into an agreement with Oracle to develop another 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity.

“We’re now in a position where we have, in a really concrete way, identified over five gigawatts of energy that we’re going to be able to build around,” Lehane said.

OpenAI hasn’t named any locations, besides its flagship site in Texas, where it plans to build data centers.

As of earlier this year, Wyoming was not one of the 16 states where OpenAI said it was looking for locations to build new data centers.

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O’Brien reported from Austin, Texas.