Under the control of anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Food and Drug Administration is unilaterally terminating universal access to seasonal COVID-19 vaccines; Instead, only people who are age 65 years and older and people with underlying conditions that put them at risk of severe COVID-19 will have access to seasonal boosters moving forward.

The move was laid out in a commentary article published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, written by Trump administration FDA Commissioner Martin Makary and the agency's new top vaccine regulator, Vinay Prasad.

The article lays out a new framework for approving seasonal COVID-19 vaccines, as well as a rationale for the change—which was made without input from independent advisory committees for the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Microsoft is updating Windows 11 with a set of new encryption algorithms that can withstand future attacks from quantum computers in a move aimed at jump-starting what’s likely to be the most formidable and important technology transition in modern history.

Computers that are based on the physics of quantum mechanics don’t yet exist outside of sophisticated labs, but it’s well-established science that they eventually will. Instead of processing data in the binary state of zeros and ones, quantum computers run on qubits, which encompass myriad states all at once. This new capability promises to bring about new discoveries of unprecedented scale in a host of fields, including metallurgy, chemistry, drug discovery, and financial modeling.

Averting the cryptopocalypse

One of the most disruptive changes quantum computing will bring is the breaking of some of the most common forms of encryption, specifically, the RSA cryptosystem and those based on elliptic curves. These systems are the workhorses that banks, governments, and online services around the world have relied on for more than four decades to keep their most sensitive data confidential. RSA and elliptic curve encryption keys securing web connections would require millions of years to be cracked using today’s computers. A quantum computer could crack the same keys in a matter of hours or minutes.

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On Monday, the developer of a large offshore wind farm being built off the coast of New York announced that the federal government had lifted a hold it had placed on the project roughly a month ago. The entire process has been shrouded in mystery. The government never fully enunciated its justification for the hold and hasn't yet commented on the fact that it had been lifted, although there is some hint that it was coupled to a reconsideration of a cancelled natural gas pipeline.

Empire Wind is a large project being built off the southeast shore of Long Island by Equinor, a Norwegian energy company. The first of two phases, Empire Wind 1, will have an 800 MW capacity and has already received permitting and environmental approval. Equinor had started construction of the foundations for the towers that would hold the wind turbines and onshore facilities that would support this and future offshore projects.

All that changed in mid-April when Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum announced via a social media post that the approval for Empire Wind had been rushed and his department would be reviewing it. A Fox News article published a few days later suggests that a review by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration "found the Empire Wind approval process relied on rushed, outdated, and incomplete scientific and environmental analysis." But nobody else has indicated that any such report exists, despite requests from the press.

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Subscribers to Adobe’s multi-app subscription plan, Creative Cloud All Apps, will be charged more starting on June 17 to accommodate for new generative AI features.

Adobe’s announcement, spotted by MakeUseOf, says the change will affect North American subscribers to the Creative Cloud All Apps plan, which Adobe is renaming Creative Cloud Pro. Starting on June 17, Adobe will automatically renew Creative Cloud All Apps subscribers into the Creative Cloud Pro subscription, which will be $70 per month for individuals who commit to an annual plan, up from $60 for Creative Cloud All Apps. Annual plans for students and teachers plans are moving from $35/month to $40/month, and annual teams pricing will go from $90/month to $100/month. Monthly (non-annual) subscriptions are also increasing, from $90 to $105.

Further, in an apparent attempt to push generative AI users to more expensive subscriptions, as of June 17, Adobe will give new single-app subscribers just 25 generative AI credits instead of the current 500.

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On Sunday, the Chicago Sun-Times published an advertorial summer reading list containing at least 10 fake books attributed to real authors, according to multiple reports on social media. The newspaper's uncredited "Summer reading list for 2025" supplement recommended titles including "Tidewater Dreams" by Isabel Allende and "The Last Algorithm" by Andy Weir—books that don't exist and were created out of thin air by an AI system.

The creator of the list, Marco Buscaglia, confirmed to 404 Media that he used AI to generate the content. "I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious. No excuses," Buscaglia said. "On me 100 percent and I'm completely embarrassed."

A check by Ars Technica shows that only five of the fifteen recommended books in the list actually exist, with the remainder being fabricated titles falsely attributed to well-known authors. AI assistants such as ChatGPT are well-known for creating plausible-sounding errors known as confabulations, especially when lacking detailed information on a particular topic. The problem affects everything from AI search results to lawyers citing fake cases.

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Jurassic World Rebirth is coming to theaters for the Fourth of July weekend, and Universal Pictures has released one final trailer to whet audience appetites for the film.

As previously reported, this is the fourth installment in the Jurassic World series and seventh film overall in the franchise spawned by 1993's Jurassic Park. This time around, Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali step into the leading roles since the film is meant to be a fresh start for the franchise—although it does feature a return to the original research facility. Gareth Edwards—who directed 2014's Godzilla—signed on to direct a script penned by David Koepp, who wrote the scripts for Jurassic Park and The Lost World (1997).

Per the official premise:

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SAVANNAH, Georgia—Hyundai's massive new Metaplant factory in Georgia is actually painted a subtle shade of green, not white, but you'd need someone to point that out to you. It's a shining example of the latest in car manufacturing—bright lights and white walls inside, knee-saving wooden floors on the production line, recaptured waste energy and solar—you name it. Hyundai even uses dog-like robots to check some welds. The vast facility is responsible for North American production of the electric Ioniq 5 and, now, the all-new Ioniq 9 SUV as well.

That Hyundai would make a three-row SUV with its class-leading electric powertrain was a no-brainer. The E-GMP platform, with its 800 V powertrain, was designed for medium to large EVs, after all. In 2021 it debuted the Seven concept, which explored the idea of a living room on wheels. I'm not sure why the nameplate skipped a couple of digits, but the production Ioniq 9 tries to keep as true to that theme as possible within the confines of real life.

Although they look quite different from one another, a common design language called "parametric pixels" ties together the Ioniq 9 with its smaller siblings the Ioniq 5 SUV and Ioniq 6 sedan. Creases catch the light even with the matte-gold paint of our test car, like the line ahead of the rear wheels that calls back to the collar on a traditional Korean garment. As ever, there are some other wonderful names for the design language: my favorite is "aerosthetic lounge," but when you look at the images, also think of words like "teutonic," "boat tail," and "integrated." When you hear the shape was inspired by a pebble, it makes sense that the drag coefficient is a slippery 0.27.

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Google is constantly making changes to its search rankings, but not all updates are equal. Every few months, the company bundles up changes into a larger "core update." These updates make rapid and profound changes to search, so website operators watch them closely.

The March 2024 update was unique. It was one of Google's largest core updates ever, and it took over a month to fully roll out. Nothing has felt quite the same since. Whether the update was good or bad depends on who you ask—and maybe who you are.

It's common for websites to see traffic changes after a core update, but the impact of the March 2024 update marked a seismic shift. Google says the update aimed to address spam and AI-generated content in a meaningful way. Still, many publishers say they saw clicks on legitimate sites evaporate, while others have had to cope with unprecedented volatility in their traffic. Because Google owns almost the entire search market, changes in its algorithm can move the Internet itself.

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One of the longest-standing mysteries about Mars has been the presence of dark and light streaks on the rolling hills surrounding Olympus Mons. This week's image, from the European Space Agency, shows some of these streaks captured last October.

This massive mountain rises about 22 km above the surface of Mars, more than twice as high as Mount Everest on Earth. It is bordered by hummocky deposits, called aureoles, that were formed by landslides from the mountain. A striking feature of these aureoles is the periodic appearance of bright and dark streaks—sometimes for days and sometimes for years.

For decades, scientists have wondered what they might be.

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Biotechnology company Regeneron will acquire 23andMe out of bankruptcy for $256 million, with a plan to keep the DNA-testing company running without interruption and uphold its privacy-protection promises.

In its announcement of the acquisition, Regeneron assured 23andMe's 15 million customers that their data—including genetic and health information, genealogy, and other sensitive personal information—would be safe and in good hands. Regeneron aims to use the large trove of genetic data to further its own work using genetics to develop medical advances—something 23andMe tried and failed to do.

"As a world leader in human genetics, Regeneron Genetics Center is committed to and has a proven track record of safeguarding the genetic data of people across the globe, and, with their consent, using this data to pursue discoveries that benefit science and society," Aris Baras, senior vice president and head of the Regeneron Genetics Center, said in a statement. "We assure 23andMe customers that we are committed to protecting the 23andMe dataset with our high standards of data privacy, security, and ethical oversight and will advance its full potential to improve human health."

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A generation ago, when former NASA Administrator Dan Goldin promoted the mantra of a "faster, better, cheaper" approach to the agency's science missions, critics often joked that NASA could only pick two.

That's no longer the case. NASA is finding success in its partnerships with commercial space companies, especially SpaceX, with lower costs, quicker results, and improved performance.

The Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office, the US government's spy satellite agency, are also capitalizing on new products and services from commercial industry. In many cases, these new capabilities come from venture-backed startups already developing and operating satellites for commercial use.

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On Monday, SAG-AFTRA filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board against Epic subsidiary Llama Productions for implementing an AI-generated Darth Vader voice in Fortnite on Friday without first notifying or bargaining with the union, as their contract requires.

Llama Productions is the official signatory to SAG-AFTRA's collective bargaining agreement for Fortnite, making it legally responsible for adhering to the union's terms regarding the employment of voice actors and other performers.

"We celebrate the right of our members and their estates to control the use of their digital replicas and welcome the use of new technologies," SAG-AFTRA stated in a news release. "However, we must protect our right to bargain terms and conditions around uses of voice that replace the work of our members, including those who previously did the work of matching Darth Vader's iconic rhythm and tone in video games."

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Last year, Google open-sourced its SynthID AI watermarking system, allowing other developers access to a toolkit for imperceptibly marking content as AI-generated. Now, Google is rolling out a web-based portal to let people easily test if a piece of media has been watermarked with SynthID.

After uploading a piece of media to the SynthID Detector, users will get back results that "highlight which parts of the content are more likely to have been watermarked," Google said. That watermarked, AI-generated content should remain detectable by the portal "even when the content is shared or undergoes a range of transformations," the company said.

The detector will be available to beta testers starting today, and Google says journalists, media professionals, and researchers can apply for a waitlist to get access themselves. To start, users will be able to upload images and audio to the portal for verification, but Google says video and text detection will be added in the coming weeks.

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After dragging its feet for years, America is finally taking its first big step toward shielding victims of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII)—also known as revenge porn—from constantly being retraumatized online.

On Monday afternoon, Donald Trump is scheduled to sign the Take It Down Act into law. That means that within one year, every online platform will be required to remove both actual NCII and fake nudes generated by artificial intelligence within 48 hours of victims' reports or face steep penalties.

Supporters have touted the 48-hour timeline as remarkably fast, empowering victims to promptly stop revenge porn from spreading widely online. The law's passing comes at a time when AI-generated revenge porn is increasingly harming a wider pool of victims—including some who may have never shared a compromising photo, like dozens of kids in middle and high schools nationwide. Acknowledging the substantial harm to kids already, the law includes steeper penalties for NCII targeting minor victims, a threat lawmakers hope will help minors get harmful images removed "as soon as possible."

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Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux has become an important tool for developers and power users since it was introduced in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update back in 2016, giving them access to a built-in Linux command line and Linux applications from within Windows.

The company has steadily improved WSL since then, improving performance, making it easier to install and use, and adding features like GPU and audio support. But today as part of its Build developer conference, Microsoft announced that it would be making almost all of WSL open source, closing the very first issue that the then-new WSL project attracted on Github in 2016.

"WSL could never have been what it is today without its community," writes Microsoft Senior Software Engineer Pierre Boulay in the company's blog post. "We’ve seen how much the community has contributed to WSL without access to the source code, and we can’t wait to see how WSL will evolve now that the community can make direct code contributions to the project."

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It's shaping up to be a big year for telecom mergers, and it appears the Federal Communications Commission is eager to approve the deals—as long as companies involved drop any DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies criticized by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. Verizon just got a big merger approved, and cable giant Charter is seeking permission to buy Cox.

The FCC on Friday announced approval of Verizon's purchase of Frontier, one day after Verizon committed to end DEI policies in a filing with the commission. Carr previously sent letters to Verizon and other companies alleging that their diversity policies are "invidious forms of discrimination" that violate federal law and threatened to block mergers pursued by firms that enforce such policies.

"Verizon has now agreed to end its DEI policies as specified in a new FCC filing," Carr wrote in a post on X. "These changes are effective immediately. A good step forward for equal opportunity, nondiscrimination, and the public interest."

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Formula 1's busy 2025 schedule saw the sport return to its European heartland this past weekend. Italy has two races on the calendar this year, and this was the first, the (deep breath) "Formula 1 AWS Gran Premio Del Made in Italy e Dell'Emilia-Romagna," which took place at the scenic and historic (another deep breath) Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari, better known as Imola. It's another of F1's old-school circuits where overtaking is far from easy, particularly when the grid is as closely matched as it is. But Sunday's race was no snoozer, and for a couple of teams, there was a welcome change in form.

Red Bull was one. The team has looked a bit shambolic at times this season, with some wondering whether this change in form was the result of a number of high-profile staff departures toward the end of last season. Things looked pretty bleak during the first of three qualifying sessions, when Yuki Tsunoda got too aggressive with a curb and, rather than finding lap time, found himself in a violent crash that tore all four corners off the car and relegated him to starting the race last from the pit lane.

2025 has also been trying for Ferrari. Italy expects a lot from the red team, and the replacement of Mattia Binotto with Frédéric Vasseur as team principal was supposed to result in Maranello challenging for championships. Signing Lewis Hamilton, a bona fide superstar with seven titles already on his CV, hasn't exactly reduced the amount of pressure on Scuderia Ferrari, either.

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In the mood for a jauntily charming sci-fi comedy dripping with wry wit and an intriguing mystery? Check out Apple TV+'s Murderbot, based on Martha Wells' bestselling series of novels The Murderbot Diaries. It stars Alexander Skarsgård as the titular Murderbot, a rogue cyborg security (SEC) unit that gains autonomy and must learn to interact with humans while hiding its new capabilities.

(Some minor spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

There are seven books in Wells' series thus far. All are narrated by Murderbot, who is technically owned by a megacorporation but manages to hack and override its governor module. Rather than rising up and killing its former masters, Murderbot just goes about performing its security work, relieving the boredom by watching a lot of entertainment media; its favorite is a soap opera called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

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There's a lot of matter around, which ensures that any antimatter produced experiences a very short lifespan. Studying antimatter, therefore, has been extremely difficult. But that's changed a bit in recent years, as CERN has set up a facility that produces and traps antimatter, allowing for extensive studies of its properties, including entire anti-atoms.

Unfortunately, the hardware used to capture antiprotons also produces interference that limits the precision with which measurements can be made. So CERN decided that it might be good to determine how to move the antimatter away from where it's produced. Since it was tackling that problem anyway, CERN decided to make a shipping container for antimatter, allowing it to be put on a truck and potentially taken to labs throughout Europe.

A shipping container for antimatter

The problem facing CERN comes from its own hardware. The antimatter it captures is produced by smashing a particle beam into a stationary target. As a result, all the anti-particles that come out of the debris carry a lot of energy. If you want to hold on to any of them, you have to slow them down, which is done using electromagnetic fields that can act on the charged antimatter particles. Unfortunately, as the team behind the new work notes, many of the measurements we'd like to do with the antimatter are "extremely sensitive to external magnetic field noise."

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Thanks to our new global tariff war, the wild world of importing and exporting has been thrust into the forefront. There's a lot of logistics involved in keeping your local Walmart stocked and your Amazon Prime deliveries happening, and you might be surprised at how much of that world has already been automated.

While cars from autonomy providers like Waymo are still extremely rare in most stretches of the open road, the process of loading and unloading cargo has become almost entirely automated at some major ports around the world. Likewise, there's an increasing shift to electrify the various vehicles involved along the way, eliminating a significant source of global emissions.

But there's been one sticking point in this automated, electrified logistical dream: plugging in. The humble act of charging still happens via human hands, but that's changing. At a testing facility in Sweden, a company called Rocsys has demonstrated an automated charger that works with self-driving electric trucks from Einride in a hands-free and emissions-free partnership that could save time, money, and even lives.

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