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said that the document, titled "Clinical Guidance for Health and Human Performance Optimization," had been temporarily rescinded on September 3 to allow for updates.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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Anthropic first reported a "partial outage" related to "elevated errors on requests to Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5" at 9:23 am (all times Eastern). The company reported that it had "identified the cause" of the error roughly 15 minutes later, before reporting that "a fix has been deployed" and the issue was resolved by 12:16 pm. A separate incident report indicated "elevated errors on requests to Claude Sonnet 5" for a brief period just after noon.

OpenAI, meanwhile, reported "elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex" were resulting in "degraded performance" as of 10:43 am Thursday morning. A mitigation put in place a little more than half an hour later led to the issue being marked as "resolved" by 12:55 pm.

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Guidance posted by US Customs and Border Protection says that starting Thursday, a 100 percent tariff will apply to imported drones that use thermal imaging or weigh more than 55 pounds.

Additionally, a 25 percent tariff has been placed on smaller drones, and drones from US allies were hit with smaller but not inconsequential tariffs. There’s now a 10 percent levy on British-made drones and 15 percent levies on drones from the European Union, Japan, Liechtenstein, South Korea, Switzerland, and Taiwan. “Nonsensitive” drones without thermal imaging and their components will carry a 25 percent tariff, starting on February 9, 2027.

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Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and "24/7 lectures," whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words.

Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of scientific merit. In the weeks following the ceremony, the winners will also give free public talks, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website.

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Hugging Face, which only last year turned down a large investment from Nvidia at a $7 billion valuation to maintain its independence, serves as a repository for millions of models and data sets and has become a champion of “open” AI systems.

Nvidia said the goal of the deal was to speed up the spread of open models. Unlike proprietary models from labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic, the design of open-weight models is public and users can download, customize and run them on their own hardware.

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This is a normal part of how the US government has operated in recent years, as it's often difficult to build the political support needed to pass a full year's budget in advance. In fact, dissent within the House's Republican caucus prevented them from agreeing on their own measure to keep the government open; instead, the House simply adopted a version of the spending bill that had previously passed the Senate.

From the perspective of scientists and their supporters, that adoption turned out to be a very good thing, because the Senate's budget bill, passed in early August, contains a provision that blocks the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from implementing new rules that would give political appointees full control over what science is funded and allow them to cancel any grant at any time. The proposed rule has been widely decried as catastrophic for science, and it faced widespread opposition from scientific and health-focused organizations.

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