Science and Technology

West Texas, from the oil rigs of the Permian Basin to the wind turbines twirling above the High Plains, has long been a magnet for companies seeking fortunes in energy.Now, those arid ranch lands are offering a new moneymaking opportunity: data centers.Lancium, an energy and data center management firm setting up shop in Fort Stockton and Abilene, is one of many companies around the country betting that building data centers close to generating sites will allow them to tap into underused clean power.“It’s a land grab,” said Lancium’s president, Ali Fenn.In the past, companies built data centers close to internet…

Apple has canceled its plans to release an electric car with self-driving abilities, a secretive product that had been in the works for nearly a decade.The company told employees in an internal meeting on Tuesday that it had scrapped the project and that members of the group would be shifted to different roles, including in Apple’s artificial intelligence division, according to a person briefed on the discussion, who requested anonymity because the announcement was not public.As part of the restructuring, Kevin Lynch, an executive who had been involved in the car project, will report to John Giannandrea, the company’s head…

The December day in 2021 that set off a revolution across the videogame industry appeared to start innocuously enough. Managers at a Wisconsin studio called Raven began meeting one by one with quality assurance testers, who vet video games for bugs, to announce that the company was overhauling their department. Going forward, managers said, the lucky testers would be permanent employees, not temps. They would earn an extra $1.50 an hour.It was only later in the morning, a Friday, that the catch became apparent: One-third of the studio’s roughly 35 testers were being let go as part of the overhaul.…

The ominous messages began arriving in Elissa’s inbox early last year.“You sell pics of your underage daughter to pedophiles,” read one. “You’re such a naughty sick mom, you’re just as sick as us pedophiles,” read another. “I will make your life hell for you and your daughter.”Elissa has been running her daughter’s Instagram account since 2020, when the girl was 11 and too young to have her own. Photos show a bright, bubbly girl modeling evening dresses, high-end workout gear and dance leotards. She has more than 100,000 followers, some so enthusiastic about her posts that they pay $9.99 a…

Reddit, the community-focused message board site, filed to go public on Thursday, paving the way for it to be the first major social media company to debut on the stock market in years and a test for private companies after a drought in initial public offerings.In an offering prospectus, Reddit disclosed its financial performance in preparation for selling shares to investors. The San Francisco-based company reported that its revenue rose more than 20 percent as its losses narrowed last year. It added that it had 73 million daily users and more than 100,000 active communities.The prospectus kicks off a process…

Probably only Americans of a certain age remember when the Volkswagen Beetle was the best-selling imported car in the United States and the hippest ride to a Grateful Dead concert was a Volkswagen Microbus.Volkswagen is trying to tap some of that nostalgia in its latest push to regain the status and sales it enjoyed in the United States during the Beetle’s and Microbus’s heydays in the 1960s. But this time it hopes its top models will be electric.The German carmaker is second only to Toyota globally but is a niche player in the United States. Part of its plan to…