Texas has more than 600 known cases of measles on Tuesday as the outbreak in the western part of the state approaches the three-month mark.The U.S. was up to 800 cases of measles nationwide on Friday. Two unvaccinated elementary school-aged children died from measles-related illnesses in the epicenter in West Texas, and an adult in New Mexico who was not vaccinated died of a measles-related illness.Other states with active outbreaksdefined as three or more casesinclude Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico. The U.S. has more than double the number of measles cases it saw in all of 2024.North America has two other outbreaks. One in Ontario, Canada, has sickened 925 from mid-October through April 16. And as of Tuesday, the Mexican state of Chihuahua state has 514 measles cases, according to data from the state health ministry. The World Health Organization has said cases in Mexico are linked to the Texas outbreak.Measles is caused by a highly contagious virus that’s airborne and spreads easily when an infected person breathes, sneezes, or coughs. It is preventable through vaccines, and has been considered eliminated from the U.S. since 2000.As the virus takes hold in other U.S. communities with low vaccination rates, health experts fear the virus that the spread could stretch on for a year. Here’s what else you need to know about measles in the U.S.
How many measles cases are there in Texas and New Mexico?
Texas state health officials said Tuesday there were 27 new cases of measles since Friday, bringing the total to 624 across 26 countiesmost of them in West Texas. Two more Texans were hospitalized, for a total of 64 throughout the outbreak, and Bailey County logged its first two cases.State health officials estimated about 2% of casesfewer than 10are actively infectious.Sixty-two percent of Texas’ cases are in Gaines County, population 22,892, where the virus started spreading in a close-knit, undervaccinated Mennonite community. The county has had 386 cases since late Januaryjust over 1% of the county’s residents.The April 3 death in Texas was an 8-year-old child, according to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Health officials in Texas said the child did not have underlying health conditions and died of “what the child’s doctor described as measles pulmonary failure.” A unvaccinated child with no underlying conditions died of measles in Texas in late FebruaryKennedy said age 6.New Mexico announced two new cases Tuesday, bringing the state’s total to 65. Six people have been hospitalized since the outbreak started. Most of the state’s cases are in Lea County. Two are in Eddy County and Chaves and Dona Ana counties have one each.State health officials say the cases are linked to Texas’ outbreak based on genetic testing. New Mexico reported its first measles-related death in an adult on March 6.
How many cases are there in Kansas?
Kansas has 37 cases in eight counties in the southwest part of the state, health officials announced Wednesday.Finney, Ford, Grant, Gray and Morton counties have fewer than five cases each. Haskell County has the most with eight cases, Stevens County has seven, Kiowa County has six.The state’s first reported case, identified in Stevens County on March 13, is linked to the Texas and New Mexico outbreaks based on genetic testing, a state health department spokesperson said. But health officials have not determined how the person was exposed.
How many cases are there in Oklahoma?
Oklahoma confirmed one more case Tuesday for a total cases of 13: 10 confirmed and three probable. The first two probable cases were “associated” with the West Texas and New Mexico outbreaks, the state health department said.Custer, Oklahoma and Cleveland counties had public exposures in the past 42 days. The state health department is not releasing which counties have cases.
How many cases are there in Ohio?
The Ohio Department of Health confirmed 30 measles cases in the state Thursday. The state county includes only Ohio residents.There are 14 cases in Ashtabula County near Cleveland, 14 in Knox County, and one each in Allen and Holmes counties, the state said. The outbreak in Ashtabula County started with an unvaccinated adult who had interacted with someone who had traveled internationally.Health officials in Knox County, in east-central Ohio, say there are a total of 20 people with measles, but seven of them do not live in Ohio. In 2022, a measles outbreak in central Ohio sickened 85.
How many cases are there in Indiana?
Indiana confirmed two more cases Monday in an outbreak that has sickened eight in Allen County in the northeast part of the statefive are unvaccinated minors and three are adults whose vaccination status is unknown. The cases have no known link to other outbreaks, the Allen County Department of Health said Monday.
How many cases are there in Pennsylvania?
In far northwest Pennsylvania, Erie County health officials declared a measles outbreak April 14 after finding two new cases linked to a measles case confirmed March 30.The state has had nine cases overall this year, six of which are not linked to the outbreak, including international travel-related cases in Montgomery County and one in Philadelphia.
How many cases are there in Michigan?
Montcalm County, near Grand Rapids in western Michigan, has four linked measles cases. State health officials say the cases are tied to a large measles outbreak in Ontario, Canada.The state has eight confirmed measles cases as of Monday, but the remaining four are not part of the Montcalm County outbreak. Michigan’s last measles outbreak was in 2019.
How many cases are there in Montana?
Montana state health officials announced five cases Thursday in unvaccinated children and adults who had traveled out of state, and confirmed it was an outbreak on Monday. All five are isolating at home in Gallatin County in the southwest part of the state.State health officials are working to trace exposures in Bozeman and Belgrade.They are Montana’s first measles cases in 35 years. Health officials didn’t say whether the cases are linked to other outbreaks in North America.
Where else is measles showing up in the U.S.?
There have been 800 cases in 2025 as of Friday, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 10 clustersdefined as three or more related cases.Measles cases also have been reported in Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentuky, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont, and Washington.Cases and outbreaks in the U.S. are frequently traced to someone who caught the disease abroad. In 2019, the U.S. saw 1,274 cases and almost lost its status of having eliminated measles.
What do you need to know about the MMR vaccine?
The best way to avoid measles is to get the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. The first shot is recommended for children between 12 and 15 months old and the second between 4 and 6 years old.Getting another MMR shot is harmless if there are concerns about waning immunity, the CDC says. People who have documentation of receiving a live measles vaccine in the 1960s don’t need to be revaccinated, but people who were immunized before 1968 with an ineffective measles vaccine made from “killed” virus should be revaccinated with at least one dose, the agency said.People who have documentation that they had measles are immune and those born before 1957 generally don’t need the shots because most children back then had measles and now have “presumptive immunity.”In communities with high vaccination ratesabove 95%diseases like measles have a harder time spreading through communities. This is called “herd immunity.”But childhood vaccination rates have declined nationwide since the pandemic and more parents are claiming religious or personal conscience waivers to exempt their kids from required shots. The U.S. saw a rise in measles cases in 2024, including an outbreak in Chicago that sickened more than 60.
What are the symptoms of measles?
Measles first infects the respiratory tract, then spreads throughout the body, causing a high fever, runny nose, cough, red, watery eyes and a rash.The rash generally appears three to five days after the first symptoms, beginning as flat red spots on the face and then spreading downward to the neck, trunk, arms, legs and feet. When the rash appears, the fever may spike over 104 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the CDC.Most kids will recover from measles, but infection can lead to dangerous complications such as pneumonia, blindness, brain swelling, and death.
How can you treat measles?
There’s no specific treatment for measles, so doctors generally try to alleviate symptoms, prevent complications and keep patients comfortable.
AP Science Writer Laura Ungar contributed to this report.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Devi Shastri, AP Health Writer
Over the past 30 days, many big-name tech giants have seen their stock prices fall hard, largely thanks to President Trumps chaotic tariff rollout. For example, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) has seen its shares fall 11% over the past month, while Nvidia has seen its shares fall (Nasdaq: NVDA) fall over 12%.
But until yesterday, IBM (NYSE: IBM) was one of the big-name tech giants that rode out the tariff storm pretty well. While the companys stock price did tank along with the rest of the markets in early April, it has recovered nicely since then and, as of the close of bell yesterday, its shares were actually up just a bit (about 0.6%) over the past 30 days.
But then IBM announced its Q1 2025 results yesterday, and its stock sank after hours. And today, as of the time of this writing, IBM shares are down more than 6.75% in pre-market trading. The main reason? You can blame Elon Musks DOGE.
IBMs Q1 2025 results
When a stock drops after a company reports its latest quarterly results, its natural to assume it is doing so because the company in question posted poor numbers. But that actually wasnt the case with IBM yesterday. By all accounts, IBM had a pretty good quarter. Here are its most salient numbers:
Revenue: $14.5 billion (up 1%, or up 2% on a constant currency basis)
Earnings per share (EPS): $1.60
As noted by CNBC, those critical metrics actually beat analysts estimates, which had expected revenue of $14.4 billion and an EPS of just $1.40.
We exceeded expectations for revenue, profitability and free cash flow in the quarter, led by
strength across our Software portfolio, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said in a statement announcing the companys Q1 results. There continues to be strong demand for generative AI and our book of business stands at more than $6 billion inception-to-date, up more than $1 billion in the quarter.
But if this is the case, why did IBM’s shares drop? Its all because of DOGE.
Elon Musks DOGE takes bite out of IBMs government contracts biz
Unfortunately for IBMs stock price, the company also announced last night that 15 of its government contracts had either been canceled or paused due to cuts initiated by Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Bloomberg reports that these cuts equate to about $100 million in future payments. Addressing the cuts on the companys financial call, IBMs chief financial officer, James Kavanaugh, said that federal sales account for less than 5% of the companys overall revenue. However, Krishna noted that DOGEs downscaling of the U.S. government did leave IBMs consulting unit more susceptible to discretionary pullbacks and DOGE-related initiatives.
As noted by Reuters, the impact of the DOGE cuts on IBMs business sent the companys shares lower in after-hours trading yesterday.
IBM issues rare quarterly guidance
But IBM also announced something else yesterdayguidance for the second quarter. Historically, IBM has not issued quarterly guidance, but as Reuters notes, the company decided to do so now.
“We’ve chosen now, in light of the very unprecedented dynamic of uncertainty going on in the market, to give a second-quarter revenue guidance range. We felt incumbent upon ourselves to give as much transparency as possible to our investor group, IBMs Kavanaugh announced yesterday.
That forecast revealed that IBM expects Q2 2025 revenue of between $16.40 billion and $16.75 billion. Thats slightly above analysts forecasts of $16.33 billion, noted Reuters.
Still, that attempt at reducing uncertainty in investors didnt do enough to counteract the effects that the DOGE cuts had. In premarket trading this morning, as of the time of this writing, IBM stock is down 6.75% to $228.90.
As of yesterday’s close of $245.48 before IBMs Q1 results were released, the companys shares had been up over 11.6% for the year so faran impressive return considering all the market turmoil over the past three weeks.
So many mourners lined up to see Pope Francis lying in state in a simple wooden coffin inside St. Peter’s Basilica that the Vatican kept the doors open all night due to higher-than-expected turnout, closing the basilica for just an hour Thursday morning for cleaning.The basilica is bathed in a hushed silence as mourners from across the globe make a slow, shuffling procession up the main aisle to pay their last respects to Francis, who died Monday after a stroke.The hours spent on line up the stately via della Conciliazione through St. Peter’s Square and through the Holy Door into the basilica has allowed mourners to find community around the Argentine pontiff’s legacy of inclusion and humble persona.Emiliano Fernandez, a Catholic from Mexico, was waiting in line around midnight, and after two hours still had not reached the basilica.“I don’t even care how much time I wait here. It’s just the opportunity to (show) how I admired Francisco in his life,” said Fernandez, whose admiration for the pope grew during his 2016 visit to Mexico. “I think because of the respect that I have for him and the great person he was, it’s worth the wait.”The last numbers released by the Vatican said more than 50,000 people had paid their respects during the first 12 hours of the public viewing, starting at 11 a.m. Wednesday. The basilica closed for just one hour Thursday morning, from 6 a.m. until 7 a.m., the planned opening time.Among the first-day mourners was a church group of 14-year-olds from near Milan who arrived for the now-suspended canonization of the first millennial saint, as well as a woman who prayed to the pope for a successful operation and an Italian family who brought their small children to see the pope’s body.“We came because we didn’t bring them when he was alive, so we thought we would bring them for a final farewell,” said Rosa Scorpati, who was exiting the basilica Wednesday with her three children in strollers. “They were good, but I don’t think they really understood because they haven’t yet had to deal with death.”Like many others, the Scorpati family from Calabria was in Rome on an Easter vacation, only to be met with the news of Francis’ death on Easter Monday.Out of devotion to the pope and his message of inclusion, the grieving faithful joined the procession of mourners that wended from St. Peter’s Square through the basilica’s Holy Door, with the repentant among them winning an indulgence, a form of atonement granted during the Jubilee Holy Year. From there, the line extended down the basilica’s central aisle to the pope’s simple wooden casket.By late Wednesday, the wait appeared to be three or four hours and growing. A person doing crowd management estimated that the wait was closer to five hours. The mourners stretched down the center of Via della Conciliazione, in a lane set aside for Jubilee pilgrims.After three days of public viewing, a funeral Mass including heads of state will be held Saturday in St. Peter’s Square. The pope will then be buried in a niche within the St. Mary Major Basilica, near his favorite Madonna icon.The death of Francis, who was 88, capped a 12-year pontificate characterized by his concern for the poor and his message of inclusion, but he was also criticized by some conservatives who felt alienated by his progressive outlook.A procession of priests, bishops and cardinals accompanied Francis’ body Wednesday on its journey from a private viewing inside the Vatican to St. Peter’s Square. The pageantry contrasted with the human interactions of rank-and-file mourners at the public viewing.Francis lay in state in an open casket, perched on a ramp facing mourners, with four Swiss Guards standing at attention. As the crowd reached the casket, many lifted their smartphones to snap a photo.One nun accompanying an elderly woman with a cane walked away sobbing, “My pope is gone.”Such despair was rare. The mood was more one of gratitude for a pope who had, by example, taught many people to open their minds.“I am very devoted to the pope,” said Ivenes Bianco, who was in Rome from Brindisi, Italy, for an operation. “He was important to me because he brought many people together by encouraging coexistence.” She cited Francis’ acceptance of the gay community and his insistence on helping the poor.Humbeline Coroy came to Rome from Perpignan, France, for the planned canonization Sunday of 15-year-old Carlo Acutis, which was suspended after the pope’s death. She stayed to pay respects to Francis, enjoying exchanges with Japanese mourners they met as they waited under the sun in St. Peter’s Square.“For me, it is a lot of things. In my job, I work with disabled children, and I traveled to Madagascar to work with poor people. Being here, and close to the pope, is a way of integrating these experiences, and make them concrete,” she said. Coroy also brought prayers for her father, who is sick with cancer.For Alessandra Nardi, the pope’s death brought back memories of the death three years ago of her beloved uncle Luigi, who used to call her from St. Peter’s Square when he came to see Pope Francis say Mass. He “let me hear the bells toll. It was a beautiful thing.”Riccardo Ojedea from Colombia said his experience waiting in line for two hours to pay respects to the pope had shown him how much “humanity loves the pope.”“He left a very important legacy for everyone,” he said, “to make this world happier.”AP video journalist Isaia Montelione contributed.
Colleen Barry, Associated Press
Weve all heard the familiar directive: Were going through another reorganization and will be cutting 20% of headcount, but priorities remain the same and, in fact, may expand. Meanwhile, youre being told to just make it work” without offering additional resources, guidance, or support.
This conversation, unfortunately, isn’t unique. It represents the silent crisis engulfing middle management across America.
Middle managerswho oversee 90% of the U.S. workforceare facing unprecedented challenges in 2025. Recent KPMG data reveals nearly one-third are actively disengaged, while 62% report unsustainable stress levels as they struggle with expanded responsibilities amid shrinking teams. At the same time, Gallup’s findings show employee dissatisfaction at 15-year highs.
The economic uncertainty plaguing the U.S. has created a perfect storm for middle management burnout. Organizations are seemingly undergoing constant reorgs and scrambling to eliminate redundancies, optimize productivity and reduce resources to do more with less. Middle managers find themselves caught between the demands from top leadership to cut costs and maintain output while keeping their teams productive and motivated at the same time.
The concrete middle
Middle managers are what I call “the concrete middle”the foundation bearing pressure from both the top echelon of organizations and the functions and teams reporting to them. They understand the real flow of work, the network connections, and who the true “magic makers” are in the organization. They’re facing tightening budgets from above while trying to maintain an engaged, high-performing workforce below.
What makes this crisis particularly acute in 2025 is that the job market is reported as healthy but remains very tight. Employers may be in a wait-and-see mode, and struggling leaders may not see viable alternatives. This creates a dangerous apathywhat I’ve observed as “doing just enough to survive.”
But here’s the concern: When the pendulum swings the other way and market conditions improve, companies will feel real painbecause employees remember. They remember which organizations honored their values during difficult times and which simply treated people as disposable resources.
Break the cycle of disempowerment
One of the biggest challenges middle managers face is maintaining a sense of autonomy and growing their employees’ talent and potential. How do you keep top talent feeling they can contribute meaningfully and advance their careers amid constant change and disruption?
The truth is, during volatile periods, trust and empowerment often take a back seat to numbers. While financial responsibility is certainly necessary, organizations need a more nuanced approachparticularly for functions that drive growth.
During these unprecedented times, I’ve coached leaders to advocate and empower themselves by harnessing this moment as a chance to reinvent and reimagine how their work is being done. Because amid the volatile and unpredictable times lies opportunityan opportunity to change and employ new strategies, tactics, and ways of working that may not have been supported during more stable, constant, and calm periods. Middle managers, with their unique vantage point, often see possibilities that senior leadership overlooks or never considers. We need to give them the tools, trust, and ability to reimagine their work in ways that might actually achieve growth in a down period while achieving cost savings by simply doing things differently and better.
This approach requires a fundamental shift in perspectivefrom viewing middle managers as mere implementers to recognizing them as the crucial bridge between strategy, execution, and market growth.
Move from platitudes to real development
Many middle managers have been told, “Nobody owns your development but you.” Translation: Its up to you to grow yourself, learn, and improve.
Traditional leadership development approaches are not meeting the needs of today’s leaders. The solution isn’t another perfunctory annual performance-review exerciseit’s creating intentional support systems that address well-being, professional growth, trust, and empowerment.
Organizations must implement scenario planning into their talent management process. This means preparing leaders for all market conditionsgrowth, stable, uncertain, and competitive landscapes. Building this muscle prevents paralysis during challenging times and empowers managers to push for a strategic repositioning of their teams to restructure, realign, and optimize team performance.
The development of top talent isn’t just about surviving difficult periodsit’s about positioning them to deliver in different ways that might not have been possible before. In times of disruption, there’s often more support and openness for working differently, adopting new tactics, approaches, and novel ways of working than during periods when business as usual comes with a playbook of what to do and how to do it.
Cut the consensus culture
Perhaps the most insidious barrier to middle-management effectiveness is what I call “consensus culture”the endless cycle of meetings and layers of review and approvals that exist primarily to stroke egos rather than drive decisions and unleash innovation and potential.
During my time leading organizational development initiatives, we introduced the philosophy of GEPO (Good Enough, Proceed On). This wasn’t about compromising the operational excellence of what you’re doing, but about streamlining how ideas are socialized. Do you really need three to five meetings with people at all levels to make a decision? Can you eliminate the pre-meetings prior to the decision meetings and the “I’m just being informed” meetings that clog calendars without adding value?
By streamlining decision-making and trusting and empowering the people who own and support the work, organizations can reduce the time-to-decision and allow experts to take true accountability. This approach isn’t just about efficiencyit’s about restoring purpose and autonomy to the manager’s role while empowering them to do their jobs effectively with minimal bureaucracy.
In the absence of this trust, we handicap our middle managers. They become dependent on groupthink and consensus-driven approaches, operating in a highly risk-averse fashion because they fear making independent decisions without extensive backup and group support. This is the opposite of innovationand organizations simply cannot afford thi handicap if they want to innovate, disrupt, and improve performance.
Embrace AI as ally, not threat
The AI revolution adds another layer of complexity and also an opportunity for middle managers in 2025. Too often, leaders view these technologies through a lens of fear rather than as an efficient resource that enables productivity and output.
Its a genuine fear of replacement. But I don’t believe AI will replace good managers. Instead, organizations must be transparent about AI’s business value while generating excitement about its possibilities. AI should be positioned as a complement to human talentjust like we would approach any new technology.
Leaders at the top need to create engagement and excitement around AI as a strategic lever that can help streamline processes and improve decision-making. This isn’t about replacing jobs but freeing up time and attention for the work that truly mattersthe strategic thinking and human connection that AI cant replace.
The path forward requires moving beyond traditional development approaches to build resilient leadership pipelines capable of sustaining organizations through continuous transformation. By elevating and empowering middle managers, companies can stabilize their operations while preparing for future challenges in an increasingly complex business environment.
The companies that will thrive in this era of disruption will be those that transform their middle management from a burnout risk into an innovation advantage through empowerment, trust, autonomy, and accountability for their work.
On a quiet residential street lined with unassuming homes and white picket fences in Gliwice, Poland, one building is not like the rest. Its a hulking, bright silver structure that’s covered entirely in pipes.
This eye-catching building is the new headquarters for Gambit, a Polish pipe distribution company specializing in underground water systems. Designed by the architecture firm KWK Promes, the headquarters takes Gambits building materials aboveground, transforming pipes from a utilitarian necessity into an aesthetic material that encases the buildings entire exterior. The result is a visually striking structure that cleverly merges architecture with product advertising.
[Photo: Juliusz Soko³owski/courtesy KWK Promes]
Building a headquarters out of pipes
While the idea to create an office entirely covered in pipes might seem like an avant-garde concept, it actually started as a cost-saving measure.
The idea to use pipes on the facade came up when the investorthe company Gambitasked us to design an office-warehouse building that would serve as its unique showcase, but at the lowest possible cost,” says Robert Konieczny, founder of KWK Promes. “We then thought that since they deal with specialized pipes, we could use this very materialespecially since they could acquire it at cost price.
The concept of using Gambits actual pipes was short-lived, as Konieczny’s team quickly discovered that PVC pipes meant for underground use are prone to oxidizing in the sun, tend to be quite bulky, and dont meet Polish fire safety requirements. Still, the firm wanted to follow through on the idea of transforming Gambits building material into a custom cladding that would resemble a stack of pipes.” Ultimately, they found a way to make it happen without breaking the bank.
[Photo: Juliusz Soko³owski/courtesy KWK Promes]
To mimic Gambits pipes, KWK Promes commissioned custom silver tubes from a metal fabrication company, each made from inexpensive raw aluminum sheetinga material the company has also used for projects like an apartment complex in Katowice, Poland, and a futuristic mountain home.
KWK Promes explained on the Archello platform that as an added advantage, the aluminum sheeting develops a patina over time, taking on a matte, raw character reminiscent of concrete.” Importantly, the firm added, “the sheet is incredibly durable and virtually indestructible, making it easy to maintain. This is crucial for us because the operation of buildings generates up to 30% of CO2 emissions, so we always seek simple, low-maintenance solutions.
[Photo: Juliusz Soko³owski/courtesy KWK Promes]
The final structure includes a two-story office section with sloping walls, a cube-shaped warehouse to hold the companys inventory, and a lower workshop section. The entire exterior is fitted with piping, while rooftop skylights and glass windows allow natural light into the working spaces. Inside, concrete walls and flooring have been added to mimic the building’s eventual aging process.
[Photo: Juliusz Soko³owski/courtesy KWK Promes]
A multifunctional material
Aesthetically, the cladding comes about as close to resembling a stack of pipes as a building could get, lending parts of the structure the disconcerting sense that it might be moments from rolling away. From certain angles, the sides of the tubing create a striped pattern, while other angles of the building take on a honeycomb pattern from the open ends of the pipes. KWK Promes also hopes that beyond its visual advantages, the pipe cladding might serve a purpose for the surrounding environment.
[Photo: Juliusz Soko³owski/courtesy KWK Promes]
Initially, at the investors suggestion, the design included protective nets for the pipes,” Konieczny explains. “Over time, however, we decided to leave the pipes open so that, for example, birds could make their home there. In the end, we managed to convince the investor to abandon the netsalthough it’s hard to say whether it was the ecological arguments or the financial ones that convinced them more, as this decision significantly reduced the implementation costs.
In an era when remote and hybrid work arrangements increasingly influence the way office interiors are designed, the Gambit headquarters is a reminder that theres still plenty of room for innovation on an offices exterioreven in an industry that rarely sees the light of day.
Oceans cover about 70% of the Earths surface, yet the ocean floor remains largely untouched by humans. But perhaps not for long.
A Canadian-based firm called the Metals Co. (TMC) recently announced plans to ask the Trump administration to allow it to mine the deep seabed for valuable critical metals in the Pacific Ocean. President Donald Trump is reportedly considering an executive order that would speed up permitting for deep-sea mining, which has prompted outrage from other countries. While some small and exploratory deep-sea mining operations already exist, the practice has yet to happen on a large commercial scale, partly due to fears that it could cause catastrophic damage to the pristine seafloor environment and the wealth of life harbored there.
But the worsening climate crisis and the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels has put deep-sea mining in the spotlight. Clean energy technologies like solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries contain critical minerals like nickel, lithium, cobalt, copper, and manganese, and concerns are growing over whether well have enough of these materials to meet near-term net-zero goals. Some companies have pitched deep-sea mining as a solution. But would the risks be worth the potential rewards?
Into the deep
TMCs mining process would involve collecting potato-size balls of rock, known as polymetallic nodules, that rest gently on top of the seafloor sediment and contain various critical minerals. These nodules have formed over millions of years, and they carpet vast swathes of the seabed. A large rover-like machine would be lowered from a ship down to the seafloor where it would gather the nodules and send them back up to the ship. (To give you a sense of depth, the area in the Pacific where TMC wants to mine, called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), is a deep-sea abyssal plain some 2.5 miles down and is estimated to hold 21 billion tons of nodules.) The water and sediment that comes up with the nodules would then be pumped back into the ocean.
A 2021 concept rendering of a Metals Co. mining device [Image: Bjarke Ingels Group/The Metals Co.]
The company says it would pay careful attention not to harm the integrity of the deep-ocean ecosystem during this process and plans to use a real-time monitoring program that will enable it to adapt, pause, and change . . . operations to stay within expected ecological thresholds.”
But the nodules themselves are an essential part of that ecosystem, and removing them would have consequences. Nodules are among the only hard surfaces in a vast plain of sludgy sediment, and serve as a habitat for many slow-growing and unique creatures, including sea sponges, corals, and octopuses. And the CCZ likely contains many thousands of species that have yet to be identified.
Research suggests that removing the nodules would lead to a loss of food-web integrity and a significant depreciation of faunal biodiversity. Disturbing the ocean food web could have cascading effects, putting many fish populations at risk and threatening the livelihoods and food security of millions of people. (The Trump administration did not respond to request for comment by the time of publication.)
There are other concerns. The mere presence of the rover itself in an environment that has remained untouched for millennia would likely disturb its living organisms, most of which exist in the top 2 inches of sediment, explains Oliver Ashford, a marine biologist with the World Resources Institutes Ocean Program. The organisms there aren’t really adapted to rapidly changing currents and being thrown around and disrupted, he says. They’re quite delicate organisms normally. So the physical interaction with that machine might cause death. A recent study published in the journal Nature found that life at a small deep-sea mining test site in the CCZ is still recovering four decades after the tests were conducted.
The creatures that arent physically disturbed by the rover could be harmed by changes in temperature, light, and sound. The activity could stir up large plumes of sediment that get picked up by ocean currents and spread across hundreds of miles, smothering and starving sponges and coral and disrupting fishing activities. Theres even some concern that mining could interfere with the oceans natural ability to sequester carbon and produce oxygen, further harming the Earths climate. TMC doesnt deny that deep-sea mining comes with environmental risks, but says the clean energy transition will require trade-offs.
Whos in charge around here?
The U.N.s International Seabed Authority is responsible for setting environmental and financial regulations for the nascent deep-sea mining industry, but has yet to do so even after years of deliberations. Theyre developing regulations from scratch for an industry that could potentially have a large environmental impact, Ashford says of the ISA. I feel like it’s a process that shouldn’t be rushed. But the sluggish pace of this rulemaking has frustrated some mining firms, including TMC, that are tired of waiting.
Technically the United States doesnt have to wait for the ISA to give mining the go-ahead because it never ratified the UN Law of th Sea, the 1994 treaty that put the ISA in charge of seabed mining. This is why TMC has come knocking on Trumps door. The company promises a massive and rapid injection of metals into the U.S. if its allowed to mine the seabed. This is important because demand for critical minerals is expected to more than double by 2030 and triple by 2040 as clean energy technology advances.
While mineral reserves are abundant on land, production tends to be concentrated in a handful of countriesin China especiallywhich makes the supply chain unreliable. In the U.S., for example, more than 80% of critical minerals are imported. And heightened trade tensions will further tighten supply: China recently restricted exports of seven rare earth elements in response to Trumps tariffs on Chinese goods. Lack of investment has also made it difficult to rapidly scale up mineral production. Deep-sea mining, therefore, is a path to making real progress toward solving our supply chain problem, TMC says in a promotional video.
TMC also argues that deep-sea mining would be less harmful for the environment than terrestrial mining activities. Its true that land mining contributes to pollution, resource depletion, and damage to biodiversity. Mining, by its nature, is not a zero-harm activity. It poses significant risks to the environment and local communities, writes Melissa Barbanell at the World Resources Institute. But its not clear that deep-sea mining would be more sustainable than land mining, and TMC admits that seabed mining is unlikely to replace land mining anytime soon.
Peering into the future
Some groups predict that rapid technological advances, improved recycling methods, and robust circular economies would be enough to help us use the minerals we have more efficiently, eliminating the need for deep-sea mining altogether. Future mineral demand can be met without deep seabed mining, declared the World Wildlife Fund in a report finding that innovations could curb demand for critical minerals by 20% to 58% by 2050.
As with so many new technologies, figuring out whether deep-sea mining is a good idea or a bad one isnt straightforward. A paper published in the journal Ocean Sustainability a few years ago tried to look at the question through an economic lens. The researchers wanted to know: Of all the key stakeholdersfrom mining companies to governments to humanity at largewho really benefits from deep-sea mining, and by how much? Our conclusion was that only the commercial mining companies are likely to get some profit, and it’s not much, says Ussif Rashid Sumaila, a professor of ocean and fisheries economics at the University of British Columbia, and lead author on the paper.
The analysis found that revenues would likely be huge for deep-sea mining companies in the first few years while demand for minerals is high, but would drop off as the market is flooded and prices come down. Combine this with high operational costs and the threat of numerous expensive lawsuits, and the long-term viability of deep-sea mining looks tenuous. Some companies, like the Norwegian firm Loke Marine Minerals, have already gone bust due to funding troubles.
As for another key stakeholdernatureSumailas paper concluded that the costs of managing environmental damage caused by deep-sea mining will likely be astronomical. Look, he says, sometimes you just have to leave things alone.
Substack and Patreon are vying to become creators primary revenue stream.
For most influencers, payouts from platforms like Meta or Google arent enough to build a sustainable career. Rather than spending their days hawking products, many creators are turning to direct fan support, and two companies dominate that space: Patreon and Substack.
Patreons latest move targets streamers. Its native livestreaming feature, currently in demo and set for a broad rollout this summer, could attract gamers and broadcasters alike. But Substack beat them to it, launching a similar live video tool just three months earlier. As the two platforms expand their offerings, the rivalry for creator loyalty is heating up.
The market for creator livestreams
Video already performs well on the platform: Its Patreons second-highest-earning media category after podcasting. Many Twitch streamers rely on Patreon as a more stable source of subscription revenue, preferring it to Twitchs unpredictable payouts. With the addition of live video, Patreon is betting that more of these streamers will shift even larger parts of their operations to its platform.
Creators can use livestreams to attract new free members, but they can also use it to encourage free members to pay to upgrade to unlock a Live so that creators are earning the most from their fans, writes Drew Rowny, Patreons VP of Product, in an email to Fast Company. Native livestreams will also be a part of our existing ticketed events experience on Patreon. Live will become a part of our tools that already convert 700,000 free memberships to paid each month.
But Substack, which was founded four years after Patreon, already has the upperhand. The platform introduced livestreaming to top-performing creators in September, then expanded access sitewide in January. Video is now central to Substacks strategy: 82% of its 250 highest-earning creators are using audio and video in their work.
Since its inception, Substack has been a refuge for journalists leaving legacy mediaand its live video feature is now drawing in television anchors as well. Don Lemon and Jim Acosta both stream on Substackand sometimes, they stream together. As of 2025, roughly one in three live videos on the platform are cohosted with another Substack creator. Earlier this month, former MSNBC host Chris Matthews announced hell be streaming there, too.
The important thing about live video, community features, or any other publishing tools is that they aren’t just standalone featuresthey’re connected to a network that helps publishers grow both audience and revenue, Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie writes in an email to Fast Company. That’s what Substack does exceptionally well.
Who will win the creator subscription market?
Second-stream creator revenue has been Patreons domain for over a decade. But Substack has recently inched its way, courting TikTok creators with big-money incentives. To some extent, the budding strategy has worked. When Hannah Neeleman, the infamous trad wife behind Ballerina Farm, wanted to venture outside of TikTok, she started a Substack newsletter. So have a good many shopping influencers, wanting to more easily insert affiliate links. Not long ago, Patreon would have been these creators only option.
Of course, Substack doesnt think of itself as a Patreon competitor. It wants to be known as a wider social media platform, and not just a subscription serviceeven if it continues to tout its five million paid subscriptions.
Substack is a destination people visit specifically to discover new voices and find creators to subscribe to,” McKenzie says. “Users willingly engage with all content forms while there, whether it’s livestreaming, reading, watching videos, or listening to podcasts. In that sense, Substack is truly a 360-degree platform, offering creators everything they need. It’s more comparable to YouTube than to Patreon.
That doesnt mean Patreon is losing its grip. The company emphasizes that more than half of the $290 billion creator economy comes from direct-to-fan paid programs. The growth of other platforms could just be a sign of an expanding industry.
Were seeing more and more platforms helping creators to connect directly with their fanswhich is a great thing for the creator economy, Patreons Rowny writes. Creators can build tighter communities, grow their audience more, and earn more income on Patreon. Were laser-focused on helping creators manage and grow their direct-to-fan businesses.
Welcome to the world of social media mind control. By amplifying free speech with fake speech, you can numb the brain into believing just about anything. Surrender your blissful ignorance and swallow the red pill. Youre about to discover how your thinking is being engineered by modern masters of deception.
The means by which information gets drilled into our psyches has become automated. Lies are yesterday’s problem. Today’s problem is the use of bot farms to trick social media algorithms into making people believe those lies are true. A lie repeated often enough becomes truth.
We know that China, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and North Korea are using bot networks to amplify narratives all over the world, says Ran Farhi, CEO of Xpoz, a threat detection platform that uncovers coordinated attempts to spread lies and manipulate public opinion in politics and beyond.
Bot farm amplification is being used to make ideas on social media seem more popular than they really are. A bot farm consists of hundreds and thousands of smartphones controlled by one computer. In data-center-like facilities, racks of phones use fake social media accounts and mobile apps to share and engage. The bot farm broadcasts coordinated likes, comments, and shares to make it seem as if a lot of people are excited or upset about something like a volatile stock, a global travesty, or celebrity gossipeven though theyre not.
Meta calls it coordinated inauthentic behavior. It fools the social networks algorithm into showing the post to more people because the system thinks it’s trending. Since the fake accounts pass the Turing test, they escape detection.
Unlike conventional bots that rely on software and API access, bot farm amplification uses real mobile phones. Racks and racks of smartphones connected to USB hubs are set up with SIM cards, mobile proxies, IP geolocation spoofing, and device fingerprinting. That makes them far more difficult to detect than the bots of yore.
Its very difficult to distinguish between authentic activity and inauthentic activity, says Adam Sohn, CEO of Narravance, a social media threat intelligence firm with major social networks as clients. Its hard for us, and were one of the best at it in the world.
Disinformation, Depression-era-style
Distorting public perception is hardly a new phenomenon. But in the old days, it was a highly manual process. Just months before the 1929 stock market crash, Joseph P. Kennedy, JFKs father, got richer by manipulating the capital markets. He was part of a secret trading pool of wealthy investors who used coordinated buying and media hype to artificially pump the price of Radio Corp. of America shares to astronomical levels.
After that, Kennedy and his rich friends dumped their RCA shares at a huge profit, the stock collapsed, and everyone else lost their asses. After the market crashed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made Kennedy the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.
Today, stock market manipulators use bot farms to amplify fake posts about hot stocks on Reddit, Discord, and X. Bot networks target messages laced with ticker symbols and codified slang phrases like cmon fam, buy the dip, load up now and keep pushing. The self-proclaimed finfluencers behind the schemes are making millions in profit by coordinating armies of avatars, sock puppets, and bots to hype thinly traded stocks so they can scalp a vig after the price increases.
We find so many instances where there’s no news story, says Adam Wasserman, CFO of Narravance. There’s no technical indicator. There are just bots posting things like this stocks going to the moon and greatest stock, pulling out of my 401k. But they arent real people. Its all fake.
In a world where all information is now suspect and decisions are based on sentiment, bot farm amplification has democratized market manipulation. But stock trading is only one application. Anyone can use bot farms to influence how we invest, make purchasing decisions, or vote.
These are the same strategies behind propaganda efforts pioneered by Russia and the Islamic State to broadcast beheadings and sway elections. But theyve been honed to sell stocks, incite riots, and, allegedly, even tarnish celebrity reputations. Its the same song, just different lyrics.
People under the age of 30 don’t go to Google anymore, says Jacki Alexander, CEO at pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting. They go to TikTok and Instagram and search for the question they want to answer. It requires zero critical thinking skills but somehow feels more authentic. You feel like youre making your own decisions by deciding which videos to watch, but you’re actually being fed propaganda thats been created to skew your point of view.
Its not an easy problem to solve. And social media companies appear to be buckling to inauthenticity. After Elon Musk took over Twitter (now X), the company fired much of its anti-misinformation team and reduced the transparency of platform manipulation. Meta is phasing out third-party fact-checking. And YouTube rolled back features meant to combat misinformation.
On TikTok, you used to be able to see how many times a specific hashtag was shared or commented on, says Alexander. But they took those numbers down after news articles came out showing the exact same pro-Chinese propaganda videos got pushed up way more on TikTok than Instagram. Algorithmically boosting specific content is a practice known as heating.
If theres no trustworthy information, what we think will likely become less important than how we feel. Thats why were regressing from the Age of Sciencewhen critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning were centralback to something resembling the Edwardian era, which was driven more by emotional reasoning and deference to authority.
When Twitter introduced microblogging, it was liberating. We all thought it was a knowledge amplifier. We watched it fuel a pro-democracy movement that swept across the Middle East and North Africa called the Arab Spring and stoke national outrage over racial injustice in Ferguson, Missouri, planting the seeds for Black Lives Matter.
While Twitter founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey thought they were building a platform for political and social activism, their trust and safety team was getting overwhelmed with abuse. Its like they never really read Lord of the Flies. People who dont study literature or history, they dont have any idea of what could happen, said tech journalist Kara Swisher in Breaking the Bird, a CNN documentary about Twitter.
Your outrage has been cultivated
Whatever gets the most likes, comments, and shares gets amplified. Emotionally charged posts that lure the most engagement get pushed up to the top of the news feed. Enrage to engage is a strategy. Social media manipulation has become very sophisticated, says Wendy Sachs, director-producer of October 8, a documentary about the campus protests that erupted the day after the October 7th Hama attack on Israel. It’s paid for and funded by foreign governments looking to divide the American people.
Malicious actors engineer virality by establishing bots that leach inside communities for months, sometimes years, before they get activated. The bots are given profile pics and bios. Other tricks include staggering bot activity to occur in local time zones, using U.S. device fingerprinting techniques like setting the smartphones internal clock to the time zone to where an imaginary user supposedly lives, and setting the phones language to English.
Using AI-driven personas with interests like cryptocurrency or dogs, bots are set to follow real Americans and cross-engage with other bots to build up perceived credibility. Its a concept known as social graph engineering, which involves infiltrating broad interest communities that align with certain biases, such as left- or right-leaning politics.
For example, the K-pop network BTS Army has been mobilized by liberals, while Formula 1 networks might lend themselves to similar manipulation from conservatives. The bots leach inside these communities and earn trust through participation before agitating from within.
Bot accounts lay dormant, and at a certain point, they wake up and start to post synchronously, which is what we’ve observed they actually do, says Valentin Châtelet, research associate at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council. They like the same post to increase its engagement artificially.
To set up and manage thousands of fake social media accounts, some analysts believe that bot farms are deployed with the help of cyber criminal syndicates and state sponsorship, giving them access to means that are not ordinary.
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The ever-increasing power of generative AI has divided the graphic design community. Many are embracing the tools in their workflows, while others believe theyve stolen from culture and commoditized a craft.
In any case, we all live in a strange time, when people are often presenting fully generative work as their own. Sometimes thats innocuous. And sometimes thats icky.
But now Adobe wants to offer the public a means to distinguish the authentic from the automated. A new created without generative AI tag in Adobe Frescothe company’s drawing and painting appwill let you mark work as being free from the use of generative AI tools, to certify that you created it by hand. The feature is likely to come to other pieces of the Adobe Suite, according to Eric Snowden, SVP of design at Adobe.
[Image: Adobe]
Fresco is one of our tools that were not including generative AI, and we wanted to make sure that for someone creating these amazing artworks by hand, they have the ability to say, I did not use generative AI inside of Fresco, says Snowden. Those are our customers, too, and we want to support them. If they feel the need to be able to convince clients that they didn’t use generative AI, we want to make that as simple for them to do as possible.
The new optional disclosure comes alongside a greater wave of announcements from Adobe this week that double down on generative AI. Adobe is introducing video and vector support to its own commercially safe Firefly model, while also integrating popular generative AI models by third partiesincluding OpenAIs ChatGPT, Googles Imagen and Veo, and Fluxinto its software suite. (More partners, including Runway and Luma, will be coming down the line.) Despite Adobes lengthy, and even delayed approach to building its proprietary AI model, Snowden says enabling these options that Adobe has tacitly criticized is all about customer choice.
How Adobe marks work as created without generative AI
To certify your work as AI-free, Adobe is using its Content Credentials standard. While originally presented as a means to limit misinformationa topic on which I was more than a little skepticalthis approach to metadata makes a lot more sense in the context of Adobes GenAI workflows. These credentials are basically a running receipt of where you did what to any piece of media inside of Adobe’s system. So it will list if you brought your own photo into ChatGPT to restyle it, and then exported it to Adobe Firefly to turn it into video. (Adobe is labeling any media imported into its software that out of its gaze might already be influenced by GenAI as media of unknown origin on this running receipt.)
Granted, provenance is almost an oxymoron in any generative AI workflow: ChatGPT 4 was trained on 13 trillion tokens of data youll never be able to cite. But the Content Credentials standard does offer some sort of ledger of reference to clients or the public at large to how something was created. Its something a creator can point to and explain or defend the source of their work.
I think illustration is where we’re seeing [demand] . . . but I don’t think it’s specific to only illustration, Snowden says. Indeed, the competing platform Procreate has taken an anti-GenAI stance, but anti-AI sentiment doesnt apply to illustrators alone. I would imagine there are people in every creative discipline where generative AI is not something they’re interested in, Snowden continues. And if they feel compelled to communicateor they’re again being asked to communicatethat they didn’t use generative AI, we should help them do that.
Claiming that any digital work is free from the influence of AI is impossible. For a human gesture to be transformed into a pixel, its filtered through all sorts of algorithms that help smooth and make sense of ones input on a screenand that’s definitely true for Adobe Fresco as well as the other apps in its suite. Long before GenAI arrived, Adobe products were steeped in the benefits of artificial intelligence and similar coded assistance.
That said, Adobe is clearly reading the room, and realizing it must acknowledge that many creators find generative AI to be an assault on their viewpoint and livelihoodeven while Adobe is investing more into these technologies that are simply too powerful, and in demand, to be ignored.
Everybody’s going to create in such different ways, says Snowden. Which is the exciting thing about working on these kinds of projectsgiving people as much choice as possible.
As the 2025 Major League Baseball season gets into full swing, youd expect the league to use its marketing muscle to hype the heroics of its biggest stars. But its anime-style ad campaign takes that idea to a new level.
Heroes of the Game mixes the on-field superpowers of players like Shohei Ohtani, Paul Skenes, Julio Rodríguez, Juan Soto, and Aaron Judge with the pop cultural artistry of anime hits like One Piece and Fullmetal Alchemist. Created with ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, the league also partnered with Passion Pictures and Echelle Studios in Japan, as well as acclaimed animation director Hiroshi Shimizu, to make the work.
The first ad features a whole collection of players, with individual player spots rolling out over this month. The new work follows earlier collabs with anime series Demon Slayer and Japanese artist Takashi Murakami for the season-opening Tokyo Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs last month.
Not-so odd couple
It may feel like an odd coupling, but MLB chief marketing officer Uzma Rawn Dowler says the league has used anime in past social posts and fans loved it. And our players are also die-hard anime fans, says Rawn Dowler. Whether it’s Julio (Rodríguez) or Fernando Tatís customizing their cleats with their favorite characters, or Jazz Chisholm wearing a One Piece chain, anime is really popular in our clubhouses and with our players. So we felt like it was a really authentic medium to tell our player stories.
The campaign lands at a time that finds baseball flying high. The leagues $12.1 billion in reported 2024 revenue was a record, breaking the previous record of $11.6 billion set in 2023. It also represents a 33% jump in the past decade. Last seasons attendance of more than 71 million fans was the highest since 2017. Television viewership was up across the board, including among the coveted 18-to-34 demographic.
If you hit a baseball to Julio Rodríguez, just know you've entered a no-fly zone J-Rod anime goes CRAZY #HeroesOfTheGame pic.twitter.com/kyQq8fFppS— MLB (@MLB) April 13, 2025
Now that it’s got the attention of fansespecially younger onesMLB is focusing on how it can harness their passion for baseball and culture in creative new ways.
Back in 2023, the league partnered with Wieden+Kennedy for its Baseball Is Something Else campaign, which this years work continues. Rawn Dowler says the emphasis on specific stars has really paid off, noting, We have young, dynamic, diverse, global players who transcend baseball, and our younger sports fans are increasingly identifying with individual players. So we want to continue to prop up the folks who are the face of our game.
The league picks which players to spotlight based on a number of factors, including sheer on-field dominance, and making sure the mix works across a variety of club markets and global audiences.
It probably shouldnt be a surprise to find the anime pedigree involved in the new campaign, considering Wieden+Kennedys award-winning, manga- and anime-related work for McDonalds last year. That saw the fast-feeder flip its golden arches as a nod to the fictional spoof store WcDonalds that had become a mainstay of many popular manga and anime TV shows, graphic novels, and video games for the past several decades. The brand went deep to collaborate with celebrated artists on limited-edition packaging, a new sauce, and a series of WcDonalds anime shorts and manga.
The next big league event is the inaugural Speedway Classic in August, when the Atlanta Braves will play the Cincinnati Reds on the infield of NASCARs Bristol Motor Speedway in Bristol, Tennessee. In the meantime, the league will continue its winning formula of finding creative ways to bring pop culture to baseball, and its superstars to pop culture.
It’s just a really exciting time in baseball right now, Rawn Dowler says. The talent level is insane. We have players achieving remarkable feats, and they’re doing it with a little bit of swagger, style, and flair, and so that has allowed us to really showcase and tell the stories of our players.
