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The firm said it expected to deliver adjusted earnings of at least $38m (£28.2m) for the first half of 2026.

EveryPlate is an actual budget meal kit whose plates taste delicious. Options and ingredients are fewer, but simplicity can also be a virtue.

From battery life to privacy, there are many hurdles to the idea taking off.

As the price of Bitcoin sinks once more, here's a guide to some of the trickiest crypto terms.

These are the cleaning robots, water monitors, and toys actually worth buying for pool season.

From the coast to the mountains, these podcasts focus on centuries of history about Maine's people and places.

Jack Clark tells BBC's Newsnight AI could get to the point where it develops without human input.

Waymo and B2U Storage Solutions have struck a "strategic supply agreement" to repurpose used batteries from Waymo's electric robotaxi fleet into stationary storage for California and Texas power grids. The arrangement could give robotaxi batteries a second life storing renewable energy after they're no longer suitable for vehicle use. It will also "support B2U projects in regions where Waymo's autonomous robotaxis operate -- meaning the used Waymo batteries could bolster the local power grids that Waymo vehicles rely upon for charging," reports Ars Technica. From the report: Waymo's "proactive maintenance" for its autonomous vehicles includes identifying opportunities to "refresh the battery to improve efficiency overall for our fleet," Adam Lenz, head of sustainability and environment at Waymo, told Ars. "That's when we look to these second-life applications, because there's still a lot of life left in the battery," he said. Waymo did not specify the average mileage at which it swaps out batteries or retires vehicles from service. But Waymo robotaxis drive around much more each day than the typical EV, which means the Waymo fleet is likely to experience faster usage-related degradation of battery capacity over time. The company confirmed to Ars that "some of these vehicles have now been serving riders for years and have mileage beyond what a normal consumer drives." [...] "Put a little haircut on that in terms of degradation and the effective capacity that would be left in those batteries when they're suitable for repurposing, and we're still talking about pretty significant capacity per battery," Hall said. The growing Waymo robotaxi fleet could lead to "pretty large numbers in terms of megawatt hours of capacity that can be deployed pretty quickly" for stationary energy storage supporting power grids, he suggested. The agreement gives Waymo discretion over when and how many used batteries will be turned over to B2U. But the companies confirmed that B2U has "already started receiving smaller initial quantities of batteries" from the Waymo fleet. Over time, the agreement could give B2U "hundreds of megawatt-hours" of additional storage capacity from Waymo's thousands of electric vehicles, Lenz said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Bumblebees can use tools to solve a problem, according to experiments that demonstrate their remarkably advanced cognitive abilities. The bees were given an adapted version of an experiment that, 100 years ago, first demonstrated chimpanzees could work out how to retrieve an out-of-reach banana by stacking boxes. Since then, various other primates, elephants and crows have joined an elite cohort of species known to be capable of this level of insight and spontaneous problem solving. In the latest research, bees were shown to be able to roll a polystyrene ball to a specific location and climb on to it in order to access an artificial flower on a low ceiling. The findings challenge the longstanding assumption that insects operate purely on instinct and mindless trial-and-error learning. "Most people think insects are reflex-based machines," said Dr Olli Loukola, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Oulu, Finland, and senior author. "That they can't have any emotional states or feel pain. Some people don't even realize that they have brains. I hope that these results change the worldview about that." "We are not claiming that bees think like humans," added Loukola. "But our findings show that miniature brains can generate flexible solutions to novel problems in ways we are only beginning to understand." The findings are published in the journal Science.

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The facility targets near-term technology development, while researchers three floors above work on projects a decade out. The new Serendie Street Boston facility will employ 120 people across engineering and development roles.

Instead of throwing away byproducts of food processing, fermentation is making them valuable.

Naomi Gleit has weathered many controversies at Meta, but remains in what she tells the BBC is her "dream job".

Anthropic is urging leading AI labs to consider slowing development, warning that frontier models are advancing fast enough that they may soon be able to improve themselves without direct human intervention. The company says a global ability to pause or slow AI development would "likely be a good thing," citing internal data about accelerating model capabilities. From a blog post: Using public benchmarks and previously unreported data from within Anthropic, The Anthropic Institute is showing that AI is already accelerating the development of AI systems. To take just one example: today, Anthropic engineers on average ship 8x as much code per quarter as they did from 2021-2025. The technical trends discussed in this piece suggest that AI systems are going to become much more capable in coming years. These trends have huge implications. AI that can build itself would be a major development in the history of technology -- one that could bring enormous good for the world in science, healthcare, and beyond. But full recursive self-improvement also might increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems. If systems are capable of fully building their own successors, the ways we secure them, monitor them, and shape their behavior all grow much more important. [...] If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing. But if a slowdown simply lets the least cautious actors catch up technologically, it could leave everyone less safe. Without a global coordination mechanism, companies and governments will have to make difficult decisions about safety while under competitive and geopolitical pressures. We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. The Anthropic Institute will conduct research -- in collaboration with many others -- and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require. These systems would enable frontier AI developers to verify that others globally have actually stopped or slowed, and that a bad actor could not use the auspices of a coordinated slowdown to jump ahead in secret. If such systems existed, we expect that we would slow down or temporarily pause, if other developers at or near the frontier also did so in a verifiable manner...

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A new npm supply-chain attack has infected 36 packages with Rust-based infostealer malware called IronWorm. According to BleepingComputer, the malware "targets 86 environment variables (key-value pairs) and 20 credential files that may contain OpenAI, AWS, Anthropic, and npm credentials, vault configuration files, SSH keys, and Exodus cryptocurrency wallet files." From the report: According to researchers at supply-chain and devops company JFrog, IronWorm is written in Rust, hides behind an eBPF kernel rootkit, and communicates with the operator over the Tor network. The Rust-based malware self-propagates by using stolen credentials for publishing on npm; this includes secrets associated with npm's Trusted Publishing workflow. Once it compromises a developer or CI environment, it can publish trojanized versions of packages owned by the victim, which then infect additional developers and CI systems. This behavior is conceptually similar to Shai Hulud, which had its code published on GitHub recently. Although JFrog researchers did not find a clear connection between IronWorm and Shai Hulud, they observed the same commit names in both supply-chain attacks. This opens the possibility that the new malware is an evolution of TeamPCP's payload, since IronWorm appears to be "a custom, carefully built implant from an operation with its own infrastructure." [...] The company provides a list of all impacted package names and their versions in the report and recommends that developers upgrade to fixed releases, rotate their keys, and enable two-factor authentication (2FA) for all accounts. At the same time, Endor Labs and StepSecurity have spotted a very similar but distinct attack involving a JavaScript-based malware named binding.gyp, performing registry poisoning and GitHub Actions infection, unfolding during the same time-frame.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The moderators of the biohacking subreddit say that peptide and hormone replacement therapy companies have been surreptitiously spamming Reddit in an attempt to get their posts scraped by AI chatbots. The strategy is an effort to systematically manipulate the answers provided by chatbots by manipulating the underlying source material that those chatbots will scrape -- in this case, a popular Reddit community. In a post last week, the moderators of r/biohackers said they would be banning new posts about peptides and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) because of attempted manipulation by the companies that make, market, and sell them. [...] "As AI search engines increasingly pull answers from Reddit, companies are using us for AEO. On top of that, there's been an explosion of peptide interest and AI usage flooding the sub. Together, this has put serious pressure on content quality," a post by the moderators read. [...] It has become incredibly difficult to stop Reddit manipulation, because the firms doing it are getting more sophisticated. The moderator said that there are really standard and long-running strategies where brands will hop in the comments and suggest their products: "That type of marketing has always existed and if people want to try something new because the brand resonated with them, cool. That's the way marketing should flow in my mind," they said. "But what I'm seeing that is way scarier to me is that there are companies that will reverse-engineer the actual prompt patterns that are prioritized by LLMs, and so you'll see someone post a super clickbait, high-traction, vague question like 'Is all the hype around Vitamin D actually worth it?" they added. "And that thread will do really well because everyone on biohackers actually has an opinion, so it gets engagement and prioritized by LLMs, and then brands will sneak in and they'll embed their brand mentions in those threads in the exact right places in a seemingly organic way. But none of it is organic, the entire thing is a strategy by an agency to prioritize brand mentions or a narrative within an LLM." The Reddit accounts that are doing this are "warmed up" or are made to seem human, meaning they have a posting history that is not just promotional. This makes them much harder to detect and moderate against. Some of the agencies doing this are paying real people to post promotional content, or have built communities where people are incentivized to post promotional content. The moderator said that Reddit's automated moderation tools have been helpful, but that the type of promotion happening has become so sophisticated that it has become more of a you-know-it-if-you-see it kind of thing. "A lot of it has become pattern recognition," they said. "You literally just sort of know what to look for. But the problem is you don't want to become punitive to the people who aren't doing this maliciously, and so I think the over-moderation risk is very real."

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Jim and Karen MacNeill, owners of the iconic spot on Route 1 in Wells, had fought prevent the auction. Their company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Meta has reportedly delayed the developer release of its Muse Spark AI model API multiple times, and as of Tuesday, had no scheduled launch date, according to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled). Reuters reports: A Meta spokesperson told Reuters on Wednesday that the company is already testing the Application Programming Interface (API) with some early partners and is looking forward to releasing it this month. "The muse spark API will be coming soon," Meta AI Chief Alexandr Wang announced in a post on X in April. Meta unveiled Muse Spark in April as the first model built to close the gap with rivals. Muse Spark is the first in a new series of models created by the company's Superintelligence Labs. Earlier on Wednesday, Meta unveiled an AI agent aimed at helping businesses carry out day-to-day operations, hinting at the company's ambitions to compete with rivals such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet's Google.

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The U.S. and its Five Eyes intelligence partners issued a joint warning (PDF) that Chinese military intelligence services are using LinkedIn and other professional networking sites to recruit people with access to government, military, foreign policy, or sensitive economic information. "These actors use an aggressive online recruitment strategy whereby intelligence officers or their affiliates pose as employees of private consultancies, think tanks or human resources firms, and place online job advertisements for foreign policy and defense analysts," the agencies said Wednesday. "China's military intelligence services ultimately seek to acquire privileged military, political and economic intelligence that can provide China with a strategic and tactical advantage over the Five Eyes." Bloomberg reports: China was targeting Five Eyes nationals with security clearance, particularly those working in foreign affairs, security and intelligence, and military personnel including people stationed in the Asia-Pacific region, it said. People with more peripheral access to government information, such as academics, journalists and think tank employees, were also being approached. The Chinese embassy in the UK strongly condemned the accusations, calling the allegation of Chinese espionage threats "entirely fabricated" and "malicious slander." The "Five Eyes" members have "engaged in unscrupulous espionage and intelligence-gathering activities around the globe. Their activities are the real threat to peace-loving countries," the embassy said in a statement Thursday. [...] According to the agencies, Chinese spies have commissioned reports to be written by those they've approached, paying them anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars, with payments sometimes made in cryptocurrency. "Military members may be asked about their roles and unit activities, home base or naval vessel," the notice said. "Five Eyes agencies have identified individuals who have undertaken these activities, leading to criminal prosecutions, job losses, and security-clearance revocation," it warned.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration Thursday in upholding the power of federal regulators to enforce data privacy laws on telecommunications companies. The 8-1 decision (PDF) preserved one of the Federal Communications Commission's key tools, though the companies also won a concession from the Republican administration that could shift the regulatory landscape. The appeal from telecommunications giants Verizon and AT&T challenged a combined $100 million in penalties imposed after the agency determined that the companies had failed to safeguard customer location data. The companies argued that the FCC's process was unconstitutional because it gave them little opportunity to tell their side of the story in front of a jury. The administration defended the fines are an essential regulatory tool. But the government also said companies did not have to pay the penalties right away, a regulatory shift in the companies' favor. The Supreme Court agreed, affirming the FCC's power to order fines when challenges are still available. "The orders at issue did not settle the carriers' legal obligations because, stated simply, they did not create an obligation to pay," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. [...] Other agencies use similar enforcement methods, so a sweeping victory for AT&T and Verizon could have had widespread effects, advocates said.

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schwit1 shares a report from NJ.com: Samsung is pulling up stakes in New Jersey and heading to Texas, a move that could leave roughly 1,000 Garden State workers facing a stark choice: relocate or risk losing their jobs. The South Korean tech giant confirmed this week that it will move its US headquarters from Englewood Cliffs, NJ, to its existing campus in Plano, Texas, marking a stunning reversal less than a year after it celebrated the opening of a new headquarters in Bergen County. The relocation is expected to be completed by the end of the year, according to company statements. "Samsung Electronics America Inc. is undergoing a business transformation designed to better position our organization for long-term growth and future success. As part of this effort, we are relocating our U.S. headquarters from New Jersey to our existing campus in Plano, Texas, building on our 30-year presence in the state," said Samsung in a statement emailed to NJ.com on Tuesday. "As part of this strategy, we will be optimizing parts of the organization to ensure our roles and functions align to key business priorities. We recognize such adjustments will have an impact on our people and we will be providing support to those affected," it continued.

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