During the course of this investigation, in March 2026, the first study connecting data centers to heat islands was published (Marinoni et al., “The data heat island effect”, arXiv). This “preprint” (a preliminary version released before going through peer review) reports an average increase of 2°C around the analyzed data centers.

The study drew methodological criticism from independent science communicator Andy Masley, the senior researcher for Omdia, Vlad Galabov and University of Bristol researcher Chris Preist, all of whom coincided on a single point: The study does not separate the heat produced by the servers from that which accumulates from simply replacing vegetation with roofs and pavement. Masley also pointed out that the paper does not compare other types of commercial buildings and that the resolution of the MODIS sensor used in the study (1 km per pixel) prevents one from distinguishing the data center from the surrounding area.

Amenaza Roboto’s analysis used Landsat, with a resolution 33 times greater, controlling for all of these factors. According to the literature reviewed, it is the first study of its kind to isolate both components.

The global data center industry consumes more energy than many entire countries. Unlike other industrial infrastructure, a data center converts virtually all of the electricity it consumes into heat and dissipates it from a single source, continuously, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Uruguay has positioned itself as a regional hub for this type of infrastructure. Antel operates three data centers—Pando, Pocitos and Lezama. It will equip a fourth server room at the Pando location and build two new centers in Aguada and at a yet-undetermined location. Google is building its own center. According to sources familiar with the industry, three additional private installations are projected to be built. Supporters like to point out that these projects bring economic investment, jobs and development of digital infrastructure.

When discussing the environmental impact of data centers, public debate usually focuses on the consumption of water and energy. The thermal effect on the environment—the heat that these places release into the surrounding communities—does not appear in the conversation. The data demonstrates that this impact does exist, is measurable and yet no one is keeping track of it.

Now there is a way of measuring this impact and a baseline for what comes next. The heat behind the cloud is no longer invisible—and it’s detectable from 700 kilometers high. 

Barring “one last run” when he gets bored of family life and gym ownership, it looks as though Cub Swanson has hung up his gloves for good. While he never achieved a world title, Swanson’s longevity has been astounding, and he was one of the last remaining veterans of the WEC fighting at the highest levels of mixed martial arts. He was even briefly part of the “guillotine revolution” among the lower weightclasses in WEC, before establishing himself as a sensational knockout puncher and never looking back.

That knockout power, and the ways in which Cub Swanson set it up, will be our subject today.

Shooting from the Hip

Swanson is one of the featherweight division’s more effective hitters, and in some ways his style reminds me of the great flyweight boxer, Jimmy Wilde. Wilde was called “The Mighty Atom,” and “The Ghost with the Hammer in his Hand” for the simple reason that he was a tiny man who could almost lift his opponents off their feet with his punches. He did this from a low hands stance, often leaping into his blows. When we talk about monstrous punchers in the lower weightclasses, there is an understanding that sacrifices must be made to textbook form in order to get more bodyweight into blows.

Swanson’s typically stands with a low guard, is crouched, and is high on the ball of his back foot—ready to spring in with either a left hook or his sneaky right hand lead. He does not bleed power by fighting with his hands held in a high guard until he throws, and in fact, Nate Landwehr’s performance against Swanson demonstrated that locking your hands to your head in a high guard can make it difficult to get going if the opponent simply shackles you with offence.  As Sugar Ray Robinson said, when you shadowbox in the mirror, you should be looking down the barrel of your fists the entire time, not at the bottoms of them.

The hands low guard—or perhaps absence of a guard—allows Swanson work very effectively with right hand leads. These shoot in straight off his chest or from down by his solar plexus. Here is an example from his fight with Shane Burgos.

By carrying the hands low, the fighter removes the telegraph of his gloves leaving his guard and his fists obviously changing orientation. If he can encroach on the opponent to the point where his hands are in the blind angle—the spot just below peripheral vision when looking at any opponent’s face or chest—he can create real discomfort in the opponent. It takes guts to try to crowd an opponent while carrying your hands down by your waist though.

The upside of dropping your hands and still standing close enough to box, is that the opponent can only make reads from what remains in their vision. This means that having low hands often amplifies the effects of shoulder feints.

Swanson has had great success through his career with a sort of lagged right hand off his shoulder feints. This is similar to the stutter jab, where a fighter steps forward, shoulder feints, holds for half a beat, and then delivers a jab with just his arm. The fighter deliberately ruins the kinetic chain of his technique in order to throw and land off-rhythm.

Swanson shoulder feints his right hand, squaring his upper body. Then he pauses just long enough to surprise the opponent when he pumps out his arm in a weaker, but far sneakier blow. In Swanson’s triumphant retirement bout against Nate Landwehr, he used this repeatedly from both stances and even dropped Landwehr with it.

While he was known for his boxing, Swanson’s kicking game was the bridge that enabled him to leap in on opponents. It was never terribly fancy outside of the goofy stumbling kick mentioned above, but he got more mileage out of the simple right low kick than most fighters billed as kickboxing world champions. The trick of it is that there is not just one low kick: the right low kick can be thrown at a number of different ranges.

This is partly due to the length of the striking surface: you can connect with anything from just below the knee to the end of the foot. However, the further down your leg you connect the more you are likely to feel it. The variance in range based on striking surface can be seen on the high kicks of someone like Superbon, who can score high kicks from an infighting range due to his hip dexterity, and by connecting the kick higher on his shin. Superbon can, of course, also throw the long, foot to neck high kick we can all just about manage on our stiffest days.

When throwing the low kick there is the added variable in the length of the target. Most of the upper leg and all of the lower leg are available to kick. For extremes of this, take a look at Rob Kaman jumping in, turning over a low kick and chopping down on the quad, and then at Yuki Yoza standing almost on top of his opponent and kicking them only an inch or two above the ankle.

As an aside, when Cub Swanson made his UFC debut in 2011 against Ricardo Lamas, the first thing Joe Rogan commented on was Swanson’s targeting of the calf. This was a full year before Benson Henderson’s famous use of the calf kick against Nate Diaz and seven years before Demetrious Johnson put Henry Cejudo’s foot to sleep. Swanson did not seem to think the kick had any magical properties, but it hurt, and it took the opponent out of balance.

To return to the idea of range on the low kick. Most MMA fighters—particularly since discovering the calf kick—love a long, run up low kick. Longest weapon, nearest target, least scary way to engage. Here is Swanson establishing the low kick early against Dias, throwing long and landing on the calf with the end of his foot.

Yet Cub was only able to truly blend his low kick with his boxing game by insisting on kicking from closer in. Swanson would shimmy his shoulders, bob his head, and get himself close enough to kick the leg with minimal step and at a low angle, almost on top of his opponent.

After scoring this short low kick, Swanson replaces his kicking leg behind him, but in a longer stance and on the ball of his back foot. An exaggerated version of that sprinter’s stance that made Felix Trinidad one of world’s greatest left hookers. From this stance, Swanson jumps in with his left hook—which he can throw longer than most fighters because of his thumb-down over rotation.

This sequence: short low kick, long left hook, appeared in just about every Swanson fight in his fifteen years in the UFC. He did it against Ricardo Lamas and he did it this past weekend against Nate Landwehr, and if you judge from the Landwehr fight he got better at it through the years. It is something that could be applied by many other fighters if they put the time into it. But like much of Swanson’s game the deterring factor is that you have to be courageous. You have to know that you are going to low kick from punching range and accept that the opponent should be punching back. Swanson was great at slipping, pulling, and even shoulder rolling—as he did so well off his jab against Quarantillo— but most of the time off this low kick he would leave his right hand out to check the opponent’s left, in the split second before he ripped into the leaping left hook.

Here is a gorgeous example from the Dias fight. This short clip crystalizes the essence of Cub Swanson: shoulder feints to close distance, short range low kick, long leaping left hook that drops Dias, and the off-balance left kick as an afterthought.

With forty-five fights on Swanson’s record, he will probably always be a subject of fascination to me. Two years ago I wrote an entire article about his unusual get up from closed guard, when I had started reviewing Swanson tape with the intention of writing about his striking.

Though the meat of his game can be boiled down to these few things— the low hands, shoulder feints, long lead hook, short right low kick—there are many more wrinkles and moments from his fights where he sets traps or picks up on the opportunity to counter. The man tried a cartwheel kick in almost every fight and I cannot remember either talking about it on the podcast or writing about it in almost fifteen years of articles because there was always so much else going on in his bouts.

I cannot be sad that Cub Swanson is retiring because he strode off into the sunset about as well as anyone has, and it had to happen sooner rather than later to avoid becoming one of those sad final acts that outnumber stories like Cub’s about fifteen-to-one in this sport. It has been a blessing to witness Swanson’s career, and I consider it another great treat that he was discovered so early and that so much of it took place on camera and was preserved. On a sad, bad day in 2045, I can still picture a classic Cub Swanson fight being a salve for many of my woes.

From theaters to galleries, arts coverage reveals what communities value and how people connect across a city.

On Local News Day, we tend to talk about accountability reporting, city hall coverage, and the steady, essential work of keeping the public informed. What we often leave behind, though, is the equally essential work of covering how our communities understand themselves.

Journalists are storytellers. We believe, deeply, in the power of narrative to lift truth from from complexity and help people see the world around them more clearly. As a long-time journalist, but first time arts reporter, it has been a revelation to see this same urge in the context of my new beat. Because artists, too, search for narrative and truth. They also dig deep to share what they understand of the world, with the world. And though the mediums are different, arts, I firmly believe, are as vital to our communities as is news.

And yet, arts coverage is often treated as expendable. As local newsrooms shrink, dedicated critics disappear, and coverage narrows, arts reporting is often one of the first areas to be cut.

Over the past year what I've realized is that when people argue that arts coverage isn’t essential, what they’re often really saying is that the arts themselves are not for everyone. And there’s a reason that perception exists. When tickets can cost $75, $150, or more, access is uneven and the audience reflects that. But that’s not an argument for less coverage; it’s an argument for better, more intentional and inclusive coverage.

It's not hard to do. Artists want people to see their work as much as people want to see it. In reporting on Boston's theater scene I've learned just how much this is true. Theaters, in Boston at least, are really working with audiences to fill seats through ticket discounts, rush policies, and community programs designed to open the doors wider. By surfacing those opportunities, arts journalists can help more people find their way in. At Scene in Boston, we treat that as core reporting, not a bonus feature.

This is why, while my cohost, Lisa Thalhamer, and I do talk about performances we've seen recently, we are explicitly not reviewing them. Instead, we’re helping people navigate the world of theater. We’re offering context, making connections, and, ideally, widening the circle of who feels like they belong. It’s not just about what’s on stage this weekend. It’s about building a sense of cultural momentum—helping people see that these stories are part of a larger conversation happening across the city.

On Local News Day, we should be clear about what we mean when we talk about “saving the news.” It’s not just about preserving institutions—it’s about preserving our ability to understand ourselves and each other. That work happens in city council chambers, yes. But it also happens in theaters, galleries, and performance spaces across our communities. If we want a fuller picture of who we are, arts coverage isn’t optional. It’s essential.

Today, take a moment to explore and support the local news organizations telling those stories—across beats, across formats, and across communities. You can find a list of local news organizations in your area at the Local News Day website here (I guarantee that there will be some you're hearing about for the first time). And if you find value in arts coverage, seek it out, share it, and help sustain it. You can start be forwarding this newsletter to someone you know.

Thank you, today and every day, for being a part of Scene in Boston.

-Laura

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For three Halloweens in a row, Joseph Valentino was Emeril Lagasse.

He wasn’t the only kid in New Jersey who idolized chefs and wanted to be one when he grew up. For Mr. Valentino, though, the dream seemed especially hard to reach. Diagnosed with autism as a toddler, he still hadn’t spoken by age 5, when he first dressed as Emeril.

Today, at 27, he is a cook at Point Seven restaurant in Manhattan, working the cold food, pastry and raw bar stations, sometimes all at once. He says the path he took to get there was strewn with rejection. There were interviews that went nowhere, jobs in kitchens where he never felt welcome, deep periods of depression.

“I viewed myself as a liability,” he said.

His career is one of the inspirations for a new program, Chefs on the Spectrum, meant to train and place people with autism in fine-dining jobs.

Mr. Valentino and the owner of Point Seven, the chef Franklin Becker, introduced the initiative Tuesday night during a $2,500-a-head fund-raiser for the nonprofit organization Autism Speaks at Cipriani Wall Street in Lower Manhattan.

Mr. Becker, who is on the group’s board, pitched his Chefs on the Spectrum idea to the rest of the board as a way to help address two problems at the same time: the shortage of skilled labor in restaurants and a high unemployment rate among autistic adults.

Professional kitchens have long been known as havens for people with neurological and developmental disabilities. Chefs who describe themselves as dyslexic include Marco Pierre White, Jamie Oliver and Marc Murphy. Cooks who say they have some form of attention deficit can seem to outnumber those without.

But people on the autism spectrum have an exceedingly low profile in the business, whether because they haven’t been diagnosed or choose not to disclose it.

“I still haven’t met anybody with autism in the kitchen,” said Mr. Valentino, who cooked in cafeterias and catering kitchens before going to work for Mr. Becker last year. “I think that needs to be fixed, and I think this program will fix it.”

There are other initiatives that place people on the spectrum into hospitality jobs. Several coffee chains, including Bitty & Beau’s, which has 13 locations in the United States, are dedicated to employing people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

But the focus on fine dining makes Chefs on the Spectrum unusual. Mr. Becker, who has an adult son with autism, has recruited more than a dozen chefs from around the country, including Andrew Zimmern, Daniel Boulud, Chris Bianco, Maneet Chauhan and Michael and Bryan Voltaggio. Their restaurants will hire workers from the program after receiving training in how to help those new employees thrive.

“There’s a preconception that there’s a risk in hiring autistic individuals,” Mr. Becker said. “The real risk is overlooking incredible talent.”

That talent can take several forms. Some cooks on the spectrum are meticulously organized at their stations. Some have an exceptional recall of recipes, and others are especially diligent about safety protocols, said Mark Fierro, who provides job-placement support and career coaching at TACT (Teaching the Autism Community Trades), a school for autistic adults in Englewood, Colo.

Some students in TACT’s culinary program perform with astonishing consistency. If a restaurant wants meat butchered into a certain cut, Mr. Fierro said, “they’re going to make them exactly the same way every single time.”

A common hallmark of autism is a cultivation of special interests, intense and passionate devotions to particular topics. For cooks on the spectrum, this can mean a penchant for intellectual spelunking into, say, the molecular structure of hydrocolloids, or the behavior of the molds that produce blue cheese and miso.

“Researching an ingredient, breaking down where it comes from, how to use it, the cultural context — all of that is a special interest,” said a chef in New York City on the autism spectrum who asked not to be identified because she fears that neurodivergence can be misunderstood. “My brain is never satisfied for information. It always craves more.”

Her proclivity for amassing and organizing data made her a “load-bearing pillar” of any kitchen where she worked, she said. It also sets her up to make unexpected associations that can lead to creative leaps.

“The needle for ingenuity gets pushed forward by people who don’t think the same way neurotypical people think,” she said.

Advocates for greater acceptance of autism in the kitchen say that working side by side can benefit people on and off the spectrum. At Chitarra Pastaria, a small pasta company in Cambridge, Mass., whose eight employees all have autism, tailoring jobs for each worker’s talents has been a valuable experience, said one of the founders, the chef Ken Oringer.

“You get to be able to appreciate people for their skill sets,” he said. “It really teaches you to have these relationships with people and learn what makes them tick and how they can be effective.” (Mr. Oringer has been recruited by Mr. Becker to join Chefs on the Spectrum’s pilot program.)

For some people on the spectrum, kitchens are places where they can put their aptitudes to good use without being held back by the challenges that social interactions often pose.

To help autistic people navigate the work, restaurants may have to make minor adjustments. One easy accommodation, said Keith Wargo, the chief executive of Autism Speaks, is to avoid face-to-face job interviews, which demand a complex set of communication skills, in favor of tryouts. Another is to swap LED bulbs for fluorescent fixtures, which flicker and buzz in ways that some people on the spectrum find stressful.

Some accommodations can have wider benefits. Mr. Fierro said he has advised employers to provide cooking timers to help TACT students with multitasking, a minor step that he said also helps neurotypical workers.

Steps, a company that runs job-training centers in Bangkok for neurodivergent adults, as well as cafes and a bakery that employ graduates, consulted with one large hotel group and advised it to place maps, labels and other signs in its kitchens there. The signs were meant to help workers who had memory or attention issues, but they proved popular with almost everybody.

“It helped onboard all new employees more quickly, it helped people work more efficiently during large events, and it increased employees’ sense of belonging,” said Courtney Konyn, the group’s communications director.

Chefs on the Spectrum is still taking shape, but it is likely that some of its training will be based on Mr. Valentino’s experience of navigating professional kitchens. He will try to answer questions about how they can work with people with autism. And he hopes that his career will help change views of autism.

“One day, I do want to become an executive chef,” Mr. Valentino said. “I want to be that one person that has autism and made it to the top of the brigade system.” Mr. Becker, he said, believes he has the qualities to make it happen.

“I have the passion and determination,” Mr. Valentino said. “And I don’t like being late to work.”

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