Artificial intelligence heavyweights in California are protesting against a state bill that would force technology companies to adhere to a strict safety framework including creating a “kill switch” to turn off their powerful AI models, in a growing battle over regulatory control of the cutting-edge technology.
The California Legislature is considering proposals that would introduce new restrictions on tech companies operating in the state, including the three largest AI start-ups OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere as well as large language models run by Big Tech companies such as Meta.
The bill, passed by the state’s Senate last month and set for a vote from its general assembly in August, requires AI groups in California to guarantee to a newly created state body that they will not develop models with “a hazardous capability,” such as creating biological or nuclear weapons or aiding cyber security attacks.
Developers would be required to report on their safety testing and introduce a so-called kill switch to shut down their models, according to the proposed Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Systems Act.
But the law has become the focus of a backlash from many in Silicon Valley because of claims it will force AI start-ups to leave the state and prevent platforms such as Meta from operating open source models.
“If someone wanted to come up with regulations to stifle innovation, one could hardly do better,” said Andrew Ng, a renowned computer scientist who led AI projects at Alphabet’s Google and China’s Baidu, and who sits on Amazon’s board. “It creates massive liabilities for science-fiction risks, and so stokes fear in anyone daring to innovate.”
The resurrection of a car plant in Brazil’s poor northeast stands as a symbol of China’s global advance—and the West’s retreat.
BYD, the Shenzhen-based conglomerate, has taken over an old Ford factory in Camaçari, which was abandoned by the American automaker nearly a century after Henry Ford first set up operations in Brazil.
When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, visited China last year, he met BYD’s billionaire founder and chair, Wang Chuanfu. After that meeting, BYD picked the country for its first carmaking hub outside of Asia.
Under a $1 billion-plus investment plan, BYD intends to start producing electric and hybrid automobiles this year at the site in Bahia state, which will also manufacture bus and truck chassis and process battery materials.
The new Brazil plant is no outlier—it falls into a wave of corporate Chinese investment in electric vehicle manufacturing supply chains in the world’s most important developing economies.
Financial Times
The inadvertent result of rising protectionism in the US and Europe could be to drive many emerging markets into China’s hands.
Last month, Joe Biden issued a new broadside against Beijing’s deep financial support of Chinese industry as he unveiled sweeping new tariffs on a range of cleantech products—most notably, a 100 percent tariff on electric vehicles. “It’s not competition. It’s cheating. And we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said.
The measures were partly aimed at boosting Biden’s chances in his presidential battle with Donald Trump. But the tariffs, paired with rising restrictions on Chinese investment on American soil, will have an immense impact on the global auto market, in effect shutting China’s world-leading EV makers out of the world’s biggest economy.
The EU’s own anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese electric cars is expected to conclude next week as Brussels tries to protect European carmakers by stemming the flow of low-cost Chinese electric vehicles into the bloc.
Government officials, executives, and experts say that the series of new cleantech tariffs issued by Washington and Brussels are forcing China’s leading players to sharpen their focus on markets in the rest of the world.
This, they argue, will lead to Chinese dominance across the world’s most important emerging markets, including Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and the remaining Western economies that are less protectionist than the US and Europe.
“That is the part that seems to be lost in this whole discussion of ‘can we raise some tariffs and slow down the Chinese advance.’ That’s only defending your homeland. That’s leaving everything else open,” says Bill Russo, the former head of Chrysler in Asia and founder of Automobility, a Shanghai consultancy.
“Those markets are in play and China is aggressively going after those markets.”
Surgeons in New York have removed a pig kidney less than two months after transplanting it into Lisa Pisano, a 54-year-old woman with kidney failure who also needed a mechanical heart pump. The team behind the transplant says there were problems with the heart pump, not the pig kidney, and that the patient is in stable condition.
Pisano was facing heart and kidney failure and required routine dialysis. She wasn’t eligible to receive a traditional heart and kidney transplant from a human donor because of several chronic medical conditions that reduced the likelihood of a good outcome.
Pisano first received a heart pump at NYU Langone Health on April 4, followed by the pig kidney transplant on April 12. The heart pump, a device called a left ventricular assist device or LVAD, is used in patients who are either awaiting heart transplantation or otherwise aren’t a candidate for a heart transplant.
In a statement provided to WIRED, Pisano’s medical team explained that they electively removed the pig kidney on May 29—47 days after transplant—after several episodes of the heart pump not being able to pass enough blood through the transplanted kidney. Steady blood flow is important so that the kidney can produce urine and filter waste. Without it, Pisano’s kidney function began to decline.
“On balance, the kidney was no longer contributing enough to justify continuing the immunosuppression regimen,” said Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, in the statement. Like traditional transplant patients, Pisano needed to take immunosuppressive drugs to prevent her immune system from rejecting the donor organ.
The kidney came from a pig genetically engineered by Virginia biotech company Revivicor to lack a gene responsible for the production of a sugar known as alpha-gal. In previous studies at NYU Langone, researchers found that removing this sugar prevented immediate rejection of the organ when transplanted into brain-dead patients. During Pisano’s surgery, the donor pig’s thymus gland, which is responsible for “educating” the immune system, was also transplanted to reduce the likelihood of rejection.
A recent biopsy did not show signs of rejection, but Pisano’s kidney was injured due to a lack of blood flow, according to the statement. The team plans to study the explanted pig kidney to learn more.
Pisano is now back on dialysis, a treatment for kidney-failure patients, and her heart pump is still functioning. She would not have been a candidate for the heart pump if she had not received the pig kidney.
“We are hoping to get Lisa back home to her family soon,” Montgomery said, calling Pisano a “pioneer and a hero in the effort to create a sustainable option for people waiting for an organ transplant.”
Pisano was the second living person to receive a kidney from a genetically engineered pig. The first, Richard Slayman of Massachusetts, died in May just two months after the historic transplant. The surgery was carried out on March 16 at Massachusetts General Hospital. In a statement released on May 11, the hospital said it had “no indication” that Slayman’s death was the result of the pig kidney transplant. The donor pig used in Slayman’s procedure had a total of 69 different genetic edits.
The global donor organ shortage has led researchers including the NYU and Massachusetts teams to pursue the possibility of using pigs as an alternative source. But the body immediately recognizes pig tissue as foreign, so scientists are using gene editing in an effort to make pig organs look more like human ones to the immune system. Just how many gene edits will be needed to keep pig organs working in people is a topic of much debate.
Pig heart transplants have also been carried out in two individuals—one in 2022 and the other in 2023—at the University of Maryland. In both cases, the patients were not eligible for human ones. Those donor pigs had 10 genetic edits and were also bred by Revivcor. Both recipients died around two months after their transplants.
You’re driving somewhere, eyes on the road, when you start to feel a tingling sensation in your lower abdomen. That extra-large Coke you drank an hour ago has made its way through your kidneys into your bladder. “Time to pull over,” you think, scanning for an exit ramp.
To most people, pulling into a highway rest stop is a profoundly mundane experience. But not to neuroscientist Rita Valentino, who has studied how the brain senses, interprets, and acts on the bladder’s signals. She’s fascinated by the brain’s ability to take in sensations from the bladder, combine them with signals from outside of the body, like the sights and sounds of the road, then use that information to act—in this scenario, to find a safe, socially appropriate place to pee. “To me, it’s really an example of one of the beautiful things that the brain does,” she says.
Scientists used to think that our bladders were ruled by a relatively straightforward reflex—an “on-off” switch between storing urine and letting it go. “Now we realize it’s much more complex than that,” says Valentino, now director of the division of neuroscience and behavior at the National Institute of Drug Abuse. An intricate network of brain regions that contribute to functions like decision-making, social interactions, and awareness of our body’s internal state, also called interoception, participates in making the call.
In addition to being mind-bogglingly complex, the system is also delicate. Scientists estimate, for example, that more than 1 in 10 adults have overactive bladder syndrome—a common constellation of symptoms that includes urinary urgency (the sensation of needing to pee even when the bladder isn’t full), nocturia (the need for frequent nightly bathroom visits) and incontinence. Although existing treatments can improve symptoms for some, they don’t work for many people, says Martin Michel, a pharmacologist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, who researches therapies for bladder disorders. Developing better drugs has proven so challenging that all major pharmaceutical companies have abandoned the effort, he adds.
Recently, however, a surge of new research is opening the field to fresh hypotheses and treatment approaches. Although therapies for bladder disorders have historically focused on the bladder itself, the new studies point to the brain as another potential target, says Valentino. Combined with studies aimed at explaining why certain groups, such as post-menopausal women, are more prone to bladder problems, the research suggests that we shouldn’t simply accept symptoms like incontinence as inevitable, says Indira Mysorekar, a microbiologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. We’re often told such problems are just part of getting old, particularly for women—“and that’s true to some extent,” she says. But many common issues are avoidable and can be treated successfully, she says: “We don’t have to live with pain or discomfort.”
A delicate balance
The human bladder is, at the most basic level, a stretchy bag. To fill to capacity—a volume of 400 to 500 milliliters (about 2 cups) of urine in most healthy adults—it must undergo one of the most extreme expansions of any organ in the human body, expanding roughly sixfold from its wrinkled, empty state.
To stretch that far, the smooth muscle wall that wraps around the bladder, called the detrusor, must relax. Simultaneously, sphincter muscles that surround the bladder’s lower opening, or urethra, must contract, in what scientists call the guarding reflex.
Enlarge/ It’s not just sensory neurons (purple) that can detect stretch, pressure, pain and other sensations in the bladder. Other types of cells, like the umbrella-shaped cells that form the urothelium’s barrier against urine, can also sense and respond to mechanical forces — for example, by releasing chemical signaling molecules such as adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as the organ expands to fill with urine.
Filling or full, the bladder spends more than 95 percent of its time in storage mode, allowing us to carry out our daily activities without leaks. At some point—ideally, when we decide it’s time to pee—the organ switches from storage to release mode. For this, the detrusor muscle must contract forcefully to expel urine, while the sphincter muscles surrounding the urethra simultaneously relax to let urine flow out.
For a century, physiologists have puzzled over how the body coordinates the switch between storage and release. In the 1920s, a surgeon named Frederick Barrington, of University College London, went looking for the on-off switch in the brainstem, the lowermost part of the brain that connects with the spinal cord.
Working with sedated cats, Barrington used an electrified needle to damage slightly different areas in the pons, part of the brainstem that handles vital functions like sleeping and breathing. When the cats recovered, Barrington noticed that some demonstrated a desire to urinate—by scratching, circling, or squatting—but were unable to voluntarily go. Meanwhile, cats with lesions in a different part of the pons seemed to have lost any awareness of the need to urinate, peeing at random times and appearing startled whenever it happened. Clearly, the pons served as an important command center for urinary function, telling the bladder when to release urine.
Enlarge/ OpenAI said it was committed to uncovering disinformation campaigns and was building its own AI-powered tools to make detection and analysis “more effective.”
FT montage/NurPhoto via Getty Images
OpenAI has revealed operations linked to Russia, China, Iran and Israel have been using its artificial intelligence tools to create and spread disinformation, as technology becomes a powerful weapon in information warfare in an election-heavy year.
The San Francisco-based maker of the ChatGPT chatbot said in a report on Thursday that five covert influence operations had used its AI models to generate text and images at a high volume, with fewer language errors than previously, as well as to generate comments or replies to their own posts. OpenAI’s policies prohibit the use of its models to deceive or mislead others.
The content focused on issues “including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza, the Indian elections, politics in Europe and the United States, and criticisms of the Chinese government by Chinese dissidents and foreign governments,” OpenAI said in the report.
The networks also used AI to enhance their own productivity, applying it to tasks such as debugging code or doing research into public social media activity, it said.
Social media platforms, including Meta and Google’s YouTube, have sought to clamp down on the proliferation of disinformation campaigns in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 win in the US presidential election when investigators found evidence that a Russian troll farm had sought to manipulate the vote.
Pressure is mounting on fast-growing AI companies such as OpenAI, as rapid advances in their technology mean it is cheaper and easier than ever for disinformation perpetrators to create realistic deepfakes and manipulate media and then spread that content in an automated fashion.
As about 2 billion people head to the polls this year, policymakers have urged the companies to introduce and enforce appropriate guardrails.
Ben Nimmo, principal investigator for intelligence and investigations at OpenAI, said on a call with reporters that the campaigns did not appear to have “meaningfully” boosted their engagement or reach as a result of using OpenAI’s models.
But, he added, “this is not the time for complacency. History shows that influence operations which spent years failing to get anywhere can suddenly break out if nobody’s looking for them.”
Microsoft-backed OpenAI said it was committed to uncovering such disinformation campaigns and was building its own AI-powered tools to make detection and analysis “more effective.” It added its safety systems already made it difficult for the perpetrators to operate, with its models refusing in multiple instances to generate the text or images asked for.
In the report, OpenAI revealed several well-known state-affiliated disinformation actors had been using its tools. These included a Russian operation, Doppelganger, which was first discovered in 2022 and typically attempts to undermine support for Ukraine, and a Chinese network known as Spamouflage, which pushes Beijing’s interests abroad. Both campaigns used its models to generate text or comment in multiple languages before posting on platforms such as Elon Musk’s X.
It flagged a previously unreported Russian operation, dubbed Bad Grammar, saying it used OpenAI models to debug code for running a Telegram bot and to create short, political comments in Russian and English that were then posted on messaging platform Telegram.
X and Telegram have been approached for comment.
It also said it had thwarted a pro-Israel disinformation-for-hire effort, allegedly run by a Tel Aviv-based political campaign management business called STOIC, which used its models to generate articles and comments on X and across Meta’s Instagram and Facebook.
Meta on Wednesday released a report stating it removed the STOIC content. The accounts linked to these operations were terminated by OpenAI.
The US government is nearing an agreement to bankroll a late-stage trial of Moderna’s mRNA pandemic bird flu vaccine, hoping to bolster its pandemic jab stockpile as an H5N1 outbreak spreads through egg farms and among cattle herds.
The federal funding from the government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, known as BARDA, could come as early as next month, according to people close to the discussions.
It is expected to total several tens of millions of dollars and could be accompanied by a commitment to procure doses if the phase-three trials are successful, they said.
Talks between the government and Pfizer over supporting the development of its mRNA vaccine targeting the H5 family of viruses are also ongoing. Pfizer, like Moderna, played a pivotal role in supplying mRNA vaccines for Washington’s jab rollout during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bird flu has been detected on poultry farms in 48 states and in dairy cow herds across nine states as part of one of the worst outbreaks in recent history, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC has also reported two cases affecting dairy workers in recent months, adding to concerns of the virus spreading in human populations.
US health authorities continue to classify the public health risk from bird flu as low, but their efforts to build up and diversify the pandemic vaccine stockpile have gathered pace. Federal health officials said last week that the government was moving ahead with plans to fill 4.8 million vials from its existing portfolio of protein-based bird flu vaccines and was in discussions with Moderna and Pfizer.
The possibility of contributing to the US pandemic vaccine stockpile also represents a commercial opportunity for the mRNA vaccine makers, whose market valuations have fallen significantly from pandemic highs. Moderna’s share price is up nearly 37 percent since the start of April.
Moderna has completed dosing of a mid-stage trial of its H5 pandemic flu vaccine, with interim data expected soon. Pfizer said in a statement on Wednesday that it “would be prepared to deploy the company’s capabilities to develop a vaccine for strategic stockpiles,” confirming that it had launched a phase-one trial for a pandemic flu vaccine last December.
Applications for BARDA grant funding for an mRNA-based pandemic flu vaccine closed in December last year, according to a project proposal seen by the Financial Times. But the bird flu outbreak has increased the urgency of talks, with federal officials acknowledging that the speed with which mRNA vaccines were designed and deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic showed their value compared with more traditional vaccine technology.
The jabs from GSK, Sanofi, and CSL Seqirus, which make up the US government’s existing pandemic vaccine portfolio, provide immunity to the current strain of bird flu, according to laboratory testing, but rely on a more time-intensive manufacturing process using egg- and cell-based cultures.
The US health department, Moderna, and Pfizer declined to comment on the potential funding.
Enlarge/ A hydro-fracking drilling pad for oil and gas operates October 26, 2017 in Robinson Township, Pennsylvania.
A fracking drilling pad operates in the Marcellus Shale formation near Robinson Township, Pa. Credit: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
In 2007, a geoscientist at Penn State named Terry Engelder calculated that Pennsylvania could be sitting on more than 50 trillion cubic feet of accessible natural gas deposits. Engelder later revised his calculation upward, to 489 trillion cubic feet, enough to meet U.S. natural gas demand for 18 years. These massive numbers set off the fracking boom in Pennsylvania, leading to drilling across the state. Since the rush began, there have been 13,000 unconventional wells drilled in Pennsylvania.
Now, a new “astounding” calculation has caught the attention of the gas industry: A study from researchers at the National Energy Technology Laboratory shows the wastewater produced by Pennsylvania’s unconventional wells could contain enough lithium to meet 38 to 40 percent of current domestic consumption. Lithium is a critical mineral that’s an “essential component” of many clean energy technologies, including batteries for electric vehicles.
The study used chemical and production compliance data from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to estimate that approximately 1,160 metric tons of lithium per year could be extracted from this produced water, which is a combination of fluids used for fracking and water from natural formations underground that returns to the surface during the drilling process. The lithium in Pennsylvania’s produced water likely comes from ancient volcanoes that were erupting at the time the natural gas deposits were being formed. This volcanic ash contained lithium that eventually seeped into the water underground.
“The researcher community in the U.S. is really working hard to find the materials and methods that will enable us to meet our climate goals and decarbonize the economy,” said Justin Mackey, the study’s lead investigator. “Sometimes you might be surprised where that material actually comes from.”
The Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry trade group dedicated to the Marcellus Shale formation, the natural gas deposit beneath Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and New York, reacted to the news with enthusiasm. “This scientific analysis by one of the leading energy laboratories in the world shows once again how abundant Pennsylvania natural gas can enhance America’s energy, environmental and national security,” the coalition said in a statement.
The United States currently relies on imports from Argentina, Chile and China to fully meet its lithium needs, and the demand for lithium is expected to rise dramatically as the clean energy transition accelerates.
Mackey, a research geochemist at the National Energy Technology Laboratory, said he had focused on lithium because it is a strategic material for the American economy and defense industries and because it has insecure supply chains. “We’re reliant on foreign entities like China and Chile and Australia to source these raw materials, but they’re critical to our economies,” he said. “And more importantly, they’re critical to decarbonizing the U.S. automotive fleet.”
He said the researchers were “shocked” that the highest concentrations of lithium found in the Marcellus “are comparable to lithium brine, to water that is actually being mined for lithium.”
“I think having more domestic sources of lithium is definitely a positive thing, especially if you don’t have to create a mine to exploit the resource,” Mackey said. Unconventional drilling waste is likely to be produced in large quantities for the foreseeable future, he said, and if remediating this waste safely could also be made economically valuable, that could be beneficial for the environment as well.
Two years ago when “Michael,” an owner of cryptocurrency, contacted Joe Grand to help recover access to about $2 million worth of bitcoin he stored in encrypted format on his computer, Grand turned him down.
Michael, who is based in Europe and asked to remain anonymous, stored the cryptocurrency in a password-protected digital wallet. He generated a password using the RoboForm password manager and stored that password in a file encrypted with a tool called TrueCrypt. At some point, that file got corrupted, and Michael lost access to the 20-character password he had generated to secure his 43.6 BTC (worth a total of about 4,000 euros, or $5,300, in 2013). Michael used the RoboForm password manager to generate the password but did not store it in his manager. He worried that someone would hack his computer and obtain the password.
“At [that] time, I was really paranoid with my security,” he laughs.
Grand is a famed hardware hacker who in 2022 helped another crypto wallet owner recover access to $2 million in cryptocurrency he thought he’d lost forever after forgetting the PIN to his Trezor wallet. Since then, dozens of people have contacted Grand to help them recover their treasure. But Grand, known by the hacker handle “Kingpin,” turns down most of them, for various reasons.
Grand is an electrical engineer who began hacking computing hardware at age 10 and in 2008 cohosted the Discovery Channel’s Prototype This show. He now consults with companies that build complex digital systems to help them understand how hardware hackers like him might subvert their systems. He cracked the Trezor wallet in 2022 using complex hardware techniques that forced the USB-style wallet to reveal its password.
But Michael stored his cryptocurrency in a software-based wallet, which meant none of Grand’s hardware skills were relevant this time. He considered brute-forcing Michael’s password—writing a script to automatically guess millions of possible passwords to find the correct one—but determined this wasn’t feasible. He briefly considered that the RoboForm password manager Michael used to generate his password might have a flaw in the way it generated passwords, which would allow him to guess the password more easily. Grand, however, doubted such a flaw existed.
Michael contacted multiple people who specialize in cracking cryptography; they all told him “there’s no chance” of retrieving his money. But last June he approached Grand again, hoping to convince him to help, and this time Grand agreed to give it a try, working with a friend named Bruno in Germany who also hacks digital wallets.
Enlarge/ 2023 marked the first sighting of a yellow-legged hornet in the United States, sparking fears that it may spread and devastate honeybees as it has in parts of Europe.
In early August 2023, a beekeeper near the port of Savannah, Georgia, noticed some odd activity around his hives. Something was hunting his honeybees. It was a flying insect bigger than a yellowjacket, mostly black with bright yellow legs. The creature would hover at the hive entrance, capture a honeybee in flight, and butcher it before darting off with the bee’s thorax, the meatiest bit.
“He’d only been keeping bees since March… but he knew enough to know that something wasn’t right with this thing,” says Lewis Bartlett, an evolutionary ecologist and honeybee expert at the University of Georgia, who helped to investigate. Bartlett had seen these honeybee hunters before, during his PhD studies in England a decade earlier. The dreaded yellow-legged hornet had arrived in North America.
With origins in Afghanistan, eastern China, and Indonesia, the yellow-legged hornet, Vespa velutina, has expanded during the last two decades into South Korea, Japan, and Europe. When the hornet invades new territory, it preys on honeybees, bumblebees, and other vulnerable insects. One yellow-legged hornet can kill up to dozens of honeybees in a single day. It can decimate colonies through intimidation by deterring honeybees from foraging. “They’re not to be messed with,” says honeybee researcher Gard Otis, professor emeritus at the University of Guelph in Canada.
The yellow-legged hornet is so destructive that it was the first insect to land on the European Union’s blacklist of invasive species. In Portugal, honey production in some regions of the country has slumped by more than 35 percent since the hornet’s arrival. French beekeepers have reported 30 percent to 80 percent of honeybee colonies exterminated in some locales, costing the French economy an estimated $33 million annually.
Enlarge/ The yellow-legged hornet’s nests can be quite large and house as many as 6,000 workers.
All that destruction may be linked to a single, multi-mated queen that arrived at the port of Bordeaux, France, in a shipment of bonsai pots from China before 2004. During her first spring, she established a nest, reared workers, and laid eggs. By fall, hundreds of new mated queens likely exited and found overwintering sites, restarting the cycle in the spring. The hornet’s fortitude—it is the Diana Nyad of invasive social wasps—allowed it to surge across France’s borders into Spain, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland in only two decades, hurtling onward by as much as 100 kilometers a year.
Suspected stowaway
As the hornet fanned out across Europe, scientists in North America wondered when it might arrive on their side of the Atlantic. Queens sometimes overwinter in crates and containers, allowing them to stow away on ships and be transported long distances. In 2013, researchers cautioned that a yellow-legged hornet invasion at any one point along the US East Coast would have the potential to spread across the country.
After the first sighting last summer, Georgia’s agricultural commissioner urged people to report hornets and nests, and warned that the yellow-legged hornet could threaten the state’s $73 billion agriculture industry. American farmers grow more than 100 different crops, including apples, blueberries, and watermelons, that depend on pollinators. Georgia mass-produces honeybees and ships them north to jumpstart spring crops, like Maine blueberries, before local pollinators have awakened.
Enlarge/ In response to the arrival of the yellow-legged hornet, the Georgia Department of Agriculture has placed hundreds of traps to monitor the insects’ spread near Savannah. This map shows the locations of those traps (gray dots), sightings of the hornet (pink dots) and five nests (red squares) as of December 15, 2023.
Less than two weeks after the first hornet was spotted, scientists found a nest in a tree 25 meters off the ground. In a night operation, while the hornets idled, a tree surgeon climbed to the nest, sprayed it with insecticide, and cut it down. Just a quarter of the full nest was the size of a human torso, and the Georgia Department of Agriculture displayed a chunk, still wrapped around the branch, at a press conference—warning that this was larger than those seen in Europe.
“Savannah, Georgia, is primo climate for these guys,” says Otis. It’s a lush, subtropical paradise, giving the insect a long growing season—and a rich hunting ground.
For the next several months, Bartlett helped the state agricultural researchers set traps and follow individual hornets to find other nests. By the end of 2023, they’d removed four more. “We think we’ve discovered them at a very early stage, which is why pursuing eradication is very, very plausible,” Bartlett said in November. If not, Georgia and its neighbors could get caught in an endless—and costly—game of whack-a-mole.
When the Brazilian nutritional scientist Carlos Monteiro coined the term “ultra-processed foods” 15 years ago, he established what he calls a “new paradigm” for assessing the impact of diet on health.
Monteiro had noticed that although Brazilian households were spending less on sugar and oil, obesity rates were going up. The paradox could be explained by increased consumption of food that had undergone high levels of processing, such as the addition of preservatives and flavorings or the removal or addition of nutrients.
But health authorities and food companies resisted the link, Monteiro tells the FT. “[These are] people who spent their whole life thinking that the only link between diet and health is the nutrient content of foods … Food is more than nutrients.”
Monteiro’s food classification system, “Nova,” assessed not only the nutritional content of foods but also the processes they undergo before reaching our plates. The system laid the groundwork for two decades of scientific research linking the consumption of UPFs to obesity, cancer, and diabetes.
Studies of UPFs show that these processes create food—from snack bars to breakfast cereals to ready meals—that encourages overeating but may leave the eater undernourished. A recipe might, for example, contain a level of carbohydrate and fat that triggers the brain’s reward system, meaning you have to consume more to sustain the pleasure of eating it.
In 2019, American metabolic scientist Kevin Hall carried out a randomized study comparing people who ate an unprocessed diet with those who followed a UPF diet over two weeks. Hall found that the subjects who ate the ultra-processed diet consumed around 500 more calories per day, more fat and carbohydrates, less protein—and gained weight.
The rising concern about the health impact of UPFs has recast the debate around food and public health, giving rise to books, policy campaigns, and academic papers. It also presents the most concrete challenge yet to the business model of the food industry, for whom UPFs are extremely profitable.
The industry has responded with a ferocious campaign against regulation. In part it has used the same lobbying playbook as its fight against labeling and taxation of “junk food” high in calories: big spending to influence policymakers.
FT analysis of US lobbying data from non-profit Open Secrets found that food and soft drinks-related companies spent $106 million on lobbying in 2023, almost twice as much as the tobacco and alcohol industries combined. Last year’s spend was 21 percent higher than in 2020, with the increase driven largely by lobbying relating to food processing as well as sugar.
In an echo of tactics employed by cigarette companies, the food industry has also attempted to stave off regulation by casting doubt on the research of scientists like Monteiro.
“The strategy I see the food industry using is deny, denounce, and delay,” says Barry Smith, director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London and a consultant for companies on the multisensory experience of food and drink.
So far the strategy has proved successful. Just a handful of countries, including Belgium, Israel, and Brazil, currently refer to UPFs in their dietary guidelines. But as the weight of evidence about UPFs grows, public health experts say the only question now is how, if at all, it is translated into regulation.
“There’s scientific agreement on the science,” says Jean Adams, professor of dietary public health at the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge. “It’s how to interpret that to make a policy that people aren’t sure of.”
Last week, the Biden administration announced it would levy dramatic new tariffs on electric vehicles, electric vehicle batteries, and battery components imported into the United States from China. The move kicked off another round of global debate on how best to push the transportation industry toward an emissions-free future, and how global automotive manufacturers outside of China should compete with the Asian country’s well-engineered and low-cost car options.
But what is an electric vehicle exactly? China has dominated bicycle manufacturing, too; it was responsible for some 80 percent of US bicycle imports in 2021, according to one report. In cycling circles, the US’s new trade policies have raised questions about how much bicycle companies will have to pay to get Chinese-made bicycles and components into the US, and whether any new costs will get passed on to US customers.
On Wednesday, the Office of the United States Trade Representative—the US agency that creates trade policy—clarified that ebike batteries would be affected by the new policy, too.
In a written statement, Angela Perez, a spokesperson for the USTR, said that e-bike batteries imported from China on their own will be subject to new tariffs of 25 percent in 2026, up from 7.5 percent.
But it’s unclear whether imported complete e-bikes, as well as other cycling products including children’s bicycles and bicycle trailers, might be affected by new US trade policies. These products have technically been subject to 25 percent tariffs since the Trump administration. But US trade officials have consistently used exclusions to waive tariffs for many of those cycling products. The latest round of exclusions are set to expire at the end of this month.
Perez, the USTR spokesperson, said the future of tariff exclusions related to bicycles would be “addressed in the coming days.”
If the administration does not extend tariff exclusions for some Chinese-made bicycle products, “it will not help adoption” of e-bikes, says Matt Moore, the head of policy at the bicycle advocacy group PeopleForBikes. Following the announcement of additional tariffs on Chinese products earlier this month, PeopleForBikes urged its members to contact local representatives and advocate for an extension of the tariff exclusions. The group estimates tariff exclusions have saved the bike industry more than $130 million since 2018. It’s hard to pinpoint how much this has saved bicycle buyers, but in general, Moore says, companies that pay higher “landed costs”—that is, the cost of the product to get from the factory floor to an owner’s home—raise prices to cover their margins.
The tariff tussle comes as the US is in the midst of an extended electric bicycle boom. US sales of e-bikes peaked in 2022 at $903 million, up from $240 million in 2019, according to Circana’s Retail Tracking Service. Sales spiked as Americans looked for ways to get active and take advantage of the pandemic era’s empty streets. E-bike sales fell last year, but have ticked up by 4 percent since the start of 2024, according to Circana.
In the US, climate-conscious state and local governments have started to think more seriously about subsidizing electric bicycles in the way they have electric autos. States including Colorado and Hawaii give rebates to income-qualified residents. E-bike rebate programs in Denver and Connecticut were so popular among cyclists that they ran out of funding in days.
A paper published last year by researchers with the University of California, Davis, suggests these sorts of programs might work. It found that people who used local and state rebate programs to buy e-bikes reported bicycling more after their purchases. Almost 40 percent of respondents said they replaced at least one weekly car trip with their e-bike in the long-term—the kind of shift that could put a noticeable dent in carbon emissions.
Enlarge/ Tesla sold 1.2 million Model Y crossovers last year.
John Paraskevas/Newsday RM via Getty Images
For at least a decade, a car theft trick known as a “relay attack” has been the modern equivalent of hot-wiring: a cheap and relatively easy technique to steal hundreds of models of vehicles. A more recent upgrade to the radio protocol in cars’ keyless entry systems known as ultra-wideband communications, rolled out to some high-end cars including the latest Tesla Model 3, has been heralded as the fix for that ubiquitous form of grand theft auto. But when one group of Chinese researchers actually checked whether it’s still possible to perform relay attacks against the latest Tesla and a collection of other cars that support that next-gen radio protocol, they found that they’re as stealable as ever.
In a video shared with WIRED, researchers at the Beijing-based automotive cybersecurity firm GoGoByte demonstrated that they could carry out a relay attack against the latest Tesla Model 3 despite its upgrade to an ultra-wideband keyless entry system, instantly unlocking it with less than a hundred dollars worth of radio equipment. Since the Tesla 3’s keyless entry system also controls the car’s immobilizer feature designed to prevent its theft, that means a radio hacker could start the car and drive it away in seconds—unless the driver has enabled Tesla’s optional, off-by-default PIN-to-drive feature that requires the owner to enter a four-digit code before starting the car.
Jun Li, GoGoByte’s founder and a longtime car-hacking researcher, says that his team’s successful hack of the latest Model 3’s keyless entry system means Tesla owners need to turn on that PIN safeguard despite any rumor that Tesla’s radio upgrade would protect their vehicle. “It’s a warning for the mass public: Simply having ultra-wideband enabled doesn’t mean your vehicle won’t be stolen,” Li says. “Using relay attacks, it’s still just like the good old days for the thieves.”
Relay attacks work by tricking a car into detecting that an owner’s key fob—or, in the case of many Tesla owners, their smartphone with an unlocking app installed—is near the car and that it should therefore unlock. Instead, a hacker’s device near the car has, in fact, relayed the signal from the owner’s real key, which might be dozens or hundreds of feet away. Thieves can cross that distance by placing one radio device near the real key and another next to the target car, relaying the signal from one device to the other.
Thieves have used the relay technique to, for instance, pick up the signal of a car key inside a house where the owner is sleeping and transmit it to a car in the driveway. Or, as GoGoByte researcher Yuqiao Yang describes, the trick could even be carried out by the person behind you in line at a café where your car is parked outside. “They may be holding a relay device, and then your car may just be driven away,” Yang says. “That’s how fast it can happen, maybe just a couple seconds.” The attacks have become common enough that some car owners have taken to keeping their keys in Faraday bags that block radio signals—or in the freezer.
