If you want to feel truly invincible when driving in the snow, you need a set of studded snow tires. They're illegal in some places, typically restricted to the frigid months of the year in others. Spring for a set, though, and they'll see you through the worst, slipperiest, snowiest driving conditions you can imagine.

They come at a pretty substantial cost, though, and I'm not just talking about a financial one. Yes, quality tires with embedded tungsten tips are generally far pricier than your average bargain rubber with snowflakes on the sidewall. The bigger issue, though, is that they can be extremely loud and are substantially worse for …

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Some European retailers have stopped selling certain headphones after an EU-funded study found that they contained hormone-disrupting chemicals.

The study included leading brands such as Apple, Beats, Samsung, Bose, JBL, and Sennheiser. Retailers Bol.com, Coolblue, and Mediamarkt didn't respond to inquiries from The Verge about which headphones they pulled, but local news outlets report that they're among the sellers that have decided to yank some of the worst-scoring models off the market.

The study authors analyzed 81 different types of headphones, and found that all of them contained at least traces of harmful chemicals including bis …

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Donna Collins lives about 20 miles from where Meta's biggest data center is being built, in a house her family has lived in for five generations. Construction has thrown the small agricultural community in North Louisiana into the spotlight as a high-profile example of how the infrastructure behind generative AI could impact nearby residents.

For Collins, this place is "a little piece of heaven." "It's all I've ever known as a home. It's quiet. It's rural. It is beautiful," she says. "We can't imagine the changes that are coming."

The region was particularly hard-hit by the recent cold snap that knocked out power for hundreds of thousands …

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The US is now leading a global surge in new gas power plants being built in large part to satisfy growing energy demand for data centers. And more gas means more planet-heating pollution.

Gas-fired power generation in development globally rose by 31 percent in 2025. Almost a quarter of that added capacity is slated for the US, which has surpassed China with the biggest increase of any country. More than a third of that growth in the US is expected to directly power data centers, according to a recent analysis by the nonprofit Global Energy Monitor (GEM).

The rush to install more powerful hardwa …

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The colossal winter storm that swept across 34 states left hundreds of thousands of people without electricity. Bitterly cold temperatures lingering after Winter Storm Fern are still testing power grids, already under stress from a rush of new AI data centers.

Over the weekend, wholesale electricity prices soared in Virginia, the state with the most data centers. And while that's not surprising during a spike in energy demand for heating, it could add to the growing discontent over rising utility bills that has fueled opposition to data centers across the US. Utilities and grid operators were already hard-pressed to meet the increasing pow …

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