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Former FTC Chair Lina Khan argued on X that regulators don't need new legislation to rein in AI companies, pointing to decades-old consumer protection and antitrust statutes as tools to hold firms and executives accountable. She cited product liability and unfair competition laws as grounds to prosecute companies releasing unvetted or defective AI systems, or engaging in risky behavior that pressures rivals to match it.
The Trump administration's Environmental Protection Agency has proposed eliminating federal restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from coal- and oil-fired power plants. The agency's filing goes further than a simple rollback, seemingly inviting judges to rule that the EPA lacks authority to regulate such emissions from the power sector at all in the future.
Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses include an Audio Only mode that disables the built-in screen entirely while driving, functioning like the standard Meta Ray-Ban AI glasses. Users retain hands-free calling and voice commands but lose all visual overlays, since the glasses were not built for real-time turn-by-turn navigation.
The Supreme Court voted 7-2 to uphold a lower court injunction blocking a new Postal Service rule that would have required states to submit lists of eligible voters so USPS could verify ballot recipients. Justices Alito and Thomas dissented, while Kavanaugh and Jackson noted the rule could be legally sound but was impractical to apply so close to the 2026 elections, since mail voting had already begun in several states.
John Ternus, who took over as Apple CEO two weeks ago, appeared at the Emmy Awards and was seen showing off Apple's unreleased foldable iPhone Duo to press and attendees. The device, pulled from his tuxedo jacket pocket, is set to launch next month starting at $1999.
A software engineering essay makes the case for proactively doing other people's jobs when they won't act themselves, citing Intel engineers who reportedly added 32-bit CPU support directly into Microsoft's compiler rather than waiting for Microsoft to do it. The piece extends this logic to dealing with unresponsive managers and slow-moving 'Scaled Agile' planning processes, suggesting direct patches often beat waiting for bureaucratic scheduling.
A new brain-computer interface has for the first time simultaneously decoded a paralyzed user's intended speech and movement, converting brain signals into on-screen text while animating a personalized avatar within seconds, according to a Nature Neuroscience study. Separately, a review published in Psychological Medicine finds that reading for pleasure correlates with structural brain changes, better mental health, and lower risk of cognitive decline, with benefits strongest when reading starts young and is enjoyable rather than obligatory.
A mouse study led by Cambridge researcher Menna Clatworthy found that immune cells activated during intestinal infections, such as those caused by Citrobacter rodentium bacteria and the parasitic worm Schistosoma mansoni, travel to the meninges surrounding the brain. There, the cells take up long-term residence and mount a faster, stronger response when the same infection recurs more than a month later, indicating they retain a memory of the original illness.
Researchers identified RNF213, an E3 ubiquitin ligase, as a key surveillance mechanism that marks poorly branched, disease-causing glycogen (polyglucosan) for destruction via autophagy. Mice lacking RNF213's ligase activity built up polyglucosan deposits in the cerebellum, pons, and hippocampus, and cell studies showed the enzyme selectively ubiquitylates abnormal glycogen while a structural domain restrains it from attacking healthy glycogen. Once tagged, the aberrant glycogen recruits autophagy receptors SQSTM1, TAX1BP1, and optineurin, which shuttle it into autophagosomes for clearance.
A Nature commentary co-authored by economist Joseph Stiglitz and UNAIDS chief Winnie Byanyima proposes creating an International Panel on Inequality (IPI), a roughly 40-member expert body that would synthesize research on income and wealth gaps for policymakers. The proposal already has support from the UN, the African Union, and more than 700 scholars, with South Africa, Brazil, Spain and Norway backing it. The commentary cites data showing the richest 1% captured 41% of new wealth created between 2000 and 2024, versus just 1% for the poorest half of the world.
A Nature.com piece profiles René Descartes, examining how his mathematical innovations reshaped geometry and laid groundwork for modern analytical methods. The page content itself was largely inaccessible due to a browser compatibility notice, limiting the technical details available.
A group of researchers argue that global urbanization, while celebrated for green city initiatives, is masking the steady degradation of the countryside that cities depend on. They cite up to 400 million hectares of abandoned land since the 1950s and roughly half the world's rangelands classified as degraded, driven by migration, land conversion and resource extraction to feed urban growth. They call for combined geospatial monitoring, landscape engineering and watershed planning to treat cities and their surrounding rural areas as one connected system.