📌 TOPINDIATOURS Breaking ai: Site of Elementary School Was Sprayed With Radioactiv

Nearly 500 elementary school children in Texas play on fields where a whistleblower says he once spread tons of radioactive fracking waste — a noxious hell-brew he believes melted the bones in his own jaw.

Lee Oldham is a 52-year-old former waste disposal worker from Cleburne, Texas, on the southern outskirts of Dallas-Fort Worth. In an interview with Texas-based publication the Barbed Wire, Oldham detailed how he went from waste handler to corporate whistleblower, and the horrifying apathy of state politicians that led him there.

Since the fracking boom of the 2000s, Oldham made his living dumping drilling mud and contaminated fracking dirt into open fields across North Texas. Though the Texas state oil and gas regulator technically forbade companies from dumping their sludge wherever they pleased, a 2016 audit found the regulator offered “little deterrent effect” to prevent it.

Instead of disposing of the fracking sludge the official way — which involved extra paperwork, expensive land designations, and tons of extra man-hours — Oldham’s company, like many others, chose to work it into empty fields.

“The whole thing operated on the honor system,” Oldham told the Barbed Wire. “And the only honor you can bank on in the oil and gas industry is there ain’t nothing honorable being done.”

In total, the Dallas-Fort Worth area is now host to somewhere between 20 and 60 million tons of hazardous waste, dredged up by the 21,000 oil and gas wells that call the place home. As fracking involves blasting through shale teeming with naturally toxic materials to find oil and gas, that waste is surely brimming with a noxious potpourri of heavy metals and radionuclides, as well as PFAS introduced during the drilling process.

As Oldham’s medical records, which were viewed by Barbed Wire show, the 52-year-old’s jaw bone has become “seriously degraded” following his stint in the oil-waste trade. His vertebrae had also broken down, another telltale sign of radiation poisoning.

While the waste sites would be dangerous enough as tracts of farmland — plenty of which have sprouted up on former dumping grounds — one particular site Oldham showed Barbed Wire is located under a brand-new suburban development. Called “Silo Mills,” the community hosts some 2,500 homes just 30 minutes away from downtown Fort Worth.

It also boasts Pleasant View Elementary School, a Pre-K to 5th grade school building built on a field where Oldham and his co-workers used to dump fracking waste.

Oldham left his previous employer after he says his questions about radioactive waste made him a target for retaliation. He has now started sounding the alarm on Facebook, drawing the attention of local law enforcement.

Whether the authorities uncover a verifiable public health threat to the new town of Silo Mills remains to be seen, but one thing’s for sure: with radioactive waste in play, it’ll be thousands of years before the area surrounding Dallas-Fort Worth fully recovers from the fracking boom.

More on radioactivity: Worker Falls Into Nuclear Reactor, Drinks a Little “Cavity Water”

The post Site of Elementary School Was Sprayed With Radioactive Fracking Waste, Worker Warns appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Eksklusif ai: Anthropic launches Cowork, a Claude Desktop agent th

Anthropic released Cowork on Monday, a new AI agent capability that extends the power of its wildly successful Claude Code tool to non-technical users — and according to company insiders, the team built the entire feature in approximately a week and a half, largely using Claude Code itself.

The launch marks a major inflection point in the race to deliver practical AI agents to mainstream users, positioning Anthropic to compete not just with OpenAI and Google in conversational AI, but with Microsoft's Copilot in the burgeoning market for AI-powered productivity tools.

"Cowork lets you complete non-technical tasks much like how developers use Claude Code," the company announced via its official Claude account on X. The feature arrives as a research preview available exclusively to Claude Max subscribers — Anthropic's power-user tier priced between $100 and $200 per month — through the macOS desktop application.

For the past year, the industry narrative has focused on large language models that can write poetry or debug code. With Cowork, Anthropic is betting that the real enterprise value lies in an AI that can open a folder, read a messy pile of receipts, and generate a structured expense report without human hand-holding.

How developers using a coding tool for vacation research inspired Anthropic's latest product

The genesis of Cowork lies in Anthropic's recent success with the developer community. In late 2024, the company released Claude Code, a terminal-based tool that allowed software engineers to automate rote programming tasks. The tool was a hit, but Anthropic noticed a peculiar trend: users were forcing the coding tool to perform non-coding labor.

According to Boris Cherny, an engineer at Anthropic, the company observed users deploying the developer tool for an unexpectedly diverse array of tasks.

"Since we launched Claude Code, we saw people using it for all sorts of non-coding work: doing vacation research, building slide decks, cleaning up your email, cancelling subscriptions, recovering wedding photos from a hard drive, monitoring plant growth, controlling your oven," Cherny wrote on X. "These use cases are diverse and surprising — the reason is that the underlying Claude Agent is the best agent, and Opus 4.5 is the best model."

Recognizing this shadow usage, Anthropic effectively stripped the command-line complexity from their developer tool to create a consumer-friendly interface. In its blog post announcing the feature, Anthropic explained that developers "quickly began using it for almost everything else," which "prompted us to build Cowork: a simpler way for anyone — not just developers — to work with Claude in the very same way."

Inside the folder-based architecture that lets Claude read, edit, and create files on your computer

Unlike a standard chat interface where a user pastes text for analysis, Cowork requires a different level of trust and access. Users designate a specific folder on their local machine that Claude can access. Within that sandbox, the AI agent can read existing files, modify them, or create entirely new ones.

Anthropic offers several illustrative examples: reorganizing a cluttered downloads folder by sorting and intelligently renaming each file, generating a spreadsheet of expenses from a collection of receipt screenshots, or drafting a report from scattered notes across multiple documents.

"In Cowork, you give Claude access to a folder on your computer. Claude can then read, edit, or create files in that folder," the company explained on X. "Try it to create a spreadsheet from a pile of screenshots, or produce a first draft from scattered notes."

The architecture relies on what is known as an "agentic loop." When a user assigns a task, the AI does not merely generate a text response. Instead, it formulates a plan, executes steps in parallel, checks its own work, and asks for clarification if it hits a roadblock. Users can queue multiple tasks and let Claude process them simultaneously — a workflow Anthropic describes as feeling "much less like a back-and-forth and much more like leaving messages for a coworker."

The system is built on Anthropic's Claude Agent SDK, meaning it shares the same underlying architecture as Claude Code. Anthropic notes that Cowork "can take on many of the same tasks that Claude Code can handle, but in a more approachable form for non-coding tasks."

The recursive loop where AI builds AI: Claude Code reportedly wrote much of Claude Cowork

Perhaps the most remarkable detail surrounding Cowork's launch is the speed at which the tool was reportedly built — highlighting a recursive feedback loop where AI tools are being used to build better AI tools.

During a livestream hosted by Dan Shipper, Felix Rieseberg, an Anthropic employee, confirmed that the team built Cowork in approximately a week and a half.

Alex Volkov, who covers AI developments, expressed surprise at the timeline: "Holy shit Anthropic built 'Cowork' in the last… week and a half?!"

This prompted immediate speculation about how much of Cowork was itself built by Claude Code. Simon Smith, EVP of Generative AI at Klick Health, put it bluntly on X: "Claude Code wrote all of Claude Cowork. Can we all agree that we're in at least somewhat of a recursive improvement loop here?"

The implication is profound: Anthropic's AI coding agent may have substantially contributed to building its own non-technical sibling product. If true, this is one of the most visible examples yet of AI systems being used to accelerate their own development and expansion — a strategy that could widen the gap between AI labs that successfully deploy their own agents internally and those that do not.

Connectors, browser automation, and skills extend Cowork's reach beyond the local file system

Cowork doesn't operate in isolation. The feature integrates with Anthropic's existing ecosystem of connectors — tools that link Claude to external information sources and services such as Asana, Notion, PayPal, and other supported partners. Users who have configured these connections in the standard Claude interface can leverage them within Cowork sessions.

Additionally, Cowork can pair with Claude in Chrome, Anthropic's browser…

Konten dipersingkat otomatis.

🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com