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An anonymous reader quotes a report from STAT: The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved the world's first medicine based on CRISPR gene-editing technology, a groundbreaking treatment for sickle cell disease that delivers a potential cure for people born with the chronic and life-shortening blood disorder. The new medicine, called Casgevy, is made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics. Its authorization is a scientific triumph for the technology that can efficiently and precisely repair DNA mutations -- ushering in a new era of genetic medicines for inherited diseases. In a clinical trial, Casgevy was shown to eliminate recurrent episodes of debilitating pain caused by sickle cell, which afflicts approximately 100,000 people in the U.S., a vast majority of whom are Black. The therapy, whose scientific name is exa-cel, is described as a potential cure because the genetic fix enabled by CRISPR is designed to last a lifetime, although confirmation will require years of follow-up. The FDA decision comes three weeks after regulators in the U.K. were the first to clear the drug. Approval in the European Union is expected next year. The FDA is also expected to rule on exa-cel as a treatment for beta thalassemia, another inherited blood disorder, by March 30. The FDA on Friday also approved another sickle cell treatment, a gene therapy from Bluebird Bio called Lyfgenia. Patients will now have the option of two cutting-edge therapies that provide potentially curative benefits. Scientists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna published their first CRISPR paper just over a decade ago. In 2020, the research won the pair a Nobel Prize. Reflecting on the approval of Casgevy, Charpentier told STAT via email that she was "excited and pleased" for what it means for patients and their families.

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The Biden administration is threatening to cancel the patents of some costly medications to allow rivals to make their own more affordable versions. The Associated Press reports: Under a plan announced Thursday, the government would consider overriding the patent for high-priced drugs that have been developed with the help of taxpayer money and letting competitors make them in hopes of driving down the cost. In a 15-second video released to YouTube on Wednesday night, President Joe Biden promised the move would lower prices. "Today, we're taking a very important step toward ending price gouging so you don't have to pay more for the medicine you need," he said. White House officials would not name drugs that might potentially be targeted. The government would consider seizing a patent if a drug is only available to a "narrow set of consumers," according to the proposal that will be open to public comment for 60 days. Drugmakers are almost certain to challenge the plan in court if it is enacted. [...] The White House also intends to focus more closely on private equity firms that purchase hospitals and health systems, then often whittle them down and sell quickly for a profit. The departments of Justice and Health and Human Services, and the Federal Trade Commission will work to share more data about health system ownership. While only a minority of drugs on the market relied so heavily on taxpayer dollars, the threat of a government "march-in" on patents will make many pharmaceutical companies think twice, said Jing Luo, a professor of medicine at University of Pittsburgh. "If I was a drug company that was trying to license a product that had benefited heavily from taxpayer money, I'd be very careful about how to price that product," Luo said. "I wouldn't want anyone to take my product away from me."

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The role-playing adventure game Baldur's Gate 3 won game of the year last night at The Game Awards 2023 in Los Angeles. The New York Times reports: It was the crowning achievement for a game based on Dungeons & Dragons that largely stayed under the radar during its six years in development by the Belgian company Larian Studios. But its summer release -- 23 years after its predecessor -- captivated gamers, who celebrated a robust character creator, deep narrative and branching paths that made it seem as though anything was possible in its fictional universe of vampires and elves. Baldur's Gate 3, which is available on the PC, the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X|S, also went home with several other awards, including those for best role-playing game, best performance and best multiplayer. The other nominees for game of the year were Alan Wake 2, by Remedy Entertainment; Marvel's Spider-Man 2, by Insomniac Games; Resident Evil 4, by Capcom; Super Mario Bros. Wonder, by Nintendo; and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, by Nintendo.

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Ahead of its December 14th launch in the European Union, Meta's Twitter-like social media platform, Threads, is adding a simplified version of hashtags to help users find related posts. 9to5Google reports: Announced in a post on Threads today, Meta is adding "Tags" to the social platform as a way to categorize a post and have it show up alongside other posts on the same topic. Tags work similarly to hashtags in the sense that they group together content, but they also work differently. Unlike hashtags, you can only have one tag/topic on a post. So, where many platforms (including Instagram) suffer somewhat from posts being flooded with dozens of hashtags appended to the bottom, Threads seemingly avoids that entirely. Meta says that this "makes it easier for others who care about that topic to find and read your post." The other big difference with tags is how they appear in posts. Tags can be added by typing the # symbol in line with the text, but they don't appear with the symbol in the published post. Instead, they appear in blue text in the post, much like a traditional hyperlink. You can also add a tag by tapping the "#" symbol on the new post UI. As for the EU launch, Meta has opted to "sneakily update the Threads website with an untitled countdown timer (which won't be viewable in countries where Threads is already available) with just under six days remaining on the clock," reports The Verge. "European Instagram users can also search for the term 'ticket' within the app to discover a digital invitation to Threads, alongside a scannable QR code and a launch time -- which may vary depending on the country in which the user is based." "The delay in Threads' rollout to the EU has been caused by what Meta spokesperson Christine Pai described as 'upcoming regulatory uncertainty,' likely in reference to strict rules under the bloc's Digital Markets Act (DMA)."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: European Union negotiators clinched a deal Friday on the world's first comprehensive artificial intelligence rules, paving the way for legal oversight of technology used in popular generative AI services like ChatGPT that has promised to transform everyday life and spurred warnings of existential dangers to humanity. Negotiators from the European Parliament and the bloc's 27 member countries overcame big differences on controversial points including generative AI and police use of facial recognition surveillance to sign a tentative political agreement for the Artificial Intelligence Act. "Deal!" tweeted European Commissioner Thierry Breton, just before midnight. "The EU becomes the very first continent to set clear rules for the use of AI." The result came after marathon closed-door talks this week, with one session lasting 22 hours before a second round kicked off Friday morning. Officials provided scant details on what exactly will make it into the eventual law, which wouldn't take effect until 2025 at the earliest. They were under the gun to secure a political victory for the flagship legislation but were expected to leave the door open to further talks to work out the fine print, likely to bring more backroom lobbying. The AI Act was originally designed to mitigate the dangers from specific AI functions based on their level of risk, from low to unacceptable. But lawmakers pushed to expand it to foundation models, the advanced systems that underpin general purpose AI services like ChatGPT and Google's Bard chatbot. Foundation models looked set to be one of the biggest sticking points for Europe. However, negotiators managed to reach a tentative compromise early in the talks, despite opposition led by France, which called instead for self-regulation to help homegrown European generative AI companies competing with big U.S rivals including OpenAI's backer Microsoft. [...] Under the deal, the most advanced foundation models that pose the biggest "systemic risks" will get extra scrutiny, including requirements to disclose more information such as how much computing power was used to train the systems.

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Slash_Account_Dot writes: The FBI investigated a man who allegedly posed as a police officer in emails and phone calls to trick Verizon to hand over phone data belonging to a specific person that the suspect met on the dating section of porn site xHamster, according to a newly unsealed court record. Despite the relatively unconvincing cover story concocted by the suspect, including the use of a clearly non-government ProtonMail email address, Verizon handed over the victim's data to the alleged stalker, including their address and phone logs. The stalker then went on to threaten the victim and ended up driving to where he believed the victim lived while armed with a knife, according to the record. The news is a massive failure by Verizon who did not verify that the data request was fraudulent, and the company potentially put someone's safety at risk. The news also highlights the now common use of fraudulent emergency data requests (EDRs) or search warrants in the digital underworld, where criminals pretend to be law enforcement officers, fabricate an urgent scenario such as a kidnapping, and then convince telecoms or tech companies to hand over data that should only be accessible through legitimate law enforcement requests. As 404 Media previously reported, some hackers are using compromised government email accounts for this purpose.

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Laura Dobberstein reports via The Register: Lenovo won't stop making Chromebooks despite the machines scoring poorly when it comes to both sustainability and revenue, according to an exec speaking at Canalys APAC Forum in Bangkok on Wednesday. "I don't know who makes the profit," commented Che Min Tu, Lenovo senior vice president and group operations officer. "Everybody struggled to sell the Chromebook." Tu further remarked that the laptop is not great from an environmental standpoint either -- recycling its material won't be easy, or cheap. "But I think we'll continue to sell the Chromebook because there's a demand," explained Tu, who added that the major driver of that demand is coming from the education sector. [...] While the number of Chromebooks being sold has dropped since the pandemic, the education market has kept it afloat. In the US, education accounted for 80 percent of Chromebook sales in Q2 this year. IDC estimated that Q2 Chromebook channel sales shrank 1.8 percent to 5.8 million units in that quarter as many customers had refreshed in the previous quarter to avoid a licensing increase in the second half of 2023.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Researchers have identified previously unknown elements of whale vocalizations that may be analogous to human speech, a new study reports. Sperm whales are giants of the deep, with healthy adults having no known predators. Scientists studying their vocalizations have already picked out key elements of their communication, namely clicks, sequences of which are called codas. Now, researchers led by Gasper Beus from the University of California, Berkeley report the discovery that the acoustic properties of these clicks -- for example, pitch -- are "on many levels analogous to human vowels and dipthongs," which is when one vowel sound morphs into another such as in the word "coin." The researchers even identify two unique "coda vowels" that are "actively exchanged" in conversation between whales, which they term the a-vowel and i-vowel. The researchers explain in their paper, published as a preprint online this week, that the first clue that so-called spectral properties could be meaningful for whale speech was provided by AI. Beus previously developed a deep learning model for human language called fiwGAN which "was trained to imitate sperm whale codas and embed information into these vocalizations." Not only did the AI predict elements of whale vocalizations already thought to be meaningful, such as clicks, but it also singled out acoustic properties. To follow up on the AI's tip, the researchers analyzed a dataset of 3948 sperm whale codas recorded with hydrophones placed directly on whales between 2014 and 2018. They only analyzed one channel from the hydrophones to control for underwater effects and whale movement, and removed click timing from their visualization to better isolate patterns in the acoustic properties themselves. These visualizations vindicated the AI's prediction: The whales reliably exchanged codas with one or two formants -- frequency peaks in the sound wave -- below the 10kHz range. The researchers termed these codas "vowels," with single-formant codas being a-vowels and two-formant codas being i-vowels. "This is by analogy to human vowels which differ in their formant frequencies," the authors wrote. They also identified upward and downward frequency "trajectories" in these codas, which they considered analogous to dipthongs in human language. Considering that these coda vowel patterns were very distinct and not intermixed, plus the existence of dipthongs, the researchers argue that whales are controlling the frequency of their vocalizations.

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Amazon sued what it called an international ring of thieves who swiped millions of dollars in merchandise from the company through a series of refund scams that included buying products on Amazon and seeking refunds without returning the goods. From a report: An organization called REKK advertised its refund services on social media sites, including Reddit and Discord, and communicated with perpetrators on the messaging app Telegram, Amazon said in a lawsuit filed Thursday in US District Court in the state of Washington. The lawsuit names REKK and nearly 30 people from the US, Canada, UK, Greece, Lithuania and the Netherlands as defendants in the scheme, which involved hacking into Amazon's internal systems and bribing Amazon employees to approve reimbursements. REKK charged customers, who wanted to get pricey items like MacBook Pro laptops and car tires without paying for them, a commission based on the value of the purchase. "The defendants' scheme tricks Amazon into processing refunds for products that are never returned; instead of returning the products as promised, defendants keep the product and the refund," Amazon said in its lawsuit.

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Record-breaking land and sea temperatures, driven by climate breakdown, will probably cause "unprecedented mass coral bleaching and mortality" throughout 2024, according to a pioneering coral scientist. From a report: The impact of climate change on coral reefs has reached "uncharted territory," said Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, from the University of Queensland, Australia, leading to concerns that we could be at a "tipping point." The upper ocean is undergoing unmatched changes in conditions, ecosystems and communities that can be traced back to the 1980s, when mass coral bleaching first appeared. In a paper published in the journal Science, US and Australian researchers say that historical data on sea surface temperatures, over four decades, suggests that this year's extreme marine heatwaves may be a precursor to a mass bleaching and coral mortality event across the Indo-Pacific in 2024-25. Mass coral bleaching happens when delicate corals become stressed due to factors including heat, causing them to lose their brown microbial algae, turning them white. At low stress levels, the algae can return to corals over a few months. But many Caribbean reef areas have recently experienced historically high sea temperatures that began one or two months earlier and lasted longer than usual. Crucially, 2023 is the first year of a potential pair of El Nino years, with the warmest average global surface sea temperature from February to July on record. Since 1997, every instance of these El Nino pairs has led to a global mass coral bleaching event.

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Apple and its suppliers aim to build more than 50 million iPhones in India annually within the next two to three years, with additional tens of millions of units planned after that, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the situation. From the report: If the plans are achieved, India would account for a quarter of global iPhone production and take further share toward the end of the decade. China will remain the largest iPhone producer. Apple has gradually boosted its reliance on India in recent years despite challenges including rickety infrastructure and restrictive labor rules that often make doing business harder than in China. Among other issues, labor unions retain clout even in business-friendly states and are pushing back on an effort by companies to get permission for 12-hour work days, which Apple suppliers find helpful during crunch periods. Apple and its suppliers, led by Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Group, generally believe the initial push into India has gone well and are laying the groundwork for a bigger expansion, say people involved in the supply chain. Apple is emblematic of a move among companies worried about overdependence on China to move parts of their supply chains elsewhere, most often to Southeast Asia and South Asia. Diplomatic efforts by the U.S. and its allies to block Beijing's access to advanced technology and strengthen ties with New Delhi have accelerated the trend.

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Tencent revealed one of its most ambitious attempts at a big-budget console game on Friday, betting on a new franchise to fire up fans and help the global expansion of China's most valuable company. From a report: Last Sentinel is an open-world adventure game set in a dystopian future Tokyo, developed by Tencent's California-based Lightspeed LA studio. The 200-member creative team is headed up by Steve Martin, a quarter-century veteran of the games industry who has worked on marquee games in the genre like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. The new title, four years in development, is testament to Tencent's long-term pursuit of foreign gaming assets and talent. The WeChat operator still relies heavily on domestic game sales in China, but in recent years it's amped up efforts to acquire slices of up-and-coming studios from Europe to Japan to complement its ownership of League of Legends creator Riot Games and large stake in Epic Games. Last Sentinel is part of its push to create new intellectual property from scratch. "We have a global gaming community that's screaming out that it wants something new. It wants new IPs, it wants new characters. We get to provide that," Martin, who left Rockstar Games to join Tencent in 2019, said in a video interview before unwrapping his work at The Game Awards in Los Angeles.

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The biggest UK mobile phone operators could face total damages of $4.15 billion following class-action claims that they allegedly charged 5 million existing customers "loyalty penalties" over a 16-year period. From a report: Claimant lawyers say they filed court documents at the Competition Appeals Tribunal against Vodafone, EE, Three UK and O2 last week. The claims accuse the phone companies of overcharging on as many as 28.2 million contracts by not reducing the amount customers had to pay after their minimum terms expired, despite them having effectively paid off their mobile devices. The claim consists of individual lawsuits against each company, with damages sought of up to $1.76 billion from Vodafone, up to $1.38 billion from EE, up to $637.8 million from Three, and up to $322 million from O2. Claimant lawyers at Charles Lyndon, a law firm, estimate that up to 4.8 million people could be affected. If the case is successful, someone who held a contract with one of the mobile operators could receiveÂup to $2,293. The claims are on an "opt-out" basis, which means all qualifying customers will be automatically included in the claim unless they make a choice not to join.

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WindBourne shares a report: Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels reached record levels again in 2023, as experts warned that the projected rate of warming had not improved over the past two years. The world is on track to have burned more coal, oil and gas in 2023 than it did in 2022, according to a report by the Global Carbon Project, pumping 1.1% more planet-heating carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a time when emissions must plummet to stop extreme weather from growing more violent. The finding comes as world leaders meet in Dubai for the fraught Cop28 climate summit. In a separate report published on Tuesday, Climate Action Tracker (CAT) raised its projections slightly for future warming above the estimates it made at a conference in Glasgow two years ago. As carbon clogs the atmosphere, trapping sunlight and baking the planet, the climate is growing more hostile to human life. The growth in CO2 emissions had slowed substantially over the past decade, the Global Carbon Project found, but the amount emitted each year had continued to rise. It projected that total CO2 emissions in 2023 would reach a record high of 40.9 gigatons. If the world continued to emit CO2 at that rate, the international team of more than 120 scientists found, it would burn through the remaining carbon budget for a half-chance of keeping global heating to 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial temperatures in just seven years. In 15 years, the scientists estimated, the budget for 1.7C would be gone too.

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Particle physicists should begin laying the groundwork for a revolutionary particle collider that could be built on American soil, a committee of scientists wrote in a draft report on the future of particle physics released on Thursday. From a report: The machine would collide tiny, point-like particles called muons, which resemble electrons but are more massive. Muons provide more bang for the buck than the protons used in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and would push the search for new forces and particles deeper than ever into the unknown. The siting of such a project, perhaps at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, would restore American particle physics to a position of pre-eminence that was ceded to Europe in 1993 when Congress canceled the giant Superconducting Super Collider. But it will take at least 10 years to demonstrate that the muon collider could work and how much it would cost. "This is our muon shot," the committee, charged with outlining a vision for the next decade of American particle physics, said in a draft report titled "Exploring the Quantum Universe: Pathways to Innovation and Discovery in Particle Physics." The draft is being presented and discussed at a meeting in Washington, D.C., on Thursday and Friday, and at Fermilab next week. The draft report also highlighted a need to invest in next-generation experiments probing the nature of subatomic particles called neutrinos; the cosmic microwave background, relic radiation from the Big Bang; and dark matter, the gravitational glue holding galaxies together. The panel also recommended participating in a future facility in either Europe or Japan, dedicated to studying the Higgs boson, the discovery of which in 2012 was key for understanding how other particles get their mass. "The size of the universe we now see as 14 billion light-years across was actually smaller than the size of a nucleus" early in cosmic time, said Hitoshi Murayama, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the committee. "So our field is actually not just looking for the fundamental constituents, but getting a bigger picture of how the universe works as whole." The committee, formally known as the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, or P5, was tasked by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to lay out a road map for the future of the field. The three-year process began by soliciting input from the particle physics community at large, and the final report will serve as a recommendation for what national agencies should prioritize over the next decade.

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Google Drive recently lost user files, with some reporting missing documents since May 2023. Google said this month that it has posted a fix, but its description of a "syncing issue" doesn't seem to capture the problem based on user reports of web files disappearing, ArsTechnica notes. The company hasn't fully explained the cause or its recovery solution, which involves desktop app options and command line file recovery, the report asserts. This opaque handling, along with Google shutting down the Drive user forum that allowed people to share fixes, adds to perception that the company prioritizes PR over assisting users, the report adds.

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Following a hack that potentially ensnared 6.9 million of its users, 23andMe has updated its terms of service to make it more difficult for you to take the DNA testing kit company to court, and you only have 30 days to opt out. From a report: In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission last week, 23andMe said hackers accessed around 14,000 customer accounts earlier this year by trying login-password combinations exposed in unrelated breaches. It later said hackers had access to 6.9 million accounts due to the interconnected nature of its DNA Relatives feature. 23andMe has since updated its terms of service in a way that changes how the company resolves disputes with users. Customers were informed via email that "important updates were made to the Dispute Resolution and Arbitration section" on Nov. 30 "to include procedures that will encourage a prompt resolution of any disputes and to streamline arbitration proceedings where multiple similar claims are filed." Customers have 30 days to let the site know if they disagree with the terms. If they don't reach out via email to opt out, the company will consider their silence an agreement to the new terms.

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Networks spent years telling us that 5G would change everything. But the flashiest use cases are nowhere to be found -- and the race to deploy the tech was costly in more ways than one. From a report: At CES in 2021, 5G was just about everywhere you looked. It was the future of mobile communications that would propel autonomous vehicles, remote surgery, and AR into reality. The low latency! The capacity! It'll change everything, we were told. Verizon and AT&T wrote massive checks for new spectrum licenses, and T-Mobile swallowed another network whole because it was very important to make the 5G future happen as quickly as possible and win the race. CES 2024 is just around the corner, and while telecom executives were eager to shout about 5G to the rafters just a few years ago, you'll probably be lucky to hear so much as a whisper about it this time around. While it's true that 5G has actually arrived, the fantastic use cases we heard about years ago haven't materialized. Instead, we have happy Swifties streaming concert footage and a new way to get internet to your home router. These aren't bad things! But deploying 5G at the breakneck speeds required to win an imaginary race resulted in one fewer major wireless carrier to choose from and lots of debt to repay. Now, network operators are looking high and low for every bit of profit they can drum up -- including our wallets. If there's a poster child for the whole 5G situation in the US, it's Verizon: the loudest and biggest spender in the room. The company committed $45.5 billion to new spectrum in 2021's FCC license auction -- almost twice as much as AT&T. And we don't have to guess whether investors are asking questions about when they'll see a return -- they asked point blank in the company's most recent earnings call. CEO Hans Vestberg fielded the question, balancing the phrases "having the right offers for our customers" and "generating the bottom line for ourselves," while nodding to "price adjustments" that also "included new value" for customers. It was a show of verbal gymnastics that meant precisely nothing.

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Data breaches and ransomware attacks are getting worse. Some 2.6 billion personal records have been exposed in data breaches over the past two years and that number continues to grow, according to a new report commissioned by Apple. From a report: Apple says the escalating intrusions, combined with increases in ransomware means the tech industry needs to move toward greater use of encryption. According to the report, prepared by MIT professor emeritus Stuart E. Madnick: 1. Data breaches in the US through the first nine months of the year are already 20% higher than for all of 2022. 2. Nearly 70 percent more ransomware attacks were reported through September 2023, than in the first three quarters of 2022. 3. Americans and those in the UK topped the list of those most targeted in ransomware attacks in 2023, followed by Canada and Australia. Those four countries accounted for nearly 70% of reported ransomware attacks. 4. One in four people in the US had their health data exposed in a data breach during the first nine months of 2023.

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Speaking of early-impressions of Gemini, users' confidence in Google might be shaken further to learn that the company pretty much faked the most impressive demo of Gemini. TechCrunch: A video called "Hands-on with Gemini: Interacting with multimodal AI" hit a million views over the last day, and it's not hard to see why. The impressive demo "highlights some of our favorite interactions with Gemini," showing how the multimodal model (that is, it understands and mixes language and visual understanding) can be flexible and responsive to a variety of inputs. To begin with, it narrates an evolving sketch of a duck from a squiggle to a completed drawing, which it says is an unrealistic color, then evinces surprise ("What the quack!") when seeing a toy blue duck. [...] Just one problem: the video isn't real. "We created the demo by capturing footage in order to test Gemini's capabilities on a wide range of challenges. Then we prompted Gemini using still image frames from the footage, and prompting via text." So although it might kind of do the things Google shows in the video, it didn't, and maybe couldn't, do them live and in the way they implied. In actuality, it was a series of carefully tuned text prompts with still images, clearly selected and shortened to misrepresent what the interaction is actually like.

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