The Trump administration's new government-help chatbot has already broken with its creator on the one claim he fights hardest to defend: who won the 2020 election. That contradiction, surfacing almost as soon as the tool went live, is an early look at how official AI handles facts that carry political weight. On the entertainment side of things, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery are merging, and the new entity will be called Skydance. And finally, scientists have figured out a low-cost solar trick to rid your garbage of the stink problem.

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The Trump administration this week launched America.gov, an AI-powered chatbot meant to help citizens navigate federal government services and information. Almost immediately, it ran into an awkward problem: when asked who won the 2020 presidential election, the chatbot answered plainly that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won and that Donald J. Trump lost, citing official Federal Election Commission results. That response spread quickly online, given that Trump still insists the election was stolen from him. The bot's dissent did not stop there. According to reporting by The New York Times, the America.gov chatbot also contradicted several other core Trump administration claims, stating that his assertion of 25 million illegal border crossings under Biden was false, that consumer prices are rising rather than falling, and that it is American consumers rather than foreign countries who bear the cost of his tariffs.

A White House official pushed back on all of those points, and after The Hill reached out on Tuesday, the chatbot was updated to refuse election questions entirely, now offering a boilerplate response that it does not discuss political questions or election outcomes. The episode illustrates a genuine tension in deploying AI models as official government information tools: the same systems that can be directed to reflect a particular agenda are also prone to surfacing data and sourced conclusions that cut against it. The White House has said the service will be updated with what it called more accurate information, leaving open what exactly that will mean in practice.

Anyone who has hauled a garbage bin to the curb on a hot summer day knows the assault that follows when the lid comes off. Researchers publishing in the American Chemical Society's journal Environmental Science & Technology have developed a solar-powered insert that fits onto the lid of a standard wheeled trash bin and attacks food waste odors directly at their source. The device uses a manganese oxide catalyst that, when activated by sunlight concentrated through a transparent lens built into the insert, adsorbs and chemically breaks down acetic acid, the vinegar-like compound primarily responsible for the sour, pungent smell of rotting garbage. Activated charcoal filters, the current go-to solution, lose effectiveness in hot and humid conditions, exactly the environments where odors are worst.

To make the catalyst more powerful, the research team ionically bonded lithium to the manganese oxide, creating a refined material that outperformed both plain manganese oxide and activated carbon in lab tests under simulated sunlight and humid conditions. The team then embedded the catalyst in a removable, gas-permeable module fitted with a concentrating lens and snapped it onto a real trash bin filled with decaying fruit, bread, and wine. The insert continuously broke down acetic acid over more than 40 days of natural sunlight exposure, demonstrating the kind of long-term stability that would be necessary for everyday use. Crucially, the system requires no electrical heating to activate the catalyst; sunlight does the work entirely. The researchers see their approach as a practical, sustainable alternative to odor control methods that depend on electricity or consumable filters, and they anticipate the technology could eventually find broader application in waste management systems.

The Hollywood landscape is about to look dramatically different. David Ellison announced Friday that the combined entity formed by the merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery will carry a single new name: Skydance. The deal, valued at roughly $110 billion on an enterprise basis, is expected to close Tuesday, capping a whirlwind 18 months in which Ellison's production company, the outfit behind "Top Gun: Maverick" and the "Mission: Impossible" franchise, first swallowed Paramount before setting its sights on Warner Bros. Discovery in a takeover bid that sparked a full bidding war.

Ellison was careful to frame the rebranding not as a burial of two storied legacies but as a way to let them breathe. The Paramount and Warner Bros. studio names will remain intact as distinct creative homes, while the new parent trades on the stock market under the ticker "SKYD." Together, the studios are slated to release 35 films in the coming year, signaling that the combined operation intends to compete aggressively at the box office from day one. Upon closing, Ellison will serve as co-CEO alongside Ynon Kreiz, the outgoing head of Mattel, a pairing that will immediately face the considerable task of integrating two of Hollywood's most iconic and complex institutions under one roof.

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