In an announcement Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services said it had begun the process to decertify the organization, Network for Hope (NFH). Losing its certification would effectively shutter the organization, which serves Kentucky as well as parts of Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia. If decertified, another organization will be appointed to coordinate donations in the region.

In a statement, NFH said it "strongly disagrees" with the HHS's finding and will appeal the decertification decision.

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The drone was first spotted by an airport employee hovering close to the ground between two parked An-124 cargo aircraft owned by Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines shortly before midnight on August 4, according to The Guardian. It had apparently been modified to help avoid detection by the airport’s drone defense sensors, said Alexander Dobrindt, federal minister of the interior for Germany, during a press conference.

Dobrindt described the drone as carrying a fist-sized package of a substance believed to be the plastic explosive Semtex. Only a failed detonator prevented the drone from exploding near the Ukrainian cargo aircraft, he said.

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"This case involves an unusually brazen group boycott," X said in a filing yesterday. "That misconduct has drawn the attention of regulators and Congress. There is no valid reason that this effort by the direct victim to recover its massive economic losses from that boycott should not move forward."

X's lawsuit was thrown out in March when US District Judge Jane Boyle in the Northern District of Texas ruled that advertisers did not commit any antitrust violation. Last week, Musk reached a settlement with the World Federation of Advertisers, the first defendant named in the lawsuit.

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In a blog post announcing the plans, Suno CEO and co-founder Mikey Shulman says this is a necessary change to meet "emerging industry standards" for the labeling of AI content. Soon, the company will add watermarks to all audio outputs from its models, giving platforms the option to mark content as AI or block it entirely. Shulman doesn't say if Suno will rely on an in-house solution or a ready-made solution like Google's SynthID.

Google recently began licensing SynthID to other companies. Google says the tech has been used to label 60,000 years' worth of audio generated by its Gemini models, plus more than 100 billion images and videos.

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Anthropic is hiring a "custom silicon team" to design chips on which to run its models, the company has revealed.

Yesterday, Business Insider noticed a job listing for a senior engineer with experience shipping semiconductor designs. (You can see listings for a silicon engineer and a technical program manager, silicon on Anthropic's job board right now.) A spokesperson for Anthropic then confirmed the plans to both Business Insider and TechCrunch.

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Since the genetic code provides a layer of abstraction between DNA and proteins, it wasn't obvious what a model trained on DNA could do. Yet people went ahead and made a large genome model, and it turned out to be able to output DNA sequences that could encode functional proteins in bacteria and mimic the gene structures found in complex cells. Now, those same models have been used to output the genomes of viruses that infect bacteria.

This isn't science fiction—all the viruses the models created are closely related to an existing virus. But they do have some distinct features that would be challenging to evolve. And the researchers who did the work, based at Stanford University, suggest we may want to start thinking now about preparing for the potential that someone could develop a related AI that can design a virus that targets vertebrates.

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The space company's chief executive, Dave Limp, said investigative work is continuing into the anomaly that happened during a hot-fire test of the rocket during the evening of May 28, 2026. He confirmed, for the first time, widespread speculation that the problem started in one of the rocket's seven BE-4 engines that power the vehicle's first stage.

"The anomaly originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines, which was later confirmed by hardware recovery and inspections," he said. "Extensive component-level and engine hotfire tests have been conducted to understand the failure mode better and inform mitigations."

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The latest finding: DNA analysis revealed the same fungus in both parasitized insects and surrounding mosses, according to a paper published in the journal IMA Fungus. (Yes, really.) This suggests a second life stage during which the fungus lives inside the moss, possibly an evolutionary adaptation to survive when insect hosts may be scarce. It could also explain why the host species seems to prefer biting into mosses during their final death throes.

As we've previously reported, there are more than 400 different species of Cordyceps fungi, each targeting a particular insect species, like ants, dragonflies, cockroaches, aphids, or beetles. The spores attach to the target insect, such as a carpenter ant, and germinate, spreading through the host’s body via long tendrils called mycelia. Cordyceps essentially turns its host into a zombie slave, compelling the ant to climb to the top of the nearest plant and clamp its tiny jaws in a death grip around a leaf or twig.

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The rule prohibits any single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent of all TV households in the US. Under Chairman Brendan Carr, the FCC is replacing the rule with a “case-by-case review” of each proposed merger.

"This will empower the FCC to approve deals that promote the public interest while allowing the agency to reject any deals that do not meet that standard," Carr's office said in a press release today. Without the 39 percent rule, broadcasters will be better able to compete against streaming companies that don't face similar limits, Carr's office said.

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On Thursday, vaccine maker Moderna announced that its flu shot, mRNA-1010, aka mFLUSIVA, had earned approval for use in all adults ages 50 and up. The approval announcement follows a unanimous vote by FDA advisors in June to approve the vaccine. That vote was based on its superior efficacy to existing seasonal flu shots and a good safety record demonstrated in trials that included nearly 44,000 people. After that vote, the FDA set a goal of August 5 for a decision on the vaccine's fate.

While the unanimous support from FDA advisors boded well for Moderna's shot, the overall path to approval was treacherous and uncertain, even until the end. For one thing, current Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a well-established anti-vaccine advocate who has worked diligently in his time in office to thwart vaccinations. One of his first acts as health secretary was canceling a federal campaign to encourage people to get flu shots in the midst of a bad flu season—despite the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had already paid for the campaign and the flu season was killing relatively high numbers of children.

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The tech company spent several months building and internally testing Cloudflare OS, which allows employees to describe workflows in natural language so that an AI agent can code them into applications. In an August 5 blog post announcing the open source version’s availability on GitHub, the company claims thousands of Cloudflare employees use the platform on a daily basis to “create documents and slides, automate repeatable tasks, and build small apps to visualize data and help them do their work.”

“This is a full-on personal app vibe coding platform, in which the sandbox is so secure that you can pretty much go wild—the AI cannot introduce a significant security bug,” said Kenton Varda, principal engineer at Cloudflare, in a post on the social media platform X. “We believe a company's security team can feel comfortable giving non-technical users permission to vibe code and then sleep soundly at night.”

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And today, we found out what that first new EV—an affordable four-door pickup truck—will be called: the Ford Fathom.

We've known for some time that the first EV built on Ford's new UEV platform was going to be a pickup truck. And that it would use a new zonal architecture for its electronics, which massively reduces the amount of wiring needed by swapping the hundred or more discrete electronic control units you find in most new cars with a handful of powerful computers each controlling multiple domains.

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At its best, social media can be a haven for people who want to share their experiences and knowledge. It gets closest to this ideal when users contribute authentic, valuable content, whether that’s a uniquely thoughtful blog post or a helpful video on how to build a PC. Relying primarily on AI tools to preserve that authenticity misses what makes social media worthwhile in the first place: the people behind it.

Erroneous erasures

In April, a Slack channel for moderators of the r/AskHistorians Reddit community was usually busy. The channel, which automatically receives links to modmail messages, was flooded with alerts after dozens of comments and posts dating back 10 years were automatically removed from the subreddit.

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Baseboard management controllers are miniature computers that are embedded into the motherboards of virtually every enterprise server. The microcontrollers, typically abbreviated as BMCs, run with their own operating system firmware, network stack, and IP address. Administrators rely on them to monitor the physical status of large fleets of servers and to perform a variety of tasks, including rebooting machines, installing updates, and even reinstalling operating systems. BMCs provide what’s known as “lights out” and “out-of-band” management because they work even when servers they’re attached to are turned off or are unresponsive.

A “pervasive, under-monitored, under-patched parallel attack surface”

Researchers have warned since at least 2013 that BMCs present a golden opportunity for hackers looking for ways to gain deep and persistent access to datacenters. The chief culprit was IPMI, the protocol that allows BMCs to operate independently of servers and to perform administrative tasks. Vulnerabilities in this firmware made it possible for attackers to remotely execute malicious code on the controllers and, from there, infect the servers they manage.

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The confirmation ends a nearly yearlong vacancy for the position since Kennedy fired the previous CDC director, Susan Monarez, last August. Monarez was ousted after she refused to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from a panel of Kennedy's hand-selected advisors, who hold similar anti-vaccine views to his own.

Schwartz is highly qualified for the role, coming to the CDC with a medical degree, a master’s degree in public health, and a law degree. She previously had a long stint as a Navy officer and held leadership roles including chief medical officer for the US Coast Guard and deputy surgeon general in the first Trump administration. Notably, she has been a public advocate for vaccines and outbreak preparedness.

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The security incidents occurred during a cyber evaluation of seven leading AI models’ capabilities by the AI Security Institute (AISI), a research organization within the UK government, in late July. The researchers discovered 19 instances in which “AI agents took unsanctioned action on the live Internet, including cases that targeted real people and organizations,” according to an AISI blog post published on August 4.

Almost all the “autonomous, unsanctioned” actions came from Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model, with two such actions coming from OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol. The AI Security Institute’s security team first realized that something was amiss on the morning of July 28, when its commercial security monitoring service flagged data leaving one of the testing systems through the Tor anonymity network.

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Reddit has strayed from saying that it will shutter the website, which many long-time Redditors prefer for its layout, navigation, and fewer feed recommendations.

In a blog post today, Reddit made a vague statement about upcoming “changes” to Old Reddit:

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The policy draws some strange boundaries. It applies to "AI-generated music" (not photorealistic) but not to "riding a unicorn through a fantastical world" (this could be photorealistic, though it is not plausible). YouTube then summarizes the policy in a different way: "Realistic AI content and meaningful changes require disclosure, while non-realistic or minor edits don’t."

But AI uses that require no disclosure can include everything from "idea generation" up through "production assistance, like using generative AI tools to create or improve a video outline, script, thumbnail, title, or infographic." Creators are free to clone their own voices for voiceovers. They can also use "AI-generated or altered animation of a missile in a fully animated video."

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SpaceX has so far partnered with traditional mobile carriers to supplement their ground-based networks with Starlink satellite capacity, mainly to ensure coverage from space in dead zones not reached by cell towers. But SpaceX is buying spectrum licenses that would let it offer its own terrestrial service to compete directly against the big carriers, and the firm's top executives said in yesterday's earnings call they plan to do just that.

"The spectrum that we purchased from EchoStar does have terrestrial components, so we definitely intend to build out the terrestrial component," SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in response to questions on the earnings call. "So you will have not only the capacity from the satellites themselves, but you will have a buildout of the terrestrial, basically the hardware and systems necessary to make a true mobile service exactly what you want it to be."

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Two "strikes" in a year might seem notable, but like the middling hurricane season to date, Arthur and Bertha were both middle-of-the road tropical storms in terms of intensity.

As a resident of a coastal region prone to hurricanes, one never wants to tempt fate. And in truth, since it is only early August, the bulk of seasonal activity definitely lies ahead of us. But all indications are we can look forward to a quiet season.

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