Girl Geek X

06/03/2026

In the race to succeed former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the candidate she endorsed (Connie Chan) just advanced to the November election. For Nancy Pelosi, it’s about keeping women “at the table.”

San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan and State Senator Scott Wiener, who have advanced to the 2026 general election in California's 11th Congressional District, a seat being held by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-11th-district-nancy-pelosi-successor-chakrabarti-chan-wiener/

06/03/2026

Zūm CEO Ritu Narayan is positioning the company as "the AWS of student mobility" with a fresh $100 million fundraising round. Her platform replaces outdated analog systems with a unified operating system connecting families, schools and dispatchers so that no one has to wonder, "Where's the bus?"

Züm provides more than software. It also hires the drivers, supplies the buses (electric ones in some districts) and manages the fleet.

"When you are wanting to revolutionize the experience, you have to own every single layer," she says, who co-founded the company with her brothers in 2014 to try to solve her own kids' transportation issues.

A technology race is heating up in the largest and most overlooked mass-transit system in America: school transportation.

05/31/2026

Emma Hewitt is among those to benefit from the battery scheme. A single parent who lives with her seven-year-old daughter south of Perth, she was progressively electrifying her home – solar panels, replacing a gas cooktop, leasing an electric car through her employer – when the subsidy was announced. It prompted her, a local government worker, to go for an interest-free loan to cover the rest of the cost of a 16kWh storage unit, which has allowed her to cut her reliance on the grid and save hundreds of dollars on her quarterly power bill.

“I don’t have huge amounts of savings but I can afford to pay things off out of my wages,” she says. “It has been something that I’ve wanted to do for a while, largely because I’m worried about the planet that my daughter will inherit and the incredible damage that burning fossil fuels does to that planet.”

Alison Reeve the energy and climate change programme director at the Grattan Institute think tank, says it neatly illustrates how the energy system has been rewritten, almost overnight. Under the new model, households are producers and players in the market, not just consumers. Older forms of generation are increasingly being squeezed out. And the advent of batteries with longer durations means past criticisms of solar energy – that the sun doesn’t shine at night – is being “blown out of the water”.

“It is a profound change in how you run an energy market. The message is that if you can make rooftop solar happen, you can make a number of other changes really easily. And storing energy just opens up so much more flexibility in the system,” she says. “We’ve just found a new way to do it.”

Australia is pioneering a revolution in home renewables and battery use, proving what is possible with the right policies

05/30/2026

Diane Bryant is clear-eyed about the human impact. She urges those impacted to not lose confidence in their role in this industry's future and to treat any single restructuring, even one as large as Meta's, as proof that AI has already finished its sweep.

"Every time a big new technology shows up, people declare the world as we know it is over. Ten years later, there's actually more software, more systems, and more need for people who understand it."

In her view, AI in 2026 looks like another compressed decade of rewiring. "This is the beginning of a long adoption curve, not the end. The only real mistake is deciding the story is finished when it's just getting started."

Meta’s AI layoffs spark tech panic. Former Intel executive Diane Bryant says the 10-year adoption rule proves the real enterprise transformation hasn't even hit yet.

05/29/2026

Co-founded by President Daniela Amodei, Anthropic has raised $65 billion in Series H funding at a $965 billion post-money valuation, led by insiders Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital. This is the largest "venture capital" round of all time and sees Anthropic leapfrog rival OpenAI on valuation.

The $65 billion funding round was led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia, more than doubling the company's valuation in just three months.

05/29/2026

Cyberdecks may feel twee at a moment of AI-driven mass surveillance and environmental destruction. But it’s not about the gadgets themselves so much as the empowerment of learning.

“I didn’t used to think I was creative, but I am,” says 29-year-old data scientist Maddy Brown (), who made a WNBA-themed cyberdeck last September in part to cope with a breakup. “I can make things out of weird things. I can make something new.”

She has since set up an at-home computer lab out of eBay finds. It is better for number crunching, since her Macbook always runs out of storage.

A growing cohort of qu**rs and femmes are building tech on their own terms.

05/28/2026

Over five seasons, the HBO comedy has explored what it means to succeed creatively. The first time we ever see Deborah Vance (played by Jean Smart), she’s onstage at her Vegas residence, late in her career of public flameouts and hard-fought comebacks, pampered as an empress and thoroughly numbed by complacency.

When her manager, Jimmy (Paul W. Downs), suggests pairing her with Ava (Hannah Einbinder), a 25-year-old TV writer, to spark some fresher punch lines, the odd-couple setup ignites a question Hacks has been preoccupied with ever since: What does it mean to be a truly great artist?

And can Deborah, a comedian who’s long excelled at making herself the punch line, kick-start her secret creative ambitions and secure her spot in comedy’s pantheon?

Over five seasons, the HBO comedy has explored what it means to succeed creatively.

05/28/2026

Evolutionary biologist Kerstin Bergh Johannesson has tried to understand how various forms of marine snail could possibly represent the same species since the 1970s.

What could have driven these rapid phenotypic changes? A 50-year study of genomic data, published in 2015, revealed that, tucked into genomes across the population, marine sticklebacks contained the genes necessary to survive in freshwater environments. These alternate genes occur sparingly across roughly 100 regions of the genome, said Catherine Peichel, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Bern who studies the fish species.

The presence of this kind of genetic diversity — having multiple forms of the same gene that harbor different traits — is known as standing variation. Even in low numbers, those alternate genes have a chance to be expressed, as if natural selection could reach into the past and redeploy those genes when needed.

Research from a different lab has shown that transplanted marine sticklebacks can switch to the freshwater ecotype in as few as 20 to 30 years. The emergence of and selection for a novel trait, on the other hand, would likely take far longer than that — if the fish even survived the initial shock of navigating a totally different habitat.

Evolutionary biologists are uncovering genomic mechanisms that allow populations to adapt quickly to different, hyperlocal habitats without splitting into new species.

05/28/2026

Black women’s unemployment rates have been climbing as other sectors that offered them long-term stable jobs, like government employment, hemorrhaged positions. It’s “kind of a perfect storm,” said Katherine Gallagher Robbins, a senior fellow at the National Partnership for Women & Families, who has studied the impact of AI displacement on women.

The concern among economists is not just job loss, but the way that it could destabilize entire families and communities, said Michelle Miller, the director of innovation for the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School, where she researches the impact of AI on working women.

“These women — mostly women — have some of the last remaining decent working-class jobs that might enable them to be the only person in the extended family that has an extra bedroom so if someone else loses their job, they don’t become unhoused, or they have predictable hours so that they can do school pickup, they can take people to doctor’s appointments,” she said. “The structure of their lives is not just about that they have this job — it’s sort of an exponential impact.”

Administrative assistants know you’re wondering whether AI is coming for their jobs. They’re not waiting to find out.

05/28/2026

Dr. Jasmine Clark led a March for Science in 2017. She just won a Georgia primary for a safe Democratic House seat.

“Being a science educator really, really spoke to me,” she says. “I found that my niche was in the classroom, helping people to better understand science.”

She received her Ph.D. in microbiology from Emory University.

Jasmine Clark led a March for Science in 2017. She just won a Georgia primary for a safe Democratic House seat