The growing ubiquity of artificial intelligence remains a divisive topic among the public, but the White House is fully leaning into the AI boom. President Donald Trump has announced the creation of a new AI-based U.S. “Tech Force” that will seek to poach employees from the private sector to lure them to government jobs. But this initiative follows a year in which the Trump administration cut thousands of federal employees.

How will this program work?
The Tech Force will be a two-year program that will “tackle the most complex and large-scale civic and defense challenges of our era,” said the Tech Force website. The program will involve on-the-job training in the areas of “software engineering, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data analytics or technical project management.”

The program will partner with 28 major tech companies, including Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Dell, Google, Nvidia, OpenAI and Oracle. It will aim to hire about 1,000 people to start. Salaries will range from $130,000 to $195,000, said Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor to reporters.

What “sets the Tech Force apart from most federal positions is its accessibility,” said Fortune. Unlike most other government jobs, candidates for Tech Force “need not hold traditional degrees or meet minimum experience thresholds,” though they must “demonstrate strong technical skills through work experience.” 

What next?
It’s unclear how successful this program will be, given that the government has “long needed more tech workers, but that deficit most likely worsened this year,” said The New York Times. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency sought to hire tech workers but “made sweeping job cuts as well, including senior technologists.” DOGE slashed about 260,000 federal jobs through firings, buyouts or early retirement, said Reuters.

Trump’s Tech Force is likely just an “effort to replace the more senior tech talent that DOGE had fired,” said Mathias Rechtzigel, a former government employee with the U.S. Digital Corps, to the Times. It’s a “reaction to DOGE not going well.”

The administration has acknowledged that the purpose of Tech Force is to “address a technical and early-career talent gap across the government,” said CNN. The government is looking to lure engineers away from private AI companies, which often offer “sizable salaries and other perks.” 

The world’s supply of glacial ice is quickly approaching an alarming milestone. In a striking study published this week in Nature Climate Change, researchers modeling multiple warming scenarios predict that the number of glaciers that disappear annually is set to dramatically increase in the coming decades.

The paper introduces the concept of “peak glacier extinction,” defined by researchers as the year in which the “largest number of glaciers is projected to disappear between now and the end of the century.” With the Alps leading our planet’s glacial disappearing act, the next few years may be a turning point for much of Earth’s ice.

‘We will lose a lot’
Although typical glacier studies focus on “mass and area loss,” the newly published research focuses on disappearances of “individual glaciers” — a trend that “directly threatens culturally, spiritually and touristically significant landscapes,” said the study’s authors. They used data on 200,000 glaciers obtained from a “database of outlines derived from satellite images” and applied “three global glacier models” to test the ranges under “different heating scenarios,” said The Guardian.

Areas featuring the “smallest and fastest-melting glaciers” are “most vulnerable,” unsurprisingly, with about 3,200 glaciers in central Europe set to shrink by 87% by the coming century, even if global temperature rise is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius.” “The biggest findings are that we will lose a lot of glaciers,” said lead researcher and ETH Zurich glaciologist Lander Van Tricht to ABC News.

‘Point of no return’
The newly published study shows we are at a “point of no return,” said Eric Rignot, a professor of Earth system science at the University of California at Irvine, to CNN. “Reforming a glacier would take decades if not centuries.” The researchers behind the study hope their paper, along with an accompanying database showing the “projected survival rate of each of the world’s 211,000 glaciers,” will help “assess climate impacts on local economies and ecosystems,” said Politico.

A saki monkey and her baby check out a stocking filled with festive treats from the zookeepers at ZSL London Zoo. The zoo has “festive animal talks” and other holiday-themed events throughout the month to promote children’s wildlife education and conservation.
Amanda Rose / Alamy Live News

Comedy writers had their work cut out for them this year, with the U.S. in political crisis and a mass culture that increasingly revolves around short-form video and manufactured outrage. It was also the year that studios tackled some of these problems directly, resulting in a crop of astute and sometimes discomfiting comedy offerings.

‘Adults,’ season 1
Anton (Owen Thiele), Billie (Lucy Freyer) and Issa (Amita Rao) are twentysomething friends living together in the Queens family home of Samir (Malik Elassal). With their brains “poisoned with all the anxieties of their internet-obsessed cohort,” the characters on FX’s Gen Z hangout comedy connect most successfully when their antics are “just straight-up zany,” said The New York Times. (Hulu)

‘Deli Boys,’ season 1
Mir (Asif Ali) and Raj (Saagar Shaikh) are brothers who inherit what they believe to be a Philadelphia convenience store and retail empire when their father, Baba (Iqbal Theba), is killed in a golfing mishap. But Aunt Lucky (Poorna Jagannathan) is forced to share the bad news that the whole enterprise was a drug-running operation. The Hulu comedy “balances bloody knuckles with a tender heart,” said Time. (Hulu)

‘Mo,’ season 2
Comedian Mo Amer plays Mohammed “Mo” Najjar (pictured above), a somewhat aimless Palestinian who was brought to the U.S. as a child. “Mo,” which concluded with this season, “excels in humanizing people of all stripes and in being as sidesplittingly funny as it is unapologetically dark,” said Hannah J Davies at The Guardian. (Netflix)