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🌎 The beautiful game is getting dangerously hot. Nearly 90% of stadiums hosting the 2026 World Cup in Mexico, Canada, and the US already exceed “safe-play thresholds” for climate hazards, including extreme heat. (Dialogue Earth)

Wildfires are coming for the East Coast, with nearly half of 2025 blazes igniting east of the Mississippi, and researchers are scrambling to get ahead of the problem before densely-packed states like New Jersey become the new California. (HEATMAP)

The legal foundation for fighting climate change was just scorched by the Trump administration, erasing the 2009 “endangerment finding” that classified greenhouse gases as a public health threat, which means the EPA can no longer regulate most carbon emissions. Sigh. (The New York Times)

HOWEVER, Big Oil is actually quietly panicking about the federal rollbacks because without federal climate authority, they lose their legal shield against the avalanche of state lawsuits trying to make them pay billions for climate damages. Get ‘em! (Heated)

Connecticut is the first state to go fully transparent on climate risk, launching a website that shows every single property’s flood damage history and future projections, complete with an ad blitz so residents (and their insurance agents) can’t claim they didn’t know what’s coming. (E&E News)

Alabama has one of America’s highest infant mortality rates and shrinking maternity care, so they’re pitching the use of telerobotic ultrasounds to fix the rural healthcare crisis, sparking a showdown between tech enthusiasts and critics who argue health care workers > robots. (The 19th)

Measles kills kids. This harrowing piece from The Atlantic follows a mother who brings her unvaccinated kids to a birthday party, and within weeks her daughter is in the ICU, and her son has lost his hearing. But the real gut-punch comes eight years later when he develops a rare brain-destroying measles complication. (The Atlantic)

🌎 The Winter Olympics just banned PFAS-laced “fluoro” ski waxes that made athletes ridiculously fast for decades but also poisoned wax techs’ blood, contaminated mountain aquifers, and turned slopes into forever-chemical dumping grounds. (Grist)

As states begin to weaken vaccine mandates, doctors are worried that kids will stop coming to the doctor at all, since many families only show up for checkups when school forms force them to. (The 19th)

Meta is flooding TV airwaves with thousands of ads touting its teen safety features, in what looks like a PR blitz to get ahead of a landmark jury trial that will decide whether the company deliberately designed Instagram to addict kids. (Bloomberg)

🌍 The EU’s deforestation law is forcing farmers to prove their beans didn’t come from cleared forest, but new research reveals that deforestation-detection services disagree 20% of the time, raising fears that compliance costs could lock small farmers out of European markets. (AidData)

Despite the immigration crackdown, food workers are doubling down in the courts, as the judiciary is now the only refuge left as federal agencies become “enforcement machines” instead of worker protection channels. (Civil Eats)

Trump is pushing to lease an area bigger than California for deep-sea mining in Alaska, but Indigenous communities who depend on the area for food are fighting back. (Mongabay)

A bipartisan bill wants to kick-start commercial fish farming offshore in deep ocean waters to reduce dependency on seafood imports, but since there’s almost zero research on what submersible ocean pens actually do in deep-sea ecosystems, critics are concerned. (Civil Eats)

The new government nutrition website features an AI chatbot (turns out it’s just Grok) that has immediately contradicted the new food pyramid. (STAT)

Turns out medical chatbots are terrible at diagnosing real-world health scenarios, proving that despite acing medical exams in controlled settings, AI isn’t ready to take over for human doctors. (404 Media)

Romance scams are going industrial, with Americans losing $16 billion to online fraud in 2024, as AI-powered deepfakes make fake lovers more convincing than ever. (Politico)

Companies are now paying big money for “generative engine optimization” (basically SEO for AI chatbots) to manipulate AI assistants into recommending their products and services. That was quick! (Wall Street Journal)

With Ring cams, American homeowners have essentially built themselves a surveillance dragnet that could easily be repurposed to track…anyone. (404 Media)

Google just launched a 21-language African speech dataset, but in a rare twist for Big Tech, African universities and institutions actually own the data, marking a shift toward digital sovereignty. (Rest of World)