Pennsylvania's explosive measles outbreak is now the largest the US has seen since the highly infectious virus was declared eliminated in 2000. With well over 1,000 cases, it's the largest on record since 1991.

Pennsylvania's health officials reported 1,078 measles cases in all of 2026 as of this afternoon. That includes 12 cases in January and March, with the remaining 1,066 cases since April, when the current outbreak began. The tally includes 145 cases recorded in the last seven days and 74 identified since the previous update on Monday. Health officials noted that 40 of the 74 cases added today were from more than two weeks ago and are just now being recorded.

Among the cases, there have been 207 hospitalizations and five deaths—a newborn, a 6-week-old, an 18-year-old, a 20-year-old, and a 40-year-old. All of the deaths occurred during the current outbreak in people who were unvaccinated; the two infants were too young to have been vaccinated.

Read full article

Comments

TP-Link is facing more legal troubles in the US as Florida and three other states filed lawsuits alleging that it lied to consumers about its connections to China and the risks of its routers being exploited by Chinese state hackers.

The lawsuits were filed yesterday, about six months after the Federal Communications Commission announced a sweeping ban on consumer-grade routers produced wholly or partly outside of the US. Numerous router makers have obtained exemptions to the ban, but the Trump administration so far has not granted one to TP-Link.

Router makers that received exemptions include Netgear, Asus, Adtran, Amazon and its Eero subsidiary, Calix, Nokia, SpaceX's Starlink division, and others. For now, TP-Link is unable to sell its latest Wi-Fi 8 routers in the US, though models approved before the ban can still be sold.

Read full article

Comments

Life is remarkably selective. Life relies on many molecules with what is termed "handedness"—they're chemically identical but are mirror images of each other. Most chemical reactions will make a 50-50 mix of the left- and right-handed forms of a chemical, but life uses only one of them. In fact, because of the differences between left- and right-handed chemicals, most of the key enzymes used by organisms will fail to work if they're presented with chemicals that have the wrong handedness.

That poses a bit of a challenge for origin-of-life research, as we're forced to explain how a world that may have started with an even mix of left- and right-handed chemicals produced organisms that only used one of them.

Today's Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to two individuals, Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai, who discovered chemical reactions could be biased, producing large excesses of one of the two forms of a chemical.

Read full article

Comments

As many doctors are moving ahead with the latest advances of modern medicine—from powerful obesity drugs to breakthrough cancer treatments—pediatricians are being forced to turn back, fighting to maintain advances in children's health that were hard-won decades ago.

With anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has spent a considerable amount of time and resources in the past year fiercely defending lifesaving vaccinations—safe, routine shots that have saved the lives of millions of children over decades and thwarted untold suffering and disability.

But just this week, The New York Times reported that Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, has opened aggressive investigations against pediatricians simply because they vaccinated their patients. Paxton falsely claims vaccines are part of a "multi-level, multi-industry scheme." But critics say his anti-vaccine campaign appears more aimed at currying favor with Kennedy, President Trump, and their supporters as Paxton runs for the US Senate.

Read full article

Comments

After pleading guilty, a 54-year-old North Carolina man, Michael Smith, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for using artificial intelligence to generate songs for a scheme that stole millions from music streaming platforms.

In a press release Tuesday, the US Department of Justice said that Smith is the first American criminally charged with AI-assisted streaming fraud.

First charged in 2024, Smith successfully ran the scheme for seven years without detection.

Read full article

Comments

Does it feel like people are perhaps a little grumpier or more on edge these days? It’s not like it’s without reason. There are wars. The climate is going haywire. Someone just died of plague. Scientific research is under attack. Machines keep stealing humans’ work. The media is a mess. And just when it all starts to feel a little overwhelming, Jaguar goes and unveils a new car.

The Type 01 is the first model to arrive from Jaguar’s rebirth. The British carmaker was an early entrant to the modern EV market with the 2017 I-Pace, which was fun to drive even if it was too small inside and perhaps completely unreliable. An all-electric sedan was supposed to be next, but a year from the showroom, it was abruptly canceled, leaving the automaker with nothing to sell as old models like the F-Pace ceased production.

Instead, Jaguar got to work on an all-new electric vehicle platform called JEA, which will underpin an all-electric product line. An elevated ownership experience and a starting price of about double the brand’s previous $60,000 entry point was the idea, Jaguar boss Rawdon Glover told me in 2024. Then last year the brand started teasing its relaunch, and everyone got upset. Things got even worse when the first images of the slab-sided and pastel-shaded Type 00 coupe concept leaked.

Read full article

Comments

One of Donald Trump’s biggest goals as president is to increase domestic manufacturing and reshore supply chains so that the most in-demand technologies in the world can be 100 percent made in the United States.

By executive order last December, he launched his “Genesis Mission,” an ambitious plan seeking to leverage US dominance in AI to maintain or seize an edge in advanced robotics, biotechnology, semiconductors, and nuclear technologies. According to Trump, that plan works best with self-sustaining supply chains. Not even neighboring countries or longtime allies should be relied upon to manufacture a single component of any US product in his ideal world.

The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) has long warned that Trump’s reshoring goals are not grounded in reality, but only recently has America’s largest technology trade association attempted to estimate what it would cost businesses and consumers to follow through on Trump’s plan.

Read full article

Comments

As tensions mount over who gets access to top-end artificial intelligence, French company Mistral has released a new freely available model that it claims can compete with the very best from the US and China.

The new 1 trillion-parameter model, Mistral Large 4—nicknamed Le Chonk—can be used and customized by anyone. It’s currently available in preview, with a final version to follow by the end of the month. Though Le Chonk is built to compete with leading general-purpose models, it’s optimized specifically for coding and cyberdefense, as well as tasks particular to manufacturing, finance, electrical engineering, and other niches.

“There are a lot of areas where the other labs will not focus that much,” Guillaume Lample, cofounder and chief scientist at Mistral, tells WIRED. “There are so many domains in which you can improve models.”

Read full article

Comments

Every piece of AI content from Google's Gemini models has a hidden SynthID label, which makes it very difficult to pass the content off as authentic. SynthID has also gotten buy-in from other major AI players, but actually checking for those invisible watermarks has been a convoluted process. It's going to be a little easier going forward, though. Google has announced that its SynthID detector now supports watermarks from all its partners, and it's available for anyone to use on a new dedicated website.

SynthID is an invisible signal encoded in the pixels of AI-generated images and videos, and in the waveform of AI audio. Google says Gemini alone has integrated SynthID with over 180 billion images and videos, plus 240,000 years of audio. Until now, the only way for those outside of Google's trusted tester program to check for SynthID was to ask Gemini. This is rather clunky, and the model's output could sometimes be confusing when you just wanted a simple "yes" or "no."

Now you can cut Gemini out of the loop. Starting today, you can go to the new SynthID.com website to check a piece of content for an AI watermark. A major limitation of Google's previous detector was that it only checked for Google's version of SynthID. Even though ChatGPT images, for example, have SynthID, they wouldn't be flagged in Google's detector. That's no longer a problem.

Read full article

Comments

There’s been something of a change in the world of motorsport over the past few years. It has to do with where the money comes from. In the old days, it was tobacco and, to a lesser extent, booze. Today such things are mostly banned, and when you look at a racecar covered in sponsor logos, you’re likely to see something crypto-, cyber-, or AI-related.

This makes sense—an ever-larger share of our GDP is wrapped up in those segments. They’re the ones with all the money, and it takes money to go racing. So at the amateur level, we’ve seen tech CEOs replace dentists as the privateer of choice: This past weekend’s Petit Le Mans included co-founders of GitHub, CrowdStrike, Shopify, and the creator of Ruby on Rails, to name a few.

But this is an instance where a sponsor can provide tangible benefits to their motorsports partner beyond a bank transfer, as Chip Ganassi Racing (CGR) and OpenAI have been showing in IndyCar this year.

Read full article

Comments

I found the trailer for Digger intriguing, starring a nearly unrecognizable Tom Cruise and giving off strong Dr. Strangelove vibes. Plus, it is four-time Oscar-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s (Birdman) first English-language film since 2015’s The Revenant. Those elements quickly moved it near the top of my "must-see" list even if details about the actual plot were lacking. Given Iñárritu’s pedigree, the film seemed poised to be prime Oscar bait.

(Major spoilers appear below the gallery. We'll give you a heads-up when we get there.)

By now it's clear that Digger is on track to be one of the biggest bombs of the year instead, racking up a mere $20 million globally its opening weekend, against a $125 million (possibly more) budget. It has sharply polarized critics and audiences alike, with some appreciating Iñárritu's bold, creative swings and others finding the film practically unwatchable.

Read full article

Comments

It's no surprise that NASA's new tack toward foreign partnerships—good deals only, please—is challenging preconceived notions of international cooperation in space.

Without a massive budget hike, the US space agency's emphasis on building a Moon Base and winning a competition for lunar real estate and resources with China will inevitably leave lesser priorities behind.

Gone is the Lunar Gateway, a space station that was to be assembled in orbit around the Moon. For the United States, Gateway was an unnecessary distraction and expense as NASA goes all-in on placing a surface station near the Moon's south pole.

Read full article

Comments