World

The house was commissioned in the 1920s by Daniel C. Jackling, a self-made copper millionaire whose business transformed the American copper industry. For a house that once embodied California wealth and architectural ambition, the end came not with a grand renovation but with bulldozers. The Jackling House, a sprawling Spanish Colonial Revival mansion in the…

Chicago’s founding problem had always been plumbing. The city drew its drinking water from Lake Michigan and emptied sewers into the Chicago River, which flowed straight into Lake Michigan. But every rainstorm flushed the stockyards and slaughterhouses and a million people’s waste out toward the water intakes. This is why the nineteenth-century city was periodically…

PC: Study: A vast 4,000-year-old spatial pattern of termite mounds Across northeastern Brazil, an extraordinary landscape hides a secret beneath its surface. Around 200 million earthen mounds stretch across roughly 230,000 square kilometres, an area about the size of Great Britain. Some of these structures are almost 4,000 years old, yet they are not termite…

For years, a 160-year-old church in St. Louis stood as a reminder of a neighbourhood’s past while steadily becoming one of its most troubled properties. The vacant structure had endured a fire, repeated complaints and two structural condemnations. City records showed 37 service requests connected to the property, as concerns about its condition continued to…

China rejects Anthropic’s AI extraction allegations China has firmly rejected accusations by US artificial intelligence company Anthropic that Chinese AI labs, including DeepSeek, Alibaba and Moonshot AI, carried out large-scale efforts to extract responses from its Claude models and use them to train their own systems.Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Beijing “advocates AI…

By 2015, estimates suggested that around one million pieces of chewing gum had found their way onto the wall. Some landmarks are built with steel, stone or glass. Seattle has one made largely of something far less permanent: chewing gum. Tucked beneath the famous Pike Place Market, the Seattle Gum Wall has spent decades attracting…

Donald Trump and Mohammed bin Salman (File photo) Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sought assistance from President Trump Thursday to help fight Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis, two sources familiar with the matter said Friday, as the Houthis stepped up their threat to the Red Sea.Trump held at least two phone conversations with the Saudi Crown…

Africa has emerged as the world’s most active terrorism theatre, according to a new US House Homeland Security Committee report. Africa has emerged as the world’s most active theatre of terrorism, with more than two-thirds of Islamic State (ISIS) activity taking place on the continent, according to a new report by the US House Committee…

Wairākei geothermal field in July 1978. Image Credit: Engineering New Zealand Wairākei Power Station in New Zealand changed the way geothermal heat could be turned into electricity when it was commissioned in 1958. Built beside the Waikato River, north of Taupō, the station drew on hot underground water beneath an active volcanic zone. Instead of…

California governor Gavin Newsom signed more than a dozen new laws on Thursday that address various aspects of children’s safety online, including one that prohibits social media companies from serving addictive features to users under 16 years old. During a signing ceremony, Newsom described the restrictions as “better” than Australia’s ban for all users under…