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.

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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.

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"The Paramount/Warner Brothers merger seems facially illegal, and the state AG lawsuit challenging it is very strong," Lina Khan, who chaired the Federal Trade Commission during the Biden administration, wrote yesterday. "It’s troubling to hear that the states may now settle for behavioral remedies, allowing the deal to go through subject to various promises from the firms. Behavioral remedies routinely fail, and the stakes here are particularly high given that a strong democracy requires open markets for sound journalism and creative expression."

After news of advanced settlement talks was reported over the weekend, Bloomberg reported today that Paramount reached an agreement with California and other states that sued to block the merger. "Settlement talks came to fruition over the weekend after four states that had opposed terms of a deal outlined with California conceded," Bloomberg wrote, citing a person familiar with the matter.

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The US president’s announcement comes as leading industry figures have sounded the alarm that humans could lose control over the rapidly advancing technology without a slowdown in development.

However, rather than announcing regulation as some have demanded, Trump has dismissed safety concerns as a “hoax.”

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(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

Reacher fans will already be familiar with Frances Neagley, played to perfection by Maria Sten (Swamp Thing). She’s arguably the most diehard friend of former US Army military police officer turned drifter Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson), coming to his aid again and again as he confronts a bevy of dangerous criminals over four hugely entertaining seasons. (Of course Ritchson’s Reacher makes an appearance in an opening scene, lending his muscle to rescue a kidnapped child.)

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These play-it-safe updates aren’t very exciting, but they’re also usually all upside—you get a year or two's worth of technological improvements for the same price you would have paid for the older version yesterday. Unfortunately, 2026's unprecedented memory crunch has upended that standard operating procedure.

The new Mac mini starts at $899 for a version with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, a $300 increase for the same memory and storage specs you could get in the $599 M4 Mac mini in 2024.

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After the Googlebook reveal at I/O this year, Google's partners are now ready to sell you one. The first Googlebooks are available from several OEMs that have been making Chromebooks over the years, but don't expect Chromebook pricing. There's only one model under a grand, and the rest are well above that.

Familiar hardware

The bulk of Chromebooks have been budget machines, and they looked the part. Googlebooks, however, feature bright OLED screens, metal builds, big haptic trackpads, and the Glowbar. All the machines have this illuminated bar on the lid, but it doesn't do much for now. It lights up when the device boots and can display battery level, but Google says it's going to release an API for developers to add more features.

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Now Google’s threat intelligence group has revealed that during a key moment of TeamPCP’s rampage, the company’s own undercover researcher had infiltrated the group—allowing Google to monitor the hacking spree from the inside, warn breach targets, and even help disrupt the group’s attempts to exploit those victims.

In a talk at security firm SentinelOne's LABScon research conference today, Google Threat Intelligence Group researcher Austin Larsen will present details on the company’s investigation—and infiltration—of TeamPCP amidst the group’s unprecedented, chaotic supply-chain hacking campaign. According to Larsen, Google eventually followed a trail of operational security mistakes allegedly made by one of the two Australians now accused of being leading members of the hacker group and passed on key identifying details to law enforcement. The company also received intelligence from ShinyHunters, another infamous cybercriminal group that TeamPCP partnered with, but which later turned on the supply-chain hackers. And perhaps most surprisingly, Larsen says that Google’s security subsidiary Mandiant had an undercover analyst—not himself—within the group’s inner circle from almost the beginning of TeamPCP’s time in the spotlight.

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For one thing, there is an extra pair of doors, rear-hinged ones that provide direct access to the pair of rear bucket seats. There’s still a rear hatch, so this is technically a five-door. But there’s an immovable firewall between the cargo area and the passenger cabin, and the rear seats do not fold flat. So unlike the 21st century breadvans we have previously reviewed, a Costco run in the Purosangue might be possible, but you’re probably going to want a roof rack if you plan to go skiing, cycling, or anything else that requires bulky equipment. It’s also probably accurate that Ferrari says the Purosangue is not an SUV but an FUV—a Ferrari Utility Vehicle.

Underneath that long hood lives a 6.5 L naturally aspirated V12, but mounted back in the chassis such that this is technically a front-mid engined layout. That contributes to the 49:51 front-to-rear weight ratio, as does the use of a transaxle gearbox for the rear wheels (an eight-speed, dual-clutch box); a separate power transfer unit at the front of the engine drives the front wheels, for this is an all-wheel drive Ferrari. But make no mistake, it’s a substantial one, too, befitting that massive 715 hp (533 kW), 528 lb-ft (716 Nm) engine: 195.8 inches (4,973 mm) long, 79.8 inches (2,028 mm) wide, 62.6 inches (1,589 mm) tall, with a 118.1-inch (3,018 mm) wheelbase and a 4,784 lbs (2,170 kg) curb weight.

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A team of researchers led by Randon J. Flores and Robert A. Eagle, geochemists at the University of California, Los Angeles, has measured the T. rex body temperature by analyzing its teeth. This dental thermometer read about 36° Celsius—roughly the body temperature of a modern elephant.

Dental thermometry

Paleontologists have long argued about dinosaur physiology based on indirect evidence like bone microstructure, growth rates, and where fossils turn up on the map. Some studies suggested many dinosaurs were endotherms, generating their own body heat like birds and mammals. Others argued that each lineage may have had its own thermal strategy.

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Could all this mental activity also help keep an aging brain healthier? Research suggests it can.

Concerns about memory and dementia can send aging adults looking for ways to exercise their brain and maintain cognitive function, whether it is solving crossword puzzles or playing a musical instrument. Language learning might not seem like the same kind of brain exercise, but it is a complex activity that engages several mental processes at once.

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In a recent study, Santos-Sanz and his colleagues used the James Webb Space Telescope to watch the same body, now known as Chariklo, pass in front of a background star again. They found one of its rings had grown denser and the other had almost vanished. We don’t know exactly why.

Shadowing a star

The technique behind the observation is simple. “We predict when a Solar System object passes in front of a star,” Santos-Sanz said. The starlight dims for a moment, and the shape of that dip reveals the size, shape, and surroundings of the object that caused it. “This is particularly challenging for minor bodies, and more challenging for distant minor bodies,” he said.

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That erroneous intelligence, submitted by a US Special Operations Command analyst, suggested the Chinese ship was transporting nuclear arms program components through the Middle East, according to "four sources familiar with the episode" cited by CNN. The US military was preparing to intercept and board the ship, with air support, before officials discovered a chatbot used in generating the report had "inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying."

One source told CNN the AI-powered fiasco "almost started a war."

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The FAA describes the SMART system as using AI models to predict air traffic flows and identify potential conflicts based on operational factors like airline schedules, weather, airport capacity, and airspace conditions. US government and industry officials told The Wall Street Journal that SMART could debut for the three major airports in the Washington, DC, area as soon as Monday, September 21.

The decision to launch SMART in a limited scope before going nationwide is the “right call,” said Philip Mann, principal consultant at Vector Strategic Consulting LLC, where he advises on aviation safety and AI governance. Mann previously worked at the FAA in multiple roles for 17 years.

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Under US law, companies with licenses to run broadcast stations need FCC approval to have direct or indirect foreign ownership exceeding 25 percent of the company's stock. Paramount says its indirect foreign ownership will reach 49.5 percent after it receives investments from the sovereign wealth funds and filed a petition asking the FCC to waive the foreign ownership limit.

Paramount, the owner of CBS, holds FCC licenses for the 28 local CBS stations that it owns and operates. Paramount is buying Warner Bros. Discovery in a $111 billion deal that is being partially financed with foreign investment but hasn't completed the acquisition because US states filed a lawsuit that aims to block the merger. Trump's Department of Justice approved the merger.

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The cortex is where the slow rhythms of deep sleep can be seen, but researchers assumed the signals that triggered them originated elsewhere. In a recent Nature study, Terral and Renata Batista-Brito, who runs the lab, report a population of cortical cells that challenges that assumption.

These cortical cells make up only around one percent of the cortex's inhibitory neurons, and switching them on in a mouse puts the animal to sleep. “What our work shows is that the cortex can not only see this rhythm but also initiate it by itself, and this is sufficient to promote sleep,” Terral said.

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The change came after social media users noticed an apparent contradiction: The National Archives was using one of Alibaba’s Qwen AI models, even as top US law enforcement claimed that such models illegally copy US frontier models. Earlier this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) named Alibaba among six leading Chinese firms allegedly conducting “industrial-scale distillation” that the agency says is helping America’s biggest competitor cut costs and development time in the race for global AI leadership.

It’s unclear when exactly the National Archives, which runs the Federal Register website, began offering visitors the option to use a Qwen model to search public comments on proposed regulations. So far, the independent agency tasked with increasing public access to federal government documents has not commented on the removal and did not respond to Ars’ request for comment. The White House and the FBI have also not commented.

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A Chinese optical engineer is the winner of this year's Small World in Motion competition, sponsored by Nikon. Ning Xu of Tsinghua University in Beijing beat out 346 other video entries from 40 different countries with his super-resolution video (above) of the abnormal beating of cilia in the airways of a child with a rare genetic respiratory disorder.

Founded in 2011, the Nikon Small World in Motion competition is a spinoff of the company's Small World Photomicrography Competition, which has been around since 1974. Both are meant "to showcase the beauty and complexity of things seen through the light microscope"—one through still photographs, the other through photovideography, taking advantage of all the technological advances that now allow users to make movies or time-lapse images through the microscope.

Primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) is a genetic disorder that adversely affects the tiny hairlike structures that line the lungs, among other areas. Their wavelike motion helps move around germs, mucus, dust, and other irritants so the body can dispel them via coughing or sneezing. In people born with PCD, there is something wrong with those cilia, so those irritants build up, causing respiratory infections, among other complications. The cilia might be the wrong size, the wrong shape, or missing altogether. They might move abnormally or not move at all.

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A small cyber security group gained access to an OpenAI employee’s ChatGPT account, which permitted them to read private software information and suggest changes.

The researchers had been given access to an Anthropic tool specifically designed for security professionals, and were paid for the work as part of a program to find vulnerabilities before they could be exploited by bad actors.

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As always, we welcome reader submissions, and 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.

Avio seeks to cash in on Falcon 9 retreat. Italian launch services provider Avio has seen an influx of customers who were unable to secure launch opportunities with SpaceX, European Spaceflight reports. “I can tell you SpaceX has already gone captive because we have a whole bunch of customers coming to us and saying, 'Oh my God, can you fly us?'” Avio CEO Giulio Ranzo said during the company’s September 10 earnings call. In recent months, SpaceX told multiple prospective customers that it was no longer accepting new orders for commercial Falcon 9 launches.

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