A researcher at Slovenia's InnoRenew Centre of Excellence describes winning a nearly €2 million European Research Council grant to develop self-repairing, UV-protective fungal-biofilm coatings for buildings. The five-year award, secured after a lengthy application and resubmission process, immediately reshaped the scope of her research group's work and her own daily responsibilities, shifting her focus from hands-on experiments toward managing people and projects.
A man with a slow-progressing, genetically rare form of ALS became the first person to receive an antisense oligonucleotide therapy designed specifically to target his causal mutation. A year later, he reported improved symptoms and remains able to work as a physician, according to results published in Med.
A Science journal analysis of patent citations and publications found that Chinese companies placed on the US Entity List increased their reliance on scientific literature to drive innovation, compared with similar firms not sanctioned. These restricted companies filed more patents citing scientific research and published more scientific articles than their unsanctioned counterparts after being blacklisted.
Researchers examined how cognitive resilience—an individual's capacity to maintain mental function despite brain pathology—can help forecast progression to Alzheimer's dementia. The findings, published on Nature.com, suggest that measuring resilience adds predictive value beyond standard biomarkers of disease.
Crusoe, the data center developer behind OpenAI's Abilene, Texas site, closed a $3.9 billion Series F funding round led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners, valuing the company at $30.9 billion. The funds will support both large-scale data center builds and Crusoe's new modular 'Spark' AI factories, which can be manufactured off-site and deployed quickly. The company also added three board members, including Redwood Materials CEO JB Straubel and Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert.
Pangram, an AI-detection service, has released a new integration for Gmail that scans incoming messages and flags those it believes were written by artificial intelligence. The tool aims to help users quickly identify AI-generated 'slop' mixed in with genuine human correspondence.
Google DeepMind has created the DeepMind Institute, led by managing editor Shane Legg alongside directors Demis Hassabis and James Manyika, to host differing perspectives on artificial general intelligence from within Google and the wider research community. Its first release includes four essays addressing economic disruption from AGI, keeping AI reasoning interpretable, principles for human flourishing, and how to evaluate frontier models. Notably, Hassabis proposes a U.S.-based standards body to assess advanced AI systems, starting with voluntary reviews before release.
Scry is a new search-over-the-web service built for AI agents, exposed through the Model Context Protocol as well as a direct HTTP API. Developers connect tools like Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor to a single MCP endpoint, authenticate via OAuth or an API key, and query a rolling crawl of high-information web pages using a SQL-like interface. The service also introduces congestion-based pricing tied to usage load.
A Nevada Transportation Authority permit that had restricted Amazon-owned Zoox to just 100 robotaxis will lapse this month, according to confirmation from an NTA official and a Zoox spokesperson. The move allows Zoox to expand its Las Vegas fleet without the previous regulatory ceiling, though the company has not disclosed how many vehicles it plans to add.
Robotics startup Vsim, founded by former Nvidia Isaac Sim engineers Lu and Storey, has built a high-performance training simulator optimized for modern GPU chips rather than older algorithms from the 1970s and 80s. The resulting software is efficient enough to run directly on the hardware of their robot Freddo, letting it simulate tens of thousands of possible near-future scenarios in real time while moving.
Reviews from Notebookcheck and PC Gamer found that external GPU enclosures connected via Thunderbolt suffer meaningful performance losses compared to desktop PCIe slots, ranging from 7 to 32 percent depending on resolution and card. PC Gamer found an RTX 4070 Ti ran about 25 percent slower over Thunderbolt than OCuLink, with worse stuttering and lower frame-rate consistency, and found that pairing an eGPU with a faster RTX 4090 yielded diminishing returns versus a full desktop connection.
Apple appeared before a UK court seeking to overturn secrecy rules that bar it from confirming whether the government has ordered access to encrypted iCloud data. The case follows reports that Britain had secretly demanded a backdoor into encrypted iCloud content, a demand Apple responded to by pulling Advanced Data Protection for new UK users rather than weakening encryption globally. After the U.S. government pushed back, Britain narrowed its original worldwide request but later issued a fresh notice aimed specifically at UK-based Apple users.
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