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The hardest problem in AI is no longer the chip but the megawatt. For much of the past three years, the global AI race has focused on semiconductors, with governments competing for advanced chips, technology outfits scrambling to secure GPUs, and investors pouring billions into ever larger datacenters. Yet the binding constraint has shifted from compute to the power required to run it. For anyone trying to energize a new AI cluster today, the bottleneck is rarely silicon; it is grid access, interconnection delays, and aging infrastructure. That was the central message from Envision founder and CEO Lei Zhang at VivaTech in Paris this June, where he argued that AI amounts to an energy revolution as much as a computing one. The steam engine transformed the industrial age by converting coal into motion, and the GPU now transforms the AI age by converting electricity into intelligence. History offers another lesson: James Watt changed industry through the efficient use of energy rather than by producing more steam. AI faces the same problem today, because the binding constraint has shifted from how many chips can be built to how they can be powered. The real risk: AI competing with society for energy The numbers behind the argument are stark. Goldman puts US datacenter power demand at 31 GW in 2025, rising to 66 GW by 2027, while assuming only about 72 percent of scheduled facilities arrive on time because electricity, not construction, is what typically slips. The IEA estimates that datacenters consumed roughly 1.5 percent of world electricity in 2024, a share rising to 3 percent by 2030 as AI-specific demand triples. The structural mismatch sits at the heart of the problem: AI models iterate every six months and chips refresh annually, while power grids have changed little in decades. Rack densities that sat at 5 kW are climbing toward 200 kW, and the IEA notes that AI server power density rose elevenfold between 2020 and 2025, with a further fourfold rise expected by 2027, straining the supply chains for power electronics and transformers that keep a cluster stable. The growing gap raises broader questions about where the energy will come from and who will bear the cost. Around the world, communities are asking whether AI infrastructure should draw on electricity that households, factories, hospitals, and public services also depend upon, with familiar concerns surfacing about consumer bills, manufacturer access to limited grid capacity, and the burden that ever-larger models place on public infrastructure. Those questions have moved beyond the purely technical into the societal, because the future of AI cannot rest on a model in which humanity competes with AI for power. Mission Gobi: Let AI follow energy Envision's answer, Mission Gobi, unveiled at VivaTech, aims to develop 5 GW of green AI computing capacity across deserts and arid regions by 2030. For decades energy followed computing, and Mission Gobi reverses that logic on the premise that in the AI era, computing may need to follow energy. The logic is grounded in geography, because deserts offer some of the world's richest solar and wind resources alongside vast expanses of low-cost land, with the additional advantage of little competing residential or industrial demand. Rather than drawing power from homes, factories, and public services, Mission Gobi seeks to build entirely new renewable energy systems dedicated to AI, expanding the available supply instead of asking society to share a fixed pie. The philosophy reduces to a single idea: compute should chase power, not the other way around. The economics matter because electricity determines whether a facility is viable, with power consistently accounting for the single largest operating cost at a datacenter and some estimates placing it at as much as 60 percent of the operational budget. Building energy-native AI infrastructure Envision splits the system into three layers: an intelligent operating hub, Physical AI powered by its Tianji Weather Foundation Model and Dubhe Energy Foundation Model, and advanced power infrastructure. Together they integrate generation, storage, grid, power electronics, computing, and large-scale AI models into a unified architecture. The challenge lies in coordinating renewable power rather than merely generating it, because AI facilities require stable, high-quality electricity while solar and wind output fluctuate continuously. Envision argues that large-scale predictive models can help balance generation, storage, and demand in real time. The concept has already moved beyond theory. In Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, Envision runs a 2 GW system on 100 percent renewable energy, coordinating wind, solar, storage, hydrogen, and compute in real time, while a gigawatt-scale AI and computing campus in Ulanqab is being developed as a demonstration of what energy-native computing infrastructure could look like. A 5 GW pledge is ambitious, but the underlying read is sound: retrofitting decades-old city grids for gigawatt AI loads is a difficult undertaking, and purpose-built renewable compute, sited where power is cheapest, offers a credible alternative. SpaceX looks up, Mission Gobi looks out Envision is not alone in recognizing energy as AI's defining constraint. Elon Musk's SpaceX has explored concepts for orbital datacenters powered by uninterrupted solar energy in space, and the vision rests on the same recognition: the future bottleneck of AI may lie in energy rather than silicon. Both approaches seek to place computing where energy is most abundant. The two visions diverge in geography, with one reaching upward beyond Earth's atmosphere and the other outward toward deserts and Gobi regions, though both start from the same premise: AI should not compete with humanity for power. A new blueprint for AI infrastructure If the industrial age was built around coal and the electrical age around power grids, the AI age may be built around energy abundance. The success of future AI infrastructure will not be measured by GPU counts and model sizes alone. It will also depend on whether the industry creates new energy supply, eases pressure on communities, and enables technological progress without reducing others' access to power. Whether deserts become the preferred destination for future computing remains to be seen. What is becoming clear is that the next phase of the AI race will be defined not only by who builds the most powerful models, but by who can build the energy systems capable of sustaining them. The path forward runs through creating new energy supply rather than reallocating existing capacity away from households, factories, and public services. Contributed by Envision.

Uber Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal walks TechCrunch through the company's financial-services ambitions, its increasingly complicated relationship with Waymo, its new AV Labs data operation, and how AI is starting to show up in ways riders and drivers will actually notice.

President Donald Trump is always eager to take credit for achievements—but not to actually do the whole achieving thing in the first place. That part is for suckers and losers, of course. So it’s no surprise that his “solution” to high gas prices is to do some behind-the-scenes fiddling to make it look like gas prices are coming down without them actually coming down. And it’s all in a…

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A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. What Republican ghoul will take Lindsey Graham’s spot? None of the options are much better than their predecessor. ‘Guardian of the strait’: Trump gets even more delusional about Iran war He’s like the boy who cried wolf … 38 times. Republicans love paid sick leave…

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Singapore-based video generation startup PixVerse closed a Series C extension on the strength of 15 million monthly active users, it said.

A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | GOP desperately insists Mitch McConnell is alive and well…

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The social media site says it will amplify posts made by users' mutual followers' to give the feed more of a communal feel.

⚡ Quick Take

• A Nova movie has been announced at Marvel Studios, after the TV show concept was dropped in 2025.
• Michael Waldron, the showrunner for Loki, will direct.
• Nerdist Take: Will the Nova movie be a Lanterns ripoff? It’s possible, but the writers do have a lot of quality Marvel comic content to work with.

A new movie is in the works at Marvel Studios, directed by the showrunner of Loki, Michael Waldron. Nova was originally going to be a movie in the early MCU, then was discussed as a TV show idea, before the concept was dropped. Now, Marvel has answered our prayers from 2025. Deadline has reported that Marvel Studios has picked the Nova idea back up in the form of a movie.

RELATED ARTICLE

Why Marvel’s NOVA Should Be a Movie, Not a Disney+ Series Nerdist Take: Is It Suspicious That Marvel Announces Nova, Just as DC Is Making Lanterns?

So, who/what is Nova? The hero was introduced in Marvel comics for the first time in 1976. As an alien officer of the Nova Corps died, he imbued ordinary teenager Richard Rider with the powers and outfit of a Nova Centurion. Rider became the last of the Nova Corps, an intergalactic police force.

Sound familiar? That’s because it’s almost a one-for-one copy of DC’s Green Lantern story. Despite Nova being a relatively niche Marvel hero, at least in comparison to the others gracing the screen lately, fans have called out this similarity to DC before. Both companies have always copied each other in one way or another, but this one is particularly obvious.

Marvel Comics

The timing of this announcement is particularly interesting, with Lanterns premiering this August. The idea for the show also came out right after DC had initially announced that Lanterns was in production. It seemed as though it would be a race to finish the shows, followed by a vying for popularity. But then, Marvel tabled the concept again. Now, with Lanterns finally finished, geared up and ready, Marvel is bringing the idea back.

Though I think Lanterns may have influenced Marvel’s picking the story back up, Nova does fit into recent MCU content. The Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy interacted directly with the Nova Corps in its first movie. Spoilers: The main characters ended up saving Xandar, the planet the Corps uses for their headquarters, from Ronan. Unfortunately, Thanos proceeded to destroy Xandar and most of the Corps just a few years later.

That and, despite not being a mainstream hero, Nova has appeared in a good number of comics now. He has various storylines for writers to draw from, and many ways he might interact with other popular MCU characters.

We don’t have much information about the Nova movie other than Michael Waldron’s direction, but after his showrunning work on Loki and writing on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, we have high hopes for the movie.

The post NOVA Movie in Production at Marvel, Michael Waldron to Direct appeared first on Nerdist.

Meta seems to be having a bit of an identity crisis. On Monday, the social networking singularity said it would spend $50 billion to expand its Hyperion datacenter project in Richland Parish, Louisiana, from 2.2 to 5 gigawatts. The news comes less than a week after a report broke claiming that Meta was actively exploring options to offload its excess compute capacity to other AI labs. So, which is it, Zuck? Did you invest too much or too little in AI? The easy answer is that Meta overcommitted. Inspired by the early success of Llama, it made a huge bet on the AI gold rush. Offloading spare compute to the highest bidder is just a hedge in case its Superintelligence team turns out to be another pipe dream, like the Reality Labs Metaverse that utterly failed to spark enthusiasm for immersive environments accessible through Meta's Quest cybergoggles. The more pragmatic read is that Zuckerberg has woken up to the fact he’ll never be as cool as OpenAI boss Altman or Anthropic's Amodei, and renting out spare compute is just the natural progression for any sufficiently large hyperscaler. Dawn of the Meta cloud? Meta's business model is closer to Google's than those operated by OpenAI and Anthropic. Both Meta and Google offer various services which generate revenues by connecting users with advertisers. For Google it’s a search and entertainment empire. For Meta it's enabling an endless feed of content generated by friends, family, influencers, and yes, bots. Both are immensely profitable, earning $132.2 billion and $60.5 billion in profits last year, respectively. That's profit, not revenue. But both are now plowing over $100 billion a year into AI infrastructure to power large language and image and video generation models. As we learned from Meta’s recent earnings calls, the most commercially potent of those models get the right ads in front of the right eyeballs. The open secret is Meta was already one of the most successful AI companies long before ChatGPT debuted. Except, it's not large language models (LLMs) that make Meta money, at least not in the conventional sense. Instead, Meta’s most profitable AI models are the recommender systems that mine profiles for context and use it to infer your needs. Meta's devs evolved those models considerably over the past few years, and their architectures now look a lot more like an LLM than the now-pedestrian neural networks on which Zuckerberg built his empire. Google is in a similar situation. It’s investing heavily in AI to feed its fast-growing and profitable cloud business, even as advertising still pays most of the bills. But unlike Google, Meta hasn’t yet made the leap from hyperscaler to cloud provider. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, even Oracle got there eventually, and it seems AI may be the catalyst that turns Meta into a cloud, too. Recent reports suggest that Zuckerberg is warming to the idea. “I think that’s certainly a thing that we could do and that I think would make sense to consider,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg last week. “As a backstop, even if for whatever reason we don’t need all the compute ourselves or for any number of reasons, there’s a very large amount of demand that I think you could sell it long-term like AWS or Azure or Google Compute.” But while the demand may be there, Zuckerberg emphasized the compute capacity is not readily available. But as Ben Thompson of Stratechery put it, cashing in on this compute may be more than a backup plan. In a post channeling an imaginary Zuckerberg, Thompson suggested that becoming a neocloud would force Meta to stop chasing pipe dreams and pet projects. His logic is that if Meta can't make money with infrastructure it buys for AI ventures, the social networking giant can lease the orphaned hardware to the highest bidder. The takeaway for investors — should Meta follow its fellow hyperscalers-turned-cloud-providers down this road — is that the profitability of its hardware investments would no longer be tied to its ability to commercialize them. Seizing the means of production If history tells us anything, scale matters. Building a cloud like Amazon Web Services (AWS) is next to impossible unless you've already figured out how to profit from those same resources. Meta's scale puts it in a position to acquire compute in volumes impossible for smaller players. Its ability to capitalize on infrastructure demand relies entirely on having something others want but can’t get anywhere else. For what it’s worth, Zuckerberg wouldn’t be the first to come to this conclusion. Earlier this year Musk-owned xAI surprised many when it announced plans to rent out its Colossus supercluster in Memphis to rival model dev Anthropic. The calculus here is the same. Making a profit off LLMs, like Grok, isn't easy — just ask OpenAI — but selling the means of AI production to those that haven’t yet figured that out is enormously lucrative. The logic appears to have gotten Zuck's attention. “The SpaceX model I think is quite interesting in terms of just making these short-term deals that are at a big premium,” Zuckerberg told Bloomberg. “So we get offers for all kinds of stuff like this and we’ll evaluate them and see what makes sense.” Reports suggest Meta is seriously considering two strategies for commoditizing its compute assets. The first would be a usage-based compute platform similar to Amazon Web Services' Bedrock. The service would allow customers to run models and serve them through APIs — interfaces that abstract operational complexity. To be clear, Meta already offers API access to its homegrown models, at least the ones it didn’t pull after realizing the way they’d been implemented could be abused. So, from what we gather the difference would be allowing customers to run third party models as well. The second scheme reportedly being explored would involve selling raw compute resources available to end customers — similar to CoreWeave or Lambda. All the right ingredients Meta’s silicon strategy may help as well. One thing all the major cloud providers have in common is a growing catalogue of custom cloud silicon. Once they've identified a core use case, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all rolled their own silicon to maximize their margins. AWS Trainium, Microsoft Maia, and Google TPUs are all examples of AI accelerators originally built for internal workloads but later made available to the broader public. Meta has been building its own AI chips for years. The first few Meta Training and Inference Accelerators (MTIA) were designed to speed up its recommender models. But new designs, developed in collaboration with Broadcom, are far better suited to running LLMs like Llama and Muse Spark, and whatever else its customers are willing to pay for access to. More importantly, this mix of compute means that Meta can take advantage of the fact GPUs are extremely flexible to bring new products to market quickly. Then once they’ve proven performers, Meta could transition those workloads to its custom chips and offload spare GPU compute to its cloud customers. Meta has all the ingredients, compute, scale, and capital necessary to become a major cloud provider. ®

The company is raising at least $75 million, led by Robot, with significant participation from USV and other prominent investors.

An AI rewrite of a popular Anthropic-owned JavaScript runtime and toolchain has sparked praise for the speed of its execution, but also criticism of the coding practices behind the project itself. Last week, Bun creator Jarred Sumner announced that he ported Bun from the Zig programming language to Rust in only 11 days, using a fleet of Claude agents running in parallel. The work cost an estimated $165,000 at API pricing, suggesting that software revisions previously considered too large to undertake could actually be feasible now with AI. Sumner said the port was necessary given the growing number of bugs Bun users were finding, including one implicated in the recent Claude Code source leak. But the creator of Zig, Andrew Kelley, didn’t want his project to be seen as the culprit behind Bun’s woes, which he blames on Sumner’s bad programming practices. For Kelley, the move to Rust was not about the feature differences between the two languages, or even the use of AI, but rather “the diverging value systems of the two projects,” he wrote. Bun in the oven Bun is a JavaScript suite consisting of a runtime, package manager, bundler and test runner. Some developers like it because it is a fast one-stop shop that plays well with Node.js. To make Bun speedy, Sumner used Apple's low-memory fast-start WebKit JavaScriptCore (JSC) engine, rather than Google’s stock V8 engine. He used the up-and-coming Zig because he appreciated its performance and low-level control. Anthropic acquired Bun in December 2025. The company built its core state machine on Bun. By then, Sumner had also grown to appreciate AI’s coding abilities, and was using it heavily in the upkeep of Bun. By the time of acquisition, a Claude Bot called RoboBun had been doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the Bun repo. It supplied the most merged PRs of any contributor, fixing bugs and remediating test failures. But as Bun’s user base grew, more cracks started appearing in the code. Users found issues across the software. Anthropic’s 512,000-line code leak in March? That was Bun’s fault, thanks to a bug in the bundler that generated source maps during builds even when told not to, NodeSource reported. All these bugs weren’t Zig’s fault, Sumner explained in a blog post last week detailing the migration. Bun’s architecture mixed garbage collection and application-driven memory management. Sumner admitted that Zig wasn’t designed for that task. Rust was just better at automating memory management. The Rustification of Bun Rewriting 500,000 lines of Zig into another language would be a gargantuan undertaking if done by hand. “A rewrite in another language would take a small team of engineers a full year. It would mean freezing bugfixes, security fixes or feature development for that time,” Sumner wrote. Instead, Sumner went with Claude. He spun up about 50 dynamic Claude Code workflows, reaching a peak of about 1,300 lines of code per minute and generating over a million lines of Rust code. The job took 11 days and cost about $165,000 at API pricing. Claude Fable did most of the heavy lifting. The Rust-based Bun was then subjected to Bun's exhaustive test suite of more than one million assertions. According to Sumner, it passed 100 percent of those tests across all supported platforms without skipping or deleting any. “There’s absolutely no way an engineer with that salary would’ve been able to achieve the milestones Claude did in 11 days,” an impressed HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto noted on X. Zig zags But does Bun’s speed of execution betray the core tenets of good software development? One person not impressed has been Zig’s Kelley, who shared his misgivings in an impassioned post entitled “My Thoughts on the Bun Rust Rewrite." Even before the Anthropic acquisition, “we became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase,” Kelley wrote. Bun was one of the largest and highest profile projects using Zig and, up until the Anthropic acquisition, a regular financial contributor to The Zig Software Foundation. In Kelley’s view, the project aggressively released new features, resulting in piled-up bugs, bad error-handling code, and technical debt. Sumner “was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs,” Kelley quipped. He speculated that Sumner may have been under pressure to meet business objectives rather than technical ones, a pressure that increased with Anthropic’s acquisition. In fact, Bun’s codebase had grown so suspect in Kelley’s estimation that Bun parting with Zig was good news. As he put it, no longer would “the publicly presumed poster child for Zig programming language actually [be] the prime example of How Not To Write Zig Code,” he wrote. The Bun team also tried to upstream some of its AI-assisted work to Zig, to no avail. Leading up to the Bun rewrite, the team maintained a fork of Zig that it said improved debug compilation speed fourfold, as eagle-eyed Reg reporter Tim Anderson revealed in May. But the Zig project would not accept Bun’s changes, citing a policy of not accepting AI-based contributions. Zig had been getting an influx of LLM-generated submissions, most of dubious quality. This lack of engineering oversight around AI-generated code would lead to countless problems down the road, Kelley reasoned. Kelley pointed out that if Bun’s tests missed these bugs in Zig, how would they be caught in unsupervised Rust code? “The argument for shipping all the million lines of unreviewed code is that the test suite is good enough to catch everything,” he wrote. “It's not sufficient to catch bugs in Zig code but it is sufficient to catch bugs in [a] million lines of unreviewed slop?” ®

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has a bone to pick with government staffers sharing insider information with the press—so he breathlessly announced a joint task force to “IDENTIFY AND PROSECUTE LEAKERS.” “Leaked information risks lives,” the former Fox News host said in a video posted to X on Monday. “Access to confidential and secret information is a sacred trust, and those who betray that…

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The Santa Cruz Metro board of directors decided against advancing its own resolution to place a half-cent sales tax measure on the November ballot, citing cost concerns and little time to build and promote an effective campaign. The board will instead throw support behind the ongoing citizen’s initiative effort to place its own measure on a ballot by 2028.

ph @bastet

Housing Matters announced that their $5 million Live Oak Landing interim housing program was officially open Thursday morning and would be welcoming participants immediately, stating that construction had been finished months ago but there had been final permitting and occupancy approval delays. Advocates are hopeful that the project can help take people off the streets, but also expressed frustrations over the lack of transparency with its delayed opening.

⚡ Quick Take

• We have a good first look at the cast of Carrie, Mike Flanagan’s series adaptation of the Stephen King classic, coming to Prime Video this fall.

Carrie was Stephen King’s first novel, which launched him as the 20th century’s preeminent master of horror. It was adapted into a film just two years later by Brian De Palma, an adaptation that is a classic in its own right. Carrie garnered Oscar nominations for both its stars, Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie, for their roles as Carrie and Margaret White, respectively. And now, modern horror master (and Stephen King disciple) Mike Flanagan is adapting the saga of the bullied telekinetic teen for Prime Video as a Carrie series, and we have several first-look images. Among them, our first proper looks at Summer H. Howell as Carrie White and Samantha Sloyan as her controlling mother, Margaret White.

Carrie Series First-Look Images Click To View Gallery Prime Video Prime Video Prime Video Prime Video Prime Video Prime Video Prime Video Prime Video Nerdist Take: Mike Flanagan Will Have to Transform the Carrie Novel in Order to Make a Series

Carrie is a relatively short novel. So for this new Carrie series adaptation, Flanagan is expanding on the material in a significant way. Carrie is now facing the real world for the first time, after her mother sequestered her at home until her teenage years. There will also be scenes relating to other women around the world with similar abilities to Carrie White. Flanagan plans to alter some fundamental things, all while building up to the iconic senior prom from hell. While speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Flanagan said the following about his version of the King classic:

The themes that Steve was talking about half a century ago of kindness versus cruelty, of empathy and bullying, and violence at school have become even more relevant today than he could have contemplated because of our relationship to technology and the degree to which violence encroaches on our high schoolers, especially in the United States. So that meant we had an opportunity to tell a story about a modern teenage experience that could use the seeds of these characters King created 50 years ago, but express them completely differently.

While the original 1976 adaptation remains a horror classic, subsequent adaptations and sequels have all paled in comparison. There was even a notorious Broadway musical that flopped. But thanks to previous adaptations of King’s work, like Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game, he may yet crack the code. Flanagan told Entertainment Weekly of the Carrie series, “For me, this was never going to be a straight adaptation. The only way to approach it was to build something new out of the ingredients of Carrie. Otherwise, there’s really no purpose in trying to retread ground that’s been so beautifully walked before.” 

Prime Video

Carrie also stars Alison Thornton as Chris Hargensen, a mean girl and Carrie’s primary bully. Joining her are Siena Agudong as the remorseful Sue Snell and Joel Oulette as Sue’s boyfriend (and Carrie’s future prom date) Tommy Ross. Arthur Conti plays Billy Nolan, a part originated by John Travolta. And Amber Midthunder will portray Miss Desjardin, the girls’ gym teacher. Scream icon Matthew Lillard plays Principal Grayle. The eight-episode horror drama arrives on Prime Video this fall. We can’t wait to see how Carrie transforms into a TV series.

The post CARRIE Images Reveal Cast of New Stephen King Series appeared first on Nerdist.

⚡ Quick Take

• The creepy first trailer for Peacock’s Crystal Lake is here, showcasing Linda Cardellini as the crazed mother of Friday the 13th slasher icon, Jason.

Slasher fans continue to wait for a much-anticipated 13th Friday the 13th film. (C’mon, it’s been 17 years!) But they’ll soon be able to return to those familiar bloody campgrounds in a new series on Peacock, Crystal Lake. The series features Linda Cardellini as a younger Pamela Voorhees, mother of Jason Voorhees, and the killer from the original 1980 film. And now, we have our first creepy trailer for the series, which will focus on Pamela Voorhees’ mental unraveling after her son Jason drowns, thanks to negligent camp counselors. You can watch the Crystal Lake teaser trailer, using that original Friday the 13th font, right here:

A24 produces the series, in a departure for the company, which usually specializes in original, non-franchise horror. After a series of creative shake-ups, including Bryan Fuller helming the series for a short time, the show landed in Brad Kane’s hands. Kane recently had a hand in the excellent It: Welcome to Derry series, another prequel to a beloved horror IP. Although Jason is not the focus, a child version of the future hockey-masked slasher will play a role. Callum Vinson, who will wear makeup and prosthetics, plays a young Jason Voorhees with an enlarged head from hydrocephalus. Despite being a prequel to the original, the Crystal Lake series is taking liberties. Jason’s drowning originally took place in 1957. Crystal Lake pushes those events to the ’70s. We can see some of this come to life in the super creepy teaser trailer for Crystal Lake. Who doesn’t love the sound of creepy children singing and the sound of a whisper saying, “Mommy’s here.”

Peacock

Crystal Lake cast Cardellini based on her role in Netflix’s Dead to Me. In that series, she played a very complex and traumatized character. Of course, as the original live-action Velma in Scooby-Doo, she’s no stranger to spooky material. Cardellini said to Entertainment Weekly, “She’s only in such a small fraction of the movies, and there’s very little actually known about her. But she’s the inciting incident in some ways. She’s an important piece of the puzzle, but a relatively unknown one.” Kane assures fans that even though the series is different from the films, it’s still a slasher at heart. And we can definitely see that in the Crystal Lake teaser trailer.

In addition to the Crystal Lake teaser trailer, you can check out a few more first-look images below.

Peacock Peacock Peacock

Crystal Lake drops the first episode of its eight-episode season on October 15, just in time for spooky season.

The post FRIDAY THE 13th Prequel CRYSTAL LAKE Drops Eerie Trailer appeared first on Nerdist.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins on Monday called for an investigation after a Colombian immigrant legally authorized to work in the U.S. was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Collins’ home state of Maine. “The shooting in Biddeford requires a full and impartial investigation of what happened,” Collins wrote in a post. “It is my understanding that the Biddeford…

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On Sunday, after four weeks of absence from Congress caused by a medical emergency—which led to extensive speculation about his health—Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) released a letter to his constituents saying that his hospitalization was the consequence of a fall. The 84-year-old former Senate Majority Leader noted that he has lifelong mobility issues related to a childhood case of polio. 

Polio—largely eliminated in the US following the pathbreaking development of the Salk vaccine in 1955, when McConnell was 13—is a life-altering disease: if it doesn’t kill a person, it can lead to disabilities. Even decades after a polio infection, people can develop what is called post-polio syndrome, which contributes to symptoms such as muscle weakness and pain. Falls like McConnell’s are often related, at least in part, though McConnell has not publicly said whether he’s been diagnosed with post-polio syndrome, and falls not related to the condition are not unusual at his age.

Despite over a century of knowledge of the impacts of polio, and seventy years of widespread vaccine availability, some American parents are either delaying or avoiding getting their kids vaccinated against it. According to CDC data published in March, around 8 percent of toddlers born in 2021 and 2022 did not receive at least three polio vaccines by age two, with similar data available for kids born in the early 2010s. Unlike with measles , there have yet to be polio outbreaks as a consequence, with just one recent recorded case in the United States in an unvaccinated adult in 2022 (and none in children).

McConnell has consistently advocated for vaccines and spoken about his experience with polio decades after his infection at two years old—a voice that might help sway vaccine-hesitant parents who lean conservative, and a counterpoint to President Donald Trump’s expression of anti-vaccine sentiments, and appointment of anti-vaccine activists to top public health posts.

McConnell voted against confirming anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary in February 2025. In a statement released at the time, McConnell made his views on anti-vax sentiment clear. 

“I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world,” he wrote. “I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”

It would be ahistorical to portray McConnell as any sort of health care hero. As Senate Majority Leader during the first Trump administration, McConnell led efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which, among other things, bans insurance companies from refusing to cover chronically ill people based on their disabilities. He also voted for Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the 2025 budget bill that has already resulted in major public health cuts and which will strip millions of people of Medicaid through administrative burden.

Texas pediatrician and vaccine advocate Vincent Iannelli, who maintains a website tracking anti-vaccine propaganda, says voices like McConnell’s have been important in containing anti-vax sentiment. Trump, meanwhile, has questioned whether McConnell truly had polio—and various anti-vaxxers have done the same.

“The polio vaccine in particular is one of the greatest accomplishments of our science innovation,” American Public Health Association executive director Dr. Georges C. Benjamin told me. Benjamin noted that polio has been detected in wastewater domestically, suggesting that there are further unreported cases. “In communities that are not picking up the vaccine, the risk of polio is occurring,” he added.

New York University Grossman School of Medicine professor emeritus Arthur Caplan had polio when he was six years old and experienced temporary paralysis. Decades later, Caplan is experiencing the effects of post-polio syndrome, and now uses a mobility aid.

“It’s hugely important that polio survivors bear witness to the terrible damage that polio did in the US,” Caplan told me.

Asked what he thought about parents not vaccinating their children on the grounds of parental autonomy, Caplan, a bioethicist, says: “That is utter bullshit.” 

Grace Rossow contracted polio in India as an infant in 1992, shortly before being adopted by a family in the United States. Despite access to quality medical care, Rossow’s symptoms, including paralysis in one leg and fatigue, persist. She’s had 19 surgeries to address the fallout.

Recovery from health problems, due to underlying neuromuscular issues, takes much longer after polio, Rossow, now 34, told me.

Right now, polio risk remains very low, Iannelli says. But if vaccination rates drop—as they have for other conditions, including measles, where such a drop was once hard for public health officials to imagine—that could change. Caplan cites the Florida surgeon general‘s efforts to end vaccine mandates in schools. 

“Polio can hide. It hides in animals. People are asymptomatic. You cannot let your guard down against polio,” Caplan said. “It’s especially important for McConnell and other people who had polio to speak up.”

The Pajaro Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees on Wednesday will consider renewing agreements that would continue placing law enforcement officers on three comprehensive high school campuses for the 2026-27 school year, a program that has remained one of the district’s more divisive issues.

The board is scheduled to vote on an agreement with the Watsonville Police Department to provide two part-time officers at Watsonville High School and Pajaro Valley High School, along with an amended agreement with the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office for one full-time deputy at Aptos High School. The meeting begins at 5:30pm in the district boardroom, 294 Green Valley Road.

The proposal is likely to draw supporters and critics, as it has in previous years.

Opponents argue that the presence of armed, uniformed officers creates a climate of fear for many students—particularly immigrant families—an issue they say has become even more acute amid stepped-up federal immigration enforcement by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Supporters counter that school resource officers provide an important layer of campus security and help build relationships with students while responding to emergencies. 

Many point to the Aug. 31, 2021 fatal stabbing of 17-year-old Gerardo Sarabia Aguilar at Aptos High School, which occurred months after the board eliminated the SRO program. Following the stabbing, trustees reversed course and reinstated officers on campuses.

What the agreements would do

The Watsonville agreement would provide two part-time officers—one each at Watsonville High and Pajaro Valley High—from Aug. 10, 2026 through June 4, 2027. The district would reimburse the city up to $152,053 for the school year. The officers would work approximately 27 hours per week, with schedules tailored to each campus.

The Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s agreement extends the existing contract through June 30, 2027 for a deputy assigned to Aptos High School. The district would reimburse the county $925 per day, for a total estimated annual cost of $166,500.70, reflecting increased personnel costs over last year.

New emphasis on restorative practices

Accompanying both contracts are new memorandums of understanding that place greater emphasis on restorative practices, student wellness and limiting law enforcement involvement in routine discipline.

The MOUs state that SROs are intended to serve as “connectors, mentors, and protectors,” rather than disciplinarians. They explicitly prohibit officers from enforcing school rules involving dress code violations, tardiness, classroom behavior, cell phone use or other administrative matters.

Instead, officers would focus on emergency response, criminal investigations, threat assessments, safety education and community-building activities. They would also participate in restorative circles and receive training in trauma-informed practices, de-escalation, implicit bias, LGBTQ+ awareness, disability rights and adolescent development.

The agreements also require annual reporting to the Board of Trustees on student interactions with SROs, including disaggregated data on arrests, citations and referrals by race, gender and disability status. School officials would be required to notify parents if a student is questioned, searched, detained or cited by an officer, and district staff would document enforcement interactions.

Background

The district’s relationship with school resource officers has shifted repeatedly over the past several years.

Trustees voted to eliminate the program in 2021 amid concerns about the disproportionate impact of police on students of color and a desire to invest more heavily in restorative justice and mental health services.

That decision was reversed after the fatal stabbing at Aptos High School prompted calls from parents, educators and law enforcement officials for a renewed police presence on campuses.

Wednesday’s meeting will determine whether the district continues that program for another school year while operating under updated guidelines intended to more clearly define officers’ roles and limit their involvement in student discipline.