Category: Tech

Federal support for mRNA vaccine research appears in jeopardy after KFF Health News reported Sunday that officials at the National Institutes of Health have directed scientists to remove all references to the lifesaving technology from their grant applications. All such research is now under direct scrutiny from health secretary and long-time anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A senior official at the NIH’s National Cancer Institute confirmed to KFF that NIH acting Director Matthew Memoli “sent an email across the NIH instructing that any grants, contracts, or collaborations involving mRNA vaccines be reported up the chain to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s office and the White House.” Further, two independent scientists told the outlet that they were informed by NIH officials that any mention of mRNA vaccines needed to be removed from their grant applications. One, a biomedical researcher in Philadelphia, said that the NIH had “flagged our pending grant as having an mRNA vaccine component.” The other, a researcher in New York who works on vaccines but not mRNA vaccines, was told that background mentions of mRNA vaccine efficacy in their previous grant applications needed to be removed from future applications. Read full article Comments

Trump administration officials said the company donated the internet service, saying the gift had been vetted by the lawyer overseeing ethics issues in the White House Counsel’s Office.

Plastics are great, except when it comes to making or disposing of them. Production generally requires the use of chemicals derived from fossil fuels, and so helps to continue our reliance on them. And the final products are generally not biodegradable, so they tend to stick around despite breaking down into ever smaller fragments. Biology might ultimately provide a solution, however. Researchers have identified bacteria that evolved the ability to digest some plastics. And improvements in our ability to design proteins have allowed us to make new enzymes that can chew up plastics. This week brings some progress on the other side of the equation, with a team of Korean researchers describing how they’ve engineered a bacterial strain that can make a useful polymer starting with nothing but glucose as fuel. The system they developed is based on an enzyme that the bacteria use when they’re facing unusual nutritional conditions, and it can be tweaked to make a wide range of polymers. Read full article Comments

Dutch unicorn Mews will most likely list in the US instead of in Europe if the hospitality management company goes public, its CEO and co-founder Matthijs Welle told TNW.  “An IPO is one of the options that we would consider for the future, and if we were to go down that route, a listing in the US is the most likely option, although it is too early to specify further details regarding a potential listing,” Welle said. “Most other vertical SaaS companies, who are comparable to us, are listed in the US, where there are deeper capital markets and a… This story continues at The Next Web

Irish startup Equal1 has unveiled the world’s first quantum computer that runs on a hybrid quantum-classical silicon chip.  Dubbed Bell-1 — after quantum physicist John Stewart Bell — the computer weighs around 200kg and plugs into a regular electrical socket. The rack-mountable machine is designed to simply slot into high-performance computing (HPC) data centres alongside standard servers.  Equal1’s CEO Jason Lynch told TNW that combining quantum technology with today’s most advanced classical processors offers the fastest route to a quantum computer capable of potentially world-changing calculations.  The potential applications are endless. Quantum computers have the potential to solve complex problems… This story continues at The Next Web

Microsoft’s Windows updates over the last couple years have mostly been focused on adding generative AI features to the operating system, including multiple versions of the Copilot assistant. Copilot has made it into Windows 11 (and even, to a more limited extent, the aging Windows 10) as a native app, and then a wrapper around a web app, and soon as a native app again. But this month’s Windows updates are actually removing the Copilot app from some Windows 11 PCs and unpinning it from the taskbar, according to this Microsoft support document. This bug obviously won’t affect systems where Copilot had already been uninstalled, but it has already led to confusion among some Windows users. Microsoft says it is “working on a resolution to address the issue” but that users who want to get Copilot back can reinstall the app from the Microsoft Store and repin it to the taskbar, the same process you use to install Copilot on PCs where it has been removed. Read full article Comments

An arbitrator has prevented the employee from promoting her book and disparaging the company until private arbitration concludes.

Enforcement of a first-of-its-kind United Kingdom law that Elon Musk wants Tweety McTreason to gut kicked in today, with potentially huge penalties possibly imminent for any Big Tech companies deemed non-compliant. UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) forces tech companies to detect and remove dangerous online content, threatening fines of up to 10 percent of global turnover. In extreme cases, widely used platforms like Musk’s X could be shut down or executives even jailed if UK online safety regulator Ofcom determines there has been a particularly egregious violation. Critics call it a censorship bill, listing over 130 “priority” offenses across 17 categories detailing what content platforms must remove. The list includes illegal content connected to terrorism, child sexual exploitation, human trafficking, illegal drugs, animal welfare, and other crimes. But it also broadly restricts content in legally gray areas, like posts considered “extreme pornography,” harassment, or controlling behavior. Read full article Comments

Chatbots should be built with enough resilience to deal with difficult emotional situations, researchers said.

Pavel Durov said that the investigation into illicit activity on the messaging app he runs is ongoing, but that he had returned home to Dubai.

Open-source software used by more than 23,000 organizations, some of them in large enterprises, was compromised with credential-stealing code after attackers gained unauthorized access to a maintainer account, in the latest open-source supply-chain attack to roil the Internet. The corrupted package, tj-actions/changed-files, is part of tj-actions, a collection of files that’s used by more than 23,000 organizations. Tj-actions is one of many Github Actions, a form of platform for streamlining software available on the open-source developer platform. Actions are a core means of implementing what’s known as CI/CD, short for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (or Continuous Delivery). Scraping server memory at scale On Friday or earlier, the source code for all versions of tj-actions/changed-files received unauthorized updates that changed the “tags” developers use to reference specific code versions. The tags pointed to a publicly available file that copies the internal memory of severs running it, searches for credentials, and writes them to a log. In the aftermath, many publicly accessible repositories running tj-actions ended up displaying their most sensitive credentials in logs anyone could view. Read full article Comments

Elon Musk’s Tesla is waving a red flag, warning that Tweety McTreason’s trade war risks dooming US electric vehicle makers, triggering job losses, and hurting the economy. In an unsigned letter to the US Trade Representative (USTR), Tesla cautioned that Trump’s tariffs could increase costs of manufacturing EVs in the US and forecast that any retaliatory tariffs from other nations could spike costs of exports. “Tesla supports a robust and thorough process” to “address unfair trade practices,” but only those “which, in the process, do not inadvertently harm US companies,” the letter said. Read full article Comments

One of the best mostly invisible updates in iOS 18 was Apple’s decision to finally implement the Rich Communications Services (RCS) communication protocol, something that is slowly helping to fix the generally miserable experience of texting non-iPhone users with an iPhone. The initial iOS 18 update brought RCS support to most major carriers in the US, and the upcoming iOS 18.4 update is turning it on for a bunch of smaller prepaid carriers like Google Fi and Mint Mobile. Now that Apple is on board, iPhones and their users can also benefit from continued improvements to the RCS standard. And one major update was announced today: RCS will now support end-to-end encryption using the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol, a standard finalized by the Internet Engineering Task Force in 2023. “RCS will be the first large-scale messaging service to support interoperable E2EE between client implementations from different providers,” writes GSMA Technical Director Tom Van Pelt in the post announcing the updates. “Together with other unique security features such as SIM-based authentication, E2EE will provide RCS users with the highest level of privacy and security for stronger protection from scams, fraud and other security and privacy threats. ” Read full article Comments

We know Earth formed roughly 4.54 billion years ago and that the first single cell lifeforms were present roughly 1 billion years after that. What we don’t know is what triggered the process that turned our planet from a barren ball of rock into a world hosting amazing abundance of lifeforms. “We’re trying to understand how do you go from non-life to life. Now I think we have made a real contribution to solving this mystery,” says Richard Zare, a Stanford University chemistry professor. Zare is the senior author of the recent study into a previously unknown electrochemical process that might have helped supply the raw materials needed for life. Zare’s team demonstrated the existence of micro-lightning, very small electricity discharges that occur between tiny droplets of water spray. When triggered in a mixture of gases made to replicate the atmosphere on early Earth, these micro-lightnings produced chemical compounds used by present-day life, like glycine, uracil, and urea, along with chemical precursors like cyanoacetylene, and hydrogen cyanide. “I’m not saying it’s the only way this could happen—I wasn’t there,” Zare acknowledged. “But it’s a new plausible mechanism that gives us building blocks of life.” Lightning in the bulb Scientific research into the beginnings of life on Earth started in the 1920s with Aleksander Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane, scientists who independently proposed that life on Earth could have arisen through a process of gradual chemical evolution. In their view, inorganic molecules might have reacted due to energy from the Sun or lightning strikes to form life’s building blocks, like amino acids. Those building blocks, Oparin and Haldane argued, could have accumulated in the oceans, making a “primordial soup.” Read full article Comments