Stephen Diamantoni, a Republican elected coroner in 2007, told Lancaster Online that the baby died at home. "I believe it was the 18th of August," he said.

He also noted that the baby had a genetic condition called Amish lethal microcephaly, in which babies are born with unusually small heads and underdeveloped brains. The condition is caused by a mutation in the SLC25A19 gene, which codes for a protein involved with energy-producing enzymes in the mitochondria and is thought to be important for brain development. About 1 in 500 babies in the Old Order Amish population of Pennsylvania is born with the condition. Infants with the disorder only survive for about six months.

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Meanwhile, two watchdog groups and individual viewers of ABC stations are trying to intervene in the lawsuit, saying they are worried Disney will agree to a settlement with the FCC that isn't in the public's interest. Disney opposed the motion, and a judge will have to decide whether the groups and individuals can act as intervenors in the case.

Disney sued the FCC on August 18, saying the agency is waging a “campaign of censorship” to retaliate against ABC for speech that President Trump doesn't like. As the lawsuit gets underway, Trump continued his attacks on the media last weekend by demanding that the FCC punish or rebuke an NBC journalist for saying he has “mixed results” in his election endorsements.

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“The recording of ancient DNA of pathogens has completely changed our understanding of infectious disease in the past, and here we show that parchment can also preserve animal pathogen DNA. It is possible that archives and libraries around the world also contain the genetic traces of disease outbreaks in animals in the past,” said co-author Louis L’Hôte, a graduate student at University College Dublin. “These genomes help us understand how these pathogens evolved and how they impacted past societies—such as sheeppox virus, which we show has been affecting Eurasian sheep herds for at least three and a half millennia.”

Per the authors, the earliest known written evidence of sheeppox infection dates to the first century CE, when Roman accounts described outbreaks of skin lesions ("pustules") in the animals. There are more frequent mentions of deadly outbreaks of "pockes" or "variola" in sheep by the Middle Ages, recorded in various agricultural texts and accounting documents in France, Spain, and England. There seemed to be a decline in outbreaks in 17th-century France, although frequent outbreaks re-emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries, often with high mortality rates in the flocks. Great Britain did not experience a sheeppox resurgence until 1847.

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Broadcom’s acquisition of the virtualization firm brought the end of perpetual license sales and the arrival of pricey, stacked, subscription-based bundles that priced out many SMBs.

The most obvious is VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), VMware’s flagship private cloud bundle that has been Broadcom’s primary focus since taking over VMware. Many SMBs find that VCF is unaffordable and stuffed with unnecessary offerings. However, numerous customers have reported online that VMware sales representatives have still pushed them toward VCF, with some claiming that sales reps have told them that the lower-priced edition of VMware’s virtualization platform, vSphere Standard, was no longer available.

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The technique is broadly known as ASCII smuggling. It gained attention two years ago as a means of making a class of AI attack known as prompt injections more stealthy. Malicious instructions embedded in emails or other untrusted content to be processed by an LLM aren’t written in ordinary text. Instead, they’re rendered by a special range of Unicode tags. For example, the tag point U+E0041 mirrors “A,” and U+E0061 mirrors “a.”

No longer just for obscuring prompt injections

The block of 128 tags mimics a portion of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange almost perfectly, with one major difference: the characters they encode are readable by computers but, by design, are almost completely invisible to humans. By expressing the malicious prompts in these tags, LLMs detect the instructions, but people reading the email never see them. There’s much more about ASCII smuggling here.

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The next day, though, the clinical guidance document disappeared, as did an accompanying statement by spokesperson Sean Parnell. The withdrawal was first reported by Reuters.

In a statement sent to Ars Technica, the Pentagon said that the document, titled "Clinical Guidance for Health and Human Performance Optimization," had been temporarily rescinded on September 3 to allow for updates.

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That news comes courtesy of former Valve writer Chet Faliszek, who said in a newly posted video about cut lines in the game that "for Left 4 Dead 2 with the ESRB... we leaked our trailer ahead of time because they wouldn't let us release the trailer."

Faliszek is referring to the Entertainment Software Rating Board, the self-regulating industry group that, since 1994, has offered sometimes questionable age-appropriateness ratings for thousands of games submitted to its purview. While many smaller and/or online-focused game makers skip out on getting those ratings these days, at the time, any publisher that wanted space on major retailers' shelves needed to submit to the ESRB's standards.

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The new work involved a collaboration between biologists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus and computer scientists at Google—both acknowledge that neither could have done the project without the other. Preparation of an entire brain for imaging at the necessary resolution requires a distinct set of skills, as does interpreting what those images indicate. But building a complete picture of the hundreds of millions of synapses in a brain as small as the fruit fly's is a task that can't be achieved by humans in a manageable amount of time.

The people behind the effort expect that in the long term, the effort will be worth it, as the connectome could give neurobiologists a valuable tool for understanding how the brain works.

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The company’s Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT) is a small group of advisers created to safeguard the lab’s mission of developing AI for the long-term benefit of humanity, even as commercial pressures intensify.

The trust holds no equity in Anthropic, but has significant influence, with the San Francisco-based company planning to preserve its role after a stock market debut that could value the Claude maker at as much as $2 trillion.

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In his opinion, Chief Judge Colm Connolly explained that Operation Bluebird was unlikely to prove that X had entirely abandoned the Twitter name. Therefore, X was likely to succeed on trademark infringement and dilution claims tied to the platform’s former name.

Most compellingly, X argued that it still uses the Twitter name in the current listing for the X app in Apple’s App Store. In the first sentence of that listing, written in the same size font as the rest of the text, a single clause clinched the early court win for X by stating, “Welcome to X (formerly known as Twitter).”

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Politico first reported the diplomatic turmoil, saying that the White House "pressured" US space companies to skip Macron's space summit in Paris next week. Since then, the companies have largely pulled out of the meeting without commenting publicly, though some US representation remains on the two-day program.

Multiple sources confirmed to Ars that an official with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP, led the call with US space companies late last week. The call was convened in response to queries from US industry about the French meeting, which is not part of the traditional circuit of international space conferences.

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As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Isar Aerospace is ready to try again. Isar Aerospace is about to make the next attempt to launch the Spectrum rocket into orbit, with a weeklong launch window set to open Friday at Andøya Spaceport in Norway, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) reports. The German launch company aims to deliver several small CubeSats to orbit with the two-stage Spectrum rocket. A test flight of the privately funded launcher failed shortly after liftoff last year, and Isar has attempted to launch the second Spectrum rocket several times since January, only to be thwarted by technical problems and the unavailability of the launch range in northern Norway.

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The new $650 Fairphone Gen 6+ is designed both for longevity and easy repairability. There are trade-offs to this approach if you're used to the standard glass and aluminum sandwiches filled with glue, gaskets, and teeny-tiny screws. But the drawbacks could be worth it for the right buyer. Fairphone CTO Chandler Hatton told Ars that Fairphone's goal is to provide a compelling mobile experience while also enabling the user to "fully own" their device. At the end of the day, this is what a lot of people say they want in a smartphone.

Take it apart, put it back together

These days, Google, Samsung, and Apple support phones with software updates for the better part of a decade, but will the hardware last that long? And what happens when it needs a repair? You may be out of luck or out a lot of money, but Fairphone prioritizes the self-repair experience.

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Early today, Reuters reported that Kennedy instructed new CDC director Erica Schwartz to delete the two deaths from the agency's website. CDC staff had reportedly already reviewed information about the deaths and accepted the characterization that they were measles-related. Still, Schwartz deleted the deaths without objection, insiders told Reuters. According to previous reporting, the two deaths were added and then removed from the CDC's website within hours on August 30.

The deaths were of a newborn and a child, and they were reported last week by health officials in Pennsylvania. The state's ongoing measles outbreak has sickened 540 so far, including 119 just in the last week.

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Starting in November, Game Pass subscriptions will include the following monthly limits on game streaming time:

• Game Pass Ultimate ($23/month): 15 hours
• Game Pass Premium ($15/month): 10 hours
• Game Pass Essential ($10/month): 5 hours

Subscribers who use up their monthly streaming allotment will be able to buy additional time, Microsoft said, without sharing specific pricing or availability for that streaming time. Access to downloadable versions of games included in a Game Pass subscription remains unaffected.

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In a study published in the latest issue of Science Translational Medicine, scientist sifted through the dump of immunological data from the infections, logging new ways to train immune cells to defeat the bacteria behind the outbreak, a type of Shigella. Researchers were able to pluck out specific bits of the bacteria that the immune system could most effectively attack, linking specific target molecules to specific types of germ-busting immune responses. The researchers even precisely homed in on some of the tiny notches within those craggy target molecules where the most potent antibodies attached.

In all, the study "revealed unexpected features of the anti-Shigella antibody response in naturally infected [non-human primates] and represents a step toward the rational design of Shigella vaccine candidates," the authors write.

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VPNs funnel all of a user’s Internet traffic through an encrypted connection to a remote server. The design provides strong assurances that no one between the user and the server can read the encrypted contents. VPNs also allow users to hide their IP addresses from the destination servers they communicate with. While US agencies have previously recommended use of VPNs, none have given recommendations on which ones provide adequate protection.

It's all in the nuances

There are a host of limitations that can undo many of the protections users may think their VPN provides them. For instance, the encrypted tunnel often terminates once a single server decrypts the traffic and sends it on to its final destination. That means the decrypted traffic or the sending and destination IP addresses may be available for snooping by rogue employees or attackers who hack the server. VPNs also don’t encrypt certain types of metadata, such as time stamps, allowing nation-states to build profiles that can be useful in intelligence gathering.

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“Companies like Kalshi claim to offer legal sports betting in all 50 states, but they refuse to follow the gambling laws of any state," New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport said in a press release announcing the lawsuit.

In April, the US Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit ruled that New Jersey cannot regulate sports bets on prediction markets. The court determined that sports-related event contracts meet the legal definition of "swaps," giving the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) exclusive jurisdiction.

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Tottenham hasn’t disclosed which VMware products it used or how much it previously paid the Broadcom firm.

The soccer organization confirmed this week to The Register that it has moved its stadium's server, storage, and networking infrastructure to HPE solutions delivered through HPE's hybrid cloud management platform, GreenLake. That is all “underpinned by" VME and HPE's OpsRamp software for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, Rob Pickering, Tottenham's CTO, told the publication, with HPE in charge of the hybrid cloud-managed service.

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In this, they do much better than current "electronic noses." Even the most advanced ones on the market tend to be expensive, painfully narrow in what they can detect, and quick to forget an odor the moment they learn a new one.

So why not just copy the fly? That's the question a growing number of researchers have been asking—including Kevin Max and Yang Shen at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, whose new algorithm, Spi-Fly, is described in a paper recently published in the journal Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering.

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