The first foldable phones hit the market six years ago, and they were rife with compromises and shortcomings. Many of those problems have persisted, but little by little, foldables have gotten better. With the release of the Galaxy Z Fold 7, Samsung has made the biggest leap yet . This device solves some of the most glaring problems with Samsung's foldables, featuring a new, slimmer design and a big camera upgrade.

Samsung's seventh-generation foldable has finally crossed that hazy boundary between novelty and practicality, putting a tablet-sized screen in your pocket without as many compromises. There are still some drawbacks, of course, but for the first time, this feels like a foldable phone you'd want to carry around.

Whether or not you can justify the $1,999 price tag is another matter entirely.

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Hackers planted a Raspberry Pi equipped with a 4G modem in the network of an unnamed bank in an attempt to siphon money out of the financial institution's ATM system, researchers reported Wednesday.

The researchers with security firm Group-IB said the “unprecedented tactic allowed the attackers to bypass perimeter defenses entirely.” The hackers combined the physical intrusion with remote access malware that used another novel technique to conceal itself, even from sophisticated forensic tools. The technique, known as a Linux bind mount , is used in IT administration but had never been seen used by threat actors. The trick allowed the malware to operate similarly to a rootkit, which uses advanced techniques to hide itself from the operating system it runs on.

End goal: Backdooring the ATM switching network

The Raspberry Pi was connected to the same network switch used by the bank’s ATM system, a position that effectively put it inside the bank’s internal network. The goal was to compromise the ATM switching server and use that control to manipulate the bank’s hardware security module, a tamper-resistant physical device used to store secrets such as credentials and digital signatures and run encryption and decryption functions.

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As of yesterday, Susan Monarez is in and Vinay Prasad is out among top federal health officials.

In a 51–47 vote along party lines, the Senate confirmed Monarez as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She is the first nominee for CDC director to be required to get Senate confirmation, following a 2022 law requiring it. She is also the first person to serve in the role without a medical degree since 1953 .

Monarez has a PhD in microbiology and immunology and previously served as the deputy director for the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) under the Biden administration. Monarez quietly helmed the CDC as acting director from January to March of this year but stepped down as required when Donald Trump nominated her for the permanent role. Before that, Trump had nominated Dave Weldon, but the nomination was abandoned over concerns that his anti-vaccine views would torpedo his Senate confirmation.

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Hacking attacks—many using ransomware—now hit US cities every few days. They are expensive to mitigate and extremely disruptive. Abilene, Texas, for instance, had 477 GB of data stolen this spring. The city refused to pay the requested ransom and instead decided to replace every server, desktop, laptop, desk telephone, and storage device. This has required a "temporary return to pen-and-paper systems" while the entire city network is rebuilt, but at least Abilene was insured against such an attack.

Sometimes, though, the hacks hit harder than usual. That was the case in St. Paul, Minnesota, which suffered a significant cyberattack last Friday that it has been unable to mitigate. Things have gotten so bad that the city has declared a state of emergency, while the governor activated the National Guard to assist.

According to remarks by St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter , the attack was first noticed early in the morning of Friday, July 25. It was, Carter said, "a deliberate, coordinated digital attack, carried out by a sophisticated external actor—intentionally and criminally targeting our city’s information infrastructure."

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After Substack shocked an unknown number of users by sending a push notification on Monday to check out a Nazi blog featuring a swastika icon, the company quickly apologized for the "error," tech columnist Taylor Lorenz reported .

"We discovered an error that caused some people to receive push notifications they should never have received," Substack's statement said. "In some cases, these notifications were extremely offensive or disturbing. This was a serious error, and we apologize for the distress it caused. We have taken the relevant system offline, diagnosed the issue, and are making changes to ensure it doesn’t happen again."

Substack has long faced backlash for allowing users to share their "extreme views" on the platform, previously claiming that "censorship (including through demonetizing publications)" doesn't make "the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse," Lorenz noted. But critics who have slammed Substack's rationale revived their concerns this week, with some accusing Substack of promoting extreme content through features like their push alerts and "rising" lists, which flag popular newsletters and currently also include Nazi blogs.

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Google is fond of saying its mission is to "organize the world's information," but who gets to decide what information is worthy of organization? A San Francisco tech CEO has spent the past several years attempting to remove unflattering information about himself from Google's search index, and the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation says he's still at it. Most recently, an unknown bad actor used a bug in one of Google's search tools to scrub the offending articles.

The saga began in 2023 when independent journalist Jack Poulson reported on Maury Blackman's 2021 domestic violence arrest. Blackman, who was then the CEO of surveillance tech firm Premise Data Corp., took offense at the publication of his legal issues. The case did not lead to charges after Blackman's 25-year-old girlfriend recanted her claims against the 53-year-old CEO, but Poulson reported on some troubling details of the public arrest report.

Blackman has previously used tools like DMCA takedowns and lawsuits to stifle reporting on his indiscretion, but that campaign now appears to have co-opted part of Google's search apparatus. The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) reported on Poulson's work and Blackman's attempts to combat it late last year. In June, Poulson contacted the Freedom of the Press Foundation to report that the article had mysteriously vanished from Google search results.

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Peacock feathers are greatly admired for their bright iridescent colors, but it turns out they can also emit laser light when dyed multiple times, according to a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. Per the authors, it's the first example of a biolaser cavity within the animal kingdom.

As previously reported , the bright iridescent colors in things like peacock feathers and butterfly wings don't come from any pigment molecules but from how they are structured. The scales of chitin (a polysaccharide common to insects) in butterfly wings, for example, are arranged like roof tiles. Essentially, they form a diffraction grating , except photonic crystals only produce certain colors, or wavelengths, of light, while a diffraction grating will produce the entire spectrum, much like a prism.

In the case of peacock feathers, it's the regular, periodic nanostructures of the barbules —fiber-like components composed of ordered melanin rods coated in keratin—that produce the iridescent colors. Different colors correspond to different spacing of the barbules.

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Amid the Trump administration's ongoing efforts to wrest the power of the purse from Congress, an estimated $15 billion allotted by lawmakers to fund life-saving biomedical research via the National Institutes of Health was temporarily frozen and then said to be released Tuesday.

According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal , the initial decision to withhold the funding came from Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget for the Trump administration and Project 2025 co-author. Vought has expansive views of presidential power, the Journal noted, and has said the NIH needs "fundamental reform."

In an interview with CBS news over the weekend, Vought defended already holding up billions in congressionally allocated funding for research on things like cancer and cardiovascular disease by claiming that the NIH has been "weaponized against the American people." He made the comments after 14 Republican Senators sent him a letter imploring that he release congressionally appropriated funding, including money marked for the NIH.

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On Tuesday, The Associated Press released results from a new AP-NORC poll showing that 60 percent of US adults have used AI to search for information, while only 37 percent of all Americans have used AI for work tasks. Meanwhile, younger Americans are adopting AI tools at much higher rates across multiple categories, including brainstorming, work tasks, and companionship.

The poll found AI companionship remains the least popular application overall, with just 16 percent of adults overall trying it—but the number jumps to a notable 25 percent among the under-30 crowd. AI companionship can have drawbacks that weren't reflected in the poll, such as excessive agreeability (called sycophancy ) and mental health risks, like encouraging delusional thinking .

The poll of 1,437 adults conducted July 10–14 reveals telling generational divides in AI adoption. While 74 percent of adults under 30 use AI for information searches at least some of the time, only the aforementioned 60 percent of all adults have done so. For brainstorming applications, 62 percent of adults under 30 have used AI to come up with ideas, compared with just 20 percent of those 60 or older.

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