Honorable Mentions Wolf 12-Inch Memory Foam Hybrid Medium Firm Mattress for $899: WIRED reviewer Molly Higgins found herself surprisingly impressed with this affordable mattress. She says the medium-firm memory foam hybrid mattress feels much more luxe than its price point suggests, and that individually wrapped coils give great support and …
Read More »Blocked From Selling Off-Brand Ozempic, Telehealth Startups Embrace a Less Effective Drug
After telehealth startups recently lost the ability to sell exact copies of patented GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, some firms have begun turning to a different, less effective medication that has been on the market in the United States since 2010. Often considered a precursor to blockbuster products like Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic …
Read More »SpaceX Tests Starship Fixes After Back-to-Back Failures
SpaceX founder Elon Musk also wants Starship to fly to Mars, which will, likewise, require a mastery of in-space refueling. NASA may also soon rely on Starship and other massive commercial rockets to launch astronauts from Earth. The Trump administration has proposed canceling NASA’s Space Launch System rocket after two …
Read More »The EPA Is Giving Some Forever Chemicals a Pass
The EPA on Wednesday said it would change a rule intended to protect Americans from forever chemicals in their drinking water. The agency plans to extend a compliance deadline to limit two key chemicals, and rescind and reconsider regulations on four others. Last year, the Biden administration released a long-awaited …
Read More »Elon Musk’s Grok AI Can’t Stop Talking About ‘White Genocide’
A chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence startup xAI appeared to be suffering from a glitch Wednesday when it repeatedly brought up white genocide in South Africa in response to user queries about unrelated topics on X. Grok, which competes with other chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is directly …
Read More »The Internet’s Biggest-Ever Black Market Just Shut Down Amid a Telegram Purge
For years, a Chinese-language market for crypto scammers and money launderers—by some measures, the internet’s biggest black market of all time—operated in plain sight on the messaging service Telegram, facilitating tens of billions of dollars in illicit finance. Now, thanks to the scrutiny of one team of crypto crime researchers …
Read More »Microsoft Cuts Off Access to Bing Search Data as It Shifts Focus to Chatbots
Through the Bing APIs, Microsoft helped other search engines save on the cost and time of crawling billions of web pages and developing a searchable index of all available content. The tools allowed them to automatically submit queries and get back results that they could present to their own users …
Read More »The Reason Murderbot’s Tone Feels Off
A confession: This dispatch will not be coming to you from one of the long-devout Martha Wells faithful. I’m a convert, a curious reader who turned to Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries series after reading my colleague Meghan Herbst’s fantastic 2024 profile of the author, which left me questioning who would …
Read More »Violent Threats Against US Judges Are Skyrocketing Online
Violent threats and calls for impeachment on social media platforms against US judges have skyrocketed by 327 percent since last year, according to new research from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE). Many of the posts are violent and politically charged. “THIS JUDGE NEEDS TO BE REMOVED AND …
Read More »CFPB Quietly Kills Rule to Shield Americans From Data Brokers
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has canceled plans to introduce new rules designed to limit the ability of US data brokers to sell sensitive information about Americans, including financial data, credit history, and Social Security numbers. The CFPB proposed the new rule in early December under former director Rohit …
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