Americans now spend an average of 35 minutes a day socializing, down from 45 minutes two decades ago, according to American Time Use Survey data. The decline spans all age groups but is sharpest among 15- to 24-year-olds, whose daily socializing has fallen from about an hour to 35 minutes. Axios reports: Sociologists and psychologists point to several trends driving this phenomenon, which Substack writer Derek Thompson dubbed "The Anti-Social Century" in the Atlantic last year. We're all on our smartphones, often interacting through screens instead of face to face -- even though social media is no substitute for spending time together in person. Teens, in particular, spend an average of 4.8 hours a day on apps like TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, according to Gallup. The shift to remote work -- and life -- during the pandemic has persisted, keeping more of us homebound. Longer-term trends are reshaping daily life in ways that make isolation easier. Homes are bigger and more comfortable, with larger TVs. Virtually every restaurant is on a food delivery app, making it easier than ever to stay in. Also contributing to the trend is the decline of gathering spaces, Axios' Avery Lotz writes. A 2025 report from CU Boulder researchers uncovered widespread closures of all kinds of hangout spots -- from libraries to coffee shops to museums -- in the last decade or so. Churches are also shuttering at unprecedented rates, Axios' Russell Contreras reports.

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South Carolina's pine forests "have spent centuries hiding a secret as old as America itself," reports CBS News: In August 1780, British and American soldiers clashed there, leading to a terrible defeat for the Continental army [fighting for the 13 colonies rebelling against England]. Battlefield archaeologists Jim Legg and Steve Smith have been studying the site for decades, but recently, they made a shocking discovery: The sandy soil was home to several sets of remains buried in shallow graves. Metal buttons suggested the men had been Continental soldiers, but there was no other identification... About 2,000 Continental soldiers were killed, wounded or captured, and some men never returned home. Their families could only guess at their fates. But Legg and Smith's discovery, paired with an explosion in DNA technology, is changing what's possible. A set of remains, previously known only as 9B, has been identified as John Pumphrey, a young man from Maryland who enlisted in the Continental Army's 7th Maryland Regiment as young as 13... Pumphrey likely marched more than a thousand miles with the regiment. The unit fought in battles with then-Gen. George Washington in New Jersey and Pennsylvania... The Pumphrey family still exists today. The DNA that helped identify Pumphrey's remains came from three women: Pam Donahue, Karen Pumphrey Etchison, and Nancy Pumphrey White... In late June, members of the extended Pumphrey family came together to hear his story and say his name for the first time in centuries. His remains are interred in South Carolina, where he and the other soldiers were discovered, but the tombstone, once marked "Unknown," will soon have his name carved on it.

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The US age-adjusted death rate fell to a record low in 2025, likely pushing life expectancy to a record high as overdose deaths declined and mortality improved across all age groups. CNN reports: There were about 689 deaths for every 100,000 people in the US in 2025, according to a new report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- the lowest rate recorded in more than a century of tracking. The age-adjusted rate has fallen 22% since 2021, landing about 4% lower than it was just before the pandemic in 2019. [...] The top causes of death in the US in 2025 followed longstanding patterns: Heart disease led with nearly 695,000 deaths, followed by cancer with nearly 623,000 deaths. Unintentional injuries, which includes drug overdoses, were the third leading cause of death. Overdose deaths are still high -- about 70,000 people died from an overdose in 2025, preliminary CDC data shows -- but experts say that sharp declines probably played a large role in bringing the age-adjusted death rate down in the US.

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America's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has "canceled its contract for a surveillance tool that enables warrantless tracking of mobile devices," reports the Associated Press. They note the move comes "after lawmakers, a prosecutor and a judge raised concerns about the legality of the tool in criminal investigations." ATF, the federal agency responsible for enforcing the nation's gun laws, told The Associated Press that it discontinued what it called a "pilot" program using a tool called Webloc after Rep. Michael Cloud, a Republican from Texas, and Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, expressed reservations about the agency's use of bulk commercial location data. Webloc, which is made by a vendor called Penlink, sources data from consumer apps and advertising networks, which collect the location of mobile devices from consumers who download apps or browse the web... The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that police needed a warrant to obtain historic movement data from cellphone companies on a criminal suspect. But it has never addressed the growing practice of commercially acquired data. Other users of Webloc include the U.S. military and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement but also local law enforcement agencies such as police in places like Elk Grove, Calif. and Durham, N.C. The technology has also expanded around the world, with the national police in El Salvador and Hungarian intelligence agencies as customers, according to a report from earlier this year from Citizen Lab, a group of researchers at the University of Toronto who investigate digital threats to civil society. The article notes that other U.S. law enforcement agencies continue to buy commercial geolocation data, "including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security."

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Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from PetaPixel: China dominates the consumer drone market, so it is perhaps surprising that it is no longer possible to fly or even purchase a drone in Beijing. The new law that passed last month makes it illegal to buy, rent, or fly a drone without prior approval from the authorities. Users must also complete an online training session and pass a test on drone regulations. Under the new rules, drone users are also not allowed to repair or replace their drones in Beijing. Not only that, but a drone in a repair shop must be picked up in-person, rather than sent back by delivery. The BBC reports that drones must now be registered before being brought into and out of the Chinese capital. "I have to apply for permission for each flight, which is very inconvenient," drone enthusiast Steven Wang tells CNN. "And starting this year, the wait time is getting longer, and the reasons for rejection are becoming more vague." Despite China being the birthplace of the consumer drone industry, it is increasingly difficult for hobbyists to fly there. Beijing authorities say that the rules are made to "strengthen the management of unmanned aerial vehicles" and "safeguard the security of the capital."

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The Wall Street Journal reports: The Trump administration's decision to halt all foreign use of Anthropic's most capable AI models was prompted by conversations between Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy and U.S. officials including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, people familiar with the matter said. Researchers at Amazon had used a series of prompts to get Anthropic's Fable 5 model to provide them with information that could be used to aid cyberattacks and was supposed to be off limits, Jassy told the officials, according to people familiar with the matter. Tech industry executives have been in regular touch with the administration about the power of cutting-edge AI tools. Shortly afterward, White House officials held a meeting to discuss how to respond and security researchers began testing Amazon's claims. The officials asked Anthropic to fix the vulnerabilities or take down the model, according to administration officials. The officials decided that the most direct way to address that risk was by preventing foreign governments, companies and individuals from accessing the tool, the people said. President Trump later signed off on the action despite reservations about it hindering innovation, a senior White House official said. The administration had long felt that Anthropic, one of the leaders in America's AI race, couldn't be trusted to manage the security risks its new model presented. Friday's call between some administration officials and Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei reinforced that feeling, the people said... Anthropic has said that the vulnerabilities like those flagged by Amazon are relatively basic. The company has said that other publicly available models are capable of discovering them and that they don't represent a full so-called jailbreak, a point of view shared by some security researchers familiar with Amazon's research. The article points out that Amazon is "a big investor in Anthropic, supply Anthropic with chips for data centers.

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It's the U.S. law that allows wiretaps without a warrant for surveilling foreign targets. And the U.S. Congress just let it lapse. Sort of. NPR reports: Each year, the provision is used by American intelligence agencies to collect the electronic communications of hundreds of thousands of foreigners located outside of the United States. The government says that more than 60% of the president's daily intelligence briefing relies on information collected under the authority. The tool officially lapsed at the end of the day on Friday. What happens now? Intelligence collection under FISA's Section 702 is authorized annually by a federal court — and the law allows for that collection to continue for the duration of the court's authorization, even if the law lapses before the court's next approval. That means companies — electronic communications service providers, in this context — will still be legally required to turn over material to intelligence agencies. Still, some lawmakers worry that the companies compelled to turn over communications may attempt to challenge the law in court, possibly leading to an indeterminately long window during which they stop providing intel. Advocates on all sides of the surveillance fight believe those challenges are ultimately likely to fail, but those closely linked to the intelligence community emphasize that even a small pause comes with risks ahead of major events like America's 250th celebration and the World Cup.

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UPDATE: Amazon CEO's Talks With U.S. Officials Triggered Crackdown on Anthropic Models. "Anthropic said on Friday it will 'abruptly disable' its most advanced AI models for all users," reports Reuters, "after the U.S. government ordered it to suspend access to the models for foreign nationals, citing national security concerns. The company received the export control directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals, without being given specific details of its national security concern, Anthropic said in a statement." Anthropic's blog post writes that the directive applies to foreign nationals "whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance." "Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected." We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET)... Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or "jailbreaking" Fable 5... We have not even received a disclosure of a concerning non-universal potential jailbreak that led to a harmful result. The potential jailbreaks that have been disclosed to us are either entirely benign responses or are minor findings that provide no Mythos-specific uplift. To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws. Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government. We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI's GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe... We are complying with the government's legal directive and are removing access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users. However, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people. If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers. As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Reuters notes that Amazon's cloud unit AWS "said late on Friday that Anthropic has asked it to revoke access to the models for 'all users in all regions.'" Dean Ball, a former White House official who contributed to the AI Action Plan the administration issued in the summer of 2025, said in a post on X that the order suggests all "non-Americans" would be restricted from using Anthropic's latest models, including those based in the U.S. "This means you should expect to have to prove your citizenship to use Anthropic models," Ball said. Several key Anthropic personnel, including co-founder Chris Olah, AI researcher Andrej Karpathy and philosopher Amanda Askell, were born outside the United States.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The first quarter of 2026 produced the most blocked and delayed data center projects on record, according to a new study shared with NBC News. The study -- conducted by Data Center Watch, a project of the AI intelligence firm 10a Labs that tracks local data center activity -- found that data center opponents blocked or delayed at least 75 projects nationwide worth about $130 billion from January through March, the most in a three-month period since the group began tracking in 2023. "The quarter reflected a structural shift rather than a cyclical spike: communities have internalized an opposition playbook, legislative sessions introduced formal regulatory uncertainty, and the number of active opposition groups more than doubled to 833 across 49 states," the authors wrote, noting that the total number and value of data centers blocked or delayed during the first three months of 2026 roughly matched the total for all of 2025. [...] The report found that legislative pushes for moratoriums on constructing data centers ballooned during the first quarter of 2026, sponsored by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. The report found such proposals introduced in 14 states from January through March, with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., introducing a federal version. Though none of the proposals has been signed into law, one did reach the desk of Democratic Gov. Janet Mills in Maine. She vetoed it in April. More than 300 bills were introduced in statehouses across the country just in the first six weeks of 2026, the authors found, saying it marked "a clear shift from incentive-focused policies toward regulatory oversight as the scale of energy demands became clearer." What's more, the study found that the number of active grassroots opposition groups across the country more than doubled from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by March. The authors found that the states with the most opposition groups through that month were Maryland, Ohio and Texas. "In some cases," they wrote, "opposition mobilized before any project was officially filed, the mere rumor of a data center was enough to trigger organized resistance."

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U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders announced a plan for the public to take a 50% ownership stake in AI companies, remembers the Associated Press. And then OpenAI's Sam Altman "told Sanders that he, too, wants the public to have equity in AI companies." Though the CEO said he couldn't support Sanders' threshold of 50%, he nonetheless wanted to work with him to advocate for the general idea, according to people with knowledge of the conversation. The nearly hourlong meeting in Sanders' Senate office this week, held at Altman's request, highlighted the inherent tension between AI powerhouses and policymakers as Americans are increasingly asked to accept the costs of the AI boom even as they remain unconvinced of its direct benefits. Yet it's also creating odd political bedfellows fueled by populism as politicians from Sanders to President Donald Trump embrace giving the public a stake in AI's growth. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Friday, Trump described a potential partnership "where the American people can benefit from the success of AI" and said executives from leading AI companies will visit the White House, "probably next week," to discuss the idea. The article points out that Altman also met with congressional leaders from both of America's political parties.

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Google has asked the EPA for permission to release up to 32 million sterile male mosquitoes in California and Florida over two years. The effort is part of the company's Debug program, which uses Wolbachia-infected males to reduce populations of disease-spreading Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Google cites a similar approach in Singapore that helped suppress mosquito populations and reduce dengue cases. The Guardian reports: As part of its successful "Debug" program, Google is tapping into its tech expertise to raise an army of sterile male mosquitoes to lower the number of illness-spreading bugs. Mosquitoes -- the world's deadliest animal -- kill more people than any other creature in the world every year by spreading lethal diseases such as dengue, West Nile virus, Zika, chikungunya and malaria. A notice (PDF) from the federal register shows the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is reviewing Google's request to release up to 16 million mosquitoes annually, in Florida and California, over the span of two years. The EPA will decide whether to greenlight Google's request for an experimental use permit after a public comment period, which ends on 5 June. Male mosquitoes don't bite or carry disease. One of the main approaches Google is testing involves rearing male mosquitoes with a naturally occurring bacteria, called wolbachia, which stops them from having offspring with wild female mosquitoes. When an infected male tries to mate with a wild female, her eggs won't hatch; Google explains in a blog post: "the population gets smaller with each generation."

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A proposal to make daylight saving time permanent has advanced in the U.S. House of Representative, reports California news station KCRA: A proposal to make daylight saving time permanent has advanced in the House, reigniting an age-old American debate around the twice-annual clock changes. And this time, the proposal has the president's backing. President Donald Trump said Thursday that he will work "very hard" to sign the so-called Sunshine Protection Act into law after the House Energy and Commerce Committee overwhelmingly approved the bill by a 48-1 vote. The bill still needs to pass the full U.S. House, and then the U.S. Senate would consider taking up the measure. The bill would allow U.S states to decide whether to "exempt themselves" from Daylight Saving Time, according to the article. The bill's sponsor described the annual clock-switching as "inconvenient, unnecessary, and out of step with the needs of today's families and economy," while finally creating a permanent Daylight Saving would bring "more usable daylight hours throughout the year."

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Thousands of Chicago-area Zillow and Trulia listings disappeared after Midwest Real Estate Data cut off Zillow's access to its feed, "in the latest escalation of a legal battle with Lisle-based Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED)," reports the Chicago Sun-Times. "The fight is over MRED's private listing network, where homes for sale are shared among real estate professionals. And MRED followed through on a threat to cut Zillow's access to its listing data feed." From the report: There were nearly 5,000 Chicago homes listed on Zillow Tuesday, but as of Wednesday afternoon, that number plummeted to about 1,700. Meanwhile, other listing sites like Redfin and Realtor.com show about 5,000 to 8,000 listings in Chicago. MRED manages listings -- submitted by brokers -- throughout Illinois, as well as parts of Wisconsin and Indiana. The regional multiple listing service has more than 43,000 members and processed more than 264,000 listings worth $43 billion in 2025. The loss of listings on Zillow's websites have made a behind-the-scenes real estate industry fight public. And it now hinders some consumers in their search to buy a home, while also limiting the marketing opportunity for sellers. The legal fight is basically over who gets to control how home listings are marketed and displayed online. Zillow recently adopted a rule saying that if a home is marketed privately, such as behind a paywall, login, or private listing network, it should not also appear on Zillow. The policy, the real estate marketplace says, is meant to discourage "pocket listings," preserve transparency, and make sure buyers can see the full market. MRED sees it differently. It expanded its private listing network and partnered with Compass, which wants to give sellers more control over whether their homes are broadly publicized or marketed privately first. MRED argues that Zillow is violating MLS rules and licensing agreements by refusing to display certain listings, including private Compass listings. Consumers are now caught in the middle...

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