Sin City blew a kiss goodbye to the Tropicana before first light Wednesday in an elaborate implosion that reduced to rubble the last true mob building on the Las Vegas Strip.

The Tropicana’s hotel towers tumbled in a celebration that included a fireworks display. It was the first implosion in nearly a decade for a city that loves fresh starts and that has made casino implosions as much a part of its identity as gambling itself.

“What Las Vegas has done, in classic Las Vegas style, they’ve turned many of these implosions into spectacles,” said Geoff Schumacher, historian and vice president of exhibits and programs at the Mob Museum.

Former casino mogul Steve Wynn changed the way Las Vegas blows up casinos in 1993 with the implosion of the Dunes to make room for the Bellagio. Wynn thought not only to televise the event but created a fantastical story for the implosion that made it look like pirate ships at his other casino across the street were firing at the Dunes.

From then on, Schumacher said, there was a sense in Las Vegas that destruction at that magnitude was worth witnessing.

The city hasn’t blown up a Strip casino since 2016, when the final tower of the Riviera was leveled for a convention center expansion.

This time, the implosion cleared land for a $1.5 billion baseball stadium for the relocating Oakland Athletics, part of the city’s latest rebrand into a sports hub.

That will leave only the Flamingo from the city’s mob era on the Strip. But, Schumacher said, the Flamingo’s original structures are long gone. The casino was completely rebuilt in the 1990s.

The Tropicana, the third-oldest casino on the Strip, closed in April after welcoming guests for 67 years.

Once known as the “Tiffany of the Strip” for its opulence, it was a frequent haunt of the legendary Rat Pack, while its past under the mob has long cemented its place in Las Vegas lore.

It opened in 1957 with three stories and 300 hotel rooms split into two wings.

As Las Vegas rapidly evolved in the following decades, including a building boom of Strip megaresorts in the 1990s, the Tropicana also underwent major changes. Two hotel towers were added in later years. In 1979, the casino’s beloved $1 million green-and-amber stained glass ceiling was installed above the casino floor.

The Tropicana’s original low-rise hotel wings survived the many renovations, however, making it the last true mob structure on the Strip.

Behind the scenes of the casino’s grand opening, the Tropicana had ties to organized crime, largely through reputed mobster Frank Costello.

Costello was shot in the head in New York weeks after the Tropicana’s debut. He survived, but the investigation led police to a piece of paper in his coat pocket with the Tropicana’s exact earnings figure, revealing the mob’s stake in the casino.

By the 1970s, federal authorities investigating mobsters in Kansas City charged more than a dozen operatives with conspiring to skim $2 million in gambling revenue from Las Vegas casinos, including the Tropicana. Charges connected to the Tropicana alone resulted in five convictions.

There were no public viewing areas for the event, but fans of the Tropicana did have a chance in April to bid farewell to the vintage Vegas relic.

“Old Vegas, it’s going,” Joe Zappulla, a teary-eyed New Jersey resident, said at the time as he exited the casino, shortly before the locks went on the doors.

—Rio Yamat, Associated Press

Sherri Myers, an 82-year-old resident of Pensacola City, Florida, says the Social Security cost-of-living increase she’ll receive in January “won’t make a dent” in helping her meet her day-to-day expenses.

“Inflation has eaten up my savings,” she said. “I don’t have anything to fall back on—the cushion is gone.” So even with the anticipated increase she’s looking for work to supplement her retirement income, which consists of a small pension and her Social Security benefits.

About 70.6 million Social Security recipients are expected to receive a smaller cost of living increase for 2025 than in recent years, as inflation has moderated. The Social Security Administration makes the official COLA announcement Thursday, and analysts predicted in advance it would be 2.5% for 2025. Recipients received a 3.2% increase in their benefits in 2024, after a historically large 8.7% benefit increase in 2023, brought on by record 40-year-high inflation.

“I think a lot of seniors are going to say that this is not really enough to keep up with prices,” said AARP Senior Vice President of Government Affairs Bill Sweeney.

The silver lining is that it’s an indication that inflation is moderating, he said.

The announcement comes as the national social insurance plan faces a severe financial shortfall in the coming years.

The annual Social Security and Medicare trustees report released in May said the program’s trust fund will be unable to pay full benefits beginning in 2035. If the trust fund is depleted, the government will be able to pay only 83% of scheduled benefits, the report said.

The program is financed by payroll taxes collected from workers and their employers. The maximum amount of earnings subject to Social Security payroll taxes was $168,600 for 2024, up from $160,200 in 2023. Analysts estimate that the maximum amount will go up to $174,900 in 2025.

On the presidential campaign trail, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have presented dueling plans on how they would strengthen Social Security.

Harris says on her campaign website that she will protect Social Security by “making millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share in taxes.”

Trump promises that he would not cut the social program or make changes to the retirement age. Trump also pledges tax cuts for older Americans, posting on Truth Social in July that “SENIORS SHOULD NOT PAY TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY!”

AARP conducted interviews with both Harris and Trump in late August, and asked how the candidates would protect the Social Security Trust Fund.

Harris said she would make up for the shortfall by “making billionaires and big corporations pay their fair share in taxes and use that money to protect and strengthen Social Security for the long haul.”

Trump said “we’ll protect it with growth. I don’t want to do anything having to do with increasing age. I won’t do that. As you know, I was there for four years and never even thought about doing it. I’m going to do nothing to Social Security.”

Lawmakers have proposed a variety of solutions to deal with the funding shortfall.

The Republican Study Committee’s Fiscal Year 2025 plan has proposed cutting Social Security costs by raising the retirement age and reducing the annual COLA. Trump has not endorsed the plan.

Linda Benesch, a spokeswoman for Social Security Works, an advocacy group for the social insurance program, said “we are concerned about this Republican Study Committee budget, and the provisions in it that would cut benefits for retirees.”

Social Security Works endorsed Harris for president in July, in part for her decision as a California senator, to co-sponsor a bill that called on the Social Security Administration to use a different index to calculate cost of living increase: the CPI-E, which measures price changes based on the spending patterns of the elderly, like health care, food and medicine costs.

The COLA is currently calculated according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index, or CPI.

—Fatima Hussein, Associated Press

As climate change causes the plant to warm and people crank up their air-conditioning, Americans are spending increasingly more money on their energy bills. This means more people are experiencing “energy poverty,” where their households are burdened by the costs of their energy bills—and it’s hitting people in Southern states the hardest.

Energy poverty can be measured in a few ways, says Christopher Knittel, an energy economist at MIT and coauthor of the new paper published today in Science Advances. For this study, he and his coauthors focused on “energy burden,” or the percent of a household’s income that’s spent on energy costs. If you spend more than 6% of your income on energy, you’re considered to be in energy poverty; more than 10% is severe energy poverty. (The average for non-low-income families is about 3%, but some low-income households can see an energy burden of up to 14%, previous research has found.)

Researchers evaluated household energy burdens in both 2015 and 2020, and found that in both years, a disproportionate number of people in the South experienced energy poverty. The research also showed that the problem is only getting worse. “As the climate warms, we’re going to need to use more and more energy on air-conditioning, and that’s going to increase the burden on low-income households,” Knittel says.

The price of renewable energy like solar and wind keeps dropping, and it’s now cheaper to build renewable energy tech than new fossil fuel plants. But that shift hasn’t exactly translated to people’s electric bills yet. Some economists say that increasing renewable energy will drive up energy bills, since it’s a change the market is being forced to make, not doing so voluntarily. Issues with insufficient storage and inconsistent solar or wind power—and the need for fossil fuel backups—also mean prices haven’t yet dropped for many consumers.

That could mean that as we decarbonize the country, we’re placing a higher burden for that change on already energy-poor Americans. This study fits into a larger research focus for Knittel: “Can we identify those groups of people or those areas, so that we can be proactive in decarbonization strategy that protects those people?”

At the same time that rising temperatures means Americans use their air-conditioning more, it also means households will use their heating less—particularly in the North. Yet current federal assistance programs for energy bills allocate more money to Northern states.

The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) is a federal program that provides assistance to home energy costs for more than six million Americans. That program was launched in 1981 to focus on heating bills, and then updated in 1984 to add cooling needs. Lawmakers also added two clauses, basically saying a state can never get less money one year than it did previously, and that a state can’t get less than a certain percentage of funding. 

“What that means is you can’t move money from the North to the South unless the budget is growing, because otherwise [a state’s allocation] has to shrink,” Knittel says. “So those allocations are basically stuck in stone, because the budget isn’t growing very much.” 

The researchers compared the current geography of energy poverty across the U.S. to the help currently provided by LIHEAP, and found a mismatch. It would take a fourfold increase in the program’s budget to ensure no U.S. household experiences energy poverty. “If we’re not going to grow the budget, then we need to be as efficient with that budget as possible, and these results suggest we’re not doing that,” he adds.

And as climate change worsens, that gap between who is experiencing energy poverty and where federal assistance goes will only grow. “This disconnect,” Knittel says, “is going to keep getting stronger and stronger because of the warming climate.”

A court in Switzerland — where time is money for its famed watchmaking industry — has ruled that a dial manufacturer was justified in telling workers: If you need a bathroom break, clock out and take it on your own time.

An investigative report by public broadcaster RTS over the weekend revealed how a regional court in western Neuchatel ruled that watch dial maker Jean Singer & Cie SA was within its rights to require staffers to punch out for toilet time.

The case has bared what some say is a labor-law loophole in a rich Alpine country with a reputation for running like clockwork.

Word of the clock-out requirement leaked to labor inspectors on a site visit during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, according to the ruling, which was delivered in June but made public late last month.

They subsequently ordered the company to end the practice, alleging a violation of federal labor law that protects workers’ personal needs and arguing that it could cause workers to “hold it in or not hydrate, which could lead to serious physiological disorders,” the ruling said.

In its legal action against the order, Singer insisted its staffers had “a great deal of freedom” during their breaks — whose length was “left to the discretion of each employee” — and the clock-in system didn’t involve telling managers why staff took breaks.

Pascal Moesch, a lawyer for the 105-year-old family-run business, told RTS that the company believed the issue was generally about “an interruption of work — whether a toilet break, meal breaks, rest breaks, phone breaks, (or) a nature walk. So regardless of the reason for the break, it requires clocking-out.”

The court said that while Swiss law was clearer on issues like the hygiene of restrooms and the rights of company leaders to make decisions suited to the specific needs of their businesses, a “loophole” remains when it comes to bathroom breaks — a hint that lawmakers might need to intervene to fill it.

In its ruling, the court wrote that “Swiss law does not mention the right of employees to go to the toilet, even though this is a basic physiological need.”

—Jamey Keaten, Associated Press

In a time where the digital world is shifting beneath our feet, the speed of technological change can feel like it has never been greater. Tech advancements achieve widespread adoption seemingly at breakneck speeds. Within the past year we saw the rapid evolution of GenAI and the swift adoption of ChatGPT, making this large language model (LLM) one of the fastest-growing services ever. With these changes, consumers, merchants, and businesses have reset their expectations for commerce.

At the same time, it’s important to remember that things typically take longer than anyone thinks. With this dynamic era of rapid advancement, “digital,” “personal,” and “simple” are no longer merely guiding principles—they’re likely to become table stakes. Fintechs are pivotal players in addressing the tangible challenges and can play a critical role in helping to solve the real-world challenges to achieving them. The invigoration of buy now, pay later and the rise of earned wage access are just two important advancements in the payments space that emerged from the ecosystem and were then embraced by the broader financial services landscape.

Roadblocks to digital monetary movement

Fintechs of all sizes are playing a central role in delivering real-time payments (RTPs), remittances for far-flung family members, government disbursements, cross-border business payments, and more. Yet there is so much further to go. While all of this innovation is fueling increased demand for quick and seamless experiences, there remain significant roadblocks to digital money movement.

Nurturing even the smallest fintechs is crucial in that context. As a former investor and someone who’s been in this space for a long time, I’ve witnessed how innovation can come from anywhere. Many startups seek to solve a problem, find product market fit, and grow rapidly. And many are capable of achieving true innovation, which may eventually become part of the fabric of our lives.

Let’s take a closer look at two big areas at seemingly opposite ends of the finance spectrum where partnerships are supporting fintechs in this era of acceleration and are having a big impact: blockchain and traditional banks.

Help technologies break through

Open-source technologies like public blockchains and crypto-based protocols have the potential to power an entirely new generation of transactions. Yet just like in the early days of the internet, skeptics question their ultimate utility. Use cases are constantly evolving, certainly. It’s still unclear which will become widely adopted, which will get left behind, and which have yet to be explored.

What’s clear is that there is a growing ecosystem of fintech developers building on top of these new platforms looking to leverage them to open vast possibilities for businesses, governments, and consumers, potentially influencing nearly every aspect of the global economy. Blockchain networks can power cross-border disbursements, efficient global settlements, and more.

Visa has been piloting how we can use stablecoins like USDC to improve cross-border settlement for issuers and acquirers. In September 2023, we expanded our pilot capabilities with Circle’s USDC, adding pilots with global merchant acquirers Worldpay and Nuvei, utilizing the Solana blockchain. These are important milestones in efforts to help modernize cross-border payment flows as central banks look to engage with the fintech ecosystem to explore ways to use central bank digital currencies.

Digital currencies can even help farmers and other small and medium enterprises improve their access to capital markets. Visa piloted this concept by working with partners to develop a programmable finance platform that allows farmers to securely fund and sell their crop harvests leveraging blockchain technology. The research work alone in efforts like this can be rich with insights into the technical and business complexities of creating an entirely new way of doing business, managing contracts, and making payments using new forms of digital currency. 

Define a new era for bank-fintech partnerships

As banks and fintechs strive to build and capture tomorrow’s consumers and clients, each faces challenges on a macro level. The introduction of RTPs has ushered in a new era, transforming how transactions are conducted, and providing more opportunities for banks and fintechs to work together.

Within this evolving landscape, the launch of FedNow by the Federal Reserve Banks last year marked a significant milestone. This real-time settlement service allows financial institutions to send and receive payments instantly, heralding a multi-rail future that broadens the scope of financial transactions.

As the ecosystem changes in this new environment, banks and fintechs are finding new ways to align around common goals. Banks have an understanding of the financial ecosystem baked into their DNA. Fintechs are keenly tuned to the changing digital ecosystem and are often designed as product-first organizations. As both navigate this multi-rail future, they are working together to deliver solutions that meet the diverse needs of customers.

Banks, for example, are focused on digitization strategies to meet customers where they are. The introduction of FedNow and RTP rails has encouraged them to develop solutions that enable seamless money movement in and out of accounts. They are learning from fintechs how to improve the distribution of new products and services tailored to meet individual needs.

Fintechs, meanwhile, are playing a pivotal role in building experiences, orchestration layers and value-added services around real-time payment rails. They are leveraging this platform to innovate and move faster in enhancing their product offerings.

Like traditional institutions, fintechs are subject to fragmented regulations locally, which get exacerbated as they eye a global footprint. Many choose to partner with banks to offer products through existing licenses. Alongside these partnerships they can tap into the expertise and strengths of banks. Banks can benefit by diversifying revenue and gaining new customers.

The bottom line is that by working together, both can experience benefits.

I’m inspired every day by the hard work of founders and their teams, who are mission-driven to innovate and often focused on traditionally under-served communities. Fintechs have the potential to touch nearly every aspect of commerce, streamlining complexities for consumers, businesses, and government entities. It’s never been more critical to support their development, partnering with them so that they and the entire ecosystem can thrive.

Vanessa Colella is the global head of innovation and digital partnerships at Visa.

If you’ve been following Hurricane Milton’s path toward Florida, you may have noticed a number of weather forecasters explaining that if the hurricane “wobbles” off path, it could have huge impacts on where the storm makes landfall and the amount of damage residents can expect.

Here, we break down exactly why that is.

What does it mean for a hurricane to wobble?

Powerful storms don’t travel in a straight and narrow course. They tend to “wobble,” or make small movements on the system’s path.

These movements may appear insignificant but can make all the difference in a storm’s strength and impact.

A wobble also has the potential to impact storm surge levels. For Hurricane Milton, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) predicts a large destructive storm surge of 10 feet or higher along a portion of Florida’s west-central coast.

“Any slight wobble Hurricane Milton makes will make a big difference in who gets the most storm surge,” reported The Weather Channel. “If the storm tracks just to the south of Tampa, then the surge won’t be as bad. The smallest wobble can make the biggest difference.”

Is Hurricane Milton predicted to wobble?

NBC’s local Tampa station WFLA has its own live Wobble Tracker, a tool that tracks wobbles and can help determine where Hurricane Milton is headed in real time and which cities it’s predicted to hit.

By midday Wednesday, the forecast for the Category 4 hurricane shifted south again, with projected landfall near or south of Sarasota in the late evening, according to CNN. But this morning, Milton was forecast to hit Tampa Bay. That slight but important shift south by 10 miles is the result of Tuesday’s significant wobble toward Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The storm’s path could still change.

The hurricane, which has shifted between a Category 4 and 5 storm, is traveling northeast at 17 miles per hour, with maximum sustained winds of 145 miles per hour, according to the NHC.

How to track Hurricane Milton in real time

As we have said, hurricanes can change paths quickly, which is why tracking the storm and how it wobbles is so important.

For updated information, advisories, and maps showing projected and traveled paths, check out these resources:

• Esri’s Hurricane Aware
• National Hurricane Center
• CNN Storm Tracker

Meta Platforms said on Wednesday its artificial intelligence chatbot, Meta AI, will be available in 21 new markets, as it looks to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Technology companies have been trying to attract consumers to their AI chatbots by introducing new features and making them more accessible with support for different languages.

Meta AI, which currently has almost 500 million monthly active users, will be available in the U.K., Brazil and more countries in Latin America and Asia beginning Wednesday, the social media company said.

The chatbot will also support languages including Arabic, Indonesian, Thai and Vietnamese, Meta said.

After the gradual rollout, the company said the chatbot would be available in 43 countries and a dozen languages, keeping it on track to become the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of 2024.

The latest expansion will not include the new character voices for the AI chatbot that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had announced at the company’s annual Connect conference. They are being rolled out on a separate timeline, the company said.

Meta AI will also be made available on Ray-Ban Meta glasses in the U.K. and Australia, the company said.

—Jaspreet Singh and Katie Paul, Reuters

OpenAI has seen a number of attempts where its AI models have been used to generate fake content, including long-form articles and social media comments, aimed at influencing elections, the ChatGPT maker said in a report on Wednesday.

Cybercriminals are increasingly using AI tools, including ChatGPT, to aid in their malicious activities such as creating and debugging malware, and generating fake content for websites and social media platforms, the startup said.

So far this year, it neutralized more than 20 such attempts, including a set of ChatGPT accounts in August that were used to produce articles on topics that included the U.S. elections, the company said.

It also banned a number of accounts from Rwanda in July that were used to generate comments about the elections in that country for posting on social media site X.

None of the activities that attempted to influence global elections drew viral engagement or sustainable audiences, OpenAI added.

There is increasing worry about the use of AI tools and social media sites to generate and propagate fake content related to elections, especially as the U.S. gears for presidential polls.

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. sees a growing threat of Russia, Iran and China attempting to influence the November 5 elections, including by using AI to disseminate fake or divisive information.

OpenAI cemented its position as one of the world’s most valuable private companies last week after a $6.6 billion funding round.

ChatGPT has 250 million weekly active users since its launch in November 2022.

—Deborah Sophia, Reuters

Our galaxy is packed with wonders and mysteries—and no, this isn’t a pitch for the next Star Wars series. We’re talking about a real-life event that only happens once every 80,000 years in the Northern Hemisphere, so maybe try not to miss it: A comet not seen since the Stone Age is going to light up the night sky beginning tonight through the end of the month.

Let’s take a look at how the same comet that a real-life Fred Flintstone might have gazed upon can reappear, when it was first discovered, and how best to see it.

What is a comet anyway?

Just like with Ikea furniture, when our solar system was being formed 4.6 billion years ago, there were some spare parts. These leftovers are essentially dust and ice that orbit the sun.

At the core of a comet is a frozen nucleus that heats up as it gets closer to the sun, making it gassy. The dust and gas form a couple of cute tails. The ion tail points away from the sun, and the dust tail immediately follows the comet.

How did this comet get its name?

The celestial phenomenon in question has a couple different names. To most of us, it is known as Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, and to scientists, it is C/2023 A3.

Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is a combination of the two entities that first spotted it. The comet was first discovered by astronomers at the Tsuchinshan Observatory in China on January 9, 2023. One month later, eagle-eyed sky watchers in South Africa saw it on the Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System, also known as ATLAS.

Where did the comet come from?

This comet hails from the Oort Cloud, which is outside our solar system, past Neptune’s orbit. To put that in perspective, it takes Tsuchinshan-ATLAS 80,000 years to orbit the sun. Pluto does it about once every 248 years.

How can you see the comet?

Scientists predict that Tsuchinshan-ATLAS will be at its brightest tonight, on October 9. This is because of its proximity to the sun, which will illuminate its tail.

On October 12, the comet will be at its closest point to Earth. Scientists believe it will be visible until the end of the month, but comets can have a mind of their own.

Gianluca Masi, an Italian astrophysicist and the scientific director of the Virtual Telescope Project, described to the New York Times the best way to spot the comet this evening. It will be visible to the naked eye, but telescopes and binoculars will help. Masi recommends finding a dark location just after sunset, and looking low in the sky toward the western horizon for a fuzzy star.

Later in the month, he recommends looking higher up in the sky.

And if you’re having trouble seeing the comet, or your geography isn’t prime for viewing, Masi has your back. His organization is hosting a live broadcast, so you won’t have to miss a thing.

Over the past few days, Florida has been defined by images of gridlock and barren gas stations, as desperate drivers seek to escape Hurricane Milton. In response, Florida officials have suspended tolls and allowed driving on road shoulders, and sent state troopers to escort fuel trucks and supervise gas stations, where tensions are running high.

The drama playing out right now on roadways across the Sunshine State offers lessons in what should be done—and what should be done better—as more frequent climate change-fueled disasters beg for better systems for clearing out of harm’s way. 

“It is essentially a congestion-management problem,” says Karl Kim, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and director of the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center. “Everyone wants to leave as late as possible, leading to crowded roadways, congestion, people running out of gas, and challenges with EVs.”

That doesn’t even begin to address issues with those who need help evacuating, have mobility challenges and disabilities, or resource limitations in preparing to evacuate and often get overlooked or aren’t integrated into emergency planning. 

Kim has seen some innovative systems and ideas taking hold in and around the areas in Milton’s path. Tampa’s efforts to get free Uber trips for evacuees needs to be encouraged, he says. The most important focus areas should be better utilizing transit systems, and partnering with paratransit systems, which are already aligned with social services agencies and at-risk populations. The Florida Department of Emergency Management has been coordinating EV chargers and fuel supplies, pre-staging support along evacuation routes, and arranging pick-up spots and departure times on shuttle buses for the most impacted counties.

A new era for evacuation

Kim’s organization, and others like it in Hawaii, have been working on better evacuation plans for the island state in the wake of the tragic Maui Fire of 2023. It’s currently a work in progress, he says. That disaster, which killed 101 people and leveled more than 2,000 structures in Lahaina, was exacerbated by communication challenges, including difficulty coordinating among rescue personnel amid the various blazes, clearing downed power lines, and navigating crowded streets. A better evacuation plan was a key recommendation from an official after-action report.

One of the biggest hurdles for U.S. evacuation planning remains our car-centric transportation system, which often seizes up in gridlock just during everyday rush hour. A majority of the 5.5 million people ordered to evacuate Florida’s west coast will travel by car. A plan that relies on a large mass of individual vehicles puts the emphasis on self-evacuation rather than transit-based systems, Kim says, and creates additional issues with fuel, parking, and driving on overcrowded roadways. In regions such as Southern California, areas prone to wildfires, have seen increased housing construction, which can create potential for fatal traffic jams as a sudden mass of drivers try to navigate hillside roads during a blaze. 

“There’s not a place in this country where there’s not some segment of the population that is carless, so we need to start thinking about that more, especially as our population is aging,” John Renne, director of Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions, told Smart Cities Drive.

Since much of evacuation planning in the U.S. is decentralized and reliant on the work of individual jurisdictions, more system-level thinking and better coordination with transit networks is lacking, adds Renne. A study he helped coordinate in 2022 found that many big cities hadn’t made or publicized their own evacuation plans. In addition to better preparation, he also suggests evacuation planning should become a more regular part of everyday life. It should be drilled into those who move to areas such as Florida, and also reinforced when visitors head to tourist attractions and theme parks in regions with a high risk of storms.

Leading by example

Kim says other countries have leveraged community and charted paths away from danger that don’t rely so heavily on cars. He points to the community-based programs following the tsunami in Japan, and the efforts to disseminate information to vulnerable populations through multiple channels including text, social media, NGOs, and neighborhood associations.

Japan has evolved its evacuation planning after suffering from numerous, significant earthquakes. Many areas have emergency transport routes that can automatically restrict normal vehicle usage during disasters, making it easier for support teams and medical and rescue staff to move, and channeling regular traffic to other routes. The country also has adopted drones for disaster support, including efforts to aid search and rescue, disaster-situation assessment, and relief transportation.

Back in the U.S., other areas with experience dealing with repeated storms and hurricanes have instituted their own ideas to improve disaster response. New Orleans created the evacuspots system after Katrina, a series of metal sculptures around the city that serve as rally points. During emergencies, media and local leaders can simply tell locals to head to these points, which look like a person raising their hand, and expect a bus pick-up that will take them to a shelter. It’s a quick, easy, and car-free means of heading to safety and higher ground.

Wimbledon is replacing line judges with electronic line-calling, the latest step into the modern age by the oldest Grand Slam tennis tournament.

The All England Club announced Wednesday that technology will be used to give the “out” and “fault” calls at the championships from 2025, eliminating the need for human officials to make them.

Wimbledon organizers said the decision to adopt live electronic line calling was made following extensive testing at the 2024 tournament and “builds on the existing ball-tracking and line-calling technology that has been in place for many years.”

“We consider the technology to be sufficiently robust and the time is right to take this important step in seeking maximum accuracy in our officiating,” said Sally Bolton, chief executive of the All England Club. “For the players, it will offer them the same conditions they have played under at a number of other events on tour.”

The move makes the French Open the only Grand Slam tournament without some form of electronic line-calling. The Australian Open and U.S. Open already had eliminated line judges and only have chair umpires on court.

Line judges at Wimbledon were dressed in famously elegant uniforms and, for traditionalists, were part of the furniture at the All England Club.

Bolton said Wimbledon had a responsibility to “balance tradition and innovation.”

“Line umpires have played a central role in our officiating set-up at the championships for many decades,” she said, “and we recognize their valuable contribution and thank them for their commitment and service.”

Line-calling technology has long been used at Wimbledon and other tennis tournaments to call whether serves are in or out.

At the U.S. Open, there has been no line judges — and only chair umpires — since 2021, with Hawk-Eye Live electronic line-calling used for all courts.

The All England Club also said Wednesday that the women’s and men’s singles finals will be scheduled to take place at the later time of 4 p.m. local time on the second Saturday and Sunday, respectively — and after doubles finals on those days.

Bolton said the moves have been made to ensure the day of the finals “builds towards the crescendo of the ladies’ and gentlemen’s singles finals, with our champions being crowned in front of the largest possible worldwide audience.”

A top U.S. commercial bakery is pushing back on a Food and Drug Administration warning to stop using labels that say its products contain sesame — a potentially dangerous allergen — when they don’t.

Bimbo Bakeries USA, which includes brands such as Sarah Lee, Entenmann’s and Ball Park buns and rolls, appears to be defying an FDA warning sent in June that said several of the company’s products are “misbranded” because the labels list sesame or tree nuts even though those ingredients aren’t in the foods.

In a response to the FDA, Bimbo officials said they wouldn’t change their sesame labeling. The company said it creates “nationally uniform labels” that prevent people from inadvertently eating foods that can trigger potentially life-threatening reactions. The firm said it was not attempting to avoid legal requirements to avoid cross-contamination in plants.

“We think our approach is the most protective of sesame-allergic consumers,” the company wrote in a July 1 letter obtained by the advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest and shared with The Associated Press.

Bimbo officials confirmed their position in an email to the AP on Wednesday, calling it a “conservative approach” for consistent labeling of nationally distributed products.

FDA officials did not immediately comment on the company’s response. By law, the agency can take actions ranging from recalls to civil fines and criminal charges against firms that fail to heed warning letters.

But CSPI and other food safety advocates said the standoff continues a practice that misleads the estimated 33 million Americans with food allergies and results in limited choices for the more than 1.6 million who are allergic to sesame.

“We depend on accurate food labeling to feel safe,” said Sung Poblete, chief executive of the nonprofit group FARE, Food Allergy Research & Education. “We depend on accurate labeling to make the food choices that we make.”

The impasse follows a 2023 federal law that requires that all foods made and sold in the U.S. to be labeled if they contain sesame.

Bimbo Bakeries, which bills itself as the nation’s largest commercial baking company, was among several food producers and restaurant chains that began adding small amounts of sesame to foods that didn’t have it previously — and then listing it as an ingredient.

Several companies said they did that because it was too difficult and expensive to keep sesame used in one part of a baking plant out of another and they wanted to avoid liability and cost. The FDA has said that such actions are legal, although they violate the spirit of the law.

In its response to the FDA, Bimbo said it has plants where some products are made with sesame and some are not. But when it came to labeling, the company said that the most “protective approach” for consumers was to declare sesame as an ingredient and use the same packaging for all of the products.

However, Bimbo officials told the agency they did change labels for certain breads that said they included tree nuts when they did not. The new labels now say the breads include hazelnut, the only nut used in the products, the company indicated.

CSPI had petitioned FDA in 2023 to halt the practice of adding sesame to foods to prevent risks of cross-contamination. It’s not clear what action the agency will take over Bimbo’s refusal to heed a warning letter, said Sarah Sorscher, CSPI’s director of regulatory affairs.

“It’s so unusual to see a big company like Bimbo calling the FDA’s bluff,” she added.

—Jonel Aleccia, Associated Press health writer

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

A severe geomagnetic storm forecast through Friday could light up the night sky over much of the northern half of the country, bringing with it disruptions to the power grid, GPS and radio blackouts, and impacted satellites, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

This is especially worrisome as it comes a day after Hurricane Milton is forecast to hit southwest Florida, which is likely to knock out power, affect cell service, and impact other telecommunications necessary for recovery efforts.

NOAA warned that the G4 storm (4 out of 5 on NOAA’s scale) could create widespread voltage-control problems, and that spacecraft could experience tracking problems and satellite navigation could be degraded for hours.

Meanwhile, NYC Emergency Management said a power outage is unlikely, but possible for New York.

NOAA also predicted the aurora borealis, or northern lights, could be visible in the northernmost U.S. states such as northern Michigan and Maine and as far south as Alabama and California on Thursday, possibly into Friday.

If this sounds familiar, you’re right: Over the weekend, a strong G3 solar storm caused a full display of dazzling aurora for millions of Americans throughout the northern Midwest and into Oregon.

A geomagnetic storm occurs when a coronal mass ejection, an eruption of solar material and magnetic fields, reaches Earth.

You can track the aurora on NOAA’s page, where the agency is providing updates.

Amazon, in its quest for greater efficiency, has developed new systems to shave seconds off each package delivery and to help customers make faster buying choices, even for new product types that they may know little about.

The company announced Wednesday it has created spotlights within its trucks to guide delivery people to packages for each stop along a route.

The technology, which Amazon is calling Vision Assisted Package Retrieval, works by shining a green light on packages so that the deliverer does not have to waste precious seconds reading labels.

“When we speed up deliveries, customers shop more,” said Doug Herrington, CEO of Amazon worldwide stores in remarks at the event. “Once a customer experiences fast delivery, they will come back sooner and shop more.”

Amazon said it would equip 1,000 active delivery trucks, supplied by EV maker Rivian, with the spotlight tech early next year. Herrington said the delivery van ceilings are equipped with cameras and LED projectors that instantly read package labels so it knows which are bound for which customers.

Amazon is Rivian’s largest shareholder and has placed orders for 100,000 electric delivery vans to be deployed by 2030.

Shares of Amazon and Rivian were up about 1% each in morning trade.

The new system calls to mind a technology widely deployed in Amazon’s warehouses that shines a light on items on robotically wheeled shelves so workers can pick them and put them in bins. That system replaced one that had some workers walking up to 10 miles a day pushing carts through narrow aisles to find stowed items.

Shortening by a few seconds the time it takes for each package delivery means Amazon can increase the number of deliveries each worker makes in a shift. Today, Amazon said, delivery workers reach about 100 customers each day.

At an event held at a warehouse near Nashville, Tennessee, Amazon also said it is using new artificial intelligence software that can reduce the need to spend minutes or hours researching new products, such as televisions and dog food. The online guides will include more extensive information, as well as recommendations, so that customers can make more informed decisions more quickly, the Seattle company said.

The new feature follows one announced earlier this year putting an AI search into the main Amazon website. Called Rufus, it gives users longer answers to search queries.

Separately, Amazon announced it was planning smaller warehouses attached to its Whole Foods grocery stores so that when items are not offered there customers will not be tempted to shop at competing stores. That way, shoppers could order a bottle of Pepsi while shopping at a Whole Foods, which doesn’t carry the soft drink, and have that brought to them when they check out.

The first such store is in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania – about 15 miles north of Philadelphia – which will start offering the service sometime next year.

—Greg Bensinger, Reuters

MoneyGram is back online after a cybersecurity breach disrupted services and compromised personal information. Between September 20 and 22, an “unauthorized third party” accessed and acquired the personal data of certain MoneyGram customers, the company said, leaving users unable to access their accounts.

The money-sending service provided an update this past Monday, confirming that systems are back online (although some customers on social media are still complaining about outages). But the investigation, which the company says involves external cybersecurity experts and law enforcement, is ongoing. Here’s what we know so far:

What information was exposed? 

MoneyGram revealed that the compromised data includes:

• Names
• Contact information (phone numbers, emails, postal addresses)
• Dates of birth
• National identification numbers
• A “limited” number of Social Security numbers
• Copies of government-issued identification documents (such as a driver’s license)
• Other identification documents (such as utility bills)
• Bank account numbers
• MoneyGram Plus Rewards numbers
• Transaction information (such as dates and amounts of transactions)

A “limited number” of customers also had criminal investigation information, like fraud, exposed, MoneyGram said.

Importantly, MoneyGram also noted that the “types of impacted information varied by affected individual.”

The company is still determining which consumers were affected and has created a dedicated page (accessible via the homepage of its website) with FAQs and recommendations for protecting personal information. A call center is available for affected customers, offering support in both English and Spanish, Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. CT.

When asked if MoneyGram plans to contact and inform impacted customers, MoneyGram referred Fast Company to its notice and FAQ page, which had no mention of how MoneyGram users are supposed to figure out if their data was compromised.

The page recommends that affected consumers in the United States enroll in complimentary identity protection and credit monitoring services, order a free credit report, and promptly report any unauthorized transactions. 

Timeline of the Cybersecurity Breach

MoneyGram first reported service disruptions on social media over the weekend of September 21. The company stated that it had “recently identified a cybersecurity issue affecting certain systems” and had taken steps to resolve it, including taking systems offline to protect network integrity.

On September 26, after several days of social media updates, MoneyGram announced that its website and app were back online, allowing customers to send and receive money through its platforms once again.

A day later, the company determined that a data breach had occurred via an unauthorized third party.

MoneyGram serves more than 50 million people in excess of 200 countries and territories each year, processing more than $200 billion annually. In its latest consumer update this past Monday, MoneyGram said it “regrets any concern this issue may cause its consumers and takes its obligation to safeguard personal information very seriously.”

Millions of Social Security recipients will get a 2.5% cost-of-living increase to their monthly checks beginning in January, the Social Security Administration announced Thursday.

The cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, for retirees translates to an average increase of more than $50 for retirees every month, agency officials said.
About 72.5 million people, including retirees, disabled people and children, get Social Security benefit.

Commissioner Martin O’Malley said the adjustment will help “tens of millions of people keep up with expenses even as inflation has started to cool.”
But even before the announcement, retirees voiced concern that the increase would not be enough to counter rising costs.

Sherri Myers, an 82-year-old retiree from Pensacola City, Florida, is now hoping to get an hourly job at Walmart to help make ends meet.

“I would like to eat good but I can’t. When I’m at the grocery store, I just walk past the vegetables because they are too expensive. I have to be very selective about what I eat — even McDonald’s is expensive,” she said.

Recipients received a 3.2% increase in their benefits in 2024, after a historically large 8.7% benefit increase in 2023, brought on by record 40-year-high inflation.
The smaller increase for 2025 reflects moderating inflation.

The agency will begin notifying recipients about their new benefit amount by mail starting in early December. Adjusted payments to nearly 7.5 million people receiving Supplemental Security Income will begin on December 31.

The program is financed by payroll taxes collected from workers and their employers and that is slated to increase to $176,100. The maximum amount of earnings subject to Social Security payroll taxes was $168,600 for 2024, up from $160,200 in 2023.

The announcement comes as the national social insurance plan faces a severe financial shortfall in the coming years.

The annual Social Security and Medicare trustees report released in May said the program’s trust fund will be unable to pay full benefits beginning in 2035. If the trust fund is depleted, the government will be able to pay only 83% of scheduled benefits, the report said.

AARP CEO Jo Ann Jenkins said in a statement that “there is more we must do to ensure older Americans can continue to count on Social Security. AARP continues to call on Congress to take bipartisan action to strengthen Social Security and secure a long-term solution that Americans can rely on.”

The presidential candidates, Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, have presented dueling plans on how they would strengthen Social Security.

AARP conducted interviews with both Harris and Trump in late August and asked how the candidates would protect the Social Security Trust Fund.

Harris said she would make up for the shortfall by “making billionaires and big corporations pay their fair share in taxes and use that money to protect and strengthen Social Security for the long haul.”

Trump said “we’ll protect it with growth. I don’t want to do anything having to do with increasing age. I won’t do that. As you know, I was there for four years and never even thought about doing it. I’m going to do nothing to Social Security.”

—Fatima Hussein, Associated Press

The award this week of Nobel prizes in chemistry and physics to a small number of artificial intelligence pioneers affiliated with Google has stirred debate over the company’s research dominance and how breakthroughs in computer science ought to be recognised.

Google has been at the forefront of AI research, but has been forced on the defensive as it tackles competitive pressure from Microsoft-backed OpenAI and mounting regulatory scrutiny from the U.S Department of Justice.

On Wednesday, Demis Hassabis—co-founder of Google’s AI unit DeepMind—and colleague John Jumper were awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry, alongside U.S. biochemist David Baker, for their work decoding the structures of microscopic proteins.

Former Google researcher Geoffrey Hinton, meanwhile, won the Nobel prize for physics on Tuesday, alongside U.S. scientist John Hopfield, for earlier discoveries in machine learning that paved the way for the AI boom.

Professor Dame Wendy Hall, a computer scientist and advisor on AI to the United Nations, told Reuters that, while the recipients’ work deserved recognition, the lack of a Nobel prize for mathematics or computer science had distorted the outcome.

“The Nobel prize committee doesn’t want to miss out on this AI stuff, so it’s very creative of them to push Geoffrey through the physics route,” she said. “I would argue both are dubious, but nonetheless worthy of a Nobel prize in terms of the science they’ve done. So how else are you going to reward them?”

Noah Giansiracusa, an associate maths professor at Bentley University and author of “How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News”, also argued that Hinton’s win was questionable.

“What he did was phenomenal, but was it physics? I don’t think so. Even if there’s inspiration from physics, they’re not developing a new theory in physics or solving a longstanding problem in physics.”

The Nobel prize categories for achievements in medicine or physiology, physics, chemistry, literature and peace were laid down in the will of Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895. The prize for economics is a later addition established with an endowment from the Swedish central bank in 1968.

Dominance

Regulators in the U.S. are currently circling Google for a potential break-up, which could force it to divest parts of its business, such as its Chrome browser and Android operating system, which some argue allow it to maintain an illegal monopoly in online search.

The profits derived from its leading position have allowed Google and other Big Tech companies to outpace traditional academia in publishing groundbreaking AI research.

Hinton himself has expressed some regrets about his life’s work, quitting Google last year so that he could speak freely about the dangers of AI, and warning that computers could become smarter than people far sooner than previously expected.

Speaking at a press conference Tuesday, he said: “I wish I had a sort of simple recipe that if you do this, everything’s going to be okay, but I don’t, in particular with respect to the existential threat of these things getting out of control and taking over.”

When he quit Google in 2023 over his AI concerns, Hinton said the company itself acted very responsibly.

For some, this week’s Nobel prize wins underscore how hard it is becoming for traditional academia to compete. Giansiracusa told Reuters there was a need for greater public investment in research.

“So much of Big Tech is not oriented towards the next deep-learning breakthrough, but making money by pushing chatbots or putting ads all over the internet,” he said. “There are pockets of innovation, but much of it is very unscientific.”

—Martin Coulter, Reuters

Marriott International has agreed to pay $52 million and make changes to bolster its data security to resolve state and federal claims related to major data breaches that affected more than 300 million of its customers worldwide.

The Federal Trade Commission and a group of attorneys general from 49 states and the District of Columbia announced the terms of separate settlements with Marriott on Wednesday. The FTC and the states ran parallel investigations into three data breaches, which took place between 2014 and 2020.

As a result of the data breaches, “malicious actors” obtained the passport information, payment card numbers, loyalty numbers, dates of birth, email addresses and/or personal information from hundreds of millions of consumers, according to the FTC’s proposed complaint.

The FTC claimed that Marriott and subsidiary Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide’s poor data security practices led to the breaches.

Specifically, the agency alleged that the hotel operator failed to secure its computer system with appropriate password controls, network monitoring or other practices to safeguard data.

As part of its proposed settlement with the FTC, Marriott agreed to “implement a robust information security program” and provide all of its U.S. customers with a way to request that any personal information associated with their email address or loyalty rewards account number be deleted.

Marriott also settled similar claims brought by the group of attorneys general. In addition to agreeing to strengthen its data security practices, the hotel operator also will pay $52 million penalty to be split by the states.

In a statement on its website Wednesday, Bethesda, Maryland-based Marriott noted that it made no admission of liability as part of its agreements with the FTC and states. It also said it has already put in place data privacy and information security enhancements.

In early 2020, Marriott noticed that an unexpected amount of guest information was accessed using login credentials of two employees at a franchised property. At the time, the company estimated that the personal data of about 5.2. million guests worldwide might have been affected.

In November 2018, Marriott announced a massive data breach in which hackers accessed information on as many as 383 million guests. In that case, Marriott said unencrypted passport numbers for at least 5.25 million guests were accessed, as well as credit card information for 8.6 million guests. The affected hotel brands were operated by Starwood before it was acquired by Marriott in 2016.

The FBI led the investigation of that data theft, and investigators suspected the hackers were working on behalf of the Chinese Ministry of State Security, the rough equivalent of the CIA.

—Alex Veiga, AP Business Writer

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy.

What Ben Horowitz’s flip-flopping  presidential support says about the Valley’s current AI politics

Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz of the influential Andreessen Horowitz (aka @16z) says he personally supports Kamala Harris. In a memo to his firm’s employees last week he says he plans to donate to the Harris campaign, but that the firm’s political allegiance remains with Trump, as Horowitz and his partner Marc Andreessen announced this summer, to the surprise of some. The two billionaires explained at the time that the Biden Administration’s tech policies have been hostile to tech startups, especially those in crypto and AI, and that a second Trump term would be best for what they call “little tech” startups, which they say they champion.

In a traditionally liberal Silicon Valley, the shift of high-profile tech billionaires like Andreessen and Horowitz toward the MAGA right has been remarkable. But their support for Trump seems narrow and transactional, almost quid pro quo. Before announcing plans to donate to a Trump super-PAC, Andreessen Horowitz partners held several meetings with the Trump camp, and came away confident that the candidate would take a light-touch regulatory approach to new technologies. Trump, for example, has pledged to reverse Biden’s October 2023 AI executive order, which offered nonbinding safety guidelines for AI companies, among other things. 

Horowitz says he has now met with Harris and her team, but came away with no firm idea of how a Harris administration might regulate AI companies. It’s likely Harris would keep, and build on, Biden’s executive order. Harris held a meeting with the heads of Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic in May 2023 that led to those companies and others pledging to uphold the EO’s safety and transparency standards. 

Horowitz wrote in a blog last December that his firm is nonpartisan and willing to side with candidates that support an “optimistic technology-enabled future.” In this year’s presidential contest, it means the firm is also willing to ignore the potential political, social, economic, and environmental risks of another Trump term. 

This attitude might be partially explained by the large risk-reward dimension of the technology shift that’s just getting underway with AI. Developing and applying AI models is an extremely expensive business, in which investors are being asked for checks of unprecedented size. OpenAI just raised $6.6 billion to add to its $13 billion in funding, and new rounds will surely follow. The AI revolution that started with ChatGPT, it turns out, isn’t transforming the world overnight; many AI startups will need long runways to get to break-even (OpenAI reportedly projects it’ll reach profitability in 2029). So, with AI, tech investors may be even more allergic to new government regulation, and politicians who support it, than usual. It’s simply seen as additive to the already significant risks. 

Consider the industry’s outsized opposition to California’s AI bill that sought to impose safety rules on large frontier models. The bill was popular with the public and sailed through the state’s legislature, but was vetoed by governor Gavin Newsom amid intense lobbying pressure.

Two Humane refugees go to war against AI hallucinations 

The tech industry is betting that generative AI will transform business operations at all levels. In order to do that, the AI must swallow the organization’s data—its combined knowledge and experience—then make it available to workers through apps, chatbots, or copilots. But large language models still have a tendency to hallucinate facts—a dealbreaker for businesses like banks or hospitals.

A new company founded by former Apple and Google execs sees that problem as an opportunity. The company, called Infactory, said this week it raised a $4 million seed round at a $25 million valuation from Andreessen Horowitz and others to build out its enterprise search and fact-checking AI platform, which it expects to deploy with partners later this year. Infactory’s founders, Ken Kocienda and Brooke Hartley Moy, most recently worked at Humane but left after the lukewarm debut of that company’s personal AI device. Kocienda is known as the brain behind the iPhone’s touchscreen and autocorrect keyboard, while Hartley Moy once led Google’s business relationship with Samsung. 

Kocienda says in an email to Fast Company that the Infactory platform provides tools to instill confidence in the data it retrieves. For instance, generated responses come with source attributions and confidence scores. Infactory’s secret sauce is the semantic modeling techniques it applies in advance to prepare the enterprise’s data for useful and accurate retrieval. Infactory is different from other AI search engines in that it’s concerned only with the enterprise’s internal data. It doesn’t pull in data from the internet, for example, Kocienda says. 

Virginia Congressional candidate will debate a chatbot version of his opponent

Bentley Hensel is a long-shot independent candidate for the Virginia House seat currently occupied by Democrat Don Beyer. Hensel and Beyer took part in one roundtable discussion earlier this year, and Hensel badly wants to debate Beyer again. But Beyer has far outspent Hensel, is far ahead in the polls, and sees no need to debate. What’s Hensel to do? Train an AI chatbot version of Beyer, of course, and debate with it during a livestreamed event October 17. 

Hensel, a software engineer by trade, says he trained “DonBot,” a chatbot powered by an OpenAI model, using information from his opponent’s official websites, press releases, and Federal Election Commission data, Reuters reports. DonBot is “text-based” so someone will have to read its responses during the “debate.” Pity Hensel didn’t use the new Realtime API from OpenAI, which would have allowed DonBot to speak for itself. 

More AI coverage from Fast Company: 

• Big Tech’s experimental AI can’t beat old-school productivity gems
• These AI tools can make filing your taxes less of a nightmare
• Supernormal is a great tool for making free virtual assistants
• This new AI answer engine plans to pay media companies for their content

Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.

A severe solar storm is headed to Earth that could stress power grids even more as the U.S. deals with major back-to-back hurricanes, space weather forecasters said Wednesday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a severe geomagnetic storm watch for Thursday into Friday after an outburst from the sun was detected earlier this week. Such a storm could temporarily disrupt power and radio signals.

NOAA has notified operators of power plants and orbiting spacecraft to take precautions. It also alerted the Federal Emergency Management Agency about possible power disruptions, as the organization copes with the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Helene and gears up for Hurricane Milton barreling across the Gulf of Mexico toward Florida.

Forecasters do not expect the latest solar storm to surpass the one that slammed Earth in May, the strongest in more than two decades. But they won’t know for sure until it’s just one million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away, where spacecraft can measure it.

Florida is far enough south to avoid any power disruptions from the solar surge unless it gets a lot bigger, said scientist Rob Steenburgh of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center.

“That adds a little bit more to the comfort level,” Steenburgh said. “Why we’re here is to let them know so that they can prepare.”

Experts are more concerned about potential effects to the power grids in areas slammed by Hurricane Helene two weeks ago, said NOAA space weather forecaster Shawn Dahl.

The storm also may trigger northern lights as far south in the U.S. as the lower Midwest and Northern California, though exact locations and times are uncertain, according to NOAA. Skygazers are reminded to point their smartphones upward for photos; the devices often can capture auroras that human eyes cannot.

May’s solar storm produced dazzling auroras across the Northern Hemisphere and resulted in no major disruptions.

The sun is near the peak of its current 11-year cycle, sparking all the recent solar activity.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

—Marcia Dunn, Associated Press aerospace writer