Author name: Rejus Almole

taiwan-rejects-trump’s-demand-to-shift-50%-of-chip-manufacturing-into-us

Taiwan rejects Trump’s demand to shift 50% of chip manufacturing into US

Policy, Taiwan, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, trump tariffs / /

In August, Trump claimed that chip tariffs could be as high as 100 percent while promising to exempt any tech companies that have committed to moving significantly more manufacturing into the US.

Since then, sources familiar with the investigation told Reuters that “the Trump administration is considering imposing tariffs on foreign electronic devices based on the number of chips in each one.” Under that potential plan, the tariff charged would be “equal to a percentage of the estimated value of the product’s chip content,” sources suggested.

Some expect that companies like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) may be exempted from these tariffs, based on a pledge to invest $100 billion into US chip manufacturing.

However, sources told Reuters that the Commerce Department has weighed offering “a dollar-for-dollar exemption based on investment in US-based manufacturing only if a company moves half its production to the US.” TSMC’s total market value is more than $1 trillion, so the US may seek more investments if the campaign to move half of Taiwan’s chip production into the US fails.

Brzytwa told Ars that tech companies are already struggling to do the math from Trump’s tariff stacking. And those headaches will likely continue. At a meeting last week with chip industry executives, Lutnick confirmed that Trump plans to use tariffs to push tech companies to buy US-made chips, The New York Times reported.

If those plans go through, companies would be expected to buy half their chips in the US, earning credits “for each dollar spent on American semiconductors, which they can use against what they spend on foreign semiconductors,” the Times reported.

Any company not maintaining “a 1:1 ratio over time would have to pay a tariff,” sources told The Wall Street Journal. For companies like Apple, the policy would require tracking every chip used in every device to ensure a perfect match. But there would likely be an initial grace period, allowing companies to adjust to the new policy as the US increases its domestic chip supply chain, the WSJ reported. And chipmakers like TSMC could potentially benefit, the WSJ reported, possibly gaining leverage in the market if it increases its US manufacturing ahead of rivals.

Taiwan rejects Trump’s demand to shift 50% of chip manufacturing into US Read More »

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SpaceX has a few tricks up its sleeve for the last Starship flight of the year

Commercial space, launch, reusable rocket, Science, Space, spacex, Starbase, starship, starship flight 11, super heavy, texas / /

This particular booster, numbered Booster 15, launched in March and was caught by the launch tower at Starbase after returning from the edge of space. SpaceX said 24 of the 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines launching on the booster next month are “flight-proven.”

The Super Heavy booster flying next month previously launched and was recovered on Flight 8 in March. Credit: SpaceX

Similar to the last Starship flight, the Super Heavy booster will guide itself to a splashdown off the coast of South Texas instead of returning to Starbase.

“Its primary test objective will be demonstrating a unique landing burn engine configuration planned to be used on the next-generation Super Heavy,” SpaceX said.

The new booster landing sequence will initially use 13 of the rocket’s 33 engines, then downshift to five engines before running just the three center engines for the final portion of the burn. The booster previously went directly from 13 engines to three engines. Using five engines for part of the landing sequence provides “additional redundancy for spontaneous engine shutdowns,” according to SpaceX.

“The primary goal on the flight test is to measure the real-world vehicle dynamics as engines shut down while transitioning between the different phases,” SpaceX said.

Stepping stone to Version 3

After Flight 11, SpaceX will focus on the next-generation Starship design: Starship V3. This upgraded configuration will be the version that will actually fly to orbit, allowing SpaceX to begin deploying its new fleet of larger, more powerful Starlink Internet satellites.

Starship V3 will also be used to test orbital refueling, something never before attempted between two spacecraft with cryogenic propellants. Refueling in space is required to give Starship enough energy to propel itself out of Earth’s orbit to the Moon and Mars, destinations it must reach to fulfill the hopes of NASA and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

The first flight of Starship V3 is likely to occur in early 2026, using a new launch pad undergoing final outfitting and testing a short distance away from SpaceX’s original launch pad at Starbase. Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability, told a crowd at a space industry conference earlier this month that the company will likely attempt one more suborbital flight with Starship V3. If that goes well, Flight 13 could launch all the way to low-Earth orbit sometime later next year.

SpaceX has a few tricks up its sleeve for the last Starship flight of the year Read More »

is-the-“million-year-old”-skull-from-china-a-denisovan-or-something-else?

Is the “million-year-old” skull from China a Denisovan or something else?

anthropology, Archaeology, Denisovans, hominins, homo longi, paleoanthropology, Science, skulls / /

Homo longi by any other name

Now that we know what Denisovans looked like, they’re turning up everywhere.

This digital reconstruction makes Yunxian 2 look liess like a Homo erectus and more like a Denisovan (or Homo longi, according to the authors). Credit: Feng et al. 2025

A fossil skull from China that made headlines last week may or may not be a million years old, but it’s probably closely related to Denisovans.

The fossil skull, dubbed Yunxian 2, is one of three unearthed from a terrace alongside the Han River, in central China, in a layer of river sediment somewhere between 600,000 and 1 million years old. Archaeologists originally identified them as Homo erectus, but Hanjiang Normal University paleoanthropologist Xiaobo Feng and his colleagues’ recent digital reconstruction of Yunxian 2 suggests the skulls may actually have belonged to someone a lot more similar to us: a hominin group defined as a species called Homo longi or a Denisovan, depending on who’s doing the naming.

The recent paper adds fuel—and a new twist—to that debate. And the whole thing may hinge on a third skull from the same site, still waiting to be published.

A front and a side view of a digitally reconstructed hominin skull

This digital reconstruction makes Yunxian 2 look less like a Homo erectus and more like a Denisovan (or Homo longi, according to the authors). Credit: Feng et al. 2025

Denisovan or Homo longi?

The Yunxian skull was cracked and broken after hundreds of thousands of years under the crushing weight of all that river mud, but the authors used CT scans to digitally put the pieces back together. (They got some clues from a few intact bits of Yunxian 1, which lay buried in the same layer of mud just 3 meters away.) In the end, Feng and his colleagues found themselves looking at a familiar face; Yunxian 2 bears a striking resemblance to a 146,000-year-old Denisovan skull.

That skull, from Harbin in northeast China, made headlines in 2021 when a team of paleoanthropologists claimed it was part of an entirely new species, which they dubbed Homo longi. According to that first study, Homo longi was a distinct hominin species, separate from us, Neanderthals, and even Denisovans. That immediately became a point of contention because of features the skull shared with some other suspected Denisovan fossils.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers, which included one of the 2021 study’s authors, took samples of ancient proteins preserved in the Harbin skull; of the 95 proteins they found, three of them matched proteins only encoded in Denisovan DNA. While the June 2025 study suggested that Homo longi was a Denisovan all along, the new paper draws a different conclusion: Homo longi is a species that happens to include the population we’ve been calling Denisovans. As study coauthor Xijun Ni, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, puts it in an email to Ars Technica, “Given their similar age range, distribution areas, and available morphological data, it is likely that Denisovans belong to the Homo longi species. However, little is known about Denisovan morphology.”

Of course, that statement—that we know little about Denisovan morphology (the shapes and features of their bones)—only applies if you don’t accept the results of the June 2025 study mentioned above, which clocked the Harbin skull as a Denisovan and therefore told us what one looks like.

And Feng and his colleagues, in fact, don’t accept those results. Instead, they consider Harbin part of some other group of Homo longi, and they question the earlier study’s methods and results. “The peptide sequences from Harbin, Penghu, and other fossils are too short and provide conflicting information,” Ni tells Ars Technica. Feng and his colleagues also question the results of another study, which used mitochondrial DNA to identify Harbin as a Denisovan.

In other words, Feng and his colleagues are pretty invested in defining Homo longi as a species and Denisovans as just one sub-group of that species. But that’s hard to square with DNA data.

Alas, poor Yunxian 2, I knew him well

Yunxian 2 has a wide face with high, flat cheekbones, a wide nasal opening, and heavy brows. Its cranium is higher and rounder than Homo erectus (and the original reconstruction, done in the 1990s), but it’s still longer and lower than is normal for our species. Overall, it could have held about 1,143 cubic centimeters of brain, which is in the ballpark of modern people. But its shape may have left less room for the frontal lobe (the area where a lot of social skills, logic, motor skills, and executive function happen) than you’d expect in a Neanderthal or a Homo sapiens skull.

Feng and his colleagues measured the distances between 533 specific points on the skull: anatomical landmarks like muscle attachment points or the joints between certain bones. They compared those measurements to ones from 26 fossil hominin skulls and several-dozen modern human skulls, using a computer program to calculate how similar each skull was to all of the others.

Yunxian 2 fits neatly into a lookalike group with the Harbin skull, along with two other skulls that paleoanthropologists have flagged as belonging to either Denisovans or Homo longi. Those two skulls are a 200,000- to 260,000-year-old skull found in Dali County in northwestern China and a 260,000-year-old skull from Jinniushi (sometimes spelled Jinniushan) Cave in China.

Those morphological differences suggest some things about how the individuals who once inhabited these skulls might have been related to each other, but that’s also where things get dicey.

front and side views of 3 skulls.

An older reconstruction of the Yunxian 2 skull gives it a flatter look. Credit: government of Wuhan

Digging into the details

Most of what we know about how we’re related to our closest extinct hominin relatives (Neanderthals and Denisovans) comes from comparing our DNA to theirs and tracking how small changes in the genetic code build up over time. Based on DNA, our species last shared a common ancestor with Neanderthals and Denisovans sometime around 750,000 years ago in Africa. One branch of the family tree led to us; the other branch split again around 600,000 years ago, leading to Neanderthals and Denisovans (or Homo longi, if you prefer).

In other words, DNA tells us that Neanderthals and Denisovans are more closely related to each other than either is to us. (Unless you’re looking at mitochondrial DNA, which suggests that we’re more closely related to Neanderthals than to Denisovans; it’s complicated, and there’s a lot we still don’t understand.)

“Ancient mtDNA and genomic data show different phylogenetic relationships among Denisovans, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens,” says Ni. So depending on which set of data you use and where your hominin tree starts, it can be possible to get different answers about who is most closely related to whom. The fact that all of these groups interbred with each other can explain this complexity, but makes building family trees challenging.

It is very clear, however, that Feng and his colleagues’ picture of the relationships between us and our late hominin cousins, based on similarities among fossil skulls in their study, looks very different from what the genomes tell us. In their model, we’re more closely related to Denisovans, and the Neanderthals are off on their own branch of the family tree. Feng and his colleagues also say those splits happened much earlier, with Neanderthals branching off on their own around 1.38 million years ago; we last shared a common ancestor with Homo longi around 1 million years ago.

That’s a big difference from DNA results, especially when it comes to timing. And the timing is likely to be the biggest controversy here. In a recent commentary on Feng and his colleagues’ study, University of Wisconsin paleoanthropologist John Hawks argues that you can’t just leave genetic evidence out of the picture.

“What this research should have done is to put the anatomical comparisons into context with the previous results from DNA, especially the genomes that enable us to understand the relationships of Denisovan, Neanderthal, and modern human groups,” Hawks writes.

(It’s worth a side note that most news stories describe Yunxian 2 as being a million years old, and so do Feng and his colleagues. But electron spin resonance dating of fossil animal bones from the same sediment layer suggests the skull could be as young as 600,000 years old or as old as 1.1 million. That still needs to be narrowed down to everyone’s satisfaction.)

What’s in a name?

Of course, DNA also tells us that even after all this branching and migrating, the three species were still similar enough to reproduce, which they did several times. Many groups of modern people still carry traces of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in their genomes, courtesy of those exchanges. And some ancient Neanderthal populations were carrying around even older chunks of human DNA in the same way. That arguably makes species definitions a little fuzzy at best—and maybe even irrelevant.

“I think all these groups, including Neanderthals, should be recognized within our own species, Homo sapiens,” writes Hawks. Hawks contends that the differences among these hominin groups “were the kind that evolve among the populations of a single species over time, not starkly different groups that tread the landscape in mutually unrecognizeable ways.”

But humans love to classify things (a trait we may have shared with Neanderthals and Denisovans), so those species distinctions are likely to persist even if the lines between them aren’t so solid. As long as that’s the case, names and classifications will be fodder for often heated debate. And Feng’s team is staking out a position that’s very different from Hawks’. “‘Denisovan’ is a label for genetic samples taken from the Denisova Cave. It should not be used everywhere. Homo longi is a formally named species,” says Ni.

Technically, Denisovans don’t have a formal species name, a Latinized moniker like Homo erectus that comes with a clear(ish) spot on the family tree. Homo longi would be a more formal species name, but only if scientists can agree on whether they’re actually a species.

an archaeologist kneels in front of a partially buried skull

An archaeologist comes face to face with the Yunxian 3 skull Credit: government of Wuhan

The third Yunxian skull

Paleoanthropologists unearthed a third skull from the Yunxian site in 2022. It bears a strong resemblance to the other two from the area (and is apparently in better shape than either of them), and it dates to about the same timeframe. A 2022 press release describes it as “the most complete Homo erectus skull found in Eurasia so far,” but if Feng and his colleagues are right, it may actually be a remarkably complete Homo longi (and/or Denisovan) skull. And it could hold the answers to many of the questions anthropologists like Feng and Hawks are currently debating.

“It remains pretty obvious that Yunxian 3 is going to be central to testing the relationships of this sample [of fossil hominins in Feng and colleagues’ paper],” writes Hawks.

The problem is that Yunxian 3 is still being cleaned and prepared. Preparing a fossil is a painstaking, time-consuming process that involves very carefully excavating it from the rocky matrix it’s embedded in, using everything from air-chisels to paintbrushes. And until that’s done and a scientific report on the skull is published, other paleoanthropologists don’t have access to any information about its features—which would be super useful for figuring out how to define whatever group we eventually decide it belongs to.

For the foreseeable future, the relationships between us and our extinct cousins (or at least our ideas about those relationships) will keep changing as we get more data. Eventually, we may have enough data from enough fossils and ancient DNA samples to form a clearer picture of our past. But in the meantime, if you’re drawing a hominin family tree, use a pencil.

Science, 2025.  DOI: 10.1126/science.ado9202  (About DOIs).

Photo of Kiona N. Smith

Kiona is a freelance science journalist and resident archaeology nerd at Ars Technica.

Is the “million-year-old” skull from China a Denisovan or something else? Read More »

fortnite-disables-peacemaker-emote-that-might-resemble-a-swastika

Fortnite disables Peacemaker emote that might resemble a swastika

culture, epic games, gaming, Peacemaker / /

If you watch this for a full hour, leave a comment to receive absolutely no prize.

Epic Games has disabled a Fortnite emote based on the HBO show Peacemaker after the latest episode cast the dancing animation in a potentially different light.

The remainder of this post contains spoilers for Season 2 of Peacemaker.

The “Peaceful Hips” emote, which was first introduced to the game on September 15, mirrors the dance motions that John Cena’s character Christopher Smith makes during the opening credits sequence for the show’s second season. In the dance and the emote (which can be applied to any character in-game), the dancer briefly flails their arms at opposing right angles before shaking their hips seductively.

Some are seeing the dance in a different light after the sixth episode of the show’s second season, “Ignorance is Chris,” which revealed that the alternate universe featured throughout the season has been controlled by swastika-brandishing Nazis. With that knowledge front of mind, the arm movements in the dance emote could be seen as a winking reference to the arms of a swastika.

“[In] season 2 there’s a lot more of the story of the season in the intro, [in] the first season there wasn’t as much of a reference to the story,” choreographer Charissa Barton said in a video interview posted by Warner Bros. last month.

The opening dance sequence to Season 2 of Peacemaker.

The arm motions mean what?

Fans have been picking up on hints of the show’s eventual Nazi-related reveal (including from that opening dance) as the second season has aired over recent weeks. But the confirmation of the link in Sunday’s episode had Epic quickly re-evaluating the emote by Sunday night.

Fortnite disables Peacemaker emote that might resemble a swastika Read More »

taiwan-pressured-to-move-50%-of-chip-production-to-us-or-lose-protection

Taiwan pressured to move 50% of chip production to US or lose protection

Donald Trump, Howard Lutnick, Policy, semiconductors, Taiwan, trump administration, trump tariffs, TSMC, us-china trade war / /

The Trump administration is pressuring Taiwan to rapidly move 50 percent of its chip production into the US if it wants ensured protection against a threatened Chinese invasion, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told NewsNation this weekend.

In the interview, Lutnick noted that Taiwan currently makes about 95 percent of chips used in smartphones and cars, as well as in critical military defense technology. It’s bad for the US, Lutnick said, that “95 percent of our chips are made 9,000 miles away,” while China is not being “shy” about threats to “take” Taiwan.

Were the US to lose access to Taiwan’s supply chain, the US could be defenseless as its economy takes a hit, Lutnick alleged, asking, “How are you going to get the chips here to make your drones, to make your equipment?”

“The model is: if you can’t make your own chips, how can you defend yourself, right?” Lutnick argued. That’s why he confirmed his “objective” during his time in office is to shift US chip production from 2 percent to 40 percent. To achieve that, he plans to bring Taiwan’s “whole supply chain” into the US, a move experts have suggested could take much longer than a single presidential term to accomplish.

In 2023, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang forecast that the US was “somewhere between a decade and two decades away from supply chain independence,” emphasizing that “it’s not a really practical thing for a decade or two.”

Deal is “not natural for Taiwan”

Lutnick acknowledged this will be a “herculean” task. “Everybody tells me it’s impossible,” he said.

To start with, Taiwan must be convinced that it’s not getting a raw deal, he noted, explaining that it’s “not natural for Taiwan” to mull a future where it cedes its dominant role as a global chip supplier, as well as the long-running protections it receives from allies that comes with it.

Taiwan pressured to move 50% of chip production to US or lose protection Read More »

can-ai-detect-hedgehogs-from-space?-maybe-if-you-find-brambles-first.

Can AI detect hedgehogs from space? Maybe if you find brambles first.

AI, Biz & IT, cambridge, computer vision, Ecology, environmental monitoring, field validation, habitat mapping, iNaturalist, machine learning, remote sensing, satellite imagery, Sentinel satellites, TESSERA, wildlife conservation / /

“It took us about 20 seconds to find the first one in an area indicated by the model,” wrote Jaffer in a blog post documenting the field test. Starting at Milton Community Centre, where the model showed high confidence of brambles near the car park, the team systematically visited locations with varying prediction levels.

The research team locating their first bramble.

The research team locating their first bramble. Credit: Sadiq Jaffer

At Milton Country Park, every high-confidence area they checked contained substantial bramble growth. When they investigated a residential hotspot, they found an empty plot overrun with brambles. Most amusingly, a major prediction in North Cambridge led them to Bramblefields Local Nature Reserve. True to its name, the area contained extensive bramble coverage.

The model reportedly performed best when detecting large, uncovered bramble patches visible from above. Smaller brambles under tree cover showed lower confidence scores—a logical limitation given the satellite’s overhead perspective. “Since TESSERA is learned representation from remote sensing data, it would make sense that bramble partially obscured from above might be harder to spot,” Jaffer explained.

An early experiment

While the researchers expressed enthusiasm over the early results, the bramble detection work represents a proof-of-concept that is still under active research. The model has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and the field validation described here was an informal test rather than a scientific study. The Cambridge team acknowledges these limitations and plans more systematic validation.

However, it’s still a relatively positive research application of neural network techniques that reminds us that the field of artificial intelligence is much larger than just generative AI models, such as ChatGPT, or video synthesis models.

Should the team’s research pan out, the simplicity of the bramble detector offers some practical advantages. Unlike more resource-intensive deep learning models, the system could potentially run on mobile devices, enabling real-time field validation. The team considered developing a phone-based active learning system that would enable field researchers to improve the model while verifying its predictions.

In the future, similar AI-based approaches combining satellite remote sensing with citizen science data could potentially map invasive species, track agricultural pests, or monitor changes in various ecosystems. For threatened species like hedgehogs, rapidly mapping critical habitat features becomes increasingly valuable during a time when climate change and urbanization are actively reshaping the places that hedgehogs like to call home.

Can AI detect hedgehogs from space? Maybe if you find brambles first. Read More »

reports:-ea-set-to-be-sold-to-private-investors-for-up-to-$50-billion

Reports: EA set to be sold to private investors for up to $50 billion

gaming / /

Video game mega-publisher Electronic Arts is planning to take the company private in a deal that could be worth as much as $50 billion, according to reports from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and Financial Times.

All three outlets cite anonymous sources in reporting that the deal could be announced next week, with Silver Lake, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners reportedly interested in investing. The Wall Street Journal says the move “would likely be the largest leveraged buyout ever.”

The Saudi PIF already had a roughly 9 percent stake in EA as of a year ago, making it one of the largest shareholders in the company. That fund also has significant investments in gaming giants such as Nintendo, Take-Two, Activision Blizzard, Capcom, Nexon, and Koei Tecmo managed through the Savvy Games Group.

EA’s stock price immediately jumped roughly 15 percent on Friday afternoon, following a month in which its stock price had remained relatively flat.

EA went public with an IPO on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 1990, and by 1996 its market cap had risen to $1.61 billion. Before today’s stock price bump, the company’s valuation was hovering around $43 billion, driven by franchises such as Madden NFL, EA FC (formerly FIFA), The Sims, and Battlefield.

Reports: EA set to be sold to private investors for up to $50 billion Read More »

you-should-care-more-about-the-stabilizers-in-your-mechanical-keyboard—here’s-why

You should care more about the stabilizers in your mechanical keyboard—here’s why

Features, Tech / /

While most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the keys they tap all day, mechanical keyboard enthusiasts certainly do. As interest in DIY keyboards expands, there are plenty of things to obsess over, such as keycap sets, layout, knobs, and switches. But you have to get deep into the hobby before you realize there’s something more important than all that: the stabilizers.

Even if you have the fanciest switches and a monolithic aluminum case, bad stabilizers can make a keyboard feel and sound like garbage. Luckily, there’s a growing ecosystem of weirdly fancy stabilizers that can upgrade your typing experience, packing an impressive amount of innovation into a few tiny bits of plastic and metal.

What is a stabilizer, and why should you care?

Most keys on a keyboard are small enough that they go up and down evenly, no matter where you press. That’s not the case for longer keys: Space, Enter, Shift, Backspace, and, depending on the layout, a couple more on the number pad. These keys have wire assemblies underneath called stabilizers, which help them go up and down when the switch does.

A cheap stabilizer will do this, but it won’t necessarily do it well. Stabilizers can be loud and move unevenly, or a wire can even pop out and really ruin your day. But what’s good? A stabilizer is there to, well, stabilize, and that’s all it should do. It facilitates smooth up and down movement of frequently used keys—if stabilizers add noise, friction, or wobble, they’re not doing their job and are, therefore, bad. Most keyboards have bad stabilizers.

Stabilizers assembled

Stabilizer stems poke up through the plate to connect to your keycaps.

Credit: Ryan Whitwam

Stabilizer stems poke up through the plate to connect to your keycaps. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

Like switches, most stabilizers are based on the old-school Cherry Inc. designs, but the specifics have morphed in recent years. Stabilizers have to adhere to certain physical measurements to properly mount on PCBs and connect to standard keycaps. However, designers have come up with a plethora of creative ways to modify and improve stabilizers within that envelope. And yes, premium stabilizers really are better.

You should care more about the stabilizers in your mechanical keyboard—here’s why Read More »

trump-says-tiktok-should-be-tweaked-to-become-“100%-maga”

Trump says TikTok should be tweaked to become “100% MAGA”

bytedance, china, Donald Trump, national security, Policy, tiktok, us-china trade war / /

Previously, experts had suggested that China had little incentive to follow through with the deal, while as recently as July, ByteDance denied reports that it agreed to sell TikTok to the US, the South China Morning Post reported. Yesterday, Reuters noted that Vice President JD Vance confirmed that the “new US company will be valued at around $14 billion,” a price tag “far below some analyst estimates,” which might frustrate ByteDance. Questions also remain over what potential concessions Trump may have made to get Xi’s sign-off.

It’s also unclear if Trump’s deal meets the legal requirements of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, with Reuters reporting that “numerous details” still need to be “fleshed out.” Last Friday, James Sullivan of JP Morgan suggested on CNBC that “Trump’s proposed TikTok deal lacked clarity on who is in control of the algorithm, leaving the national security concerns wide open,” CNBC reported.

Other critics, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s civil liberties director David Greene, warned in a statement to Ars that the US now risks “turning over” TikTok “to the allies of a President who seems to have no respect for the First Amendment.”

Jennifer Huddleston, a senior fellow in technology policy at the Cato Institute, agreed. “The arrangement creates uncertainty about what influence or oversight the US government might require over this separate algorithm that could raise potential First Amendment concerns regarding government influence over a private actor,” Huddleston said.

Will TikTok become right-wing?

The Guardian recently conducted a deep dive into how the Murdochs’ and Ellisons’ involvement could “gift Trump’s billionaire allies a degree of control over US media that would be vast and unprecedented” by allowing “the owners of the US’s most powerful cable TV channels” to “steer the nation’s most influential social network.”

Trump says TikTok should be tweaked to become “100% MAGA” Read More »

scientists-want-to-treat-complex-bone-fractures-with-a-bone-healing-gun

Scientists want to treat complex bone fractures with a bone-healing gun

3D printing, Biology, bone, fractures, medicine, Science / /

After examining a few candidate formulations, the team found the right material. “We used a biocompatible thermoplastic called polycaprolactone and hydroxyapatite as base materials,” Lee said. Polycaprolactone was chosen because it is an FDA-approved material that degrades in the body within a few months after implantation. The hydroxyapatite, on the other hand, supports bone-tissue regeneration. Lee’s team experimented with various proportions of these two ingredients and finally nailed the formulation that checked all the boxes: It extruded at a relatively harmless 60° Celsius, the mix was mechanically sound, it adhered to the bone well, and it degraded over time.

Once the bone-healing bullets were ready, the team tested them on rabbits. Rabbits with broken femurs treated with Lee’s healing gun recovered faster than those treated with bone cement, which is the closest commercially available alternative. But there is still a lot to do before the healing gun can be tested on humans.

Skill issues

While the experiment on rabbits revealed new bone tissues forming around the implants created with the healing gun, their slow degradation of the implanted material prevented the full restoration of bone tissues. Another improvement Lee plans involves adding antibiotics to the formulation. The implant, he said, will release the drugs over time to prevent infections.

Then there’s the issue of load bearing. Rabbits are fine as test subjects, but they are rather light. “To evaluate the potential to use this technology on humans, we need to look into its long-term safety in large animal models,” Lee said.

Beyond the questions about the material, the level of skill required to operate this healing gun seems rather high.

Extrusion-based 3D printers, the ones that work more or less like very advanced hot glue guns, usually use guiding rods or rails for precise printing head positioning. If those rods or rails are warped, even slightly, the accuracy of your prints will most likely suffer. Achieving comparable precision with a handheld device might be a bit difficult, even for a skilled surgeon. “It is true that the system requires practice,” Lee said. “We may need to integrate it with a guiding mechanism that would position the head of the device precisely. This could be our next-gen bone printing device.”

Device, 2025.  DOI: 10.1016/j.device.2025.100873

Scientists want to treat complex bone fractures with a bone-healing gun Read More »

study:-planned-budget-cuts-would-hurt-drug-development-badly

Study: Planned budget cuts would hurt drug development badly

drugs, grants, NIH, patents, Science, science funding / /

It turns out that nearly 60 percent of the patents cite NIH-funded research. And here, the at-risk grants put in a very good showing, with just over half of the patents citing at least one at-risk grant. Note that many grants will have citations from both categories; to get a better sense, the researchers looked for patents where at least a quarter of the papers cited arose from NIH-funded research. For any grant, that number was a bit over 35 percent; for at-risk grants, it was about 12 percent.

Looking at specific examples, the researchers found that some of the approved drugs that relied on at-risk research were used for cancer treatments and genetic disorders. In other words, treatments that are likely to have a significant impact on public health. There are a couple of reasons to think that this is an underestimation of the impact, as well. To begin with, their source data on funding priorities stops at 2007, leaving a roughly 15-year gap where research funding can’t be analyzed, but patents are still being filed.

In addition, drugs are just a small part of the potential impact of NIH research. “We excluded a wide range of important medical advances that may also build on NIH-funded research,” the researchers acknowledge. “These include vaccines, gene and cell therapies, and other biologic drugs; diagnostic technologies and medical devices; as well as innovations in medical procedures, patient care practices, and surgical techniques.” Beyond the obvious implications for public health, these sorts of patents can result in lots of economic activity, including the launching of entirely new businesses.

Beyond informing current debates about science funding, the research makes a larger point about scientific progress. We tend to focus on the major leaps forward and the high-profile scientists that drive them, as the upcoming Nobel Prizes highlight. But the reality is that most advances, especially in biology, are built on a broad intellectual foundation of lower-profile work that may require years for someone to find a way to apply it to anything patentable. Broad cuts like these may mean that the scientific superstars will still walk away with grants, while leaving a field devastated by having parts of this foundation knocked out from under it.

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.aeb1564 (About DOIs).

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Amazon blamed AI for layoffs, then hired cheap H1-B workers, senators allege

Amazon, Apple, Google, H-1B visas, Meta, microsoft, Policy / /

Tech firms pressed to explain if H-1B workers are paid less than US workers.

Senators are demanding answers from Big Tech companies accused of “filing thousands of H-1B skilled labor visa petitions after conducting mass layoffs of American employees.”

In letters sent to Amazon, Meta, Apple, Google, and Microsoft—among some of the largest sponsors of H-1B visas—Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) requested “information and data from each company regarding their recruitment and hiring practices, as well as any variation in salary and benefits between H-1B visa holders and American employees.”

The letters came shortly after Grassley sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem requesting that DHS stop “issuing work authorizations to student visa holders.” According to Grassley, “foreign student work authorizations put America at risk of technological and corporate espionage,” in addition to allegedly “contributing to rising unemployment rates among college-educated Americans.”

If DHS refuses to stop authorizing the visas, Grassley requested a “detailed explanation of what legal authority DHS is relying on to issue these authorizations.” He suggested that the authorization violates a law intended to ensure that only highly skilled workers and top talents that can’t be found in the US are granted visas.

In the letters to tech firms, senators emphasized that the unemployment rate in America’s tech sector is “well above” the overall jobless rate.

Amazon perhaps faces the most scrutiny. US Citizenship and Immigration Services data showed that Amazon sponsored the most H-1B visas in 2024 at 14,000, compared to other criticized firms like Microsoft and Meta, which each sponsored 5,000, The Wall Street Journal reported. Senators alleged that Amazon blamed layoffs of “tens of thousands” on the “adoption of generative AI tools,” then hired more than 10,000 foreign H-1B employees in 2025.

The letter similarly called out Meta for its “year of efficiency,” laying off “a quarter of its workforce” between 2022 and 2023. Meta followed that with more layoffs impacting 3,500 employees in 2025, Senators noted, while receiving approval to hire more than 5,000 H-1B employees.

Senators also pushed Google to explain why it “laid off tens-of-thousands of employees in recent years” despite “enjoying record profits.”

“With all of the homegrown American talent relegated to the sidelines, we find it hard to believe that [you] cannot find qualified American tech workers to fill these positions,” senators scolded tech firms, demanding responses by October 10.

That’s the same deadline that Grassley gave Noem to respond about stopping student visa authorizations. If Noem agrees, that would likely also include cutting off “a pathway for students to work in the US for around 12 to 36 months immediately after completing their degree,” Hindustan Times reported, noting that students from India were likely to be most harmed by the proposed change.

Asked for comment on whether Noem would meet the deadline, DHS told Ars that “Congressional correspondence will be handled through official channels.”

Ars reached out to tech firms, but only Microsoft immediately responded, declining to comment.

Trump’s $100,000 H-1B visa fee spooks startups

On X, Grassley noted that the recent pressure campaign revives an effort to change H-1B visa approval processes that he and Durbin have worked to oppose since 2023.

Back then, the senators introduced the H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act, alleging that “for years” companies have “used legal loopholes to displace qualified American workers and replace them with foreign workers who are paid subpar wages and put in exploitative working conditions.”

That legislation sought to “put an end” to “abuses” by placing new wage requirements on employers and new education requirements, only approving visas for specialty occupations that required “a bachelor’s degree or higher.” If passed, employers risked fines for violating wage requirements.

But despite having bipartisan support and a stamp of approval from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—who has long argued H-1B visas “replace American” workers “with cheaper international workers,” The Guardian noted—the bill died after being referred to the Committee on the Judiciary.

Now the White House is forcing changes after Donald Trump issued an executive order last week requiring all companies sponsoring new H-1B employees to pay a $100,000 fee to bring them into the US, which started Sunday.

Trump claimed the fee was necessary to stop the H-1B nonimmigrant visa program from being “deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.”

To support this, the order cited data showing that the number of “foreign STEM workers in the United States has more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, increasing from 1.2 million to almost 2.5 million, while overall STEM employment has only increased 44.5 percent during that time.”

Attacking the tech sector in particular, the order also noted that “the share of IT workers in the H-1B program grew from 32 percent” in 2003 to “an average of over 65 percent” in the last five years. According to Trump, tech firms are incentivized to “close their IT divisions, fire their American staff, and outsource IT jobs to lower-paid foreign workers,” due to “artificially lower labor costs” the H-1B program supposedly creates.

“American IT workers have reported they were forced to train the foreign workers who were taking their jobs and to sign nondisclosure agreements about this indignity as a condition of receiving any form of severance,” Trump’s order said. “This suggests H-1B visas are not being used to fill occupational shortages or obtain highly skilled workers who are unavailable in the United States.”

By imposing the $100,000 fee, Trump claims that companies will be forced to use the H-1B program the way “it was intended”—motivated to pay more for certain foreign workers in order “to fill jobs for which highly skilled and educated American workers are unavailable.” Speaking last Friday, Trump suggested that money collected from the fees would be used to “reduce taxes” and “reduce debt,” The Guardian reported.

The order also proposed a new weighted lottery system, where applications for visas for jobs with the highest wages would be more likely to be approved than lower-wage jobs. For some firms, changes to the system may feel personal, as The Guardian noted that Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai and Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella “were at one point H-1B visa holders.”

Most tech companies haven’t commented directly on the order, with Netflix founder Reed Hastings standing out among the few voicing support for the change, while other firms internally warned workers to limit travel until companies understood how the process could impact existing H-1B employees. Since then, the White House has confirmed that only new applicants will be impacted by the changes.

Previously, tech firms only had to pay somewhere between $1,700 to $4,500, “depending on whether the visa was expedited,” The Guardian reported. Now facing a much larger fee to hire foreign talent, smaller tech firms have complained that Trump’s policy advantages Big Tech firms with deeper pockets, The New York Times reported. The fee may also deter companies from coming into the US, the Times reported.

Some believe that Trump’s policy is short-sighted, with startups particularly panicked. While Big Tech firms can afford to pay the fees, the US risks falling behind in innovation and tech leadership, critics told the Times, as “Silicon Valley relies on a steady stream of start-ups to advance new ideas and technologies.”

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Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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