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Los Angeles County said Wednesday that it’s suing Southern California Edison, alleging the utility’s equipment sparked January’s Eaton Fire, which destroyed more than 9,400 structures and killed 17 people in the Altadena area. The lawsuit seeks to recover costs and damages sustained from the blaze that damaged “essential community infrastructure” and “massively impacted the County’s natural resources, harmed the environment and wildlife, and threatened public health,” LA County said in a statement. Additional costs have been incurred by county departments for ongoing support in assisting residents recovering from the fire’s destruction, according to the lawsuit. …

How can a razor brand market their products online when the word “razor” is shadowbanned. Start an OnlyFans, of course. London-based razor brand Nimbi, which launched at Erewhon in January 2024, began posting on TikTok last summer but noticed their views were disappointingly low. Turns out, it’s because they were using the word razor, which is on TikTok’s list of shadow-banned (meaning TikTok was limiting who could see their content). So, Nimbi got creative. Co-founder Anna Reid first suggested the idea of making an OnlyFans account as a joke. But it made a lot of sense. Most brands would steer well clear of posting on a platform infamous for sexually explicit c…

It’s tough enough bringing the first major redesign of a commercial jetliner to fruition—especially when it looks more like something out of The X-Files than a travel brochure. So, to streamline that journey, JetZero—the first commercial blended-wing body (BWB) aircraft—is teaming with Delta as an eventual buyer to troubleshoot operation and design issues from the ground up. “Our biggest challenge is, `How do you bring an aircraft to market as quickly as possible so that you can have the most impact for your customer?’” says CEO Tom O’Leary, who cofounded JetZero with CTO Mark Page. “We don’t want to zig-zag our way to entry into service. We want to take the cleanest,…

Mid-aughts news aggregator Digg is making a comeback, thanks to a pairing that would have seemd unlikely when the site debuted in 2004: Digg founder Kevin Rose and a former corporate rival, Reddit cofounder and former CEO Alexis Ohanian. The pair bought Digg from its prior owners Money Group in early 2025 for an undisclosed sum. The deal was supported by True Ventures, which counts Rose as a partner, as well as Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six fund. They know this is an unlikely pairing. “I really disliked you for a long time,” Ohanian told Rose during an interview with Fast Company. “Reddit had raised $12,000 at YC. We felt like outsiders. Here was a tech celebrity who had …

Teaching machines in the way that animal trainers mold the behavior of dogs or horses has been an important method for developing artificial intelligence and one that was recognized Wednesday with the top computer science award. Two pioneers in the field of reinforcement learning, Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton, are the winners of this year’s A.M. Turing Award, the tech world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Research that Barto, 76, and Sutton, 67, began in the late 1970s paved the way for some of the past decade’s AI breakthroughs. At the heart of their work was channeling so-called “hedonistic” machines that could continuously adapt their behavior in response to posi…

Before Reddit there was Digg, which popularized up- and down-votes on online posts. Now the founders of both platforms—social media veterans Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian—are relaunching the early Reddit rival with a focus on “humanity and connection” they hope will be boosted by the use of artificial intelligence. Rose founded Digg, which launched in 2004 and let people up- and down-vote (“Digg” or “bury”) content from users and from sources around the web. At its peak, it had 40 million monthly users—a high number for the time considering that Facebook only hit 100 million in 2008. Digg was divvied up and sold in 2012, with many of its assets and patents acquired by L…

Each year, our Innovation by Design Awards celebrate the most notable projects across the design world. And while there are many design awards offered across the industry—perhaps too many!—Innovation by Design continues to be the most rigorous, facing the scrutiny of a panel of leading design journalists and influential designers. But it’s also time for Innovation by Design to evolve. So this year, you may see we’re doing things a bit differently. And we’re sure you will like these changes. First off, we’ve paired back our core design categories significantly, reducing them from 50 to 20. Why? The list had simply gotten big, with too many subcategories that h…

A federal judge has denied Elon Musk’s request for a court order blocking OpenAI from converting itself to a for-profit company but said she could expedite a trial to consider Musk’s claims against the ChatGPT maker and its CEO. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled late Tuesday that “Musk has not demonstrated likelihood of success on the merits” in his request for a preliminary injunction. She offered to hold a trial in her California courtroom as soon as this fall, “given the public interest at stake and potential for harm if a conversion contrary to law occurred.” Musk, an early OpenAI investor, began a legal offensive against the ChatGPT maker and CEO Sam…

While there seems to be no relief in sight for the high cost of eggs, it almost feels counterintuitive for people to celebrate two cracking, but it is a welcome distraction from the current political turmoil. Two bald eagles in Big Bear, California, have just become parents again to two chicks, with the potential for a third. This is egg-cellent news. Here’s everything to know about Jackie and Shadow’s journey to parenthood: Jackie and Shadow’s origin story Jackie and Shadow have been together since 2018. Shadow actually stole Jackie from another male, which is unusual for eagles who normally mate for life. They successfully raised two chicks but also exp…

It’s not just the tech industry that is facing layoffs in 2025. In recent weeks, a number of high-profile media and entertainment companies have seen job cuts. The most recent media giant to reportedly undergo layoffs is the Walt Disney Company. Here’s what you need to know about the layoffs affecting the media industry right now. ABC News and Disney Entertainment Networks cut jobs The Walt Disney Company company is getting ready to let go of about 6% of its employees who work in the company’s ABC News Group and Disney Entertainment Networks units, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. The layoffs will total about 200 employees and will reportedly…

Last summer, The Brandtech Group CEO David Jones and creative director James Dow went to Cannes Lions to convince the industry of the power in their company’s GenAI tools. To show off what the tools could do, Jones and Dow declared they could create a brand in 59 minutes. The Brandtech Group made a spree of AI acquisitions over the past few years. The company’s crown jewel is Pencil, which it acquired in 2023. Pencil uses AI to create static and video ad creative, and as of December, it had generated more than 2.35 million ads for more than 5,000 brands, and processed $2.65 billion in media spend since 2018. Soon after the acquisition, the company launched a premium…

I like to say that I spend most of my life negotiating—and if you consider your own work and life, you just might feel the same. My career has been full of back-and-forth: I sat across tables negotiating agreements for Christie’s for over two decades as Global Managing Director of Strategic Partnerships; I stand on stages around the world as a charity auctioneer, negotiating prices up to maximize fundraising; and I founded a talent agency that requires me to negotiate pay and conditions on behalf of my clients. To top it all off, I’m a mom of three kids. Over the years, I have listened to many people unknowingly sink their own negotiations with a mistake as simple as…