The woman, a rice farmer in the Philippines, headed to the emergency department. There, doctors gave her a physical exam and found nothing out of the ordinary. Then they took a look at her brain. Magnetic resonance imaging revealed a bright cluster of nodules surrounded by fluid in her left frontal lobe. The doctors had an immediate guess as to what they were: worm eggs.

In a case report published in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors write that they suspected the woman had neuroschistosomiasis, an uncommon complication of an infection with a Schistosoma parasitic worm, aka a blood fluke. In the Philippines, the most common fluke is S. japonicum. It's also found in China and part of Indonesia; despite its name, it has been eliminated from Japan.

Read full article

Comments

OpenAI and Anthropic both recently released new models aimed at lowering costs. Anthropic announced Opus 5.5, the latest version of its main mass-market workhorse model, used for tasks like coding and other complex knowledge work.

And OpenAI announced GPT-6 Sol and Luna, the latest versions of its middle-of-the-road or smaller models focused on efficiency and speed.

Read full article

Comments

The Federal Communications Commission has been taking public comments on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that proposes to preempt state and local permitting rules. The FCC argues that too many local governments "excessively delay approvals and seek to extract exorbitant sums from providers, resulting in costs that render some deployments infeasible."

The FCC plan is supported by broadband providers, but local governments told the FCC that it would override rules that protect public safety. Local governments say the plan is illegal and that the FCC should instead focus on how Internet providers thwart competition with permit-hoarding and other tactics that prevent competitors from deploying networks.

Read full article

Comments

Named EvilTokens, the platform was introduced over a Telegram channel in February and charged an initial $1,500 fee and a recurring $500 charge each month after that. EvilTokens provided a single service for streamlining most steps required to compromise email accounts in large numbers. From there, the platform helped customers analyze inboxes, select targets that would provide the biggest potential payouts, and draft follow-up emails that provided realistic ruses for tricking company employees into transferring funds to attacker-controlled accounts.

Minutes, not days

“While EvilTokens helped cybercriminals access email accounts, at the center of the service was an AI-style chatbot that could analyze a victim’s inbox and help criminals identify trusted relationships, payment authorizations, and sensitive responsibilities, as well as other circumstances where fraud was most likely to succeed,” Microsoft said. “The platform could even recommend fraud strategies, including drafting messages that impersonated trusted contacts to help criminals trick victims into taking action.”

Read full article

Comments

Now, British Columbia is suing, explaining for the first time how costly and extreme the disaster response has been. OpenAI and Sam Altman owe the tiny remote mining community shattered by the tragedy much more than an apology, the Canadian province argued. They must make meaningful changes to end ChatGPT-assisted violence and then pay whatever it costs to help Tumbler Ridge to rebuild, recover, and heal.

In a complaint filed Monday, British Columbia explained that Tumbler Ridge Secondary School had to be demolished after an 18-year-old transgender shooter, Jesse Van Rootselaar, died by suicide there in February after killing five kids and an education assistant. In total, eight lives were lost, as prior to the school shooting, Van Rootselaar shot their mother and half-brother.

Read full article

Comments

Android's version of Premiere doesn't offer all the features you'd get in the desktop application, but it's a big step up from the soon-to-be-retired Premiere Rush app. You can import as many video tracks as you want, trim them, split them, add effects, and export videos in up to 4K resolution. It can even extract audio from clips, reduce background noise, and add voiceovers. The app emphasizes the YouTube Short format, even defaulting your video outputs to portrait 16:9, but you can change that to something more traditional.

On a standard smartphone, the app splits the screen with the timeline at the bottom and preview up top. Adobe says that Premiere is optimized for multiple form factors. If you have a foldable phone, the UI adjusts to give you more breathing room, placing the timeline to the right of the video. That makes sense as the default, as Premiere wants you to make YouTube Shorts, but if you're working with something wider, there's a layout toggle that puts the widescreen video above the expanded timeline. The split is also adjustable if you want to make your video or timeline larger.

Read full article

Comments

(Spoilers below, but we'll give you a heads-up before any major reveals.)

When the first Resident Evil game debuted in 1996, it was an immediate commercial and critical success, spawning several sequel games, comics, novels, and a very lucrative film franchise directed by Paul W.S. Anderson and starring Milla Jovovich. Reviews were mixed, despite the films’ massive box office success. The first reboot, Welcome to Raccoon City (2021), was critically panned and had a disappointing box office, grossing just $42 million globally against its $25 million budget. The studio nixed its plans for a direct sequel, and a 2022 Netflix series was also canceled after a less-than-stellar first season.

Read full article

Comments

Starting in 2028, the Toyota Motor group aims to start investing $6.42 billion every year in upgrading factories with the new robotic workforce, according to Nikkei Asia. The company wants to put 150,000 robots in its own automotive plants and deploy another 250,000 at group company facilities that produce various components and materials.

Toyota has already begun deploying some of its ELEY humanoid robots across assembly lines to learn from human workers. Nikkei Asia reported that workers are teaching the robots, which roll around on wheels, to perform tasks requiring precise hand movements by wearing “jigs” based on the humanoids’ fingers.

Read full article

Comments

The data loss occurred on August 18, the English hospitals announced in a blog post on Monday spotted by The Register. The blog said the problem is “the result of human error” during routine technical work while “creating a copy of a radiotherapy database for reporting purposes.”

The post reads:

Read full article

Comments

Later in the year, the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society announced an effort to give researchers a central place to compile the kind of work that would have fed the next US report, as well as potential regional and local reports. This “US Climate Collection” works differently from the US Global Change Research Program or the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Rather than facilitating the writing of a giant, coordinated report, the groups are inviting teams of researchers to publish peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals, which will then be added to a centralized resource for future report-writers.

The first paper has now been added to that collection. It’s the work of 175 authors (many of whom had been working on the US report), and it is actually being published in two journals—one operated by the American Geophysical Union and one by the American Meteorological Society. That’s because this paper is intended to provide a roadmap to prioritize future contributions.

Read full article

Comments

The biggest apparent change is for the Halo franchise, which will now be under the remit of Call of Duty maker Activision. Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries), which recently released Halo: Campaign Evolved, will remain as just a "small team" to support the player community, Microsoft said, with the remaining staffing roles eliminated as part of 268 newly announced layoffs.

"For Halo, our goal is clear: make the greatest Halo game ever, worthy of its universe and legacy, while staying true to what made players love it in the first place," Activision President Rob Kostich said in a statement provided to Kotaku. "It is a bold ambition, one that this franchise deserves. We have already begun assembling a purpose-built team, unique in capability and talent, ready and excited to deliver this next chapter with the community."

Read full article

Comments

Total automotive sales in Europe have fallen from a peak of almost 18 million in 2019 to around 13 million in 2025, and some share of that smaller market is increasingly going to new entrants from China, which has its own spare automotive production capacity problem to worry about. And while the US market has always been the most profitable for German car exports, that was before the imposition of new import tariffs, which currently stand at 25 percent but could be subject to change at any time.

Factory closures now seem not just possible but likely, something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Earlier this summer, news emerged that Volkswagen Group is considering closing four of its German factories to prepare for the future. Things have not gotten much better for VW Group in the months since that news broke.

Read full article

Comments

Staffers were essentially asked to start looking the other way when private interests cause preventable deaths of vulnerable animals. Instead of prohibiting habitat modifications that injure animals or cause accidental deaths, the ESA will now only prohibit actions “specifically intending to target an animal,” FWS Director Brian Nesvik instructed staff in the September 14 memo.

“A vessel that inadvertently strikes a whale has not taken it because the vessel’s course was not set against the whale,” Nesvik’s memo said. “Felling a tree is not a take of the bats roosting in it unless the tree is felled for the purpose of killing or capturing them.”

Read full article

Comments

The Chinese invented the first bristle toothbrush during the Ming dynasty. That concept muddled along quite nicely until 1937, when Tomlinson Moseley filed a patent for the earliest electric toothbrush. After more than 400 years, the Motodent marked the beginning of an evolutionary shift from manual brushing to powered oral care.

Having had considerable success reimagining established product categories such as stick vacuums and premium hair dryers—though not so much air-purifying headphones—the company earlier this month, with great fanfare, unveiled the next leap forward for teeth: the $499 Dyson CameraJet with a tiny camera to aim streams of rinsing fluid into the gaps between your teeth.

Read full article

Comments

Jared Isaacman, now in his 10th month at the helm of the world's largest civilian space agency, told a gathering of military leaders and defense contractors last week near Washington, DC, that the 21st-century race to the Moon is more than a battle of ideologies. The sweet spot for a Moon base, Isaacman said, is a relatively small region near the lunar south pole, and there are tangible implications for who gets there first.

The Moon's south pole harbors substantial quantities of water ice concentrated on the floors of craters away from the reach of sublimating rays of sunlight. The ice inside these eternally dark craters could be used to supply water, air, and rocket fuel for a Moon base, supporting a permanent settlement and providing a springboard for future expeditions to Mars.

Read full article

Comments

Meta introduced Muse a few weeks ago. The assistant “books appointments, fills out forms and handles customer service,” “proactively takes tasks off your plate,” and can “make purchases, generate images, create documents, and connect with your favorite apps and services.” The macOS app (curiously, there’s no Windows version) also works with a user’s WhatsApp, email, calendar, and social media accounts. When a task requires a tool that doesn’t exist, Muse creates one on the fly.

Meta doth hype Muse security too much

Of course, for Muse to do any of these things, users must first give it access to their accounts. This includes authenticating the assistant to each service and, because the app runs on macOS, giving it permissions to a broad range of operating system-restricted device resources, like writing files to disk, accessing the mic and camera, and monitoring location and calendars. Apple has spent years developing these defenses to prevent installed apps or commands entered into the terminal from accessing these resources, clearly because the company considers them a security threat. Muse completely undoes these default measures.

Read full article

Comments

The lopsided battle took place on September 12 when members of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence detected the Russian uncrewed surface vessel (USV) in the Black Sea and directed a Ukrainian Navy drone boat to intercept. The Russian vessel was “positively identified” as an Orcan surface drone with a “jet ski type steerable water jet” designed to ram targets and explode, according to naval analyst HI Sutton in Naval News.

Such Orcan drones have already been used to attack Ukrainian ports and ships. These often work in coordination with flying drones, like Russian Geran drones that provide aerial reconnaissance and can boost communication between drone operators and drone boats, Sutton explained.

Read full article

Comments

KING ABDULLAH ECONOMIC CITY, Saudi Arabia—It may come as a surprise to some, but Saudi Arabia has never had a domestic automaker. That changes with Ceer. A joint venture between the country’s Public Investment Fund and Foxconn, it’s the Kingdom’s first home-grown automaker and a significant part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 plan to diversify its economy away from oil production and bring technological innovation locally by the end of the decade.

Ceer in Arabic means to “drive forward,” and this forward-looking approach applies to the vehicle lineup. The flagship vehicles you see here—the Exobot sedan and SUV—are demonstrations of what the company is capable of and the vision it sees for future vehicles in the portfolio.

It plans to have seven new cars in its portfolio by 2030—some of which will be hybrids—and while that doesn’t currently include sales outside the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) region, Ceer says it's building a competitive, world-class product and that if the demand is there, expansion is possible.

Read full article

Comments

The hack took place during a test conducted by cybersecurity firm Irregular. A collection of Gemini models were taking part in a "capture the flag" exercise intended to test the AI's cybersecurity capabilities in a closed environment. The AI was instructed to retrieve information from a fake company (which shared a name with a real company) within this environment. Irregular was not supposed to allow the model to operate outside its servers, but due to a misconfiguration, Gemini was able to access the Internet.

When Gemini started snooping around the web, it targeted real infrastructure instead of the fakes. For one of the three hacks, Gemini simply guessed passwords until it accessed a company's online services. In the other two instances, Gemini searched public software repositories until it found login credentials for companies that had been accidentally included.

Read full article

Comments

This initial leak has been confirmed and expanded on by outlets such as The New York Times and Politico. It now appears that the administration is drafting an executive order that would give Vought veto power over every individual grant awarded by the NIH.

If at first you don't succeed

The NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research on the planet, and its $47 billion budget is larger than that of the next 10 research funders combined. Its funding, distributed largely through grants to academic researchers at universities, supports everything from basic biological research to clinical trials and has helped the biotechnology industry flourish.

Read full article

Comments