At first glance, Lent Hill Dairy Farm in Steuben County, New York, looks like most other industrial dairies. There are red buildings that house some 4,000 cows, a staggering manure pit and two gigantic domelike structures that serve as anaerobic co-digesters.

These giant machines break down manure and local food waste to produce biogas. This renewable natural gas, or RNG, is then typically transported for use as electricity, heating and fuel. But at Lent Hill, the gas produced isn’t just heating homes or running tractors. It’s also powering an on-site cryptomine.

The operation, run by Pennsylvania-based Ag-Grid Energy, is the first of its kind in the country. The company claims the anaerobic digestion of manure and food waste could be a game-changer, not only in powering crypto, but data centers, which currently use 4.9% of the country’s electricity, a figure that could double by 2030.

“At the end of the day, our model is providing value to the rural area that we are in,” Rashi Akki, the founder and CEO of Ag-Grid Energy, tells Sentient.

The project claims to recycle more than 45,000 gallons of food waste per day and the manure of 4,000 cows. “What we want to do is also provide, if possible through fiber optics, [the] value of the AI computing capacity to that same regional area,” Akki says.

While Ag-Grid Energy wants to work with mid-sized dairies to create on-site power generation for small-scale data centers, the world’s largest technology players have bigger visions. Tech giants are increasingly searching for fossil-fuel alternative fuel sources to power hyperscale data centers that won’t put a strain on the grid.

Biogas proponents — a broad coalition of industries, including agriculture, fossil fuels, utilities and waste management — are pushing renewable natural gas, sourced in part by manure digesters, as a sustainable way forward.

In California, Microsoft has partnered with Enchanted Rock to use RNG for backup data center power. Vanguard Renewables, a waste management company and portfolio company of Black Rock, has touted RNG as Read more

Jennifer Brooks, a history professor at Auburn University, had barely unpacked from a trip out of town in early June when the messages started blowing up her phone.

Texts from colleagues and rumors on social media delivered the unsettling news: The Auburn Board of Trustees had voted to dissolve the school’s faculty senate and give itself ultimate authority over academic decisions, including curriculum.

“What was really surprising … is the lack of knowledge that most of our faculty leaders had about the decision,” Brooks, who’s been teaching at Auburn since 2006, told Stateline.

Faculty leaders across departments at Auburn — one of two flagship public universities in Alabama — said they learned of the proposal a day before the vote. The board approved the changes unanimously and without public discussion.

“To have that (decision) be the sole product of the Board of Trustees, with no input from faculty, is really unusual,” Brooks said.

The move at Auburn came two months after Alabama’s Republican-dominated state legislature passed a law curtailing the power of faculty senates at the state’s public colleges and universities. That law exempted Auburn and the University of Alabama, because their governing structures are enshrined in the state constitution. Some faculty felt Auburn’s eagerness to follow it anyway signals the board’s willingness to bend to political pressure.

The Auburn trustees did not respond to a request for comment, though the board said in a statement that its new policy is “intended to advance academic quality, transparency, consistency and institutional alignment while preserving meaningful faculty participation.”

Alabama isn’t alone. Since last year, states like Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas and Utah have enacted similar laws that give greater power to politically appointed boards and administrators while weakening tenure protections and faculty sway over curriculum and university leadership. In Indiana, the new state budget gives Republican Gov. Mike Braun full authority to appoint members of Indiana University’s Board o

Divorce is one of the most financially consequential events a person can go through. The legal fees and court costs get most of the attention, but they rarely tell the full story. From filing a petition to splitting retirement accounts to maintaining two households where there was once one, the total price tag of ending a marriage often far exceeds what people anticipate at the outset. In this article, Skillern Firm Divorce & Child Custody Lawyers, a Texas family law firm, examined what divorce actually costs in every U.S. state — and why the biggest expenses often come after the decree is signed.

According to Martindale-Nolo Research, the average cost of a divorce in the United States is $11,300, with a median of $7,000. Those figures, however, do not reflect a wide range of outcomes. For divorces that go to full litigation, costs can reach much higher.

Where You File Matters

State laws govern filing fees, waiting periods, mandatory mediation requirements, and how marital assets are divided. Each of those variables carries a price.

In 2025, most state filing fees range from $70 to $435. That figure alone can differ by hundreds of dollars depending on where a couple lives. California has a $435 filing fee, with attorney fees averaging $13,800 for contested cases. Texas has a $300 average filing fee, with attorney costs running approximately $12,400. New York’s filing fee averages $335, with legal fees that can reach $13,500.

High-cost metro areas like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco have the highest hourly attorney rates, driven largely by the overhead costs of operating law firms in those markets. Midwest and Southern states generally offer more affordable legal services, though court filing fees still vary widely, sometimes even by county.

At the lower end of the cost spectrum, states like North Dakota, Mississippi, Wyoming, and South Dakota consistently rank among the least expensive places to divorce, with North Dakota recording the lowest overall average divorce cost in the country.

Contested vs. Uncontested: The Biggest Cost Driver

Whether the parties agree on terms is, by most measures, the most consequential factor in what a divorce ultimately costs.

According to the Martindale-Nolo survey of divorcing couples, an uncontested divorce where both spouses hired lawyers cost an average of $4,100, including attorneys’ fees. Meanwhile, couples who handled an uncontested divorce themselves often paid only a few hundred dollars in court filing fees, which range from about $100 to over $400 depending on the state. A contested divorce, where at least one major issue remains unresolved, can run significantly higher and take considerably longer, with timelines often stretching a year or more depending on court schedules and the complexity of disputes.

Among divorces that involved disputes but were ultimately settled without going to trial, average costs came in around $10,600. For those that proceeded all the way to trial, average costs climbed to $20,379 or more, per Martindale-Nolo Research.

The issues most likely

Rent is usually the single biggest payment renters make each month, and how it gets paid can shape whether that due date is routine or stressful. Unlike a lot of smaller recurring charges, paying rent still often requires active effort: logging into a portal, writing a check, or remembering to hit send before a deadline.

Some renters have never considered putting their rent on autopay. Others have thought about it but hesitate. Is it worth it? For many renters, the answer is yes. Autopay can reduce the risk of missed payments, help avoid late fees, and make it easier to build a consistent payment history. But like any financial tool, it’s worth understanding both the benefits and the tradeoffs before deciding whether it’s the right fit for how you manage your money.

What autopay does for renters

A missed rent payment can trigger late fees, awkward conversations with a landlord, and, in worst cases, a report to collections that follows a renter’s credit history for years.

The numbers show what’s at stake: RentRedi’s four years of rental payment data reveals that renters who use autopay hit a 99% on-time payment rate, compared to 87% for those who pay manually. Rather than an unwillingness to pay, that gap is more about small moments where life gets in the way, whether that’s forgetting a due date, traveling, or simply getting distracted during a busy week.

Given that 64% of landlords in a December 2025 RentRedi survey consider rent late within four to seven days of the due date, using autopay eliminates the tension that occurs when a tenant misses that window, and their rent is considered late.

Many renters seem to know this already. In the same survey, 29% said automatic payments are among the tools that help them most in paying rent on time, and 44% pointed to automatic rent reminders as the single most helpful factor. Reminders and autopay tend to work in tandem: One nudges you before the due date, the other makes sure the payment goes through even if the nudge doesn’t work.

Unlike many financial habits that require spending more or saving more, rent is simply about making the payment you already have to make work harder for you.

The credit-building bonus

There’s another reason autopay is worth considering, and it has nothing to do with avoiding a penalty. A growing number of renters are reporting their on-time rent payments to the three major credit bureaus — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion — turning a monthly obligation into a monthly credit-building opportunity.

Rent traditionally hasn’t shown up on credit reports the way a car loan or credit card payment does, which means years of responsible on-time payments can go completely unrecognized by lenders. Rent reporting closes that gap. TransUnion has found that renters who report a year of on-time payments see an average score increase of up to 26 points, and 60% see some increase after just their first reporte

Artificial intelligence has spent the past few years learning how people click and buy. Now it is moving closer to the harder part of commerce, where a late shipment or missed delivery window can become a customer problem before a retailer has time to react.

A 2025 PwC operations survey found that 53% of respondents already use AI to anticipate and reduce supply chain disruptions, while another 31% are testing it.

Operators tracking fulfillment data are seeing the same pressure behind those adoption numbers as retailers look for systems that can read operational pressure before it reaches the customer. And agentic AI gives that pressure a name, while its arrival points to a larger change inside commerce. As AMS Fulfillment explains below, software is beginning to guide decisions that used to wait for human review.

What Is Agentic AI and Why Does It Matter?

Agentic AI is the term now attached to systems built to pursue a business goal and decide the next step as new information comes in. Old automation stays rigid, doing exactly what its rule says and nothing past it. For example, a system set to reorder 500 units when stock dips below a line does just that, even as the supplier runs dry and the order stalls.

But the agentic version starts from the goal instead, holding a product in stock at a fair price. If the usual supplier runs out, it finds a new source and places the order itself. And inventory balancing follows the same logic, with an agent moving stock toward a regional spike and easing off where demand has cooled.

Sinan Aral, a professor at MIT Sloan, says the agentic AI age “is already here,” with real agents at work across the economy. Agentic systems keep working when reality breaks the script, while older tools simply quit.

How AI Is Changing Warehouse Operations

Warehouse floors make the difference easier to see, since small errors often travel faster than the product itself. A survey conducted in November and December 2024 by Deep Analysis, Hyperscience, and the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals found that 82% of respondents said manual document processing has a heavy to extreme impact on operational efficiency, with data-entry errors and slow processing among the biggest problems.

But AI starts cutting into that drag by keeping inventory records closer to the shelf and coordinating automated equipment as it runs. It also moves urgent orders higher before a delay spreads.

The work still belongs to people, though fewer decisions have to sit inside a spreadsheet or wait for a status check. In other words, faster reads inside the building lead to fewer wrong picks and cleaner handoffs before an order leaves the dock.

Forecasting and Fulfillment in Real Time

Once an order clears the dock, speed depend