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Apes, dolphins, 18-month-old human babies, and now roosters can all pass versions of the mirror test.
Like the question of what lies beyond the universe and what happens when we die, thinking too long or too hard about the implications of what it means if the things we eat have self-awareness can drive you a little mad. Certainly, it’s deeply uncomfortable to contemplate at length.
Take it from me: Earlier this year, I tried to weigh the ethical dilemma of eating more chicken — which would be vastly better for the planet, short of the impossibility of everyone becoming a vegetarian — and the fact that replacing beef and pork in our diets with more poultry would necessitate the slaughter of an additional 41 billion animals worldwide. Now, a new study out this week in the journal PLOS One has upped the stakes of my ethical conundrum: It appears that roosters can recognize themselves in a mirror, a test that researchers have long used to assess the self-awareness of animals and that has only been passed by the ones we consider “smart,” like whales, primates, dolphins, and elephants.
Roosters failed the traditional mirror test, which is passed when an animal investigates a paint spot on its body using a mirror, thereby proving it “recognizes” the image in the glass as its own reflection and not another animal of the same species. But animal behavior specialist Sonja Hillemacher of Germany’s University of Bonn devised an improved version of the experiment that would cater more to a rooster’s sensory experience of the world. Roosters “are known to cry out to warn each other when a hawk is circling overhead,” The New York Times writes. “But when they’re alone and a predator is near, they stay silent to avoid attracting attention.”
Hillemacher’s resulting experiment went like this, the Times explains (if you need a visualization, see fig. 3 here):
Ms. Hillemacher wrangled roosters and gave them time in an enclosure with a mirror, so they could get used to the experimental set-up. Because roosters warn others more reliably than hens do, the team chose to focus on them, but they believe the results of the test apply to all chickens. She then projected a hawk silhouette over the roosters to see how they’d react.
When another rooster was visible through a partition, the rooster that was the subject of an experiment cried out to warn the other of danger. When alone without a mirror, the bird stayed quiet. When another rooster was present, but blocked from view by a mirror, the test subject still tended to stay silent.
The researchers interpreted this behavior to mean that the rooster didn’t perceive its reflection to be another rooster, and felt it also showed that the birds were sensing each other with sight — not hearing or smell.
The self-awareness and “experience” of animals is a particularly contentious corner of behavioral science and ethics, at least in part because the psychological stakes are so high. Still, the Times is careful to note that while the study appears to indicate the possibility of rooster self-awareness, it is not likely to persuade everyone. The mirror test itself is considered an imperfect indicator of animal “intelligence” by some researchers.
But if I didn’t feel queasy enough about trying to reconcile the positives of more climate-friendly eating with the negatives of animal suffering, I sure do now! For example, pigs — which some people refrain from eating because of their intelligence — have not confidently passed a mirror test. At this point, chickens are the only animal in most people’s diets that have.
I don’t have all the answers, besides a perennial reminder that eating more plants = good. (Also, is this another point in favor of eating bugs???) Instead, I’ll leave you with the words of the researchers themselves:
“With over 19 billion individuals worldwide used for meat and egg production each year, chickens are the most widely used farm animal,” they write. “Despite their worldwide presence and use, only a few studies [have] addressed their cognitive capacities.”
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The U.S. central bank left its interest rate target unchanged for the fifth time in a row.
Interest rate relief isn’t coming anytime soon for renewables. As widely expected, the Federal Reserve chose to keep rates unchanged on Wednesday, despite intense pressure from President Trump and two Republican Fed governors to lower rates.
The Fed maintained the benchmark short term rate at a range of 4.25% to 4.5%. During the press conference that followed the rate announcement, Fed Chair Jerome Powell gave no indication that the board will lower rates at the Fed’s next meeting in September, either. That’s contrary to Trump’s claims to reporters after the meeting. “We have made no decisions about September,” Powell said. “We don’t do that in advance. We’ll be taking that information into consideration and all the other information we get as we make our decision.”
High interest rates are particularly detrimental to renewable energy projects, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin has noted many times over. The long-term benefit of renewables, of course, is that the wind and the sun are free (and effectively inexhaustible) fuel sources. The short-term tradeoff, however, is that renewables are capital-intensive, requiring high upfront costs to get up and running. The highest proportion of the lifetime cost of a renewable energy generator, such as a wind turbine or a solar farm, is in building it. Elevated interest rates make it that much more difficult to lure investors and borrow the significant capital necessary to build out renewable infrastructure.
“The lack of interest rate relief means that construction loans, which are floating-rate loans tied to market conditions, will command higher interest rates and raise the total project costs for energy developers,” Advait Arun, senior associate of energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise and a Heatmap contributor, told me over email. “Developers rushing to build solar and wind energy between now and next summer to take advantage of tax credits will have to pay out these higher interest costs as they build.”
Though the Fed’s decision was unsurprising, the circumstances surrounding Wednesday’s meeting were out of the ordinary. For the first time since 1993, multiple Fed governors cast no votes on a rate decision. Christopher Waller and Michelle Bowman, both Republicans appointed by Trump, have voiced their preference for the Fed to lower rates by a quarter of a percentage point.
Additionally, Trump himself has been vocal about his views on chopping interest rates,— even going so far as to publicly threaten to fire Powell and appoint himself as head of the central bank, though he is legally unable to make good on his promise. Trump also recently criticized the Fed’s $2.5 billion building renovation project, singling out Powell for cost overruns. At the press conference on Wednesday, Powell emphasized the importance of the Fed’s independence from outside influence. “If you were not to have that, there’d be a great temptation of course to use interest rates to affect elections, for example,” he said.
While it may appease Trump, cutting interest rates won’t hold back the major energy price shocks that are very likely on their way. “Cutting rates sooner rather than later might make it easier for market actors to weather the coming shocks, but — crucially — they will not address the fiscal policy issues that created the shocks,” Arun noted. “However helpful rate cuts might be, they are not a solution to tariffs, tax credit uncertainty, and, soon, sharp spikes in electricity prices.”
The Department of Energy announced Wednesday that it was scrapping the loan guarantee.
The Department of Energy canceled a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, a transmission project intended to connect wind power in Kansas with demand in Illinois that would eventually stretch all the way to Indiana.
“After a thorough review of the project’s financials, DOE found that the conditions necessary to issue the guarantee are unlikely to be met and it is not critical for the federal government to have a role in supporting this project. To ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources, DOE has terminated its conditional commitment,” the Department of Energy said in a statement Wednesday.
The $11 billion project had been in the works for more than a decade and had won bipartisan approval from state governments and regulators across the Midwest. The conditional loan guarantee announced in November 2024 would have secured up to $4.9 billion in financing to fund phase one of the project, which would run from Ford County in Kansas to Callaway County in Missouri.
In response to a request for comment, an Invenergy spokesperson said, “While we are disappointed about the LPO loan guarantee, a privately financed Grain Belt Express transmission superhighway will advance President Trump’s agenda of American energy and technology dominance while delivering billions of dollars in energy cost savings, strengthening grid reliability and resiliency, and creating thousands of American jobs.”
The project had long been the object of ire from Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who recently stepped up his attacks in the hopes that a more friendly administration could help scrap the project. Two weeks ago, Hawley posted on X that he’d had “a great conversation today with @realDonaldTrump and Energy Secretary Chris Wright. Wright said he will be putting a stop to the Grain Belt Express green scam. It’s costing taxpayers BILLIONS! Thank you, President Trump.” The New York Times later reported that Trump had made a call to Wright on the issue with Hawley in the Oval Office.
Hawley celebrated the Grain Belt Express decision, writing on X, “It’s done. Thank you, President Trump,” and exulting in a separate post that “Department of Energy officially TERMINATES taxpayer funding for Green New Deal ‘grain belt express.’”
The senator had claimed that the plan would hurt Missouri farmers due to the use of eminent domain to acquire land for the project. In 2023, Hawley wrote a letter to Invenergy chief executive Michael Polsky claiming that “your company’s Grain Belt Express construction campaign has hurt Missouri’s farmers,” and that “they have lost the use of arable land, seen their property values decline, and been forced to operate under a cloud of uncertainty.”
Controversy over eminent domain and the use of agricultural land by transmission lines illustrates the difficulties in building the long-distance energy infrastructure necessary to decarbonize the grid.
Opposition to the project had been gestating for years but picked up steam in recent weeks. Earlier this month, Andrew Bailey, the Republican attorney general of Missouri, announced an investigation into the project. “This is a HUGE win for Missouri landowners and taxpayers who should not have to fund these green energy scams,” he wrote on X Wednesday following the DOE’s announcement.
As the project appeared to be more imminently imperiled, Invenergy scrambled to preserve its future, including making plans to connect gas to the transmission line. In a letter to Secretary of Energy Chris Wright written earlier this month, the Invenergy vice president overseeing the project wrote that the Grain Belt Express “has been the target of egregious politically motivated lawfare,” echoing language President Trump has used to describe his own travails.
If the author’s intent was to generate sympathy from the administration, it didn’t work. The end of the loan guarantee could be a death blow to the project, and will at the very least force Invenergy into a mad dash to try to match the lost capital.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include a comment from Invenergy.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.
Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.
“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis.
That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.
At the end of last year, Zuckerberg said that a datacenter project in Northeast Louisiana, now publicly known as Hyperion, would take 2 gigawatts of electricity; in his post on Monday, he said it could eventually be as large as 5 gigawatts. To get a sense of the scale we’re talking about, a new, large nuclear reactor has about a gigawatt of capacity, while a newly built natural gas plant could supply only around 500 megawatts.
As one could perhaps infer from the fact that their size is quoted in gigawatts instead of square feet or number of GPUs, whether or not these data centers get built comes down to the ability to power them.
Citing information from the natural gas company Williams, Semianalysis reported that Meta “went full Elon mode” for the New Albany datacenter, i.e. is installed its own natural gas infrastructure. Specifically, Williams is building two 200-megawatt facilities, according to the gas developer and Semianalysis, for the Ohio project. (Williams did not immediately respond to a Heatmap request for comment.)
Does this mean Meta is violating its commitments to reach net zero? While the data center buildout may make those goals more difficult to achieve, Meta is still investing in new renewables even as it’s also bringing new gas online. Late last month, the company announced that it was procuring almost 800 new megawatts of renewables from projects to be built by Invenergy, including over 400 megawatts of solar in Ohio, roughly matching the on-site generation from the Prometheus project.
But there’s more to a data center’s climate footprint than what a big tech company does — or does not — build on site.
The Louisiana project, Hyperion, will also be served by new natural gas and renewables added to the grid. Entergy, the local utility, has proposed 1.5 gigawatts of natural gas generation near the Meta site and over 2 gigawatts of new natural gas in total, with another plant in the southern part of the state to help balance the addition of significant new load. In December, when the data center was announced, Meta said that it planned to “bring at least 1,500 megawatts of new renewable energy to the grid.” Entergy did not immediately respond to a Heatmap request for comment on its plans for the Hyperion project.
“Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher. I'm looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier!” Zuckerberg wrote.