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The midterms were in no small part a searing repudiation of the AI industry, and in particular data centers. In fact, of 41 ballot proposed measures that would crack down on data center development, Americans voted for all but one.

The lone exception: the town of Harwood, North Dakota, population 845.

According to reporting by The Washington Post, a lot of residents were hesitant to approve the $3 billion, 1.8 million square foot facility for the same reasons as their peers across the country: noise, environmental impact, and the shady backroom dealmaking that facilitated it.

But all the same, they still voted against a measure demanding additional reviews and public hearings for big new industrial projects like this one, by a 3-to-1 majority — albeit, it sounds like, reluctantly.

The reasons why are both charmingly parochial and unremittingly bleak. One 40-year resident, Mark Kerkvliet, was on board once he was assured that the data center wouldn’t drive up power costs. But he stopped short of endorsing the technology.

“As soon as I was comfortable with the power use, I was on board,” he told WaPo. “Not because I like data centers or I like artificial intelligence or anything like that, but because this was very good for the city of Harwood.”

The other glaring reason: if they voted against the project, led by the Texas-based firm Applied Digital, their next-door neighbor of Fargo, the state’s most populous city, would almost certainly get the contract instead. And you can’t let that happen.

Blake Hankey, the mayor of Harwood, put it in frank terms.

“It was always going to get built right around the same area that it was now,” he told WaPo. “If the data center is going to get put in this similar location, we might as well get the tax benefits and the tax revenue from it.”

If AI data center construction is inevitable, in other words, then you might as well reap the benefits. Hankey estimated that having the project in the town would earn it $1.65 million in property taxes once it’s fully constructed, which is six times the entire tax revenue Harwood collected in 2024. Applied Digital claims that it will create 200 jobs. (That’s no joke in such a small town, but these data center job projections often turn out to be a mirage, especially after construction is finished.)

But if AI data center is as inevitable as the townspeople believe, then the future is looking rather grim. Your town can protest an AI data center and maybe even shoot it down, but there’s no guarantee that the town next door won’t.

If your primary objection to data centers is them being in your back yard, then perhaps you’re content to have them be built out of sight and out of mind. But many also oppose data centers for environmental reasons which become all the more exigent amid an accelerating climate crisis. In that case, forcing a data center to be built in a less ideal location for a multimillion or billion dollar company isn’t much of a victory.

But who’s to say their — or the mayor’s — fatalism is correct? Exit polls showed that 76 percent of voters said they’re against new data centers in their community, and 56 percent considered AI and data centers a crucial or major factor in how they vote. A full 57 percent of Americans now believe AI is outright bad for society. Texas’s governor-elect Gina Hinojosa even campaigned on a data center moratorium. It just may be that opposition to the facilities has reached critical mass.

More on AI: New AI Data Center Is So Huge That It’ll Generate the Heat of 23 Atomic Bombs Every Single Day

TL;DR: The Pokémon TCG Mega Evolution Delta Reign Elite Trainer Box is on sale for $99.64 at Amazon, down from its list price of $134.45.

Black Friday hasn’t really started yet, but the Pokémon TCG’s recently released Delta Reign expansion is already seeing huge discounts on Amazon. This time, the Rayquaza-themed Elite Trainer Box has finally slipped below $100, setting a new record-low price with the retailer.

As of Nov. 10, the Pokémon TCG’s Delta Reign Elite Trainer Box is available for just $99.64 at Amazon, saving you $34.81 against its usual $134.45 price. That’s an impressive 26% off, bringing the cost of its nine booster packs down to $11.07 apiece, before factoring in the extras.

That’s $3.59 cheaper than the previous $103.23 Amazon low we covered on the Nov. 6 launch day.

What’s more, this bargain has brought the ETB much closer to market price, now only $10.10 above its estimated value determined by dedicated trading card marketplace TCGplayer — currently $89.54.  

Note that this $99.64 listing comes from third-party seller Thumbs Up Distribution, rather than Amazon directly. 

Buyers are getting nine Delta Reign packs, an exclusive full-art foil Kyogre promo card, 65 card sleeves, 40 Energy cards, seven dice, a plastic coin, six dividers, a collector’s box, a player’s guide, and a Pokémon TCG Live code card.

UAE telecoms group etisalat has started offering artificial intelligence-powered smart glasses from Meta Platforms, as it aims to broaden its wearable technology base.

The smart glasses from the Facebook parent and Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica start at Dh1,160 ($316), Abu Dhabi-based etisalat said in a statement on Tuesday.

Options include the standard Meta Glasses, the second and third generation Ray-Ban Meta Glasses and Oakley Meta HSTN performance glasses.

They are able to perform smart functions, from real-time translation in a number of languages and recommendations to search queries to hands-free calls, photo capturing and video recording, and audio.

Etisalat says it is the first telecom company in the Middle East and North Africa to offer the Meta smart glasses, serving as “another step in expanding Etisalat UAE’s device portfolio around how people progressively want to live, work, create and stay connected”, said Tamer Eltoni, senior vice president at etisalat UAE.

“AI wearables are opening up a new way for people to interact with technology, making access more immediate, intuitive and hands-free,” he said.

California-based Meta has said privacy is built into its glasses and that it will continue strengthening its protections. In the UAE, owning smart glasses is permitted but using their recording features without consent can result in penalties.

Aside from the Meta smart glasses, etisalat also offers smartwatches and smart rings.

The telecoms company is pushing for AI-led growth, with the launch of a strategic project to develop and expand digital infrastructure capacity within the UAE and abroad.

Etisalat has also announced a commercial service that increases upload speeds to smartphones threefold, boosting the UAE’s push towards the next-generation 6G standard for mobile communications.

Hot off the heels of a devastating defeat in his attempts to influence the midterm elections, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that his EV maker would begin winding down production of its widely-reviled Cybertruck.

In a tweet last week, Musk said that the company was looking to “make room for increased Cybercab production” at its massive Gigafactory in Texas in the “middle of next year.”

Despite sales circling the drain for years now, Musk said that the number of orders for the pickup “far exceeds” the company’s capacity to build them — meaning, he claims, that Tesla has must “return deposits for a lot of people.”

The basic laws of economics dictate that Musk is fudging the details. If demand for the brutalist pickup was really that high, and the company was really able to produce enough for all of them, it would obviously be doing so instead of nixing the entire line. Put simply, the billionaire is almost certainly engaging in some tricky rhetoric to make it sound like buyers are lining up around the corner for one — which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Musk appears to be equating deposits with orders, which seems disingenuous at best, considering capacity to build them didn’t appear to be a problem when he sold $131 million worth of Cybertrucks to himself earlier this year. Countless deposits likely never converted into actual sales as potential buyers realized the sheer amount of problems the truck had.

In 2019, when the vehicle was first announced, Tesla claimed it had received 250,000 preorders. Considering the EV maker only ever delivered just over 70,000 of them — a far cry from the quarter million trucks a year Musk once promised — the number of people getting cold feet likely grew quickly in the four years it took for the company to get production going.

As of right now, we don’t know how many orders — if any — are outstanding and how many $100 deposits Tesla will have to issue refunds for. But it’s certainly a humiliating end to one of the biggest flops in automotive history.

Musk also refuted that the Cybertruck was “unprofitable,” but suggested that the “opportunity cost of the complexity of Cybertruck is vastly outweighed by the value of incremental Cybercab production.”

People on his social media platform didn’t buy the claim.

“LOL — no company shuts down a profitable product,” one user replied. “Just admit the Cybertruck has been one of the all time stinkers and move on. People might start to respect you a bit more.”

In reality, barely anybody actually wants to buy one of the trucks. The Cybertruck has quickly become a physical manifestation for all of the pent-up hatred directed at the almost-trillionaire. Beyond the truck becoming a major target for vandalism and open mockery, the vehicle has also been haunted by near-constant technical issues and has been recalled in the US a whopping eleven times over its short production run.

More on the Cybertruck: The Death of the Cybertruck Proves That Elon Musk Can’t Actually Predict the Future

The University of Oxford and Boston Children’s Hospital, with collaboration from The Jackson Laboratory and N=1 Collaborative, have been selected to establish a new Genetic Medicines Hub, one of six research hubs within the Aligning Research to Impact Autism (ARIA) ecosystem. The Genetic Medicines Hub is a collaborative research effort led by the University of Oxford and Boston Children’s Hospital, that is developing a scalable platform to design, test, and accelerate genetic medicines, including antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) therapies, for children with specific genetic disorders causing neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs), including profound autism. The $46M multi-year commitment brings together leading expertise in genomics, neuroscience, and translational medicine.

While advances in genetic sequencing have rapidly increased understanding of the biological basis of many neurodevelopmental conditions, translating these discoveries into scalable therapeutic strategies remains a significant challenge. ARIA is leading the way in an effort to address this critical bottleneck in the field.

At the core of the program is the development of a platform-based approach to genetic medicines, focused initially on antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs), which are short, synthetic molecules that can be designed to interact with RNA and modify gene expression. ASOs have been used to successfully treat disorders of the central nervous system, offering an opportunity for rapid translation.

Rather than pursuing one condition at a time, the Genetic Medicines Hub will establish systematic methods to design, test, and optimize these molecules across multiple genetic targets. This approach is intended to improve efficiency, reduce duplication, and enable progress across a wider range of rare conditions.

The program will initially focus on a set of genes associated with NDDs, including ARID1B, CHD2, GRIN2B, RNU4-2, SCN2A, and SLC6A1, working hand-in-hand with another research hub, the ARIA IMPACT Network and gene-specific Patient Advocacy Groups.

The Genetic Medicines Hub will combine cutting-edge experimental and computational capabilities, including:

• High-throughput laboratory systems to scale molecular testing
• Novel screening approaches to assess biological impact at the protein level
• AI-informed design tools to optimize candidate molecules
• Integrated data platforms to enable sharing of results, protocols, and insights

Together, these elements are designed to create a reproducible, scalable pipeline for genetic medicine development and to generate a shared resource for the wider research community.

The Hub brings together complementary strengths across Boston Children’s Hospital, the University of Oxford, The Jackson Laboratory and N=1 Collaborative, combining expertise in human genetics, functional genomics, clinical research, and therapeutic development.

Stephan Sanders, Professor of Paediatric Neurogenetics at the Department of Paediatrics in the University of Oxford, said: “This program represents a step change in how we approach developing genetic medicines. By building a platform that can be applied across multiple genes, we can move beyond fragmented efforts and begin to scale our impact. Importantly, this work is grounded in collaboration and open science, ensuring that the knowledge generated benefits the broader community.”

Tim Yu, Associate Professor of Paediatrics at the Boston Children’s Hospital, added: “Genetic neurodevelopmental disorders have long faced a bottleneck between gene discovery and therapeutic development. By uniting world-class teams and building a shared, transparent blueprint for ASO innovation, we aim to make that bottleneck disappear. This Genetic Medicines Hub will allow us to move from scientific insight to actionable therapies with unprecedented speed – and to do so in a way that benefits the entire field.”

For rare disease patients, the biggest barrier has never been scientific ambition, it’s been data. JAX has built its rare disease mission around open, deeply annotated genomic resources, and this collaboration is a direct extension of that commitment, ensuring rare conditions have the depth of evidence needed to drive genetic medicine development forward.”

Cat Lutz, Vice President of the Rare Disease Translational Center at The Jackson Laboratory 

Nicole Nolen, Executive Director of N=1 Collaborative, said: “Reaching more patients requires more than advancing individual programs – it requires a field that learns together. This collaboration creates an opportunity to turn what is learned into shared approaches that can be adopted and built upon across the community.”

Together, the teams aim to develop safe and effective ASO therapies for several NDDs while establishing a sustainable framework for advancing genetic medicines across a much wider range of conditions.