China is poised to be the next big donor to the World Health Organization after Trump abruptly withdrew the US from the United Nations health agency on his first day in office, leaving a critical funding gap and leadership void.

On Tuesday, Chinese Vice Premier Liu Guozhong said that China would give an additional $500 million to WHO over the course of five years. Liu made the announcement at the World Health Assembly (WHA) being held in Geneva. The WHA is the decision-making body of WHO, comprised of delegations from member states, which meet annually to guide the agency's health agenda.

“The world is now facing the impacts of unilateralism and power politics, bringing major challenges to global health security," Liu told the WHA, according to The Washington Post. "China strongly believes that only with solidarity and mutual assistance can we create a healthy world together."

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Out of all the books I read for my formal education, one bit, from one slim paperback, has lodged the deepest into my brain.

William Blundell's The Art and Craft of Feature Writing offers a "selective list of what readers like." It starts with a definitive No. 1: "Dogs, followed by other cute animals and well-behaved small children." People, Blundell writes, are your second-best option, providing they are doing or saying something interesting.

I have failed to provide Ars Technica readers with a dog story during nearly three years here. Today, I intend to fix that. This is a story about a dog, but also a rare optimistic take on a ubiquitous "smart" product, one that helped out a very good girl.

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The Department of Justice today asked the Supreme Court to block a ruling that requires DOGE to provide information about its government cost-cutting operations as part of court-ordered discovery.

President Trump's Justice Department sought an immediate halt to orders issued by US District Court for the District of Columbia. US Solicitor General John Sauer argued that the Department of Government Efficiency is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) as a presidential advisory body and not an official "agency."

The district court "ordered USDS [US Doge Service] to submit to sweeping, intrusive discovery just to determine if USDS is subject to FOIA in the first place," Sauer wrote. "That order turns FOIA on its head, effectively giving respondent a win on the merits of its FOIA suit under the guise of figuring out whether FOIA even applies. And that order clearly violates the separation of powers, subjecting a presidential advisory body to intrusive discovery and threatening the confidentiality and candor of its advice, putatively to address a legal question that never should have necessitated discovery in this case at all."

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Signal Messenger is warning the users of its Windows Desktop version that the privacy of their messages is under threat by Recall, the AI tool rolling out in Windows 11 that will screenshot, index, and store almost everything a user does every three seconds.

Effective immediately, Signal for Windows will by default block the ability of Windows to screenshot the app. Signal users who want to disable the block—for instance to preserve a conversation for their records or make use of accessibility features for sight-impaired users—will have to change settings inside their desktop version to enable screenshots.

My kingdom for an API

“Although Microsoft made several adjustments over the past twelve months in response to critical feedback, the revamped version of Recall still places any content that’s displayed within privacy-preserving apps like Signal at risk,” Signal officials wrote Wednesday. “As a result, we are enabling an extra layer of protection by default on Windows 11 in order to help maintain the security of Signal Desktop on that platform even though it introduces some usability trade-offs. Microsoft has simply given us no other option.”

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Whenever something bad happens to us, brain systems responsible for mediating emotions kick in to prevent it from happening again. When we get stung by a wasp, the association between pain and wasps is encoded in the region of the brain called the amygdala, which connects simple stimuli with basic emotions.

But the brain does more than simple associations; it also encodes lots of other stimuli that are less directly connected with the harmful event—things like the place where we got stung or the wasps’ nest in a nearby tree. These are combined into complex emotional models of potentially threatening circumstances.

Till now, we didn’t know exactly how these models are built. But we’re beginning to understand how it’s done.

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Cheese connoisseurs are no doubt familiar with a particular kind of semi-hard Swiss cheese called "Tête de Moine." Rather than spreading or slicing the cheese, Tête de Moine is usually served by scraping the top of the cheese wheel in a circular motion using a specialized tool called a Girolle. This produces elegant thin shavings known as rosettes, since they resemble a frilly flower.

The method is both aesthetically pleasing and serves to enhance the aromas and mouth feel of the cheese, according to the authors of a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters (PRL). This group of physicists based in Paris noted a marked similarity between the frilly edges of those cheese flowers and certain leaves, fungi, corals, and even torn plastic sheets—all formed by different mechanisms. So naturally the physicists decided to conduct their own research to determine the underlying mechanism(s) for the delicate frills of Tête de Moine shavings.

Tête de Moine translates as "monk's head," and the name dates back to the 1790s, although the actual cheese originates back to a 12th-century Bellelay monastery in Switzerland. It's made from raw unpasteurized cow's milk and is matured for a minimum of 75 days on spruce boards and boasts a firm reddish-brown crust. The Girolle (named after the French word for chanterelles, which have a similar rosette shape) is a more recent innovation, invented in 1982 specifically for Tête de Moine by a man named Nicolas Crevoisier. It's just a round wooden plate with a pin stuck vertically in the middle—the better to skewer one's cheese wheel—and a crank handle to control the slicing blade.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—Google used to be all about the 10 blue links, but that was then, and this is now. You have to scroll farther than ever to get to the links in Google search results, and now this trend is being taken to its ultimate conclusion. At I/O, the company has announced a major expansion of AI Mode search, which heralds a new era for its signature product. There are big changes coming, some of which will start rewriting the web sooner than you think.

The past several years at Google have been marked by an all-consuming obsession with generative AI. It has invaded your search results as AI Overviews, but Google has made it clear at I/O 2025 that AI Overviews was just practice. AI Mode is the game. Everyone at Google is acutely aware of this shift—at the end of the I/O keynote, CEO Sundar Pichai showed a cheeky AI counter graphic that tracked how many times speakers had mentioned "AI" and "Gemini." But Google is serious about AI in general and AI search in particular.

To that end, the AI Mode search that debuted a few months ago as a Labs experiment is graduating to the main Google search page for everyone, and it's available to everyone. It's not the default way of searching the web, but it seems like only a matter of time before that happens. According to Pichai, people search more and enter longer, more complex queries in AI Mode, which is exactly the kind of search AI is good at handling.

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On Wednesday, OpenAI announced that former Apple design chief Jony Ive and his design firm LoveFrom will take over creative and design control at OpenAI. The deal makes Ive responsible for shaping the future look and feel of AI products at the chatbot creator, extending across all of the company's ventures, including ChatGPT.

Ive was Apple's chief design officer for nearly three decades, where he led the design of iconic products including the iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and Apple Watch, earning numerous industry awards and helping transform Apple into the world's most valuable company through his minimalist design philosophy.

"Thrilled to be partnering with jony, imo the greatest designer in the world," tweeted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman while sharing a 9-minute promotional video touting the personal and professional relationship between Ive and Altman.

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Pixar's Finding Nemo immortalized the colorful clownfish, with its distinctive orange body and white stripes, in the popular imagination. Clownfish, like many other species, are feeling the stress of rising temperatures and other environmental stressors. Fortunately, they have a superpower to cope: They can shrink their body size during dangerous heat waves to substantially boost their odds of survival, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances.

“This is not just about getting skinnier under stressful conditions; these fish are actually getting shorter," said co-author Melissa Versteeg, a graduate student at Newcastle University. "We don’t know yet exactly how they do it, but we do know that a few other animals can do this too."

Many vertebrates have shown growth decline in response to environmental stressors, especially higher temperatures. Marine iguanas, for example, reabsorb some of their bone material to shrink when their watery habitat gets warmer, while young salmon have been known to shrink at winter's onset. This can also happen when there is less food available. And social factors can also influence growth. When female meerkats, for example, are dominant, they have growth spurts, while a disruption in their social status can cause stunted growth in male cichlids

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Verizon petitioned the Trump administration to let it lock phones to its network for longer periods of time, making it harder for customers to switch to other carriers.

There are two rules that require Verizon to unlock phones more quickly than other major carriers. Verizon agreed to both rules and gained significant benefits in return—first in 2008 when it purchased licenses to use 700 MHz spectrum that came with open access requirements and in 2021 when it agreed to merger conditions in order to obtain approval for its purchase of TracFone.

The Biden-era Federal Communications Commission last year proposed a 60-day unlocking requirement that would apply to all wireless providers, which would have made AT&T and T-Mobile follow the same unlocking timeframe as Verizon. But now that the FCC is chaired by Republican Brendan Carr, it's looking to eliminate telecom regulations instead of making them stricter. Verizon sees this as an opening to seek an end to its unlocking obligations.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Sea levels in some parts of the world could be rising by as much as 8 to 12 inches per decade within the lifetime of today’s youngest generations, outpacing the ability of many coastal communities to adapt, scientists warned in a new study published this week.

The research by an international team of sea level and polar ice experts suggests that limiting warming to 2.7° Fahrenheit (1.5° Celsius) above the pre-industrial temperature—the Paris Climate Agreement’s target—isn’t low enough to prevent a worst-case meltdown of Earth’s polar ice sheets.

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As electric vehicles reduce car exhaust as a source of particulate emissions, people are increasingly focusing on other vehicular sources of pollution that won't go away with electrification. Tires are one of them, particularly as we grapple with overweight EVs with tire-shredding torque. And brakes are another—even an EV with regenerative braking will occasionally need to use its friction brakes, after all.

Over in Europe, the people responsible for writing regulations have taken this into consideration with the upcoming Euro 7 standard, which sets new limits on 10- and 2.5-micron particulate emissions on all new vehicles—including EVs—starting next year. And to help OEMs achieve that target, Brembo has developed a new brake and pad set called Greentell that it says cuts brake dust emissions by 90 percent, improving durability in the process.

"We started 10 years ago to investigate a different solution. The main topic that we had in mind was to develop a disk that is greener than the current production of cast iron," said Fabiano Carminati, VP of disc technical development at Brembo.

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SilverStone's first '80s throwback PC case started life as an April Fools' joke, but the success of the FLP01 was apparently serious enough to merit a follow-up. The company brought another beige case to the Computex trade show this week, the vertically oriented FLP02 (via Tom's Hardware).

If the original horizontally oriented FLP01 case called to mind a 386-era Compaq Deskpro, the FLP02 is a dead ringer for the kind of case you might have gotten for a generic 486 or early Pentium-era PC. That extends to having a Turbo button built into the front—on vintage PCs, this button could actually determine how fast the processor was allowed to run, though here, it's actually a fan speed control instead. A lock on the front also locks the power switch in place to keep it from being flipped off accidentally, something else real vintage PCs actually did.

Despite its retro facade, the FLP02 is capable of fitting in even higher-end modern PC parts than the original FLP01. Front USB-A and USB-C ports are hidden behind a magnetic door on the front of the case, and its faux-5.25-inch floppy drives are just covers for drive bays that you could use for an optical drive or extra front I/O.

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If you ask the man who has largely shaped how friends and family connect on social media over the past two decades about the future of social media, you may not get a straight answer.

At the Federal Trade Commission's monopoly trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted what seemed like an artful dodge to avoid criticism that his company allegedly bought out rivals Instagram and WhatsApp to lock users into Meta's family of apps so they would never post about their personal lives anywhere else. He testified that people actually engage with social media less often these days to connect with loved ones, preferring instead to discover entertaining content on platforms to share in private messages with friends and family.

As Zuckerberg spins it, Meta no longer perceives much advantage in dominating the so-called personal social networking market where Facebook made its name and cemented what the FTC alleged is an illegal monopoly.

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An all-new version of Toyota's bestselling RAV4 crossover debuted last night. For generation six, Toyota North America is going all-electrified, with hybrid and plug-in hybrid powertrains on offer. And while the RAV4 isn't quite a software-defined vehicle as we understand the term, it features an all-new software platform tying everything together.

Toyota has grouped the various RAV4 configurations into three groups: core, rugged, and sport. And there are three different powertrain options: front-wheel drive hybrid, all-wheel drive hybrid, and all-wheel drive PHEV, although some trims are only available in certain configurations.

Front-wheel drive hybrid RAV4s feature a 226 hp (168 kW) 2.5 L engine, with all-wheel drive hybrid models offering a slight increase at 236 hp (176 kW). The PHEV generates a combined 320 hp (239 kW), and Toyota says it can go 50 miles (80 km) on a single charge.

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AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 were fairly well received when they were released in March, ably competing with Nvidia's RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti for the same or a little less money. We were impressed by the cards' performance and power efficiency, even if they still have some of the same caveats as older Radeon cards (lack of DLSS upscaling and lower relative ray-tracing performance being two).

Today AMD is formally expanding its family of RDNA 4 graphics cards with the Radeon RX 9060 XT, a GPU that will go up against Nvidia's RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti GPUs. These GPUs have just half the compute units of the RX 9070 XT, but at $299 and $349 for 8GB and 16GB configurations, they ought to be decent options for 1080p or entry-level 1440p gaming PCs (with the eternal "if you can find them" caveat that comes with buying a GPU in 2025).

AMD says the new GPUs will be available starting on June 5th from the typical range of partners—AMD released renders of a reference GPU design, but sometimes these are starting points that manufacturers can take or leave, rather than products AMD intends to manufacture and sell itself.

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Three-dimensional printing is transforming medical care, letting the health care field shift from mass-produced solutions to customized treatments tailored to each patient’s needs. For instance, researchers are developing 3D-printed prosthetic hands specifically designed for children, made with lightweight materials and adaptable control systems.

These continuing advancements in 3D-printed prosthetics demonstrate their increasing affordability and accessibility. Success stories like this one in personalized prosthetics highlight the benefits of 3D printing, in which a model of an object produced with computer-aided design software is transferred to a 3D printer and constructed layer by layer.

We are a biomedical engineer and a chemist who work with 3D printing. We study how this rapidly evolving technology provides new options not just for prosthetics but for implants, surgical planning, drug manufacturing, and other health care needs. The ability of 3D printing to make precisely shaped objects in a wide range of materials has led to, for example, custom replacement joints and custom-dosage, multidrug pills.

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Self-hosting is having a moment, even if it's hard to define exactly what it is.

It's a niche that goes beyond regular computing devices and networks but falls short of a full-on home lab. (Most home labs involve self-hosting, but not all self-hosting makes for a home lab.) It adds privacy, provides DRM-free alternatives, and reduces advertising. It's often touted as a way to get more out of your network-attached storage (NAS), but it's much more than just backup and media streaming.

Is self-hosting just running services on your network for which most people rely on cloud companies? Broadly, yes. But take a look at the selfh.st site/podcast/newsletter, the r/selfhosted subreddit, and all the GitHub project pages that link to one another, and you'll also find things that no cloud provider offers.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—Google rolled out early versions of Gemini 2.5 earlier this year, marking a significant improvement over the 2.0 branch. For the first time, Google's chatbot felt competitive with the likes of ChatGPT, but it has been "experimental" and later "preview" since then. At I/O 2025, Google announced general availability for Gemini 2.5, and these models will soon be integrated with Chrome. There's also a fancy new subscription plan to get the most from Google's AI. You probably won't like the pricing, though.

Gemini 2.5 goes gold

Even though Gemini 2.5 was revealed a few months ago, the older 2.0 Flash has been the default model all this time. Now that 2.5 is finally ready, the 2.5 Flash model will be swapped in as the new default. This model has built-in simulated reasoning, so its outputs are much more reliable than 2.0 Flash.

Google says the release version of 2.5 Flash is better at reasoning, coding, and multimodality, but it uses 20–30 percent fewer tokens than the preview version. This edition is now live in Vertex AI, AI Studio, and the Gemini app. It will be made the default model in early June.

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In sparking his global trade war, Donald Trump seems to have maintained a glaring blind spot when it comes to protecting one of America's greatest trade advantages: the export of digital services.

Experts have warned that the consequences for Silicon Valley could be far-reaching.

In a report released Tuesday, an intelligence firm that tracks global trade risks, Allianz Trade, shared results of a survey of 4,500 firms worldwide, designed "to capture the impact of the escalation of trade tensions." Amid other key findings, the group warned that the US's fixation on the country's trillion-dollar goods deficit risks rocking "the fastest-growing segment of global trade," America's "invisible exports" of financial and digital services.

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